re: What is Donald Trump's stance on H1B visas?

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My wife and I are from India and have lived here for more than 13 years. We both came to the US in our early-20s and went to grad school here and between us have three graduate degrees in engineering and business. Both of us currently work in the high-tech industry on the West Coast on H1B visas and make good money. The companies we work for filed for our green cards a few years back, but due to per country/year limits on green cards and many high-tech workers being from India and China, citizens of these two countries have the longest waits for green cards. At the current rate our application is being processed, we are looking at another 5-7 year wait to get our green cards, and in the meanwhile have to continue working on our H1B visas.

We both have spent most of our adult lives in this country and is the only country where we have held full-time jobs and want to retire here. We have a 14 month old son who was born here also and we bought a house couple of years ago. So for all practical puposes we are living the American dream and are following the legal immigration process as it was intended. I just hope the Trump administration looks at cases like ours before making any knee-jerk changes to the H1B visa program that may put families like ours out of status, forcing us to return to our country of origin, when America is the real home to us at this point.

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Great post.

My girlfriend is here on an H1B visa. She came here for graduate school, then moved to NYC for a job after she graduated. She's uniquely qualified for her job and it would be very difficult to find a similarly qualified American citizen to fill her position. That is the exact purpose of an H1B visa.

I also work in a field that has a high number of H1B workers. The fact is that we just don't have enough American citizens who have the advanced science and technical training that many immigrants (mostly from Asia) have. If you look at the graduate programs that feed into my field, they're filled with foreigners.

Ending the H1B program would only shut off the stream of brainpower we have coming into our country from around the world.

If you look at recent Nobel Prize winners from America, 40% of them are immigrants. LINK

Finally, workers on H1B visas are not working for less than Americans would be paid. The law requires employers to pay a competitive salary to anyone here on an H1B visa. The only reason to hire an H1B worker is if you can't fill the position with an American citizen. It's a hassle and you don't save any money.