With H-1B visa's future uncertain, US receives applications by truckloads

President Trump has vowed to overhaul the popular visa programme

The delivery trucks began arriving with their precious parcels before daybreak, lining up outside a massive government edifice that rises above Orange County’s suburban sprawl.

On Monday, the starting gun went off on application season for skilled-worker visas, known as H-1B visas, which allow employers, primarily technology companies, to bring in foreign workers for three years at a time. For the last few years, the federal government has been so overwhelmed by applications that it has stopped accepting them within a week of opening day, hence the line of trucks trying to deliver applications before the doors close on the program for another year.

And this year, the rush has escalated to an all-out scramble because the future of the H-1B program is unclear.

Hailed by proponents as vital to American innovation, the program has also been criticised as a scheme to displace United States workers with cheaper foreign labour. President Trump has vowed to overhaul it, and lawmakers from both parties have drafted bills to alter it.

At campaign rallies, Mr. Trump introduced laid-off Americans who had been asked to train their foreign successors at companies that included Disney. “We won’t let this happen anymore,” he thundered in one stump speech about the practice, which he has called “outrageous” and “demeaning.”

This past weekend, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services announced a technical change that could make it harder for entry-level programmers to receive the visas, and on Monday, the Justice Department warned that it would investigate companies that it believed had overlooked qualified American workers.

“The Justice Department will not tolerate employers’ misusing the H-1B visa process to discriminate against U.S. workers,” Thomas Wheeler, the head of the department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.

Each year, 65,000 H-1B visas are made available to workers with bachelor’s degrees, and 20,000 more are earmarked for those with master’s degrees or higher.

When the gates swung open at the government processing centre here on Monday, the first truck in line, a FedEx rig, carried 15,000 packages, said a courier, Andrew Langyo.

“We’re loaded, and we have more trucks coming,” said Mr. Langyo, who would return two hours later in the same truck with another haul.

Last year, the government received 236,000 applications in the first week before deciding it would accept no more. A computer randomly chooses the winners.

The average H-1B petition, a collection of forms and documents attesting to the bona fides of a job offer and the person chosen to fill it, is about two inches thick. But some files are six inches thick and weigh several pounds, according to Bill Yates, a former director of the Vermont Service Center, which also processes H-1B applications.

Mr. Yates recalled some mishaps, like the time a driver bound for the centre in Vermont drove 50 miles unaware that his truck’s back door had swung open, spilling its cargo onto the road.

The visas are attractive not only to the companies that file the applications, but also to the workers themselves, who can become eligible for a green card while working on an H-1B.

Among the petitions expected to land in California’s centre is that of Minh Nguyen, a software-design engineer from Vietnam who was sponsored for an H-1B by BitTitan, a cloud software company in Kirkland, Wash. It is his second attempt at a visa.

“In America, you’re in the centre of new technology and cutting-edge changes in the I.T. industry,” said Mr. Nguyen, 25. “I would contribute directly to the company and to software development in the U.S.”

In 2014, the last year for which information is available, just 13 outsourcing firms accounted for a third of all granted visas. The top recipients were Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, all based in India.

The companies, which subcontract their employees to banks, retailers and other businesses in the United States to do programming, accounting and other work, often inundate the immigration service with tens of thousands of applications.

BitTitan, a growing company that hopes to hire 60 engineers in the next 12 months, is submitting six applications. “We are trying to fill specific positions around cloud and artificial intelligence,” the chief executive, Geeman Yip, said. “If we can’t fill them, our innovation suffers.”

Several bipartisan bills in the Senate and the House seek to make companies give more priority to American workers before they fill jobs with H-1B visas. They also seek to raise the minimum pay for the jobs, which depend on skill level and location: A computer systems analyst in Pittsburgh, for example, must make at least $49,000 under current regulations. The theory is that higher pay will eliminate some of the rationale for importing workers.

A draft of a presidential executive order on “protecting American jobs and workers by strengthening the integrity of foreign worker visa programs” was distributed widely in late January but never signed. Then, without warning, Citizenship and Immigration Services published a memo on its website over the weekend that could affect many applications.

Specifically, companies seeking to import computer programmers at the lowest pay levels will have to prove that the work they perform qualifies as “specialty” labour, which is what the H-1B visas were created for. “There will be greater scrutiny of the role the company wants to fill,” said Lynden Melmed, a lawyer in Washington and a former chief counsel for the immigration service.

The measure appears to be directed mainly at outsourcing firms, rather than the big technology companies, which tend to hire workers at higher skill and pay levels.

In a statement, the National Association of Software and Services Companies, the main trade group for India’s outsourcing industry, said, “The H-1B visa system exists specifically because the U.S. has a persistent shortage of high-skilled I.T. talent.”

The group said that its members followed all the program’s rules, and that the change would have little impact. “It is aimed at screening out less-qualified workers, whereas our members tend to provide well-credentialed workers to help U.S. companies fill their skills gaps and compete globally,” it said.

Even before the memo and the Justice Department’s warning, fears about the future of the H-1B program were making this year more pressure-packed than most. “Just to make sure the petitions get in, almost every client demanded that theirs arrive on the first day,” said Greg McCall, a lawyer at Perkins Coie in Seattle who prepared 150 applications.

Inside the federal building, a formidable structure that has provided backdrops for movies including “Coma” and “Outbreak,” the logistical dance unfolded over two floors. In the mailroom, about 40 people wearing blue gloves sat around tables opening packages that arrived nonstop in six-foot-high bins. In a huge warehouse, those same packages were separated according to whether the applicants had bachelor’s or master’s degrees.

All told, 1,500 workers were involved, with a second shift expected to stretch past normal business hours.

“This is the day we prepare for months and months in advance,” said Donna P. Campagnolo, the centre’s deputy director.

Trucks came and went all day, with some couriers, including from FedEx, staggering their deliveries to avoid having dozens of trucks backed up at the gate.

Some smaller delivery companies received a piece of the action, too. One courier, Fernando Salas, pulled up in a red Suzuki station wagon stuffed with 10 boxes. “I have 109 envelopes,” he said. “That is all that fits in here.”

It was all surprisingly low-tech for a program used primarily for high-tech jobs. Asked why the government had not digitised the process, Ms. Campagnolo said: “There’s obviously a lot of paper. There’s no denying it.”

The biggest challenge, she said, is “trash overflow.”

Vindu Goel contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Nick Wingfield from Seattle.

©2017 The New York Times News Service