Trump cracks down on H-1B that feeds Silicon Valley

April 4, 2017

Washington, Apr 4: The U.S. 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.

trump3Fed up with a program it says favors foreign workers at the expense of Americans, the Trump administration rolled out a trio of policy shifts. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency on Friday made it harder for companies to bring overseas tech workers to the U.S. using the H-1B work visa. On Monday, the agency 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 U.S. 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there's also broad recognition that reform is needed, given several high-profile examples where American employees have been replaced by lower-paid foreign workers through the program.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. Monday's 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 U.S. IT services jobs.

The new guidelines released Friday 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 begins Monday. The changes don't explicitly prohibit applications for a specific type of job. Instead, they bring more scrutiny to those for computer programmers doing the simplest jobs.

"This is a step in the right direction in terms of tightening up the eligibility," said Ron Hira, an associate professor at Howard University, who has done extensive research on the H-1B program. "You're going to have to beef up your argument for why you need this person."

Technology and outsourcing companies are the heaviest users of the H-1B visa, which is the largest program for temporary foreign workers in the U.S. by a wide margin. India-based outsourcing companies receive a disproportionate percentage of the visas and tend to pay lower salaries than U.S.-based tech firms. Employers sought H-1B visas for more than 13,000 computer programmers in 2016, citing an average salary of about $72,000, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Caitlin Webber. About half of the visas sought last year were for computer-related positions, she said.

Computer programmers made up about 12 percent of all H-1B applications certified by the Department of Labor in 2015. Of those, 41 percent were for positions at the lowest wage level, defined as jobs requiring people to perform routine tasks that require them to exercise little judgment on their own. The guidelines issued Friday refer specifically to entry-level computer programmers, which the U.S. Department of Labor defines as those who write and test code to allow computer applications and software to work properly.

"This is not a change in policy on H-1B and H-1B1 eligibility in computer-related fields," CeCe Gwathmey, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, said in an email, referencing the March 31 document. The memorandum rescinded a 17-year-old set of guidelines that "relied on obsolete information and had not been used as a standard" to decide on H-1B petitions for many years, she said.

Still, the administration hasn't thrown its lot in with any of the plans for broader changes to the program. Lawmakers from both parties have introduced several bills this year. One would replace the current random lottery with a system that gives priority to companies paying higher salaries. Another would explicitly prohibit companies from replacing qualified U.S. workers with H-1B workers.

Scott Corley, executive director Compete America, a coalition of employers that rely on high-skilled immigrants, said in a statement Monday that H-1B reform should be part of a broader re-assessment of the country's immigration priorities. "Our nation's outdated legal immigration system relies heavily on a single temporary visa category, the H-1B, to prove work authorization for every kind of high-skilled foreign professional we recruit," he said.

The result, said Corley: "Chaos, inefficiencies, and criticism."

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
Agencies
May 17,2020

Washington, May 17: The overall number of global coronavirus cases has increased to over 4.6 million, while the death toll has surpassed 311,000, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

As of Sunday morning, the total number of cases stood at 4,634,068, while the death toll increased to 311,781, the University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) revealed in its latest update.

The US currently accounts for the world's highest number of cases and deaths at 1,467,796 and 88,754, respectively.

In terms of cases, Russia has the second highest number of infections at 272,043, followed by the UK (241,461), Brazil (233,142), Spain (230,698), Italy (224,760), France (179,630), Germany (175,752), Turkey (148,067) and Iran (118,392), the CSSE figures showed.

Meanwhile, the UK accounted for the second highest COVID-19 deaths worldwide at 34,546.

The other countries with over 10,000 deaths are Italy (31,763), Spain (27,563), France (27,532), and Brazil (15,662).

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
Agencies
February 4,2020

As the deadly coronavirus has spread worldwide, it has carried with it xenophobia -- and Asian communities around the world are finding themselves subject to suspicion and fear.

When a patient on Australia's Gold Coast refused to shake the hand of her surgeon Rhea Liang, citing the virus that has killed hundreds, the medic's first response was shock.

But after tweeting about the incident and receiving a flood of responses, the respected doctor learned her experience was all too common.

There has been a spike in reports of anti-Chinese rhetoric directed at people of Asian origin, regardless of whether they have ever visited the centre of the epidemic or been in contact with the virus.

Chinese tourists have reportedly been spat at in the Italian city of Venice, a family in Turin was accused of carrying the disease, and mothers in Milan have used social media to call for children to be kept away from Chinese classmates.

In Canada, a white man was filmed telling a Chinese-Canadian woman "you dropped your coronavirus" in the parking lot of a local mall.

In Malaysia, a petition to "bar Chinese people from entering our beloved country" received almost 500,000 signatures in one week.

The incidents are part of what the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine has described as "misinformation" which it says is fuelling "racial profiling" where "deeply distressing assumptions are being made about 'Chinese' or 'Asian-looking' people." Disease has long been accompanied by suspicions of foreigners -- from Irish immigrants being targeted in the Typhoid Mary panic of 1900s America to Nepali peacekeepers being accused of bringing cholera to earthquake-struck Haiti in the last decade.

"It's a common phenomenon," said Rob Grenfell, director of health and biosecurity for Australia's science and research agency CSIRO.

"With outbreaks and epidemics along human history, we've always tried to vilify certain subsets of the population," he said, comparing the behaviour to 1300s plague-ridden medieval Europe, where foreigners and religious groups were often blamed.

"Sure it emerged in China," he said of the coronavirus, "but that's no reason to actually vilify Chinese people." In a commentary for the British Medical Journal, doctor Abraar Karan warned this behaviour could discourage people with symptoms from coming forward.

Claire Hooker, a health lecturer at the University of Sydney, said the responses from governments may have compounded prejudice.

The World Health Organisation has warned against "measures that unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade", but this has not stopped scores of countries from introducing travel bans.

The tiny Pacific nation of Micronesia has banned its citizens from visiting mainland China altogether.

"Travel bans respond largely to people's fears," said Hooker, and while sometimes warranted, they often "have the effect of cementing an association between Chinese people and scary viruses".

Abbey Shi, a Shanghai-born student in Sydney, said the attitude shown by some of her peers has "become almost an attack on students who are Chinese".

While Australia's conservative government has banished its citizens returning from Wuhan -- the central Chinese city at the epicentre of the virus -- to a remote island for quarantine, thousands of students still stuck in China risk their studies being torpedoed.

"Right now it looks like they have to miss the semester's start and potentially the whole year, because of the way the courses are set up," Shi said.

According to Hooker, studies in Toronto on the impact of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS -- another global coronavirus outbreak in 2002 -- showed the impact of xenophobic sentiment often lasted much longer than the public health scare.

"While there may be a cessation of direct forms of racism as news about the disease dies down, it takes quite a bit of time for economic recovery and people continue to feel unsafe," she said.

People may not rush back to Chinese businesses or restaurants, and may even heed some of the more outlandish viral social media disinformation -- such as one popular post imploring people to avoid eating noodles for their own safety.

"In one sense you might think the effects lasted from the last coronavirus to this one because the representation as China being a place where diseases come from has been persistent," Hooker said.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.
News Network
April 9,2020

Paris, Apr 9: More than 1.5 million cases of the novel coronavirus have been registered worldwide, according to a tally compiled by AFP at 0530 GMT Thursday from official sources.

Of the 1,502,478 infections, 87,320 people have died across 192 countries and territories since the epidemic first emerged in China late last year.

The tallies, using data collected by AFP from national authorities and information from the World Health Organization (WHO), probably reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections. Many countries are only testing the most serious cases.

Comments

Add new comment

  • Coastaldigest.com reserves the right to delete or block any comments.
  • Coastaldigset.com is not responsible for its readers’ comments.
  • Comments that are abusive, incendiary or irrelevant are strictly prohibited.
  • Please use a genuine email ID and provide your name to avoid reject.