Bad U.S. economy sends H-1B visa holders home

A growing number of Indians in America--both temporary workers and permanent residents who have held lucrative high tech jobs--are now packing up and heading home to India, the Wall Street Journal reports. Since nearly 40 percent of all H-1B visa holders are from India, IT layoffs are hitting Indian professionals particularly hard.

An estimated 16,000 to 20,000 Indian nationals have returned home, Arvind Panagariya, an economics professor at Columbia University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, tells the newspaper. And for the first time, H-1B visas are going unused. In September, six months after the U.S. government began accepting applications for the visas in 2009, only 46,000 petitions had been filed for the 65,000 visas. In 2008, the 65,000 visas were snapped up the first day they became available.

This change is clearly a sign of the rough economic times in the United States that have affected nearly every sector of the economy, including high-tech.

Problems for foreign workers don't end when they return home. Those who return are finding it harder to get a job at an Indian company than it was just a few years ago. If someone has worked abroad for more than seven years, it can be hard to get a job. And managers have to be careful not to pay them more than "locals," the newspaper reported.

Nevertheless, there are predictions that the IT workforce will be resurrected as the recession ends. And there will be new demands for IT talent especially in IT security, and for the return of foreign workers eligible for H-1B visas, according to economic experts.

For more on H-1B visas:
- see this Wall Street Journal article [1]