President Donald Trump’s administration crackdown on H-1B visas got a little more real Monday with the opening of the annual race to hire workers from abroad. But just how real remains in question.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency announced on Friday that it was taking multiple measures to stop what it called H-1B visa abuse and fraud. USCIS reminded companies that the visas should be allocated for only highly skilled workers coming from abroad applying for “specialty occupations,” and that this was being abused by some companies. USCIS said it would focus on three aspects where abuse might occur:

• Cases where USCIS cannot validate the employer’s basic business information through commercially available data.
• H-1B-dependent employers — or employers who have a high ratio of H-1B workers as compared to U.S. workers.
• Employers petitioning for H-1B workers who work off-site at another company or organization’s location.

The Justice Department said on Monday that it would not tolerate abuse of the H-1B visa process and discriminate against U.S. workers. “U.S. workers should not be placed in a disfavored status, and the department is wholeheartedly committed to investigating and vigorously prosecuting these claims,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Tom Wheeler of the Civil Rights Division said in a press release.

This has provoked some amount of fear in the tech community. NodeSource Inc., a San Francisco-based technology company said it relies heavily on international talent to run a successful business. “This new constraint will have a severe impact on innovation and the continued maintenance and support of many Silicon Valley tech companies,” said Joe McCann, chief executive of NodeSource.

McCann said the changes will impact the bottom line of some of the world’s largest companies, “creating a downward economic spiral for technology, for Silicon Valley and for the entire United States. Every company is a technology company today, and with the current technology skills gap, we’re facing in America, this proves even more challenging. We at NodeSource would hire even more Americans if we could, yet, we, like every other company, simply can’t find qualified candidates here at home.”

The New York Times reported, however, that the big names in tech won’t feel much blowback from the changes, mainly because they use the visas to employ workers with unique skills. The changes are said to be basically an update reminding tech companies that they should be adhering to guidelines regarding what a specialty occupation is. Candidates for the visa will have to prove they meet the specific requirements for the visa. Even Indian outsourcing companies, which employ many workers on H-1B visas, might not be too concerned as they too now hire fewer entry-level programmers, according to the report.

Prior to this week’s changes, Indian tech company Happiest Minds had told SiliconANGLE that the Indian IT industry will adapt to whatever changes are made to the visas. “In the long run, my view is that any restriction on H-1B visas will hurt the US industry more than India,” said Ashok Soota, executive chairman at Happiest Minds.

The reason is that today the H-1B professionals are being deployed not only in the IT industry but in the whole range of IT-driven industries, including finance, health and education. “In virtually every sector, the digital content is increasing,” said Soota. “The US has a negligible unemployment rate of IT professionals and the persons who go from here therefore become multipliers for the U.S. economy. Restricting the inflows or increasing the salary to more than double the current levels will deny the U.S. industry of the talent.”

Some critics believe that more scrutiny regarding the skill level of the visa applicants is not enough, calling the move a crackdown without much substance. They say the larger outsourcing companies have abused the system, hiring a majority of staff on the visa and paying them less than an American worker would be paid. To thwart this alleged abuse, reformers have asked to do away with the current lottery system for visa applicants, and also to prohibit firms from giving visas to anyone who could be seen as taking the job from a qualified American.

Image: Michael Vadon via Flickr