US likely to increase H-1B visa application fee

In what may be a damper for those aspiring to work in the US under the H-1B visa, the American government is proposing a hike in the application fee in order to increase funding for the expansion of a program to train American youth in technology-related services, reports PTI. The H-1B visa, which is a non-immigrant visa allowing companies in the US employ foreign working with technical expertise, has Indians as the biggest beneficiaries. 76% of the total visas issued went to professionals from India last year. “In FY 2020, the Department's budget includes $160 million to continue our expansion of apprenticeship programmes, along with a proposal to increase H-1B fee revenues to fund additional apprenticeship activities,” PTI quotes Labour Secretary Alexander Acosta as saying in his testimony on May 2 before the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Labour, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies. This apprenticeship program looks to train American youth in in-demand industries such as IT, healthcare and advanced manufacturing. And these are the sectors, the report says, that are often filled by H-1B visa holders. However, how much the application fee will be increased and what categories of applicants it will apply to is not known yet. This comes at a time when there has been uncertainty over H-1B visa regulations and its future, with approval ratings too, falling drastically. However, the PTI report states that with Indian IT companies accounting for a large number of H-1B applications, the companies are likely to face additional financial burden. The Labour Department has also reportedly made changes to the H-1B application forms to ensure greater transparency and better protect American workers from employers seeking to misuse the programme. Ever since Donald Trump took over the presidency of the country, there has been a movement to support Americans and their jobs and to reduce immigration into the country. In fact, as per data from the Centre for Immigration Studies (CIS), government statistics show that the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) is slowly reducing approval rates on a case-by-case basis in 2019, as compared to 2015. CIS states that while there are nearly 750,000 H-1B workers in the US, there are usually more H-1B workers on extended visas than on new ones. More questions are now being asked when visa extensions are sought, CIS says. This is usually called requests for evidence (RFEs) and as per the data, approval rates after RFEs have dropped from 95.7% in 2015 to 61.5% in the first three months of this fiscal year. Source: The News Minute