IS US unemployment been counted somewhere else?
US Visa arrangements turn sour
By Kerry Townsend - May 24 2001 09:26:22
For Artur Lima, a Brazilian and former employee of Globalstar, a global satellite company in Silicon Valley, it hasn’t been an easy spring. First, he lost his job, part of a crop of redundancies announced by his employer. Now, in what has become commonplace in the weakened economy among workers with temporary US work visas, he has been forced to return to Brazil.
“I just couldn’t stay here any longer. I didn’t know how long I could stay after my H1B status was expired, so I left 10 days after my last day on the job,” he says.
Mr Lima is one of 425,000 workers in the US who are holders of the H1B visa, the three-year work permit for skilled workers that was created in the early 1990s to help the growing technology industry meet its labour needs. The programme became so popular throughout the last decade that Congress increased the visa's quota twice – the last time up to 195,000 a year.
Out of status
But what Congress didn’t prepare for was an economic downturn and how it would affect the H1B workers - many of whom were brought over by large companies such as Cisco, Hewlett-Packard and Lucent Technologies, and now often find themselves redundant. Since the employer applies for the three-year visa on behalf of the employee, the law says that the H1B holder is “out of status” the day he or she stops working. In theory, that means workers must leave the country the day after they are out of work.
In practice, however, it is much more ambiguous. Most immigrants, who have families, mortgages and maybe a partner who works, are remaining for at least a month – sometimes more – to look for another job. If they find a new position their new employer can apply for a transfer of the H1B visa – and claim that the time the visa holder spent out of status was due to “extraordinary circumstances.”
Just how long these workers can stay out of status and still receive the transfer is undecided. Most immigration lawyers recommend anywhere from 10 days to three months. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) says it is sympathetic to the problem of individual employees and promises to clarify the “out of status” rule in a few months, but its sympathy does not extend to employers.
Green card
“The employers are the ones bringing these people over. They knew full well what it would mean to the employee once they were made redundant,” says Bill Strassberger, spokesperson for the INS.
Meanwhile immigrant groups have become angry and frustrated. Many immigrant workers say they came to the country only after their employer promised to sponsor them for a permanent visa, or green card, once they were established in the US. But under current law, once they are made redundant the processing of the green card ends – forcing H1B workers to begin the whole process over again when they start working for a new employer.
In one case, an H1B worker, made redundant by PricewaterhouseCoopers, sued for $3.5m because the company did not file for green card status as promptly as it promised it would.
Taking root
“You can’t live out of a suitcase forever. Am I really supposed to be ready just to leave at any time – whenever I am made redundant or the company goes under? In that case, I would never be able to get married, sign a lease or anything permanent,” says Murali Debarakonda, a director of the Immigrant Support Network, an association for the H1B workers.
Industry groups, on the other hand, refuse to take blame for all the confusion. They say that the immigrants knew that the H1B visas were temporary and did not guarantee permanent immigration.
For Mr Lima, blame is irrelevant. He just knows that if things were cleared up, a lot of H1B workers would not have had to return home so soon.
“Everything is just so vague. At least if you know your options, you can make a proper decision. A lot of foreigners, like me, would have stayed put if there wasn’t so much misleading information out there.”
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