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Trump To Sign Executive Order On Reform Of H-1B Visa System
Tuesday, 18 April 2017, 23:13 IST
"The highest wage tier, for instance in 2015, was only five per cent of H-1B workers. So 80 per cent received less than the median wage and only 10 per cent received the median wage," he noted.
"And, so only five per cent were categorised at the highest wage tier of the four wage tiers that are in place for the H-1B guest-worker visa," the official said.
The result of that is that workers are often brought in well below market rates to replace American workers, sort of violating the principle of the programme, which is supposed to be a means for bringing in skilled labour, the official said.
"And instead, you're bringing in, a lot of times, workers who are actually less skilled and lower paid than the workers that they're replacing," he stated.
The official said Trump has done more to bring a national spotlight onto the abuses in the H-1B guest-worker programme than anybody in the country has at any point in recent history.
"If you change that current system that awards visas randomly without regard for skill or wage to a skills-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers. These are not bringing in workers at beneath the market wage," he said.
The top three recipients of the H-1B visas, the official said, were Tata (TCS), Infosys and Cognizant.
"Some companies oftentimes are called outsourcing firms. They're like the top recipients of H-1B visa. You know, are companies like Tata (TCS), Infosys, Cognizant. They will apply for a very large number of visas; more than they get. Like putting extra tickets in the lottery raffle, if you will," the official said.
"And then they'll get the lion's share of visas," the official said.
As part of the executive order, the agencies have been asked to do everything they can, he said.
"But you could be looking at things on the administration side like increasing fees for H-1B visas. You could be looking at things like if we could adjust the wage scale to have a more honest reflection of what the prevailing wages actually are in these fields," the official said.
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Source: PTI
