Visa ban a challenge for India tech giants

Living with Donald Trump’s protectionism in his clearly stated “America First” vision will be a real challenge for the world. There’s no point being in denial: Candidate Donald, having transformed into President Trump, seems determined to carry out all that he promised in a populist, reactionary campaign that emboldened racism and white supremacy advocates. The world, including India, have to not only reassess their relations with the US but also learn to cope with whatever the Trump administration throws up in its bid to clean what the President, in his inaugural address, called “American carnage” — inner cities of rusted factories and people without jobs. In an extension of his pledge “to make America great again”, he signed the refugee travel ban and will soon sign the proposal to overhaul the popular H-1B visa programme.

One of the first to reel under the Trump “vision” is India’s IT industry, whose majors derive much of their revenue from the US and depend on H-1B visas through which tech specialists can work on-site with clients. Indian IT, that uses a lion’s share of 60,000 visas, faces a hit to its profitability from the soon-to-be-doubled minimum wage ($130,000) for skilled workers. The use of L-1 visas, that are not restricted by number, could also be hit as the US seeks to regulate the entire work visa programme. One Indian IT bellwether, TCS, secured 8,333 H-1B visas in 2015. However, such restrictive measures had been predicted long back, as Americans had been raging over the “Bangaloring” of high-tech jobs and Mr Trump had promised that jobs would go to Americans first during his campaign.

It is ironical, but true, that a Democratic Congresswoman from San Francisco’s Bay Area, a place with the most diverse population due to the high-tech sector, should introduce a bill to curb foreign talent. There is a view that the H-1B visa programme is a “genius visa” that enabled the US to hire the best of the world’s talent over decades as most students getting doctorates are from outside America. India’s IT industry will have to tweak its ways of working to get around the restrictions, first by keeping more tasks within India, second by sending more senior managers on-site than just programmers and, finally, by changing delivery systems to cope with the challenge. The US accounts for over 65 per cent of India’s IT revenue, which means the headwinds will be strong. But the Indian IT industry, famous for innovative thinking, even if as the world’s back office, would have to lean on its ingenuity to remain a force to be reckoned with. Former reality TV star Donald Trump is in charge: goodwill and diplomacy will probably not work with a deal-making tycoon.