Majority of H-1B workers get temporary employment

The survey said the main aim of sponsorship offered by employers is not provide permanent residency for such H-1B visa holders but only to fill the vacant posts temporarily. 

The Economic Policy Institute which released the study last week brought forth the stark realities of the plans of various US and offshore firms offering sponsorship. The findings reveal that majority of India-based firms seek PR (Permanent Residency) for only a fraction of their US based employees. Meanwhile, some big giants including Microsoft Corp. are thinking of initiating the process of green card to attract employees. 

The motive of almost all such sponsorships, said the author of this study and an associate professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology, Ron Hira, is to take advantage of cheap guest-worker labor for filling temporary positions for work in the US from overseas workers. 

The study separated the data into H-1B and L-1 visa categories after examining the data company-by-company.

Meanwhile, there has been severe criticism from far and wide against the study. Eric Thomas, a spokesman for Complete America (a 
coalition of universities, vendors and various sponsors of H-1B visa holders) called the study as misleading, since the study putting different visa categories into one bucket. 

Thomas said that the L-1 visa, for example, is used for intracompany transfers by MNCs (multinational companies) and that’s how this system was intended to work. So, there is no need to skew the data, quipped Thomas. 

The study found that Microsoft Corp. sought PR for 703 H-1B visa holders out of the total 1037 H-1B visas granted for the company in 2008. Another company, Intel Corp. sought permanent residency for just two H-1B visa holders out of the total 351 H-1B Visa approvals received by the company in the same year. 

The study by Hira has argued that the current visa rules empower the employers to control H-1B workers since these visa workers have very limited options to switch jobs. Moreover, their visa can be revoked by their employer at any point of time through termination of their employment and resulting in immediate exit of the employee from the country.