Worried over the increasing rates of the rejections of the L-1 visas — which are employed for intra-company transfers of the employees from their overseas offices to the US offices — many Indian IT biggies, together with their US clients & partners, including many big American organizations, have approached Barack Obama. They have sought his intervention to beat the growing curbs placed on the skilled workers from India, which, they claim, is impacting their operations, and also affecting their businesses.

At the root of the criticism from such firms from both the involved nations is the inordinately long delays and crippling chaos that, as alleged, the concerned American immigration officials are putting on the L-1 visa applicants. Such firms claim that the concerned officials of the US immigration are overreaching the mark and misreading the rules to out rightly reject many L-1 Visa applications. They claim that such long delays fail to boost compliance or enforcement though they play havoc with their meticulously planned business plans and also eat into their overall business profits.

According to some experts, lately, the overall rejection rate of the L-1 visas has alarming shot-up. While during 2008 it was just somewhere between 6% and 7% during, during the year gone by, i.e., 2011 it stood at 27%. It needs to be mentioned that in the wake of certain complaints filed by some lawmakers that many companies from India were blatantly misusing the visa class to dent the US salaries and displace the local workers, the concerned immigration authorities have remarkably tightened the interpretation of the rules meant for the L-1 and the H1-B visas.

However, the critics of the development refute the charges claiming that the American immigration officials believe in an incoherent and inappropriately blinkered meaning of the specific knowledge — which is one of the criteria for making available such visas to the applicants.