President Donald Trump’s H-1B reforms will shrink the Fortune 500’s large-scale use of cheap Indian gig-workers, say opponents and supporters.
The immediate beneficiaries may include thousands of middle-class Americans at the Vanguard Group, Ascension Healthcare, and other companies who have been told they will soon lose their jobs to Indian contract-workers imported by Indian-run staffing companies, such as HCL and Infosys. The staffing H-1B gig-workers comprise seven-in-ten of the more than 600,000 H-1Bs in the United States.
Industry representatives and lawyers are objecting to the new rules, which will dramatically raise the cost of hiring foreign workers and reduce the CEOs’ incentives to sideline young American graduates and mid-career American professionals.
For example, Indian staffing companies that import H-1B workers will only be allowed to keep them in the United States for one year, instead of six years. Also, U.S. companies would have to pay higher salaries to their imported gig-worker programmers, doctors, accountants, and designers.
Opponents of Trump’s rules say they will damage the Indian-dominated outsourcing business.
“It is clear that by erecting significant barriers to third-party worksite placement, DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has decided to make America great again by returning us to the time before contracting out and specialization existed,” immigration lawyer Vic Goel of Goel & Anderson told Forbes for an October 7 article.
[…] Companies will be forced to pay an extra $38,000 to an inexperienced engineer contract-worker in San Jose, California, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy. That would bump the worker’s salary up from $88,710 up to $127,042. Similarly, employers would have to raise the $53,810 pay for an imported “medical scientist” in Boston up to $66,622, said the foundation, which strongly opposes curbs on visa workers. […]
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