#h1b

If tech talent can’t come to the U.S., American companies will go where the talent is.

Hiring by Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and Google has risen sharply in India in recent months. This trend coincides with the growing scrutiny of the H-1B visa, often used by tech companies to bring international talent to the U.S.

There were about 4,200 open positions at these companies in India as of February 5, Anuj Agrawal, founder and CEO of talent advisory and recruitment firm Zyoin Group, told Rest of World.

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Harini, who is from the west Indian city of Pune, is one of roughly 600,000 workers hired in the U.S. on an H-1B visa, a “non-immigrant work visa” that allows people in certain professions to stay and work in the country. The visa is linked to their employer; if their employment ends, workers have only 60 days to find a new job to retain their visa status, or leave the country. Indians form the majority of H-1B visa recipients in the U.S. In the 2021 financial year, more than 300,000 Indians had an H-1B petition approved, either for new or continued employment, accounting for almost 75% of the total number of H-1B visas approved that year.

While finding a new tech job in the U.S. is often a scramble, it is particularly difficult now. Following a Silicon Valley hiring boom during the pandemic, a surge of layoffs in recent months has devastated the tech industry. That means many people are fighting for the same positions. According to Layoffs.fyi, a website that has been tracking reported layoffs since the early days of the pandemic, more than 180,000 tech workers have been laid off globally since November. That month, Elon Musk announced that he planned to cut Twitter’s 7,500-person workforce. Some days later, Meta announced 11,000 job cuts. In January, Microsoft said it planned to let go of 10,000 employees. Two days later, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced that it was laying off 12,000.

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For Indians on H-1B visas, in particular, there is almost no alternative way to stay on in the U.S. Their estimated wait time for most employment-based green cards — which would allow them to stay in the country for longer — is about 90 years. That’s partly because the number of green cards available through employment — around 140,000 a year — is capped at 7% for each country. The number of Indians on H-1B visas is much higher than the number of employment-based green cards allotted for their nationality, creating a massive backlog. According to Grode, many laid-off H-1B visa holders from other countries may be able simply to transfer to a visitor status and wait for a green card, but that isn’t an option for most Indians.