This is not a normal bear-market sob story. According to a swamp of constantly shifting federal regulations, Nagaraj and his colleagues must now either return to India or find another job in a tight labor market and hope that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) allows them to transfer their visa to the new company. And the law doesn’t allow them to earn a paycheck until all the paperwork winds its way through the INS bureacracy. “How am I going to survive without any job and without any income?” Nagaraj wonders.
Until recently, H-1B visas were championed by Silicon Valley companies as the solution to the region’s shortage of programmers and engineers. First issued by the INS in 1992, they draw in skilled workers from other countries, many of whom bring their families with them, lay down roots in Silicon Valley suburbs and apply for more permanent green cards. With the dot-com crash, those workers have been getting pink slips instead, and that’s causing mass consternation in immigrant communities nationwide. The INS considers a worker “out of status” when he loses a job, which technically means he must pick up and go home. But because of the scope of this year’s layoffs, the U.S. government has recently backpedaled, issuing a confusing series of statements that suggest workers might be able to stay if they qualify for some exceptions and can find a new company to take over as the sponsor of their visa. The result is thousands of immigrants who have been laid off now face dimming career prospects in the United States, and the possibility that they will be sent home. “They are in limbo. It is the greatest form of torture,” says Amar Veda of the Silicon Valley-based Immigrants Support Network.
The crisis looks especially bad in light of all the heated visa rhetoric by Silicon Valley companies in the past few years. Last fall the industry won a big victory by getting Congress to approve an increase in the annual number of H-1B visas the INS could issue to foreign workers. Now demand for such workers is slowing as the downturn picks up steam. Valley heavyweights like Intel, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard have all announced thousands of layoffs this year, which include many H-1B workers. The INS reported last month that only 16,000 new H-1B workers came to the United States in February–down from 32,000 in February of last year.
Getting laid off doesn’t improve anyone’s life, but for foreign workers it’s a one-way ticket to a bureaucratic nightmare. If you haven’t lined up another job right away (impossible for many since the ax usually falls quickly), you’re supposed to leave the country. The only exception is appealing to the INS under what it calls “extraordinary circumstances.” A layoff that’s swift and unexpected may qualify, but the INS decides this on a case-by-case basis. Then it’s up to the discretion of the overworked INS case officer. The process can take up to 75 days, and the backlog is getting worse all the time.
In the meantime, visa holders are not allowed to take part-time work. Since many immigrants have rent payments to make and families to support here and back home, that rule is roundly ignored. One 22-year-old Taiwanese woman was forced to take up illegal employment after getting laid off from her job as a Web designer for a New York dot-com in January. She waitressed, tutored kids, taught English to elderly immigrants and even volunteered to participate in a neurological study–anything to earn some cash. “Waitressing was the hardest job but the easiest to get,” she says. “They didn’t ask many questions or ask to see work papers. All they wanted to know was how much I weighed.”
Back in February, the State Department issued a memo stating that the H-1B visas are good until their expiration date. But last month the INS told H-1B holders “not to panic,” and that there would be a grace period for laid-off workers before they had to leave the United States. The result has been confusion. INS spokeswoman Eyleen Schmidt promises that more formal guidance will come this month. “We’re aware of the cutbacks happening everywhere,” she says. “We’re trying to be as generous as we can be within the confines of the existing law.”
Among the established immigrant communities in Silicon Valley, there’s a growing consensus that the visa system itself is flawed. Kanwal Rekhi, an Indian-American entrepreneur, says, “H-1B workers have become the indentured slaves of companies,” since they rely on their employers to sponsor them for visas and green cards. Special-interest groups, such as the Immigrants Support Network, are trying to remove those bonds, and have achieved a few modest successes. They lobbied successfully for the “portability” provisions in last year’s H-1B visa-expansion bill, allowing workers to transfer their visas and green-card ap-plications between companies. Murali Krishna Devarakonda of the Immigrants Support Network says the goal now is to completely remove companies from the H-1B process. “What we are shooting for is simple freedom,” he says. “Employers need us. The economy needs us. Why is the law structured in a way that we also need the employer?”
For now, though, the lives of immigrants like Umair Rashidi, from Karachi, are still in chaos. An H-1B worker since 1998, he got a Connecticut-based software company to sponsor him, his wife and their four children for green cards last year. Two months later he was laid off, and his application for permanent residence discarded. “It’s tragic: one moment you’re ecstatic that you can finally plan your future here,” he says. “Then in one snap of a finger, your whole life is obliterated as fast as a sand castle crumbles.”
