WASHINGTON: The Trump Administration on Tuesday announced sweeping changes to the H-1B work visa selection process, replacing the long-standing random lottery with a weighted system that prioritises higher-skilled and higher-paid foreign workers.
The move, Department of Homeland Security said, is aimed at better protecting the wages, working conditions, and job opportunities of American workers, while strengthening the integrity of the H-1B nonimmigrant visa program.
“The existing random selection process of H-1B registrations was exploited and abused by U.S. employers who were primarily seeking to import foreign workers at lower wages than they would pay American workers, ” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Matthew Tragesser said.
“The new weighted selection will better serve Congress’ intent for the H-1B program and strengthen America’s competitiveness by incentivising American employers to petition for higher-paid, higher-skilled foreign workers, ” he said.
Under the new regulation, H-1B visas will no longer be awarded through a purely random draw, as has been the practice over the past two decades. Instead, registrations will be ranked and selected through a weighted process that increases the probability that visas go to higher-skilled and higher-paid foreign nationals, while still allowing employers to petition for workers across all wage levels, DHS said in a media release.
The change is intended to curb what they described as systemic abuse of the lottery system, in which some employers allegedly flooded the registration pool with lower-skilled, lower-wage applications, crowding out higher-value petitions and disadvantaging American workers, it said.
The annual number of H-1B visas remains capped at 65, 000, with an additional 20, 000 visas reserved for applicants holding advanced degrees from U.S. institutions. The new weighted selection rule will apply beginning with the fiscal year 2027 H-1B cap registration season, it said, adding that the final rule will take effect on February 27.