My question is regarding HB1 students (particularly from Asia) in the US and domestic employment. I do understand that many post-graduate students will go back to their home countries but a large proportion of them will do their utmost to stay in the US for job experience and perhaps return at a later date. Who keeps statistics on graduates and their absorption into the domestic workforce? I’d be interested to know how that impacts employment prospects for homegrown graduates?
I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
First of all it is H1B. And H1B visa is a work visa - not a student visa.
So here’s the whole system in brief :
F1 visa - for students. Students have to prove that they have assets to cover their education and living expenses for upto 2 years before the visa is granted. Students have to enroll in full time degree seeking courses. They are allowed to work 20 hrs per week - but it has to be an on campus job.
(There are other classes of student visas like J1 for post doctoral students. Spouses get the F2 visa - but they are not allowed to work).
After graduation, a F1 student is allowed to work full time for 1 year - if they apply for it.
You can find statistics by googling it. F1 students by definition are non-immigrant category and the US-DOL (Department of Labor) does not review their part time employment
Sorry I muddled that information. My question should have read whether H1B visa holders (many of them foreign graduates from US universities) are having a significant impact on employment prospects for homegrown graduates. Asian graduates (be they from China or India) certainly make up a large proportion of these graduates and from what I understand need job experience (preferably abroad) before companies in their home countries will hire them. What prompted my question is the fact that jobs are scarce for graduates. Let me cite one article I found.
“Over the last decade, the top four countries of birth for approved H-1B workers were India, China, Canada and the Philippines. Across all 10 years, about 64 percent of approved H-1B workers were born in these four countries, with the largest group from India,” it added."
For H1B visa holders to get a green card takes a minimum of 5 years (I’m not sure if that depends on the states. Some states may process them faster.
So you have statistics for countries from which H1B workers hail, but you have a vague assertion about jobs for US citizen grads. Perhaps you’d like to flesh that out with another cite.
BTW, the states don’t process applications to be resident aliens. That’s the purview fo the federal government.
The labor certification process (testing the labor market to document that there are no available, qualified U.S. workers at the prevailing wage, as determined by the Department of Labor, to fill the position you are trying to fill with a foreign worker) works like this. You can find some stats from the horse’s mouth here. 75,000 people is not a huge chunk of the U.S. workforce, although some occupations are more heavily represented than others. And not all accepted applications are approved.
Sorry, Eva Luna, but did you post that for more information on the issue or to indicate I was mistaken as to which level of government is responsible? Just curious.
For information. I have more links at work re: processing times for the labor certification stage of the process, but didn’t feel like digging around for them just then.
Here’s a link to Dept. of Labor processing times for prevailing wage determinations, PERM labor certification applications, and related application. Generally speaking, the big delays in employment-based green card processing are due to the annual quota backlogs, not to the actual processing time at each stage of the process (all of which is done by Federal agencies, not by the states).
To understand the quota system, take a look at the Visa Bulletin released monthly by the State Department. For example, in October Chinese workers who had labor certifications filed for them for positions requiring at least a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent on April 1, 2009, or earlier finally become eligible to file their green card applications. Indians are in even worse shape - for the same job, someone born in India would be waiting 11+ years for their green card. This is because within each quota category, only 7% maximum of the green cards can go to people born in any single country, and there are a LOT of educated Indians applying for employment-based green cards.