SAN FRANCISCO: Facing new corporate demands and political pressure from a Trump administration that wants to curb immigrant work visas, Infosys, one of India’s leading tech outsourcing companies, said Tuesday that it will hire up to 10,000 Americans to serve its clients in the United States.
The move makes Infosys the latest Asian technology company to portray itself as a jobs creator as President Trump threatens to take action against companies he sees as hurting American workers.
Last month, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing government agencies to review employment immigration laws to promote “Hire American” policies. That included offering suggestions for how to reform the H-1B visa program, which operates as a lottery to bring skilled foreign laborers to the United States each year — usually tech workers.
But Infosys is also making its move to hire American driven by other forces. Its home base of India has become a less appealing place to do the grunt work of programming as wages rise there and skilled labor has become more difficult to find. A study of 36,000 engineering students at 500 Indian colleges released last month found that only 5 percent could write software code correctly.
“Building talent pools that define the future of America is what we want to do,” said Ravi Kumar S., Infosys’s president, in a phone interview from Indiana.
Indiana, the home state of Vice President Mike Pence, will be the first beneficiary of Infosys’s hire-American efforts. The company intends to open a new technology and innovation office in or near Indianapolis in August, recruiting 100 new workers this year and several hundred more next year, with a goal of adding a total of 2,000 employees by 2021.
Infosys said it would seek out three other sites for American expansion, looking for places that are close to clients and universities and where state and local governments are willing to offer significant economic incentives. The company already has an innovation hub in Silicon Valley.
The majority of Infosys’s business is in the United States, and it typically receives several thousand H-1B visas every year to bring in mostly entry-level Indian programmers who move from project to project at companies in industries like banking, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and energy.
Infosys has hired more American college graduates in the last couple of years, said Mr. Kumar. And now clients in the United States want the company to have even more people on site locally. So it must expand its American work force significantly, he said.
