Concerns Rise Over the Increase in H-1B Lottery Applicants Compared to Recent Years

At the end of April, USCIS announced that over 780,000 H-1B registrations were filed for the 2024 fiscal year compared to 308,000 filed for 2022. This significant increase in registrations could be due to obvious reasons such as the shortage of skilled workers in certain industries, particularly in technology and healthcare. However, many immigration experts, including The US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), have expressed concerns regarding fraud and abuse in the registration process. 

One of the major issues to address is the large number of beneficiaries with multiple eligible registrations. Individuals are potentially “gaming” the system by submitting multiple registrations with different companies to gain an unfair advantage and increase their chances of selection.

For years, immigration lawyers have been making suggestions to change the selection process so that a beneficiary can only be counted as one registration, no matter how many prospective petitioners they have. In response, USCIS has stated “We are working on an upcoming H-1B modernization rule that will propose, among other improvements, bolstering the H-1B registration process to reduce the possibility of misuse and fraud in the H-1B registration system.”

Read More About This Year’s H-1B Registration on the USCIS website.