US work visas for foreign aid workers

When Aditi Hate graduated from Lawrence University in Wisconsin in 2005, the Mumbai-born development professional had what seemed like a healthy supply of job opportunities. She moved to Washington and was soon working for the Stimson Center. Before the year of work training tacked onto Hate’s F-1 student visa ran out, the Stimson center had sponsored her for an H-1B employee visa and she spent the next four years at the nonprofit center researching natural disaster preparedness plans for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and examining nonproliferation issues as part of a contract with the United Nations. By the time Hate completed Georgetown University’s Master of Science in Foreign Service Program in May, though, the battered U.S. economy, the crunch on government and foundation grants, and the growing pool of overeducated, overexperienced and unemployed U.S. citizens had radically changed the landscape of job openings at development-focused NGOs. Employers that were once eager to sponsor H-1B visas for promising foreigners were now only hiring foreigners for very specialized jobs or for none at all. Recent graduates like Hate with up to a year of F-1 visa eligibility were struggling to find U.S. employers willing to say H-1B sponsorship might be a possibility down the road. After several disappointments, Hate began calling NGO human resources offices before filling out an application, she said, and found they were quite candid about when H-1B sponsorship wasn’t an option. Usually it wasn’t. Hate is working for the National Democratic Institute now while her F-1 visa runs down and is actively looking for another employer that will sponsor an H-1B. NDI told Hate upfront it would not sponsor an H-1B for her and if she can’t find a willing employer before May, she will likely move back to India or search for work elsewhere in the world. Hate’s experience isn’t uncommon. While the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service doesn’t keep tabs on H-1B visa requests from NGOs or development NGOs specifically, the overall number of employers seeking H-1Bs dropped dramatically following the 2008 global financial crisis and continues to plummet. The immigration service grants up to 85,000 H-1B applications each year. That includes the first 20,000 applications for employees with U.S. master’s degrees or another advanced degree and 65,000 for everyone else. Applicants from higher education institutions and nonprofit centers that are primarily devoted to academic research are generally exempt from the cap. When Hate was applying for her first U.S. jobs in 2005, the immigration service received more H-1B petitions than its effective 85,000 cap on the very first day it accepted applications, April 1. “The number of petitions would sometimes nearly double the cap,” said Robert Deasy, information and liaison director with the American Immigration Lawyer’s Association. “Three to four years ago, they received well in excess of 100,000 petitions on the first day of filing.” By August 2010 — four full months after the immigration service began accepting 2011 H-1B petitions — it had only received 34,000 forms, according to numbers provided by Naomi Schorr, an immigration law scholar and New York-based attorney with Kramer Levin Naftalis and Frankel. As of Aug. 26 this year — nearly five months after the 2012 H-1B season began — the immigration service had only received 29,000 petitions, just over a third of the total allowed under the cap. The economic climate is, by far, the greatest cause of the drop in H-1B sponsorship at NGOs and elsewhere, experts said. First there’s the cost of applying for an H-1B, which starts at $1,575 for organizations with fewer than 25 full-time employees and can rise to more than $5,000 for large employers with a significant number of foreign employees. Those figures don’t include the cost of attorneys the employer may need to hire if the immigration service questions any part of its application. Those application fees were once considered a standard cost of hiring a qualified and diverse workforce. But as grant and contract money dries up, development groups are becoming more and more cautious of their own bottom lines, observers said. High unemployment rates also mean these organizations have their pick of a new crop of highly educated and experienced U.S. citizens who, in a better economy, would have been scooped up swiftly by for-profit firms. “If there’s a pool of potential applicants and some are from the U.S. and don’t need sponsorship and if everything else is equal, why not go for the American?” asked Elizabeth Quinn, an immigration attorney with Maggio and Kattar in Washington who represents many NGOs in the visa process. Making things more complicated, Quinn said, is a requirement that employers pay H-1B holders the prevailing wage at the company based on their education and experience. The employer must also match the prevailing wage for the H-1B holder’s job category in the city or county where it’s located, she said. “In some instances, that prevailing wage is higher than what you’d pay a U.S. worker,” Quinn’s colleague Jim Alexander said. “Then there are filing fees on top of that and an already tight budget. So if you find a qualified U.S. worker, it makes it very easy to make that choice.” Those barriers don’t mean development NGOs and consultancies will never stick their necks out for a foreign applicant, Quinn and Alexander said. But the applicants most likely to win H-1B sponsorship are going to have something few U.S. applicants can compete with. For some development groups, that can mean deep knowledge of a particular region, issue or conflict, borne from years on the ground, they said. Applicants with a background in science and technology will also likely get a leg up, but even an advanced degree in science is no guarantee sponsorship will be easy. Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño, for instance, holds a Ph.D. in physics from the Max Planck Institute in Munich, Germany, and did contract work as an astrophysicist for NASA for two years while he was officially a postdoctoral student at George Mason University. After several years at NASA, in 2010, Nuño chose to shift his focus from hard sciences toward the relationship between science, society and policy. He completed a fellowship at the National Academy of Sciences but, despite his advanced degrees, Nuño couldn’t find an employer who would sponsor him for an H-1B. Foundations “all said it was too difficult to hire me because they really couldn’t afford the time or the money to do that,” he said. “They said go work for a contractor, but contractors are all tied to these regulations,” such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, which prohibit foreigners from handling data about U.S. weapons systems and other national security information. Ultimately, Nuño had to return to his native Asturias, Spain, for several months. Soon after his return, he began doing contract work for the Global Adaptation Institute, a globally focused environmental nonprofit. After several months of telecommuting, the organization agreed to sponsor him for an H-1B and brought him back to Washington. Despite the gloomy picture for foreign job seekers, there are some bright spots now for development organizations looking to sponsor H-1Bs, Quinn and Alexander said. When the immigration service was drowning in H-1B petitions in the early 2000s, they went over each application with a fine tooth comb, often putting solid applications through lengthy and expensive investigations, they said. “That made a lot of NGOs risk averse,” Alexander said. “Why even try [they asked] because immigration will just find a reason to question it and the employer will have to spend a lot of money and time with an immigration attorney responding to questions.” Immigration officials still scrutinize H-1B applications closely now, Alexander said. But there’s less excessive scrutiny and with so few applications coming in, each one has a better shot at approval. Organizations that once would have sought an exemption from the 65,000 cap and perhaps had to defend their status as a nonprofit research institution or other aid group can now apply under the cap, he said, knowing it’s unlikely to be met.