[vsskanth]

The vast majority of those H1Bs are obtained by outsourcing firms in India. Since it's a lottery, they file a massive pool of applications and send the ones who get picked.

Now since a H1B visa can't be issued if you're outside the USA (executive order), all those picked applications will be abandoned.

This is on top of another trend where EU and Canada are competing for high skilled immigrants and making it easier to move there.

[thrwlkan3n]

I hope you do know that the Indian WITCH companies hire a lot of people from US on h1b. From what I heard, most of the companies such as Infosys stopped bringing people from India 1.5 to 2 years ago. One team I know has been hiring only US MS H1Bs at least since 2010. Its actually easier for them to hire foreign MS students straight out of US colleges, because they are desperate for h1b, than bringing someone from India. The MS graduate can be placed in projects right away, while it will take several months to bring someone from India. Many of these students will accept whatever salary they are offered if they are running out of OPT or whatever its called. So when you are seeing Infosys got x visas, that doesn't mean they are bringing x people from India. Probably half or more of them were h1bs hired in US - either students or h1bs who are changing jobs while in US.

[pandaman]

Most of H-1Bs are indeed from AOS or COS process, however there are still 15% of consular processing applications according to the USCIS [1]. It's rational to assume that 15% of selected in the lottery were also consular processing and as they dropped out it would create ~13000 vacant spots (15% of 65K+20K total cap).

1. https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U...