The Hindu Business Line : US Senators slam IT cos again

New Delhi, June 27 Even as the US Senate gears-up to resume the debate on the controversial Immigration Bill, Senators Richard Durbin and Chuck Grassley have fired yet another salvo at offshore IT firms — this time claiming that foreign outsourcing companies were “abusing” the L-Visa programme. The two Senators have used the data from the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services to point out that the top 20 H1-B users — which include Indian IT companies such as TCS, Satyam, Wipro and Infosys — were also the heaviest users of L-Visas (used for intra-company transfers) in fiscal 2006.The H1-B visa is a non-immigrant visa, which allows a US company to employ a foreign individual for up to six years. H1-B visas are subject to annual numerical limits, and petitioning US employer may place the H1-B worker on the worksite of another employer if all stipulated rules are followed. The L1 visa is a non-immigrant visa which allows companies operating both in the US and abroad to transfer certain classes of employee from its foreign operations to the US operations.

“Some of these companies have hundreds, and in some cases thousands of L visa workers. I find it hard to believe that any one company has that many individuals that are legitimately being transferred within a single year. I find it even harder to believe that these L visas are being used appropriately when many of the same companies are some of the largest employers of H1-B workers. It’s clear that foreign outsourcing firms are abusing the system and we can’t let that continue,” Senator Durbin has said. India’s largest IT services exporter TCS has topped the list of L-Visa users for the financial year 2006 with 4,887 visas, according to the two senators. TCS had 3,046 H1-B visas for the same period. Within the top 20 list, Satyam had 950 L-Visas and 2,880 H1-B visas; Wipro 839 L-Visas and 4,002 H1-B visas; HCL 511 L-visas and 910 H1-B visas and Infosys Technologies 294 L-visas and 4,908 H1-B visas.

Others in the top 20 list included Cognizant, IBM Corporation, Deloitte & Touche, Patni Computer Systems, Intel Corporation, Kanbay Inc, Honeywell International, HP, Accenture, Oracle, Syntel, and Microsoft, according to the Senators.

In a posting on his own site, Senator Grassley said that the information indicated many of the companies identified as using the most H1-B visas were the same companies that used the most L-Visas. “Under the current law, employers can use the L-visa program to evade restrictions on the H1-B program because it does not include protection for American workers.

This demonstrates the need for additional checks on the L-visa programme,” he said. They had written to 9 Indian firms, asking them for details.

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