H-1B Lottery, Driving Record Applications Cheated by Some Companies, U.S.

According to the Biden administration, several dozen small technology companies have allegedly worked together to increase the odds that their prospective foreign hires will be awarded an H-1B visa in this year's lottery.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the government agency responsible for issuing H-1B visas, has claimed to have discovered that a handful of companies have been entering the same applicants into the lottery multiple times to increase their odds of winning a visa. A notice to employers detailing the findings was seen by The Wall Street Journal ahead of its scheduled release on Friday.

The agency claims that this method is a major contributor to the record number of visa applications received this year: 781,000 for only 85,000 available visas. According to official statistics, some of that demand growth is natural. This year, about 350,000 people applied for H-1B visas, an increase from last year's figure of about 307,000.

According to the numbers, a major contributor to the uptick in people whose applications were submitted by more than one business. According to the immigration service, many of the submitted duplicate applications came from the same small group of businesses. About 408,000 visa applications were submitted, with about 96,000 people submitting more than one.