Tech workers outside the US appear to love H-1Bs, too, despite the system’s limitations. The visas provide a way for ambitious coders to get closer to the epicenter of the global tech industry, or to leverage their skills into a fresh start in the US.
Nearly 70 percent of the visas went to “computer-related” jobs in the 2021 fiscal year, according to data from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, and many of these workers eventually convert their visas into permanent US residency. But because of restrictions on the number of employment-based residency applications granted each year, it can take decades for immigrants from larger countries like India to receive a green card, leaving many people working on an H-1B tied to one employer for years. During that time they are vulnerable to life-disrupting shocks like those facing some immigrants caught up in the recent tech layoffs.
“It reveals the predicament these H-1B workers are put in,” says Faraz Khan, legislative director for the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers labor union. “The rules and regulations under which they work are not advantageous to any worker who is in any type of unfortunate situation.”
Immigrant workers aren’t the only ones losing in this moment. Tech companies have invested decades and millions of dollars into lobbying for kinder rules and an increase in the number of visas available, and in sponsoring hundreds of thousands of workers. Yet the process remains unchanged, and layoffs mean some skilled workers that companies may want to hire from competitors either now or in future will instead leave the country.
“The challenge is holding on to that talent and being able to really enable the country as a whole to benefit from the creations that they were going to bring forward,” Karan Bhatia, vice president of public affairs and public policy at Google, said in a June 2022 interview. Many Amazon employees with “longstanding” applications for green cards are still waiting, according to an October 2022 post from Beth Galetti, Amazon’s top human resources executive.
The recent layoffs even disadvantage current H-1B workers who escaped the cuts, and those who manage to secure new visas. Immigration law forbids companies from sponsoring a new green card for a foreign worker if they’ve recently laid off a US resident in a similar job, Moore says. That means an immigrant worker who was laid off but lucky enough to get a new H-1B sponsorship could be barred from starting a green card application if their new employer has recently made its own layoffs.
Tech industry groups and some lawmakers argue that the US is already losing talent to competitors overseas because of its failure to reform the system. “We’ve had such major movements toward restricting our already restricted and complicated immigration process, other countries saw that as an opportunity for them to take advantage of to increase high-skilled immigration to their countries to their benefit,” Moore says. The US has declined in the International Institute for Management Development’s world competitiveness ranking over the past several years. It occupied first place on the index in 2015 and had dropped to number 10 by 2021, where it remained in 2022.
