Editorial: Body shopping for the H-1B

Elon Musk, who had previously vowed to go to war on account of defending the H-1B visa programme, has tiptoed around the contentious issue by saying that there is a need for reforms in the broken system that the US relies on, in order to onboard skilled foreign workers to the US. The Tesla head, who had come under fire from MAGA loyalists, offered a backtracked solution which sought the raising of the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H-1B, which would make it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.

One might recall that president-elect Donald Trump during his first term had restricted the H-1B programme in 2020, arguing that it allows businesses to replace Americans with lower-paid foreign workers. He had unveiled a “Hire American” policy that directed changes to the programme to try to ensure the visas were awarded to the highest-paid or most-skilled applicants. Immigration hardliners have been pushing for scrapping the programme. The recent developments transpired in the aftermath of a right-wing influencer Laura Loomer calling out Trump for selecting Indian-American entrepreneur Sriram Krishnan as an adviser on AI policy in his upcoming administration. Loomer had declared that the tech executives who have aligned themselves with Trump were doing so to enrich themselves, mirroring the sentiments of several MAGA loyalists who are unhappy with the slew of plum positions in the Trump administration that have been handed to immigrants of Indian origin.

The conservative base argues that rather than bring in top foreign talent, the 0.1%, US corporations and offshoring companies have gamed the system through body shopping and recruiting lakhs of relatively lower wage IT and financial services professionals, suppressing the wages of American workers, and often replacing these staffers. The stakes are particularly high for India as 73% of H-1B visas go to Indian students and professionals as part of a globalisation drive that was kicked off in the early 1990s. The 'disproportionate' allocation becomes clear when you consider that the Chinese have only bagged 13% of these visas while 0.3% has gone to European nationals like those from Germany.

Today, Indians make up around 1.5% of the US population, and MAGA backers are viewing the H-1B visa as a conduit for allowing a large number of Indians to settle in America, creating a steady flow of remittances (to the tune of $120 bn, which made the US the biggest source of remittances to India). Trump's base believes that this in turn will beef up political influence aligned with New Delhi's interests. And now, to add insult to injury, MAGA apologists are training their guns on Optional Practical Training (OPT) programme, which helps foreign students and graduates, with many of them from India, to stay back in the US to gain some much-needed work experience.

A Congressional Research Service report tells us that in 2023, there were 1.5 mn F1 and M1 (vocational training) students and recent graduates in the US. Close to 23% or 3.44 lakh of those were authorised to work through OPT. Neutralising this programme would effectively mean that these students would have to leave the US following graduation, sans the advantage of employment experience. Needless to say, such regressive measures will only contribute towards denting the talent pool available to the US, diminishing its prospects as the hub of innovation and opportunity for enterprising foreign workers.