US agency raises ‘serious concerns’ about manipulation in H-1B visa lottery

The number of applications for visas used in the technology industry soared for a second straight year, raising “serious concerns” that some are manipulating the system to gain an unfair advantage, authorities said on Friday.

There were 780,884 applications for H-1B visas in this year’s computer-generated lottery, up 61 per cent from 483,927 last year, US Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a message to “stakeholders.” Last year’s haul was up 57 per cent from 308,613 applications the year before.

Each year, up to 85,000 people are selected for H-1B visas, a mainstay for technology giants such as Amazon.com Inc., Google parent Alphabet Inc., Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. and International Business Machines Corp.