For many years US senator Richard Durbin wanted to bring about a change in the program that is considered as a way by which tech companies can hire experts from the technical field. Durbin is not a supporter of Trump but he thought that changes will come about after the November elections but now he is losing patience.
On Friday Richard Durbin wrote to Donald Trump to adhere to the promised crackdown before end of this month. This is mainly due to the April deadline when employers can hire guest workers from the chunk of H-1B visa holders through a lottery system. There are in all 85000 available of which 20000 are kept aside for higher degree holders. A large number of IT firms hire these skilled workers at lower wages and displace the American workers.
The tech companies want to hire capable immigrants while the Trump administration is asking them to give priority to Americans. There were protests from several Google employees and several tech companies went in court when Trump signed an executive order which prohibited the entry of people from 7 major Muslim countries for a period of 90 days.
Durbin always wanted the H-1B visa program to be revamped. He even introduced a bill which would give priority to those employers who paid higher wages and hired workers with prolific degrees in science and technology from US universities.
Durbin has asked Trump to have the same approach as far as this year’s H-1B visas are concerned. The White House spokesperson has said that White House is monitoring the situation closely.
Durbin knows that he is in a tight spot by asking the President to attack the H-1 B visa policy. There have been several suggestions to the Trump administration to do something about the H-1B lottery system like giving priority to companies that do not have higher proportions of H-1 B workers. There would be on one exception and that is Facbook which is an officially H-1B visa dependent company.
Trump had earlier made a statement that H-1B program is not a high skilled or immigrant program. It is a program which involves hiring large number of temporary foreign workers at low pay in order to substitute American workers. He said that he will end this cheap labor program and make it mandatory to prioritize American workers first.
The CEO of Envoy Global said that some companies had put on hold their preparation for this year’s H-1B visa lottery system with the fear that Trump will weaken this program. Several bills are being passed which intends to punish the outsourcing firms and try and protect the US tech companies. From past several years many such bills have got passed but after that nothing much happened which has added to the frustration of people like Durbin.
