The efficacy of this as a deterrent seems to depend on the notion that India would like its citizens to be able to obtain H1 visas from the US.
Is that the case?
Is that the case?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittances_to_India [2] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...
Yes, because it directly affects the business of large outsourcing companies. It also drops remittances, one of the largest sources of dollars for India.
No, because for many decades, India has been trying to keep their smartest citizens to build their own country. Making local companies, serving at local hospitals, teaching at local schools and universities. They want their own Google, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Adobe instead of Indian citizens working in the US for US corporations. They were just unsuccessful for so many years because countries like US drained the well-educated so much.
Ultimately, this will be a great deal for India. India doesn't want remittances. They want their own companies to make software that the world wants to buy.
What I mean is: How are the outsourcing companies affected by this?
Likewise, many employees at big cos who are actually 'vendors' are employees of outsourcing companies working at offices located in America.
Imagine GE, a company with a pool of power electronics talent in the US, wants to build specialized power plants for the Indian market. They can't do it remotely from the US. They will fly their US employees to India to study the market, understand rules and constraints, design and consult local Indian teams. The US employees need to stay there for years to build those things.
All that requires India to give US citizens the visa to work for such a long time. And India does give that. Business visas in India are easy to get.
Reverse the roles and if an Indian company wants to use their own pool of talent to do business in the US, H-1b are the only ones available for long term business related work, which got totally distorted by politics over the years.
https://www.usa-corporate.com/start-us-company-non-resident/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-1_visa
>L-1 visas are available to employees of an international company with offices in both the United States and abroad. The visa allows such foreign workers to relocate to the corporation's US office after having worked abroad for the company for at least one continuous year within the previous three prior to admission in the US. The US and non-US employers must be related in one of four ways: parent and subsidiary; branch and headquarters; sister companies owned by a mutual parent; or "affiliates" owned by the same or people in approximately the same percentages.[2]
Although when I look at the top companies utilizing them, you see it is Tata.
Still, it's separate from the H1 and not subject to the H1 cap.
Capping H1B is classic Trump and threatening to cap it based on complaisance with a particular pro-US policy goal, doubly so.
Fundamentally, Trump believes America has tremendous amounts of value that it “gives away” too freely to competing countries in terms of access to our education, employment, and markets (visas and trade). He’s willing to leverage the value of cheap visas and cheap trade to obtain foreign policy goals.
I get this. But what Trump fails to grasp is that our own ecosystem in the US relies heavily on sucking MIT, Harvard, Stanford level people from other countries. Stopping that is a boon for other countries who not only have their own smart people starting companies locally but also have fewer American companies competing in general since America hemorrhaged that innovation ecosystem.
But in practice, it's not that simple. US businesses do well largely because our market is not nearly as corrupted by politics the way things are in India. Chinese companies do well because the communist party cracks down on corruption with brutal force. But in India? Corruption is how work is done. There are real stability issues at play and they manifest themselves even in the elite companies and institutions. This is the same country that almost sank its own nuclear submarine because someone left a hatch open...
So yeah, it sounds nice to keep Indian workers in India, but without a political landscape that is stable enough to support something like an Indian Silicon Valley and earn the trust of investors, there's no guarantee they will offset the loss of US remittances on the current H1B workers.