Are you feeling the H1B rush already? Our offices is extending our working hours in order to make sure that all our H1 files will be submitted in a timely fashion. So as April 1, H-1b visa application deadline approaching, IT companies are urging the government to authorize an increased number of visas to meet demand.
In just a few short weeks, the U.S. government will begin to accept applications for H-1B visas for Fiscal Year 2009. As was the case last year, not only is the annual supply of H-1B visas virtually assured to be exhausted on the very first day applications are accepted, half of those applying will lose out in the visa lottery, denying U.S. employers access to tens of thousands of highly skilled and badly needed professionals who could contribute to economic growth and job creation in this country,” Robert Hoffman, chairman of Compete America
But who is actually getting most of the H1B visas, did you take a moment to think about it. BW provided an excellent article and stats on this question and it seems that Indian outsourcers top the list of companies bringing foreign workers to the U.S. on the H-1B program. Indian outsourcers accounted for nearly 80% of the visa petitions approved last year for the top 10 participants in the program.
Infosys Technologies (INFY) and Wipro (WIT), both based in Bangalore, top the list of visa beneficiaries in 2007, with 4,559 and 2,567 approved visa petitions, respectively, according to data from the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services. Each visa allows the companies to bring one worker to the U.S., where they have substantial operations providing tech support and other services to corporations, complementing services provided from India. Overall, six of the top 10 visa recipients in 2007 are based in India; two others among the top 10, Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH) and UST Global, are headquartered in the U.S. but have most of their operations in India.
Microsoft (MSFT) and Intel (INTC) are the only two traditional U.S. tech companies among the top 10. Microsoft received 959 visa petition approvals, or one fifth as many as Infosys, while Intel got 369. Read the entire Business Week article here
So if all this is true, we are left with %20 of the 65,000 visas to share between smaller companies located across the United States, that doesn’t seem fair to me. In fact, there should be a revision to the regulations, limiting companies from bringing such large number of workers on the H1B visa. Infosys Tech brought almost 5000 workers on this visa, surley they could have used the L1 to bring legitimate workers? I guess that we shall see what will happen in the next 3 weeks before the April 1 deadline. Maybe the government will surprise us all with more visas, but most likely not.