The San Jose software engineer was dismayed when she learned she was part of Twitter’s mass layoffs.
Born in India, she is in the United States on an H-1B visa, a special permit for skilled workers. Now the clock is ticking for her to find a new job to maintain her visa status.
“It’s like our whole lives are being destroyed,” Vidya said of herself and dozens of other H-1B visa holders who have also been laid off in recent weeks. The Chronicle is using a pseudonym for her and other workers laid off under its anonymous sources policy as they are concerned about her immigration status.
Silicon Valley companies rely on the H-1B program as a source of thousands of employees with specialized training in computer science and engineering.
Now, as layoffs mount across the industry, those laid off include dozens of H-1B visa holders who face an urgent situation. Under visa rules, they have 60 days to get a new, comparable job in a tight market where they’re competing against a flood of other displaced tech workers. Otherwise, they must leave the country or seek other solutions, such as trying to gain time by exchanging for other types of visas.
The layoffs highlight the precarious situation of H-1B workers, who could quickly lose their right to live here if their employer quits their job to cut costs.
“Many laid-off tech workers (with H-1B visas) have been in the country for five or 10 years, own homes, have US citizen children who attend local public schools,” said Sophie Alcorn, founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Mountain View. “Their spouses may have a work status dependent on theirs. (Losing the head of household visa) … is really putting the family at risk.”
One displaced H-1B worker encapsulated the dilemma in a note to Alcorn, writing: “It’s not just dollars and a job. It’s our whole life.”
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The US is home to over half a million H-1B visa holders, with a large concentration in the Bay Area.
Meta, Google, Apple, Intel, Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon and Uber are among the tech companies with the most H-1B workers. Meta, Cisco and Amazon, along with Twitter, Lyft and Stripe, are among the companies that have recently laid off large chunks of their workforce.
Immigration issues are exacerbated for H-1B holders from India and China, who may have legally lived and worked in this country for many years, unable to obtain a green card and later citizenship. That’s because the US imposes a cap on how many immigrants from each country can receive a green card each year. Populous nations like India and China receive the same number of places as much smaller countries. The result: hundreds of thousands of Indian and Chinese workers are trapped in immigration limbo.
“The Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates that more than 2 million people from India will be waiting on the US employment immigrant portfolio by 2030,” said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan thinktank. focused on trade and immigration.
“We’re looking at decades, decades of waiting,” said Sunil Mallya of Mountain House, vice president of engineering at digital health startup OncoHealth, who has been in the country for about 10 years on an H-1B visa. “If I were from any other country, I probably would have gotten a green card five years ago. As I am from India, it is a huge wait.”
He and his wife weren’t fired, but he can see how painful it would be if they were.
“We would have to start from scratch, finding a job and a home in India,” he said. “Our children (ages 8 and 10) were born and raised here and are US citizens; it would be a great fit for them.
Anderson and others fear the situation will result in a brain drain to the US.
“Obviously, for anyone who needs to leave the country, that would be devastating for them,” he said. Some may choose to never come back and “give up on their American dream”.
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Now is a tough time to look for a job for many reasons. Companies are laying off people or implementing hiring freezes. It’s a holiday and the end of the year. And competition is intense among all the laid-off workers.
The 60-day grace period can be much shorter, as workers may need to allocate time for the paperwork involved in transferring an H-1B visa.
“Those 60 days are more like five weeks for you to prepare, apply and get a job offer,” said Kakki (a pseudonym), who was laid off from an engineering job at a large tech company this month. “Suddenly it destroys your life; you have to drop everything and start preparing for interviews.”
If she doesn’t find a job in time, she’ll have to find someone to take over the year’s lease on her South Bay apartment and figure out what to do with all her furniture and belongings if she has to return to India.
Finding another job so quickly can involve big commitments.
“You are forced to make suboptimal decisions a lot because you have to accept something very quickly,” said Lakshmi (a pseudonym), who was fired this month from a startup. “It could be a big step down; it might be something you’re not remotely excited about, but you have to settle in and accept it.
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Aradhana Vaidya of Albany, California was devastated when she found out she was being fired from her product manager role a few years ago.
“What will happen?” she thought. “What will happen to my status in this country?
“Of course, losing a job is hard for anyone,” she said. “But if you’re on an H-1B visa, you’re going to have a harder time. You can’t get a job at Starbucks or Target; it has to be a job for which you are qualified and trained”.
Vaidya called her husband from the BART on the way home and they brainstormed ways to handle the situation. She had an idea: maybe she could negotiate to delay the layoff, remaining on the payroll instead of a three-month severance, giving her more time to look for a job. Her company agreed and she was able to find a job in time to maintain her H-1B visa.
While that worked for Vaidya, Alcorn, the immigration attorney, warned that it could be a risky strategy as the regulations do not define what “employment termination” means and the grace period itself is discretionary.
“All these mass layoffs are in the news, so it’s safe to assume that UCCIS is well aware of moves to terminate employment,” she said.
US Citizens and Immigration Services did not respond to a request for comment.
Some supporters are calling on the Biden administration to extend the 60-day period, but the White House has not commented on the situation.
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Vidya, like all other laid-off Twitter employees, is technically still on the company’s payroll until early January because new owner Elon Musk failed to give the required two months’ notice for a mass layoff.
She consulted with four or five immigration attorneys, asking whether her grace period began when layoffs were announced in early November or when paychecks stopped coming in January. They suggested that it was safer to take a conservative approach and assume that the grace period had already started.
Vidya’s husband also has an H-1B visa, so she has the option to switch to a spouse visa, called an H-4.
“It’s technically possible, but it’s not easy,” she said. “I have to pay $7,000 or $8,000 for an immigration attorney out of pocket at a time when I don’t have a job. It adds a lot of stress.”
She has already experienced having to go back to India. A few years ago, her student visa expired and she failed to get a spot in the annual H-1B lottery, which grants 85,000 visas but usually receives more than five times as many applicants.
“I was very disappointed; I thought it was very unfair, through no fault of my own, to have to leave the country and look for a job in another country,” she said. “It took time to make peace with that for sure.”
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For H-1B visa holders returning to their home countries, returning to the U.S. can be extremely difficult due to the pandemic deadlocks. Not only do they have to find a new, comparable job, they must also visit a US consulate or embassy in their country to get their visa stamped.
“Because of COVID, many consulates, like the one in Mumbai, have visa interview wait times of three years or more,” said Alcorn. A recent update gives them the freedom to waive in-person visits so visa applicants can submit their visa for stamping, “but it’s not predictable which consulates are offering this to which visa applicants,” she said.
Another option for staying in the country is to switch to a six-month status B visa for business or tourism. However, Alcorn said, the wait for a decision can range from 1 to 2 1/2 years, with no premium processing option to speed it up. Applicants can stay for the initially requested six months and then must submit more documents before the due date to try to stay longer.
“Our broken US immigration system continues to cause PTSD for the world’s brightest individuals,” said Alcorn.
Indeed, many of those affected said the emotional lash was overwhelming.
“All my friends are here, my whole network is here,” said Lakshmi, who has lived in the United States for more than 15 years, most of her adult life, part of the time on H-1B visas and part on visas. student. 🇧🇷 “It’s about where you feel at home. The Bay Area is the longest area I’ve lived in my entire life, including India because I moved there a lot.
“No one should have to go through this,” she said, sobbing. “Thinking of a country as your home, but it can be taken away from you in a second.”
Carolyn Said is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @csaid