US to ease visas for skilled Indian workers as PM Modi visits

The Biden administration would make it easier for Indians to live and work in the United States, taking advantage of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit this week to let some talented professionals enter or remain in the nation.

According to one source, the State Department might announce as soon as Thursday that a small number of Indians and other foreign employees on H-1B visas will be allowed to renew such visas in the United States without having to fly abroad, as part of a trial programme that could be expanded in the coming years.

Indian citizens are by far the most active users of the US H-1B program and made up 73 percent of the nearly 4,42,000 H-1B workers in the fiscal year 2022.

“We all recognize that mobility of our people is a huge asset to us,” said another U.S. official. “And so our goal is to approach that in a sort of multifaceted way. The State Department already has been working very hard to find creative ways to make changes to things.”

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on questions about which visa types would qualify or the timing of the pilot launch. Plans for a pilot program were first reported by Bloomberg Law in February.

“The pilot would begin with a small number of cases with the intention to scale the initiative over the following one to two years,” the spokesperson said, while declining to define small.

The steps could change and are not finalised until they are announced. The White House declined to comment.

Each year, the US government makes 65,000 H-1B visas available to companies seeking skilled foreign workers, along with an additional 20,000 visas for workers with advanced degrees. The visas last for three years and can be renewed for another three years.

According to US government data, the companies that have used the most H-1B employees in recent years include Indian-based Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, as well as Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta in the United States.

The option for some temporary foreign workers to renew their visas in the United States would free up resources for visa interviews in consulates abroad, according to the spokeswoman.

According to one of the individuals, the trial programme would also include some workers with L-1 visas, which are given to persons transferring inside a company to a position in the United States.

A separate initiative to clear a backlog of visa applications at U.S. embassies in India is finally showing signs of progress, according to another one of those sources, and is expected to figure into the discussions between the two countries’ delegations in Washington this week.

India has long had concerns with the difficulty its citizens face in receiving visas to live in the United States, including technology industry workers. More than 10 million jobs stood open in the United States at the end of April, according to the Labor Department.

Some H-1B visa holders in the U.S. have been among the thousands of tech workers laid off this year, sending them scrambling to find new employers within a 60-day “grace period” or return to their home country.

The Biden administration has spent months seeking to expand visa access for Indians in order to circumvent Congress’s lack of political will to fundamentally alter US immigration rules. President Joe Biden wants to bring the world’s two largest democracies together, mainly to compete with China.

After Washington halted practically all visa processing internationally in March 2020 owing to the COVID-19 epidemic, US immigration agencies are still striving to clear a backlog. Because of the immigration backlog, some families have been separated for extended periods of time, with some venting on social media.