Is There Still Time to File for H-2B?
The H-2B Visa Cap
Each year, there are 66,000 H-2B visas available, divided between two halves of the fiscal year (starting in October and April). Before the economy tanked, the visas tended to run out fairly quickly. Now, use of the H-2B visa program has declined, and there may be visas available even late into the year.
Time to File?
To figure out if there is still time to file for an H-2B, you need to know two things: 1) how long the process takes, and 2) when the visas are likely to cap out.
The H-2B process consists of two parts, the labor certification (LC) and the I-129 petition. You reserve a spot for an H-2B visa upon filing the I-129 petition, so what matters is how long the LC takes. With pre-filing recruitment and the adjudication of the LC, you should count on the process taking 5-7 weeks. In some states, there is a 30-day requirement for the job order (instead of the 10-day minimum mandated by the US Department of Labor), so you would need to add an extra 3 weeks.
We can use data from USCIS to estimate when the H-2B visas will be used up. Periodically, USCIS updates the number of H-2B visa petitions received and approved. By plotting the usage on a chart, we can get a rough idea of when the visas will run out. As seen below, it looks like the cap for the upcoming period should be hit around the beginning of October.
So for the moment, it looks like there will be no shortage of H-2Bs for the 2nd half of FY2010 (those with a start date between April 1 and September 30, 2010).
For the upcoming period, the first half of FY2011 (October 1, 2010 to March 31, 2011), it became possible to file on June 1. However, USCIS has not provided numbers yet on H-2B usage for this period.