Trump administration eases throttle on visas for techies

President Trump. Photo credit: Gage Skidmore.

The US Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced resumption of “premium processing” of non-immigrant H1-B visas that large tech companies use to move workers temporarily to the US to work on projects. For a premium fee, these visas get processed fast.

The Trump administration had clamped down on this six months ago to look into alleged misuse of the visas to bring in workers on rotation instead of hiring Americans. Tech workers from India, for example, cost less than their counterparts in the US. Apart from US tech giants, Indian IT services companies are the biggest users of these visas, which also give them a lot of flexibility in deploying talent according to ongoing projects.

See: Asian cities suck for programmers in terms of real earnings: study

Initially, new visa applications too were halted. This resumed in April, but without the premium processing option. This meant long delays and uncertainty over the availability of tech talent from abroad, forcing companies to choose between hiring more American workers at higher costs or moving more work to offshore centers. Indian IT giants like Infosys, TCS, and Wipro as well as US tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon lobbied against the throttling, criticizing its impact on their businesses.

Now it appears to be back to business as usual with fast processing of H1-B visas. But the number of visas is still capped at 65,000 for the financial year 2017-18, which is much lower than the 195,000 limit in the early years of this millennium. In addition to the 65,000, there are 20,000 H1-B visas earmarked for those who have a master’s degree or higher qualification from an American university.