US suspends H1B visa till the end of the year
US President on Monday suspended H-1B Visa till the end of this calendar year along with H-2B visas, J visas, L visas and visas for all those accompanying these categories along with, extending the freeze on the issuance of green cards.
The ban expands earlier restrictions and the measures will apply only to applicants seeking to go to USA. However, this suspension will not affect the people who are already in US on the visas.
This development may have some impact on Indian IT companies as there would be difficulties in the talent supply chain. However, due to the ongoing pandemic, there are already travel restrictions to United States. Also, Indian IT companies have already taken the initiative to ramp-up local recruiting in the wake of increasing protectionist measures of US government. Also, the quantum of new H-1B visas for Tier 1 IT vendors have been declining as a percentage of their total headcount.
Following this, BSE Information Technology index in today’s trading session opened in a negative terrain at 14,398.92 as against its previous close of 14,489.38 but later, it recovered and currently, it is trading in a positive bias.