The software industry is now worried. President Barack Obama’s re-election, they fear, might bring in work-visa restrictions.
“This is because many US businesses want to outsource jobs within the the country,” said a senior official at IT major Infosys.
IT companies such as TCS, Wipro and HCL have several hundreds of employees sent for specific numbers of years abroad. But employees at these firms feel the difficulty of obtaining US visas will worsen now. Experts say that last year, over 50 per cent of Indian professional’s initial requests for L-1B visas that allow employees with “specialized knowledge” to work in the US, were rejected by US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Procuring large numbers of H-1B for the US that allow educated foreign workers with US employer sponsors to stay for about six years and work in select technical areas, have also become difficult in the last three years, say experts. “The rejection rate for visas was just about 5 per cent in 2007 and even less before that. The scrutiny has increased now,” said Arun Jayaraman, human resources head of an IT major.
