Your myUSCIS Account
When you first registered your beneficiary to enter the lottery for an H-1B visa, you set up a myUSCIS account. That’s where you paid the $10 to submit your registration before March 17. That’s the same place you’ll head to when you file your H-1B application now that your registration has been selected. These are accepted from April 1, 2023, through June 30, 2023.
Although it’s crucial to prepare your petition thoroughly and without any mistakes, you should also attempt to complete and submit it well before the deadline. That way, if there are any concerns, you have to fix them and resubmit.
However, in some cases, the petition may be refused, and you’ll need to wait to resubmit it the following year. The importance of this step is why so many employers hire an immigration attorney to help them.
Note: These deadlines do not apply if your position is exempt from the annual cap, such as occurs when the petitioner is a non-profit organization or institute of higher learning or a beneficiary is seeking to transfer employers but already has an H-1B visa.
What You Should Be Doing to Get Your Petition Ready
By now, you likely have much of this work completed, but we’ll start from scratch, just in case. Before submitting your visa petition, you’ll need to have all of the following in place:
● All fees, including the base filing fee of $460, electronic filing fee of $10, AICWA fee ($750 if you have 1-25 full-time equivalent employees, $1,500 if that number exceeds 25), the Fraud Prevention and Detection fee of $500 for new H-1B visas and employer changes, and the Public Law 114-113 fee of $4000 if 50 or more employees are in the company with over half of them on H-1B or L-1 status.
● A complete submission, reviewed by an immigration expert, which includes evidence that you can pay the salary required for your vacancy and signatures at all appropriate sections.
● Evidence that the employer and foreign worker meet all eligibility requirements and that the potential beneficiary’s skills and education link at least tangentially to the job vacancy.
One vital point to know involves duplication. Do not submit more than one petition for an employer in the hopes of increasing the chances of approval. For instance, you may have a potential employee with an incredible skillset, so you submit petitions for various job vacancies. USCIS watches for this and will reject all petitions that are duplicates.
Individuals may submit applications through multiple employers, but employers cannot submit multiple applications for the same foreign worker.
What’s Next?
Even though the deadline is right around the corner, it’s not too late to get your petition reviewed by an immigration expert. Our professionals at Visa2US are ready 24/7 to guide you through the process and assist you as you complete the paperwork. Before you submit your application, contact us to verify it is correct or to help you come up with a backup plan if your petition wasn’t selected this year.
