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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

I am trying to find a table of the number of H1B visas awarded. The best thing I can find is [1]. It doesn't show enough years of the Trump presidency to be useful, and the 2017 number is incomplete because the report was published before year end in 2017. Other than the fact that visa awards significantly increased from 2015 to 2016, the chart doesn't show what we're looking for.

If anyone can volunteer a better source that would be much appreciated.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...

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https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re... is pretty good data for 2018.

You can see that non-consultancy firms like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Facebook all have approval rates close to 99%.

There's a large difference between IBM Corporation (approval rate 92%) and IBM India Private Limited (approval rate 82%). The difference is even greater if you look only at initial approvals vs. denials (IBM India 62 vs. 60, IBM 268 vs. 3). I wonder what the cause is.

Those numbers are skewed because they count visa extensions and transfers to a different company instead of just new H1Bs arriving. They also don't count people leaving, except in the sense that they won't apply for an extension or transfer in 3 years.

The country numbers are also skewed because someone from countries other than India/China, say France, shows only once or twice in your data before they get their green card and don't have to renew their work visa.

This is because of the hard cap of 7% per country for work green cards regardless of the size of the country. i.e countries with a billion plus people have the same 7% limit as tiny countries.

There is a cap that is always reached. More denied applications just means more people are applying.

Yup. H1-B has been over-scribed for close to a decade I think.

When a friend applied post-9/11, they didn’t even use up the quota each year.

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