VISA2US Blog

With the most recent Visa Bulletin released and the start of the new federal fiscal year in place, you’re seeing the terms H-1B Visa, EB-2 Green Card transfer, and Visa Bulletin everywhere in immigration headlines. What do these terms refer to, and how are they related? We’ll explain what you need to know here.

The H-1B visa system is a popular avenue used by skilled foreign workers to expand their professional skills across borders and into the United States. While there are numerous benefits that come with this visa category, the downside to an H-1B is the need to wait for strict filing dates and hope that your registration is chosen in the random lottery, where a cap of 65,000 regular and 20,000 advanced registrants are selected to move forward and file a petition. But there’s a way around this limitation if you can find a cap-exempt employer, and those in the scholarly field often meet the conditions to do this quite naturally. Read on to find out if a scholar you know (or you yourself) can skip the lottery process and obtain an H-1B more easily.

The architect profession requires an advanced degree and significant skills to be successful. With the expansive amount of new construction and remodeling in the United States on a regular basis, it can be challenging to find American citizens who fit the requirements of the job and are open to working for a particular company, requiring those employers to reach out to overseas countries for help. As a foreign worker in this occupation, you’ll need a visa to accept a job offer. Here are the options you have to move your profession into the US job market and what you should know before taking another step forward along this journey.

Skilled individuals who live overseas but want to work in the United States for approved employers can apply for an H-1B visa. For various reasons, this document is highly sought-after by millions worldwide. Each year, only 85,000 registrants are allowed to apply for capped job positions, and getting to this point is challenging. But once you've cleared all the hurdles and have that coveted H-1B approval in your mailbox, you're not quite done yet. Here are some of the most critical pieces of info anyone with an H-1B approval should know before moving to the US.

Obtaining an H-1B is an important step for foreign workers who want to make the United States their permanent home. But when you’re approved for this coveted visa, there are terms that come with it, including who you can and can’t work for. This could be as simple as completing a transfer request with USCIS, but the process gets more complicated if you’ve filed for a Green Card. What do you need to do if you change employers while waiting for your Permanent Resident Card? Read on to find out.

If you’ve paid attention to the immigration scene in the United States recently, you’ve heard about the mass layoffs in the tech industry over the past year. As mega-corporations dealt with the long-term fallout of the pandemic, a somewhat unexpected result was the need to reduce jobs significantly, to the tune of tens of thousands of H-1B visa beneficiaries. These visa holders faced the serious threat of losing their status if they didn’t find a new job before the end of their grace period. Against the odds, 90% of visa holders were able to successfully navigate this challenge. How did they make this happen, and what can you learn from it as an H-1B visa employer or employee? Read on to find out.

Whether you successfully landed an H-1B visa in the 2023 lottery or not, the reality is that millions of people registered and weren’t selected. This is particularly true in countries like India, where the capped limit on a per-country allocation is 7%. The United States permits a limited number of visas annually, but the amount is split amongst all countries with applicants. This creates a substantial backlog of registrants, all of whom are transferred to the next year. Although this has been the system for decades, many experts say 2023 was the worst year yet. What happened, and how can you learn from the mistakes this year? Read on to find out.

If you’re an employer with the intent of hiring foreign workers in the upcoming fiscal year, you should already be paying attention to the dates and deadlines of the H-1B visa category. This application process is cumbersome and time-consuming, with the initial important registration window having already closed on March 17, 2023. Registrants who were selected in the lottery process have 90 days to file their H-1B petitions, which means your deadline is likely June 30. What should you be doing before this date arrives? We have all the information here to get you ready.

It’s no secret that this year’s cap filing numbers were substantially higher than predicted or that many registrations are being inspected for potential fraud. Whether the fraudulent claims are based on legitimate abuse or simply careless mistakes remains to be seen, but the fact is that you want your H-1B registration to stand up to scrutiny. To ensure your petition is adjudicated successfully, avoid these common filing mistakes in the future.

There’s no denying that the H-1B visa is arguably the most popular category on the market. But with many more petitioners than visas allocated, it’s also very difficult to obtain. This year’s lottery, FY 2024, saw the largest influx of registrations in history, but the US Citizenship and Immigration Services can only provide 85,000 visas. If you weren’t one of the chosen few, you still have options, as we’ll discuss here.