Chinese, Indian men crowd out rest of globe in key U.S. guest-worker program

America’s H-1B visa guest-worker program was supposed to be a way of giving the world’s best and brightest work superstars a foot in the door. Instead, it’s become a way for men from India to take computer and other basic technology jobs.

A staggering 59 percent of all H-1B applications submitted over the last year were from men from India, according to new data being released Friday by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Indeed overall, Indians and Chinese — men and women — accounted for 85 percent of the 419,637 applications filed in fiscal year 2018, with India accounting for 74 percent and China for 11 percent.

The next highest countries were Canada and South Korea with just 1.1 percent of the visas each.

No other country even cracked 1 percent.

The data, which covers fiscal year 2018, also shows a record number of applications were filed, topping 2017’s high of about 404,000.

Applications are still being adjudicated, so there is no final number yet of approvals.

USCIS has released overall country numbers before, but the gender breakdown is new — and is part of the Trump administration’s commitment to better transparency about the American immigration system and who’s really benefitting from it. It’s part of a review, ordered by President Trump last year, to return the H-1B program it to the original goal of attracting the best-skilled workers.

“It is our hope that this data will help facilitate the agency’s ongoing review of employment-based visa categories, including H-1Bs, more effectively in fulfillment of the president’s ’Buy American, Hire American’ executive order aimed at benefitting U.S. workers to the greatest extent possible,” said Michael Bars, a spokesman for the agency.

Originally intended as a temporary worker visa, the H-1B now is one of the most prominent ways for new immigrants to arrive and work while they apply for a green card, or permanent residency.

That has left some critics of the current immigration system wary of the high level of applications from just a couple of countries, saying it skews the mix of people.

It has become known as the “genius visa” because it’s supposed to be used for people who show exceptional merit in their field.

Yet it’s also been used to oust some Americans from their jobs. A number of information technology workers have reported being ousted from their positions in favor of H-1B visa holders — in some cases being kept on staff just long enough to train their foreign replacements.

Mr. Trump has a very personal connection to the H-1B visa. His wife, Melania, came to the U.S. from her home country of Slovenia on an H-1B visa as a model in the 1990s. She would eventually win a green card.

In the latest data, Slovenians applied for 33 H-1B visas in 2018, with the gender ratio being nearly evenly split, 16 women and 17 men.

Among countries with at least 10 applications, those with the highest ratio of women were Caribbean nations.

Meanwhile, those with the highest ratio of men were all majority-Muslim countries. Syria led the way with 88 percent of its applicants men, followed by Iraq, Egypt and Afghanistan.