Over the weekend, it was reported that the Department of Homeland Security has run a second H-1B visa lottery for the apparent reason that "the agency did not receive enough applications for individuals selected in the first round" according to an article, partially behind a paywall, at Law360.
The article quotes a USCIS spokesperson as saying "additional registrations needed to be selected to reach the numerical allocations." No details were offered on which companies had lost interest in the program, or the size of the "shortfall".
In other words, the government is taking every possible step to make sure that every one of the visas will be used, which, in turn, will maximize the number of jobs lost by U.S. workers.
What the government might have done — a subject the Law360 article avoids — is to decide that it had made a good faith effort to allocate the over-subscribed visa process among competing employers and to give the suddenly uninterested employers the rest of the year to use or not use the lottery winnings.
Or it could have decided to eliminate the visas not picked up by employers and let U.S. workers have those jobs should the need to hire someone arise.
Or it could have decided to do nothing.
But no, it decided it has to make sure that the 85,000 ceiling on new H-1B workers is not just a ceiling, it is a floor as well.
It's like a parent saying to an obese child who loves chocolate cookies, "you can only have six of them a day — and you must eat every one of them."
We have requested more information from the USCIS press office, but have not heard from them as of this writing.