The rejection rate for H-1Bs has remained high under the Trump administration compared to previous peak levels but a new analysis of official data reveals US branches of Indian IT companies are bearing the brunt of it, compared to American users of these temporary work visas for high skilled foreigners.

But the discrimination has nothing to do with the country of origin of these companies but the nature of their business, says the author of the report. Providers of professional IT services are worse hit than product makers.

From 2% of its petitions being rejected in 2015, Infosys saw it go up by 43 percentage points to 45% up to the third quarter of 2019, according to an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, a non-partisan think-tank, of data disclosed by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which runs the H-1B programme.

US tech companies, which are leading users of H-1B visas that often go to Indians, also saw their rejections go up but not as significantly. Rejection rates for Amazon, Microsoft, Intel and Google went up by mere 5,7, 6 and 2 percentage points. Facebook’s went up by even less, 2 percentage points, and there was no change whatsoever for Apple.

These numbers are for “initial employment”, and not “continuing employment”, which are in the nature of extensions. H-1B visas are given a period fo three years, which can be extended for a maximum of up to another three years.

There doesn’t appear to be pattern indicating targeting of companies as per their countries of origin. Capgemeni, a French company, saw its rejection rate go up by 50 percentage points from 5% in 2015 to 55% in 2019. The rates for Ireland’s Accenture and UK’s PricewaterhouseCoopers jumped as well, by 48 and 29 points respectively.

“The data show that as a result of changes in policies at USCIS both US and Indian companies that provide professional and information technology services to customers in the United States have higher H-1B denial rates than other companies, particularly U.S. product companies like Apple,” said Stuart Andersen, author of the NFAP report released recently.