Outsourcing fee that was imposed on the visas for the US, for the high qualified technology professionals from India has been dropped, which has brought a temporary relief for the domestic IT companies for payment, which Nasscom had earlier described it as unfair.
According to the website of Citizenship and Immigration Service, a fee of $2000 for H-1B visas and fee of $ 2,250 for some of the L-1 visas was adopted by the US way back in August 2010. The fees were applicable for the companies with minimum limit of 50 or more employees with most of them in the country.
The fee has not been renewed by Congress of the US yet; it may come up for the review later on. Nasscom considers it is a welcome step urges the USCIS not to introduce this fee again.
In last month study by Nasscom, it said that India’s IT outsourcing industry which is worth $146 billion has been the beneficiary for temporary visas required by skilled foreign nationals for working in the US.
The IT companies based in India invested an excess of $2 billion in the previous years of 2011-13, had paid around $22.5 billion in form of taxes to the Treasury of the US in those years, and today it is supporting more than 4, 11,000 jobs direct and indirectly which also includes 3,00,000 people which were held by the permanent residents and the US citizens.
The bills has been considered by the US Congress for seeking the triple limit of H-1B visas to 1,95,000. But there is rising dissatisfaction about the processing of H-1B visas among the skilled workers in the US.
Nasscom has also said that the outsourcing fee is an unfair move which was targeted at the technology firms of India, which has no link with paying for border security.
