USCIS recently announced that, as of May 21, it had approved 26,422 H-2B petitions of the 47,000 allocated for the second half of the fiscal year. This latest count includes 25,178 approved and 1,244 pending petitions.
The H-2B cap set by Congress is 66,000 per fiscal year, with 33,000 to be allocated for employment beginning in the first half of the fiscal year (October 1 – March 31) and the same number allocated for employment beginning in the second half of the fiscal year (April 1 – September 30). Any unused numbers from the first half of the fiscal year are made available for use by employers seeking to hire H-2B workers during the second half of the fiscal year. However, there is no “carry over” of unused H-2B numbers from one fiscal year to the next.
The H-2B category is most often utilized to fulfill an employer’s temporary needs of hiring a trainer from abroad to train U.S. workers for seasonal employment, handling peak-load situations or filling a position temporarily left vacant by the absence of a regular employee. This category has proven particularly useful for companies in the hospitality industry to meet seasonal or peak-load demands.
If the position to be filled is temporary in nature and thus, the need for the foreign national is for a temporary period, an H-2B visa may be a viable option. The key to the H-2B visa is not only that the employer is seeking to hire foreign nationals on a temporary basis, but that the need of the business is also temporary. In other words, the employer may not seek to fill a full-time, permanent position with an H-2B worker.
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