Bills seek stringent measures in H1B visa reform

Authors of all these bills from both the Republican and the Democratic parties believe that H1B work visas, which are highly popular among Indian techies and Indian IT companies, tend to replace American workers, though this argument is disputed by research scholars, economists and Silicon Valley executives. 

In less than a week of Trump being sworn in as the 45th US President, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, and Assistant Senate Minority Leader Dick Durbin, introduced the “H1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act” to prioritise American workers and restore fairness in visa programmes for skilled workers. 

Grassley is chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. Among other things, the H1B reform bill proposes to eliminate the lottery system and give foreign students educated in the US priority on visas. 

The bill prohibits companies with more than 50 employees, of which at least half are H1B or L-1 holders, from hiring additional H1B employees. The bill would also crackdown on outsourcing companies that import large numbers of H1B and L-1 workers for temporary training purposes only to send the workers back to their home countries to do the same job. 

Democrat Zoe Lofgren, who represents a Congressional district in California that includes Silicon Valley, introduced ‘The High-Skilled Integrity and Fairness Act of 2017’. 

As soon as the bill, which proposes a skill and wage-based system for allocation of H1B visas and seeks to more than double the minimum wage for an H1B visa holder to USD 1,30,000, was introduced, stocks of major Indian information technology went down and rattled the USD 150-billion outsourcing industry. 

“It’s near-impossible to design an immigration system that selects only the highest-paid and still protects the inventiveness and meritocracy that has made Silicon Valley the centre of the tech world,” said Ridhika Batra, US-head of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industries.

Republican Senator from Arkansas Tom Cotton, who met President Donald Trump this week, has said that the current H1B work visa and employment-based green card categories do not bring in the brightest. “I think, on the H1B temporary visa and also on the permanent green cards, like EB1, EB2, the President wants to get the very best people from around the world,” Cotton said.