Shikha Dalmia in the Business Insider on Why India Wants the Senate Immigration Bill to Fail
Restrictionist Republicans aren't the only ones rooting for the death of the Senate immigration bill. Ten thousand miles away, much of the Indian subcontinent is cheering on the bill's demise, reports Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia.
That's because a coalition of domestic high-tech companies and pro-labor Democrats has twisted the worthy goal of knocking down America's barriers to technical foreign talent into blatant protectionism.
Companies like IBM and Accenture have managed to rewrite the H-1B visa program so as to allow themselves to add foreign workers to their U.S. payrolls while forcing Indian companies in the U.S. to subtract Indian workers from theirs. But that's the kindest aspect of the bill. There are even worse provisions.
Why are they doing this? Writes Dalmia:
IBM now generates about a third of its revenues in India where it employs over 100,000 people. The visa restrictions are simply an effort to cripple their foreign competitors and capture their offshore market share, something that won't save a single American job…
Not only is this unfair but it sends the dispiriting message that America is not interested in abiding by the rules of free trade that it preaches to the rest of the world.
Read more here.
