The federal government is changing how visas for college-educated immigrants work

A change to a visa application process for college-educated immigrants could make the system more fair, according to a Nashville immigration lawyer.

Employers fill out H-1B applications on behalf of immigrants they want to hire. But the process is a lottery with only 65,000 slots nationwide each year, plus another 20,000 for people with master’s degrees. Last year saw more than 780,000 applications competing for those slots.

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Doug Russo, owner of Nashville’s Rose Law Firm, said there were actually far fewer than 780,000 people competing for H-1Bs because some applicants got multiple employers to apply on their behalf.

“I think there was one individual who had about 80 registrations filed for them, and that person got selected,” Russo said.

The new rules give each applicant one chance in the lottery, regardless of how many employers sponsor them. This rewards applicants who find one job they really want, rather than those who collect multiple job offers to increase their chances.

Another rule-change raises the application fees for employers, but there’s a sliding scale for small companies.

Still, these changes don’t address a larger question: why there’s a lottery in the first place, even for immigrants with jobs lined up. Russo says businesses have seen shortages of qualified employees, especially in tech and other STEM fields. Also, many H1-B applicants he works with have spent years in the US already.

“A lot of these individuals who want to be in H-1B status are foreign nationals who have come to the US as students and have invested in our educational system,” he said.

But opening more H-1B slots would require an act of Congress, which hasn’t changed the program since 2006.

“There was actually a time in the Dot-Com boom where the H-1b numbers were significantly higher for about three or four years,” Russo said. “I think it would be sufficiently justified to increase those numbers for what we’re going through right now, which is a huge boom with AI and a lot of other technologies.”