Indian-American presidential candidate from the Republican Party, Vivek Ramaswamy has vowed to put an end to the H-1B temporary work visa if voted to power in 2024.
In addition, Ramaswamy called the Person in Specialty Occupation Visa “indentured servitude”, VisaGuide.World reports.
“The lottery system needs to be replaced by actual meritocratic admission. It’s a form of indentured servitude that only accrues to the benefit of the company that sponsored an H-1B immigrant. I’ll gut it,” he said, according to Politico.
The 38-year-old added that people who come as family members are not the meritocratic immigrants who provide skilled-based contributions to this territory.
According to a report from the Politico, a total of 29 applications for Ramaswamy’s former company, Roivant Sciences, to hire employees under the H-1B program have been approved by the United States and Immigration Services for a period from 2018 to 2023.
“As the largest organization of members currently on H1B visa stuck in green card backlogs, we completely agree with @VivekGRamaswamy & others willing to speak the truth: H1B visa is, in fact, indentured servitude that only benefits the company that sponsors the visa, but is bad for everyone else. We agree — it is time to gut H1B,” US-based non-profit, Immigration Voice, wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
The H-1B visa is a temporary work visa that gives US employers the opportunity to hire qualified workers engaged in specialty jobs.
Among the main beneficiaries of these kinds of visas are nationals from India, acquiring about 75 percent of them, according to the US government.
The United States allocated 65,000 H-1B visas to all as well as 20,000 to those with advanced US degrees, yearly.
Besides, recently the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that it completed the second round of random selection for the H-1B temporary work visa, thus allowing companies from the US to employ foreign workers engaged in specific fields.
Previously, an Indian-descent Democratic lawmaker, Raja Krishnamoorthi, introduced legislation proposing to increase the annual intake of foreign workers on H-1B visas to bring a larger number of workers to the US.
Krishnamoorthi’s bill attempts to increase the H-1B visa cap from 65,000 to 130,000.
However, the program was often criticized for being subject to unlawful affairs. Recently, nearly 70 nationals from India announced that they are suing the US government, under the pretense that their H-1B visa applications were unjustly denied due to fraudulent activities committed by their employers.