US to ease H-1B visas for skilled Indian workers as PM Modi visits America

US to ease H-1B visas for skilled Indian workers as PM Modi visits America

Washington: The Biden administration will make it easier for Indians to live and work in the United States, using this week’s state visit by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help some skilled workers enter or remain in the country, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The State Department could announce as soon as Thursday that a small number of Indians and other foreign workers on H-1B visas will be able to renew those visas in the US, without having to travel abroad, one of the sources said, part of a pilot programme that could be expanded in the coming years.

Indian citizens are by far the most active users of the US H-1B programme and made up 73 per cent of the nearly 4,42,000 H-1B workers in fiscal year 2022.

“We all recognise that mobility of our people is a huge asset to us,” said another US official.

“And so our goal is to approach that in a sort of multifaceted way. The State Department already has been working very hard to find creative ways to make changes to things.”

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on questions about which visa types would qualify or the timing of the pilot launch. Plans for a pilot programme were first reported by Bloomberg Law in February.

“The pilot would begin with a small number of cases with the intention to scale the initiative over the following one to two years,” the spokesperson said, while declining to define small.

The steps could change and are not finalised until they are announced. The White House declined to comment. Each year, the US government makes 65,000 H-1B visas available to companies seeking skilled foreign workers, along with an additional 20,000 visas for workers with advanced degrees. The visas last for three years and can be renewed for another three years.

The companies using the most H-1B workers in recent years include the Indian-based Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services as well as Amazon, Alphabet and Meta in the US, according to US government data.

The ability for some of the temporary foreign workers to renew visas in the US would free up resources for visa interviews in consulates abroad, the spokesperson said.

India has long had concerns with the difficulty its citizens face in receiving visas to live in the United States, including technology industry workers. More than 10 million jobs stood open in the United States at the end of April, according to the Labour Department.

Some H-1B visa holders in the US have been among the thousands of tech workers laid off this year, sending them scrambling to find new employers within a 60-day “grace period” or return to their home country.