After Healthcare Defeat, Can The Trump Administration Fix America's H-1B Visa Program? (bloomberg.com)

Friday the Trump administration suffered a political setback when divisions in the president's party halted a move to repeal healthcare policies passed in 2010. But if Trump hopes to turn his attention to how America's H-1B visa program is affecting technology workers, "time is running out," writes Slashdot reader pteddy. Bloomberg reports: [T]he application deadline for the most controversial visa program is the first week of April, which means new rules have to be in place for that batch of applicants or another year's worth of visas will be handed out under the existing guidelines... There probably isn't enough time to pass legislation on such a contentious issue. But Trump could sign an executive order with some changes. The article points out that under the current system, one outsourcing firm was granted 6.5 times as many U.S. visas as Amazon. There's also an interesting map showing which countries' workers received the most H-1B visas in 2015 -- 69.4% went to workers in India, with another 10.5% going to China -- and a chart showing which positions are most in demand, indicating that two-thirds of the visa applications are for tech workers.

Comments

Re:Just repeal it

[frovingslosh]

The astronomical prices only exist because of the assumption that everyone has healthcare and it isn't coming out of their pocket. Have people pay for these things out of their own pocket and you'll see how quickly prices come down. Prices have escalated astronomically since the so call "affordable health care act". Also, you fail to mention in your "make everyone get it" speech that Obamacare specifically doesn't apply the mandate to Muslims. How exactly is that fair to all of the real Americans?