Indian-American entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa strongly reacted to the Donald Trump administration’s suspension PERM program for eight IT giants, including Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Capegemini and said that these companies are not the visa abusers. The visa abusers are those who recruit for these companies or the IT bodyshops and they need to be shut down, Wadhwa said.“America has enjoyed the greatest free lunch in history: highly educated, highly skilled immigrants bringing their talent to its shores. Now it’s snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by turning away the truly best and brightest. These companies aren’t the visa abusers. The body shops exploiting the system are the ones that need to be shut down,” Wadhwa said, defending Silicon Valley.Suspending PERM process means the H-1B visa holders working in these companies can’t take the Green Card route. However, it is not known whether the suspension will eventually be lifted.Nasscom, the apex body of Indian IT companies, called it a temporary suspension and said that it believes that immigration and skilled talent mobility are two separate issues and should not be viewed through the same lens.“The H-1B visa program has historically played an important role in addressing short-term skill gaps in the US, and it will continue to be used to address short-term talent gap. However, over a number of years, Indian technology companies have significantly reduced their dependence on H-1B visas, while steadily expanding local hiring and building a strong domestic workforce in the US. They work with majority of the US Fortune 500 companies...”
Microsoft only files H-1B petitions for those…
Microsoft also issued a statement against the damaging allegation of visa fraud and said Microsoft only files H-1B petitions for those who meet the rigorous standards of this visa category. “We pay our employees some of the highest compensation in the tech sector, and our wages are among the highest of all H-1B filings. We pay our H-1B employees the same as any other employees doing comparable work,” it said.Microsoft said it is ready to provide additional information to the administration. “For example, of the approximately 6,000 H-1B visa applications we submitted in the last fiscal year, 80% percent were to extend or change the status of existing Microsoft employees. These were not to hire new people. The remaining filings for new employees were for individuals already legally in the United States who decided to come work for us, and they equal only 1% of our U.S. workforce. They are not new arrivals to our country,” it said.
JD Vance on IT bodyshops
JD Vance, in his statement, mentioned the IT bodyshops that recruit the H-1Bs on behalf of these IT giants but the administration decided to shake the big players to make an impact, instead of chasing the thousands of small staffing companies.“If you are working as an H-1B visa in the United States of America, you’re earning $20,000 less than an American citizen hired in the same position. If you were brought in by one of these foreign outsourcing firms, you’re making $48,000 less than an American citizen in a similar position. So I’m sure that everybody here understands the game that is being played. You bring in indentured servants from outside the country, you lay off American workers and, if you’re a corporation, you make a ton of money by undercutting the wages of American workers, replacing them with people who frankly shouldn’t be in the United States of America to begin with,” Vance said.
