The H-2B Lottery

It’s no secret that the demand for H-2B labor has substantially increased in recent years. Industries operating within seasonal needs often struggle to fill their seasonal positions during the times of year that they need it most. The H-2B program has become an excellent solution for these employers that need to hire temporary labor. However, the demand for these visas has warred with the limited number of visas available. Leaving many employers who participate in the program backed against the wall and pigeonholed into applying based on when the highly competitive visa cap opens up on October 1st and April 1st which effectively split the 66,000 visa cap into two halves.

The H-2B Visa randomization procedure went into effect onJuly 3rd, 2019 after the Department of Labor (DOL) analyzed the demand of H-2B labor. For April 1st, 2018 start dates, DOL received approximately 4,498 applications covering 81,008 visas, which exceeded the allotment by nearly 250%. Previously operating on a “first come first serve” basis, DOL quickly came to realize this was an unfair and inefficient way to process these applications as it did not account for technical problems or federal holidays. Calling for a reassessment of their processing procedures.

Instead of the “first come first serve” process, DOL implemented a three-day filing window for employers to file their applications to be added to the randomization pool. After that window, DOL will then use a computer generated randomization process and assign each application a grouping (Groups A-G).

Group A traditionally holds the amount of applications to meet the semi-annual statutory cap limit of around 33,000, while lower groupings are reliant on either cap relief which includes returning workers who have held an H-2B visa within the last three years, or workers from the newly established cap for the North Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras,El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Haiti. Any applications submitted after the initial three day filing window or for dates after April1st that are submitted during that window will be processed after the applications that have been assigned their grouping number.

Efforts to increase the cap have been made, such as the supplemental visas or “cap relief” that have been traditionally issued for returning workers who have held an H-2B visa within the past three years, and more recently the NCA visas which nearly doubles the statutory H-2B cap of

33,000. Other legislative efforts have been made, such as the Seasonal Employment Protection Act (SEPA) and other advocacy groups petitioning for the importance of an H-2B cap increase. 

As of now, the lottery is the only system to help mitigate the cap, and even then, it can often feel like a revolving door of random, lucky groupings year to year rather than a long-term fix.

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