Earlier this year a Trump draft executive order on foreign worker visas was leaked to the press and revealed the administration’s intention to craft legislation prioritizing “the interests of American workers and — to the maximum degree possible — the jobs, wages, and well-being of those workers.” That executive order was never issued, but it appears that some of the ideas it contained are now winding their way through the Trump administration.
With the press overly focused on “Russian hacking,” while also eagerly trying to put out the Susan Rice fire, they completely missed rules changes implemented by the Department of Homeland Security taking direct aim at tech companies and their excessive use of the H-1B program. Per The Hill:
Without fanfare, the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Friday issued a policy memo that would make it harder for companies to fill computer programmer positions with workers on H-1B visas. The memo stated that being a computer programmer is no longer sufficient to qualify as a “specialty occupation.”
The agency followed up Monday by announcing that it would begin to crack down on H-1B visa abuses by conducting targeted site visits to companies with a high proportion of high-skilled visas in their workforce.
“The H-1B visa program should help U.S. companies recruit highly-skilled foreign nationals when there is a shortage of qualified workers in the country,” the agency said. “Yet, too many American workers who are as qualified, willing, and deserving to work in these fields have been ignored or unfairly disadvantaged.”
In a separate release on Monday, the Department of Justice said that it “will not tolerate employers misusing the H-1B visa process to discriminate against U.S. workers.”
All the announcements are in step with a portion of the draft executive order, which said the Homeland Security Department would begin conducting “site visits” to ensure that worker visas are not being abused.
Meanwhile, tech companies are definitely growing weary of the changes but aren’t quite ready to openly take on the Trump administration just yet.
“Unpredictability is the thing we’re most concerned about,” said one technology industry official. “We’re keeping a close eye on these policies. We want to give guidance to our employees that may be affected, but we don’t know which ones will be yet.”
The official said that the concern at their company was no longer if H-1B visas will be reduced in volume, but whether the entire program might ultimately be scrapped.
We’re worried that the whole program would be dismantled,” the official said, adding that the fear was rooted in the direction of the administration’s overall policies and rhetoric on immigration, rather than specific conversations with the White House.
As we’ve pointed out before, large Indian consulting firms are by far the largest users of the H-1B visa program. That said, most of the jobs created by those companies tend to have lower salaries than those created by the likes of Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
Tech industry insiders expect Trump will direct DHS, which runs the H-1B visa lottery system, to start a rule-making to re-prioritize the visa allocation to give preference to higher-paying firms. This pits tech firms against the Indian IT-staffing firms.
In theory, prioritizing by salaries means visas for more senior, higher-paying jobs will be granted first, and visas for lower-paying jobs (such as those being filled by Indian IT services firms) would fall to the back of line, perhaps not getting allocated at all if demand for the high-wage job visas is strong.
California House members Darrell Issa, a Republican, and Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat, are pushing bills that would raise salary requirements for H-1B visa holders. Tech companies generally support those efforts to de-prioritize Indian outsourcers that they claim “clog up” the oversubscribed lottery system with bulk applications.
Seems like this tweet is coming to life, with our without an executive order.
MY POSITION ON VISAS#MakeAmericaGreatAgain #Trump2016https://t.co/JGmOd5gr5z http://pic.twitter.com/OLg6N3Ug9U
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2016
via http://ift.tt/2oHr9g8 Tyler Durden