Layoffs have made a precarious situation for noncitizens even worse, forcing them to play a game of chance to stay in the US
Less than a year ago, K was working with a US-based team at Amazon from one of the e-commerce giant’s many international outposts in east Asia. While the distance between himself and those on his team had made his role tricky, he was at a stable job, at a company in his home country where labor laws protected workers from layoffs and sudden terminations.
To make it easier for him and his team to work together, Amazon offered him a role in the US and said it would sponsor his L visa – a temporary worker visa available to employees of US-based companies who transfer from an international office. Though that meant uprooting his family, including his children who did not speak English, K took the job, confident in the importance of his department, the Amazon’s devices team, to the company.
But just seven months later, Amazon laid off 10,000 workers. K was one of them.
K is over 30 days into the 60 days he and other workers on temporary work visas are allotted to find another job before their visa expires and their ability to stay in the US is in limbo. But unlike those in the US on an H-1B visa – another type of temporary work visa widely used by tech companies – his best chance at staying in the US would be to find another role at the company that just laid him off. Companies can only sponsor L visas for people who have worked in one of their...
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