Strengthened diplomacy on top! 90 percent of work permits given to spouses of Indian H1B visa holders

Washington, March 30: Indians are highly successful in getting jobs in the western countries including US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE etc. The United States has issued employment authorization documents to spouses of more than 71,000 H-1B visa holders that include 90 percent of Indians.

Notably, the bilateral relationship between Indian and the United States has been strengthened comprehensively in last four years after PM Modi led government came to power. PM Modi’s strong diplomacy has led many countries to support India on various fronts including trade, terrorism etc.

The Migration Policy Institute in a report said that the United States has issued employment authorization documents to more than 71,000 spouses of H-1B visa holders, over 90 percent of whom are Indians. “As of June 2017, USCIS had granted 71,287 initial (versus renewal) employment authorization documents to H-4 spouses," the Migration Policy Institute said.

Of those H-4 spouses with work authorisation as of early 2017, 94 percent were women, and the vast majority, 93 percent, were from India, while four percent were from China," said the Institute, which obtained the information from US Citizenship and Immigration Services under the Freedom of Information Act, which is similar to India's Right to Information Act.

“The Obama administration in 2015 put into place a programme to grant work authorization to H-4 visa holders whose spouses had been on an H-1B visa for more than six years and were in the process of applying for a green card,” the report added.

The report also revealed that, almost one-third of all approved H-1B petitions in fiscal 2017 went to just 20 companies, even as 40,645 firms were approved to sponsor H-1B visas that year. “The top employers are either foreign consulting firms, some accused of using the visa to outsource U.S. jobs, or U.S. high-tech giants such as Amazon, Apple and Google,” the report noted.

“Among the top 20 firms, those with the highest share of H-1Bs pay less and employ fewer workers with advanced degrees, compared to companies that are less dependent on an H-1B workforce. Workers at H-1B dependent employers in the top 20 earned an average $82,788 in fiscal 2017, as compared to $110,511 for H-1B workers in top firms that are not dependent. And just 27 percent of H-1B workers in the dependent firms had a master’s degree or higher, as compared to 55 percent working for employers who are not H-1B dependent,” the report concluded.

 

BACKGROUND:

The previous Obama administration had started issuing employment authorization or work permits to the spouses of H-1B visas in 2015. The spouses or dependents of H-1B visa holders come to the US on H-4 visas, who before 2015 were not authorized to work.