“America is built on the hard work of immigrants”, said Hemant Taneja, a venture capitalist who emigrated from India and an investor in Snap Inc. and Stripe.
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Sergey Brin and Sundar Pichai, of Google, address a rally opposing Donald Trump’s ban on refugees from around the world and on immigrants from seven Muslim countries. Amazon and Expedia gave their support to a lawsuit filed by the Washington State Attorney General against the executive order.
“It is not known if Trump will stop issuing new visas or stop renewing existing H-1B visas – it’s open for debate”. For foreign visas, the top priority will be to protect interest of U.S. citizens and their jobs.
An IT associate consultant with a leading IT company (who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity), who has worked in the U.S. for many years and would soon be going there on an H-1B visa, said that nothing is certain as of now. Under the current system, companies wishing to bring in workers via the H-1B program must enter a lottery; the number of such visas granted per year is now capped at 85,000 (including visa-holders with master’s degrees or higher).
According to statistics, in the last few years, outsourcing firms have been the most successful in obtaining H-1B visas and the IT companies have struggled to fill their H-1B positions. The average salary for a Tata or WiPro worker on such a visa is under $70,000 a year. Late Friday, he sent a memo to all employees raising his concerns and revealing that more than 100 Google staff were directly affected.
It’s a significant difference, but those wages are still lower than other employees at all three companies.
The executive order means individuals possessing H1-B visas and whose green cards are still being processed are altogether banned from entering the U.S. over the next three to four months. Breitbart News called the judge who struck down the order an “Obamaappointed, Schumer-allied” judge (Charles Schumer is a Democratic senator), while describing Council for American-Islamic Relations as a “terror-tied group causing chaos, promoting protests as Trump protects nation”.
Then-candidate Trump said he was unable to hire US workers for the positions filled by guest workers. The important thing, though, is that it’s a draft. However, more than 2,900 visas from the affected categories were issued to people in Canada in 2015, State Department numbers show. They warn that his ban on nationals from seven Muslim countries will be hugely damaging to their businesses. They fear that the president’s recent efforts to limit immigration, and a forthcoming order created to end abuses that allow seemingly unqualified immigrants to benefit from the visa program, might deny them access to these workers, who they say they must have if their innovation machine is to continue rolling in high gear. Numerous core tasks at Silicon Valley companies are handled by immigrants.
What a new tech political engagement may mean in the coming weeks remains to be seen.
Following the ACLU’s challenge in court, federal judge Ann Donnelly issued an emergency stay on Saturday night in NY against the executive order, temporarily allowing people who have landed in the USA with a valid visa to remain.
Protectionist policies often have unforeseen repercussions.
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“The tech industry is the natural rallying point for the global values that most of America espouses”, said Kirk O. Hanson, executive director of Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Put another way, it could hasten the development of jobs, infrastructure, services, and other forms of growth overseas, rather than in the U.S. Google CEO Sundar Pichai denounced the order, arguing that it had stranded almost 200 of his employees overseas, according to USA Today. In addition, there is already legislation in the works that could change the guest worker visa programs.
