What is an H-1B visa?
It may not sound super exciting, but if you are an employer in the tech industry, particularly the high-technology industry, then you know what these are. The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows companies in the US to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations that require highly technical and theoretical expertise.
What is the big H-1B visa news?
The US State Department launched a pilot program that starts on Monday, January 29th, 2024, that opens up 4,000 application slots with a total of 20,000 slots. If you have H-1B visa workers or are seeking them, take notice, because this is the first time in 20 years that the US State Department has opened this up. H-1B visa renewals can now happen in the United States without H-1B workers having to return home. The idea behind this was to alleviate workload pressures on consular offices abroad. Previously, if you were an H-1B worker for a company here in the US and your visa was expiring, you had to go home to renew your visa. The previous policy has been in place since 2004 as part of the post-9/11 security measures.
This pilot program, which focuses on workers from India and Canada, will process renewals in six to eight weeks while the H-1B visa holders are here in the United States. If it’s successful, they’re likely to broaden it to family members and other workers. That’s all good news for workers. If you’re not an employer who uses a lot of H-1B workers, maybe it’s something to investigate. Typically, these workers are found in sectors where there just aren’t enough domestic PHDs or high-level technical experts, or where another country happens to have a lot of high-level technical workers in fields like software development.
What are the H-1B visa requirements?
First, the job must be a specialty occupation that requires a bachelor’s degree or higher to be in the occupation. The employer is the one applying on behalf of the employee, and they must prove a legitimate employer-employee relationship. You can’t use this visa just to bring people over. Employers have to hire them and pay them at least the prevailing wage in the geographic area of employment. At Dunlap Bennett & Ludwig, we have some attorneys from foreign countries, such as South Korea, and we have to pay those attorneys the prevailing wage of the area where they’re employed. If they’re in Richmond, it’s the Richmond metropolitan area. If the job is in Manhattan, it’s the Manhattan metropolitan area, which you can imagine is more.
There is an annual cap on H1B Visas of 65,000 applications, with an additional 20,000 for those who have a master’s degree or higher from a US institution. If you are a foreign attorney who graduated from a U.S. law school, you get to be in that extra cap, which is pretty neat.
The visas are distributed through a lottery system. When DBL’s immigration partner, Gerald LeMelle, who does a ton of these H-1B visas, says “Hey, your client won the lottery!” then I know what that means. It means they got one of those much-sought-after H-1B visas. These are used not only in the tech industry and business, but also in academia for university lecturers or researchers.
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