By The Straits Times | Created at 2026-10-10 09:12:06 | Updated at 2026-10-10 10:08:29
58 minutes ago
India’s government criticised Vice-President J.D. Vance for “deeply offensive” remarks in which he referred to foreign recruits at software firms in the US, many of whom are Indians, as servants.
Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling on Oct 8 suspended some of India’s biggest IT services businesses, as well as Microsoft and Adobe, from a longstanding immigration initiative as part of a crackdown on alleged abuse of the H-1B worker visa system.
Vance urged US companies to hire more American workers and to “stop importing an indentured servant to do a job that an American worker would happily do”.
In India, the term is associated with a colonial-era system in which workers were forced into labour on plantations and farms overseas under exploitative conditions.
Without citing Vance’s comments, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said on Oct 9 that the remarks were “unwarranted and ignore the fact that Indian professionals in the United States are highly educated and skilled contributors to its economy and innovation ecosystem”.
“Resorting to terminology that carries painful historical and colonial legacy connotations is deeply offensive,” the ministry said in a statement.
India-US ties have come under strain in the past year over trade disputes, immigration and US President Donald Trump’s closer ties with Pakistan, India’s nuclear-armed neighbour. Top officials from the US and India recently signalled that trade negotiations are at an impasse despite months of talks.
Vance on Oct 9 repeated the controversial phrase, while answering reporters’ questions around industrial policy.
“We’re trying to make it harder for major corporations to undercut the wages of American workers and bring in indentured servants to replace American jobs,” he said.
“You see Democrats aggressively saying, ‘No, no, no, no! We want to continue to allow corporations to bring in indentured servants from overseas to undercut the wages of Americans.’ That is absurd. We fight for American workers.”
The latest steps to curb skilled immigration “do not advance the shared ambitions of both countries” since talent mobility is mutually beneficial, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said.
“The history of the United States itself has been shaped by generations of immigrants whose labour, enterprise and innovation have contributed to its growth and prosperity.”
Ashok Malik, a partner at strategy and business advisory firm The Asia Group, said the latest US restrictions on IT firms are clearly targeted at India.
“It will have an impact on the bilateral relationship,” he said. “The trust between the two countries has clearly suffered now.”
The moves announced by Vance and Sonderling take aim at the Permanent Labor Certification Program, or PERM, which allows companies to sponsor a foreigner who has been working in the US under the H-1B and other visa holders to become a legal permanent resident, the first step to becoming a US citizen.
India’s Tata Consultancy Services, the largest provider of software outsourcing services in Asia, shrugged off the curbs on Oct 9, saying they will not affect its hiring or business strategy. BLOOMBERG
