Top 5 Silicon Valley Companies for H-1B Released
Recent press reports reflect a slow start to the H-1B visas application process because of the recession, applications for the high-tech industry’s favorite work visa, the H-1B, reached the annual cap of 65,000 for the month of December federal immigration authorities said this week. Top 5 Silicon Valley Companies for H-1B released were released recently. They include:
#5 Patni Americas
609 H-1B Visas
#4 IBM India
695 H-1B Visas
#3 Intel
723 H-1B Visas
#2 Microsoft
1,318 H-1B Visas
#1 WiPro
1,964 H-1B Visas
According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News, “the announcement by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services might appear to be one more sign of an economy on the mend, but compared with previous years, applications for the normally popular — and controversial — work visa have moved at a snail’s pace. It took nine months to exhaust the supply of visas this year, and a mere day to do so last year. There was only light demand for the visa in April, when the government started taking applications for this fiscal year’s quota, but employers finally used them all up in a sign that perhaps high-tech hiring was rebounding”.
Source: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
There are at least 200 companies that applied for H-1B visas in 2009. The major technology companies that did not rank in the Top 25, but did rank in the Top 50 include Yahoo, Amazon, Apple, Texas Instruments, Nvidia and IBM. Some of the leading research universities in the United States also rank in the Top 50. Some of the top H-1B visa obtainers this year included University of Maryland, University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, University of Illinois, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, University of Pittsburgh, Columbia, and Baylor College of Medicine.
According to Wikipedia, the H-1B is a non-immigrant visa in the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H). It allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. If a foreign worker in H-1B status quits or is dismissed from the sponsoring employer, the worker can find another employer, apply for a change of status to another non-immigrant status, or must leave the US.
The regulations define a “specialty occupation” as requiring theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor including, but not limited to, architecture, engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, social sciences, biotechnology, medicine and health, education, law, accounting, business specialties, theology, and the arts, and requiring the attainment of a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent as a minimum (with the exception of fashion models, who must be “of distinguished merit and ability”.) Likewise, the foreign worker must possess at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent and state licensure, if required to practice in that field. H-1B work-authorization is strictly limited to employment by the sponsoring employer.