The Hindu Business Line : Plea to US not to impose restrictions on H1, B1 visas

Bangalore, April 25 The Bangalore Chamber of Industry & Commerce has urged the US Senate to reconsider its decision to impose further restrictions on the number of H1 and B1 Visas, which allow highly skilled guest workers to work in the US for temporary periods.

Stating that the move was unfortunate, BCIC said with a cap already prevalent on issuing such visas, any further restriction would only increase the shortage of skilled workers so critical for information technology and some other high skill sectors in the US.

Bad for relations

The leading IT companies in the US, including Microsoft, have vouched time and again about the utility and value of such workers for the US economy and the competitiveness of leading companies there. “The move will have an adverse impact on Indian IT majors who rely on such visas to meet their offshore requirements in the US market and will be discriminatory, protectionist and anti-competition hurting the US economy as well as the Indo-US economic partnership. The contention that such guest workers may be low-skilled, thereby taking away US jobs, is unsustainable as the category of jobs tends to be highly-skilled that suffer labour shortage.”

BCIC expressed its hope that the new US administration, which has made known that it does not desire to encourage protectionism, would examine the scheme in its entirety and desist from doing anything that will hurt competition, US competitiveness and prolong the downturn that much longer, besides further harming multilateral trade negotiations in the WTO, which appear to be already on the rocks.

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