India’s commerce minister lashes out at ‘highly discriminatory’ US proposal to raise visa fees

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India protests US Senate bill to raise visa fees

MUMBAI, India — India is protesting a bill in the U.S. Congress that would increase visa fees for foreign workers in the U.S. as discriminating against Indian companies.

“It is inexplicable to our companies to bear the cost of such a highly discriminatory law,” the Commerce Ministry said in a statement Tuesday that included excerpts of a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

The legislation would raise fees for H1B and L1 visas, which outsourcing companies use to send workers to the U.S. for project work. The fee increases would only be levied on companies where over half of U.S.-based employees use work visas.

The bill sponsored by Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, passed in the Senate last week and in the U.S. House on Tuesday. President Barack Obama is expected to sign it into law. The money the fee increases would raise would be used to pay for heightened security on the U.S.-Mexico border.

India’s Commerce Minister Anand Sharma said in his letter to Kirk that the bill would cost Indian companies over $200 million a year.

He argued the bill unfairly targets Indian companies because U.S. companies like IBM, Microsoft and Intel — which he says use more foreign-worker visas than Indian companies — would not be liable for the increased fees because a greater proportion of their workers are American.

Sharma also said Indian software services companies pay over $1 billion each year to the U.S. government in the form of Social Security, “with no benefit or prospect of a refund,” an issue that has long irritated New Delhi.

Sharma’s comments are part of a wave of distress that crashed through the Indian news media after Schumer described top outsourcing companies like Infosys as “chop shops.”

In Senate debate last Thursday, Schumer complained that such companies outsource good, high-paying American technology jobs to lower-wage, temporary immigrant workers and that his proposal would not affect companies that recruit Americans and “play by the rules.”

“I am saddened and disheartened,” Infosys chief executive S. Gopalakrishnan told India’s Economic Times on Tuesday. “When emerging economies are opening up, it’s unfortunate that countries like the U.S. are moving in the other direction.”

The Times of India’s foreign editor Chidanand Rajghatta commiserated in an editorial: “Such is the pressure on American politicians at a time of economic decline and a shrinking job market that they are lashing out indiscriminately.”

Associated Press Writer Charles Babington contributed to this report in Washington.