Petitions for Skilled Worker Visas Drop Second Year in a Row

Employers submitted 190,098 petitions for H-1B visas this year, a drop from the 199,000 submitted last year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced.

This is the second year in a row that the number of petitions for the temporary visas for skilled workers has gone down from the year before. Petitions had been steadily climbing for several years until they reached a peak in 2016 at 236,000.

The drop is unusual, as the number of petitions tends to expand or contract according to the state of the economy. The unemployment rate currently stands at 4.1 percent.

The H-1B program has ...