I notice that the Americans hiking H1-B visa costs to Indian companies to pay for border security with Mexico is hitting headlines in India. I also notice that the Indian IT industry, led by Nasscom, is sounding all indignant about it. What’s to be excited? This was just waiting to happen. Mr Obama has never made any bones about his attitude to India (and China) in every jobs statement; so everyone in the know should have seen this coming. US lawmakers aren’t like flashfloods. What’s the point in making statements to the already-converted Indian media when the damage has already been done?
The danger signals have been around from 2007. So expect more of these measures, in more elaborate and less obvious ways, from every European market in future. The Americans may be a wee bit crass, but in the western world today, the linkage between Indian IT company workers and border security — whether with Mexico or Timbuctoo — is pretty obvious to the aam aadmi. I’ll explain in a bit.
It’s considered political incorrect to be rude about the iconic Indian IT industry , but I’ve always said I think its global image management mostly stinks. All overseas Indians have to live with the deliberately-bad PR that Indian IT manages to generate for its overseas staff.
What the US move has proved is that the strategy that used to work 10 years ago — keep quiet, lobby with influential customers and stay below the radar as long as the contracts come in — doesn’t work any more. The world has changed. In a situation of high local unemployment, and political unrest about illegal immigration, new urban myths are being created: in Europe, US, UK, wherever. In the minds of the public, Indian IT workers on work permits, transfers or H1-Bs equate to jobs stolen from locals — and community and national resources in the host countries that these people use.
Nobody, but nobody, knows that social security payments — with a few countries as exceptions — are net contributions to the host country. The hosts are now short of jobs and resources. So what should be fairer than if rich, perceived as unnecessary, immigrants pay to police the poor ones? In their minds, it’s like progressive taxation.
These days, the British media is full of stories about how many thousands of foreign workers are streaming into the country, how intra-company transfers are being misused for illegal immigration, singling out Indian IT companies, and so on. I haven’t seen a single denial, or anything, not from any industry body or their spin doctors. Whenever I’ve asked, I’m repeatedly told that IT companies themselves don’t want to make a scene — forget about in the media, not even in behind-the-scenes lobbying and government circles.
The image strategy that Indian IT adopted, way back when the first flush of Bangalored sentiments hit headlines, was to go underground. They lobbied and worked with highly-influential customers to influence policy.
They didn’t want to tick off customers, who didn’t want anyone knowing they were employing Indians, or even the sizes of contracts doled out, and as long as the work kept coming in, well. They even went about hiring lots of locals and buying local companies, constantly insisting that ‘we don’t really bring that many people over from India’ . (If true, that would play merry hell with most financial models.)
Besides, as employers, if you pretend your overseas staff doesn’t exist, then how do you expect his neighbours to know that they’re any different from illegal immigrants, who also go live in those five-to-a-flat ghetto-type setups?
That’s exactly what the global banks thought, and look where it got them. Wall Street felt it could get away with anything because ‘their customers loved them, they were making great profits, economists knew they were contributing’ . What everyone forgets is that eventually, it’s the voting public who pulls the strings in any democracy, and the voting public needs to understand — or at least know — what you contribute to their society at large. At the least, they should not be deliberately misinformed by other vested interests. Otherwise, elected reps have to take political, not economic, decisions.
Take an example. We all know that, well, some chunks of the UK government’s IT contracts are with Indian companies, though it’s always been intensely hush-hush , just in case the customer faced voter anger. Hey, the UK government is making massive budget cuts, those contracts are already in danger. And sooner or later, it will hit every British media headline in a splash of scandal — chances of keeping things like that quiet in a hyper-charged , high-unemployment economy is less than that of a snowflake in hell — and then everyone can kiss goodbye to those contracts. It’s high time both Nasscom and its members realise that they really do need to tell Joe Public why they’re good for him — and what all those people he thinks are stealing jobs actually do.
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