 "Donald Trump (left) said on November 9 that sweeping changes to US migration policy rank among his top three priorities. Photo: Reuters")
Before the election, Nicole Manion and her boss joked about whether a Donald Trump victory would mean she’d have to leave her tech job in Seattle and go home to Toronto. The ribbing has stopped.
The future of Manion, an analyst for a marketing-software company, is suddenly in jeopardy. She works in the US on a special visa for Canadians and Mexicans that owes its existence to NAFTA, the continental free-trade deal the president-elect has threatened to “rip up”. “To move here was always a dream of mine,” she says. “I always saw the States as that big brother, the land of opportunity, especially in tech. Do I go back to Toronto and start again, try and rebuild what I’ve accomplished here? Or do I stay and run the risk?”
Tens of thousands of people working in the US tech industry on temporary visas are, like Manion, suddenly thinking more seriously about whether their adopted country will still want them under President Trump. The former Apprentice host said on November 9 that sweeping changes to US immigration policy rank among his top three priorities, and he’s surrounding himself with advisers and backers who take pride in their strict views on the issue, including Republican senators Jeff Sessions of Alabama and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. So far, though, Trump has been light on specifics, leaving workers and immigration advocates to scrutinise a handful of statements for clues.
He’s said he will “end forever” the use of cheaper labour from the H-1B worker programme, a lottery system that’s a principal source of visas for tech workers, as an alternative to hiring US citizens. But he’s also said Silicon Valley and the US in general need to bring talented workers into the country. “Usually we have a much better sense for what the president-elect is going to focus on and where it’s going to take us,” says Peter Leroe-Muñoz, vice-president for technology and innovation policy at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a regional lobbying organisation.
The Valley “would be the first to suffer if it got harder to come to America or if increasing xenophobia made fewer people want to”, says investor Paul Graham, co-founder of start-up accelerator Y Combinator. More than half the US start-ups worth at least $1 billion have an immigrant founder, and the companies getting the most H-1B visas each year — about 80,000 are granted — include Amazon.com and Microsoft. Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has been lobbying Congress for an expansion of the H-1B quota. Now maintaining the status quo seems optimistic.
Another Silicon Valley immigration priority-work authorisations for foreigners looking to start their own companies instead of working for someone else’s-is also vulnerable. A recently proposed “entrepreneurial parole” from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, prompted by a memo from President Obama, would allow entrepreneurs to stay several years in the country if they meet certain thresholds for funding and job creation. It’s a likely target for Trump, who’s vowed to erase Obama’s unilateral executive actions.
Abhishek Kona, a 28-year-old Indian software engineer at Bright, a solar panel maker in San Francisco, says he’s putting the dream of having his own company aside for now to hang on to his employer-sponsored visa. Some other workers were scared to give their names. Another Indian expat, who works for delivery start-up Postmates, says he and his wife are no longer looking to buy a home, as they were before the election. Instead, they’re questioning things they never had before, such as whether they want to raise their young son in the US.
© 2016 Bloomberg
