Smaller companies apply for more H1B visas in 2018

Smaller companies and startups are said to have increased their number of applications for H-1B visas of the US with larger Indian IT enterprises striving to be less dependent on them by hiring more local workers in America.

Although the total number of applications that USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services) will be receiving in 2018 is not going to decrease drastically from 2017, it is reported that some IT behemoths have increased local hiring in the US to nearly 50 percent of late compared to around 10 to 12 percent previously.

According to the new guidelines of the USCIS, the duration of visas to be issued may be between six months to three years as against two to three years in the past.

With more rigorous examination of applications, it is expected that more of them would be rejected in 2018. The authorities, it is reported, will accept the applications until they feel they have adequate numbers to meet the visa ceiling of 65,000, and only after they have evaluated them all, they would release the actual number of applications.

The Hindustan Times says that only about 15,000 of H1-B visas issued to Indians every year out of the nearly 40,000 are done by the IT companies directly. The remaining visa applications are filed by the third-party intermediaries who recruit and place skilled professionals depending on requirements. But as USCIS raises scrutiny on applications from third-party companies, clients who depend on them could get fewer visas.

Data from the NFAP in fiscal 2016 shows that the 9,356 new H-1B visa petitions approved for the top seven Indian IT companies account for only 0.006 percent of the US workforce.

The number of approved H-1B visas petitions filed by TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) fell by 56 percent in FY16 to 2,040 when compared to its previous fiscal. The reduction in new petitions in fiscal 2016 from Wipro and Infosys plummeted by 52 percent and 16 percent, respectively, to 1,474 and 2,376.

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