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Abstract

Advances in information technology (IT) have been critical to the USA for maintaining its competitive edge in the global economy, and the role of workers on the H-1B visa has been central in this process since the 1990s. The H-1B visa program, which allows US employers to hire skilled foreign workers on a temporary basis, enabled the recruitment of thousands of IT professionals, the majority of whom has been from India. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with Indian IT workers in the USA, this paper illustrates how the interplay between visa policies and flexible hiring in IT marginalizes this workforce. As a result of their fragile immigration status under H-1B visa terms, these workers are disproportionately employed as contract labor in an exploitative system of subcontracting. As an employment-based visa, the H-1B makes these workers dependent on their visa-sponsoring employers for immigration status and livelihood. The compulsion to remain employed and legal drives H-1B employees to accept severely exploitative work conditions, including wage cuts, deduction of commissions from hourly wages, lack of benefits, and frequent relocations. Theoretical insights from Asian-American studies, which foreground the historical nexus between US immigration policies and the gendered racialization of immigration, anchor the analyses of how current visa policies sustain the exigencies of late-capital.

Keywords

transnational migration race gender information technology South Asian labor in the USA H-1B visas immigration policy globalization flexible hiring.

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Indian Information Technology Workers in the United States: The H-1B Visa,Flexible Production,and the Racialization of Labor

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