Indians & the H-1B Visa Are Facing Their Greatest Challenge Today and We Reveal the Fight Back

The H-1B Visa system and India are inextricably linked as in some year Indian citizens have made up about 60% of the 65,000 cap issue

As was recently reported in the Washington Post, according to the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs in New Delhi. Worldwide, Non-Resident Indians send home more than $30 billion a year, which constitures about 3% of India's GDP, the International Labor Organization estimates. Approximately 2 million NRIs live in the US.

In terms of overall immigration, India is third behind Mexico and China for immigration to the US.

Additionally in recent years, about 70% of the top 10 companies who sponsor the annual H-1B visa are Indian founded and head quartered companies with offices in the US.

So you can see just from this alone the connection between India and the US is extremely strong as far as US Immigration is concerned. This is also why the Indian Government lobbys strongly both the Bush Administration previously and the current Obama Administration to maintain the H-1B program. Moreover they want it scaled back up to levels at the start of the decade where there were 195,000 H-1B visas annually.

Additional lobbying is coming from Indian Corporate and powerful Immigrant groups direct to US politicians to establish the importance of the H-1B visa program.

With elections coming up this is a hot bed issue in Indian politics so what are they stating to further justify their cause in the face of a hostile media and bordering on racist politicians in the US blaming immigrants for US economic and job loss ills.

Well the argument they have to counter is organizations like the IEEE previously have drawn connections between the H-1B program and the unemployment rate for engineers. For instance, in 2003, when the visa cap was still at 195,000, the unemployment rate for computer software engineers was measured at 5.2%. But in November 2004, the IEEE said that unemployment among software engineers had shrunk to 3.3%, a decline it attributed to the lowering of the H-1B cap.

However this argument is countered by the fact Immigrants founded more than half of all the Silicon Valley start-ups in the past 10 years. These immigrant founded U.S. technology companies employed over 450,000 workers and grossed $52 billion in 2005 alone according to Vivek Wadwha from Harvard.

Google, eBay, Intel and PayPal are all examples of companies founded by Immigrants to the US which are now household brands and responsible for millions of direct and indirect employment bring billions of dollars of wealth to the US and its people

Immigration experts say shutting out the talent from abroad will only hurt U.S. competitiveness in the long run. The next Google or Silicon Valley will be in Bangalore or Beijing according to Vivek Wadwha due to the current loss of talent.

Furthermore US heavyweights like Bill Gates of Microsoft fame have called for the H-1B visa quota to be 500,000.

Already countries like Canada, Singapore and Australia have created fast track programs to hopefully attract these types of entrepreneurial and hard working immigrants away from the US.

So for the many Indian students and other potential immigrants desperately applying for jobs and in some cases having employers submit H-1B visa petitions on April 1, 2009 for FY2010, it is a hope that the US again realizes the value of the Indian and foreign worker to their society and culture.

CJ helps foreigners understand the US Immigration System so they can live and work in the USA on visas like H-1B or E-3 and even Green Cards.