Bringing on International Talent

Immigration under the Trump administration: a topic that could fill all the pages of this newsletter, and many beyond. We’ll leave that discussion to every watercooler and dinner table in the country and narrow our focus to the work authorization of international investment management job seekers. This is not to replace immigration legal advice, but we thought it could be useful to share some observations stemming from our own research, as well as our conversations with candidates and the hiring firms navigating this tricky world.

For background purposes, there were just over 500,000 Immigrant visas issued in the US in 2018 (allowing people to live and work in the US permanently) and twice as many Temporary visas issued (including for tourists, students, and those looking to work for limited periods). In our research we discovered that there are approximately 185 types of Immigrant and Temporary visas issued by the United States; fortunately, the vast majority of visa situations involving international professionals in the investment management world fall into the following handful of visa categories.

H-1B: The Professional Work Visa

The most well-known visa program is the H-1B. The H-1B visa is a Temporary category that allows employers to petition for highly skilled and educated foreign professionals to work in “specialty occupations” that require at least a bachelor’s degree or the equivalent. Jobs in fields such as mathematics, engineering, and technology often qualify, as well as in finance.

The H-1B has a term of three years, and allows for a single three-year extension. However, if there’s a green card application pending (usually a multi-year process), then the H-1B will continue to be valid until the green card process is resolved.

The tricky things about H-1Bs are that they are limited in supply and there’s a great deal of uncertainty about whether a specific individual being sponsored by a US firm will actually receive one. Even for the most qualified candidates sponsored by the most prestigious firms, the chance of being successful is about 1 in 3. This stems from the fact that there’s a cap of 65,000 H-1Bs distributed from a pool of nearly 200,000 applications (there are an additional 20,000 H-1Bs reserved for foreign professionals who graduate with a master’s degree or PhD from a U.S. university, which help these odds).

Decisions are made and communicated in April and May, and the actual visas are granted in October. This is important because newly approved H-1B holders have to wait until after October to potentially resign and have their visa transferred to a new employer.

There were concerns in recent years that the H-1B cap would be further lowered; that hasn’t materialized. Also of concern was that Premium Processing (guaranteed 15-day processing – shortened from an average six-month time frame, a more expensive VIP service most of our clients take advantage of) for transfers was suspended in April 2018, due to high demand. A suspension, it was reasoned, would allow US Citizenship and Immigration Services to work through the heavy backlog. One Head of HR at a multi-billion-dollar hedge fund labelled the suspension “uncharted territory,” and said, “our immigration attorneys don’t have much ‘advice’ to provide because there’s no history to base this off of.” However, as of February 2019, Premium Processing has been reinstituted.