Hundreds of thousands of temporary visa holders in the USA may be forced to return to their home countries if they do not manage to find sponsors.
What's happening: 2022 is a bad year for job workers, Mass tech layoffs have left hundreds of workers living in the US on temporary visas with little time to find another job or face deportation.
Adding to the issue is the inadequate guidance from the companies that sponsored them the first time.
Backdrop: When it comes to specialized fields like computer science and engineering, the tech industry has for a very long, relied on the H-1B visa program to meet its need for workers in specialized fields.
According to statistics provided by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, Amazon, Lyft, Meta, Salesforce, Stripe, and Twitter have sponsored at least 45,000 H-1B workers in the past three years.
What next: H-1B holders who become unemployed can remain in the US legally for only 60 days without finding new employers to sponsor them.
So now: Workers having lived in the USA for multiple years awaiting permanent citizenship are now fanatically searching for jobs and sponsors in an already competitive labour market.
Simultaneously, major employers have frozen hiring, and recruitment is typically slowed down during the holiday season.
What next: Companies, which must pay for H-1B workers to return to their home country if they have to leave the US after losing their job, have offered varying levels of support for immigrants.
Conclusion: freshly laid-off workers are scrambling to find new jobs to prevent their deportation in light of the mass tech layoffs this year.
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