“American First”: How has Trump’s Presidency affected H-1B Visas?
By: Jong Min, John
Tags: Politics, Trump, Immigration, Data Science, Data Analysis

A major area of focus during President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was his “American First” immigration reform theme. Trump, among other Americans, held the belief that companies hiring foreigners had led to a decline in American-held jobs and American-made products, a sign of declining American prosperity.

In his 2016 inaugural speech, he stated, “From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.”

In his eyes, part of the problem was the H-1B visa, a visa in the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H) that allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations. A specialty occupation requires the application of specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent of work experience. (source Wikipedia)

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issue 85,000 H-1B visas. To select these applicants, the USCIS runs a computer-generated random selection process. They first pick out the 20,000 applicants with a masters degree or higher, then they run the same random selection process to pick out the remaining 65,000 applicants from the regular quota.

For foreigners, the H-1B is the golden ticket to furthering their career and building a new life in America. Many international students attend American universities in the hopes that they will receive a green card through their H-1B visa. For Trump and his supporters, the H-1B is the ticket to cheap, foreign labor for corporations that prevents American citizens from holding these jobs.

During Trump’s presidency, he passed the Buy American and Hire American Executive Order, which has greatly impacted the H-1B program. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security to award the H-1B visa to the foreign citizen who is the most skilled or has the highest-paid beneficiaries. The H-1B application has become more elaborate, with employers having to further provide additional evidence that the applicant’s skills are of specialized knowledge.

As an international student, I wanted to further investigate the effect of this Executive Order on the H-1B visas. Therefore, I performed an exploratory data analysis on the H-1B visa dataset from the United States Department of Labor. I specifically looked at the data from 2011 to 2018. The code snippet can be found on Github.

Before exploring the impact of the Executive Order, I wanted to first understand where H-1B visa applicants apply from. This choropleth map highlights the location of applicants. From figure 1, we can see that the majority of the H-1B visa applicants are applying from California, New York, and Texas.

In order to see the impact of the Buy American and Hire American Executive Order, I visualized the number of applications from 2011 to 2018. The blue bars represent the number of applications during Obama’s Presidency and the red bars represent the number of applications during Trump’s Presidency. The bar chart below indicates that there was a gradual yearly increase in the number of applicants during Obama’s Presidency. However, the number of applications has dropped significantly with the start of Trump’s presidency. The process has become uncertain and elaborate, thus dropping the number of applicants by approximately 120,000, or 18.12% of the total number of applicants.

Not only has the number of H-1B applications dropped, but also the approval percentages of H-1B visas. From the data provided by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, a significant drop in the number of applications can be observed. From 2017 to 2018, there is a 8.1% decline in applications. This could be explained by the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to only award foreign citizen who is the most skilled or has the highest-paid beneficiaries.

Homeland Security’s efforts to hire the most skilled foreign citizens can also be seen by comparing the companies that apply for H-1B visas in 2015 and 2018. In 2015, the 3 companies that applied for the most number of H-1B visas were Infosys Limited, Tata Consultancy, and Wipro Limited. In the past, the majority of the H-1B visas have gone to these Indian outsourcing companies that generally hire foreign workers with lower salaries and those with less specialized knowledge.

However, if we compare this to the number of H-1B visa applicants in 2018, there was a significant difference in the companies that applied for H-1B Visas. Companies like Deloitte Consulting, Cognizant Technology Solutions, and Google applied for the most number of visas. In addition, Infosys’ number of applicants has decreased significantly. This means that it is Big American companies that are now hiring these foreign-worker visas, replacing Indian outsourcing firms.

The Executive Order’s impact can be observed with the decline in the number and percentage of H-1B visas approved. It also changed the companies that are hiring H-1B visa applicants from Indian outsourcing companies to Fortune 500 companies. It also had other unintended effects like lowering the number of international students applying to American colleges. According to the National Science Board, between fall 2016 and fall 2017, the undergraduate enrollment dropped by 2% and graduate enrollment dropped by 5%.

On January 11th, 2019, Trump tweeted, ‘H1-B holders in the United States can rest assured that changes are soon coming which will bring both simplicity and certainty to your stay, including a potential path to citizenship.’ I look forward to examining the impact this change will have on H-1B visas.

For a more in-depth analysis of these recommendations, an exploratory data analysis, and source code for the machine learning algorithm, please feel free to check out my website.