Thread: Indian companies lobby Washington to promote offshoring/H-1B

From the international press. This type of information rarely appears in the American mainstream media.

Indian companies lobby Washington to promote offshoring and H-1B (and related) visas, using American frontmen and executives. And now they are bragging about it!

"We don't want to be seen as very active there, because it can seem that India is trying to poke its nose into the debate," said Kiran Karnik, the president of Nasscom. "We would prefer that the active effort of working the Hill is done by U.S. companies."

A successful example of getting a heavyweight to help their case, according to the Indian companies, was recent congressional testimony by Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, in which he called vigorously for expanding the H-1B skilled-worker visa program. While Microsoft does use the visas heavily, 8 of the 10 largest H-1B applicants in 2006 were outsourcing vendors with their major operations in India.

Indian-American political groups in the United States are also effective proxies. The U.S.-India Political Action Committee has defended outsourcing vendors, most of whose employees are in India, even though the group represents Indian-Americans living in America. In a profile of Clinton on the group's Web site, it notes admiringly that "even though she was against outsourcing at the beginning of her political career, she has since changed her position."

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/15/ ... source.php

International Herald Tribune

Indian companies learn the Washington lobbying game
By Anand Giridharadas
Wednesday, August 15, 2007

MUMBAI: In the heat of the 2004 U.S. presidential race, John Kerry likened outsourcing to treason, Lou Dobbs harangued against it from his CNN anchor chair and the Indian outsourcing vendors were left scrambling.

Engineers to the core, their leaders fired back with data-packed PowerPoint presentations. Outsourcing is good for the economy, they said; it increases efficiency; it creates more jobs than it costs. But in the eyes of many Americans, those arguments proved no match for vivid tales of laid-off software engineers.

"Telling someone who loses their job in North Carolina or Jacksonville that this is good for the economy doesn't work," said Phiroz Vandrevala, an executive vice president at Tata Consultancy Services, one of the largest Indian vendors, who serves as an in-house Washington strategist for Tata and other Indian firms.

But if four years is a lifetime in Washington, it is an eternity in Bangalore. And as the 2008 U.S. election starts to sizzle, the Indian outsourcing firms have returned to win Washington over as veritable insiders, slicker and better connected than ever.

They have hired a former high official in the administration of President George W. Bush as a lobbyist. They are humanizing the issue by bringing Americans they have hired into meetings with politicians.

They work with research firms like the Brookings Institution to generate sympathetic research. They host cocktail hours on Capitol Hill. They have learned to play politics, urging members of Congress whose districts benefit from trade with India to support them on outsourcing.

And most strikingly, they have mastered the Washington art of waging proxy battles through local front organizations, which spare them from appearing to be foreigners with an agenda. They provide facts, figures and arguments to trade groups like the Information Technology Association of America and to Indian-American political groups. Then they watch as those groups arrange for seemingly neutral voices to champion their causes in the newspapers or before Congress.

"The moment Nasscom says something, it is a vested interest," said Lakshmi Narayanan, the chairman of Nasscom, a trade group that represents the Indian outsourcing industry. "In the last few months," he said, Nasscom decided "to provide the data, work behind the scenes, but really to be fronted by the local organizations."

The Indian companies are mounting this effort out of fear that the pressures of the U.S. presidential election, and of the Democratic primary especially, will induce candidates to lash out at the Indian vendors. Their business model is a perpetual lightning rod: the companies carve out tasks from their American clients and perform them more cheaply back in India or other low-cost locations.

The Indian vendors' main worries are the Democratic candidates Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, whose campaign has flirted with anti-outsourcing rhetoric, and John Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, who is running an explicitly populist campaign. The Indian executives believe that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, also a Democrat, is more sympathetic to their cause, but they are concerned that she would be compelled to match the others' statements in a tight contest.

Meanwhile, new Democratic majorities in Congress have swept into office on a wave of anti-free-trade rhetoric. To the Indian firms, a recent attempt in Congress to crack down on skilled-worker visas underscored that a storm is gathering.

"People are trying to make it an issue again," said one Washington lobbyist who represents some of the Indian companies and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of company rules.

But if the anti-outsourcing movement rouses itself again, it will find itself jousting with a changed foe. The Indian vendors have in no way strayed from their belief that outsourcing benefits both India and the United States. But they have found smoother ways to get the point across.

Vandrevala, the Tata Consultancy official who also works for NASSCOM, described 2004 as "a fantastic learning experience."

Nasscom has hired as its chief Washington lobbyist Robert Blackwill, a former senior White House adviser and U.S. ambassador to India in the Bush administration. As the president of Barbour Griffith & Rogers International, an arm of one of the most powerful lobby shops in Washington, located three blocks from the White House, he is a heavy hitter on Capitol Hill.

In the past year, Blackwill, the unnamed Washington lobbyist and the Indian firms' own executives have, among them, met with members of the staffs of more than 100 U.S. representatives and senators, the Washington lobbyist said.

Executives from the Indian firms visiting the United States, including on a trip organized by Nasscom in May, have met with aides to all the major presidential hopefuls, including Clinton, Obama, the former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, Vandrevala said. Several months ago, he said, Nasscom hosted an evening reception for members of the House of Representatives' India caucus that drew 40 to 50 people.

But the heart of the Indian vendors' new strategy appears to be to remove themselves from the limelight. Outsourcing is not about us, goes the new Indian mantra to lawmakers: it benefits living, breathing Americans, including ones in your district.

The Washington lobbyist said that a focus of the campaign was to collect data on Indian companies' investments in the United States, and then to lobby members of Congress from districts where those investments had created jobs.

Tata Consultancy Services, for example, may be funneling some San Francisco-area technology jobs to India. But it belongs to an Indian conglomerate, Tata Group, that recently acquired the Campton Place Hotel in San Francisco and thus has hundreds of U.S. workers on its payroll.

The Indians have also begun to use their own customers, which include the largest U.S. companies, as proxy soldiers. Both the vendors and the clients belong to trade groups like the Information Technology Association of America, which help to coordinate lobbying campaigns in which an American chief executive will write a newspaper article or make a statement to Congress that is in his or her own company's interest but also benefits the Indian vendor.

"We don't want to be seen as very active there, because it can seem that India is trying to poke its nose into the debate," said Kiran Karnik, the president of Nasscom. "We would prefer that the active effort of working the Hill is done by U.S. companies."

A successful example of getting a heavyweight to help their case, according to the Indian companies, was recent congressional testimony by Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, in which he called vigorously for expanding the H-1B skilled-worker visa program. While Microsoft does use the visas heavily, 8 of the 10 largest H-1B applicants in 2006 were outsourcing vendors with their major operations in India.

Indian-American political groups in the United States are also effective proxies. The U.S.-India Political Action Committee has defended outsourcing vendors, most of whose employees are in India, even though the group represents Indian-Americans living in America. In a profile of Clinton on the group's Web site, it notes admiringly that "even though she was against outsourcing at the beginning of her political career, she has since changed her position."

Narayanan, the Nasscom chairman, said: "Much of the difference between four years back and now is that many of the Indians who are influential, who are contributing, are in the technology industry. So clearly they are aligned with the cause."

In a sign of their changing approach, the Indian vendors are also imitating a tactic used against them in the last election: putting a human, and preferably American, face on the issue.

In meetings in Washington with members of Congress and with the presidential campaigns, the Indian companies are bringing in American employees they have hired locally. The employees typically serve as liaisons between the Indian firms' American clients and their back-office workers in India, but to the Indians, they illustrate that outsourcing can also create American jobs.

"Our opponents have been very good at spreading a lot of myths, and we have to counter that," said the Washington lobbyist. "And part of it is by putting an American face on it."

You know any politician even caught talking with a foreign lobbyist should be tried for treason.

What right does a foreign government, company, or entity have trying to influence our government?

We have to clean house -

If we vote out everyone in Washington, these lobbyist will have to make new contacts - that might take a while and we might gain some ground on them.

If we do it again next election, they may be behind -

Again, what in the world does any lawmaker need to listen to foreign entities - NONE. They are supposed to represent us - just us.

Just more way to cut out more American jobs..... I am so sick and fed up with the H1-B policy's!!!!!

Vote out every one in office - if we get the chance to actually vote - then do it again and again.

NO MORE OUTSOURCING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Everytime a job is outsourced to India, China, Mexico ....it means Americans lose JOBS.....It only benefits greedy Corporations and their shareholders who are not satisfied with 300% profits margins they want more and more....Greed is never satisfied....it is a monster that is never full.!!!!

Originally Posted by blkkat99

NO MORE OUTSOURCING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Everytime a job is outsourced to India, China, Mexico ....it means Americans lose JOBS.....It only benefits greedy Corporations and their shareholders who are not satisfied with 300% profits margins they want more and more....Greed is never satisfied....it is a monster that is never full.!!!!

I have been a witness to outsourcing of workers overseas and I tell you what it is the worst thing to do to you domestic employees who need the services of a department that is no longer in the USA! I think its an insult to not just the workers but to also to American citizens!!!

Outsourcing is only a short-term profit machine.....just look at Mattel! Moving production to China! Just imagine on the law-suits, ligation's, and the scar on the companies reputation for all the toys that had to be recalled! Just to save 8 cents!!!!!

Bill Gates is an arrogant, amoral elitist who cares little about the country that allowed him to become so wealthy. Furthermore his company puts out a mediocre product at best. It'll be a great day for America when Microsoft ends up on the ash heap of history.