Indian Information Technology Workers in the United States: The H-1B Visa, Flexible Production, and the Racialization of Labor

Abstract

Advances in information technology (IT) have been critical to the USA for maintaining its competitive edge in the global economy, and the role of workers on the H-1B visa has been central in this process since the 1990s. The H-1B visa program, which allows US employers to hire skilled foreign workers on a temporary basis, enabled the recruitment of thousands of IT professionals, the majority of whom has been from India. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with Indian IT workers in the USA, this paper illustrates how the interplay between visa policies and flexible hiring in IT marginalizes this workforce. As a result of their fragile immigration status under H-1B visa terms, these workers are disproportionately employed as contract labor in an exploitative system of subcontracting. As an employment-based visa, the H-1B makes these workers dependent on their visasponsoring employers for immigration status and livelihood. The 426 • Banerjee compulsion to remain employed and legal drives H-1B employees to accept severely exploitative work conditions, including wage cuts, deduction of commissions from hourly wages, lack of benefits, and frequent relocations. Theoretical insights from Asian-American studies, which foreground the historical nexus between US immigration policies and the gendered racialization of immigration, anchor the analyses of how current visa policies sustain the exigencies of late-capital.

Ethical Pitfalls of Temporary Labour Migration: A Critical Review of Issues

“…The recruitment of temporary high skilled labour is construed as a win-win combination: the economies of receiving societies benefit in short term and since knowledge workers do not leave their countries forever, receiving nation-states and employers cannot be accused of the new form of colonialism. However, as the study conducted on the experiences of Indian IT workers in the US (employed precisely on these types of migration schemes) has shown, the morality of such arrangements is deeply problematic (Banerjee 2006). The evidence from this study revealed that the HR managers of the North American IT Company discouraged Indian employees on temporary visas from bringing their families.…”

Prototyping self in Silicon Valley: Deep diversity as a framework for anthropological inquiry

“…These visas allow individuals with distinctive intellectual or technical skills to get residency to work and live in the United States. Migration from South and East Asia exploded and the region is now a minority majority space, where foreign-born and 'people of color' numerically dominate (see Banerjee 2006;Center for Immigration Studies 1995).…”

Bodyshopping versus offshoring among Indian software and information technology firms

“…3 The high-skilled migration literature primarily analyzes nationwide trends and policies, or the experiences of high-skilled migrants, especially IT workers specifically. Banerjee [11,12] and Chakravartty [17] document continuing pressures on Indian IT workers in the US to find ongoing work lest they lose their visa status, as well as how rules of the visa system contribute to these and other 1 The publicly perceived negative wage impacts of offshoring have been observed among less-skilled workers [28]. Another effect of offshoring is that, at least in the US and the UK, it has contributed to a rise in skill levels of remaining employees [26,31].…”