The H-1B electronic lottery registration is being offered for the first time in 30 years of H-1B history. In the past, employers with the help of attorneys needed to prepare complete H-1B petition packages and send the entire package to USCIS.
The cost of preparing the H-1B petition itself was $1500-$3000 in attorney fees. Now an employer can file for H-1B lottery with $10 government fees and minimal attorney costs.
Due to this reason, there may be more than 300,000 applicants that may apply for the H-1B lottery. The general H-1B quota is 65,000 and the masters H-1b quota is 20,000.
Both general quota and master’s quota will be heavily oversubscribed in the upcoming H-1B lottery.
Usually, full-time employers usually want employees to work for a year before sponsoring their H-1B. Along with applying to full-time positions, it is better to consider an alternative career in IT consulting if you need H-1B sponsorship immediately.
Full-time employers usually want employees to work for 2 years before filing green cards. Big 5 Indian consulting companies are notorious in this regard. They usually file a green card only in the 5th year of the H-1B.
If the labor or I-140 gets delayed before the end of the 6th year of H-1B the employee needs to quit the job and leave the country. IT Consulting employers can usually file a green card within one year of employment.
The green card process is divided into three stages, Perm or labor certification, I-140, and I-485. An immigration bill called S.386 is in the senate and has the support of both democrats and republicans.
There is a strong possibility of the bill being passed by Congress by May 2020. This is the first immigration bill in a decade to have the support of both democrats and republicans.
If this bill passes an H-1B employee who has the first two stages of their green card approved can apply for an unrestricted employment authorization document (EAD). This is similar to the OPT EAD but with much fewer restrictions. The H-1B employee will be able to change employers with minimal paperwork 180 days after the I-140 is approved.
For a long time, the Department of Labor's regulated minimum salaries for H-1B employees was $60,000. Now the DOL regulated minimum salary for an H-1B employee for many IT professions needs to be $80,000 in states like Georgia and can go up to $120,000 for states like California.
Many technologies like manual software testing, business analysis, data warehousing have billing rates around $50 to $55 per hour. The profit spread between billing rate and employee salary plus benefits is barely sufficient for an IT consulting company to pay H-1B salary, immigration costs, payroll taxes and benefits like health insurance, data warehousing with these kinds of technologies.
.Net, Java and Phyton are the most stable technologies for a 20-year career in Information Technology in the United States after which people progress to senior IT positions like Project Manager or Software Architect.
Business Intelligence and reporting tools usually go through uptrends and then disappear from the market after a decade. Many PeopleSoft developers had to change technologies in their mid-40’s when it is difficult to study new technologies with family commitments.
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Press release by: Indian Clicks, LLC