US to ease visas for skilled Indian workers as Modi visits
22/06/2023 01:14
By Trevor Hunnicutt and Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) - The Biden administration
will make it easier for Indians to live and work in the United
States, using this week's state visit by Prime Minister Narendra
Modi to help some skilled workers enter or remain in the
country, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The State Department could announce as soon as Thursday that
a small number of Indians and other foreign workers on H-1B
visas will be able to renew those visas in the U.S., without
having to travel abroad, one of the sources said, part of a
pilot program that could be expanded in coming years.
Indian citizens are by far the most active users of the
U.S. H-1B program and made up 73% of the nearly 442,000 H-1B
workers in fiscal year 2022.
"We all recognize that mobility of our people is a huge
asset to us," said another U.S. official. "And so our goal is to
approach that in a sort of multifaceted way. The State
Department already has been working very hard to find creative
ways to make changes to things."
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on
questions about which visa types would qualify or the timing of
the pilot launch. Plans for a pilot program were first reported
by Bloomberg Law in February.
"The pilot would begin with a small number of cases with
the intention to scale the initiative over the following one to
two years," the spokesperson said, while declining to define
small.
The steps could change and are not finalized until they are
announced. The White House declined to comment.
Each year, the U.S. government makes 65,000 H-1B visas
available to companies seeking skilled foreign workers, along
with an additional 20,000 visas for workers with advanced
degrees. The visas last for three years and can be renewed for
another three years.
The companies using the most H-1B workers in recent years
include the Indian-based Infosys INFY.NS and Tata Consultancy
Services TCS.NS as well as Amazon AMZN.O , Alphabet GOOGL.O
and Meta META.O in the U.S., according to U.S. government
data.
The ability for some of the temporary foreign workers to
renew visas in the U.S. would free up resources for visa
interviews in consulates abroad, the spokesperson said.
The pilot program would also include some workers with
L-1 visas, which are available to people transferring within a
company to a position in the U.S., one of the sources said.
A separate initiative to clear a backlog of visa
applications at U.S. embassies in India is finally showing signs
of progress, according to another one of those sources, and is
expected to be figure into the discussions between the two
countries' delegations in Washington this week.
India has long had concerns with the difficulty its citizens
face in receiving visas to live in the United States, including
technology industry workers. More than 10 million jobs stood
open in the United States at the end of April, according to the
Labor Department.
Some H-1B visa holders in the U.S. have been among the
thousands of tech workers laid off this year, sending them
scrambling to find new employers within a 60-day "grace period"
or return to their home country.
The Biden administration has spent months working to improve
visa access for Indians, trying to get around the lack of
political will in Congress to comprehensively reform U.S.
immigration policy. President Joe Biden wants to knit together
the world's two largest democracies, partly in a bid to better
compete with China.
U.S. visa services are still attempting to clear a backlog
after Washington halted almost all visa processing worldwide in
March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The visa backlog has
led to some families being separated for extended periods of
time, with some taking to social media to lament their
situation.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Ted Hesson in Washington;
Editing by Heather Timmons and Lincoln Feast.)
((Heather.Timmons@thomsonreuters.com;))