Indian engineering manager Abir was in the middle of a performance review cycle when he was abruptly laid off from his job at Google – a victim of a wave of industry-wide cutbacks.
“Everything was going well,” said Abeer, 31, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect his identity. “I know some people who were actually promoted in October and (then) demoted … There was no foresight that this was coming.”
A wave of tech layoffs in the United States at companies including Meta Platforms Inc, Google and Amazon is changing the lives of foreign workers like Abeer who are in the country on H-1B visas reserved for “high skilled” occupations.
Under the terms of their visas, laid-off workers face the prospect of leaving the country in 60 days, unless they can find another job or manage to change their immigration status.
Indians will represent about 75 percent of approved special visa holder petitions in 2021, according to the US government, and industry estimates suggest they will account for nearly a third of the nearly 200,000 tech jobs in the United States last year. are responsible.
As a result, thousands of Indian workers have seen their lives thrown into disarray in recent months.
“It’s a nightmare that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone,” Mandakini Gupta, 39, who splits her time between San Diego and India and is from Assam in northeastern India, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
Gupta, who currently works as a program manager at Amazon, said she has experienced several layoffs in the past on H-1B visas, describing the experience as “absolutely harrowing”.
She first moved to the United States in 2013 to pursue a master’s degree in business analysis and market research at Georgia State University and said it was a “big deal” for her family to send thousands of miles away to another country .