On Thursday, with J D Vance beside him at the White House, US Labour Secretary Keith Sonderling suspended 8 companies - Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini - from the Permanent Labour Certification Programme (PERM), the labour certification at the front of most employment-based green card cases. The Department of Labour will not take new applications from them, and has frozen the once already pending.
Six of the 8 run their delivery engines largely out of India. The other two are US product giants, included, one suspects, to blunt the charge that this is only about India. It isn't. But Indians will pay most of the bill.

None of the suspended firms has been charged with anything, and no end date has been set. The Trump regime's case rests on aggregates. Sonderling said the 8 had sought nearly 3 mn foreign workers since 2009, and won over 2,30,000 H-1B approvals. Big numbers are not evidence of fraud. Even at the libertarian Cato Institute, the argument is that the department cannot legally suspend a company before proving it broke rules. Courts may agree. But business does not wait for courts.

Human costs land first. An Infosys engineer on an H-1B already faces a queue measured in decades. India's EB-3 cut-off sits around Jan 2014, and EB-2 has been unavailable. Now, even the first step is frozen. Clearly, one will witness quiet resignations, moves to US employers not on the list, and families rethinking whether to stay on in the US. Some of that talent will go elsewhere, including come back to India.

Link: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/opinion/et-commentary/permafrost-without-bite-indian-it-must-stop-treating-every-us-rule-change-as-a-crisis-to-be-lobbied-away-fix-lies-elsewhere/articleshow/134841919.cms?from=mdr