H1B Visa misuse, Infosys faces charges

For India's top outsourcing companies looking to hire more local staff in the US, allegations of visa misuse and age discrimination in recruitment is the latest form of backlash to deal with.

Over the past few weeks, two individual lawsuits alleging H1B misuse and age discrimination in local hiring have been filed against Infosys, the country's second biggest tech firm that counts JP Morgan among its top customers.

While Infosys is the only company to have faced individual lawsuits, tougher visa regulations are affecting business for India's $60-billion software exports industry. For instance, US visa rejection rates for Indian techies have doubled from around 4% to over 8% over the past nine months.

"We're still quite young in this game. We'll need to learn from how companies like Toyota dealt with such issues many years ago," said a senior official at one of the leading Indian technology firms with operations in the US. He requested anonymity because he's not authorised to comment on this issue. "We are making sincere efforts to hire more locally and even engage with policymakers, such lawsuits against big outsourcing brands are opportunistic," he added.

Until last year, Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services had to deal with new legislations and proposals that increased fee for work permits and even made it tougher for them to send Indian techies to the US for delivering projects locally. Now that the political rhetoric against outsourcing companies seems to have slowed down, these lawsuits are beginning to raise concerns about a new face of anti-offshoring backlash.

In the age discrimination suit filed by 58-year-old Ralph DeVito of New Jersey against Infosys, he has alleged that the company rejected his application filed through job portal Monster.com despite having adequate experience. According to the complaint, Infosys had set the maximum experience as 25 years, which DeVito had while applying in August 2009.
"The maximum experience requirements constituted a limitation, specification or discrimination as to age i.e. a de facto age limit because they were more likely to eliminate applicants for the Infosys positions who were age forty or older," DeVito said in his complaint, a copy of which is with ET.