U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has received enough petitions to meet the congressionally mandated\u00a0H-2B cap\u00a0for the second half of fiscal year 2019. <\/p>\n
Feb. 19, 2019, was the final receipt date for new cap-subject H-2B worker petitions requesting an employment start date before Oct. 1, 2019. USCIS will reject new cap-subject H-2B petitions received after Feb. 19 that request an employment start date before Oct. 1, 2019.<\/p>\n
On Feb. 19, the number of beneficiaries USCIS received petitions for surpassed the total number of remaining H-2B visas available for the H-2B cap for the second half of FY 2019. In accordance with regulations, USCIS determined it was necessary to use a computer-generated process, commonly known as a lottery, to ensure the fair and orderly allocation of H-2B visa numbers to meet, but not exceed, the remainder of the FY 2019 cap.\u00a0On Feb. 21, USCIS conducted a lottery to randomly select petitions from those received on Feb. 19.\u00a0As a result, USCIS assigned all petitions selected in the lottery the receipt date of Feb. 22. Premium processing service for petitions selected in the lottery also began on that date.<\/p>\n
USCIS continues to accept H-2B petitions that are exempt from the congressionally mandated cap. This includes petitions for:<\/p>\n
Current H-2B workers in the United States petitioning to extend their stay and, if applicable, change the terms of their employment or change their employers;<\/p>\n
Fish roe processors, fish roe technicians, and\/or supervisors of fish roe processing; and<\/p>\n
Workers performing labor or services in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands and\/or Guam from Nov. 28, 2009, until Dec. 31, 2029.<\/p>\n
U.S. businesses use the\u00a0H-2B program\u00a0to employ foreign workers for temporary nonagricultural jobs. Currently, Congress has set the H-2B cap at 66,000 per fiscal year, with 33,000 for workers who begin employment in the first half of the fiscal year (Oct. 1 – March 31) and 33,000 for workers who begin employment in the second half of the fiscal year (April 1 – Sept. 30) plus any unused numbers from the first half of the fiscal year, if any. However, unused H-2B numbers from one fiscal year do not carry over into the next. (PR)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has received enough petitions to meet the congressionally mandated\u00a0H-2B cap\u00a0for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[508],"class_list":["post-294413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-fy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}