Immigration policy change — reduction of skilled-worker visas
CNN (Reuters) reports: “U.S. set to cut skilled-worker visas by two-thirds.”
“The United States is about to cut the number of employment visas it offers to highly qualified foreign workers from 195,000 to 65,000.” The change will affect the number of H1-B visas, used mostly to bring high-tech experts from Asia, especially the Indian sub-continent, to work in the U.S for up to three years.
Unless Congress acts by the end of this month — and there is little sign it will do so given the political climate, with a lack of jobs for Americans– the change will take effect automatically Oct. 1.
“Employers, especially technology companies, argue the move will hurt them and the economy.”
Intel Corp. says “finding the best-educated engineering talent from around the world is critical to [the] company’s future” and it “cannot find enough U.S. workers with the advanced education, skills, and expertise” it needs
A spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said: “In the near-term, we simply must have access to foreign nationals. Many of them have been educated in the United States. By sending them home, we are at best sending them to our own foreign plant sites, and at worst to our competitors.”
Probably another very short-sighted policy that will just accelerate the movement of high-tech work overseas.
Wouldn’t you rather have that Indian computer programming whiz living and spending his/her salary in the US rather than India? With modern communications, he/she can do the job just as well from Calcutta.
Yeah, we don’t want him/her here if it takes an American’s job, but I thought the visa process was designed to determine if there truly was a need for the person, so displacement of American jobs by visa workers should be minimal
