Adam Purinton, the accused shooter of Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, faces charges of premeditated first-degree murder and two counts of attempted premeditated first-degree murder, The New York Times reports.
Purinton yelled at the two men to “get out of my country,” witnesses at the Kansas bar said, and then fired his weapon, the Associated Press reports. Purinton killed Kuchibhotla and injured Madasani, his friend and co-worker at the operational headquarters of GPS giant, Garmin, in Olathe, a largely white and well-off Kansas suburb.
Kuchibhotla was one of more than 100 Garmin employees on the H-1B program, which allows U.S. firms to hire foreigner workers with certain technical skills to work here for three to six years. While the shooting has shaken up employees at Garmin, Laurie Minard, Garmin’s vice president of HR, is confident it won’t stifle the firm’s overseas recruitment efforts.
The firm’s Olathe campus is in the midst of a $200 million expansion. "We tend to be a family here," Minard says. ”We want people to feel safe. We embrace it. We encourage it. We support it. It's extremely important to us about acceptance.”
H-1B visas have enabled U.S. firms to recruit more overseas workers to fill temporary high-skilled positions. In 2014, most of those H-1B visa workers--about 70%--came from India. Overall, Indian immigration to the U.S. has grown from about 200,000 in the 1980s to more than two million now.
Before the shooting, Democratic and Republican lawmakers pushed ahead on efforts to curtail H-1B visas, notes the Society For Human Resource Management. Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill) reintroduced a 2015 bill to kill the H-1B visa lottery and replace it with a system that gives priority to foreign students who are studying in the U.S.
"We need programs dedicated to putting American workers first," Grassley said. "When skilled foreign workers are needed to meet the demands of our labor market, we must also ensure that visa applicants who honed their skills at American colleges and universities are a priority over the importation of more foreign workers.”
But Rebecca Peters, director of government affairs at the Council for Global Immigration (CFGI), a nonprofit that advocates hiring of high-skilled immigrants, contends the bill would hurt employers.
"Sen. Grassley's bill would place H-1B-dependent employer…and willful violator requirements on all H-1B employers, not just bad actors, making it difficult for employers acting in good faith to access the talent they need given skills gaps today," Peters said.
Olathe is home to many South Asian immigrants and 84 languages are spoken in the school district, The New York Times reports. Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, said ahead of the shooting that she had been worried about reading of other shootings.
“I, especially, I was always concerned, are we doing the right thing of staying in the United States of America?” Dumala said. “But he always assured me that only good things happen to good people.” Dumala said she wanted “an answer from the government” about what “they’re going to do to stop this hate crime.”
Trump press secretary, Sean Spicer, maintained there was no connection between Trump’s immigration policy and the Kansas shooting.