Companies that want a temporary work visa for potential foreign hires will today begin applying to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The demand for the 85,000 available slots will likely be high, if previous years are any indication. The agency expects they will reach that number of requests in five business days, Politico’s Morning Tech reported.
The annual April 1 deadline underlines, again, tech industry advocates’ frustrations with the prospect for immigration reform. Silicon Valley had hoped that President Obama’s executive changes to immigration rules, announced last November, would include releasing unused H-1B visas. That didn’t happen, although tech applauded the change of giving spouses of H-1B workers the ability to work, as U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker wrote in Inc.
For most companies and startups, the fixes don’t address their greater needs. Many are supporting Sen. Orrin Hatch’s “I-Squared” bill would raise the cap to 115,000.
In a TechCrunch op-ed, Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and CEO of Affirm who emigrated to the U.S. in 1991, called on congressional leaders to pass Hatch’s bill:
The H-1B visa lottery leaves to chance what we should want to guarantee for our economy: that the best and the brightest innovators contribute to our country’s success, instead of being forced out and likely given little choice but to go create jobs for our global competitors. At nearly every company I’ve been a part of, there has been at least one heartbreaking story of a hardworking immigrant being sent back to his or her home country.
Advocates for reform have launched a “Let PJ Stay” campaign to keep Pierre-Jean “PJ” Cobut, a Belgium entrepreneur and co-founder of Echo Labs, stay in the country. His visa expires June 15, and he has said he plans to move, with his Palo Alto-based wearables firm, to Canada.
But labor and others have argued that raising the cap would hurt American workers.
Michael Wasser, a senior policy analyst with Jobs With Justice, a labor group, argued in an op-ed in The Hill that employers have used the visa program to lay off employees and hire contract labor. Any change to the current visa program needs to come with worker protections, he said.
H-1B workers are not responsible for the loss of U.S. jobs or lowering of labor standards. That responsibility rests solely with employers who use the H-1B program’s inherently coercive conditions to drive down labor costs, even if that means replacing American workers.
At top: The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services building in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Matt York, File)
