As if Silicon Valley needed another reason to not approve of President Donald Trump, the White House has started to deliver on its promise of cracking down on work visas given to overseas workers — many of whom toil in the tech industry.
This week, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency issued a memo detailing moves it intends to make to fight “fraud and abuse” of the program, while also warning employers that they shouldn’t discriminate against U.S. workers in their hiring.
This follows an announcement by the agency last Friday that it will be harder for companies to bring in international tech workers on the much-used H-1B work visa.
The problem the rules change is supposed to address is undercutting American workers by hiring lower-paid foreign workers as part of the H-1B program.
The Economic Policy Institute estimated there were about 460,000 people working on H-1B visas in 2013. Two years later, other figures suggested that around 12 percent of all H-1B applications certified by the Department of Labor are for computer programmer roles — with 41 percent of positions being at the lowest wage level.
Apple isn’t one of the companies singled out in reports as relying unduly on foreign labor in the U.S., but the company has repeatedly clashed with Trump.
After Trump’s temporary travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, Tim Cook gave an interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which he described the “heart-wrenching” messages he had received about the executive order, which potentially affects hundreds of Apple employees.
Trump has also butted heads with Apple on the question of the company bringing back manufacturing to the U.S., rather than relying on plants located overseas.
Source: Bloomberg
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
2 responses to “Trump’s visa crackdown will likely upset Silicon Valley”
Hardly done for especially if you want to succeed. It’s too bad that the fresh out of school kid can’t create an Accounts Receivables aging schedule in under 3 days. All those cuts to education has really “produced results”.
Sorry, I am not crying for the CEO’s of silicon valley because they are finding it more difficult to find cheap, foreign labor. H-1B, F-1, and L visa abuses are championed by the likes of Zuckerberg, Gates, and good ol’ Timmy Cook. These guys pretend to cry about the lack of multiculturalism in the American work force and the pooh widdle immigrants who can’t find a job… Yeah right! Zuckerberg and crew are out to cut labor costs and keep a crew of foreign tech workers working in a basic state of indentured servitude. Meanwhile, graduating STEM students coming straight out of US colleges are getting cut off right at the knees. Nice double whammy: huge student debt and no jobs to pay it off. Meanwhile Hitesh from Hyderabad with his toilet paper ‘degree’ from the Indian degree mill gets right in at Facebook.