Trump’s Administration Just Made It Harder to Get Work Visas

President Donald Trump announced a review of the H-1B visa program, which technology companies use to hire thousands of workers from overseas, to favor more skilled and highly paid applicants.

Trump is taking aim at information-technology outsourcing companies, including India's Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp. and Mphasis Corp. The H-1B visa system has been criticized following high-profile examples of American workers being replaced by lower-paid foreigners through the program. On March 31, 2017, the administration issued new guidelines requiring further information for computer programmers applying for H-1B visas to prove the jobs require more advanced knowledge and experience. The changes come as companies have submitted applications for the controversial program.

H-1B visas were created about three decades ago to help companies bring in skilled workers from other countries when they couldn’t find Americans to fill those jobs. But the program has morphed greatly from its original intent.

Americans are losing their jobs to foreign visa holders, who tend to be paid substantially less. Most of the visas don’t even go to American companies, but rather to overseas firms that use the program to build up operations in the U.S. India would have the most at stake in any reform.

Under the trio of Trump reforms, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency said it will take more aggressive steps to combat “fraud and abuse” and tighten requirements for computer programming jobs. The Justice Department also warned employers applying for the visas not to discriminate against U.S. workers.

“These are all steps forward,” said Ron Hira, an associate professor at Howard University, who has done extensive research on the H-1B program.

One reason the program has been criticized is the rise of the outsourcing industry, a nascent business 30 years ago. Outsourcers, such as India’s Wipro Ltd. and Cognizant Technology Solutions of the U.S., take over and manage the technology systems for corporations in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

In the U.S., outsourcers bring staffers into the country on work visas, train them in the tech departments of leading corporations and then rotate them back to India where, pay and living costs are lower. Outsourcing companies now get far more visas than traditional technology companies, according to data collected by Hira through Freedom of Information Act requests. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. received 5,650 H-1Bs in 2014 while Amazon.com, the largest recipient in the latter group, got 877.

Most of the companies applying for the visas are seeking to fill technology jobs. The most frequently requested positions are computer system analysts and software developers.

The business model has been a success for outsourcers and their corporate customers. But workers suffer. American employees lose jobs as their employers opt to hand over tech departments to outsourcing companies. Outsourcing companies tend to pay H-1B workers $65,000 to $75,000 a year, far less than the $100,000 or more at Google and Microsoft Corp.

Bruce Morrison, a former Democratic congressman who helped write the original H-1B law, says the goal of capping the number of visas was to limit the number of workers who came to the U.S. for temporary positions. Instead, employers would be encouraged to hire permanent employees, on what are known as green cards, so they could become U.S. citizens.

“Our motto was ‘Green cards, not guest workers’,” said Morrison by telephone from Maryland, where he works as a lobbyist for labor groups.

But outsourcing companies, whose business model is built on rotating employees between India and the U.S., rarely help their workers get green cards, according to data Hira compiled.