U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has received enough petitions to reach the congressionally mandated cap on H-2B visas for temporary nonagricultural workers for the first half of fiscal year 2021. <\/p>\n
Nov. 16 was the final receipt date for new cap-subject H-2B worker petitions requesting an employment start date before April 1, 2021. USCIS will reject new cap-subject H-2B petitions received after Nov. 16, that request an employment start date before April 1, 2021.<\/p>\n
On Nov. 16, 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 first half of FY 2021. 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 cap for the first half of FY 2021. On Nov. 18, USCIS conducted a lottery to randomly select petitions from those received on Nov. 16. As a result, USCIS assigned all petitions selected in the lottery the receipt date of Nov. 18. 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 the following types of petitions:<\/p>\n
Current H-2B workers in the U.S. who are extending their stay and, if applicable, changing the terms of their employment or changing 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 (plus any unused numbers from the first half of the fiscal year) for workers who begin employment in the second half of the fiscal year (April 1 – Sept. 30). (USCIS)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has received enough petitions to reach the congressionally mandated cap…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":331088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[508,119],"class_list":["post-333735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-fy","tag-uscis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333735","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=333735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/331088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}