US restrictions on visa

H1-B visa curb to hurt Indian aspirants for US jobs
by Swati

Bangalore: The time when young budding IT professionals of Bangalore would head to the United States for either higher studies or to fetch themselves the 'dream' job, seems almost to be over. The US gives 65,000 H1B work visas every year and over 45,000 of them go to Indian professionals, mostly from the IT sector. But with the US Senate imposing restrictions on hiring foreigners on H1-B visa, the feeling has come hitting hard on the highly skilled Indians that the door to the US might actually close for them. The U.S. Senate in early February while agreeing to an economic stimulus package sought by President Barack Obama, approved by a voice vote to bar recipients of federal relief funds from receiving H-1B visas to hire foreign workers if they had laid off U.S. employees in the previous six months. R. Kartik Shekhar, secretary, Union for Information and Technology, Bangalore said that jobs are being cut not only in the United States, but in other countries as well and that is why the fear of the unknown future looms large for Indian IT professionals. "It is not a question of US alone, it is a global phenomenon. There will be jobs that will be cut, and there will be lot of downsizing. Some of these would be based on reality and some of them would be based on fear. Fear of the unknown as to what is going to happen in times to come. Things are going to be bad and tight in the immediate foreseeable future," said Shekhar. Besides the economic recession hitting developed economies, the Indian IT professionals are equally worried over the fallout of the fraud hitting one of India's IT major Satyam. Jayraj Menon Kraniu, an IT professional said that over 10, 000 Indians have already lost their jobs. "The new policy has not exactly impacted, but what has happened is those who are already there and those companies which have lost business or those companies which are taking a bailout and the Satyam scam have togetherly (together) acting in a way wherein some people have been asked to come back. We figure out this number around 10, 000 plus and these people have already come back to India," said Kraniu. The US senate curb on the H1B visas came shortly after it was announced that in the United States 598,000 jobs were lost in January, the biggest one-month drop in 34 years. The unemployment rate soared to a 16-year high of 7.6 per cent.
-Feb 20, 2009

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