With the ban posed on seven countries by President Donald Trump, there are many more reforms that are on their way. Good or bad, these reforms will be impacting millions of lives. Everyone grows up with the big American dream in their mind. Moving to one of the most powerful nations in the world is what we all think about, but with Trump being the President, this dream is going to get a lot tough to achieve. There hasn’t been an official statement by Donald Trump on the H-1B visa, but there’s definitely going to be some major changes. Here’s some detail about the H-1B visa and how that affects everyone.
What is H1-B visa?
Companies employ foreigners for a period of up to six years on this non-immigrant visa. The aim is to gather man power for jobs that Americans are not skilled to do. The minimum salary for an employee holding the H1-B visa is $60,000 per year. People holding such visas can apply for permanent residency and buy/sell property in the country.
Criticism
It has been brought to notice that many companies use the H-1B visa to replace Americans as it is easy to get foreigners to do the job at lower wages. The whole idea of introducing the visa was to supplement the US workforce and not replace them. It has been alleged that companies take advantage of this and replace American employees with foreigners.
Donald Trump on H-1B
There hasn’t been any official statement given by Donald Trump on the issue, but he did promise to make reforms on the visa bill during his campaign. Melania Trump, the First Lady moved to the States from Slovenia using the H1-B visa. The H-1B reform bill has been proposed and we still have to know what the future of this would be like.
H-1B reform bill
The reform bill proposed to increase the minimum salary for visa holders from $60,000 to $130,000, more than double the amount. Companies hiring such visa holders would have to pay a higher price for skilled workers or make do with American citizens. If this bill reform is passed, Indian IT firms such as Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, and global dynamos like IBM, Microsoft and Google would suffer. These companies are the biggest recipients of H-1B visas and would have to provide higher costs for employing skilled foreign citizens.
‘Buy American and hire American’ is what Trump believes in. If the bill is passed, it would affect companies and people alike.
We did know there were going to be tough times ahead.
