Moving quickly along, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) informed the public that it completed data entry of all “winning” fiscal year 2017 (FY2017) H-1B cap-subject petitions (i.e., petitions that were selected in the computer-generated random process). The announcement was made on May 2, 2016. Considering that approximately 236,000 H-1B cap-subject petitions were received by USCIS in early April, it is quite a feat that the Immigration Service conducted the lottery and completed data entry on the selected petitions so fast.
Due to volume and to balance the workload, USCIS stated that it will be transferring some of the selected petitions from the Vermont Service Center (VSC) to the California Service Center (CSC). Employers whose petitions are transferred will be notified via mail and should communicate with the indicated Service Center going forward, including for such things as upgrading to premium processing.
USCIS will return the “unselected” cap-subject H-1B petitions to employers, but could not provide a time frame for this due to the large number of petitions for which there were no available H-1B numbers. USCIS stated that it will issue an announcement after all of the unselected petitions are sent for return.
