Fearing tighter US visa regime, Indian IT firms rush to hire, acquire

Bengaluru

ANTICIPATING a more protectionist US technology visa programme under a Donald Trump administration, India's US$150 billion IT services sector will speed up acquisitions in the United States and recruit more heavily from college campuses there.

Indian companies including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro have long used H1-B skilled worker visas to fly computer engineers to the US, their largest overseas market, temporarily to service clients.

Staff from those three companies accounted for around 86,000 new H1-B workers in 2005-14. The US currently issues close to that number of H1-B visas each year.

President-elect Trump's campaign rhetoric, and his pick for Attorney General of Senator Jeff Sessions, a long-t…