The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) — the industry body for information technology (IT) in India — has stepped up its lobbying with US lawmakers to get them to change rules pertaining to immigration.
The stress could be on the H1-B visa, which the current administration under US President Donald Trump has cut to quite an extent, forcing IT firms to look to Americans as prospective employees.
The step has led to drastic job cuts in the hitherto burgeoning Indian IT sector, which is valued at $150 billion. Nasscom itself may have refuted some of these reports, but it has also urged IT professionals to "re-skill" themselves — learn skills that are more relevant to the industry now and where there is a paucity of manpower — in order to become employable again.
Now, it seems, the industry body has stepped up its lobbying with US lawmakers in order to possibly effect changes in laws of that country so more Indian IT employees can be redeployed there. The biggest indicator of this heightened lobbying is the increase in lobbying spend that Nasscom has incurred.
The US Senate requires that lobbying disclosure reports be filed with it in order to lend a degree of transparency to national politics. According to these reports, Nasscom has — in the first quarter of the calendar year 2017 — spent $150,000 in lobbying with US lawmakers. This is a jump of more than 36 percent, or more than a third of its earlier quarterly expenditure on lobbying, which had stood at $110,000.
According to a PTI report, Nasscom uses two lobbyists to reach out to US lawmakers — the Lande Group and Wexler & Walker. The latter is a unit of Hill+Knowlton Strategies. Nasscom in January-March 2017 paid the Lande Group $50,000, the same as it had been paid every quarter in 2016. However, Wexler & Walker got $100,000 as opposed to the $60,000 in the four previous quarters.
The issues that were lobbied upon included "high skill immigration, green cards, visa processing, US-India relations, US-India matters, tax reform, (and) border adjustment tax." It might not be amiss to surmise that "high skill immigration" might have included the H1-B visa, on which Trump has passed an executive order to curb "misuse."
Meanwhile, IT layoffs are casting an increasong shadow on the industry, with one estimate claiming that as many as 56,000 people across seven companies could be handed the pink slip in 2017 alone. Some others have predicted that 6 lakh jobs across major IT companies are "under threat." This, even as Infosys hires around 10,000 people locally in the US.
