USCIS announced that it has received enough H-1B petitions to meet the cap for the bachelor’s degrees cases for fiscal year 2008. By the afternoon of April 2, it had received approximately 150,000 cap-subject petitions. Since there are only 65,000 visa numbers available, it will subject these cap cases received on April 2 and April 3 to a lottery process (random selection). The petitions that are not randomly selected will be returned.
USCIS has not yet provided any information on whether the cap has been reached for those petitions under the master’s degree cap.
If exceeding the cap more than three-fold in the first day is not dire and cogent enough evidence of the need to eliminate the H-1B cap, then it is hard to say what is. Not only does it lead to a waste of government resources in siphoning through, reviewing and returning thousands of cases, and to businesses needlessly paying attorneys fees for thousands of cases that will be rejected, but it damages the competitiveness of the US economy. Further, the government is losing potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in filing fees for these cases.