A crackdown on the controversial H-1B visa intended for skilled workers has struck Indian citizens harder than other foreign nationals, with federal officials hitting them with more visa denials and demands for proof of their eligibility to work.
That’s according to a report that found U.S. gatekeepers ramping up their rate of visa refusals at the end of last year and slapping applicants from India with more “requests for evidence” of eligibility than applicants from other nations. The increased denials and scrutiny were “likely due to new Trump administration policies,” said the group that produced the report, the National Foundation for American Policy.
India has long dominated applications for the H-1B, which is obtained by employers seeking to hire foreign workers. From 2007 to 2017, 2.2 million H-1B applications were submitted for Indian workers. Chinese workers were the next-largest group of H-1B applicants, with about 300,000 visa requests. In Silicon Valley, about 71 percent of tech employees are foreign-born, according to a 2016 report based on U.S. census data. However, that data did not break down how many were foreign-born U.S. citizens versus visa holders.
But as the U.S. government moved forward with President Donald Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” executive order, the rejection rate for Indian workers’ H-1B applications jumped to 23.6 percent in the fourth quarter of last year from 16.6 percent in the third quarter — a 42 percent increase, according to the foundation. The foundation, a non-profit think tank, has pushed for an increase to the number of new H-1B visas granted per year, which is currently capped at 85,000.
Indian nationals’ rejection rates for the first and second quarters of 2017 were 18 percent and 17 percent respectively, highlighting the fourth-quarter spike.
Applicants from other countries were also rejected more frequently, but the percentage increase in denials was slightly smaller, rising from 14 percent in the third quarter of 2017 to 19.6 percent in the fourth quarter — a 40 percent increase.
“Cases that used to be approved without a second thought are now receiving requests for evidence and are being denied,” said Cornell University immigration law professor and immigration lawyer Stephen W. Yale-Loehr.
Immigration Reform Law Institute lawyer John Miano applauded the increases in requests for evidence and H-1B rejections. “For the first time, we’re seeing actual scrutiny applied to H-1B petitions,” Miano said. “The people in (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration) who have seen the fraud and abuse going on for decades now are able to do their jobs without fear of repercussions from above.”
The H-1B, heavily relied upon by Bay Area technology companies, including Google and Facebook, has become a flashpoint in the U.S. immigration debate, with the tech industry lobbying for expansion of the visa program, and critics pointing to reported abuses and arguing that H-1B visa holders take jobs from Americans. H-1B recipients are supposed to have a bachelor’s degree or higher, and do specialized work.
The Trump administration’s H-1B crackdown, intended to help American workers, could do the opposite if U.S. firms can’t get the foreign talent they need, Yale-Loehr said. “They may not be able to continue to grow their companies the way they would like,” he said. “It may make larger companies more likely to set up overseas operations rather than expand in the United States, and that ultimately hurts U.S. workers.”
But Miano sees the H-1B program as un-salvageable. “The question is, should we have a program that’s designed to replace Americans with cheap foreign workers?”
On top of upping the rate of H-1B denials for Indian citizens, officials from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services appeared to be laying an especially heavy hand on workers from India during the application process. In the fourth quarter of 2017, 72 percent of H-1B applications for Indian citizens were met with requests for additional evidence to prove the applicant and the job were eligible for the visa, compared to 61 percent for nationals of other countries, the foundation reported.
However, the data — which the foundation said were based on federal government figures and its own calculations — showed a dramatic upswing in demands for evidence from citizens of all nations. In the first quarter of 2017, the rate of “requests for evidence” for Indian citizens’ applications was 18 percent, and for all other countries, 14 percent. Those numbers dropped slightly in the second quarter, crept up in the third — to 24 percent for Indians and 18 percent for citizens of other countries — before skyrocketing in the fourth quarter.
Whether Indian citizens are being singled out by the U.S. government is unclear, Yale-Loehr said. “It could just be just because Indians are over-represented among computer professionals, therefore they’re over-represented in these requests for evidence and denials.”
UC Davis computer science professor Norman Matloff, who studies the H-1B, believes more denials and evidence requests hit Indian citizens’ applications because visas for Indian nationals are often obtained by the outsourcing companies that have been the subject of H-1B-abuse reports and have become a target of the Trump administration.
