The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the agency that handles the Lawful immigration to the US, had announced that, it has reached the mandated 65,000 H1B visa application cap for the fiscal year 2018, in just five days.

Despite the growing attacks on Indians and the existing Trump factor, Indians do not seem to be in a mood, to suspend their interest towards pursuing their US dream.

And that eventually highlights the craze for America, and the H1B mania, still continues. It was also reported that, the USCIS, also received a sufficient number of H1B visa petitions to meet the 20,000 US advanced degree exemptions.

Interestingly, the application process opened on Monday, for the year 2018, and it will continue to accept petitions.

H1B, is the most commonly used visa for workforce transfer for Indian IT professionals to the US. The visa programme had been under intense discussion and scrutiny, on the sidelines of President Donald Trump’s popular campaign “Buy American, Hire American”. Since then, there has been a kind of worry among Indian aspirants, but that did not clearly reflect on the number of applications received. Further, critics argued that, the visa programme, is being misused to send IT professionals to the US.

Earlier, President Trump, during his Presidential campaign, had promised to bring about changes to the H1B visa system, and vowed to bring back American jobs for US citizens.

USCIS said in a statement, “It will continue to accept and process petitions, that are otherwise exempt from the cap.”

“Petitions filed on behalf of the current H1B workers, who have been counted previously, against the cap, and who still retain their cap number, will also not be counted towards the mandated FY 2018 H-1B cap,” it added.

H1B visas are given to highly skilled workers, who travel to the US to work at the client location, and the IT industry has been a big beneficiary of the programme. Not just Indian IT companies, but even global firms outsource work and bring in Indian programmers on H1B visas.

However, the quota of 85,000 i.e., 65,00 for foreign workers and 20,000 for international students, remained unchanged, when the agency started to accept petitions this week.

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By Supraja