H-1B Yearly Lottery Announced Amid Fears of Cuts to Visa Program

Officials announced that United States employers looking to hire H-1B visa holders will be able to apply for next year’s round of visas as usual next month, despite uncertainty for legal immigration under the new Trump administration.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) announcement that the high-skilled visa category’s registration period would open March 7 comes after open disagreement within the Republican Party around the benefits of the program and the anticipation of cuts to the legal immigration system.

“I’ve been surprised at how it seems like there hasn’t been as much change in the legal immigration process yet,” Christopher Richardson, a former visa officer and president and general counsel of BDV Solutions, which works with visa applicants, told Newsweek on Thursday.

“When Trump came in last time as president, you know he did the Muslim ban that day, he did what was known as the public charge that day, but he’s really not focused a lot on the legal immigration stuff. It’s really been a huge focus on deportation and the undocumented community.”

Why It Matters

President Donald Trump has signaled his support for the visa, which saw more than 400,000 applicants in 2024, and said that he wants to have skilled workers entering the country legally as part of his America-first immigration agenda set out during the campaign. During his first term in the White House, however, he slowed and expanded vetting processes for visas.

What To Know

The new round of H-1B applications will run from noon ET on March 7 through March 24, USCIS said Thursday. Employers and potential employees will have to use a fully digital system for the first time.

Working as a lottery, the H-1B only sees about 80,000 applications approved, with big tech companies often the major beneficiaries. USCIS said it will prioritize “unique beneficiaries” for the visa, meaning multiple applications for the same person will not necessarily guarantee an approval.

The visa category is one of a number of legal routes to enter the U.S. for work or study purposes and comes with a subset designed to allow spouses and children to also stay in the country for the visa period.

During the holidays, when a debate around the H-1B opened up, MAGA Republicans called for the program to be scrapped or drastically changed, while X, formerly Twitter, owner Elon Musk and Trump voiced support for it. Some of the criticism of the H-1B revolves around immigrants being reliant on their employer, as if they are fired, they will likely have to leave the U.S.

Shortly before Inauguration Day, January 20, the outgoing Biden administration said some changes would be implemented,including faster processes for renewing H-1B visas of current employees, and longer work permit extensions for spouses.

The 2026 process announcement Wednesday appeared to be business as usual for the H-1B, but for Richardson and others working in the legal immigration space, there is a sense of watching and waiting to see what the administration will do next.

“I think that maybe that’s a reflection of a battle going on in the White House itself,” Richardson said. “Maybe you have people who are supportive of legal immigration in the White House versus those who are not, and they’re trying to come up with how they want to handle it going forward.”

Much of the focus of the Trump administration so far has been on illegal immigration and delivering on promises of mass deportations and tougher border security. Some legal protections introduced under Biden have been revoked, such as for those in the country on humanitarian parole.

The only major change for legal immigration from USCIS so far has been to waive the requirement for most applicants to have had the COVID-19 vaccine.

What People Are Saying

President Donald Trump, at Mar-a-Lago on December 31: “I always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country. We need competent people. We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in. We’re going to have jobs like we’ve never had before.”

Ron Hira, an immigration professor at Howard University, previously told Newsweek: “All of these things are around balance. Making sure that you’re balancing a program that looks out for workers—both H-1B workers, but also U.S. workers—and balances it in a way that doesn’t make the protections and restrictions so difficult that employers can’t use it at all.”

NumbersUSA, a right-leaning immigration reform group, on X on January 31: “Employers love the program because it gives them a deep pool of young, inexpensive, and captive labor they can legally draw from in order to bypass Americans who might demand things like market wages, good working conditions, and the ability to change jobs if they aren’t happy.”

What Happens Next

Registration for the next round of H-1B visas opens March 7. Meanwhile, in Congress, House Republicans are trying to overturn some of the Biden administration’s changes, arguing that they have negative effects on American-born workers.