updated
The U.S. Department of State and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has cut off requests from foreign nationals to change their employment status for the rest of 2007, in a move that could impact many high-tech start-ups that depend on such workers.
If a Silicon Valley company brings in a worker from India on a temporary visa, for example, and wants to hire them permanently, any requests won’t even be considered until next year. A worker with a job offer on table won’t know whether they’ll have an option to take that offer for several months — raising significant hurdles for fast moving start-ups. This also comes at a time when some companies are seeking to bring people back to the U.S. after hiring them abroad. We mentioned the example of Riya earlier this morning: After seeing wage inflation for its Indian workers, Riya decided to move those workers back to Mountain View, Calif.
A departmental “visa bulletin” said the change was due to “the sudden backlog reduction efforts” by immigration offices during the past months, which resulted in the “use of almost 60,000 employment numbers.”
A posting on the web site of law firm Duane Morris called this an “unprecedented action” and went on to say that the American Immigration Law Foundation is contemplating litigation due to the impact on “eligible applicants and sponsoring employers.”
The bulletin said that employment preference numbers will once again be available beginning October 1, 2007, when the department’s 2008 fiscal year begins.
Via Y Combinator News.
10 Comments
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NR said:
Matt, Startups very rarely depend on such workers.
I completely understand Munjal Shah’s (Riya) decision.
Startups just don’t have bandwidth to play with visa issues, inflated wages or lack of productivity.
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Eric Eldon said:
Startups DO face visa problems like this. Meebo blogged about their visa problems: http://blog.meebo.com/?p=147
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NR said:
Eric,
Okay, I should have said successful startups! :-) The ones that make real money :-)
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rj said:
the smartest, hardest working people in the world are banging on the door to come here and make the world a better place. And we won’t let them in. Un-f’n-believable.
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NR said:
@RJ
The world is a better place. The smartest & hardest working people don’t waste time banging on the doors to come here.
It is the cheap labor (non-skilled in most cases) and the companies exploiting them are banging on the door.
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Absolut said:
They are not banging….the companies are dying to get them here…and they cannot because of these archaic immigration laws. Can you imagine that to get a greencard a person has to do a TB test among a hundred other totally irrelevant things. The stupid immigration laws are wasting time energy money and other resources for both employers and employes and only encourages companies to move their production centers overseas.
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Coui said:
They are not banging….the companies are dying to get them here…and they cannot because of these archaic immigration laws. Can you imagine that to get a greencard a person has to do a TB test among a hundred other totally irrelevant things. The stupid immigration laws are wasting time energy money and other resources for both employers and employes and only encourages companies to move their production centers overseas.
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Coui said:
As a side note I know people who have been in this country for almost 11 years on h1b visa , paid their taxes, broke no law - has been with the same company for say around 4 years and now the company would like to promote them - or the individual wants to buy a house or do some major investment etc - but all these are not possible because he is stuck in the green card process. There is a ridiculous per country quota limit on employement based green cards irrespective of the number of applicants from the country. Therefore a engineer from cyprus will get a green card within 4 months whereas an engineer from India or China might have to wait for 5-6 years (which may increase further) because of this per country limit. There are many professionals from these countries who have been doing their job and being law abiding persons and yet waiting agonizingly for years for a green card. All that this green card will give is FREEDOM - Freedom to change jobs - freedom to start a business etc. TELL ME WHO DOES NOT DESERVE THAT? A PERSON WHO HAS INVESTED YEAR AFTER YEAR doing his job diligently paying his taxes - I say DAMN WELL DESERVE this FREEDOM in this country. And if you read the news and understand it you will understand what a CRUEL JOKE was played on these individuals who had been waiting patiently for years to file their final application in the long winding road of green card - and spent money and resources to do all the paperwork. It was like you have waited all night for the store to open to sell IPhone in the morning and then when the dawn comes it is announced that the sale of IPhones has been cancelled.
Pardon the ramblings —— it is just my chains rattling.
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Coui said:
OK … it is more like your to be bride runs away on the morning of your wedding.
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Coui said:
It is more like your to be bride running away in the morning of your wedding.
