Two lawmakers have introduced a legislation in the House of Representatives seeking to prevent US companies from outsourcing American jobs and using H-1B visas to hire highly-skilled foreign workers. The bill — moved jointly on Wednesday by a Republican and a Democratic member of the House — proposes to raise the annual salary for an H-1B hire from $60,000 currently to $100,000 in order to prevent firms from employing cheaper labour from abroad. It also proposes getting rid of the masters degree exemption to ensure highly-skilled foreign workers are indeed highly skilled, and not, the lawmakers said in a statement, those who “obtained low-quality certificates to meet the requirements”. The bill will be tracked closely by US companies, among them subsidiaries of Indian IT giants such as TCS, Infosys and Wipro, which use H-1B visas to hire foreign workers, many of them from India, due to, they contend, a shortage of trained American hands. Critics of the H-1B programme — some of whom are in senior positions in the incoming Trump administration — have argued it is being used by US companies to bring cheaper labour from abroad to maximise profits. Source Hindustantimes.com