Hitting back against the US administration’s allegations of cheating by TCS and Infosys in gaming the lottery system for H-1B visas, IT industry body Nasscom on Monday said that the two companies together received only 8.8 per cent of the H-1B visas approved in FY 2015.
Nasscom said the White House statement that Indian companies had secured the lion’s share of H-1B visas was factually incorrect as only six of the top 20 H-1B recipients were Indian companies in 2015.
The US had accused TCS and Infosys of unfairly cornering the lion’s share of H-1B visas by “putting extra tickets” in the lottery system. “The top recipients of the H-1B visa are companies like Tata, Infosys, Cognizant — they will apply for a very large number of visas, more than they get, by putting extra tickets in the lottery raffle, if you will, and then they’ll get the lion’s share of visas,” a senior US official said, according to the transcript of the briefing posted on White House website.
The US administration has been pushing for a change in rules for H-1B visas on the grounds that it was being misused by IT firms to bring cheap workers to replace American jobs.
Countering this narrative, Nasscom said, “Every reputable data source in the US has documented a growing shortfall between the supply and demand for computer science majors in the US workforce, especially in cutting-edge fields such as cloud, big data, and mobile computing. The US Department of Labor estimates that there will be 2.4 million unfilled STEM jobs by 2018, with more than 50 per cent of these vacancies in IT-related positions.”
The IT industry body said that all Indian IT companies cumulatively account for less than 20 per cent of the total approved H-1B visas; however, Indian nationals get 71 per cent of the H-1B visas.
“This is a testimony to the high skill levels of Indian-origin professionals, especially in the very coveted STEM skills category. The annual number of Indian IT specialists working on temporary visas for Indian IT service companies is about 0.009 per cent of the 158-million-member US workforce,” the industry association said
A Nasscom survey also finds that the average wage for visa holders is over $82,000 apart from a fixed cost of about $15,000 incurred for each visa issued which includes visa cost and related expenses. This is over 35 per cent higher than the minimum prescribed exempt wage of $60,000.