US begins crackdown on visa program in tech sector

Bloomberg

The US administration began to deliver on President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to crack down on a work visa program that channels thousands of skilled overseas workers to companies across the technology industry.
Fed up with a program it says favours foreign workers at the expense of Americans, the Trump administration rolled out a trio of policy shifts. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services agency made it harder for companies to bring overseas tech workers to the US using the H-1B work visa. The agency later issued a memo laying out new measures to combat what it called “fraud and abuse” in the program. The Justice Department also warned employers applying for the visas not to discriminate against US workers.
Trump campaigned on a promise to overhaul the immigration system, calling for companies to hire more Americans instead of outsourcing jobs to countries with cheaper labor or bringing in lower-paid foreign workers. Silicon Valley’s biggest tech companies, many of which were founded or run by immigrants, depend on H-1Bs and say efforts to thwart immigration threaten innovation, recruitment and startup formation. Trump’s executive orders restricting travel from a handful of Muslim-majority nations led to unprecedented opposition from the industry.
But there’s also broad recognition that reform is needed, given several high-profile examples where American employees have been replaced by lower-paid foreign workers through the program. Advocates for immigrants’ rights also argue H-1B workers are easily exploited because their legal status is tied to a particular employer. The Economic Policy Institute estimated there were about 460,000 people working on H-1B visas in 2013.
This week’s moves weren’t the administration’s first attempts to adjust the program. Last month, the immigration department suspended a system that expedited visa processing for certain skilled workers who paid extra. But people who have been pushing for reform had become frustrated in recent weeks that the Trump administration wasn’t moving fast enough.
Outsourcing firms are considered the worst abusers of the system, an impression that the tech industry has been happy to encourage. The USCIS announcement targets those firms, with the agency saying it will focus inspections on workplaces with the largest percentage of H-1B workers, and those with employees who do IT work for other companies. Shares of Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Wipro Ltd. and Accenture Plc each slipped more than 1 percent on Monday.
Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc., Cognizant, Wipro and Accenture didn’t respond to requests to comment. Infosys declined to comment, while Tata Consulting Services Ltd. said it has reduced use of high-skilled H-1B visas, while creating more US IT services jobs.
“Each of these steps are small steps by themselves,” said R Chandrashekhar, president of the trade group Nasscom, which represents many India tech firms. “What we are waiting to see is how they will tighten the process. How exactly will the policy be implemented? The process for granting H-1B visas has become a lot more uncertain.”
The new guidelines require additional information for computer programmers applying for H-1B visas to prove the jobs are complicated and require more advanced knowledge and experience. It’s effective immediately, so it will change how companies apply for the visas in an annual lottery process that began on Monday.