Monday, February 2, 2009

Silicon Valley Job Cuts Hit H1-B Visa Holders

Silicon Valley is hurting. Intel, Microsoft, and other high technology giants are announcing tens of thousands of layoffs. Unemployment in Silicon valley hit a new high of 7.8% in January, 2009. Many of the high-tech companies rely on foreign-born technologists, particular those from India, China, Israel, Pakistan, Philippines, and other nations. Thousands of these workers are facing the ax, with the H1-B workers particularly fearing the worst.

When times were good, the high-tech companies lobbied for and got over 100,000 yearly H1-B visas approved by U.S. Congress. The largest number of workers who were hired with the H1-B visas were of Indian origin. Some of them suffered abuse at the hands of their employers and the intermediaries who helped place them. "H1-B slavery" was the term used to describe their situation.




Things have changed dramatically in the last few months. And they are going to get much worse in 2009. In a letter addressed to Microsoft, U.S. Senator Charles Grassley has asked the company to layoff foreign workers before laying off skilled American workers.

Today's San Jose Mercury News has highlighted the plight of two Indian engineers on H1-B visas who recently lost their jobs. For them, it's a race against time. They need to quickly find other jobs at a time when companies everywhere are cutting back. Both Jay and Prasad (fictitious names) have advanced degrees earned from elite American universities. And both are facing the inflexible rules of their H-1B work visas.

Technically, as soon as they lost their jobs, they were required to leave the country. In reality, they can probably stick around for a week or two, but not much longer.

There are no statistics available yet on how many of the job cuts have already hit or soon expected to hit H1-B workers. But San Jose Mercury is reporting that this "stark dilemma is being repeated with increasing frequency across Silicon Valley, according to immigration specialists, as companies downsize to weather a punishing downturn. It's a small number compared with the layoffs of H-1B visa holders during the dot-com crash. But the downturn has sent a wave of concern through the community of immigrant workers who hold the visa, which companies use to hire skilled noncitizens."

Dot com bust in 2000-2001 followed by post-911 economic slow-down were hard on H1B visa holders. The running joke at the time was that B2B stood for Back-to-Bangalore, not business-to-business. But, somehow, the smart techies survived and then thrived. Short term, things are going to be particularly tough again. But, eventually, there will be a rebound and the highly-educated and smart people like Jay and Prasad are going to do very well. Their hard work and persistence will pay off. My message to Prasad and Jay is: Hang in there , Guys! Don't give up hope! Things will get better.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this very touching post Riaz. Even if its the same fictitious Jaydev who writes very fanatic stuff on you blog, i pray that he lands a job soon.

Riaz Haq said...

Request received via email:

I have read the article and would like to take advise for my son employment in microsoft. He was selected by Microsoft in April 2008.His HIB visa granted in NOvember 2008, He was interviwed on Nov 12 2008 at USA Consulate but still waiting for the clearence from the State Department Washington.Microsoft
also arranged for his working visa for Canada, whivh is valid. Microsoft informed him about the job cuts in Microsoft, but have given him the assurance that they do not intend to
with draw his offer of employment and rather eager to see him in Microsoft Silicon velley subject to security clearence. From Nov 2008 he is enemployed,as he was expecting vis in a month time.

I would appreciate your professional advise

Here's my email response:

I think Microsoft will honor its commitment to your son.
However, if things continue to deteriorate and Microsoft is forced to announce more layoffs of US workers, then all bets are off.
High-profile companies like Microsoft will come under a lot of political pressure from US Congress and may have to back out.
But they are are a big company and they have to maintain their trust. They will not lie to you. They will tell you if the situation changes in the future.

Anonymous said...

Would the Indian government be willing to grant open ended work visas for Indian companies to hire the hundreds of thousands of laid off US tech workers?
No, I didn't think so.

Anonymous said...

read the comments by Romesh Chander and the follow up. LOL.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126012590544978989.html#articleTabs%3Dcomments

Riaz Haq said...

In spite of the discrimination by some Indian hiring managers at Microsoft that is rightly pointed out by a white female commenter on the Wall Street Journal website, Microsoft has been and continues to hire in Pakistan, though the pace has considerably slowed since the financial crisis last year and imposition of new visa restrictions.

Riaz Haq said...

The BBC is reporting that Dubai crisis is impacting a remote village in Bihar:

In August 2008, Bharat Bhushan Tiwari - from Akhopur village in eastern Indian Bihar - took a loan of 71,000 rupees ($1,500) from a village moneylender to pay a local agent who had arranged a job for his son in Dubai.

Mr Tiwari - who runs a small shop - was hoping for better days for his family of five by sending his second son, Jay Kumar Tiwari, to the Gulf country.

Jay Kumar had got a job as a carpenter in a Dubai-based construction company and had big dreams - he wanted to earn a lot of money to pull his family out of grinding poverty.

But last month, their dreams came crashing down when Jay Kumar was asked by the company officials to quit by 6 March 2010.

'Cruel joke'

Dubai has been hit by an unprecedented financial crisis and the tremors are being felt in far away Bihar.

"This has been a cruel joke on our fate," Bharat Bhushan Tiwari told the BBC, trying to fight back his tears.

His other two sons are also unemployed and the Tiwari family now prays that the situation improves in Dubai.

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a 2010 Times of India sory on illegal immigration into US from India:


WASHINGTON: In 2009, India accounted for the third highest increase in the number of illegal immigrants in the US in ten years, according to a new government report, though only two percent of all illegal immigrants were Indians.

The number of illegal immigrants in the US fell by seven percent to 10.8 million last year.

A majority of them came from Latin America, according to the department of homeland security (DHS) report, though India with 200,000 was the sixth biggest sender of illegal immigrants to the US.

In overall numbers, Indians accounted for only two percent of illegal immigrants. Mexico (6.7 million) topped the list with 62 percent, followed by those from El Salvador (530,000), Guatemala (480,000), Honduras (320,000) and the Philippines (270,000).

Between 2000 and 2009, the Mexican-born unauthorised immigrants increased by two million or 42 percent. But the greatest percentage increases occurred among unauthorised immigrants from Honduras (95 percent), Guatemala (65 percent), and India (64 percent).

"The number of unauthorised residents declined by one million between 2007 and 2009, coincident with the US economic downturn," said the report based on census data and extrapolations from the total foreign population in the country.

Beside the US and global financial crisis, other reasons the report adduces for the drop in the undocumented population include tougher border enforcement and a national crackdown on illegal immigrants.

The overall annual average increase in the unauthorised population during the 2000-09 period was 250,000 with ten leading countries of origin representing 85 percent of the unauthorised immigrant population in 2009.

Of the nearly 11 million undocumented people living in the US in January 2009, 37 percent, or four million, arrived since January 2000, 44 percent since the 1990s and 19 percent since the 1980s, the DHS said.

Between January 2008 and January 2009, the number of unauthorised immigrants living in the US decreased seven percent from 11.6 million to 10.8 million after growing from 8.5 million to 11.8 million between 2000 and 2007, DHS said.

An estimated 8.5 million of the 10.8 million unauthorised immigrants living in the US in 2009 were from the North America region, including Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. The next leading regions of origin were Asia (980,000) and South America (740,000).

California remained the leading state of residence of the illegal immigrants in 2009, with 2.6 million, followed by Texas (1.7 million), Florida (720,000), New York (550,000) and Illinois (540,000).

California's share of the national total was 24 percent in 2009 compared to 30 percent in 2000. The greatest percentage increase in the illegal population between 2000 and 2009 occurred in Georgia (115 percent), Nevada (55 percent) and Texas (54 percent).

In 2009, 61 percent of unauthorised immigrants were aged 25 to 44 years, and 58 percent were male. Males accounted for 62 percent of the illegal population in the 18 to 34 age group in 2009 while females accounted for 52 percent of the 45 and older age groups.



Read more: Indian illegal immigrants in US up 64 percent last decade - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/indians-abroad/Indian-illegal-immigrants-in-US-up-64-percent-last-decade/articleshow/5554881.cms#ixzz1Cfty49sl

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a Guardian Op Ed on disappearing middle class jobs in America and Europe:

...."Knowledge work", supposedly the west's salvation, is now being exported like manual work. A global mass market in unskilled labour is being quickly succeeded by a market in middle-class work, particularly for industries, such as electronics, in which so much hope of employment opportunities and high wages was invested. As supply increases, employers inevitably go to the cheapest source. A chip designer in India costs 10 times less than a US one. The neoliberals forgot to read (or re-read) Marx. "As capital accumulates the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse."

We are familiar with the outsourcing of routine white-collar "back office" jobs such as data inputting. But now the middle office is going too. Analysing X-rays, drawing up legal contracts, processing tax returns, researching bank clients, and even designing industrial systems are examples of skilled jobs going offshore. Even teaching is not immune: last year a north London primary school hired mathematicians in India to provide one-to-one tutoring over the internet. Microsoft, Siemens, General Motors and Philips are among big firms that now do at least some of their research in China. The pace will quicken. The export of "knowledge work" requires only the transmission of electronic information, not factories and machinery. Alan Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has estimated that a quarter of all American service sector jobs could go overseas.

Western neoliberal "flat earthers" (after Thomas Friedman's book) believed jobs would migrate overseas in an orderly fashion. Some skilled work might eventually leave but, they argued, it would make space for new industries, requiring yet higher skills and paying better wages. Only highly educated westerners would be capable of the necessary originality and adaptability. Developing countries would obligingly wait for us to innovate in new areas before trying to compete.

But why shouldn't developing countries leapfrog the west? Asia now produces more scientists and engineers than the EU and the US put together. By 2012, on current trends, the Chinese will patent more inventions than any other nation. As a new book – The Global Auction (by sociologists Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder and David Ashton) – argues, the next generation of innovative companies may not be American or British and, even if they are, they may not employ American or British workers.

It suggests neoliberals made a second, perhaps more important error. They assumed "knowledge work" would always entail the personal autonomy, creativity and job satisfaction to which the middle classes were accustomed. They did not understand that, as the industrial revolution allowed manual work to be routinised, so in the electronic revolution the same fate would overtake many professional jobs. Many "knowledge skills" will go the way of craft skills. They are being chopped up, codified and digitised. Every high street once had bank managers who used their discretion and local knowledge to decide which customers should receive loans. Now software does the job. Human judgment is reduced to a minimum, which explains why loan applicants are often denied because of some tiny, long-forgotten overdue payment.

Brown, Lauder and Ashton call this "digital Taylorism"....

Riaz Haq said...

Here's a Guardian story on US penalizing Infosys for violating visa restrictions:

Infosys Ltd said on Wednesday it has reached a $34m settlement with US authorities in a case involving the widespread practice by Indian firms of flying workers to client sites in the United States on temporary visas.

The fine, which the US Department of Justice said is the largest in a case of its kind, comes as US lawmakers consider legislation that would make it more difficult and costly for Indian IT firms to send workers to the United States on temporary, restricted visas.

"Infosys denies and disputes any claims of systemic visa fraud, misuse of visas for competitive advantage or immigration abuse. Those claims are untrue and are assertions that remain unproven," Infosys said in a statement.

"There were no criminal charges or court rulings against the company. Furthermore, there are no limitations on the company's eligibility for federal contracts or access to US visa programs as a result of the settlement," it said.

Infosys, India's second-largest IT services exporter, employs roughly 15,000 people in the United States. As of March 31, about 10,800 of those were on H-1B visas, which allow an employee to stay and work in the United States up to six years, and 1,600 were on temporary L-1 visas, a company filing said.

The US investigation focused on the use of B-1 business visas and I-9 forms, Infosys has said. I-9 forms verify the identity of employees and their authorisation to work in the United States. A person on a B-1 visa in the United States can participate in meetings but is not allowed to work.

"It is likely to add more fuel to the ongoing debate around visa reforms," Chirajeet Sengupta, practice director in Mumbai at Everest Group, which advises clients on technology vendors, said on Tuesday after reports that a settlement was imminent.

"These reforms, if executed, have the potential to impact Indian service providers' landed resource model that is largely driven by access to H-1B visas in large numbers," he said.

In its statement, Infosys said only 0.02% of the days that Infosys staff worked on US projects last year were performed by people on B-1 visas.

"The Company's use of B-1 visas was for legitimate business purposes and not in any way intended to circumvent the requirements of the H-1B program," the Bangalore-based company said.

Infosys has secured roughly one B-1 visa for every 10 H-1B visas, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter who declined to be identified.

US authorities have been looking into Infosys' use of visas since 2011. Earlier this month, Infosys set aside a reserve of $35m, including legal fees, as it worked towards a resolution of the US investigation.

The case is "an important event in the annals of Indian IT industry," Sundararaman Viswanathan, a consultant in Bangalore with Zinnov, which advises US corporations on sending outsourcing work to India, said ahead of the settlement.

"This is a common issue amongst all the Indian service providers – just that Infosys had to deal with it," he said.

"Though the Indian service providers do not intend to flout the visa regulations, there was definitely a lack of regard for certain norms and procedures. This will be fixed. There will be an increase in onsite hiring," he said.


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/30/infosys-34m-settlement-us-department-justice-visa

Riaz Haq said...

Despite H-1B lottery, #India body shops dominate H-1B visa use http://www.computerworld.com/article/2954612/it-outsourcing/despite-h-1b-lottery-offshore-firms-dominate-visa-use.html … via @computerworld

Offshore outsourcing firms that do most of their work in India remain the largest users of the H-1B visa for computer-related jobs, seemingly unaffected by the odds of the visa lottery, according to new data.

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With the exception of a few tech firms -- notably Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Oracle -- the top 25 H-1B-using firms are either based in India or are U.S. firms running large offshore operations.

These firms include Tata Consultancy Services, the leading H-1B user with 7,149 approved visa petitions for last year, and Infosys, which ranked third on the list at just over 4,000 approved visas. Both were major contractors at Southern California Edison, where IT employees were fired as work was shifted to contractors.

HCL, one of the contractors at Disney Parks and Resorts, was approved for just over 900 visas. IT employees at Edison and Disney complained of training their visa-holding replacements prior to losing their jobs. (Disney later said it was canceling its recent IT outsourcing plans).

The IT services firms in the top 25 H-1B using firms accounted for approximately 43% of the 76,272 H-1B approvals in new computer-related jobs only in the U.S. government's fiscal year 2014, which ran from Oct. 1, 2013 to Sept. 30, 2014.

This is the first time we have data broken down by job type, via a federal Freedom of Information Act request. These totals will likely be lower than H-1B totals reported in prior years when Computerworld did not have breakdowns by employment categories. Visa requests for employment changes (as opposed to new employment) are not included in these totals.

The U.S. has been distributing its annual 85,000 H-1B allotment via a lottery because of high demand. This system works against many small U.S. tech firms that make up the bulk of the visa applicants. They must compete against large-volume IT services firms that submit multiple H-1B visa applications to improve their odds of winning the lottery, according to immigration experts.

New computer-related employment last federal fiscal year represented almost 64%, or two out of every three, such visas issued. Other job categories included engineering, medicine, science, law and, yes, modeling. (While rumors persist this is a large use of the H-1B program, in fact there were only 38 visas approved for fashion model new employment last fiscal year).

Computerworld requested but did not receive information about how many of these approvals were not subject to the H-1B cap, as well as a breakdown of approvals by gender and data about wages.

The tally of top H-1B users includes Computerworld analyses to combine various iterations of company names; there were, for example, 64 different versions of Cognizant Technology Solutions, including Cognizant Tech Solns US Corp, Cognizant Technology Solns US Corp and so on. The analysis also combines a company's different divisions and business units -- IBM Corp and IBM India, among others.

Riaz Haq said...

Software engineers' salaries

Source: Glassdoor

https://www.glassdoor.com.au/Salaries/index.htm


Pakistan Avg Rs 500,0000 ( US$4,770) Min Rs 240 K ($2,290) Max $1.08 million ($10,302)

India Avg Rs. 450,000 ($6,875) Min Rs 327,000 ($4,125) Max Rs. 519,000 ($7,930)

China Avg RMB 150,000 ($21,760) Min 80,000 ($11,605) Max 246,000 ($35,687)

USA $95,105 Min $67,000 Max $132,000

UK British Pounds 37,469 ($46,786) Min 26,000 ($32,465) Max 61,000 ($76,168)

Canada C$72,000 ($53,853) Min C$51,000 ($38,146) Max C$95,000 ($71,057)

Germany Euro 54,000 ($58,144) Min 42,000 ($45,223) Max 70,000 ($75,372)

France Euro 42,000 ($45,223) Min 34,000 ($36,610) Max 55,000 ($59,221)

Australia A$83,968 ($63,963) Min 62,000 ($47,229) Max 116,000 ($88,384)

Israel Shekel 240,000 ($65,717) Min 126,000 ($34,501) Max 319,000 ($87,350)

Riaz Haq said...

An Indian-origin Google employee lost job after 11 years of service.
The Google employee says it is difficult to express the pain after layoff news.
The H1B visa holders need to leave the country after 60 days if they job.

https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/indian-google-employee-with-h1b-visa-lost-job-after-11-years-of-service-says-countdown-begins-to-leave-us-2327310-2023-01-27

Google laid off thousands of employees and the process was not as smooth considering many were locked out of their systems without any notice. While the news of layoff is disheartening for many, the most impacted ones are the employees who got the job on an H1B visa. An Indian-origin employee with an H1B visa who worked at Google for more than 11 years also lost his job and found out about layoff news out of nowhere.

His wife also got locked out of the system and discovered in the morning that her access to any internal resources on the laptop was blocked. He penned down an emotional note on LinkedIn about his good and bad experiences at Google. He wrote that they were in disbelief after finding about the job they lost at the biggest tech company, even after giving many years to the company.

“Two out of the 12,000 Googlers were staring at each other in disbelief in that room while our 2-year-old daughter slept peacefully not knowing (thankfully so) what just hit her family. It’s hard to explain what this feels like, especially when you’ve spent a third of your life at a place that’s given you so much and more that it becomes an integral part of your identity. I spent 11.5 amazing years at Google - staying loyal and committed to its mission and believing in its “do no evil” motto,” he said on LinkedIn.


The laid-off Google employee with an H1B visa also expressed his pain of leaving the country after about two months if he doesn’t get a job in the US, where he is currently living. “The dreaded H1b countdown has begun and I’m starting to look for roles,” he said.


For those who are unaware, H1B visa holders or we can say immigrants, who get a job in the US, are not allowed to stay back in the country for more than 60 days if they lose a job. The H1B visa workers will have to find a new job in about 60 days or they will have to leave the country. The visas are typically issued for three years, and they can get extended depending on the employment.

Google did fire as many as 12,000 employees across globe, but the company has also promised to offer severance pay to the affected workers. The laid off Google employees will get 16 weeks of salary, two weeks for every additional year at Google, and at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting. Google will also pay 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation time. The sacked employees will also be entitled to receive six months of healthcare, job placement services as well as immigration support.