Washington, April 23 (PTI): America has accused Indian infotech companies Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys of unfairly cornering the "lion's share" of H-1B visas by "putting extra tickets in the lottery".
An official added that the Trump administration wanted to replace the lottery system with a skills-based award of the visa, making it difficult to use it to replace or undercut American workers.
He suggested that although the H-1B visa was meant for highly skilled overseas workers, this was not always followed in practice.
The official, speaking at a White House briefing last week, said a small number of giant outsourcing firms were flooding the system with applications, thus increasing their chances of success in the lottery.
"You may know their names well, but like the top recipients of the H-1B visa are companies like Tata, Infosys, Cognizant - they will apply for a very large number of visas, more than they get, by putting extra tickets in the lottery raffle, if you will, and then they'll get the lion's share of visas," he said, according to a transcript posted on the White House website.
All the three Indian firms declined comment.
Asked why Indian companies were picked out for mention, the White House response said that Tata Consultancy, Infosys and Cognizant - a multinational with extensive operations in India -were the top three recipients of H-1B visas.
"And those three... are companies that have an average wage for H-1B visas between $60,000 and $65,000 (a year). By contrast, the median Silicon Valley software engineer's wage is probably around $150,000," the official had said last week.
"Only about 5 to 6 per cent, depending on the year, of H-1B workers command the highest wage tier recognised by the department of labour."
He said the foreign workers were often brought in well below market rates to replace American workers, sort of violating the programme's principle of bringing in skilled labour.
A more merit-based system, which the administration is considering, would be "a very elegant way of solving very systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa", he said.
