H-1B application numbers fall for second year in a row

San Francisco Chronicle

By Trisha Thadani

April 13, 2018

H-1B application numbers fall for second year in a row

The number of H-1B applications for the next fiscal year dipped for the second year in a row — a trend experts say could be influenced by the current administration’s “America First” rhetoric and a rise in scrutiny of companies’ petitions.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency said Thursday that it received 190,098 H-1B applications for the next fiscal year, a 4 percent drop from 2017, when 199,000 applications were filed. It is also a sharp decline from its peak in 2016, when the government received 236,000 applications.

The dip comes after years of steady increases in applications for the visa, which allows foreigners to live and work in the U.S. for three to six years. Tech companies large and small, particularly in Silicon Valley, have come to rely on the visa to staff engineering positions.

Only 85,000 visas are granted to for-profit companies every year, a number set in 2005 that hasn’t budged despite the rise in demand.

Companies apply for the visa on behalf of the foreigner they want to hire, and the visas are doled out through a lottery held on the first Monday in April each year. Nonprofits like hospitals and colleges are exempt from the cap, so their petitions don’t go through the lottery.

Under the Trump administration, officials doubled the number of “requests for evidence” issued, which are documents asking for more proof that a position requires a foreigner’s special skills. At the same time, the government also increased its number of denials, according to government data obtained by The Chronicle last year.

Experts say the threat of more requests for evidence and denials could have deterred some companies from using the program. It could have also pushed foreigners to seek out other countries with seemingly more welcoming immigration policies, such as Canada.

“When we stop being this welcoming country to the best and brightest in the world, we’re ultimately limiting the ability for the economy to grow to only people within the United States of America,” said immigration attorney Jason Finkelman.

But the decrease in overall numbers may have masked shifts in the companies requesting visas. Some lawyers, like Hiba Anver, an immigration attorney with the Erickson Law Group, said her firm, which represents large Bay Area tech companies, noticed an uptick in petitions this year.

“Employers want to get as many cases filed as soon as possible because they are worried about how things are going to (change) in years to come,” she previously told The Chronicle.

However, due to the increases in requests for evidence, Anver said many lawyers are now viewing H-1Bs as one of the harder visas to get approved. Employers have been looking at using other visas, like the O-1 or L-1, instead.

While the increased scrutiny has made the process of applying for an H-1B more rigorous, some foreigners like Alejandro Castillejo, 25, are undeterred.

Castillejo, a Spanish citizen, was not chosen in the lottery last year and is taking another chance this year. Because he graduated with a technical degree, he has a few shots at the lottery. And the fewer people that apply, he said, the more likely he is to be chosen.

“It would be nice to know if I had six years here, so I could take control of my life plans and not leave it to luck,” he previously told The Chronicle. But, he added, if more people are deterred from the scrutiny, “then that’s lucky for me.”

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