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The going has been tough for employees working on IT projects onsite, especially since April 2017, when US President Donald Trump signed off on his Buy American Hire American (BAHA) law that seeks to encourage local firms and reduce immigration into the US.
Still among the top ten H-1B visa recipients, the share of Indian IT services companies dropped to 24% in financial year 2019, from around 51% in fiscal year 2016, an ET analysis of data sourced from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) shows.
In financial years 2016 and 2017, five of the top 10 firms who got the work permits for high technology workers were from India. However, by financial year 2019, only Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys feature on that list, according to the data by USCIS, the agency that deals with issuance of visas to foreign nationals. The USCIS follows an October-September calendar year.
“The number of visas from the allocated 85,000 cap has come down quite drastically after BAHA was introduced. For the top seven companies, the visa share has fallen from about 16% in FY17 to 3% in FY18,” Shivendra Singh, vice-president, global trade development at software industry lobby group National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), said. “While Indian nationals get about 70% of the H-1B visas issued, very few are going to Indian companies,” he added.
In financial year 2018, TCS, Infosys and Wipro had approval rates of 82%, 74% and 82%, respectively. Cognizant, Deloitte and Capgemini — other companies in the top ten — saw approval rates of 68%, 75% and 60%, respectively. In contrast, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple had approval rates of 99%.
Analysts say the Trump administration has targeted services companies — who deploy computer science professionals at client locations — in its anti-immigration policies. “USCIS has changed the legal standard for approving cases, particularly in situations where an H-1B visa holder would perform work on a customer’s site,” Stuart Anderson, executive director, the National Foundation for American Policy, a public policy research organisation, told ET over email.
“This has been done through a series of memos and directions to adjudicators that attorneys and companies argue go beyond what the law allows USCIS to do. That has affected both US and Indian companies that provide professional and information technology (IT) services to customers in the United States,” he said.
BAHA was introduced to improve employment rates for US workers and protect their economic interests through more rigorous administration of immigration laws. It also directs the Department of Homeland Security, in coordination with other agencies, to advance policies to help ensure H-1B visas are awarded to the most-skilled or highestpaid beneficiaries, according to the USCIS website. There has been no legal or constitutional amendment to the visa conditions, but the USCIS has been introducing newer requirements through memos.
The BAHA order has resulted in changes to ‘specialty occupation’ and the employeremployee relationship. Many immigration lawyers have said there has been higher rejection rates for visa renewals, even as conditions under which the visa was initially approved remain unchanged.
In a recent report, Nasscom-IHS Markit said that average wages paid to H-1B workers tended to be higher than the industry average for the same job, debunking the claim that these were low-cost workers who were taking away local jobs.
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