Employers seeking to hire foreign professionals may be out of luck this year. On April 5, 2013, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that the statutory cap on H-1B petitions for FY 2014 has been reached, just five days after the application process opened. Any employer who did not submit an H-1B petition on behalf of a professional foreign worker on or before April 5 will likely not get another chance to petition for that employee until next year. USCIS announced Monday that it used a random lottery system to select petitions from among the 124,000 submitted for processing. As the statutory caps are 65,000 for standard petitions and 20,000 for professionals who hold a U.S. Master's Degree, the numbers indicate that approximately 1 out of 4 timely submitted petitions will be rejected.

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