There are a huge chunk of Indian IT employees who are working in the US on H-1B visas as the new government is backing the immigration of highly skilled workers and programmers, the US H-1B visa applications that are put up by entry level workers are facing innumerable requests for RFE which is further evidence that will help in taking up complex jobs at higher salaries in the US. Many law firms to have seen a surge in the number of queries from the USCIS for entry level petitions or entry level jobs.

An RFE from the USCIS is not something that is new. But this time it has received innumerable RFE’s for almost all the petitions filed for entry level h-1B sponsorship jobs with the US. There has been a policy change for computer programmers who are in Level-1 jobs and hence the RFE’s for these petitions are said to be understandable. However, number of RFE has been filed for all types of jobs in the entry level category which includes technical analysts, content matter experts, and other jobs.

Since the President has been implementing his election promise of restricting immigrants entry to the US, many laws have been enacted in the US to increase the minimum wages for H-1B visa holders in order to protect the jobs of the Americans. In January a lawmaker from California had introduced a bill in the US congress to force the companies who are employing workers on H-1B visa sponsorship jobs to double the pay to $130,000 a year but the bill came under a lot of fire and was eventually not passed. Later the US Administration names services firms such as TCS, US bases CTS, Infosys accusing them of paying lower wages than what was set by the Department of Labor. The US claimed that only a mere 5% of the visa holders are earning higher wages that are deemed to be set by the DOL and three out of four workers are said to be paid lesser than the median wage and the firms, however, denied the claims.

Indian IT firms are most likely to find the new regime tough and challenging as they still send entry level engineers to the US to work on projects and the latest news is just so disturbing for them, This time the circumstances are found to be unusual. In the past, a large number of petitions that received RFE were approved by the USCIS but this time we need to wait and watch as to what happens. Also, earlier the entry level applications were not that stringently verifies unlike this time and in the year 2015 41% of the approved H-1B applications were Level 1 wages.

Such an approach by the US will mean that the ongoing efforts that are taken by the entry of highly paid and highly skilled professionals. Experts also say that highly skilled professional is the person who is working on machine learning projects and not just on Java. So updating ourselves is the key here. Entry level engineers need to buck up and master new technologies to stay in the game.