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Fnord666 writes:

Time is running short to reform the U.S. work visa programs.

President Donald Trump and Congress have said they want to overhaul policies that allow companies to bring employees from overseas to the U.S. But the application deadline for the most controversial visa program is the first week of April, which means new rules have to be in place for that batch of applicants or another year's worth of visas will be handed out under the existing guidelines. The current H-1B visa program has been criticized for hurting American workers and undercutting salaries.

H-1B visas were created about three decades ago to help companies bring in skilled workers from other countries when they couldn't find Americans to fill those jobs. But the program has morphed greatly from its original intent.

Americans are losing their jobs to foreign visa holders, who tend to be paid substantially less. Most of the visas don't even go to American companies, but rather overseas firms that use the program to build up operations in the U.S. India would have the most at stake in any reform.

"I think everyone agrees the system is broken," says Neil Ruiz, an immigration expert at the Pew Research Center and former executive director of George Washington University's Center for Law, Economics and Finance.

One reason is the rise of the outsourcing industry, a nascent business 30 years ago. Outsourcers, like India's Wipro Ltd. and Cognizant Technology Solutions of the U.S., take over and manage the technology systems for corporations in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

In the U.S., outsourcers bring staffers into the country on work visas, train them in the tech departments of leading corporations and then rotate them back to India where pay and living costs are lower. Outsourcing companies now get far more visas than traditional technology companies, according to data collected by Howard University's Ron Hira through Freedom of Information Act requests. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. received 5,650 H-1Bs in 2014 while Amazon, the largest recipient in the latter group, got 877.

[...] Democratic Senator Richard Durbin, who has tried for a decade to reform the visa program, wrote a letter to Trump this month raising the president's campaign promises to "end forever" the use of H-1Bs for cheap labor. Now Durbin is concerned that Trump won't follow through on the pledge.

"You must act immediately to prevent further harm to American workers," Durbin wrote.

Source: Bloomberg

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