A huge part of our daily lives in our city and country, skilled workers from around the world benefit from the H-1B visa program, which has been around since 1990.
These are people like researchers, physicians, and engineers, who are allowed to legally work here if organizations can prove they haven't been able to find American workers with similar skills.
These visas expire after three years, and employees must be paid comparable salaries to U.S. workers.
"All you have to do is go to any major hospital and you look around at the doctors treating you or the nurses, health professionals, a high percentage will be foreign nationals and a good part of them graduated from a U.S. university and they were able to remain in the us because of the H-1B visa classification," immigration attorney Charles C. Foster said.
The Trump administration increased H-1B visa application fees last year, and starting Friday, the visa system will operate on a weighted scale, prioritizing higher-paid, higher-skilled workers.
Here in Texas, the governor has frozen all new H-1B visa applications for public universities and state agencies for now.
That means places like the University of Houston, which officials estimate has somewhere around 100 H-1B workers, or UT Health, won't be getting any new skilled workers this year without special approval.
"So physicians that are here on H-1B, they are also worried, and they are looking for jobs outside the state," said Dr. Jayesh B. Shah, the President of the Texas Medical Association. "We have 30 to 40 counties in Texas where there is no physician."
Reports from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services show that nearly 4,500 H-1B visa approvals were issued in Houston last year.
Professional, scientific, and technical services were at the top, followed by educational services, manufacturing, construction, and, finally, energy to round out the top five.
Hospital jobs usually fall within the top two categories.
The ABC News Data Team crunched the numbers and found that Chicago, which is relatively close in population to Houston, had about three times the number of people on H-1B visas than Houston.
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