“We won’t let this happen anymore,” Mr. Trump thundered in one stump speech about the practice, which he has deemed “outrageous” and “demeaning.”
This past weekend, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced a technical change
that could make it harder for entry-level programmers to receive the visas, and on Monday, the Justice Department warned that it would investigate companies that it believed had overlooked qualified American workers.
For the last few years, the federal government has been so overwhelmed by applications
that it has stopped accepting them within a week of opening day, hence the line of trucks trying to deliver H-1B applications before the doors close on the program for another year.
In a statement, the National Association of Software
and Services Companies, the main trade group for India’s outsourcing industry, said, “The H-1B visa system exists specifically because the U. S. has a persistent shortage of high-skilled I. T.
The group said that its members follow all the program’s rules, and that the change would have little impact.
“If we can’t fill them, our innovation suffers.”
Several bipartisan bills pending in the Senate and the House seek to make companies
give more priority to American workers before they fill jobs with H-1B visas.