Mary Chang, a mid-level manager at a Fortune 200 company in Washington, D.C., said recent U.S. visa restrictions seem more like a photo-op than anything else.
"Limiting H1-B seems to be politically motivated, with more optics than real impact," Chang told Xinhua.
U.S. President Donald Trump on June 22 signed an executive order suspending the issuance of a number of certain employment-based visas through the end of 2020, including the H-1B which are used for highly skilled workers and common in the tech industry.
The move is part of Trump's larger plan not only to crack down on illegal immigration, but also to limit competition for American jobs. But some experts said the plan may have been ill-conceived.
The president suspended H1-B visas for several different kinds of jobs, covering positions in computer programming, as well as seasonal hospitality workers, students on summer work-study programs and others.
Critics of Trump's move to suspend H1-B visas said it was poorly thought-out.
"H1-Bs are offered for skilled workers, whose job categories are not impacted by the COVID-19 lockdown," said Chang, who has hired many employees with H1-B visas.
"By not granting H1-Bs, that will not directly help those people who lost their jobs, because those jobs are not in the skilled categories, such as IT," Chang said.
Indeed, the layoffs and furloughs caused by the government's response to the pandemic have mostly impacted those in the service sector.
Around three-quarters of the 85,000 H-1B visas granted by the government go to individuals in computer science, according to the Associated Press. That sector and related industries have not seen massive job losses because employees can easily work at home on their laptops.
Chang said that overall, the U.S. economy has "benefited from the overseas talent who bring in additional skill sets and also introduce healthy competition within the workforce for the United States to remain competitive in the global economy."
Trump's order will make little difference actually, as companies can easily find loopholes in it, Chang added.
"Regardless of limiting H1-B or not, U.S. employers can still outsource their work overseas or hire companies with overseas resources to perform the same jobs," Chang said.
"Restrictive changes to our nation's immigration system will push investment and economic activity abroad, slow growth and reduce job creation," Thomas Donohue, the CEO of U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement last week.
The CEOs of Silicon Valley giants Google, Tesla and YouTube have also been quick to blast Trump's move, as they hire H1-B holders.
