Congressman Shri Thanedar has urged United States Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to raise the cap for H-1B visas.
According to the Economic Times India, Thanedar has called on Mayrkas to expand legal pathways for immigration further, thus permitting a more significant number of foreigners to benefit from the US immigration programs.
“We must expand legal pathways for immigration, including by raising the cap for H-1B visas,” Indian-American Congressman told Mayorkas, VisaGuide.World reports.
His comments came during a Congressional hearing by the House Committee on Homeland Security regarding the Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Request for the US Department of Homeland Security.
The H-1B visa, also known as a Person in Specialty Visa, allows US employers to bring to the territory qualified foreign workers engaged in specific fields, including IT specialists, architects, lawyers, accountants as well as professors. Among the primary beneficiaries of this kind of visa are IT professionals from India.
The annual H-1B visa allocations are capped at 85,000. Of them, 20,000 are dedicated to workers holding advanced degrees from US institutions, while the remaining 65,000 visas are approved on a lottery basis.
Thanedar has considered that the country’s frontier security challenges are a symptom of the broader failure to overhaul the US immigration system. According to the Economic Times report, he was the only lawmaker to bring the issue of H-1B visas to the table.
The Congressman added that the Department of Homeland Security has a broad range of missions beyond the border that are critical to securing the homeland that deserves US attention.
“For example, we must make sure the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is able to carry out its mission to secure all modes of transportation,” he pointed out.
He said that TSA employees have laboured under inequitable working conditions; at the same time, frontline officers are receiving 30 percent less pay as well as inferior labor protection compared to other federal employees doing the same work.
A previous report of the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), called “H1B Petitions and Denial Rates in FY 2022,” found that employers from the US are subject to significant difficulties when planning to employ workers from other countries as a result of the low annual limit for approving H-1B visas.
The American think tank Cato Institute previously revealed that holders of H-1B visas are among the highest-paid workers in the US. In addition, it noted that their salaries are among the 90th percentile of all salaries in the US, meaning that they have wages in the top ten percent of the country’s salary earnings.
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