Nearly 80,000 Indian IT professionals on H-1B and L1 visas now jobless scrambling for options to stay in the US

The same thing happened to me when I was laid off in Abu Dhabi.

I was back in Canada 60 days later. After selling my car and belongings.

Sometimes, life sucks.

I wish them well.

Edit: Thank you for the award

As a US IT professional that has had two jobs outsourced to Indian consulting firms, them’s the breaks.

This was sadly inevitable, and I hope that at least some of them saw the massively abused visa program for what it is: A lobbied (paid) for scam to outsource jobs “in place” by bringing tons of expats into the country to save money on labor while avoiding some of the optics of offshore outsourcing. This really kicked off in the earliest years of the 2000’s.

The more recent pissing match of the big companies offering massively overpaid salaries as a way to hoard talent was, IMO, clearly unsustainable and temporary. In our “growth is the only option” earnings model, dumping as many of those people as necessary when the time came was always the hair-trigger Plan A.

A lot of pretty toxic comments here, and a few that spout common misunderstandings about the US immigration system. I’ll take a stab at a few:

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1. The H1-B visa is incredibly hard to get. 95% of the people writing here would not qualify. You have to prove no American could possibly take your job, meet an income threshold for your job, prove your educational achievements (anything below a masters degree is normally not accepted) and get sponsorship from a company that’s willing to go through the paperwork nightmare (employers also have to pay a fee to do this). Then, after that, you enter a lottery in which you normally only have a 20% chance of winning (this varies year-on-year but I’ve never seen it below a 33% chance). Has this system been abused by some sponsors? Yeah, but it’s been exaggerated. The idea companies can just go “Ya know? Hiring Americans is tough, let’s get some cheap foreign labor in” doesn’t have much grounding in reality.
2. H1-B labor has little to do with the fact your job was outsourced. If they outsourced your job to china, it’s just because they wanted to do that.
3. It’s hard to move jobs on a H1-B as someone else has to sponsor you. These people cannot just go get jobs at McDonalds. It’s a very strict procedure. If you get laid off you’re told you’ve got 90 days to find another sponsor. Many firms cannot be bothered with sponsorship.
4. The H1-B visa system is capped. There will always be a set number of H1-B visas issued each year. These people going home isn’t going to mean there’s less people arriving next year. It’s not like that.
5. Jumping from H1-B to green card is not easy. There are numerous hoops to jump through and, frankly, a lot of randomness in the process. If you’re from India you’ll likely never get a green card because there’s a yearly cap based on your country of origin.
6. Tech companies in the US provide the highest wages in the world and have continued to grow well above other sectors. The evidence H1-Bs in tech are lowering wages is pretty slim. All economic studies on this have shown they tend to increase the wages of those around them rather than lower them.
7. The fact that another country’s immigration system is even stricter or draconian than the US’s isn’t a good defense and you know it.

And outside all that, damn, these are people’s lives we’re talking about. People who have settled, bought a house, made friends. After 5 to 10 years, the US is all they know. It’s their life. Anyone who smiles at people being made to leave should ask themselves “How would you feel if you were told tomorrow you had to go live in Mexico for the rest of your life and you couldn’t take anyone with you?”. That’s really what we’re talking about here. Many will be returning to a life in their home country they are no longer part of.

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Edit: Fixed some typos and grammar

This is the unfortunate downstream effect of the broken H-1B policy, imho.

If you fix the implementation of the policy to match the intent (eg: allow bringing in “specialized” workers to fill roles which otherwise would be vacant, as per the intent of the law, but *only* under the condition that employers are paying at least 150% of the market rate for the industry and position), then this problem will effectively be solved by extension (ie: people on H-1B’s either wouldn’t be laid off, or would easily find new employment). If you have a broken implementation which allows companies to underpay employees by using this as a loophole to cut costs, then you get this downstream effect when layoffs happen.

As they say in the industry, look to solve the root cause, not the symptom.

We have an immigration employee and she was getting paid a certain amount because it was either policy or law she had to be paid x-amount. The rest of the team got a raise to compensate her higher pay.

India actually needs their talents more than the US does. This should be a blessing in disguise for India.

Messed up system. Person can live in US for fifteen years and get deported! I hope these folks land somewhere.

I have always despised H1B visas. I had so many friends in the Silicon Valley lose jobs being undercut by somebody who would work for 1/2 the pay. One guy went from working at Apple and Cupertino to living in a basement back east.

I have nothing personal against these folks but I always believe you take care yourself your family and your neighbors first.

The law says that it must be a position that can’t be filled by an American worker… so they rewrite it and rewrite it until it qualifies and then have the American train the guy on the way out.

I understand that if their position or contract ends they’ve got to leave.

It is for that reason I write the following:

See ya! Best of luck!

The whole point of the H1B and L1 visa was to fill a *temporary* need…

“The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. Technology companies depend on it to hire tens of thousands of employees each year from countries like India and China.”

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This seems like the companies should really be hiring american citizens and paying them a living wage instead of outsourcing to china and new china.

Most of them are going to take their skills and move back to a country that is increasingly at odds with American interests, even though they would rather stay here.

This will continue to push wages higher. Only mass immigration can change wage inflation, not interest rates.

And this is exactly why I’m never leaving my underpaid position. Income is income, despite how tight I’m living.

RIP Dublin CA