The bill approved by voice vote on Wednesday also prohibits H-1B dependent employers from replacing American workers with H-1B employees.
The recent move to impose restrictions on companies using H-1B visa will adversely affect Indian IT companies, according to experts.
“The Bill is very narrowly focused on H-1B dependent companies,” Rajkamal Rao, Managing Director of US-based Rao Advisors was quoted as saying by The Hindu.
According to the bill passed by the House Judiciary Committee, the H-1B dependent employers will have to increase the minimum pay to the visa holders to $90,000.
“This will primarily affect low-level techies dependent upon contract jobs to stay in the US. It will be a double whammy for them because they are hired by staffing companies (Indian IT services companies) in the hopes of placing them at low wages,” he added.
Once the bill becomes law, the companies will have to change their business models to sustain in the market.
Some experts are of the opinion that the changes in the law would harm the US business since it imposes restrictions on companies that immensely contribute to the US economy.
“It also could disrupt the marketplace, threaten thousands of US jobs, and stifle US innovation by unfairly and arbitrarily targeting a handful of companies who used just 16 percent of the new H-1B visas in FY 2016 while imposing no new requirements on the vast majority of companies that use the visas to do the same exact same things,” said R Chandrashekhar, president of NASSCOM, a not-for-profit industry association in India.
According to the official data, the US currently has a shortage of about two million STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) workers. Since India has an excess of those skills, India is likely to fill in the gap and Indian IT professional would be in high demand.
“Unfortunately, this legislation is being driven by myths, not reality. US government data show very significant shortages of high skill talent around the country. The data show that the high skill visa programmes are not a major cause of US unemployment, and IT specialists working on temporary visas are not cheap labor,” said Chandrashekhar.
The bill approved by voice vote on Wednesday also prohibits H-1B dependent employers from replacing American workers with H-1B employees.
It also lengthens the no-layoff policy for H-1B dependent employers and their client companies for as long an H-1B employee works at the company, which means they cannot layoff equivalent U.S. workers.