In a relief for Indian techies, US authorities today said that the Trump administration is not considering any proposal that would force H-1B visa holders to leave the country.<\/p>\n
The announcement by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) came days after reports emerged that the Trump administration was considering tightening H-1B visa rules that could lead to deportation of 7,50,000 Indians.<\/p>\n
The reports had said it was mulling ending extensions for H-1B holders.<\/p>\n
The USCIS “is not considering a regulatory change that would force H-1B visa holders to leave the United States by changing interpretation of section certain language in Section 104 C of the American Competitiveness in the 21st Century Act (AC21) statute that states that USCIS may grant the extensions,” an official said.<\/p>\n
This provides for H-1B extensions beyond the 6 year limit.<\/p>\n
“Even if it were, such a change would not likely result in these H-1B visa holders having to leave the United States because employers could request extensions in one-year increments under section 106(a)-(b) of AC21 instead,” Jonathan Withington, Chief of Media Relations at the USCIS, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
“The agency is considering a number of policy and regulatory changes to carry out the Presidents Buy American, Hire American Executive Order, including a thorough review of employment based visa programmes,” Withington said.<\/p>\n
The statement comes after last week’s news report by US- based news agency McClatchy DC Bureau according to which the US was considering new regulations to prevent the extension of H-1B visas, the most sought after by Indian IT professionals.<\/p>\n
The USCIS was never considering such a policy change, he said adding that “any suggestion that USCIS changed its position because of pressure is absolutely false.”<\/p>\n
The reported move had been opposed by both the industry and several lawmakers.<\/p>\n
The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), a trade association of Indian information technology, had warned that any disruptive move on the visa front would be detrimental for both India and the US.<\/p>\n
The USCIS has a Congressional mandate to issue 65,000 H- 1B visas in general category and another 20,000 for those applicants having higher education — masters and above — from US universities in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.<\/p>\n
The H-1B programme offers temporary US visas that allow companies to hire highly skilled foreign professionals working in areas with shortages of qualified American workers.<\/p>\n
Since taking office last January, the Trump administration has been talking about cracking down on the H- 1B visa scheme.<\/p>\n
During his election campaign, President Trump promised to increase oversight of our H-1B and L-1 visa programmes to prevent its abuse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a relief for Indian techies, US authorities today said that the Trump administration is not considering any proposal that would force H-1B visa holders to leave the country. The announcement by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) came days after reports emerged that the Trump administration was considering tightening H-1B visa rules that could lead to deportation of 7,50,000 Indians. The reports had said it was mulling ending extensions for H-1B holders. The USCIS “is not considering a regulatory change that would force H-1B visa holders to leave the United States by changing interpretation of section certain language […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-791510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bpo"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}