President Donald Trump has called a halt to recruitments by IT companies from countries like India – and he has also asked them to stop setting up factories in China. This obviously follows a pattern and cannot be seen in isolation. Trump won elections, not once but twice, by whipping up the nationalist spirit. His stress, at an AI summit in Washington on Wednesday, was that tech companies that provided a whole lot of jobs should care more for their own country and create more jobs for Americans at home. The “globalist mindset” of hiring foreigners, he felt, has undercut the interests of America. While Trump has a point, it would appear that he is not being mindful of the realities on the ground. He has been whimsical, and more so during his second term in office. In a matter of a few months, he has already taken several retreats vis-à-vis policy propositions.
Trump’s call reflects a mood that’s steadily building up in the US against “domination” of “foreign” workers in the IT sector that has its eminent global base there. Reports were that the post-Covid19 period saw a revival of lost job opportunities there, but the gains were more for “foreigners,” mainly Asians like Indian techies. The issue of nepotism, which is perhaps an import from India to the US, has also cropped up. Some top IT firms were sued by the department of labour there recently, citing bias in hiring and violations of wage rules. White, Hispanic and African American applicants were allegedly discriminated against in favour of Asian or Indian techies. Recent reports had said Indian nationals received more than 70 per cent of the H-1B visas, which was introduced in the 90’s for hiring of techies from outside the US. CEOs of Indian origin head nearly 20 Fortune 500 companies in the US. Some of them face allegations of ‘bias’ towards Asians in the recruitment process. Notably, however, the companies sued by the US labour department insist their recruitment were based purely on “experience and merit.”
When it comes to private companies, their ultimate aim is profit and top-positioning, both of which make it imperative that they employ competent personnel. This is a truth everywhere, for most part, though other considerations play lesser roles. Trump, a billionaire businessman himself for decades, cannot be impervious to such ground realities. Techies from India who work in the US would have us believe that, despite Trump’s aggressive stands against Indian hirings, the US companies cannot do without them. In quality of work, experience and other parameters for hiring, they are head and shoulders above others. Since the 1990s, when the IT boom started in the US, Indian techies are increasingly being preferred; and over the years, some of them came into top positions, as in MicroSoft. It will be an appreciable idea if Americans qualify themselves to run their companies in future by virtue of their efficiency – the ultimate yardstick for both work and leadership.
