Indian IT firms see 37% fall in H-1B visa petition

Report reveals that the drop is not due to Trump’s win

Washington, June 6: Top seven India-based IT firms in the US collectively experienced a whopping 37 per cent drop in approved H-1B visa petitions in 2016 as compared to the previous year, according to a new report that comes amid the Trump administration's crackdown on the “visa abuse”.

The firms experienced a drop of 5,436 approved petitions (37 per cent) in 2016 as compared to the previous year, said a report by the National Foundation for American Policy — a Washington-based non-profit think-tank.

It said that the 9,356 new H-1B petitions for the top seven India-based companies approved in fiscal 2016 represent only 0.006 per cent of the US labour force.

“While the threat of job loss has long been exaggerated by critics, it reaches illogical proportions when discussing fewer than 10,000 workers in an economy that employs 160 million workers nationwide,” the National Foundation for American Policy said in a statement.

The report comes after Donald Trump signed an executive order in April for tightening the rules of the H-1B visa programme to stop “visa abuses”.

Trump said his administration is going to enforce ‘Hire American’ rules that are designed to protect jobs and wages of workers in the United States.

The executive order also called upon the Departments of Labour, Justice, Homeland Security, and the state to take action against fraud and abuse of the US’ visa programmes.

According to the report, the number of approved new H-1B petitions for TCS declined by 56 per cent from FY15 to FY16, from 4,674 to 2,040, a drop of 2,634. For Wipro, the petitions declined by 52 per cent between FY15 and FY16, a drop of 1,605, going from 3,079 to 1,474 approved petitions for initial employment during those years.

For Infosys, it declined by 16 per cent (or 454 petitions), with 2,376 approved H-1B petitions for initial employment in FY16, compared to 2,830 in FY15, said the report, which based its research on government data.

“The drop in new H-1B visas for India-based firms, which is expected to continue when data are released on cases filed in April 2017 for FY 2018 start dates, is due to industry trends toward digital services such as cloud computing and AI, which require fewer workers, and a choice by companies to rely less on visas and to build up their domestic workforces in the US,” the report said.

“H-1B petitions approved for initial employment in FY16 were filed by employers in April 2016, which means the drop in H-1B visa use by these firms is not due to Trump’s election win,” said NFAP executive director Stuart Anderson.