Tens of thousands people have been laid off at Amazon, Meta, Salesforce and other once-hungry tech employers in recent months. But one group of workers has been particularly harmed: U.S. immigrants on H-1B visas for workers with specialized skills.
These high-demand visas are granted to employer-sponsored immigrants to come to the United States, and their limited supply is widely used by large technology companies. But if a worker is fired, they must obtain sponsorship from another company within 60 days or leave the country.
It’s a particularly difficult situation when the big companies that sponsor most tech-related visas are also the ones doing layoffs and hiring freezes. Amazon and Meta, which together announced at least 29,000 layoffs in recent months, have each applied to sponsor more than 1,000 new H-1B visas in fiscal 2022, according to figures from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. immigration.
American dominance in science and technology has long depended on a steady flow of talented people from abroad. But the H-1B system — and U.S. immigration as a whole — hasn’t evolved much since the last major immigration bill in 1986. Today, pandemic-era economic uncertainty is reshaping tech giants and highlights the limitations of the system. This shows that workers, businesses, and perhaps the United States as a whole are losing.
“Because our system has been so far behind, these visa holders have built their lives here for years, they have homes, children, and personal and professional networks that span years,” says Linda Moore, President and CEO of TechNet, an industry. lobbying group that includes almost every major tech company. “They’re just stuck in this system that doesn’t give them clarity or certainty.”
Over the past decade, tech companies, which are typically fierce competitors, have been particularly tight-lipped on the issue of H-1B immigration. They are requesting large numbers of visas, want an increase in the annual supply of 85,000 visas, and have pushed for changes to the application process to make it easier for highly skilled workers to stay in the United States permanently. An H-1B visa holder can generally only stay for six years, unless their employer sponsors them to become a permanent U.S. resident or green card holder.
