Is H1B misused by Indian/US outsourcing firms?
Disclaimer: This post represents my personal views on a strongly controversial topic. First, my employer, Sun Microsystems cannot be held responsible for whatever I have mentioned here. Second, this post is mainly influenced by the letter from the Senators available in the open domain and any dispute to the post should not be addressed to me. I will make sure that I will update this post if and only if I know about the response given by these companies to the letter.
On May 16, two US Senators, Charles E. Grassley (Republician) and Richard J. Durbin (Democrat) questioned about the suspected misuse of H1B visas by the outsourcing firms (mainly Indian) like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, Patni, etc. H1B visas are mainly intended to improve the competitiveness in the workforce and they should be used when there is no US workforce available to fill those vacancies. However, it is evident that the outsourcing companies use this visa for a different purpose. They mainly use this visa to facilitate the outsourcing of jobs from US to offshore. This really is a genuine concern and the outsourcing companies are bound to answer this.
The H1B visa holders from such companies are mostly posted on the client site and there is a major complaint that they receive lesser than the prevailing wages. Also the employer is not trying to fill the position using US workforce before they try to hire a H1B candidate for that. This should never be entertained because of the fact that it doesn’t really to any value add to the competitiveness of the workforce. When there is a lot of requests coming in from companies like Microsoft to increase the H1B quota, it appears that 20000 (around 30%) of H1B visas are used by the top 9 Indian outsourcing firms. If one adds the number from US outsourcing firms who have major presence in India(like Accenture and CTS), the count is going to be still higher.
Here is the letter issued by the Senators to Infosys.
