Washington: The US has accused top Indian IT firms TCS and Infosys of unfairly cornering the lion's share of H-1B visas by putting extra tickets in the lottery system, which the Trump administration wants to replace with a more merit-based immigration policy.
At a White House briefing last week, an official in the Trump administration said a small number of giant outsourcing firms flood the system with applications which naturally ups their chances of success in the lottery draw.
Responding to a follow up on why Indian companies were singled out for a mention, the White House response said Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Cognizant were the top three recipients of H-1B visas.
"And those three companies are companies that have an average wage for H-1B visas between USD 60,000 and USD 65,000 (a year). By contrast, the median Silicon Valley software engineer's wage is probably around USD 150,000," the official said.
He said contracting firms that are not skills employers, who oftentimes use workers for entry-level positions, capture the lion's share of H-1B visas. "And that's all public record."
The official said H-1B visas presently were awarded through random lottery with about 80 per cent of H-1B workers being paid less than the median wage in their fields.
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"Only about 5 to 6 percent, depending on the year, of H-1B workers command the highest wage tier recognised by the Department of Labour, there being four wage tiers. And the highest wage tier, for instance, in 2015, was only 5 percent of H1B workers," he said.
So if the current system that awards visas randomly without regard for skill or wage is changed to a skills-based awarding, it would make it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers, he said.
"Because you're not bringing in workers at beneath the market wage. And so it's a very elegant way of solving very systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa," he said.
ALSO READ: US Tells India no Significant Change in H1B Visa Regime(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)