Indians have long been proud of what they see as their outperformance in the information technology sector. Companies such as Infosys Ltd. and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. dominate IT-enabled services, bringing home billions of dollars in profits. US technology giants including Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp., and International Business Machines Corp. have Indian-origin CEOs. India-trained engineers labor in the trenches of Silicon Valley and invisibly help Western companies adapt to the digital age.

It turns out that others have noticed this as well, and they aren’t happy. Over the past fortnight, Indians have watched aghast as victorious Republicans in the US have torn into each other over the future of H-1B visas.

The temporary work permits are the only real way to employ Indian immigrants in the US, since national caps make it nearly impossible for them to get a green card. What quickly became clear was that the intra-GOP argument had less to do with fixing the H-1B system than whether all these Indian engineers were welcome in the first place. Some on the left, like Senator Bernie Sanders, joined in the right’s chorus, deriding H-1B recipients as “low-wage indentured........

© Bloomberg