Notwithstanding objections raised by American tech giants, US President Donald Trump will sign an executive order this week to ban work visas including H-1B and L1. The move will have a huge impact on Indian tech graduates eyeing jobs in the US.

The order is likely to be signed on Monday or Tuesday.

“Trump is taking this action to prevent jobs from being given to non-Americans,” said an executive of a multinational tech company in Boston. “But the fact is that there is a shortage of graduates with skills in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Big tech companies hire Indians and Chinese because there are not enough Americans qualified for the job. So, even if Trump was to ban H-1B, it is not going to create jobs for the locals.”

A Chicago thinktank founded by former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry M. Paulson and run by the Paulson Institute found that only 20 per cent of the world’s top artificial intelligence researchers come from the US.

“The move to ban H-1B is misguided. This will have major impact on American companies as they won’t get the talent they need for cutting edge work. While Indian IT services also depend on H-1B, most of the large IT services companies are hiring locally to reduce reliance on sending techies from India,” said a Nasscom executive.

Trump, in a television interview, said that there could be some exclusions but those will be limited. “In some cases you have to have exclusions because in some cases you have to have them for big business that have had certain people coming for a very long time, but very little exclusions and they are pretty tight and we may even go very tight for a big period of time. The US has been dealing with high unemployment rates following business closures on account of the Covid19 pandemic,” he said.

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