Foreign Workers Are Losing Their Tech Jobs. Will They Have to Leave the Country Too?Thousands of tech workers are being laid off. That’s putting H-1B visa holders on tight timelines to find new work.
FIONA HARRIGAN
11.23.2022
Mass layoffs have left dozens of major tech firms and startups hemorrhaging workers ahead of the holiday season, capping off a year of shrinkage at those companies. That leaves thousands of former employees rushing to find new work in a currently contracting industry—a daunting task for U.S. citizens and a predicament with potentially life-changing consequences for laid-off workers on H-1B visas.
The H-1B visa program is a temporary work pathway through which U.S. companies can employ highly skilled foreigners in "specialty occupations." Per the Department of Labor, the program is meant to serve employers who otherwise aren't able to "obtain needed business skills and abilities" from the American workforce. Visas are capped at 85,000 per year and are issued for three years, with the possibility of extensions. Once an H-1B worker has lost his job, he can only stay in the U.S. legally for 60 days unless he finds new work or reclassifies to a different visa.
Sam—who requested that Reason not use his real name, fearing retaliation—is staring down that deadline. Until Friday, he worked at Carvana, an online used car retailer. "I thought, 'OK, this is my break to enter the tech space,'" he says. "I uprooted my life…and moved to a city where I knew no one." Now, he calls the situation at the company "an unmitigated disaster."
Citing economic pressures, Carvana recently laid off 1,500 employees, amounting to 8 percent of its workforce. They're joined by over 40,000 other tech workers who have lost their jobs in November—"well over double the amount of any other month in 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi," writes Kenrick Cai for Forbes. Stripe, Salesforce, Meta, and Amazon have all announced widespread layoffs. Twitter, under new owner Elon Musk, has made waves for its very public staff-whittling, which has affected thousands.
It remains unclear how many H-1B workers are among those laid off, but these visa holders are known to comprise significant shares of many tech companies' workforces. Using U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, the National Foundation for American Policy estimates that roughly 8 percent of Twitter's 7,500 employees are on H-1B visas, while 4 to 5 percent (roughly 300 to 350) of Stripe's employees are. Bloomberg reports that "at least 350 immigrants" at just Meta and Twitter were affected by layoffs, according to information compiled by employees. Forbes notes that "thousands of foreign nationals could soon be forced to leave the United States."
With the shrinkage happening at so many major companies, laid-off workers face discouraging odds of securing new jobs in tech. Firms that once hired large shares of H-1B visa holders are now wary of expanding their staffs. "If you want to get into another tech company, who's really hiring at this point?" asks Sam. "Google's hiring very, very selectively. Amazon is in a freeze."
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/11/23/foreign-workers-are-losing-their-tech-jobs-will-they-have-to-leave-the-country-too/
