Information Technology, Flexible Production, and the Racialization of Indian Immigrant Labor in the U.S.

Advances in information technology or IT have been marked as one of the key impulses driving the processes of globalization. Yet, little attention has been given to how the centrality of IT for U.S. corporations is inseparable from the corporate sector’s reliance on an immigrant labor force. The induction of these skilled immigrants, however, has relied upon strategic alterations of U.S. immigration laws. Responding to the IT industry’s lobbying for an increase in the number of H-1B visas for hiring skilled immigrant IT workers, the U.S. Congress raised the yearly H-1B quota from 65,000 to 115,000 in 1998, and later to195,000 in 2000 (effective for the next three years). In 1999, 60 percent of all H-1B visas went to immigrants hired for the IT field and about 75 percent of all immigrant IT workers on H-1B visas were from India. The overwhelming majority of these Indian IT workers are males. Hundreds of thousands of these immigrants continue to provide IT services—such as software development, networking, data management etc.--to the entire spectrum of U.S. corporations spanning from pharmaceutical companies to hotel chains.

My work illuminates the exorbitant logic of employment of these immigrant IT professionals as temporary ‘contract workers’ within a flexible sub-contracting system. Theoretical insights from Asian American studies, which richly demonstrate the historical nexus between U.S. immigration policies and the racialization of Asian American labor, anchor the analyses of this immigration trend operating within the exigencies of post-industrial capitalism. Based on 40 in-depth interviews with Indian immigrants about their experiences as IT workers on work-visas in the U.S., I examine how, laws around these visas, in association with the IT industry’s flexible sub-contracting system have positioned a set of immigrants within a set of relations with U.S. capital. The access to immigrants through sub-contracting has enabled corporations to contract out their IT jobs down a long chain of ‘consulting companies’, without having to commit to a permanent workforce employed with customary compensations. These labor-supplying consulting companies employ the immigrants and hold their visas. The immigrants’ employment with these companies is incumbent upon their continuous engagement as contract workers on successive short-term projects at different corporate client’s sites, because commissions taken out from the client’s hourly pay for the immigrants’ services generate the revenues for the consulting companies. If these immigrants cannot be placed on any contracts, they are rendered unprofitable to the consulting companies and are laid-off. The telling narratives of the participants show how, as contract workers on H-1B visas, the immigrants are legally and figuratively tied to their visa-sponsoring employers both for their immigration status and income. Because the loss of employment simultaneously translates into the termination of legal status under the terms of the work-visas, the compulsion to remain employed and legal drives these immigrants to accept severely exploitative conditions of work.

This fragile positioning of high-skilled and legal immigrants in the IT field--grounded in the exigencies of the corporate sector and organized strategically around a complex set of immigration laws—exposes the articulations among the state, capital, and racialization of Asian immigrant labor. Taking this cue, I analyze the vortex of these developments in the U.S. since the 1990’s and extends ideas about the intersections of race, gender, class, immigration, and globalization.

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