What is H1B Grace Period ? 60 Days USCIS Rule ? Job Loss, Quit ? H4?

Some of the unfortunate H1B holders go through situations, where their company does a layoff as part of cost cutting, merger or acquisition…in the past, there was no concept of grace period and H1B holders were out of status upon job termination or layoff…but, in Jan 2017, USCIS made effective a set of rules that helps certain employment based non-immigrants …

USCIS processing times for H1B visa petitions can sometimes get very long and some H1B holders may end up in situations, where they hit the 240 days mark and not sure, if they can work or not. As the H1B premium Processing is suspended until Feb 2019, many H1B holders are in similar situations with the delays in processing times. …

As you know, DHS proposed a pre-registration rule for H1B lottery recently. As part of the propose rule documentation, USCIS revealed many of their internal H1B statistics data regarding petitions filed, overall lottery numbers, premium petitions, US masters vs Regular quota filings, etc. This H1B data used to be only provided on request and not widely published to everyone. Now, …

As announced in Fall 2018 Regulatory Agenda, DHS and USCIS published the proposed new H1B petition pre-registration rule in Federal Register for public review and comments. It had an expected date of Oct 2018 for Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM), but got delayed to December. Actual proposed rule document is 139 pages. We will cover the below aspects of …

Some of the H1B petitions are denied by USCIS, it could be for a variety of reasons. Two of the most common H1B denial reason is Employer Employee Relationship Clause and H1B Speciality Occupation Services. Many of you may be curious to know, how that may look like and the wording that USCIS uses for the same.  One of our readers, …

Today is October 1st, USCIS fiscal year starts today. If you have applied H1B Visa for Fiscal year 2019, earlier this year during April 2018 and got lucky in H1B visa lottery and have your H1B approved, today is when most of you would start working. Depending on your situation, you may be doing Change of Status (COS) to H1B …

USCIS announced that premium processing will be suspended for most of the H1B Visa petitions starting September 11th, 2018 until Feb 19th , 2019. Below is a summary of the update and how it will impact various H1B holders and prospective H1B seekers like F1 students, OPT, etc. Summary of USCIS H1B Premium Processing Suspension until Feb 19th , 2019 …

USCIS announced a policy memo on July 13th giving more power to the USCIS’ adjudicators of various kinds of petitions.  The new policy memorandum basically cancels/ revokes previous USCIS policy on issuance of Request for Evidence (RFE) and Notice of Intent to Deny (NOID) from 2013.  Let’s look at details. What was the previous 2013 USCIS Policy memo on Issuing …

Many of you, who are yet to hear back from USCIS on your H1B petition, have been awaiting this news update. USCIS announced today that the Data Entry is completed for H1B Petitions filed for FY 2019 quota. Below is the quick summary and what to expect next.  Summary : H1B 2019 USCIS Data Entry Completed This year’s Data Entry …

Many of you applying H1B visa for the first time might wonder, how the H1B Visa 2020 Receipt notice might look like. Below are some samples shared by users from previous seasons. If you already have received a receipt notice, then check out Understand USCIS receipt Number for H1B Also, you may check out H1B Visa Lottery Reject notice for not selected …