Indian IT Sector Warns Against US Visa Bill (reuters.com)

India's IT lobby warned on Tuesday that a bill before the U.S. Congress aimed at imposing tougher visa rules unfairly targets some of its members and will not solve a U.S. labor shortage in technology and engineering. From a report on Reuters: Industry lobby group Nasscom was responding to a bill introduced by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, that would double the minimum salary required for holders of H-1B visas to $130,000 and determine how many of the visas were allocated, based on factors such as overall wages. India's $150 billion information technology sector, led by Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, uses the H-1B visas to fly engineers and developers to service clients in the U.S., their biggest market, but opponents say they are using the visas to replace U.S. workers. Concerns about President Donald Trump's immigration policies were heightened by his ban on refugees on Friday. "The Lofgren Bill contains provisions that may prove challenging for the Indian IT sector and will also leave loopholes that will nullify the objective of saving American jobs," Nasscom said.

Comments

Re:Does this bill mean....

[naughtynaughty]

This has nothing to do with Permanent Residents, they aren't here on H-1B visas

There is no labor shortage in tech.

[pecosdave]

There's a shortage of below minimum wage labor within our borders.

Call centers tend to be run as sweat shops to squeeze as much tech work out of as minimally qualified people as possible for a little pay as they can offer to get them to show up to work. India was the solution to pay even less to get equally unqualified work.

The problem with tech isn't the lack of people willing to work tech, there's thousands of reasonably good techs that are jobless in every major city. It's the way companies view tech. Bean counters see tech as a pure expense since I.T. rarely brings money into the company directly. The job of I.T. is to enable everyone else in the company to bring money in. Sadly I.T. is seen as the equivalent to cleaning staff or the electrician that had a job to do but never left by many organizations. This view of I.T. is part of why so many companies that shun tech are often caught without good backups and easily fall prey to ransomware. At least ransomware makers are profiting from the mindset.

Re:Labor shortage in engineering?

[smooth wombat]

Considering the tens of thousands of software developers and engineers who are laid off each year by companies such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco and so on, and all the people coming into the market after graduation, I don't think that pool will ever be empty.

What might be empty are people with the exact qualifications a company may want, but all that needs to be done is a little retraining.

If companies insist on wanting someone with the exact, no-other-options, candidate for a position and are unwilling to offer training, they deserve to go under.