H1-B Visa: The Workforce Gateway for Immigration

The H1B visa is a tool that allows universities to hire qualified individuals from abroad to fill positions. This program has faced recent criticism for contributing to the decline of the American workforce. Eric Mintz, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences said that this is a misunderstanding.

“The H1B visa allows us to bring in people from foreign countries on a kind of work permit to fill positions that require very specific expertise,” Mintz said.

Mintz said a large portion of the individuals working in the United States on an H1B visa are from India, and a significant number work in computer science and computer engineering.

“It is my understanding anyway, that the unemployment rate for U.S. citizens who have those degrees is pretty low, so it seems reasonable that the reality is that the H1B program is really important to being able to fill these positions,” Mintz said.

Michael Pfahl, associate council for Kent State University said that he does not engage in the political rhetoric that has surrounded the H1B Visa and immigration reform.

Pfahl said that he thinks when people are hearing news about the H1B visa; they are getting their information from very limited sources.

“They hear about it from a blurb in the news or a blurb on somebody’s stump speech or part of a political agenda,” Pfahl said.  “At the end of the day we are talking about work authorization.”

The cap for H1B visas is currently set at 65,000 per year, although universities are exempt from the cap to allow for   positions to be filled throughout the year, at times after the cap has already been meet, Pfahl said.

Pfahl said it is important to remember that before an H1B visa even comes into consideration, the individual applying for a position with the university has to be offered the position.

Mintz said that it has been insinuated that the individuals applying for university jobs could have gone to someone that is already an American citizen. Mintz was recently looking for an individual to fill a post-doctoral research position

“When I advertised the position in my lab I received no applications from any U.S. citizens or permanent residents,” Mintz said.

The H1B visa allowed him to fill the position, that otherwise would have gone unfilled.

Mayank Ladoia has been working in the United States on an H1B visa for over three years.  He works as a programmer for Kent State University.

“Kent state University does the H1B for me, I do not apply for myself,” Ladoya said. “A foreign worker applies for a job and then the employer of the foreign worker applies H1B for that employee saying that we need his skills.”

Ladoia says that the process of applying for an H1B visa is very time consuming.

“They do request a lot of documents which is kind of super crazy to be honest, like a lot of documents on my end to make sure that everything is in place and correct,” Ladoia said.

He said that once all of the necessary documents are collected, they are then sent to U.S. immigration, where they are processed and a decision is made based on the documents provided.

Ladoia said that the reason U.S. based employers are searching out qualified individuals from abroad is there are simply not enough qualified people in the United States for positions such as programmers.

“If they need a developer and they can’t find it over here, that is when they start looking for foreign workers,” Ladoia said.

Operating on an H1B Visa has been a double edged sword for Ladoya, who says he initially had a hard time finding employment in the United States because he is not a citizen or operating on a Green Card at t

“The H1B is not what most people think of when they think of immigration,” Mintz said.  “It is not an immigration visa, it is a temporary work program basically and it is specific to these high tech, high qualified fields.”