Feds put finger on H-1B scale to favor higher earners

"The H-1B lottery in the US is being tipped heavily in favor of high-wage earners under a long-awaited rule proposal unveiled on Tuesday. The US Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has released the text of a proposed rule that was first advanced in July, which would shift the H-1B program from a purely randomized lottery to a wage-weighted draw favoring applicants with higher-paying job offers."

"The current process was defined during the Biden administration and limited H-1B lottery entries to one per person, regardless of the number of qualifying H-1B job offers an individual had received. The newly proposed rule keeps the one-to-one entry system for each unique applicant but weights the lottery by wage level, giving up to four entries to those with the highest-paying offers."

""When random selection is required ... USCIS would conduct a weighted selection among the registrations ... generally based on the highest Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) wage level that the beneficiary's proffered wage would equal," the proposal explains. For those unfamiliar, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) program compiles salary data for hundreds of occupations, reporting average pay and percentiles. The Department of Labor uses that data to define four prevailing wage levels for H-1B purposes, which roughly correspond to the 17th, 34th, 50th, and 67th percentiles of wages in a given occupation."

USCIS released a proposed rule that would change the H-1B selection from a purely randomized lottery to a wage-weighted draw favoring higher-paying job offers. The H-1B program caps visas at 85,000 annually and typically requires a lottery due to excess applications. The current one-entry-per-person system remains, but the new rule would grant up to four lottery entries for applicants with the highest prevailing wage levels. The weighted selection would use OEWS wage levels defined by the Department of Labor, corresponding roughly to the 17th, 34th, 50th, and 67th salary percentiles. The change aims to prioritize higher-wage beneficiaries.

Read at Theregister