The audio for this podcast can be downloaded at

http://www.immigrationfridays.com/podcasts/04132007.mp3     

00:24 Announcer: Today is April 13, 2007 and this week's topic, Current Status of H1 Filings for April 2007. Here is David Hart.

00:34 David Hart: Welcome back everyone to Immigration Fridays. This is your immigration podcast broadcasted every Friday from our offices in Miami, Florida. Today is April 13, 2007. My name is David Hart. I’m your host and I’m here once again with Senior Attorney and co-host Andrea Olivos-Kah, who is going to give us a little bit of a breakdown of what is going on currently. This is very current information for the last few days in terms of the H1 filings, which most of you probably know and this generated a lot of press, were available to be filed    April 1, 2007 and that was a Sunday so most of us filed on Friday and Saturday by overnight express mail so that they would be feed in or receive on Monday on April 2. So Andrea, why don’t you give us an idea of what is the current situation with regard to the filings and how many, etc.

01:47 Andrea Olivos-Kah: As everybody knows last week starting with Monday April 2 was the first filing date for H1-B visas, and there has been a lot of confusions and rumors and controversy about which cases were counted towards the cap and what happened that day. We learned to people that were on site at the Vermont Service Center actually an AILA liaison that stated that the FedEx facility in Vermont received so many applications that they couldn’t even send them in the same date to the service center so that they held them at the FedEx facility until Tuesday. So those cases that were sent by petitioners even Friday to be received at the Vermont Service Center on Monday did not make it there on Monday; it made it there on Tuesday. So it was not really fair that they started in putting some cases although they did, so we got some receipt notices by email ahead of time even though they decided that the headquarter sent out a director to the field; directors and operations officers letting them know that they were going to be processing in a different way and that is by random selection. There is actually a regulation that requires the officers to function differently than in regular years and last two years we have seen the H1-B cap hit really quickly. So this is what happened this year. They started doing the random selection process according to the regulation and that random selection process requires that, first of all they count how many H1-B masters cap subject cases they have so they first have to count whether they reached that cap of 20,000. If they have reached it, then any other H1-B masters that are cap subject are sent to the normal pool or the regular pool of cases so that they continue counting how many cases they received toward the general cap of 65,000. So that was the big problem is they first have to count the masters H1-B subject for the cap of fiscal year 2008 and then they could keep counting toward the cap so all the applications that were sent by premium processing took longer to count and took longer to send out a receipt notice and we are not sure if they are going to get premium process this year.

04:14 David Hart: Andrea, so here is basically from what you are saying, there is a little bit of confusion obviously.

Andrea Olivos-Kah: Right. And many many rumors.

David Hart: Right. And many rumors. Obviously we know they have received the 150,000 subject to the cap H petitions by the end of that Monday and then that press release that came on Tuesday so what is going to happen now? What do you think? I mean obviously we can never predict. But based on what you have heard and we got some information from AILA, which some of it we have posted on the website on www.immigrateusa.com but tell our listeners what to expect.

04:51 Andrea Olivos-Kah: Well on April 10, the Immigration Service finished counting the masters cap subject cases which means that on April 12, which was yesterday, they started processing premium processing cases within the 15 days. So petitioners that received receipt notices from the Immigration Service can start counting not necessarily from the date of the receipt notice but from the date of April 12, the 15 days. If any petitioners have received an approval notice prior to April 12, they have to call the service center.

David Hart: Because it maybe not valid?

05:34 Andrea Olivos-Kah: Correct. Those are the approval notices. But there was an issue and a lot of confusion about emails that we received from petitioners giving them a case number for premium processing cases which was the case for some of our applications.

David Hart: Right. We had several.

05:52 Andrea Olivos-Kah: And then we started saying well did they issue the receipt notice by email with the case number but it doesn’t mean that they made it to the random lottery or not and my conversations with immigration services officers, of course not on the record, were that as long as the case is feed in, it assigned a case number and as long as it is feed in and assigned a case number, you are in. I mean if the immigration services is not organized enough because of bureaucracy in the way they function with the contractors to be able to go back and whatever has been feed in to issue checks to the petitioners. So whatever was feed in, was assigned a case number, whatever assigned a case number is going to be adjudicated for the fiscal year 2008 H1-B cap so the start date of October 1, 2007.

06:45 David Hart: Well, I guess at this point, it is interesting, this is a very  up-to-date news and we will obviously post whatever information we get but clearly, as far as I’m concerned, I look forward to seeing those approval notices and when.

Andrea Olivos-Kah: Or even an original receipt notice from Immigration Services. I think that makes everybody just as happy as happy as an approval at this point.

07:16 David Hart: Exactly right. Ok. Because of our time schedules, this is a brief important podcast, and send us your emails at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . We will be back with another edition of Immigration Fridays next week and I wish you all the very best for the weekend.

Andrea Olivos-Kah: Bye everybody.

07: 41 Announcer: I would like to provide you with our contact information so that you can send in your questions, stories and situations. We will try to answer your questions and maybe even interview you on a future program.  You can leave a message at 305-577-9977.  From overseas, the code for the U.S. is 01 or toll free in the US and Canada at 1-800-344-4278. Leave a message for Immigration Fridays or email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . You can also find us at www.immigrateusa.com.