Visa disaster.

Byline: Rafia Zakaria

INDIA has been having a bad summer. The Nepalese have face-palmed them, the Chinese have taken territory they said belonged to them, and now Donald Trump has dealt a deathblow to hundreds of thousands of Indians. Last Monday, June 22, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order that mandated an immediate stop in the processing of all H-1B, J, and L visas. The order, which is already in effect, is set to expire at the end of the year and will primarily affect Indian tech workers who make up over 70 per cent of all grantees in the H-1B category. Those who already hold H-1B visas are not expected to be impacted by the order, although it is unclear whether H-1B extensions will continue to be processed.

Over the past decade, US tech companies like Google and Microsoft have employed hundreds of thousands of engineers in the sector. In addition to them, Indian companies like Infosys and Tata, which have also established a presence in Silicon Valley, were also using the visas to bring high-skilled Indian workers to the US. In addition to the H-1B visa, which is usually capped at about 85,000 issuances a year, awarded by a lottery system, Indian firms in the US had already become quite adept at using an L visa for intra-company transfers to bring thousands of Indian workers to the US.

Now those days have come to an end. Trump administration officials complained that these companies were using third party and outsourcing companies to bring in workers who were paid less than American workers and were thus responsible for driving down American wages. An analysis of the numbers does show that firms like Tata and Infosys were filing for thousands of visas (far more than employers like Apple and Amazon) and were paying workers on average about 70pc of what an American worker would have been paid. Since the employees were beholden to the employers, who were their ticket to the US labour market, they could never complain about this (if their wages were lower than what was stated in the paperwork) or bring it to the attention of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services. The companies have long denied the allegation, but a look at the statistics does make a case for the Trump administration; last year, 278,491 visas went to Indians, about 50,408 to Chinese, and then 58,303 to people from other countries. (This count includes new H-1Bs and extensions.) In sum, India had established dominance in the category as a means of...