Indian consulting firms sharply cut H-1B visa filings

› Searches related to the H1B visa, as a share of all searches on Indeed.com, have consistently declined through 2017 and into 2018. DANIEL CULBERTSON, Economist at Indeed Hiring Lab

WASHINGTON: Indian consulting firms operating in the US are understood have filed fewer H-1B visa applications than before, given the harsh glare of Trump administration on them.

“Indian consulting firms, which have been accused of flooding the system with applications, have dramatically reduced their filings,” San Francisco Chronicle noted in an editorial on Monday.

It added: “Foreign nationals are exhibiting new reluctance to make the jump to a US company.”

The overall filings had dropped by 63,242 in 2017, from 399,349 in 2016 to 336,107, according data published by the US citizenship and immigration services (USCIS), which runs the H-1B programme, that allows US companies, and US-based units of foreign companies such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro, to hire foreign workers for speciality occupation for a temporary period of three years, extendable by another three years.

And most of this drop was accounted for by a decline in application for Indian beneficiaries, by 52,975; from 300,902 in 2016 to 247,927.

The Trump administration has dramatically scaled up scrutiny of the H-1B visa programme in the past months. It had even accused Indian IT companies of gaming the system, the electronic lottery used by the USCIS to sort the petitions.

Though companies tend to not discuss their filings publicly, Indian IT firms have already announced plans to ramp up their local hirings, as a rising proportion of their respective workforce in the United States. Wipro, for instance, says 55% of its employees in the US are locals.

Also, Indians looking for work in the IT sector could be considering other options. A Wall Street Journal columnist has suggested there is declining market interest in H-1Bs, citing the job-site indeed.com, which found that searches related to the H-1B visa, as a share of all searches on the job site have been going down since 2017.