The United States (US) is mulling new regulations to stop H-1B visa extensions, mostly used by Indian IT professionals, in line with the US President Donald Trump’s ‘Buy American, Hire American’ campaign that seeks to bring back jobs to the country. An US-based news agency has pointed out that if this happens, the move would directly prevent hundreds of thousands of foreign workers in the US from keeping their H-1B work visas, while their green card application is under processing.
According to the report, such a move aims to impose new restrictions to prevent abuse and misuse of H-1B visas, besides ending the provision of granting extension for those who already have a green card. It also noted that the act currently allows the administration to extend the H-1B visas for thousands of immigrants, predominantly Indian immigrants, beyond the allowed two three-year terms if a green card is pending, Besides, it said that the idea is to create a sort of ‘self- deportation’ of hundreds of thousands of Indian tech workers in the US to open up those jobs for Americans.
The report further said that the proposed changes would have a dramatic effect particularly on Indian visa holders considering more than half of all H-1B visas have been awarded to Indian nationals. It also said that this would be a major catastrophic development as more than 1 million H1-B visa holders have been waiting in line for green cards for over a decade, have US citizen children, own a home. The H1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. The technology companies depend on H-1B to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.