US President Donald Trump’s administration has begun to deliver on his campaign promise to crack down on a work visa program that channels thousands of skilled overseas workers to companies across the technology industry.
Fed up with a program it says favors foreign workers at the expense of Americans, the Trump administration rolled out a trio of policy shifts.
The US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency on Friday made it harder for companies to bring overseas tech workers to the US using the H-1B work visa, while on Monday, it issued a memo laying out new measures to combat what it called “fraud and abuse” in the program.
The US Department of Justice also warned employers applying for the visas not to discriminate against US workers.
Trump campaigned on a promise to overhaul the immigration system, calling for companies to hire more Americans instead of outsourcing jobs to nations with cheaper labor or bringing in lower-paid foreign workers.
Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies, many of which were founded or run by immigrants, depend on H-1Bs, and say that efforts to thwart immigration threaten innovation, recruitment and start-up formation.
Trump’s executive orders restricting travel from some Muslim-majority nations led to unprecedented opposition from the industry.
However, there is also broad recognition that reform is needed, given several high-profile examples where American employees have been replaced by lower-paid foreign workers through the program.
Advocates for immigrants’ rights also argue that H-1B employees are easily exploited because their legal status is tied to a particular employer.
The Economic Policy Institute estimated there were about 460,000 people working on H-1B visas in 2013.
This week’s moves were not the administration’s first attempts to adjust the program.
Last month, the immigration agency suspended a system that expedited visa processing for certain skilled workers who paid extra, but people who have been pushing for reform had become frustrated that the Trump administration was not moving fast enough.
Outsourcing firms are considered the worst abusers of the system, an impression that the tech industry has been happy to encourage.
Monday’s announcement targets those firms, with the agency saying it would focus inspections on workplaces with the largest percentage of H-1B workers, and those with employees who do IT work for other companies.
“Each of these steps are small steps by themselves,” said R Chandrashekhar, president of the trade group Nasscom, which represents many Indian tech firms. “What we are waiting to see is how they will tighten the process. How exactly will the policy be implemented? The process for granting H-1B visas has become a lot more uncertain.”
The new guidelines released on Friday require additional information for computer programmers applying for H-1B visas to prove the jobs are complicated, and require more advanced knowledge and experience.
As it is effective immediately, it is to change how companies apply for the visas in an annual lottery process that begins on Monday. The changes do not explicitly prohibit applications for a specific type of job. Instead, they bring more scrutiny to those computer programmers doing the simplest jobs.
“This is a step in the right direction in terms of tightening up the eligibility,” said Howard University associate professor Ron Hira, who has done extensive research on the H-1B program. “You’re going to have to beef up your argument for why you need this person.”
Tech and outsourcing companies are the heaviest users of the H-1B visa, which is the largest program for temporary foreign workers in the US by a wide margin.
India-based outsourcing companies receive a disproportionate percentage of the visas and tend to pay lower salaries than US-based tech firms.
Employers sought H-1B visas for more than 13,000 computer programmers last year, citing an average annual salary of about US$72,000, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Caitlin Webber said.
About half of the visas sought last year were for computer-related positions, she said.
Computer programmers made up about 12 percent of all H-1B applications certified by the US Department of Labor in 2015. Of those, 41 percent were for positions at the lowest wage level, defined as jobs requiring people to perform routine tasks that require them to exercise little judgement on their own.
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