On December 23, 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a Final Rule to amend the process by which the government issues H-1B visas to petitioners subject to the H-1B cap.
Each year, the government allocates 65,000 H-1B visas, plus an additional 20,0000 visas for persons holding advanced degrees. These are referred to as “cap-subject petitions” and are the type of H-1B visas sought by most private sector employers. In contrast, H-1B visas sought by institutions of higher education, nonprofit organizations affiliated with such educational institutions, and nonprofit research organizations and governmental research entities are not subject to the numerical limitation on the number of H-1Bs issued each year.
Under the prior rule, employers first submitted an online registration for each candidate during a designated window that closed annually on April 1. Each registration included basic details and required payment of $10. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) would then conduct a lottery due to the number of registrations far exceeding the number of capped visas. Only employers who “won” the lottery were permitted to file a full H‑1B petition, which normally would be effective October 1 of the same year. By way of example, in fiscal year 2026, there were approximately 339,000 applications submitted into the lottery, which meant employers had about a 30% of winning the right to submit a full application.
The new rule does away with the...
The Cambodian Interior Ministry has firmly rejected misleading reports from the Thai news outlet Khaosod English, which alleged that Thai Marines had seized a significant cache of Cambodian arms a...