On Thursday, at a White House briefing, US Labour Secretary Keith Sonderling, with Vice President JD Vance beside him, suspended eight companies from the programme that lets American employers sponsor foreign workers for a green card. Four of them are India’s largest IT firms. The announcement came on the day the commander of America’s Pacific forces, Admiral Samuel Paparo, ended a six-day visit to Delhi. This raises a question Delhi can no longer avoid. How long can a partnership work when one side seeks India as a security partner but unfairly shuts out Indian engineers seeking better prospects? Should India keep saying yes to the first while it meekly accepts the second?
He came at the end of one of the most substantial US-India land exercises, even as the US Air Force flew F-35 fighters with the Indian Air Force.
No end date has been announced. If a company certified that no American was available for a job an American had just lost, that is fraud, and Delhi should not defend it. The programme, known as PERM, is the first step towards an employer-sponsored green card. Before a company can sponsor a foreign employee for permanent residence, it must prove to the Labour Department that it tried and failed to find a qualified American for the job. The Department will now accept no new PERM applications from the eight companies and will not process any already pending. The eight are TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, Cognizant, Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe. In one month, the list has grown to eight, and the announcement has shifted from a social media post to the White House. The green card queue was already long. A worker whose PERM application is now frozen loses years she cannot recover. Why has Washington done this? The stated reason is fraud. The outsourcing firms have paid visa settlements before. So far, however, no specific charge has been made public against the four Indian firms. Delhi has stopped hiding its irritation. Part of this tone is for voters at home.
On 8 September, the Labour Department’s Inspector General had announced on X that Cognizant’s filings were suspended, without stating any allegation. Indians in the EB-3 category receive green cards only if they applied before January 2014, and EB-2 is closed to them. Vance said nearly 1,000 of Microsoft’s 3,682 PERM applications were for jobs from which American workers had been laid off. He claimed that workers hired through outsourcing firms earn about $48,000 less than comparable Americans.
In May, the Department of Homeland Security said it would grant green cards to applicants already in the US only in “extraordinary circumstances”. In New York on 28 September, Jaishankar said countries “should not be so self-centred”, faulted America’s understanding of India’s concerns on terrorism, and said, “the economics of mobility and the politics of mobility are at odds”. On 5 October, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said trade talks had reached a “plateau” and that tariffs had been “weaponised”, with a new American law allowing 100 per cent tariffs on buyers of Russian oil due within weeks.
The manner of action, however, points to politics. Normal enforcement investigates first and penalises after it finds wrongdoing. Placing Microsoft on the list lets the administration present this as a fight against Big Tech and answer any charge of targeting Indians. Doubts about outsourcing also cross party lines. Senators Dick Durbin (Democrat) and Chuck Grassley (Republican) spent more than a decade drafting bills to curb it. Meanwhile, the security relationship keeps moving forward. In Delhi, Paparo met the service chiefs and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. In August, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri and US Under Secretary Allison Hooker advanced the Indian Ocean Strategic Venture, which covers maritime security, undersea cables, and strategic infrastructure.
Here, pending applications were frozen before any finding, and the Vice President made the announcement four weeks before the midterm elections of 3 November.
