H-1B US visa holders often brought in for temporary work
February 23 2010 by Liam Clifford
The H-1B US visa, which was designed in order for US employers to bring in special talent from abroad to fill permanent roles, is increasingly being used to bring in temporary workers, according to a new report.
A study released last week
by the Economic Policy Institute, a non-profit think-tank in Washington, found
that there are significant differences in the way companies use the H-1B US visa.
Large companies based in India, for example, tend to seek permanent residency
for only a small number of their employees in the US, for whom they attempt to
secure H-1B visas. By contrast, several companies based in the US, such as
Microsoft, are more likely to initiate the green card process for their
employees to allow then to live in the US permanently.
Ron Hira, an
associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology
said that the H-1B visa programme was “increasingly been used for temporary
labour mobility to transfer work overseas and to take advantage of cheaper
guest-worker labour."
The study was not well-received by Compete America,
a coalition of vendors, universities and other sponsors of H-1B US work visa
holders. Eric Thomas, a spokesperson, queried the use of data from the L-1 visa,
which is used by multinational companies for intracompany transfers, in the
study. “That's how the system was designed, and that's how it's working. Lumping
different visa categories into one bucket is a clear attempt to skew the data,"
he said.
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