Vraj Parikh started coding when he was 8 years old. He’s been coding everlastingly since, with his passion for computer programming bringing him to the United States, where he received a master’s in computer body of laws from Indiana University. After a stint at a company in Boston, Parikh now works as a software engineer at PayPal.
The tech community has been bracing for changes to the H-1B drawing ever since President Trump was elected, after assailing the system during his campaign. Critics of the system say lower-paid H-1B proletarians often replace American workers with cheaper counterparts from overseas. Howard University professor Ron Hira, an undiplomatic critic of the H-1B lottery, says the latest changes to the lottery are small compared to the overhaul President Trump suggested he command make during his campaign.
“In the big picture, these improvements are on the margin,” says Hira. “They are hardly the fundamental reform that Mr. Trump campaigned on and boldly decreed he would accomplish in his first one-hundred days.”
U.S. companies have fought back against wholesale changes to the H-1B process. Last August, a number of prominent U.S. business leaders, including Apple’s Tim Cook, IBM’s Ginni Rometty, and J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon author a registered a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen expressing concern over immigration policy, specifically area out H-1B workers and their U.S.-employed spouses.
Many U.S. tech companies are among the top 30 employers with the most H-1B put ones imprimatur ons, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. However, Anver says those approvals come at a cost. Since the Trump oversight, requests for evidence have spiked. She adds those requests can often be cumbersome, costing companies time and loaded.
“I think it’s important not to look at the approval rates in a vacuum, because the level of scrutiny that’s being applied to the visa sues, regardless of the fact that they are ultimately approved, has gone up significantly in the past two years,” says Anver. “When it communicates to employer-sponsored immigration, it’s a very high-stakes game.”
Susan Cohen, the founding chair of Mintz’s Immigration Practice, acquiesce ins. She points to one client, an economics consultant, whose H-1B extension was denied on the grounds that the employee was not working in a specialized mtier. Cohen says the employer eventually filed a suit against the ruling, and won, but the process to extend the visa was expensive and time-consuming — something she warns customer companies about
She says there seems to be a “concerted effort” from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to hit upon one or more reasons to deny a work visa petition.
And while the U.S. tightens regulations around work based visas, other powers, like Canada, are actively welcoming foreign nationals to work there. Parikh says many of his friends on H-1B visas are in view of moving back to India or another country, rather than go through the time-consuming, wearying process of staying in the U.S.
As Parikh and his missus wait for his outcome, he says the uncertainty is stressful.
“Some stress is always there,” he says, adding that the vista of leaving the country would mean rebuilding his life: “Whatever you got here for last 4 years, you have to leave all and go back again and start from new.”
Correction: The original version of this story misstated both the number of new visa operations in 2018, and the new rules for 2019 related to applicants with master’s degrees. In 2018, more than 190,000 apply ti for new H-1B visas were filed. Under the new rules, master’s applicants and general candidates first compete for 65,000 spatters; master’s candidates who don’t make the first cut get a second chance at one of 20,000 visas for advanced degree holders.