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United States Citizen and Immigration Services announced that lottery bids for the H-1B Visa plummeted by nearly 40 per cent for the 2025 fiscal year.
The government department announced on Tuesday it had received 470,342 entries in the final week of March for this year’s lottery, a decrease of 38 per cent compared to last year’s total of 758,994 as reported by AP. The number of individuals who applied to work in the U.S. however remained close, with about 442,000 applicants this year compared to 446,000 last year.
USCIS attributes the decrease in the number of applications to the crackdown on fraud and abuse of the system by the department. Thus authorities have hailed this development as a ‘great success’ in combating those who exploit the system.
For a long time, tech companies were complaining that their existing employees were unable to clear the lottery system as a result of a glut of applications in the system. In many cases to game the lottery many individuals would be submitting multiple applications to increase their chances of being picked.
Earlier this year, U.S immigration officials implemented new rules earlier this year that limit each worker to one visa application, regardless of how many job offers they receive. Remarkably, over 400,000 of the 759,000 registrations that were filed the previous year were duplicates.
The changes in the visa application process occurred after the government switched from requiring bulky paperwork to a $10 online registration fee. This change led to a drastic increase in applications from 2021 to 2023, with the number tripling. The new system allowed applicants to easily apply for multiple job roles, which ended up overwhelming both the industry and the government. For instance, in 2022, one person submitted bids for 83 different job offers.
In the last few years, nearly 70 per cent of all 85,000 available H-1B visa slots, including 20,000 in the master’s quota for advanced US degree holders, have been allocated to Indian technology workers, thus making them the largest visa category under the cap-subject H-1B visa category.
According to Poorvi Chothani, a prominent immigration attorney, the USCIS changed the electronic selection process to ensure equal selection chances for each registered beneficiary, irrespective of multiple registrations submitted for them. This seems to have been the cause for the almost 40 per cent reduction in eligible registrations because the modified selection process was refined to focus on “unique beneficiaries” instead of number of registrations. This, in my view, gave all registrants a fair chance and since a vast majority of registrations are likely to be for the IT sector, this would have had an impact on the selection rate for IT workers. I think it surely impacted the IT sector, increasing overall selections compared to last year, but the larger impact was that it created a level playing field for companies and their potential employees.
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