Hard Time Hit Applicants As U.S. Announces New H1-B Visa Approval Policy
The United States administration has announced a new policy that makes very tough the procedure of issuing H-1B visas to those to be employed in one or more third-party worksites, a move that will hugely impact Indian IT companies and their employees.
Under the new policy, a company will have to go an extra length to prove that its H-1B employee at a third-party worksite has specific and non-qualifying speculative assignments in a speciality occupation.
Indian IT companies, which are among the major beneficiaries of H-1B visas, has a significant number of its employees deployed at third-party worksites.
A significant number of American banking, travel and commercial services depend on on-site IT workers from India to get their job done.
The new move announced on Thursday through a seven-page policy empowers the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to issue H-1B visas to an employee only for the period for which he/she has work at a third-party worksite.
As such the issuing of H-1B visas could be of less than three years. This would reverse the tradition of issuing the H-1B visas for three years at a time.
Effective immediately, the new guidance comes weeks ahead of the beginning of the H-1B visas filing season, which is expected to be April 2, for the fiscal year 2019 beginning October 1, 2018.
