This year, 236,000 foreigners applied for the H-1B, the most common visa for high-skilled foreign workers. That’s up 3,000 from 2015 — and up significantly more from 2014 which had 172,500 applications.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will grant just 85,000 H-1B visas (20,000 of which are reserved for master’s degree holders), which it selected on Saturday, April 9, via a lottery process.
For applicants — and employers — the fate of their applications is out of their hands.
“The lottery makes everything very uncertain,” said immigration lawyer Tahmina Watson of Watson Immigration Law, who said she was anticipating that the number of applications would indeed be higher this year.
The growing demand is one of the reasons why some regions — Massachusetts, Colorado and most recently New York City — have introduced programs to help applicants get around the H-1B cap. With the help of universities, a select number of H-1B applicants can bypass the annual quotas.
Silicon Valley types have spoken out about the need for high-skilled immigration reform for innovation’s sake. Without a pathway to stay in the country, many talented techies could take their ideas and companies elsewhere.
After all, according to a recent study from the National Foundation for American Policy, more than 50% of the U.S.’s “unicorns” — or privately-held companies deemed to be worth $1 billion or more — had at least one immigrant founder.
Legendary investor Ron Conway spoke about the ongoing need for immigration reform in February.
“28% of new [tech] startups in American are started by immigrants,” said Conway.
Conway is one of the original backers of FWD.us, a group focused on immigration reform that was launched by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs in 2013.
“We have CEOs who can’t even stay in the country with the rest of their team. That’s the most catastrophic case,” added Conway.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/12/technology/h1b-cap-visa-fy-2017/
And this goes on while American college grads move back into Mom’s basement, buried in debt they’ll never be able to pay.
As long as Americans’ only concern is beer and football, we’re all going to get screwed, and as long as these brain-dead TV addicts are distracted with cheap food and mindless entertainment, they’re not going to be able to compete with hard-working, and well educated kids from the rest of the world.
We’re too accustomed to sitting back and having it easy, while these foreign kids work harder at their jobs, and study harder at school. We allowed the “globalization” to proceed as far as it did, and now you’re going to have to compete with the whole world to eat.
And when they finally attack this place, whether it be NATO troops, Chinese, Russians, Mexicans, or all of them, you damn well better be ready to fight the whole world.
One things for certain, and that is that the attack on this country, from all angles, isn’t going to stop until we’re all gone, or we kick all their asses. Anyone who still has their head up their ass is dead meat, and the rest of us better be ready to fight like hell to survive.