NRI techies master the art of giving to the motherland
spoken videos to enhance learning experience among the rural students by leveraging technology is also on the agenda of these techies in America, who still look to India whenever an opportunity is thrown at them.
There is some good news on the visa front from the US for “meritorious Indians”.
The Department of Homeland Security ( DHS) announced on Friday that it would require petitioners seeking to file H-1B capsubject petitions to first electronically register with US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) during a designated registration period. Under the proposed rule, USCIS would also reverse the order by which USCIS selects H-1B petitions under the H-1B cap and the advanced degree exemption, likely increasing the number of beneficiaries with a master’s or higher degree from a US institution of higher education to be selected for an H-1B cap number, and introducing a more meritorious selection of beneficiaries.
Incidentally, more Indians are doing masters than any other foreign nationals, and those coming to STEM courses to US institutions also have Indians among the highest numbers, even higher than China.
Usually, in the USCIS, when it receives more than enough petitions to reach the con- gressionally mandated H-1B cap, a computer-generated random selection process, or lottery, is used to select the petitions that are counted towards the number of petitions projected as needed to reach the cap.
Currently, in years when the H-1B cap and the advanced degree exemption are both reached within the first five days that H-1B cap petitions may be filed, the advanced degree exemption is selected prior to the H-1B cap. The proposed rule would reverse the selection order and count all registrations or petitions towards the number projected as needed to reach the H-1B cap first. Once a sufficient number of registrations or petitions have been selected for the H-1B cap, USCIS would then select registrations or petitions towards the advanced degree exemption.
The Homeland Security announcement stated that “the proposed change would increase the chances that beneficiaries with a master’s or higher degree from a US institution of higher education would be selected under the H-1B cap and that H-1B visas would be awarded to the most-skilled and highestpaid beneficiaries.”
A win-win for India and bright Indians! Maneesh Pandey is Senior Executive Editor of ITV Network and currently a Fulbright Visiting Professor at Delaware State University, USA.