H1B visa - Immigration through employment

H-1B visa race begins again, but Green Card Lottery visa still a winner

Winning a US Visa Lottery is the dream of almost all the people waiting to immigrate to America and become US citizens. While all the American Visa categories are filled with application entries and interested candidates lined up to get a US Visa, the most sought after Visa categories are Green Card Lottery visa and H-1B visa.

While Green card lottery visa is desired and therefore applied for by almost every individual wanting to migrate to US, H-1B visa mostly attracts employees willing to work in US H-1B Visas allow foreign skilled workers to work as well as reside in the US for as long as their company sponsors them. This year, i.e. on 1st April 2008, the entries for the H-1B Visa applications will open again. And in all this, the main question remains whether or not the terrain for H-1B visa will increase any further, especially as America is all geared up for the presidential elections this year. Last year the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) received 130,000 applications, almost double the number of applications allowed for the allocation of visas in a day. This resulted in pressing the USCIS to use automated random selection process to fill the 65,000 places selected by Congress. Since majority of the H-1B visas are awarded to IT professionals, major IT tycoons like Google and Microsoft have been pushing Congress to raise the limit of the number of H1B visas.

Most of the US based IT companies are of the view that the increase in the number of skilled foreign man power in US plays a major role in making it more competitive in today's global market. Fortunately, their outlook did not go waste as it has caught the attention of the two leading candidates standing for the upcoming presidential elections, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Both these Democratic candidates have gone public with their views of being in favor of raising the cap for H-1B quota. But till the time the Whitehouse does not consider lending a sympathetic ear to the views of the top IT companies regarding the H-1B visa issue, all the IT professionals willing to take the US journey will have to make do with just a window of opportunity through a limited H1B visa quota. But with the Green Card lottery visa, there are no such concerns as citizens of almost all the countries in the world are eligible to apply for this US Green Card lottery except a few countries such as: Russia, Canada, China, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Columbia, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Pakistan, Korea, Philippines, United Kingdom and Vietnam.

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