WASHINGTON, June 21 (Reuters) – The Biden administration will 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 help some skilled workers enter or stay in the country, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The State Department could announce as soon as Thursday that a small number of Indians and other foreign workers on H-1B visas will be able to renew those visas in the US, without having to travel abroad, one of the sources said, part of a pilot program that could be expanded in the coming years.
Indian citizens are by far the most active users of the US H-1B program, making up 73% of the nearly 442,000 H-1B workers in fiscal year 2022.
“We all recognize that the mobility of our people is a great asset to us,” another US official said. “So our goal is to address that in a multifaceted way. The State Department has already been working very hard to find creative ways to change things.”
A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on questions about what types of visas would qualify or the timing of the pilot program’s launch. Plans for a pilot program were first reported by Bloomberg Law in February.
“The pilot would start with a small number of cases with the intention of scaling the initiative over the next one to two years,” the spokesperson said, declining to define how small it is.
The steps could change and are not finalized until they are announced. The White House declined to comment.
Each year, the US government makes 65,000 H-1B visas available to businesses seeking skilled foreign workers, along with an additional 20,000 visas for workers with advanced degrees. Visas last for three years and can be renewed for another three years.
Companies using the most H-1B workers in recent years include India-based Infosys (INFY.NS) and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS.NS) as well as Amazon (AMZN.O)Alphabet (GOOGL.O) and goal (META.O) in the US, according to US government data.
The ability for some of the temporary foreign workers to renew visas in the US would free up resources for visa interviews at consulates abroad, the spokesperson said.
The pilot program would also include some workers on L-1 visas, which are available to people transferring within a company to a position in the US, one of the sources said.
A separate initiative to clear a visa backlog at US embassies in India is finally showing signs of progress, according to another such source, and is expected to be included in discussions between the two countries’ delegations. in Washington this week.
India has long been concerned about the difficulty its citizens face in receiving visas to live in the United States, including workers in the tech industry. More than 10 million jobs were open in the United States at the end of April, according to the Department of Labor.
Some H-1B visa holders in the US have been among those thousands of tech workers laid off this year, sending them to fight to find new employers within a 60-day “grace period” or return to their home country.
The Biden administration has spent months working to improve visa access for Indians, trying to circumvent a lack of political will in Congress to comprehensively reform US immigration policy. President Joe Biden wants to unite the two democracies largest in the world, partly in an attempt to better compete with China.
US visa services are still trying to clear a backlog after Washington halted almost all visa processing worldwide in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The visa backlog has led to some families being separated for long periods of time, with some taking to social media to lament their plight.
Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Ted Hesson in Washington; Edited by Heather Timmons and Lincoln Feast.
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