No more H-1B visas for FY07

NEW DELHI: Bad news for those hoping to secure a temporary highly skilled worker (H-1B) visa for the US fiscal year ’07. Making history, the annual cap for fiscal ’07 has been reached four months before the year begins on October 1, ’06.

For fiscal ’06, the cap was reached a month and a half before the year started. On Thursday, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it has received a sufficient number of H-1B petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap of 65,000 H-1B visas for fiscal year ’07.

The USCIS will begin accepting petitions for fiscal year ’08 (beginning from October ’07) only from April next year.

In such a situation, the ongoing comprehensive immigration reform legislation being debated in the US Congress takes on a really special significance.

Immigration expert Arun C Vakil says, “The ‘politics of immigration’ is working against the reality of the need of continuation of American competitiveness in global economy.

The US department of labour has projected that by ’10, the US will face a skill-shortage of an estimated 1.7m in computer-related jobs.”

The total number of H-1B visas on offer for fiscal year ’07 stood at 64,300. The annual cap is at 65,000 H-1B visas. Of this cap, about 6,800 visas have been set aside under the terms of the free trade agreements signed by the US with Chile and Singapore the nationals of those two countries.

This would mean that only 58,200 H-1B visas from the annual mandated cap are available.

However, the unused Chilean and Singaporean H-1B visas for a particular fiscal year have to be used within the first 45 days of the subsequent fiscal year.

Projections by the USCIS show that only 700 H-1B visas will be used by Chile and Singapore in the current fiscal year (that is fiscal year ’06). This would mean that the remaining 6,100 H-1B visas have been put back in the general pool.

Since the USCIS has already allocated the unused H-1B visas for fiscal ’06, there will be no H-1B filing season later on to use these unused visas.

The “final receipt date” for H-1B petitions subject to the fiscal ’07 annual cap was May 26.

This would mean that the H-1B petitions received on May 26 are subject to a random computer-based selection process.

The remaining petitions received on May 26, are returned to applicants along with the fee.

Petitions for H-1B visas subject to annual cap for the fiscal year ’07 that are received after the “final receipt date” of May 26 will be rejected.