Infosys to hire 10,000 Americans over two years

Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka made the announcement in interviews with Bloomberg and Reuters.

Sikka said the company would open four technology centres in the US, beginning with one in Indiana, the home state of US vice-president Mike Pearce, in August this year. It is expected to create 2000 jobs by 2021.

Since the election of Donald Trump as US president, there has been talk of reforming the H-1B visa system on which Infosys and other Indian outsourcing firms such as Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, TechMahindra and HCL depend on to bring in IT workers from India.

{loadposition sam08}All these companies have been accused on various occasions of gaming the H-1B visa system by paying the workers they bring in wages that, while high enough to obtain visas, are much lower than those paid to American workers.

Last month Trump signed an executive order aimed at overhauling the visa system.

"The reality is bringing in local talent and mixing that with the best of global talent in the times we are living in and the times we're entering is the right thing to do," Sikka said.

In March, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services said it would be suspending premium processing of H-1B visas. And last month, the USCIS said that computer programmers could no longer be presumed to be eligible for H-1B visas.

These changes have resulted in applications for this year's quota of H-1B visas falling for the first time in four years.

Sikka told Bloomberg: "We are not only hiring computer science specialists but also engineers with software development aptitude and potential who we will train and prepare.

“In the past two years, through the non-profit Infosys Foundation, we’ve trained 2500 teachers and over 135,000 students and that has gone extremely well. The number of people we have trained is almost getting to the size of our delivery organisation and we will be tapping these."