US uses lottery to deal with visa requests surge

Swamped by petitions for work visas from highly educated or skilled foreigners, immigration authorities have conducted a lottery for the first time to determine which ones would be considered, federal officials announced on Friday.

A computer randomly selected 65,000 petitions from among the 123,480 that had passed a preliminary check for eligibility, said Shawn Saucier, a spokesman for the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that oversees the visas.

The lottery, conducted on Thursday, brought cries of pain from technology companies and immigration lawyers around the country. They lamented the limit that Congress imposed on the high-skilled visas, known as H-1B, and the luck-of-the-draw method to make the cut.

"The people we need to contribute to our innovation economy are being subjected to a perverse form of `Wheel of Fortune,'" said Robert Hoffman, vice president for government and public affairs at Oracle Corp, the information software giant based in Redwood Shores, California.

The immigration authorities resorted to the lottery after the annual ceiling for the visas was exceeded by the cascade of petitions it received on April 2, the first day of the application period. In all, the agency received 133,000 packages with visa petitions on April 2 and April 3, more than double the 65,000 high-skilled visas that are available for the year beginning Oct. 1.

For the past three years, petitions for the visas have exceeded the cap. But this year was the first in which the cap was surpassed on the first day, triggering the lottery, according to the agency's regulations.

The H-1B visas are three-year work visas for immigrants who have at least a bachelor's degree, either from a US or a foreign university. Immigrants seeking the visas generally are young adults who are software and computer engineers, construction engineers, doctors and nurses, mathematicians and scientists.

In 2005, the last year for which figures are available, about 40 percent of the visas went to immigrants from India. About 54 percent of the immigrants who received the visas that year had a master's degree, a doctorate or a professional degree. High-skilled visa holders can extend for another three years before they must return home. They can also apply to become permanent residents.

With about half of this year's applicants eliminated in the lottery, thousands of immigrants waiting overseas for jobs and foreign students graduating from US colleges have been left in limbo.

"Many members of the Class of 2007 effectively received deportation orders and lost their post-graduation jobs last week," said an April 9 editorial in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. Harvard seniors would not be able to apply for this year's high-skilled visas until after they graduated in June.

For three years after 2001, the visa limit was raised by Congress to 195,000. It reverted to the 65,000 in 2003. The immigration agency is still accepting petitions for H-1B visas from those with advanced degrees from US universities, who do not fall under the limit of 65,000.