Infosys to Hire 10,000 American Workers Amid Crackdown on Visas

Infosys to Hire 10,000 American Workers Amid Crackdown on Visas
Shutterstock

India’s Infosys said it plans to hire 10,000 Americans in the next two years, following criticism from the Trump administration that the company and other outsourcing firms are unfairly taking jobs away from U.S. workers, according to Bloomberg.

Infosys, which employs about 200,000 people around the world, will expand its local hiring in the U.S. while adding four hubs to research technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. The first location will open in Indiana in August 2017 and is expected to create 2,000 jobs for American workers by 2021, the company said.

The moves come after India’s outsourcing firms have come under attack for allegedly displacing American workers with employees from overseas.“In the fast-changing world of today, we need the ability to be local. We need to be trusted by our customers as being local,“ said CEO Vishal Sikka in an interview from Indiana. “To work with a mix of global and local talent is absolutely the right thing to do.“

Sikka has come under particular pressure. The Trump administration’s clampdown has hit his company’s stock. In addition, a group of Infosys founders publicly accused the board of corporate governance violations and questioned hefty pay raises given to Sikka and his deputy. Sikka, a former SAP executive, took the helm of India’s No. 2 technology services provider almost three years ago with a mandate to remake the company’s business model.

Instead of charging customers such as Goldman Sachs and Toshiba for the hours spent by technicians and engineers to build and manage corporate computer systems, Infosys set out to build automated software and tools that would detect problems and solve them with less human intervention, freeing up consultants to provide more specialized and proactive services. Indian outsourcing firms have said that they need to hire foreign workers in part because the U.S. has a shortage of qualified employees. Yet Sikka says that is something Infosys can overcome.