Laid-off H1B visa holders in limbo

In this story: Scramble for new jobs 'It's not your fault' RELATED STORIES

By Staff and wire reports

BANGALORE, India -- An expected surge in the tech sector led to a hike in the guest worker quota of H1B visas from 115,000 to 195,000 per year, but times have changed.

The tech boom has gone bust. Dotcoms are dissolving, options are worthless and profits even at the blue chips of the tech sector are in free-fall.

For some of the non-American workers who were supposed to be the foot soldiers of a new technological era, the comedown has been devastating, and incredibly sudden.

Scramble for new jobs

More than half of the H1Bs granted to skilled workers in 1999 and 2000 were given to those in technical fields in order to meet what was then seen as a desperate shortage of high-tech talent, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) says.

Indians have made up 41 percent of the beneficiaries since the program started in 1992, followed by Chinese with 10 percent and Canadians a distant third with three percent.

Dotcoms have been known to fire employees -- both domestic and foreign -- on the spot, sending H1B visa holders off on a frenzied scramble to find new jobs.

Technically, the INS would be justified in ordering laid-off H1B workers to leave the country.

In reality, however, the INS, itself taken by surprise by the situation, has taken the more pragmatic path of dealing with each person on a case-by-case basis.

Although the conventional wisdom is that H1B holders have up to 10 days to find a new job, in fact there is no official timeframe, leaving people in a kind of immigration limbo.

"It gives us stomachaches when people ask 'how much time do I have?'," says Linda Hoffman, a lawyer at immigration law firm Freilicher and Hoffman in Washington.

'It's not your fault'

Immigration lawyers say it was not that the INS had changed its policy.

"If the person's out of status, the INS has always been fairly reasonable in saying 'OK, we're going to allow you to change jobs because you found that job in five days and we understand that it really wasn't your fault'," says immigration lawyer Dawn Lurie.

The INS hopes to introduce proposed regulations in May that will pin down exactly the amount of time H1B visa holders have, INS spokeswoman Eyleen Schmidt says. In the meantime the deadline will have to remain vague.

Lurie says in the meantime provisions in the new bills passed by Congress -- dubbed grandly the "American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act" -- that allowed for the "portability" of the H1B visas from job to job with relative ease have helped laid-off workers find new employers.

The U.S. immigration service does not know the total number of H1B visa holders currently in the United States but quotes a Georgetown University report, using INS data, which put the number at around 450,000.

The number of H1B visa holders who have been laid off is also not known. INS's Schmidt said there had been more approvals than denials of applications to "port" H1B visas after being laid off, but could not provide figures.

Meanwhile applications for new H1B visas continue. As of March 7, 72,000 new H1B visas had been granted in the fiscal year that started Sept. 1, 2000, and there are 66,000 more petitions pending.

Reuters contributed to this report.

U.S. slowdown hits Indian tech workers
April 9, 2001

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.