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Largest beneficiary, India to be hit hard by overhaul
President Trump has also directed officials to separately overhaul the H-1B programme through a regulation at a later date to turn it merit-based by prioritizing highest paid applicants.
President Donald Trump on Monday extended the suspension of Green Cards till the end of the year and expanded it to cover non-immigrant work visas such as H-1B that go mostly to Indian professionals hired by both American companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and Indian IT services giants such as TCS, Wipro and Infosys.
The president has also directed officials to separately overhaul the H-1B programme through a regulation at a later date to turn it merit-based by prioritizing highest paid applicants.
Indians will be disproportionately impacted on both counts as the largest beneficiaries of the H-1B programme accounting for more than 70% of the 85,000 visas issued annually.
Senior Trump administration officials said the suspended work visas included H-1B (H-4 is for spouses and unmarried children of H-1B visa-holders, and some of them with H-4 EAD are allowed to work, not all), H-2B for low skill workers, some categories of J visas for cultural and education workers and L-1 for intra-company transfers. They were intended to ensure Americans had the first shot at jobs in the aftermath of record job losses caused by Covid-19 related lockdowns, and are expected to free up 525,000 jobs.
Opposition from the industry came swiftly. “Immigration has contributed immensely to America’s economic success, making it a global leader in tech, and also Google the company it is today,” Sundar Pichai, the head of Google and an immigrant from India, wrote on Twitter. He added: ’“Disappointed by today’s proclamation — we’ll continue to stand with immigrants and work to expand opportunity for all.”
Amazon, which received more H-1Bs than any other company. in 2019, also slammed the Trump order. ““Preventing high skilled professionals from entering the country and contributing to America’s economic recovery puts American’s global competitiveness at risk,” the company said.
For those at the receiving end of the order, it was frightening. Vikram Desai, an IT professional cleared for a Green Card, said he and his wife had looked at each other with dread when they first heard of the suspension order. “We have parents in the high-risk category of those vulnerable to Covid-19 and our first thoughts were that if one of us had to leave the US for India, we may not be able to return until the end of the year,” he said.
Hundreds of Indians on H-1B or those approved for Green Cards have already been living away from their family or spouse for months now, stranded in India because of travel restrictions in force on either side, compounded by the closure of consular operations at US missions.
Political observers linked the suspensions to Trump’s desire to seal the support of his base ahead of his re-election bid in November. Some conservatives have long viewed the work visa programmes, specially H-1B, as a threat for Americans, and Trump is tapping into it with these suspensions.
Activists campaigning for a better deal for Indian H-1B visa holders in line for Green Card say an estimated 2 million Indians will be impacted by the suspensions, including H-1B visa holders, those waiting for their Green Cards and those on L-1. They claimed these were conservative estimates.
Chinese are the second largest beneficiaries of these programmes, but they are already on notice from the Trump administration because of the coronavirus disease (which originated in China) .
Equally significant with lasting impact for Indian professionals wanting to work in the United States and Indian IT services companies will be the permanent changes that the president is ordering, such as the way H-1B applicants are selected from among the hundreds of thousands that apply.
The electronic lottery system, which is used to pick the 85,000 successful applicants from the total number of applicants that was three times more last year at 225,000, will now be replaced by a merit-based system that will prioritize the highest salaried applicants to “get the best and the brightest”, a senior Trump administration official told reporters in a background briefing ahead the issuance of the order.
“So the top 85 (thousand) salary offers among the 225,000 or so applicants for those visas will get those visas,” the official added.
President Trump has been calling for reforms in the H-1B visa programme to attract the best and brightest, echoing immigration hardliners who have argued that the present system is being abused to bring foreign workers on low wages to displace Americans, instead of attracting the really talented as its original mandate.
The Trump administration will also seek to plug a “loophole” in the existing H-1B programme that allowed companies to hire foreign workers and then “domestically outsource” them to other companies, replacing their American workers. They do so by bypassing a rule prohibiting the hiring of a foreign worker if it directly led to the firing of an American worker. Outsourcing through a third-party system is critical to the business model of Indian IT services companies.
The officials did not name any Indian companies, but did mention two American companies that have gone on to become controversial faces of this practice, Disney and AT&T. Most egregiously for the critics of this practice, Americans workers were forced to train the foreign workers who replaced them.
“The President has instructed us to end that practice and will do so by regulation as soon as we possibly can,” said one of the officials who briefed reporters.
The H-1B reforms will also include a change in the way the department of labor calculated prevailing wages so that foreign workers are in the upper end of the salary scale and don’t end up undercutting American workers. The labor department will also be empowered to investigate H-1B abuse.
“Without regulatory language on changing the H-1B lottery to a system based on highest salary it is not possible to know whether such a regulation would be lawful and not struck down by a court,” said Stuart Andersen, whose non-partisan think tank National Foundation for American Policy closely tracks immigration issues, of the proposed changes in the H-1B selection system.
The text or the timing of the regulation is not known.
About the suspension of H-1B and other work visas, Andersen said, “it will encourage companies to conduct more work outside the United States and are much more likely to harm the US economic recovery than to aid it”.
