Increasing visa hurdles

When a federal judge in the United States temporarily blocked the Donald Trump administration’s ban on work visas, stocks in information technology-enabled services (ITeS) companies rose sharply. That reaction from the markets demonstrated that there are few takers for the IT majors’ claim that the work visa ban does not affect their bottom line, and may in fact be a positive. The Trump administration has long sought to attack the H1-B system, which is the standard way for Indian IT engineers to work in the US. Although the programme has been in the administration’s sights ever since it took office,