Analysts say the impact on Indian entities would not be immediate
An executive order signed by US President Donald Trump on Wednesday (Indian time) to protect American industry, has also targeted Indian information technology services firms, who depend on H-1B visas to send engineers to work on projects to the US.
Trump has directed his top administration officials — the Secretaries of State, Labor and Homeland Security along with the Attorney General — to suggest reforms, so that the H-1B visas are given to the most skilled or highest paid beneficiaries.
The move by Trump will help Silicon Valley-based entities such as Google, Facebook and Oracle to take advantage of the programme to get more engineers from India to work on projects back home. At the same time, it is expected to hurt outsourcing companies majors here, such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro, which traditionally have used the H-1B visa programme to send engineers to work on projects at customer locations in America.
This has riled the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), which says there is a campaign to discredit the Indian services sector and the move would hurt the American economy, as the US faces a shortage of computer engineers. It would benefit only Silicon Valley companies at the cost of the rest of America.
“Regarding the concept of reorienting the H-1B lottery to be a system that prioritises the “most-skilled or highest-paid” visa applicants, the (US) Administration needs to be careful about unintended consequences,” it stated.
“Using salary levels as the metric is not necessarily the best indicator of benefits to the US economy. And, unless such a system reflects variations in wages in all parts of the US, it could advantage certain regions such as Silicon Valley over other regions of the US.”
TCS, this country’s largest software exporter, says it has reduced the number of visas it has applied over the past few years, and has several local development centres in the US, hiring local engineers.
“We have to watch what the visa issues are. Are they going to be constraints for having the right people on projects? We have taken a view of this and our dependency on visas has been reducing. Our strategy is to move to a regime where our operating model should be visa-neutral,” says N G Subramaniam, chief operating officer at TCS.
Trump has directed his top administration officials — the Secretaries of State, Labor and Homeland Security along with the Attorney General — to suggest reforms, so that the H-1B visas are given to the most skilled or highest paid beneficiaries.
The move by Trump will help Silicon Valley-based entities such as Google, Facebook and Oracle to take advantage of the programme to get more engineers from India to work on projects back home. At the same time, it is expected to hurt outsourcing companies majors here, such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro, which traditionally have used the H-1B visa programme to send engineers to work on projects at customer locations in America.
This has riled the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), which says there is a campaign to discredit the Indian services sector and the move would hurt the American economy, as the US faces a shortage of computer engineers. It would benefit only Silicon Valley companies at the cost of the rest of America.
“Regarding the concept of reorienting the H-1B lottery to be a system that prioritises the “most-skilled or highest-paid” visa applicants, the (US) Administration needs to be careful about unintended consequences,” it stated.
“Using salary levels as the metric is not necessarily the best indicator of benefits to the US economy. And, unless such a system reflects variations in wages in all parts of the US, it could advantage certain regions such as Silicon Valley over other regions of the US.”
TCS, this country’s largest software exporter, says it has reduced the number of visas it has applied over the past few years, and has several local development centres in the US, hiring local engineers.
“We have to watch what the visa issues are. Are they going to be constraints for having the right people on projects? We have taken a view of this and our dependency on visas has been reducing. Our strategy is to move to a regime where our operating model should be visa-neutral,” says N G Subramaniam, chief operating officer at TCS.
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