Many people with H-1B visas have been living in the US for years (Representational)
Washington:
Mass tech layoffs have left hundreds of thousands of workers living in the US on temporary visas with little time to find another job, or they will have to leave the country. And many say they are getting inadequate guidance from the companies that sponsored them.
The tech industry has long relied on the H-1B visa program to meet its need for workers in specialized fields such as computer science and engineering. Amazon, Lyft, Meta, Salesforce, Stripe and Twitter have sponsored at least 45,000 H-1B workers over the past three years, according to a Bloomberg analysis of data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. Reports compiled by employees on Meta and Twitter indicate that the latest round of job cuts has affected at least 350 immigrants at those two companies alone. H-1B holders who become unemployed can only legally stay in the US for 60 days without having to find new employers to sponsor them.
Many people with H-1B visas have been living in the US for years waiting for permanent citizenship. Now they’re looking for jobs in a new competitive labor market, along with thousands of other tech workers. Some have mortgages, student loans and children in school.
At the same time, many major employers have stopped hiring, and hiring is typically slow during the holidays. With deadlines looming, desperate job seekers have turned to their professional networks to find a way to make a living. Some have appealed directly on LinkedIn, generating threads with hundreds of responses, citing job openings in the US and abroad. Crowdsourced spreadsheets and referrals abound on social networks.
More than a dozen recently laid off workers spoke to Bloomberg; He requested anonymity to avoid angering his former employers or jeopardizing his job search. A former Twitter designer, the 30-year-old, who has been in the US for 14 years and was let go in November along with 3,500 colleagues, says he had long envisioned this scenario, of packing everything up and leaving. The country on the fly was living in fear. “There’s always this thing running through our mind,” she says: “Will I need to relocate?”
The H-1B program allows American employers to recruit foreign workers with college degrees in technical fields where there has historically been a shortage of Americans. Visas are issued for three years with possible extensions. The number of people allowed in each year is capped at 85,000, and demand is particularly high among Indian professionals. The median wage for an H-1B worker in the third quarter was $106,000, according to data from the US Department of Labor. But employees at top tech companies earn much more than that. The average salary for an H-1B worker at Meta, Salesforce and Twitter was around $175,000, not including hefty bonuses and stock options.
The layoffs have had an especially big impact on Indians, who stay on temporary visas longer than other foreign groups because of a backlog in obtaining permanent residency (a green card). Each country is typically allowed a maximum of 7 percent of the employment-based green cards issued each year, so there are about half a million Indian citizens in the queue, with only about 10,000 green cards available per year to them. A Congressional report estimates that Indians filing in 2020 will have to wait 195 years for a green card. Sugar workers faced an 18-year wait; For the rest of the world, it is less than a year.
At the beginning of the year, an H-1B holder from India bought a home in Seattle to start a job with Meta. Eleven months later, he is looking for a company to hire her and sponsor her visa transfer. The father of two, who has an MBA and has lived in the US for 15 years, says he hopes to land a job as a technology product or program manager. He has been scouring his networks on LinkedIn, joining dedicated WhatsApp groups and submitting application after application. “You have to spend months preparing for some of these jobs,” he says over the phone over the sound of his young children singing in the background. “It’s hard to tell yourself that after 15 years of being properly documented, you may still have no way to live. The way to live is broken.”
Companies that have to pay for H-1B workers to return to their home countries after losing their jobs have offered varying levels of support to the immigrants. Five former Twitter employees on temporary visas say the company has provided little assistance and it is unclear when their 60-day grace period will begin. When a worker asked for clarification, a representative from the company recommended finding her own attorney, as the law can be interpreted in different ways. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
Aditya Tawde, an engineer from India who works at LinkedIn, calls immigration assistance from US companies “minimal”. He was fired by TripAdvisor at the start of the pandemic. After taking two days to process his layoff, he interviewed with 25 different employers and found a job with only two weeks left on his visa. “It’s natural to feel sad and angry,” he says.
A USCIS spokesperson says the agency is exploring policy options to address challenges facing immigrant communities and is committed to expanding access to immigration benefits.
Vidhi Agarwal, a visa holder from India who was not affected by the layoffs, is working with a friend to build a database of H-1B workers in need of jobs. After two weeks, it listed over 350 people. She and her friend are reaching out to recruiters on their behalf for help. Agarwal, who works at Databricks and moved to the Gulf region from India 11 years ago, is part of the green card backlog. “It’s scary to be on a visa and lose your job, especially when you have kids and you have to be uprooted and leave,” she says.
Ceci Cervantes, a recruiter at the 15-person tech startup in New York, says LinkedIn has been “crazy” with job appeal posts from people on visas who suddenly lost their jobs. She woke up on Monday last week with 47 messages instead of the usual 10, and she’s already interviewed four people on H-1B visas who have been deleted by Twitter and one from Meta.
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, which this month announced 11,000 job cuts, told employees that visa holders would be given a “notice period” – which could give them more time before their visas clock in. Have – and help from “dedicated immigration experts”. But one former Meta employee says the counseling was not helpful. The attorney had given Twitter similar advice: “Find your own lawyer.” Others said they appreciate the support.
Stripe, a payment processing software company that cut more than 1,000 jobs this month, offered counseling and help to change visa status wherever possible. Lyft said it was willing to keep workers on its payroll without working a few extra weeks to extend their clocks. Amazon is giving employees 60 days to find a different job internally before taking them off the books, which extends their visa clock, according to three former employees. Salesforce declined to comment on whether it was providing immigration assistance for those it was laying off.
“There is serious pressure to find a job,” says Fiona McEntee, an immigration attorney with McEntee Law Group in Chicago. “The issue is the clock is ticking.”
Some have given up hope. A 34-year-old product manager fired by a large fintech company says he is half-heartedly trying to find a job over the next few weeks, but has largely made up his mind to move back to India. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he has been living in the US for seven years. He says moving back to his hometown of Bengaluru could be a “blessing in disguise” for him—he would be able to spend more time with his aging parents and start his own company, which is difficult to do when you don’t have a visa. be on “I’m burned out,” he says of the green card backlog. “I don’t see any light at the end of this tunnel.”
—with Alex Barinka, Jackie Davalos and Matt Day
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