NASSCOM Chief sees US Visa limits as 'business killer'

I know this topic does not pertain to Indian housing however the sheer mornic arguments made by Som Mittal makes me wonder whether he is cocooned 20000 ft below the Indian Ocean and expects US Congressmen and Senators believe asnine press releases.

What Som Mittal doesn't say is that Indian offshore providers want to ship in cheap Indian engineers while billing the end customer market rates. The onsite wage arbitrage was exploited by Infosys/TCS/Wipro who shipped thousands of engineers on H-1B and L1-B visa to the US until Mr Grassley and Mr Durbin stepped in and put a brake to these unfair trade practices.

I'm not sure how Mr Som Mittal can explain a shortage of US trained IT workers when there is unemployment leves at 10%+ with underemployment at 15% levels. How can American competitiveness improve by issuing Visa when local work-force is unemployed ?

These press releases show that Nascomm is nothing more then shill for Indian IT companies and does not care about work-force whether Indian or American. They will exploit Indian engineers by paying them below market wages and thereby drive American workers out of their choses professions. The only ones to benefit are the owners and top management of these companies and the politcians in India who they suck up to, to get free land, tax-exempt SEZ's and other benefits.

WASHINGTON: The head of an Indian trade group fears proposals in US Congress to limit visas for foreign high-tech workers would be a "business killer" for India's burgeoning information technology industry and would not reduce US unemployment.

Som Mittal, president of India's National Association of Software and Service Cos (NASSCOM), was concerned that pending legislation would sharply restrict the hiring of foreign workers by domestic and overseas companies operating in the US, harming rather than helping the US economy.

Two senators, Democrat Richard J Durbin and Republican Charles E Grassley have proposed legislation that would prevent any large company from hiring more foreign high-tech workers if more than half its work force already consists of visa-holding foreigners.

"It's a business killer for us," Mittal said, adding that such a move could harm US competitiveness and was not needed anyway because there are not enough Americans to fill the high-tech jobs.

The Grassley-Durbin visa reform bill was first introduced in 2007. Congress is preoccupied with health care and climate change legislation, but Mittal said he fears that elements of the visa bill could be incorporated in immigration legislation that Congress is expected to take up next year.

US technology giants argue that they need more, not fewer, foreign workers to tackle highly technical jobs.

"Sixty percent of all technology PhDs are foreign nationals," Mittal said. "[The visa requirement] could be detrimental to the US economy. You do want to retain the best and brightest."

The industry also needs the ability to make rapid changes to its work force in response to demand or new product development, he told a newspaper.

Launching a new product in the United States requires the temporary infusion of technicians from the country where the product was developed, he said.

It's no different, he said, when a company such as General Electric is building power systems in India - the company will need to temporarily assign a substantial number of US technicians to India.

The Indian information technology sector - with export revenues of $47 billion - includes the software, design and back-office outsourcing industries. It is critical to US technology and financial services companies, Mittal said.