Indian IT companies may come under the scanner.
IEEE-USA, the organizational unit of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. will urge President-elect Donald Trump to do away with the H-1B visa lottery, and replace it with a system that gives priority to companies that pay the best wages.
This proposal would also move large H-1B users to the back of the visa distribution line. For this to happen, all it would take is an executive order by the president, the engineering group says, reported ComputerWorld.
Separately, the IEEE-USA also wants Trump to prod the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate what it claims is discrimination against U.S. workers by H-1B visa-using companies. This discrimination occurs when U.S. workers are replaced by visa-holding workers.
This would likely include Indian IT companies like TCS, Infosys and Wipro.
Trump has immediate “opportunities to start pushing back against outsourcing through the H-1B program,” said Russell Harrison, director of government relations, for the IEEE-USA, which says it has some 200,000 engineering, computing and IT professionals, reported ComputerWorld.
The government labels companies that have 51 or more full-time workers, of whom 15 percent or more are H-1B workers, as “dependent” H-1B employers. This includes all the major India-based offshore outsourcing firms, as well as some U.S.-based firms, such as Cognizant. According to U.S. government visa records, Facebook is also considered an “H-1B dependent” employer for its hiring.
The IEEE-USA said the “non-dependent” employers, those with a smaller number of visa-holding workers, should get priority in the visa distribution system. Some large tech companies, including Microsoft, IBM and Google, are non-dependent employers under the government’s definition.
Employers who hire H-1B workers have to pay them a prevailing wage. There are four prevailing wage levels for each U.S. occupation. For instance, the Level 4 prevailing wage for a programmer in Des Moines is $81,000. The Level 1 wage, which is for entry level workers, is $46,000.
Most companies pay lower prevailing wages, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In a 2011 study, the GAO found that 54 percent of all H-1B workers are paid Level 1 wages, and 29 percent are paid Level 2.
The IEEE-USA also wants the Trump administration to push the DOJ to investigate what it claims is discrimination against U.S. workers by H-1B visa-using companies. Ten U.S. senators in 2015 asked the DOJ to investigate national origin discrimination in response to the layoff of IT workers at Southern California Edison, but no action has emerged, reported ComputerWorld.
The U.S. distributes 85,000 H-1B visas through a lottery, with the odds of winning roughly one-in-three based on current demand. There were 236,000 visa petitions submitted this year.
Another effort by the IEEE-USA will be to seek to close a 1998 legislative loophole that allows H-1B-dependent firms to replace U.S. workers provided that they pay at least $60,000 per year or employ workers with master’s degrees.