How Mega Corporations Rigged the H-1B Visa Program at the Expense of Small Business

‘The H-1B program is critical as a way for employers to fill skill gaps and for really talented people to come to the United States,’ said Ronil Hira, a professor at Howard University who studies visa programs. ‘But the outsourcing companies are squeezing out legitimate users of the program,’ he said. ‘The H-1Bs are actually pushing jobs offshore.’
Those firms have used the visas to bring their employees, mostly from India, for large contracts to take over work at American businesses. And as the share of H-1B visas obtained by outsourcing firms has grown, more Americans say they are being put out of work, or are seeing their jobs moved overseas.
The top companies receiving H-1B visas in recent years, Professor Hira found, include Tata Consultancy Services, known as TCS, Infosys and Wipro, all outsourcing giants based in India; Cognizant, with headquarters in New Jersey; and Accenture, a global operation incorporated in Ireland.
– From the New York Times article: Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program, and Jobs Leave the U. S.
Most of you will be at least somewhat familiar with the H-1B visa program, which is meant to provide work-visas for foreign workers skilled in technology and science. The annual quota of these visas is 85,000, and large consulting firms (many of them Indian), are flooding the system with thousands of requests and scooping up a disproportionate share. They are exploiting a loophole which imposes no limits on the amount of visas each individual company can acquire. In fact, the 20 biggest recipients of H-1B visas for 2014 collected 40% of the total, leaving those who need it most left high and dry.
Here’s more from the New York Times:

This post was published at Liberty Blitzkrieg on Nov 10, 2015.