Indian professionals harassed for work permit violation in US

Indian professionals harassed for work permit violation in US
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

WASHINGTON, JANUARY 23: This was one program 40 Indian computer professionals in the United States would wish they had never encountered. When the dreaded Immigration and Naturalisation Services (INS) swooped down at a Texas Air Force Base last Thursday to book them for work permit violations, they could have sworn that the authorities were reading the code wrong. They were the right people with the right job with the right visas, but according to the INS, they were in the wrong place.

The programmers were released after a traumatic night in prison, but as the word about the incident gets around, there is outrage among the huge Indian constituency in this country at the heavy-handed manner in which US immigration authorities acted against a highly-valued professional force.

At the heart of the issue lies the INS charge that some India-linked companies practice what is known as "bodyshopping" i.e. bringing over computer professionals to the US with promise of placing them in jobs that do not exist. Theprofessionals, mostly computer programmers, arrive here on what is called an H1-B visa - a temporary work visa for skilled professionals.

But in violation of INS rules which makes the visa job-specific, they are moved around to fit jobs, sometimes at sub-par salaries. In this particular case, INS authorities, say the programmers were brought to the US by two firms on the premise of being employed by a firm in Houston but were later shifted unauthorisedly - without Labour Department clearance - to a project in San Antonio.

The programmers were brought to the US by two India-owned firms Softech and Frontier, and placed at the Randolph Air Force Base by the Maryland-based ACS Government Solutions Group Inc, which is the prime contractor for developing the two computer programs for US Air Force.

INS says the placement for the workers should be made by the firm that brought them here on the H1-B visa and for the project for which they were originally contracted.

But attorneys for the firms say this ismerely a technical dispute that did not merit the heavy-handed INS treatment including handcuffing and detention of professionals doing a job for the United States armed forces.

"The law says if you come here on an H1-B visa, you have to work for the employer that brought you here on your H1-B visa. Immigration is saying they are no longer employed by the people that brought them here, therefore they're in violation of their visa status. Our argument is they continue to be employed by the people that brought them here for their H1-B visas," an attorney for the firms told the San Antonio Express News.

The 40 programmers, mostly from Andhra Pradesh, were developing software for the US Air Force Personnel Center (AFPC) which oversees personnel matters affecting 3,52,263 active-duty troops and more than 1,82,900 civilian workers worldwide.

US Federal law permits 1,15,000 H1-B visa approvals a year. In the last couple of years, Indians are snagging more than 40 per cent of this quota because of the heavydemand for information technology professionals in the US. The demand is so great that some US lawmakers, lobbied by the industry, are seeking to raise the cap to 2,00,000 next year.

But US authorities say the visa program is being abused in India, China and Russia. In recent times immigration officials charged that many Indian professionals obtain visas, mostly at the consulate in Chennai, on forged documents that cannot be authenticated. The controversial San Antonio raid was initiated after a six-month investigation authorities said.

Indian activists and professionals here say that in this case there was no dispute about the authenticity of the programmers, and while the firms may have been in technical violation, the professionals themselves did not violate any law.

Describing the raid as "jack-booted thuggery" by the INS, one Indian professional said the violation of regulations could not be construed as criminal and did not merit such treatment.

The San Antonio incident came even as the Justiceand State Department in Washington launched a bribery and extortion investigation of employees at the US Embassy in New Delhi after an INS contract employee there was charged with extracting money from Indian residents seeking political asylum in this country.

Rakesh Kumar Kashyap, 36, the New Delhi-based contract employee, allegedly sought $ 13,000 to speed up application for political asylum from a Sikh couple. Kashyap, who has worked for the INS for eight years, has reportedly told authorities here that several other Indian employees at the embassy are involved in the racket. He was invited to the US for "training" and arrested at the Washington Dulles airport last week.