Among the more significant developments for Irish people abroad this month were the sweeping changes to the H-1B foreign worker visa scheme relied on by US tech groups announced by US president Donald Trump.
The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US employers to temporarily hire foreign workers in speciality occupations such as IT, engineering, medicine, and finance.
The key change announced by Trump is the imposition of a $100,000 (€85,000) fee on the cost to companies to secure one of these visas for each new employee to enter the country. Approvals for Irish-born workers have been in decline for a number of years, but have stabilised around the 400 mark in recent years. There were 372 last year, of which 213 were new, USCIS data shows. Are you an employer or employee potentially impacted by this development? Will it have significant impact on your business or work situation? We would like to hear about your experience and what you think of the move. You can respond to our callout using the form in this article.
Elsewhere, we heard from Tipperary man Eoin Cantwell who moved to Dubai in 2012, initially teaching English. After a few years he set up the Sharjah GAA club and later his own company which delivers fresh meals direct to people’s homes. Five years on, Fitt Meals employs 140 people and has a fleet of 30 vans delivering around 40,000 meals a week in Dubai.
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Rodhan Harris (20) moved from Co Clare to the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands before taking a step further afield for a placement in Singapore – an experience he says has been the opportunity of a lifetime.
Andy Culligan, chief executive of marketing business Purple Path, lives in Austria with his wife. He said “jobs were scarce when I finished my degree just as the economy crashed in 2008″.
“My then partner – now wife – is Austrian. We had met on a Erasmus exchange. We decided that Vienna offered a stronger future, so I packed up my life in Ireland and made the move.”
Hannah McCarthy visited the Los San Patricios GAA club in Mexico City. David O’Reagan, the men’s team captain, is a maths teacher originally from Douglas, Co Cork. O’Reagan has called Mexico home for the last six years – “I love it here,” he says.
Paul Kearns lives in Israel, “in a state that is committing genocide 70km from our home”. And yet life continues in Tel Aviv. “I walk through the city, with its beautiful Bauhaus architecture and tree-lined avenues dotted with busy cafe terraces, and think about stopping at a stranger’s table to ask, ‘Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but what do you think about Palestinian children dying of starvation from an Israeli-induced famine, an hour’s drive away?’”.
Laura Kennedy writes about Ireland’s long tradition of leaving, but that has traditionally been counterbalanced by almost as long a tradition of coming home.
“Ireland has never had much difficulty drawing its emigrants home. Many want to go home.
“Yet, we do need to think in Ireland about what it is that people are coming home to.
“We can be sensitive about their going, but this should promote serious conversation about how we might incentivise their return.”
