BENGALURU: The Donald Trump administration’s proposal to not extend H-1B visas of those waiting for their Green Cards (permanent residency), if accepted, will have major ramifications for Indian IT professionals, IT industry body Nasscom said. US competitiveness will also be seriously affected, Nasscom added.

Any such change in regulations will create a sudden reduction of skilled professionals in the US. For all the rhetoric of hiring locally, America is seen to be severely short of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) skills, making it imperative for MNCs to send thousands of skilled workers on H-1B visas to the US.

“The US has a big skill gap. Out of the 2 million vacant STEM jobs, 1 million are in IT related areas. All these measures, mostly political and emotive, aren’t changing the skills gap and will hurt the American economy. All these factors have to be kept in mind by the US administration,” said Nasscom president R Chandrasekhar.

Stephen Yale-Loehr, professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School , said that if the administration goes forward with the changes, companies and H-1B workers can sue to stop the changes. Among other things, they will argue that only the US Congress can make such a drastic change. They can also say that it is unfair to change the rules mid-stream, while H-1B workers have been waiting patiently in line for years to get a green card, Yale-Loehr said.

It will be several months before any change actually takes place, if at all.

“If the administration goes forward, they would first need to publish the proposed changes in a publication called the Federal Register. Then they would need to wait a month or longer to accept comments from the public about the proposed change. Then they would need to read and evaluate the comments before they could publish afinal rule,” Yale-Loehr said. So the whole process would take several months.



In Video: US plans change in H-1B visa rules, Indians may get affected