WEB DESK
Trump administration in US has announced a new policy that makes very tough the procedure of issuing H-1B visas to those to be employed at one or more third-party work sites. The new policy announced yesterday, empowers the US Citizenship and Immigration Services to issue H-1B visas to an employee only for the period for which he/she has worked at a third-party work site.
Under the new policy, the company would have to go an extra length to prove that its H-1B employee at a third-party worksite has specific and non-qualifying speculative assignments in speciality occupation. As such the issuing of H-1B visas could be of less than three years. This would reverse the tradition of issuing the H-1B visas for three years at a time.
The latest policy is part of President Donald Trump’s ‘Buy American and Hire American Executive Order’ and the directive to protect the interests of US workers, it said. The H-1B programme offers temporary US visas that allow companies to hire highly skilled foreign professionals working in areas with shortages of qualified American workers.
Indian IT companies, which are among the major beneficiaries of H-1B visas, has a significant number of its employees deployed at third-party worksites. A significant number of American banking, travel and commercial services depend on on-site IT workers from India to get their job done.