SETBACK FOR INDIAN IT - Canada tightens immigration norms for skilled workers
Like the US, Canada too has over the past few weeks tightened significantly the regulations governing its skilled worker immigration visas, a move that could hurt Indian IT companies’ ability to win and service orders in that country.
IT industry body Nasscom sees the changes to be so potentially disruptive that on Friday it sent mails to external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj and industry & commerce minister Nirmala Sitharaman requesting “urgent intervention”. The matter is expected to come up for discussion on Tuesday during the visit of Canada’s minister of citizenship and immigration, Chris Alexander, to India.
“We are disappointed that Canada has chosen to follow an insular path rather than a progressive policy as adopted by the EU recently with regard to treating skilled workers transfer under intra-corporate transfers,” Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar told TOI.
Indian companies use over 15,000 Canadian work visas annually.
The visa that’s used the most to work for short periods in Canada is called the Intra-Company Transfer (ICT) visa. It’s similar to the L1 visa in the US, and can be used by companies to transfer specialist employees, in say India, to their subsidiary in Canada. On June 9, the Canadian government introduced changes that make it more difficult to understand what kind of people would be eligible to use the visa. The change states that it must be people with “uncommon knowledge”.
The implication is that profiles normally considered specialists in the tech sector will no longer be adequate under the new rubric of ‘uncommon knowledge’.
Gagan Sabharwal, deputy director of global trade development in Nasscom, said the Canadian government’s failure to define ‘uncommon knowledge’ has
meant that Canadian embassies do not know how to implement the new norm.
“So they are putting the onus on applicants to prove they fit the requirement.
They have brought in a huge level of subjectivity and ambiguity. No visas have been issued under this category since the changes were introduced on June 9,” he said.
Another visa that can be used is the LMO (labour market opinion) visa. In this, Canada has mandated companies to certify that they would not displace any local workers in the two years following the award of an IT contract. “Companies are not comfortable providing such certificates,” Sabharwal said.
Canada and US have been tightening visa programmes under pressure from sections locally that are worried about high unemployment rates in these countries. But many others say that the countries do not have the skills that India provides, and the move will ultimately be detrimental to those countries.
Source - TimesOfIndia (8th July 2014)
