Tag: visas

Visas to India

Between January 2012 and October 2013, India issued over 34000 employment visas. Where did these 34000 foreign workers come from?

empvisas

 

Notice that the number of people with employment visas from Japan and Germany outstrip all other countries, by a long way! The United States is not even in the top 12! The other notable exception? Bangladesh!

What about tourists? Where do India’s tourists come from? Between January 2012 and October 2013, India issued about 4.5 million tourist visas. And where did these tourists come from? This graph here shows the percentages:

tourvisas

 

And which country contributes the maximum number of tourists to India? Bangladesh! 800,000 or almost 18% of India’s tourists in these 22 months came from Bangladesh! And they didn’t come here for medical treatment – that has been taken care of in another category of visas!

Go figure.

H1B visas in 2013

It is amazing how much of the annual quota of H1B (worker) visas that the US issues goes to IT outsourcing companies.  The top 20 beneficiary companies are shown in this graph.

Source: http://h1b-visas.findthecompany.com/
Source: http://h1b-visas.findthecompany.com/

As you can see, Infosys is by far the biggest beneficiary of this. I wonder if it is a result of the lawsuit by an American employee last year against the company, which alleged that the company was misusing B1 (business) visa, which has led the company to play it safe by taking H1B visas instead.

Indian companies have been shaded blue, while non-Indian companies have been shaded red. The amount of blue on this plot tells you that India is the biggest beneficiary of the H1B visa system of the US.

The data also gives the mean salary paid by each of these companies to their H1B workers.

Source: http://h1b-visas.findthecompany.com/
Source: http://h1b-visas.findthecompany.com/

Apart from Intel, all non-Indian companies pay their H1B employees well over $90,000 per annum. None of the Indian companies even come close to that number. This might help you understand why H1B visas are such a contentious point in American domestic politics.