Wall Street Journal on the H-1B Program

Over the past months we have written extensively about the issues raised by today’s Wall Street Journal article “Slump Sinks Visa Program” but it is still an interesting read.   Most of our readers are aware of the current H-1B quota and the fact that a substantial number of H-1B visas still remain available (for comparison, prior years’ H-1B quota was exhausted in as little as 5 days).

The article explains the decrease in the H-1B demand not only due to the economic slowdown and the corresponding decrease in hiring but also to recent anti-immigrant sentiment in Washington,

Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied H-1B visas, said that [the decreasing number of H-1B applications trend] has been compounded by what he sees as rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. “The best and the brightest who would normally come here are saying, ‘Why do we need to go to a country where we are not welcome, where our quality of life would be less, and we would be at the bottom of the social ladder?’” Mr. Wadhwa said.

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[Also,] some would-be employers are put off by a crackdown on fraud. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers the H-1B program, has been dispatching inspectors on surprise company visits to verify that H-1B employees are performing the jobs on the terms specified. The fraud-detection unit in coming months is expected to inspect up to 20,000 companies with H-1Bs and other temporary worker visas.

However, the article also points out the value of the H-1B program to the U.S. economy,

While the number of visa holders is small compared with the U.S. work force, their contribution is huge, employers say. For example, last year 35% of Microsoft’s patent applications in the U.S. came from new inventions by visa and green-card holders, according to company general counsel Brad Smith.

Google Inc. also says that the H-1B program allowed it to tap top talent that was crucial to its development. India native Krishna Bharat, for example, joined the firm in 1999 through the H-1B program, and went on to earn several patents while at Google. He was credited by the company as being the key developer of its Google News service. Today, he holds the title of distinguished research scientist.

Read the full article here.