In a recent Bollywood blockbuster, actor Sanjay Dutt sends thousands of flowers to the villain who has unlawfully laid claim to his girlfriend’s house, and is refusing to vacate it. In doing so he adopts Mahatma Gandhi’s method of peaceful protest, a figure he is inspired by in the film, and “wrests” the house back for his sweetheart.

July saw this romantic ideal being extended to real life when a group of Indians seeking green cards sent thousands of flowers to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director, Emilio Gonzalez. These Indian H-1B visa holders were working toward a July 2nd deadline for green-card applications, but were driven to protest when the USCIS retracted on the deadline on grounds that the quota for green cards had already been filled, and it could not accept any more applications.

The green-card issue is the most recent of a series of immigrant and non-immigrant visa-related issues that have cropped up in the past two months. On the non-immigrant side, technology companies with a predominantly offshoring model have been accused of misusing the non-immigrant H-1B and L-1 visas issued to them, by bringing in cheaper labor from overseas, thereby taking away the chance of qualified Americans who would wire much higher amounts to their banks.

Charge of Abuse

In May, two U.S. Senators charged some of the leading Indian tech outsourcing firms of misusing the H-1B visas issued to them, stirring up protectionist sentiments and opening up the outsourcing debate once again.

The companies targeted include Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Satyam, Patni, Larsen & Tourbo Infotech, i-Flex Solutions, Tech Mahindra and MphasiS. These companies were amongst the highest users of H-1B visas in 2006, together accounting for over 30 percent (or 19,912) of the 65,000 H-1Bs allowed last year. This is the first time that the list of H-1B visa recipients was made available.

Senators Dick Durbin and Chuck Grassley demanded to know from these companies how they were using the visas allocated to them: How many U.S. citizens they employ in the U.S.; what percentage of their total workforce are H-1B visa holders; what is the average wage of their H-1B visa holders; what are their efforts in recruiting Americans for the positions for which they employ H-1B workers?

Then in June the Senators turned up the heat on these firms by releasing a list of the top users of the L-1 visas. They drove home the point that of the top 20 users of the L-1 visas in fiscal 2006, nearly half are Indian IT outsourcing firms that are also among the top users of the H-1B visas. They include TCS, Satyam, Wipro and Patni, and together account for about 45 percent of total L-1s allocated to the top 20 users of these visas! (See table for list of the top 20 H-1B and L-1 visa holders for 2006.)

Company	No. of H-1B Visas, 2006
Infosys Technologies	4,908
Wipro	4,402
Microsoft	3,117
Tata Consultancy Services	3,046
Satyam Computer Services	2,880
Cognizant Tech. Solutions	2,226
Patni Computer Systems	1,391
IBM	1,130
Oracle U.S.A.	1,022
Larsen & Toubro Infotech	947
HCL America	910
Deloitte & Touche	890
Cisco Systems	828
Intel	828
I-Flex Solutions	817
Ernst & Young	774
Tech Mahindra Americas	770
Motorola	760
MphasiS	751
Deloitte Consulting	665

H-1B visas are issued to companies to hire and bring foreign skilled workers (engineers, doctors, nurses, architects, mathematicians) to the U.S. at salaries comparable to their U.S. counterparts. Companies can hire such staff only if the skills that they bring aren’t available locally. There is also a cap on the H-1Bs — 65,000 as of now, though in 2000 it went up to as much as 195,000. L-1s, on the other hand, are allocated to companies with offices both in the U.S. and abroad for bringing their foreign workers to work in the U.S. for a short while.

IT outsourcing firms — not just Indian firms, but equally American ones — have been charged of misusing these two types of visas allocated to them. Protectionist forces have alleged that foreign outsourcing companies bring their employees into the U.S. on the H-1B and L-1 visas to get them trained on the work done by Americans, and then offshore that piece of work abroad. Moreover, since these guest workers purportedly come in “cheaper,” they work as inexpensive onsite resources to coordinate the offshore functions.

Following this, corporate America, and indeed even the Indian outsourcing firms, riding their fortunes on the back of a global economy, feared a backlash reminiscent of the 2004 Presidential elections when John Kerry and his democrats raised job losses as a result of outsourcing as one of their campaigning placards. Some of these fears proved founded — Patni, one of the Indian companies charged of visa misuse, will be paying $2.4 million in back wages to 607 of its H-1B employees, whom it purportedly brought to the U.S. under salaries lower to what U.S. workers would get paid for similar work.

In Defense of the Indians

Meanwhile, the accused Indian companies responded to the Senators toward the end of June through the country’s high-profile association of software and services companies, Nasscom. When contacted by Global Services, Nasscom declined to comment, though in its statement issued to the press it held the Indian companies in question as abiding by the law, while shifting the blame to smaller, “fly-by-night” operators.