Immigration debate is roiling the Republicans.
By Raif Karerat
Follow @ambazaarmag
A prominent Indian American business advocacy group has called for expanding the number of H-1B visas granted to overseas professionals every year.
“One of the areas where the US has to look at is H-1B (visas). How do you expand that? By limiting the numbers [of H-1B visas], it does have an impact on the US companies. By making it expensive, it does have an impact on US companies,” Mukesh Aghi, president of the U.S. India Business Council (USIBC) told the Press Trust of India.
Under Congressional-mandated laws, the United States grants 65,000 H-1B visas per annum and another 20,000 to those foreign professionals who get higher degrees from a U.S. university.
In 2015, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) received thousands of more applications than the number of H-1B visas it can grant, forcing it to decide on the successful applicants through a computerized lottery.
Data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Computerworld indicates that in 2014, 86 percent of the total H-1B visas issued in 2014 for technology firms was used to hire IT professionals from India.
Critics of the visa program argue that it enables foreign nationals to “steal” American jobs.
Meanwhile, proponents have stated the nation is simply failing to produce enough skilled workers of the caliber top-tier companies are looking for, and that H-1B visas serve as a driver for innovation and entrepreneurship.
Donald Trump recently lambasted the H-1B program, and proposed action that would make it more difficult for U.S. companies to hire foreign workers under the program.
4 Comments
Most H-1b visas are taken up by Offshore Outsourcing companies that use H-1b workers as liaisons to remove entire departments, overseas.
Offshore Outsourcing companies stuff in an excess number of requests, in order to get the more visas in the resulting lottery (that comes about, mostly because of the overstuffing of requests by Offshore Outsourcing companies).
The result is that legitimate tech originating businesses have a difficult time obtaining an H-1b visa. And so the CEO’s of those companies do the ZERO-IQ Whining about not enough H-1b visas.
The problem isn’t that we don’t have enough H-1b visas.
Allowing more H-1b visas would be like throwing gasoline on a fire.
The problem is that we allow companies, whose purpose is to NEVER HIRE AN AMERICAN and instead move jobs overseas, any access WHAT-SO-EVER to the U.S. Federal Government H-1b Visa program.
The single most important issue for American workers is the h-1b visa. Whether they are Indian Americans or white Americans or black Americans this election is going to be decided on the basis of which politician supports the H-1b. The candidates from the two parties that will be nominated are Sanders and Trump. The only reason will be because they oppose the h-1b. This is going to be a struggle for survival for politicians who support the h-1b. They may even lose their senate seat in the next election.
The h-1b visa is the root cause of huge wealth and income disparities in America. The US was always a country where everybody was equal. Not so anymore. The h-1b visa enables technology that takes away jobs without allowing those who lost their jobs to move up to higher paying technology jobs. The folks who lost their jobs to technology end up going down the job chain. They cannot move up into technical jobs because those jobs are given away to h-1b workers. There are hardly any native born Americans in most corporate IT departments. Many IT departments have a mandate to only hire h-1b workers. H-1b visas should be disallowed if the IT department has more than 50% non native workers. This is the challenge to Sanders and Trump.
Americans don’t want to train their cheaper foreign replacements. Enough with this propaganda already.
Trump says “stop paying bottom of the barrel wages” and the USIBC calls that unfair? Seems like they are admitting this is a cheap labor program, and has nothing to do with specialized skill sets. Just the way they want it.
If Indian coders are superior, why should American companies not pay a premium for their services?
All Trump is suggesting is raising the bottom tier for H-1Bs to the median level. That would put them squarely in the middle of the pack.