The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has announced that it received enough petitions order for the cap for the additional 18,216 H-2B visas to be reached.
Through a statement, the USCIS confirmed that it received enough petitions available for the returning workers for the first half of the fiscal year 2023 on or before March 31 this year, following the recently announced H-2B supplemental cap temporary final rule, VisaGuide.World reports.
The agency stressed that it continues to accept petitions for H-2B nonimmigrant visas for additional 20,000 H-2B visas dedicated to nationals from El Salvador, Haiti, Guatemala and Honduras.
“We recently began accepting H-2B petitions under the Dec. 15 temporary final rule increasing the cap by up to 64,716 additional H-2B nonimmigrant visas for fiscal year FY 2023. Of the 64,716 additional visas, 44,716 were available only for returning workers. The remaining 20,000 visas are set aside for nationals of Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras who are exempt from the returning worker requirement,” the statement provided by USCIS reads.
It has been emphasized that petitioners whose workers were not accepted for a total of 18,216 returning-worker allotment are urged to file under the El Salvador, Haiti, Guatemala and Honduras allotment while visas continue to remain available.
As of January 26 this year, the agency announced that it received petitions for workers filing under the El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala quota, as well as those who are excluded from the congressionally mandated cap, taking also into account petitions for current H-2B workers in the US requesting to prolong their stay, and if applicable change the terms of their employment or their employers.
It has been also revealed that petitions also include fish roe processors and fish roe technicians and workers performing labour or service in the Commonwealth of Northern Marina Islands and Guam.
The H-2B visas permit foreigners to come to the United States and get engaged in non-agricultural areas, thus helping the US to fill in the labor shortages that it is facing in many sectors.
In December last year, the US Department for Homeland Security and Labour stressed that it would for the first time increase the maximum number of H-2B visas, after the publication of a rule that permitted such a decision to be taken.
Regarding the issue it was reported that through the temporary final rule, the H-2B visa number would almost double, adding a total of 64,716 visas, and will supplement the regular 66,000 annual cap introduced previously by the Congress.
The post USCIS: Cap for Additional Returning Workers H-2B Visas Reached appeared first on VisaGuide.World.
