WASHINGTON —
Sakshi Nanda has 28 days to find a new job.
Nanda is a foreign worker on an H-1B visa, and a clock started ticking when a Connecticut health-tech company fired her last month.
If she cannot adjust her visa status or find a new employer to sponsor her by March 19, she will have to end her sedentary life in the United States abruptly and return to New Delhi.
“I haven’t processed the information yet. I’m still in shock,” she said.
Tech companies including Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have laid off more than 100,000 workers in the US this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.
Thousands of these workers work on the same watch as Nanda. Foreign workers on H-1B visas, used by tech companies to hire highly skilled non-US citizens, have a strict 60-day period to find a new employer willing to sponsor them or the country to leave. More workers could be at risk: 85,000 visas are issued annually under the H-1B program, and some reports estimate that more than 70% of Silicon Valley’s tech workers were born outside the US
Sakshi Nanda at her home office in Connecticut.
(Christopher Capozziello / For the Time)
For laid-off workers like Nanda, who has lived in the US since 2019, the countdown adds to the dire tide of being suddenly unemployed.
“I don’t think that as an immigrant you have the freedom to process your feelings. … I have to find something within 50, 54 days because my clock has already started ticking”, said Nanda, who has experience in business analysis and sales operations. “I do not have much time. It’s like a race against time every day.”
The layoffs don’t mean the skills of these foreign workers, some of whom were educated in the United States, aren’t needed, said David Loshin, senior lecturer at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies. He told the Times that several international graduates from the master’s program he teaches have been affected by the technology layoffs. (Nanda completed his program in 2021.)
“It would be unfortunate for these veteran practitioners to be forced to leave,” Loshin said. “I think it would be valuable to consider whether these are times when circumstances would allow for those time frames to be extended.”
In most cases, special work visas for foreigners are limited in time. For example, a foreign worker on an H-1B visa can stay in the United States for a maximum of six years, which can only be extended under certain circumstances. The H-1B visa and status is initially valid for three years and is renewable for an additional three years. After the maximum length of stay has expired, the H-1B visa holder must either leave the United States or apply for alternate immigration status.
Many people with work visas — particularly H-1B holders — are staying much longer than the initial transition period and are constantly renewing their visas while waiting to be granted U.S. residency, said Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington , DC think tank. Green card application processing backlogs have skyrocketed in recent years, and country-specific caps on workers from certain countries like India and China have forced many to wait decades before becoming legal residents in the United States .
Meanwhile, workers are building a life in their adopted country. Some have children with US citizens. Others buy houses. Many are integrating into their communities and planting deep roots.
If Sakshi Nanda cannot find a new employer to sponsor her by March 19, she will have to end her sedentary life in the United States abruptly and return to New Delhi.
(Christopher Capozziello / For the Time)
Sixty days to find a new employer willing to become a sponsor can feel shockingly short. Some workers may have the option to transfer and stay on a visitor visa, but they would not be allowed to legally work in the United States. Others, including Nanda, may be eligible to upgrade to a spousal visa, but this process can take as long as six months, and applicants cannot work while they wait for their application to be accepted or rejected.
“It’s really challenging, especially since many of the workers have very specialized skills, and the more specialized someone is, the longer it can take to … find a new job that matches their talents and skills,” Gelatt said.
In 2019, 1.6 million people in the United States held temporary worker visas, according to the US Department of Homeland Security youngest estimates. This number includes the spouses and children of temporary workers who may or may not work themselves, depending on the type of visa. DHS has not yet released figures for 2020 and 2021.
Some companies are looking to hire laid-off H-1B visa holders. “If you were recently fired and have an H-1B visa, we’d love to chat with you,” Joshua Browder, CEO of San Francisco-based legal services startup Do Not Pay, tweeted shortly after Facebook’s parents fired the company Meta November thousands of workers. “25% of our team are non-US citizens and we can act quickly.”
Browder typically has to pay a recruitment agency 20% of a person’s salary for talent.
But after his tweet, he received an overwhelming response – including 450 resumes. He didn’t have the capacity to hire anywhere near that many people.
“We got more resumes than we could handle,” he said. He made two offers and one hire and plans to hire more workers. He has also sent some applications to his friends at other startups.
Browder, a 26-year-old UK immigrant, said redundant technicians with special visas really struggle.
“It’s a shame. These are some of the most talented people I’ve ever seen. I’ve interviewed a lot of people in my career and these people are particularly talented,” he said. “I think it’s totally wrong that the system only gives them 60 days.”
Among those laid off are foreign graduates from American universities and colleges who received work permits for an optional internship after completing their studies. These workers, like Srinivas Ch, have 90 days to find a new employer.
Ch, 25, from India, graduated in August from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte with a Masters in Computer Science. He was fired via email in mid-January after just four months at Amazon.
“I felt really bad, I was discouraged and eventually I shed a few tears too,” he said. “Joining a FAANG company has always been a dream of mine; Being passionate about software, being a software developer, that was the biggest dream I’ve ever had,” he added, referring to the industry acronym for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.
As his schedule nears, Ch spends his days applying en masse for dozens of jobs at once. But few positions are open and many companies are imposing hiring freezes. As for his family back home in India, he said they would “give me moral support so I don’t get depressed and move on.”
Many of these tech companies have offered generous severance packages that come with weeks or even months of potential work, said Sophie Alcorn, who directs Alcorn Immigration Law in Mountain View, Calif.
“But in the immigration context, money doesn’t even really matter,” she said. “Most people in this situation have a lot of savings and can afford to live here and not work for many months based on their emergency savings. The money is paltry compared to the immigration issues at stake.”
Since November, Alcorn has been hosting numerous public webinars specifically for laid-off technicians who are in the country on special work visas.
She believes about 15% of all tech workers laid off when layoffs began last year were immigrants. Alcorn arrived at this number after analyzing data from public lists in which laid-off technicians looking for jobs self-identified their immigration status.
Alcorn said many of her clients are reluctant to speak publicly about their firing, fearing reprisals from potential employers or even the US government.
“This whole thing is shrouded in shame and secrecy for the people involved, who tend to come from cultures that value humility, stick to the rules, and respect authority,” she said.
During their online seminars, many chose to remain anonymous and enter their questions in a chat. Sometimes the questions she gets aren’t so much about getting another job as they are about how to manage family dynamics under such stress.
“What’s the best way to prepare my family…?” A fired tech employee typed into a chat during a “Navigating the 2022 Tech Layoffs” webinar she hosted in November.
Alcorn choked a little as he read the question.
“I have an 8 year old and an 11 year old. I think just being present, compassionate, loving. … It’s stressful,” Alcorn said. “Acknowledge that this is a burden for everyone. You know you are doing your best.”
US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency administering the country’s naturalization system, “continues to monitor the US labor market and economy as it examines procedural, policy and regulatory options to address the related challenges faced by immigrant communities are,” said a spokesman. “USCIS remains committed to breaking down barriers in the immigration system.”
But any reforms, if they happen, would likely come too late for workers like Ch and Nanda. At the moment there’s only one thing they can do: “Apply, apply, apply because you’re racing against the clock and that’s not a great feeling,” said Nanda.
“As an immigrant, you are very resilient,” she added. “We’ve had our own journey and struggles to get here, so I’m not going to let this one job take that away from me. I will fight to the end.”
Source: www.latimes.com
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