Among Silicon Valley’s top tech employers, Facebook was viewed as the most vulnerable to U.S. President Donald Trump's expected crackdown on guest-worker visas and illegal aliens, according to a Reuters analysis of U.S. Labor Department filings.
More than 15 percent of Facebook's U.S. employees in 2016 used a temporary work visa, giving the social media leader a legal classification as a H-1B "dependent" company. That is a higher proportion than Alphabet Google, Apple, Amazon.com or Microsoft.
That could cause problems for Facebook if Trump or Congress decide to make the H-1B programme more restrictive, as the president and some Republican lawmakers have threatened to do.
Both Trump and Attorney General nominee Senator Jeff Sessions have opposed the programme in its current form. They have also indicated that they are open to reforming it to "ensure the beneficiaries of the programme are the best and the brightest," according to a draft executive order seen by Reuters.
The Trump administration has not proposed any new rules that would target companies with the H-1B "dependent" classification. But the fact that Facebook alone among major tech companies falls into that category suggests it is the most exposed in the industry to any changes in H-1B visa policy.
H-1B visas are intended for foreign nationals in "specialty" occupations that generally require higher education, which according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) includes, but is not limited to, scientists, engineers or computer programmers. The government awards 85,000 every year, chiefly through a lottery system.
Companies say they use them to recruit top talent. But a majority of the visas are awarded to outsourcing firms, sparking criticism by sceptics that those firms use the visas to fill lower-level information technology jobs. Critics also say the lottery system benefits outsourcing firms that flood the system with mass applications.
More than 15 percent of Facebook's U.S. employees in 2016 used a temporary work visa, giving the social media leader a legal classification as a H-1B "dependent" company. That is a higher proportion than Alphabet Google, Apple, Amazon.com or Microsoft.
That could cause problems for Facebook if Trump or Congress decide to make the H-1B programme more restrictive, as the president and some Republican lawmakers have threatened to do.
Both Trump and Attorney General nominee Senator Jeff Sessions have opposed the programme in its current form. They have also indicated that they are open to reforming it to "ensure the beneficiaries of the programme are the best and the brightest," according to a draft executive order seen by Reuters.
The Trump administration has not proposed any new rules that would target companies with the H-1B "dependent" classification. But the fact that Facebook alone among major tech companies falls into that category suggests it is the most exposed in the industry to any changes in H-1B visa policy.
H-1B visas are intended for foreign nationals in "specialty" occupations that generally require higher education, which according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) includes, but is not limited to, scientists, engineers or computer programmers. The government awards 85,000 every year, chiefly through a lottery system.
Companies say they use them to recruit top talent. But a majority of the visas are awarded to outsourcing firms, sparking criticism by sceptics that those firms use the visas to fill lower-level information technology jobs. Critics also say the lottery system benefits outsourcing firms that flood the system with mass applications.
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