Washington:
A bipartisan group of two highly effective American Senators on Wednesday urged the President Joe Biden administration to implement the H-1B visa programme reforms issued by the Donald Trump government in January, beneath which the visas have been to be issued on the criteria of wages and not by a computerised draw of lots.
In a notification problem on January 8, the Trump administration had sought to problem H-1B visas to employers supplying the highest wages in the region of employment ahead of becoming allocated to other petitioners.
Five weeks later, the Biden administration on February 4, announced a delay in the successful date of the H-1B choice rule from March 9 to December 31, 2021. The Department of Homeland Security has announced going back to the lottery technique.
“We were disappointed to learn of this delay, as the H-1B visa programme is greatly in need of reform,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, Chair of Senate Judiciary Committee, and Senator Chuck Grassley, Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee stated in a letter to the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
“The practical effect of this delay is that outsourcing companies will continue to game the lottery system and secure thousands of new H-1B visas for financial year 2022 since the H-1B filing season begins in a few weeks. This will facilitate these companies” efforts to continue outsourcing American jobs,” they wrote.
“We believe the H-1B visa programme must be reformed to stop abuse. Implementing a reasonable allocation of visas as the H-1B selection rule would do is a meaningful step toward reform to protect American workers. We urge you to expeditiously implement the rule,” the two Senators stated.
According to a May 4, 2020 evaluation by the Economic Policy Institute, a majority of H-1B employers use the visa programme to spend migrant workers under-market place wages, and half of the leading 30 H-1B employers use an outsourcing company model, they stated.
This is just unacceptable and does not reflect how Congress intended the H-1B programme to work.
While Congress really should pass legislation to overhaul the H-1B visa system, DHS and the Department of Labor really should use their robust regulatory authority to reform the H-1B system to guard American workers from displacement and migrant workers from exploitation, the Senators wrote.
Observing that establishing an equitable distribution of new visas is a crucial beginning point to guaranteeing that the H-1B visa system is not used to reduced wages and displace American workers, they stated that the annual H-1B visa lottery has been abused for years by outsourcing corporations.
“Employers offering high wages to international graduates of American universities often lose out in the H-1B lottery, while thousands of new H-1B visas are issued each year to outsourcing companies offering below-market wages and seeking to offshore American jobs,” they wrote.
Durbin and Grassley stated that the H-1B choice rule is a affordable regulatory reform that will enhance the H-1B visa system for American and immigrant workers, and American employers.
“We disagree with the decision to institute a lengthy delay to the effective date of the H-1B selection rule, and we urge DHS to retain and implement the rule as soon as possible – ideally before the upcoming April 2021 lottery – so that outsourcing companies cannot continue to game the system at the expense of American workers, as they have done for far too long,” they wrote.
In January, the then President Donald Trump had extended the ban on issuing of new H-1B visas till March 31 arguing that the nation is getting a extremely higher unemployment price and the US can’t afford to have more foreign workers.
Indian IT specialists, most of whom are extremely skilled and come to the US mostly on the H-1B work visas, are the worst sufferers of the existing immigration technique which imposes a seven per cent per nation quota on allotment of the coveted Green Card or permanent legal residency.
The H-1B visa, the most sought right after amongst Indian IT specialists, is a non-immigrant visa that enables US corporations to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that demand theoretical or technical experience. Technology corporations rely on it to employ tens of thousands of staff each and every year from nations like India and China.
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