India Software Body Sees U.S. H1-B Visa Lull Pushing Jobs Offshore

The U.S. immigration office said Tuesday that it already has enough applications to fill all the available slots until Oct. 1 for the popular H1-B visa under which American companies hire foreign workers for a limited time period.

"Some of the work [carried out in the United States] will now move offshore," Kiran Karnik, president of India's National Association of Software and Service Companies, told The Associated Press.

He said U.S. firms that want to hire foreign workers at lower costs will just move the jobs to countries such as India if they cannot bring them to America to work.

Most Indian software firms depend on the H1-B visa to send low-cost workers to their clients' offices in the United States. The nonimmigrant visa is valid for three years and can be extended by another three years.

The H1-B visa program is controversial. Critics say it allows businesses to fill jobs with cheap foreign labor rather than hiring Americans at higher wages.

Also, one of the principal tasks of foreign workers is to learn the clients' operations and prepare a plan to move jobs to cheap foreign locations.

Karnik said large Indian firms have enough workers with H1-B visas to sustain them over the next few months. Smaller firms that have started out recently will be affected, however.

"But overall, we don't see a major impact' on India's software revenues," Karnik said.

The U.S. Congress in 2000 temporarily raised the number of H-1B visas available to 195,000 from 65,000 in response to the high-tech boom and the outcry from U.S. businesses about worker shortages. But that increase expired last Sept. 30 and the cap went back to 65,000.

India derives two-thirds of its software export revenues from the United States. Total revenues are expected to reach US$13 billion for the fiscal year ending March 2004.

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