U.S. visa season running full tilt
Changes feared, H-1B filings leap
LAGUNA NIGUEL, Calif. — The delivery trucks began arriving with their precious parcels before daybreak early last week, lining up before a government tower that rises above Orange County’s suburban sprawl.
The starting gun has gone off on application season for skilled-worker visas, known as H-1B visas, which allow U.S. employers, primarily technology companies, to bring in foreign workers for three years at a time. For the past few years, the federal government has been so overwhelmed by applications that it has stopped accepting them within a week of opening day — hence the line of trucks trying to deliver H-1B applications before the doors close on the program for another year.
And this year, the rush has escalated to an all-out scramble because the H-1B program’s future is unclear.
Hailed by proponents as vital to American innovation, the program also has been criticized as a scheme to displace U.S. workers with cheaper foreign labor. President Donald Trump has vowed to overhaul it, and lawmakers from both parties have drafted bills to alter it.
At campaign rallies, Trump introduced laid-off Americans who had been asked to train their foreign successors at companies including Disney. “We won’t let this happen anymore,” Trump said in one speech about the practice, which he has deemed “outrageous” and “demeaning.”
Recently, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced a technical change that could make it harder for entry-level programmers to receive the visas, and last week, the Justice Department warned that it would investigate companies it believed had overlooked qualified U.S. workers.
“The Justice Department will not tolerate employers misusing the H-1B visa process to discriminate against U.S. workers,” Tom Wheeler, head of the department’s civil-rights division, said in a statement.
Each year, 65,000 H-1B visas are made available to workers with bachelor’s degrees, and 20,000 more are
earmarked for those with master’s degrees or higher.
When the gates swung open at the government processing center in Orange County, the very first truck in line, a FedEx rig, carried 15,000 packages, said a courier, Andrew Langyo.
“We’re loaded, and we have more trucks coming,” said Langyo, who would return two hours later in the same truck with another haul.
Last year, the government took in 236,000 applications in the first week before deciding it would accept no more. A computer randomly chose the winners.
The average H-1B petition, a collection of forms and documents attesting to the bona fides of a job offer and the person chosen to fill it, is about 2 inches thick. But some files are 6 inches fat and weigh several pounds, according to Bill Yates, former director of the Vermont Service Center, which also processes H-1B applications.
Yates recalled some mishaps, like the time a driver bound for the center in Vermont drove 50 miles unaware that his truck’s back door had swung open, spilling its cargo onto the road.
In 2014, the last year for which information is available, just 13 outsourcing firms accounted for a third of all granted visas. The top recipients were Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, all based in India.
The companies, which subcontract their employees to banks, retailers and other businesses in the United States to do programming, accounting and other work, often inundate the federal immigration service with tens of thousands of applications.
Several bipartisan bills pending in the Senate and the House seek to make companies give more priority to American workers before they fill jobs with H-1B visas. They also seek to raise the minimum pay for the jobs, which depend on skill level and location — a computer systems analyst in Pittsburgh, for example, must make at least $49,000 under current regulations. The theory is that higher pay would make those jobs more competitive with U.S.-filled positions and eliminate some of the rationale for importing workers.
In a statement, the National Association of Software and Services Companies, the main trade group for India’s outsourcing industry, said, “The H-1B visa system exists specifically because the U.S. has a persistent shortage of highskilled I.T. talent.”
The group said that its members follow all the program’s rules, and that the change would have little impact. “It is aimed at screening out lessqualified workers, whereas our members tend to provide wellcredentialed workers to help U.S. companies fill their skills gaps and compete globally,” the group said.