The story line is familiar: Large U.S. company outsources work to offshore service provider that uses foreign nationals with temporary work visas to take what could have been domestic IT jobs. Whats not familiar to many IT professionals is the L1 visa. Although the L category visa has been around some 50 years, it hasnt received a fraction of the attention the H-1B visa has from legislators, the media and outraged domestic IT workers, many of whom believe companies have given their jobs to lower-paid foreign IT workers brought in on H-1B visas. While many of those resentful workers have attempted to mount political pressure to reduce the number of H-1B visas given each year, no such movement has been mounted against the L1 visa.
In some respects, however, the L1 visa is easier for employers to use than the H-1B. And theres some evidence that use of the L1 visa is rising. The latest figures released by the Immigration and Naturalization Service show that the number of L1 visas granted climbed from 112,124 in 1995 to 294,658 in 2000. But they still havent caught up to the H-1B numbers: In 1995, 117,574 H-1B visas were granted, compared with 355,605 in 2000.
To IT workers such as Emmons who say they feel theyre facing unfair competition from imported workers, statistics mean little. What matters is that theyve lost their jobs, theyve had to train their replacements and many of those replacements are here on L1 visas.
https://www.eweek.com/it-management/l1s-slip-past-h-1b-curbs/
