Tech firm abuses slow opportunity for H-1B visa overhaul
It’s a shame that many Americans — including President Trump — don’t appreciate the benefits that diverse, well-educated workers bring to our economy and culture.
The nation would benefit from further expansion of the H-1B program that allows companies to hire highly skilled foreign professionals for positions with shortages of qualified American workers.
But the tech industry, which relies on those workers, shares blame for the failure. Tech firms — especially outsourcing and consulting companies — for too long have been replacing American workers with cheaper foreign labor.
As a result, the Trump administration understandably has cracked down on firms abusing the H-1B visa process. Unfortunately, that also makes it harder for tech companies that play by the rules to add the talent they need to innovate and thrive.
In 2017, the president directed the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Service to more closely scrutinize H-1B applications. The agency strengthened its fraud prevention programs and ratcheted up inspections of H-1B employers. Immigration officials announced last month that in 2018 they denied nearly 25 percent of requests for new visas for foreign workers. It represents the highest H-1B visa denial rate in 10 years and was nearly double the 13 percent rate in the prior fiscal year.
The tech industry’s largest direct employers — Google, Facebook and Microsoft — were not significantly impacted by the policy shift. They had visa denial rates only 1 percent to 2 percent higher in 2018 than in 2017. But outsourcing and consulting companies that rely heavily on H-1B visas saw their denials increase from 4 percent in 2016 to 42 percent in 2018.
The U.S. Citizen and Immigration Service said that the major reasons for visa denials
were:
• Failure to establish an occupation meets the visa requirements.
• Failure to show that a company and visa candidate have a valid employment relationship.
• Failure to demonstrate that work is available for the term of the visa.
It’s disappointing that some companies fail to play by the rules and hurt the H-1B program at a time when workers are needed more than ever. The exact extent of the tech industry’s worker shortage has been a topic for heated debate for the past decade. What’s clear is the Bay Area’s exploding job market has exacerbated the problem.
Tech leaders say it’s increasingly difficult to find qualified applicants for thousands of electrical engineering, computer science and software engineering jobs. They continue pushing to expand the limit of H-1B visas from the current 85,000 to more than 100,000.
Silicon Valley’s continued success relies on attracting and retaining the brightest minds around the world to drive the next wave of innovation. It’s what has made this region the envy of its global competitors for decades. But tech companies should ensure that they are not abusing the system if they want to garner the political support required to expand the H-1B visa program.