US Citizenship and Immigration Services has received enough petitions to meet the congressionally mandated H-2B cap for the first half of fiscal year 2023 for foreign workers starting on or before March 31, the agency announced this week.

USCIS continues to accept petitions for H-2B nonimmigrant workers for the additional 20,000 visas allotted for nationals of Haiti, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Covered employees could be employed as short-term personal care aides, nursing assistants and home health aides, among other positions.

In December, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor issued a temporary final rule that made available 64,716 additional H-2B temporary nonagricultural worker visas for fiscal year 2023. Previously, Congress had set the H-2B cap at 66,000 per fiscal year, with 33,000 for workers who begin employment in the first half of the fiscal year (Oct. 1 to March 31) and 33,000 for workers who begin employment in the second half of the fiscal year (April 1 to Sept. 30). Had the H-2B cap of 33,000 visas not been met in the first half of the fiscal year, USCIS automatically would have made those unused numbers available for use during the second half of the fiscal year. Unused fiscal year cap-subject H-2B visas, however, do not carry over to the following fiscal year.

Long-term care industry advocates continually have pushed for immigration reform as a means of addressing the workforce shortages plaguing the field.

Operators, Jeanne McGlynn Delgado, vice president of government affairs at the American Seniors Housing Association, previously told the McKnight’s Business Daily, are “facing an unprecedented shortage of workers,” and that shortage is expected to worsen with the “silver wave” coming soon.

“People are living longer and requiring more care. Without an adequate workforce to care for these seniors, much is at risk,” she said. “The immigration system needs to be reformed to reflect these needs. There are simply not enough US workers to take care of the increasing elderly population.”