What Does the Boston Half Marathon have to do with H-1Bs?

By Magaly Rojas Navarro Every year, the Boston Athletic Association holds a Half Marathon in October. There is a limited number of slots available each year. Earlier this year, 2,640 runners pre-registered for the event via a Distance Medley program. Yesterday, an additional 2,000 slots opened up for registration at 10:00 am on a first come, first serve basis. I completed my first half marathon last year, and I wanted to register for this event. At 10:00 am, I was sitting in a Wi-Fi enabled location ready to register for the event. By the time I finished entering my personal and payment information, I received notification that my entry submission did not constitute entry into the race. That is, within a matter of minutes, 2,000 slots were already filled. Instead, my entry - along with all those entries which were received by 5:00 pm yesterday - would be eligible for a random selection to fill the race field's additional 3,000 remaining slots. To my surprise, within the first 5 minutes of when registration opened, all the spots were taken. Now, I am playing the waiting game, anxiously waiting to receive good news by Friday. As disappointed as I may be, I can only imagine the great deal of anxiety and stress my clients go through during the H-1B cap season. Each fiscal year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) can approve 85,000 new H-1B petitions subject to the congressional mandated cap. This year, USCIS received 233,000 H-1B cap-subject petitions within the first five days of "open registration." The rules are that when more petitions than numbers available are received within the first five days of filing, all the petitions received within those five days are subject to a lottery. For many of our clients, this is the most nerve-wracking part of the process. They are anxiously waiting for their petition to be chosen from the computer-generated random selection process. But even when USCIS has finished the process, it is not possible to know whether any particular case has been accepted for processing until a receipt notice or rejection package is received. For weeks, our clients do not know if they will be able to remain in the U.S., if they can continue working with their employer, or if they have to make alternate plans which can include going back home. For better or worse, that wait is now over. On July 14, 2015, USCIS announced that it completed processing the return of fiscal year 2016 H-1B cap-subject petitions that were not selected in their computer-generated random selection process. Now they can regain a sense of certainty, for better or worse, and prepare for their next steps. Perhaps other options are available to them, and I hope we can help them find those solutions. For now, the H-1B cap season will continue to be one of the most high pressure, high stress producing seasons in our field of work. And for now, I continue to wait to see if I will be chosen for my half marathon. While this experience is nowhere close to the life impacting H-1B process on our clients, it has opened my eyes to how they must be feeling.