More than 300,000 filings were made for the fiscal 2022 specialty occupation visa lottery, setting a new U.S. record for demand in the H-1B program.
About 308,000 unique H-1B registrations were submitted to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services online system, an agency spokesman told Bloomberg Law, about a 12% increase from last year’s registrant volume.
The continued demand for the visas popular with the technology industry shows stakeholders’ optimism in a program largely hampered by the coronavirus pandemic and visa travel restrictions implemented over the last year.
“The lottery volume reflects what’s going on with the economy in certain sectors. ...