H1B visa new rule is designed to be used for foreign workers with highly specialized skills

 Growing up in a country where education is considered the cornerstone of development, it’s highly unlikely for a young Indian school student to have not been fed the dream of landing in the developed world of America. For most Indians, success is synonymous with bagging a perfect cushiony job in the high rise buildings on the Wall Streets and Avenue roads of the New York City, USA. 

You see most of your friends updating their Facebook statuses as “Moved to” followed by names and states in the US, building a sense of apprehension and pressure within you. While one way to reach the dream country was to clear  GRE/ GMAT tests, writing endless revision tests to crack TOEFL, and sending out numerous SOPS and applications to the Universities, the other simpler way was to wait for your employer,  the outsourcing companies such as CTS, TCS to send you on an Onsite job. 

But with the arrival of Donald Trump, the game plan has now changed. You would have come across headlines that read Trump signs new H1b Bill: What is the fate of the young aspiring Indians at the US universities and would have shared panic attacks with friends. But before you sweat and fret, let’s delve deeper into the Bill and understand the nuances of it. 

The H1b was introduced originally to enable companies in the US to hire highly specialized and qualified employees from foreign lands for jobs that they could not make do with localized talent. Especially in the context of countries like India and China, where education and technology are the heart of the social system, where the supply is much more in number when compared to the demand, the outsourcing companies preferred employees of the said countries over their own. 

However, the purpose was defeated, when outsourcing giants like Accenture and CTS started hiring people from India using the H1b schemes to do regular jobs which required no specialized skill. The reason behind this being, they would have to pay more for the American employees in accordance to the labour law, Indian employees meant cheap labour for them. 

There are 85,000 H1b visas that are available per annum for non-citizens of America, who can work in the US, and also gain a green card, should they wish so. 20, 000 of these visas are specifically for those who graduate from American Universities, while the remaining 65,000 are open for the outsourcing giants to apply for. The visas are selected randomly based on a computer lottery system, with the priority being given to the Students quota first. Once the students’ quota gets full, the remaining student applicants join the pool of the 65,000 company applicants. The problem lies in the fact that the outsourcing companies take over advantage of this system, use and misuse the system and apply for a humongous number of applicants every year. 

“For example, in 2016, Infosys filed approximately 33,000 applications! That is half the number of H1B visas available for an entire year!” says Shruthi Ganesh, writer at GRE- Edge. 

While top product companies such as Oracle, Google pay an “upwards of $90,000 per annum”, the lower outsourcing companies pay wages much lower, around $70,000 per annum. 

Donald Trump’s intention behind passing this is bill is to ensure that these loopholes are plugged and the original purpose of the bill is brought back into play that is to hire specialized talents for jobs that require specialized skills! Only the worthy can now access the H1b visa. 

This spells success to you, MS/ MBA aspirants!!! As once you graduate from your Business school or University, your wages will now have to be in line with the labour laws of the country and you are bound to be paid more than what the companies initially intended to offer. 

As now if the bill gets passed, the H1B dependent employers are liable to pay a minimum of $130,000 per annum to all of its employees on a H1B visa ( Shruthi Ganesh, 2017). The number of H1b visa applicants from the outsourcing companies will also drop drastically, owing to the fact that they will eventually have to pay much more than they have been paying, all these years! So, the number of people competing for the Visa also falls, ensuring that your chances at gaining a H1b visa is now much more enhanced than before. 

This could only be beneficial to aspiring students of MBA and MS, as now, H1b visas are your gateways to a bigger bag of salary!!!

All the best and for the first time, and at least for once, let’s say, thank You, Trump! 

- Written by Amritha S