Trump’s H-1B reform to hit desi tech firms hard
US President Donald Trump is set to sign an executive order that would tighten the process of issuing the H-1B visas and seek a review of the system for creating an “entirely new structure” for awarding these documents, the most sought-after by Indian IT firms and professionals.
Trump is scheduled to travel to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the home state of House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, to sign the ‘Buy American, Hire American’ executive order. This was a transitional step aimed at achieving a more skills-based and merit-based immigration system.
The order would be signed a day after the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it has completed the draw of lots from the 199,000 petitions it received for the Congressional mandated 65,000 H-1B visas for the fiscal 2018 beginning October 1 this year.
The lottery was held for the 20,000 H-1B visas for those applicants having higher education from US educational institutions. Opposing the traditional lottery system for H-1B visas, a senior administration official told White House reporters that these visas were being used by companies to bring in foreign workers at low wages and displace local workers. The official argued that there were enough qualified people within the country to meet the demand of technology professionals.
“With respect to the H-1B visa programme in particular, which deals mostly with STEM jobs, we graduate about twice as many STEM students each year…The issue of training workers for skilled manufacturing jobs is a different aspect of a policy then, say, the H1B visa, which obviously is for STEM occupations," the official said.
The official argued that the reality was that the US has large numbers of unemployed American workers. “Right now we're creating an environment with our guest-worker programmes where those workers are being bypassed,” he said.
Trump had made the alleged abuse and fraud in H-1B visa system a major election issue during his campaign.
The executive order signed by Trump will call for the strict enforcement of all laws governing entry into the United States of labour from abroad, for the stated purpose of creating higher wages and higher employment rates for workers in America.
According to senior US administration officials, these reforms were broadly supported by groups that represent American workers in the US, and that a lot of the driving action historically for these kinds of guest-worker reforms have been from groups that in fact even tilt Democratic.