USCIS announced a preliminary number of filings today as the tallying of H-1B petitions received on April 2 and April 3 continues. On April 3, USCIS announced that it had received enough petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap for fiscal year
2008 (FY 2008) and that it would conduct a computer-generated random selection of cap-subject petitions filed on Monday (April 2) and Tuesday (April 3) to determine which cases USCIS will accept for processing.

During Monday and Tuesday, USCIS received 133,000 unique pieces of mail containing H-1B petitions. This is lower that the original USCIS estimate of 150,000. USCIS based the initial estimate on amounts from manifests received along with the mail. USCIS reached the updated number following a physical count of the mail. Each piece of mail may contain more than one H-1B petition. It will take USCIS a substantial amount of time to open and sort through that volume of mail.

As of April 4th, 28,052 of the cases sorted are H-1B petitions subject to FY 2008 regular cap. 4,703 cases are exempt from the FY 2008 H-1B cap as employers filed those petitions for aliens holding a master’s degree or higher from a U.S. institution. Cases subject to advanced degree cap accounts for 14.36% of all the opened petition cases. If we assume a normal distribution of these two kinds of cases, then, there might be 19,096 (14.36% x 133,000) cases are subject to the 20,000 advanced degree cap. We wish there are still more H-1Bs for advanced degree holders after the first two days.

USCIS will provide regular updates as the processing of FY 2008 H-1B cap cases continues.

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