High-skilled visa requests likely to exceed supply
The urgent race for such visas—highly desired by Microsoft, Apple, Google and other leading technology companies—coincides with congressional plans to increase the number available to tech-savvy foreigners.
The race to secure one of the 85,000 so-called H-1B visas available for the 2014 budget year started Monday and requests will be accepted through at least Friday. If petitions outpace the availability in the first week, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for the first time since 2008 will use a lottery to pick which companies get visas to award to prospective employees.
"It will be a frenzy, because the cap ... is nowhere near high enough to meet demand," said Robert Holleyman, president and CEO of the Software Alliance, a trade group for technology companies. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Christopher Bentley said the agency won't know for certain whether a lottery is necessary until next week.
