Washington: The federal agency has announced that petitions pertaining to H1-B visas acceptance are slated to begin from April 2. H1-B visa is popular among Indian IT professionals.

The USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) further announced that premium processing of all H-1B visas will be suspended which are subject to the annual caps.

The US companies employ workers from foreign countries for specialty occupations requiring theoretical or technical expertise based upon the H1-B –a non-immigrant visa. Thousands of employees from countries like India and China cater to the requirement of the technology companies in US.

The filing of H-1B visa petition is for the fiscal year 2019 beginning of October 1, 2018.

The announcement of suspension of premium processing of H-1B visas petitions which are subject to the annual caps is expected to be in effect until 10^th of September, 2018. And during this period, USCIS stated that it will continue to accept premium processing petitions for H-1B that cannot be termed as subject to the fiscal 2019 cap.

“We will notify the public before resuming premium processing for cap-subject H-1B petitions or making any other premium processing updates,” it stated.

The USCIS also stated that while the suspension of premium processing is in effect, a petitioner has the option to submit a request to expedite an FY 2019 cap-subject to H-1B petition meeting the expedited criteria.

The main purpose of suspension of premium processing, according to USCIS, is that it will greatly reduce overall H-1B processing time.

After temporarily suspending premium processing, the USCIS stated that it will help it process long-pending petitions easily without any hassle, in contrast with the present situation, in which the agency is not able to process due to the high volumes of requests for incoming petitions and also the significant surge in premium processing requests over the past few years. It will also help it to prioritize adjudication of H-1B extension of status cases that are about to touch the 240-day mark.

The applicant, who submits for H-1B non-immigrant status, may get admission for a total period of up to three years. But the time period may be further extended, but in general they cannot go beyond the mark of six years. But it has got some exceptions to it.

The US Congress has mandated an annual numerical limit cap of 65,000 visas pertaining to H1-B visa, for each fiscal year. The first 20,000 petitions filed on behalf of beneficiaries holding US master’s degree or a higher one are to be exempted from the cap.

In addition to that, H1-B workers who are petitioned for or already employed at any of the institution of higher education or any of its affiliated or related nonprofit entities or an organization of nonprofit research status or a government research organization are not at all subject to this numerical cap.

The statistics according to USCIS, between 2007 and 2017, it received the maximum number of 2.2 million H-1B petitions from Indians with high skills. India was followed by China with a total of 301,000 H-1B petitions during the same duration.