233,000 H-1B Cap Petitions for USCIS Random Selection Process

Maggio Kattar

The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that they received 233,000 H-1B cap petitions between April 1, 2015 and April 7, 2015 (the H-1B cap filing window for Fiscal Year 2016). According to the USCIS Press Release, they “used a computer-generated random selection process, or lottery, to select enough petitions to meet the 65,000 general-category cap and the 20,000 cap under the advanced degree exemption. USCIS will reject and return all unselected petitions with their filing fees, unless the petition is found to be a duplicate filing.” The USCIS will begin adjudicating the H-1B petitions that were filed via Premium Processing no later than May 11th; regular cases will be adjudicated as assigned to officers once the petition has been selected in the lottery. Typically, the USCIS has taken about two to several months to process non Premium Processing petitions.

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