The U.S. government on Tuesday issued two new rules on the controversial H-1B skilled-workers visa, one intended to prevent companies from scheming together to game the allocation lottery, and the other dramatically boosting fees for the visa.
After federal authorities streamlined the H-1B application process in 2020 by requiring submission of initial “registrations” that would then go into the lottery used for awarding visas, the registrations began to surge, nearly tripling over the next three years. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration said last year it had undertaken “extensive” fraud investigations and was making referrals to law enforcement for criminal prosecutions. Some companies, to boost their chances of winning the lottery, “may have tried to gain an unfair advantage by working together to submit multiple registrations on behalf of the same beneficiary,” the agency said.
The new rule issued Tuesday, taking effect April 1 in time for this year’s lottery process, seeks to prevent such abuse. Registrations will be selected to ensure only one may be entered in the lottery per foreign worker. Under a new requirement, valid passport or travel-document information that would be used by a worker on an H-1B must be submitted.
The H-1B, intended for jobs requiring specialized skills, and heavily used by Silicon Valley’s technology giants, has become a political flashpoint in America’s debate over immigration. Companies use the H-1B both to acquire top foreign talent and to obtain lower-cost IT workers. Critics point to abuses including replacement of U.S. workers by visa holders, while the tech industry lobbies to boost the annual cap on new visas past 85,000.
The most recent research, by the Bay Area Council, showed nearly 60,000 foreign citizens on the H-1B were approved to work for Bay Area companies in 2019.
Under a separate rule issued Tuesday by Citizenship and Immigration, the cost for both the initial registrations, and the official applications for workers whose registrations are selected in the lottery, are to rise substantially. The fee for a registration will skyrocket to $250 from $10 starting next year. The application fee will jump to $780 from $460, starting this year.