Serious Great News - H1B Might be Suspended, More Fantastic Talents for SG Inc!

[Pinkieslut]

Covid-19: US tech workers’ body urges Donald Trump to suspend H-1B visas amid massive layoffs
The organisation appealed to the US president to protect the interest of American workers.

File photo of US President Donald Trump. | Brendan Smialowski / AFP
An organisation representing technology workers in the United States has appealed to President Donald Trump to stop issuing H-1B visas , and protect the interests of American workers amid massive layoffs due to the economic impact brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows American companies to employ foreign workers in occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise.

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In its letter to Trump, US Tech Workers – a nonprofit organisation which describes itself as representing American workers – also urged him to suspend the H-2B visa programmes, which are mostly for foreign farm workers.
“We have written a letter asking that the H-1B & H-2B visa programme be suspended for this year due to the economic fallout from the coronavirus,” the organization said in its letter. “Battling both a pandemic and the resulting fallout to our economy from the coronavirus is no time to approve employment visas for more foreign workers.”
The organization said that 3.3 million Americans have filed initial jobless claims for the week ending March 31, breaking the record-high of 6,95,000 in 1982 – the peak of recession.

In its letter, the organization said the government should be cautious about bringing in foreign workers at a time of tremendous uncertainty. “We urge you to pause the H-1B visa programme that would bring in 85,000 workers this year and suspend the recently approved addition of 35,000 workers for the H-2B visa,” the organization said. “Overall the importation of workers should be undertaken with great caution during this period of tremendous uncertainty, the letter said.”
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Fearing layoffs, foreign technology professionals holding H-1B visas, meanwhile, have demanded the extension of their permissible post-job loss limit to stay in the US from the existing 60 to 180 days, PTI reported.

Economists have predicted that 47 million jobs could be lost in the United States due to the coronavirus, which would translate to a 32.1% unemployment rate, according to CNBC.

Trump has warned Americans to prepare for “very, very painful two weeks” as the White House projected that the coronavirus pandemic could kill 1,00,000 to 2,40,000 people even if social distancing norms are followed. US has nearly 1,90,000 cases of the coronavirus, the maximum in the world. The number of deaths has crossed 4,000 – higher than the toll in China, where the virus originated.

 

[Pinkieslut]

Two-thirds of H1-B visa applications this year are from Indians
April 2, 2020
https://qz.com/author/abhattacharyaqz/
By Ananya Bhattacharya
Tech reporter

US president Donald Trump’s protectionist stance has not stopped Indians from forming the bulk of the H-1B applicants yet again this year.
Over 67% of the total 275,000 electronic registrations for H-1B visas in fiscal year 2021 are from India, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said on April
1. The authority will now pick 85,000 from this pool through a randomised lottery.

The numbers are in keeping with previous years wherein Indians and Chinese have been the largest beneficiaries of the H-1B.

This comes amid doubts over the future of immigrant workers and their families, and even as the wait for green card becomes painfully longer.
This year’s applicants’ fates hang in the balance as coronavirus rips through the world at a menacing pace. Already, several international students have been forced to return to their home countries and H-1B workers fear layoffs. Experts, though, see no big impact on this year’s petitioners.
“Since there is no need for any personal contact between the stakeholders to file these petitions, they can be filed to reach USCIS on April 1, 2020, provided USCIS is open to receiving them,” Poorvi Chothani, managing partner at immigration law firm LawQuest, told Quartz. The start date for H-1B candidates is Oct. 1, 2020, by when the worst of the pandemic will likely be over.
However, the system itself may have thrown a spanner in the works. This is the first time the USCIS is accepting only e-registrations for H-1B. A glitch in this new process may have wrongfully denied hundreds of authentic petitioners, labelling them duplicates, according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) and several law firms.

 

[Pinkieslut]

Indian H-1B Visa Holders In US Face Layoffs As Coronavirus Topples Economy
H-1B layoffs are rising as joblessness soars in the US, leaving many Indians without jobs, healthcare or a way to get back home.

VIROJT CHANGYENCHAM VIA GETTY IMAGESRepresentative image.
Boston, Massachusetts — Divyanshu Pandey, a Duke University graduate, received his H-1B sponsorship in September 2019, and was working as a business operations analyst at a tech and rental industry startup in Dallas, Texas, when he was laid off a week ago due to the sudden economic slowdown prompted by the global novel coronavirus pandemic.
“As hard as it is for me, if I was in the company’s position, I would do the same,” said Pandey, whose company was in the middle of a Series A funding round when the pandemic hit America.
Since early March, unemployment claims in the United States have jumped by a whopping 3,000%. In just the last week, 6.6 million people have filed for unemployment benefits, according to data released by the country’s Bureau of Labour Statistics. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman predicts that unemployment could rise further to a record-breaking 20% in the next two weeks.
As the US economy slows, H-1B visa holders — three fourths of whom are Indian — are faced with the prospect of losing their jobs and health insurance amidst a raging pandemic. As of date, the United States has the largest number of coronavirus cases in the world, with over 360,000 confirmed infections and almost 11,000 deaths according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

The laid-off workers, who will no longer be able to access the health insurance provided by their employers, now have just 60 days to find a similar full-time job or leave the country.

Dan Nandan, the CEO of Hire IT People Inc., a recruitment company in New Jersey, estimates that over 20-25% of H-1B employees could lose their jobs and be forced to return home in the coming weeks as the crisis worsens. Just in the past two weeks, Nandan has received 150 phone calls and resumes of people with H-1B visas looking for a new job. This is up from just 2-3 calls a month earlier.

“American companies can put the US citizens on furlough (temporary unpaid leave or reduced hours) but with H-1B workers, they have to ensure that they are on the payroll for all of the 40 hours and also that they are paid the same amount and nothing less,” said Kevin Pinto, a product manager from Mumbai, India, who was one of the many international employees who were let go two weeks ago from a mid-sized tech company in Boston, Massachusetts, a day before he finished two years in the company. “It is convenient for companies to put international students and people with H-1Bs aside.”

Indians tend to be the single largest beneficiary of the H-1B visa programme. Two thirds of all H-1B registrants this year were Indian, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) department. The H-1B programme is a non-immigrant work permit that allows US employers to hire foreign workers in specialist occupations. Tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google are often the top H1-B visa recipients.

The US Tech Workers, a non-profit body representing American tech workers, has already asked President Donald Trump to suspend the H1-B visa programme for this year given the rapidly rising unemployment. H-1B rejections had already skyrocketed under the Trump administration, rising from 6% in 2015 to 21% in 2019, according to the National Foundation for American Policy. This includes both new employment and “continuing” employment. The denial rate for those continuing employment—which includes extension for employees in the same company or change/transfer of employers—is now four times higher than it was in 2015
.
“These are not just immigrants, these are the doctors and nurses treating patients without PPE gears, these are software engineers who are enabling banks to function and building softwares that are allowing people to work from home and the economy to run, these are researchers working towards a cure,” said Aman Kapoor, the president of Immigration Voice, a non-profit organization working on Indian immigration issues. “Imagine if 15,000 Indian doctors had to suddenly leave the country.”
Kapoor sees this new wave of H-1B layoffs as a symptom of a greater immigration problem where it would take high-skill Indian immigrants over 60 years to receive lawful permanent residence in the US—giving ample time for their employers to make cuts or for the economic situation to change. Public policy think-tank CATO Institute estimates that around 200,000 Indians could die of old age while waiting for their green cards.



Joblessness and the 60-day clock

Losing a job on an H-1B visa can be devastating: visa holders are ineligible for unemployment benefits because accessing these is contingent on the employee being eligible for future employment. They must either find a similar full-time job with the same pay-scale in the next 60 days or leave the country.
Unemployed H-1B holders will also lose the health insurance provided by their employers at a time when hospitalisation for COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, could cost up to $72,000 according to an estimate by the Washington Post. H-1B workers are also ineligible for Medicaid, the federal government programme that provides health coverage to low-asset people.

Pandey, the Duke graduate who was laid off, is worried that transferring his H-1B status to another company in the 60-days grace period would prove incredibly difficult, given the hiring freezes.

“Even if I were to find a company willing to hire me, the recruitment and hiring process alone might take four weeks,” he said.
A petition in the White House by Hire IT People’s Dan Nandan, pushing to extend the grace period to 180 days to allow the employees a better chance at finding another job, has attracted almost 45,000 signatures thus far. It needs 100,000 by April 18, 2020, to warrant a response from The White House.
“Most H1B workers are from India and cannot travel home with children who are U.S Citizens as many nations announced an entry ban, including India,” the petition stated.

As of now, both Kevin Pinto and Divyanshu Pandey cannot return home as India has declared a ban on all international flights (except cargo) until April 14, 2020. If the travel bans are extended, Pinto and Pandey could find themselves overstaying their visas.
On April 2, 2020, the Consulate General of India, New York, released a travel advisory stating that there are no evacuation flights to take Indian citizens back to India as of now.

“You have to understand that it is not a problem that can be solved by evacuation. How many people can you evacuate? The numbers are in hundreds of thousands, if not millions,” said the Consul General Sandeep Chakravorty in a Facebook live interview with ITV Gold. “Secondly, who will you give priority? There are all kinds of people who are here: there are students, there are tourists, there are elderly and sick people who came from India to spend time with their families.”

As of now, there is little clarity by the USCIS on the subject of visa expirations. A few days ago, a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security had stated that people can apply for their visa extensions to the USCIS and expect that their request is “favorably received by USCIS” if an extension is requested and flights to their country are not operational. If flights are available and the applicant’s visa period is coming to an end, they will be expected to return home, the official added.
The author is an Indian-origin freelance journalist and researcher currently based in Boston.

 

[Pinkieslut]

Indian IT industry head accuses US of discrimination over worker visas Claims Trump’s crackdown on H-1B visas disproportionately affects Indians Debjani Ghosh argues that Indian workers help to fill vital skills gaps © Bloomberg Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Save Benjamin Parkin in Mumbai FEBRUARY 16 2020Print this page62 India’s largest IT industry group has accused Donald Trump’s government of discriminating against Indian workers seeking H-1B visas, as it embarks on a last-ditch lobbying effort ahead of the president’s visit to India this month.

Debjani Ghosh, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, has asked to meet Mr Trump’s delegation when it comes to India on February 24. Nasscom has also implored prime minister Narendra Modi to challenge the president over his crackdown on H-1B visas, which companies in the US use to bring in skilled foreign workers for a limited number of years. In recent years, the Trump administration has sought to clamp down on what it sees as the abuse of the US’s H-1B scheme by foreign IT companies, enforcing tougher requirements for getting a visa, such as prioritising applicants with US degrees. Nasscom, which has nearly 3,000 companies, including leading IT companies such as Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro, argues that the move has disproportionately affected Indian companies. “We’re at a loss trying to figure out why we’re seeing the kind of discrimination when this is actually benefiting the US,” Ms Ghosh said, arguing that

Indian workers help to fill a vital skills gap in the country. Critics had long complained that the IT firms were using the visas to hire cheaper Indian employees instead of Americans. Indians make up about 70 per cent of workers on H-1B visas in the US. But Nasscom counters that most H-1B visas are actually taken by US firms such as Microsoft or Amazon, and that they enjoy higher approval ratings than the Indian companies. Around 80 per cent of H-1B applications from the likes of TCS and Infosys are approved by US immigration authorities, far below approval rates of as much as 99 per cent for the American tech giants. Stricter H-1B rules have already dented profits for Indian IT firms, with brokerages Kotak saying last year that the additional US visa costs were likely to weigh on earnings before interest and taxes.

Nasscom is lobbying the two sides to treat the movement of skilled Indian workers under the H-1B scheme as a trade issue, asking that it be separated from the president’s broader concerns about immigration to the US. “We just have one request to [our] government, which is — talk to him, make him understand the importance of high-skilled talent mobility,” Ms Ghosh said. “We have to ensure that he understands that this cannot be treated the same way as immigration — they’re two different things. That’s our biggest ask.” But her pleas are likely to go unheeded. The US and India are negotiating a limited trade package to resolve market access issues for goods such as dairy and medical devices, but a spokesperson from India’s trade ministry confirmed that visa issues have been excluded from the talks. Observers expect that a limited deal could be signed during Mr Trump’s visit to India.

Ms Ghosh also argued that lingering stigma around Indian workers is misplaced, as the country’s companies have altered their business models away from lower-value outsourcing to higher-skilled tech work, and have started hiring more locals. “It was about cost arbitrage in the past, where people would send jobs to India for cheaper cost, but that has completely changed,” she said. “People haven’t realised the change that the industry has gone through, the contribution that it’s making to the US.”

 

[A Singaporean]

This is a country does to protect its citizens very unlike PAP who will bring in more to fuck citizens.

 

[tanwahtiu]

One day buddy and next day enemy.

Modi knows HCQ does not work and cheated Trump. No rip off we worry.

 

[birdie69]

Covid-19: US tech workers’ body urges Donald Trump to suspend H-1B visas amid massive layoffs
The organisation appealed to the US president to protect the interest of American workers.

File photo of US President Donald Trump. | Brendan Smialowski / AFP
An organisation representing technology workers in the United States has appealed to President Donald Trump to stop issuing H-1B visas , and protect the interests of American workers amid massive layoffs due to the economic impact brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows American companies to employ foreign workers in occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise.

ADVERTISEMENT

In its letter to Trump, US Tech Workers – a nonprofit organisation which describes itself as representing American workers – also urged him to suspend the H-2B visa programmes, which are mostly for foreign farm workers.
“We have written a letter asking that the H-1B & H-2B visa programme be suspended for this year due to the economic fallout from the coronavirus,” the organization said in its letter. “Battling both a pandemic and the resulting fallout to our economy from the coronavirus is no time to approve employment visas for more foreign workers.”
The organization said that 3.3 million Americans have filed initial jobless claims for the week ending March 31, breaking the record-high of 6,95,000 in 1982 – the peak of recession.

In its letter, the organization said the government should be cautious about bringing in foreign workers at a time of tremendous uncertainty. “We urge you to pause the H-1B visa programme that would bring in 85,000 workers this year and suspend the recently approved addition of 35,000 workers for the H-2B visa,” the organization said. “Overall the importation of workers should be undertaken with great caution during this period of tremendous uncertainty, the letter said.”
ADVERTISEMENT

Fearing layoffs, foreign technology professionals holding H-1B visas, meanwhile, have demanded the extension of their permissible post-job loss limit to stay in the US from the existing 60 to 180 days, PTI reported.

Economists have predicted that 47 million jobs could be lost in the United States due to the coronavirus, which would translate to a 32.1% unemployment rate, according to CNBC.

Trump has warned Americans to prepare for “very, very painful two weeks” as the White House projected that the coronavirus pandemic could kill 1,00,000 to 2,40,000 people even if social distancing norms are followed. US has nearly 1,90,000 cases of the coronavirus, the maximum in the world. The number of deaths has crossed 4,000 – higher than the toll in China, where the virus originated.

Will our PAP government carry out the same policy by withdrawal of CECA agreement? Our local talent and young graduates got hope already

 

[tanwahtiu]

Suspend H1B is taking away surfing whole day time from lazy angmoh...

they dont like... civil war coming...

Remember AMDK are used to be AMDK.... grow opium in India let Indian work like slaves for them and AMDK can hv all day play crickets with ALL whites, blacks not allowed...

No Blacks And Dogs Allowed...

Will our PAP government carry out the same policy by withdrawal of CECA agreement? Our local talent and young graduates got hope already

 

[mojito]

Only 85k jobs a year go to indians aiya small case lah. Here in SG we like to gamble bigly.