U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced today that it has received enough H-1B petitions to meet the congressionally mandated cap for fiscal year 2009, both in the general category (65,000) and under the "advanced degree" exemption (20,000). This means that no additional, general, cap-subject H-1B petitions for temporary professional workers can be filed until April 1, 2009, absent a legislative fix. (H-1B petitions for cap-exempt visas remain available.)

What happens next? USCIS will now run its computer-generated random selection process, but it first will complete initial data entry for all filings received during the filing period that ended on April 7, 2008. According to its March rules, the selection process for "advanced degree" exemption petitions will be run first, and all "advanced degree" petitions not selected will be part of the random selection process for the 65,000 general category limit. USCIS has not yet announced when it expects to conduct these random selection processes.

As previously announced, USCIS will reject, and return filing fees for all cap-subject petitions not randomly selected, unless found to be a duplicate. Duplicate petitions will be denied , i.e., the filing fees will not be returned.

Stay tuned.