American advocacy groups file lawsuit, seek details on selection process of H-1B visas

Two immigration-related advocacy groups from America have recently filed a lawsuit against the federal government, asking it to show the transparency into the lottery process of H-1B work visas, which is the most sought after visa for IT professionals, especially from India.

American Immigration Council and American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) have filed this lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and seek information about how the government administers the H-1B lottery.

The two groups have also said that USCIS has never actually described how it selects the winners of the lottery process, a statement said.

"When petitions are submitted to USCIS in April, it's as if they disappear into a 'black box'," said Melissa Crow, Legal Director of the American Immigration Council.

"This suit is intended to pry open that box and let the American public and those most directly affected see how the lottery system works from start to finish, and to learn whether the system is operating fairly and all the numbers are being used as the law provides," Crow said.

"Despite the Obama Administration's public commitment to the values of transparency and accountability, frankly, our attempts to see into this process have been resisted," said AILA executive director Benjamin Johnson.

"Instead of responding to our requests for information about how the lottery is conducted, how cap-subject petitions are processed and how the numbers are estimated and tracked, USCIS has kept the process entirely opaque," he alleged.

"This litigation is intended to shine a necessary light on an important process in America's business immigration system," Johnson said.

Every year, US employers looking forward to hiring highly skilled foreign professionals submit their H-1B non-immigrant visa petitions to USCIS on the first business days of April, for number of visas available for the coming fiscal year. These numbers are limited to 65,000 visas for new hires and 20,000 additional visas for professionals with a master's or doctoral degree from a US university.

If it receives more than enough petitions to meet the numerical limits in the first five business days, a computer-generated random selection process (also called a "lottery") is used to select a sufficient number of H-1B petitions to satisfy the limits.

The selection of selected visas from this lottery process remains largely unknown to both the US employers and foreign nationals seeking H-1Bs, as well as immigration lawyers who want to know how USCIS administers the lottery process.

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