The United States on Tuesday issued two new rules that make it harder for US companies to employ people on H-1B non-immigrant visas. The move, with less than a month to go for the US Presidential election, is likely to hurt Indian technology professionals and could face scrutiny from courts, legal experts said. As per the Interim Final Rules, which have been issued without any notice period or right to comment, the US Department of Homeland Security and Department of Labor (DHS) have changed the definition of specialty occupation and employee-employer relationship, as well as limited the validity of an H-1B visa to one year - instead of three earlier - for a tech worker placed at a third-party worksite. The rules allow for increased workplace monitoring to improve compliance, while the minimum wage levels at which H-1B employees can be hired have also been increased significantly. This is not a minor increase in wages. They’re fairly substantial and could be a serious deterrence....

The US State Department Wednesday  allowed some exemptions  to President Donald Trump’s June 22 announcement where he’d indicated that the entry of foreign and non-immigrant visa workers will be banned till the end of 2020. The new relaxations allow H-1B and L-1 visa holders to go back to US for continued employment with the same employer. What does the new travel advisory say? In its latest travel advisory, the State Department has said that it had decided to allow certain categories of workers and non-immigrant visa holders in “national interest”. For such categories of workers, who are not covered by the presidential proclamation of June 22, neither they nor their spouse or children will be barred from obtaining a visa to travel to the US. According to the new advisory, H-1B visa holders who are public or private healthcare professionals or are engaged in medical research “in an area with a substantial public health benefit” will be allowed to travel. Further, H-1B visa hol...

India's caste system is thought to be among the world's oldest surviving forms of social stratification. However, some British Asians say they still experience discrimination due to their caste. So, why are so many Hindu bodies in the UK opposed to this being made illegal? Sudesh Rani was shopping in the Home Counties two years ago when she experienced such discrimination first hand. The 42-year-old from Bedford identifies herself as Ravidassia - a group regarded by some as at the lower end of the caste system. She says she was in a supermarket when two women began verbally abusing her. "They started calling me a low caste chamar (a derogatory term used to describe an individual belonging to a low caste), a dirty bitch. "At that time, I got a bit frightened, I thought 'no, no this can't be happening.'" She said the women, who had seen her at a wedding previously, followed her and her nine-year-old son to her car. "There were two of them and one o...

Exploring the mixed legacy of colonialism within the British Indian community, Ashna Ahmad discusses colourism, social mobility and the myth of a ‘model minority’ My mother and grandmother arrived in the UK having fled persecution in newly independent Kenya, where our family had been sent along with millions of other Indians under the British Empire. They had nothing. My mum tells me stories of her childhood: the fear she felt watching National Front marches pass her house, the tears and uncertainty when my grandmother had run out of money, the hurt from being called “Wog” or “Paki” in the street or at school. A generation later, I sit in my North London suburban house writing this article, having just finished my first year at Cambridge. As the story goes, the upward social mobility of British Indians such as my family is a perfect example of ‘bootstrapping.’ This is the idea that marginalised groups can become more prosperous on the basis of individual merit and hard work, subsequen...

  These are testimonies collected by Kavita Puri, the presenter of the Radio 4 series Three Pounds In My Pocket, interviewed now-elderly pioneers, who never thought they would have to live through such hostility again. “I don’t know what it is to be British any more.” This from a man who is a professor at a prominent university and part of the British establishment. So how did it come to this? For the past five years I have been interviewing the generation that came from the Indian subcontinent to postwar Britain. These early pioneers arrived with as little as £3 due to strict currency controls. They are now elderly people. I have watched as they have grown older, frailer, their voices weaker. Some have died. Their stories are an overlooked part of British history. It’s important to record them before it’s too late. From 1948 until the early 1960s, these former subjects of the British Raj automatically became British citizens. They came here for a better life, and to rebu...

  US President Donald Trump has directed his administration to "reform" the H1B visa system and move in the direction of merit-based immigration, White House officials have said. "Moving to a merit-based immigration system," the White House said in a statement soon after Trump issued a proclamation to temporarily suspend H1B and other work visas till the end of the year. The Trump Administration will reform the immigration system to prioritise the highest-skilled workers and protect American jobs, it said. Under these reforms, the H-1B programme will prioritise those workers who are offered the highest wage, ensuring that the highest-skilled applicants are admitted, the White House said. The Trump Administration will also close loopholes that have allowed employers in the US to replace American workers with low-cost foreign labour, it said. These reforms will help protect the wages of American workers and ensure that foreign labour entering our country is high skill...