Active lobbying to make Immigration Bill more practical: Premji

Proposed 800-page bill being promoted by 'Gang of Eight' talks about comprehensively overhauling immigration system in the country

Wipro chairman Azim Premji on Friday said that few of the clauses in the Comprehensive Immigration Reforms Bill as proposed by some of the senators in the US may witness active lobbying in the House of Representatives to make it more practical.

“There are one or two clauses for which there is going to be active lobby in the House of Representatives to see that they are made more practical. We are confident that some of these conditions will be made more practical otherwise it will affect the American companies just as much as the Indian firms.”

The proposed 800-page bill which is being promoted by a bipartisan group of senators, known as 'Gang of Eight’ talks about comprehensively overhauling the immigration system in the country by giving citizenship to over 11 million illegal and undocumented immigrants.

However, the bill also has also proposed certain changes in the H-1B visa norms which are widely believed to affect the Indian IT services companies. For example, it says that if an employer has more than 50 employees or more than 50% of their employees on H-1B or L-1 visas, it must pay a $10,000 fee per additional worker.

Industry body Nasscom fears that it would severely limit the ability of Indian firms to get enough number of H-1B visas. The bill however encourages US-based technology firms such as Google, Intel and Facebook to bring more high-skilled foreign talents to the country.

Premji said since the bill is only going to be operative next year, so there is enough time between now and the implementation of bill “to at least ensure that or attempt to ensure that some of the conditions in the bill, so far as they reflect on visas, are made a little more practical”.

According to Wipro, the company has stepped up its onsite hiring sometime ago which will eventually help it have 50% of its onsite employees belonging to that respective country.

“We have been doing onsite hiring for the past five to six years. Our ratio of American employees is over 35%, which is among the highest in the industry. We have anticipated this problem that eventually this ratio would come to 50:50.”

To a query on what could be the possible impact of such regulation for Wipro. T K Kurien, CEO of Wipro’s IT business said the procedural impact of the proposed changes is more worrying than the cost associated with it.

'We worry about procedural impact it will have on us; it's not so much by way of cost. Undue procedures can slow you down, that's what is worrying. It's too early to talk about cost implications as the fine print of the bill is yet to be studied.''

The company also said that it has enough number of visas required for the rest of the years.