38% of Tech Workers Hurt by H-1B Premium Processing Suspension

38% of Tech Workers Hurt by H-1B Premium Processing Suspension

Many companies in the tech industry depend on H-1B visas to hire tens of thousands of employees each year. In fact, last year, four of the top 10 employers for approved H-1B visa applicants were US tech companies.

Recently, the United States Citizenship and Immigration services (USCIS) extended its previously announced suspension of some premium processing for H-1B petitions until February, 2019. This premium processing program shortens the usual H-1B visa petition processing time from about six months to 15 days for an extra fee. In addition to impacting new H-1B applicants, the suspension of premium processing will also cause delays for current H-1B visa holders applying for a renewal and those switching jobs.

h1b transfer approval, h1b visa, h1b premium processing, h1b premium processing suspended

We decided to survey our community of tech employees and see how big of an impact the suspension of H-1B visa premium processing has had on them. We asked users to answer one simple question: Have you been negatively affected by the suspension of H-1B premium processing?  Participants could answer with  ‘YES,’ ‘NO’ or ‘DOES NOT APPLY’ and a total of 10,554 answered the survey question.

Here’s what we found:

  • 38.19% answered with ‘YES’
  • 17.68% answered with ‘NO’
  • 44.13% answered with ‘DOES NOT APPLY’H1b, h1-b, h1b visa, h1b visa premium processing, visa, USCIS, visa status, immigration, immigration law, United States immigration, US immigration, h1b transfer, citizenship, immigrant workers, STEM, S.T.E.M., tech workers, Tim Cook, Apple, Apple Workers, Marc Benioff, Salesforce, Salesforce worker, Tech Workers, Tech Employees, Amazon Employees, Google Employees, LinkedIn Employees, eBay employees, eBay workers, pay pal employees, facebook employees, Microsoft employees, Microsoft workers

We also took a look at the results broken down by companies with at least 100 employee responses.

  • eBay led the way with 55.4% of employees answering with ‘YES.’
  • Rounding out the top three were PayPal (with 51.5%) and Amazon (with 44.9%).
  • Google had the lowest percentage of employees answering ‘YES’ with 28.8%.
  • The two other companies with the lowest percentage of employees answering ‘YES’ are Facebook (with 35.3%) and Microsoft (with 36.5%).

H1b, h1-b, h1b visa, h1b visa premium processing, visa, USCIS, visa status, immigration, immigration law, United States immigration, US immigration, h1b transfer, citizenship, immigrant workers, STEM, S.T.E.M., tech workers, Tim Cook, Apple, Apple Workers, Marc Benioff, Salesforce, Salesforce worker, Tech Workers, Tech Employees, Amazon Employees, Google Employees, LinkedIn Employees, eBay employees, eBay workers, pay pal employees, facebook employees, Microsoft employees, Microsoft workers, premium processing suspension h1b

Is the suspension of the H-1B premium processing affecting you? Tweet us and let us know @teamblindapp!

About Blind
At Blind we’re on a mission to bring transparency to the workplace. Transparency results in voice and voice results in change, often for the better. That’s why we created Blind, an anonymous social network for the workplace. Our user base includes over 49,000 employees from Microsoft, 34,000 from Amazon, 13,000 from Google, 10,000 from Facebook, 9,000 from Uber, 8,000 from Apple, 6,000 from LinkedIn, and 5,000 from Salesforce, just to name a few. With such a large user base of tech professionals, it makes it easy to quickly poll these employees about important and popular topics, such as this.