Critics say Trump’s H-1B order will make immigration harder
CAPITOL CUT Executive order seen as move to protect American workers from fraud, abuse
President Donald Trump’s executive order signed on Tuesday aims to end “fraud and abuse” of a temporary visa programme for high-skilled foreigners and ensure only the best and the brightest benefit from it, but some are warning against going too far.
The order, when it becomes effective, is expected to benefit American companies that are willing to pay top dollars for best talents from around the world but, critics of the programme have said, get crowded out by outsourcing firms mostly from India.
NASSCOM, a body representing Indian IT, lashed out in a statement, saying the “current campaign to discredit our sector is driven by persistent myths, such as the ideas that H-1B visa holders are ‘cheap labour’ and ‘displace American workers’.”
In the US, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a non-partisan think-tank, and fwd.us, a body representing IT giants Facebook, Google and others, cautioned this order should not lead to making legal immigration harder and expensive. The US grants 85,000 H-1B temporary visas to highskilled foreigners every year — 65,000 hired from abroad and 20,000 from those enrolled in US colleges. Because of the high demand, a lottery system is used to pick qualifying petitions.
“Right now, H-1B visas are awarded in a totally random lottery — and that’s wrong,” Trump said at the signing at a factory in Wisconsin. “Instead, they should be given to the most-skilled and highest-paid applicants, and they should never, ever, be used to replace Americans.”
Called the ‘Buy American, Hire American Executive Order’, it also mandates government agencies to review and change rules that come in the way of ‘Buy American’ policies, a campaign promise to re-energise local manufacturing.
On H-1B, which would be of immediate concern to India and Indians, the order said it would be the policy of the administration to rigorously enforce and administer laws regarding foreign workers “in order to create higher wages and employment rates for workers in the US, and to protect their economic interests”.
The executive order directs the departments of state, justice, labor and homeland security (of which the US Citizenship and Immigration Services that runs the H-1B programmes is a part) to propose new rules and guidelines to protect American workers from “fraud and abuse”.
While the intent to end fraud and abuse and attract only the best and brightest was not contested by any one, the order was greeted with skepticism in many quarters, specially in the US tech industry and, in India, which is likely to be impacted.