American companies are so dependent on the talent that comes to the United States on H-1B visas that they are willing to pay top dollar for them.
Facebook and Google dominated the top-paid jobs among H-1B applicants in software engineering roles in the first eight months of this year, according to h1data.info. The site indexes the Labour Condition Application disclosure data – required for H-1B applications – from the US department of labour.
One Facebook employee being paid $2 million (Rs15 crore) had their application denied but another being paid over $1.9 million was approved.
Silicon Valley bigwigs have always relied on H-1B workers to bridge the skills gap in America’s tech sector. In 2016, more than 15% of Facebook’s employees were H-1B visa-holders.
Despite the Donald Trump administration cracking down on the programme, both Facebook and Google featured amidst the giants who had 99% of their H-1B applications approved.
Of course, these are anomalies in the most popular H-1B profession. The average salary for 1,90,000 software engineers applying for H-1B visas was just over $100,000.
Besides software engineers, there were also H-1B workers in some other roles that cashed massive cheques at both behemoths.
This article first appeared on Quartz.
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