Seyfarth Synopsis: USCIS completes the
lottery process and received 190,098 H-1B cap petitions.
On April 12, 2018, United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services (USCIS) announced that it received 190,098 H-1B petitions
to meet both the Master's and regular H-1B quotas (or
"caps") for Fiscal Year 2019, which begins on October 1,
2018. This means that USCIS received more than double the
number of available H-1B petitions in the first week of filing, and
that more than 20,000 of these petitions were filed under the
Master's cap. The number of petitions decreased slightly
again this year, down from more than 199,000 petitions filed for
Fiscal Year 2018.
In addition, USCIS announced that they completed a
computer-generated random selection process — the lottery
— for all cap-subject filings received from Monday, April 2
through Friday, April 6, 2018 to determine which filings to
adjudicate. USCIS first conducted the lottery process for
H-1B petitions subject to
