PM Modi, Joe Biden
According to three people with knowledge of the situation, the Biden administration will make it simpler for Indians to live and work in the United States by using this week’s state visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to aid some qualified employees in entering or remaining in the nation.
According to one of the individuals, the state department may announce as soon as Thursday that a select group of Indians and other foreign employees on H-1B visas will be able to renew their visas domestically in the US as part of a trial programme that may be expanded in the next years.
Indian nationals use the US H-1B programme more frequently than any other country, accounting for 73% of the almost 442,000 H-1B employees in fiscal year 2022.
“We all recognize that mobility of our people is a huge asset to us,” said another US 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 US 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 and Tata Consultancy Services as well as Amazon, Alphabet and Meta in the US, according to US government data.
The ability for some of the temporary foreign workers to renew visas in the US 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 US, one of the sources said.
A separate initiative to clear a backlog of visa applications at US 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.
A portion of the thousands of tech employees in the US with H-1B visas who have been laid off this year are scurrying to find new jobs within a 60-day “grace period” or return to their home country.
The Biden administration has been working for months to increase Indians’ access to visas in an effort to circumvent Congress’ lack of political will to enact comprehensive immigration reform. In part to better compete with China, President Joe Biden wants to bring together the two biggest democracies in the world.
After Washington halted practically all visa processing abroad in March 2020 owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, US immigration authorities are still working to reduce a backlog. Several families have been split up because of the long visa wait times.
(This story has not been edited by Bharat Express staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
