A lottery that could change your life literally! A lottery for H1-B visas!

If you have been dreaming of a workstation at Uncle Sam’s nation, the time is now just ripe enough. Retaining the suspense of approval of visas, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will now conduct a lottery system to allocate H1-B visas highly popular among IT professionals from India.

As per a news report in The Economic Times, USCIS said it has reached the congressionally mandated H-1B cap for fiscal year 2016, besides receiving more than the limit of 20,000 H-1B petitions filed under the US advanced degree exemption.

A computer-generated process, also known as the lottery will randomly select the petitions needed to meet the caps of 65,000 visas for the general category and 20,000 for the advanced degree exemption.

The agency will first randomly select petitions for 20,000 visas allocated to foreign nationals with advanced degrees from US universities.

All unselected advanced degree petitions will then become part of the random selection process for the 65,000 general limit.

"Before running the lottery, USCIS will complete initial intake for all filings received during the filing period, which ended April 7. Due to the high number of petitions, USCIS is not yet able to announce the date it will conduct the random selection process," the ET quoted a press statement of the USICS.

However, USCIS will continue to accept and process petitions that are otherwise exempt from the cap.

(Image: Reuters)