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Indian IT Companies Are in Trump’s Crosshairs

Top companies like Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant will not be able to apply for green cards for H-1B visa workers.

U.S. President Donald Trump is pressing home the advantage, as they say in sports. After showcasing the biggest advertisement for his stiff tariff policy against India — the Essar Group’s American subsidiary announcing an $18-billion investment in a U.S. steel project — Trump is going full throttle. This time, the target was Indian information technology (IT) companies.

On October 8, the U.S. suspended several companies from the Permanent Labor Certification Program, which allows firms to apply for green cards for H-1B visa workers, saying the practice takes jobs away from Americans. The most affected companies are Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, and HCL.

U.S. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said the U.S. government would not accept or process any new or pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies.

U.S. journalist Fareed Zakaria said that Trump, a real estate developer, assesses who holds more leverage and pushes as hard and publicly as possible to dominate and extract the maximum price. Trump knows very well that the U.S. market is India’s Achilles’ heel.

The United States is a major destination for Indian goods, a crucial market for its IT companies, and an important source of employment opportunities for Indian professionals. Trump is using this leverage. The U.S. president, like the chief minister of any Indian state, is claiming that his tariff policies are bringing investment and manufacturing jobs to the U.S. He is welcoming foreign capital, not foreign labor. Vice President J.D. Vance said that the action was a response to companies abusing the system to hire lower-paid foreign workers at the expense of U.S. workers. His ire was directed at Microsoft, whose CEO, Satya Nadella, is of Indian origin.

According to Microsoft’s diversity data, Asian employees make up approximately 34.9 percent of Microsoft’s overall workforce. Some say a major chunk of this comprises Indians. This is why Vance lashed out at Microsoft, saying the company had abused the H-1B visa system to replace laid-off American citizens with foreign workers. He asserted that “no company in the United States, unfortunately, has abused this system more than Microsoft.”

The pressure is coming from........

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