The US Southwest Border Bill imposes an increased application fee of an additional $2000 for every H1B and L1 employee on a few Indian Offshore Services companies. Much has already been said about it by politicians, Indian companies and NASSCOM. [NY Times, Hindu]
In early July I had written a piece on the challenges of Local Hiring or onsite hiring. In it I wrote
Also, there is the issue of optics. Can you do X billion dollars of business in a country, with tens of thousands of employees in the country and hire just a handful from the local market? The law may allow it, but you have to do much more in the court of public opinion.
Little did I know that Senator Schumer was actually planning to change the law itself.
But perhaps this will be the turning point for onsite hiring. There are other good reasons to increase onsite hiring. Again, from my post
Going forward, local hiring will become more important. Winning business is now less about technical expertise, which is assumed. It is about domain expertise – do you understand my business process well enough? It is going to be pretty tough to build domain expertise organically – through the work the company does for clients. Hiring industry expertise into the company either from industry or from other consulting companies will become necessary to compete.
6 am pacific 