Anger Grows in India over U.S. Visa Rules

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A highly placed administrative officer in the ministry, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said that in internal discussions the government has realized that at a time of such economic crisis internationally, asking the U.S. government to help protect jobs of Indian citizens would be counterproductive. Instead, the government wants to help Indian engineers get work in countries in the EU or elsewhere, especially if this provision hurts their job prospects.

In the U.S., the H-1B remains embattled. In the late 1990s, as a shortage of U.S. engineers threatened to cut off growth for companies like Microsoft (MSFT), the U.S. government temporarily lifted the cap on H-1B visas, allowing as many 115,000 applications to be approved each year, before returning the number to the original 65,000. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates wrote op-ed pieces in 2007 encouraging the expansion of the program to help maintain U.S. competitiveness. Other IT companies lobbied Congress for the program's expansion, too, saying that U.S. graduate schools simply did not produce enough engineers for their companies to hire.

Opposition to the H-1B Program

The program has drawn sharp criticism from anti-immigration groups and unions for state employees in places like California, where the H-1B visa is used extensively to fill the jobs of civil engineers. The visa does require that the employer prove that the applicant will be paid the same salary as that of a U.S. citizen, but it does not require that the company prove that it could not find a U.S. citizen to fill that job. If, after six years of H-1B employment, the company decides to help the foreign worker get a green card, it must advertise the job extensively and then prove that applicants were of inferior quality than the current worker.

It is unclear if the provision would make it difficult or impossible for Indian companies working on outsourced projects from bailout-receiving U.S. companies to hire H-1B visa employees. For now, the Indian IT lobbying group Nasscom believes that the law applies only to direct employment by U.S. companies, but "remains concerned," it said in a statement.

And if, as the data now show, Indian companies doing business in the U.S. such as Infosys (INFY), Wipro (WIT), and scandal-plagued Satyam (SAY) were able to send more than 10,000 workers from India to work on projects in the U.S. last year, while Microsoft needed only about 1,000 visas and Google (GOOG) needed even fewer, the program may invite more congressional scrutiny.

Srivastava reports for BusinessWeek from New Delhi.