SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — India is the largest exporter of IT workers to the U.S., but the country could be jolted if President Trump’s H-1B Visa Bill, which was tabled in the House of Representatives Tuesday, becomes law.
India’s largest IT firms — TCS, Infosys, Wipro and others — enjoy significant cost advantages by shipping their homegrown engineers to the United States. These same companies will likely be hit hard if the minimum salary cap for H-1B visas is raised to $130,000 from its current $60,000.
The stock values of four top IT companies in India plummeted Tuesday on the Bombay Stock Exchange in the wake of the announcement the proposal had made its way to Congress.
Meanwhile, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM),denounced President Trump’s proposal. “The bill does not treat all IT service companies with H-1B visa holders equally, and the provisions are biased against H-1B dependent companies,” NASSCOM said in a statement.
“The bill does nothing to address the underlying shortage of STEM-skilled workers, which has led all companies to have a calibrated strategy of hiring locally and bridging the skills gap by bringing skilled workers on non-immigrant visas including H-1Bs,” it added.
India just so happens to be the world’s largest recipient of H-1B visas, more than one million were issued to citizens of the South Asian nation in 2016. Indians accounted for 70 percent of the entire program in 2016. This had led critics to worry that Indian companies wouldn’t shoulder the impact alone — America’s Fortune 500 companies are deeply invested and dependent on their IT army of workers from India.
“Skilled foreign workers who come to work in the US by the route of H1-B visas don’t just directly supplement the US IT industry with specialized skill sets, they also contribute indirectly to other industries in the US. Often H1-B workers bring their families along and thereby bring additional business for other industries like real estate, banking, hospitality to name a few. The effects of this announcement will impact the GDP and the overall business economy and growth of US,” says Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research.