Today, April 6, 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services ("USCIS") announced that it has received
more H-1B cap petitions than the statutory available visas for both
the general cap of 65,000 available H-1B visas and the additional
20,000 for U.S. advanced degree exemption, also known as the
"master's cap." Therefore as mandated, USCIS will run
a computerized random selection lottery to choose the petitions
that will be selected for processing. As previous years, USCIS will
run two lotteries. First, it will run a lottery for the advance
degree petitions for the 20,000 visas available; and then for the
regular cap cases and those petitions that were not selected in the
advanced-degree lottery, to fill the standard quota of 65,000 visas
available. The petitions that are not selected in either lottery
will be formally rejected and returned with their accompanying
filing fees.