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“American technology companies for years have relied on a steady stream of skilled engineers from overseas to help them create their products,” Nick Wingfield and Mike Isaac report for The New York Times. “Now many of those companies and their workers are girding for expected changes to immigration policy under President Trump that the companies say could hurt their ability to tap the technical talent they need to stay competitive.”
“The technology industry relies heavily on the H-1B visa program, through which highly skilled workers like software engineers are permitted to work in the United States for companies like Microsoft, Google and Intel,” Wingfield and Isaac report. “The draft proposed a regulation to ‘restore the integrity of employment-based nonimmigrant worker programs’ and to consider options for modifying the H-1B program to ‘ensure that beneficiaries of the program are the best and the brightest.’”
“That language rattled some executives and lawyers representing technology companies because of its implication of sweeping changes,” Wingfield and Isaac report. “‘You’d be shocked at the number of people who are feeling fear, calling our firm alarmed based on what’s coming out,’ said Priya Alagiri, an immigration lawyer based in the Bay Area who has tech clients. ‘It’s not just the undocumented. Even people who are here on green cards, legally. Citizens. They’re scared.’”
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