On Tuesday, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that his government was abolishing a temporary worker visa programme that would affect around 95,000 foreign workers—the majority of them Indians. This comes on the heels of the US announcing its own visa reforms that will affect the Indian IT industry, and new visa restrictions in the UK that will impact Indians.
India is also fighting an uphill battle at the World Trade Organization, where it is trying to address imbalances in the General Agreement on Trade in Services by improving provisions for cross-border movement of service suppliers—an area where it will face opposition from the US and the European Union.
For all the political upheaval it is causing in the developed world, globalization has been a massive force for good in emerging economies such as India. But with developed countries increasingly clamping down on the free movement of labour that has been a crucial component of it, there are difficult times ahead. Not just for the IT industry.