Posted on 03/02/2015 6:17:09 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
(FULL TITLE) EXPOSED: American Companies, States Firing American Workers And Importing Foreign Guest Workers To Replace Them
Excerpted from News 10: It’s nearly 8 p.m., and inside a state office building two dozen computer experts design and troubleshoot a system that will take and process millions of unemployment claims each year.
It’s a $200 million Employment Development Department project, but with the exception of two managers, everyone inside the office is from outside of the U.S. They are employed by Deloitte, a major U.S. IT company hired by the state to create and manage its Unemployment Insurance Modernization project. The mostly Indian nationals are allowed to work here under a visa program called H-1B.
Tech companies like Microsoft, Intel, Google and Facebook say they need hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to fill jobs here because American colleges can’t crank out computer science grads fast enough. In 2013, the industry lobbied Congress on the issue to the tune of almost $14 million.
Those companies, who need workers with highly specialized knowledge like computer expertise, are awarded the visas through a lottery process. It’s allowed under the Immigration and Nationality Act and administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. The visas can be valid as long as six years.
News10 reached out to several H-1B workers over the past three months, and they all declined to comment for this story.
“The program is going unfettered, unchecked, without bounds, and it’s all in the interest of profit,” Computer Database Administrator Chris Brown said. He said was displaced by one of the special visa workers in 1996, and he has been following the issue for the past 18 years.
Hewlett Packard laid off Brown from its Roseville plant during the height of the H-1B program, when as many as 300,000 of the workers were allowed to take jobs in the U.S. The cap for H-1B visas today is 85,000 after federal audits showed there were abuses in the program. There’s an effort on Capitol Hill to raise the ceiling again to levels last seen in the mid 1990s. And, during a recent presidential trip to India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked President Obama to help loosen the restrictions on the H-1B program. India’s tech outsourcing industry makes billions of dollars every year sending programmers and engineers overseas to work for U.S. companies.
Brown is watching those new developments with interest. When he lost his job in 1996, it was just two weeks before Christmas. He says he’s afraid more Americans will be replaced by foreign-born workers.
“I’m a single income, so on that particular day, as a direct result of this program, we were unable to provide Christmas presents and I kept telling my kids that day that Santa might not show up,” Brown said.
A spokesperson for Hewlett Packard said he would not comment on layoffs that happened 18 years and three CEOs ago, but he defended the visas as a needed resource for HP and the industry as a whole.
U.S. Department of Labor data shows more than 1,100 H-1B visas were certified for workers in the Sacramento area in 2014. The largest number was for Accenture, an IT company that is currently holding state contracts totaling more than $1 billion. It has 125 H-1B visa holders in Sacramento. Deloitte has another 28, and there are four dozen of them filling positions in state offices in the Capital City. Keep reading
I doubt that very much.
It is extremely hard to manage offshore operations, especially when they are located on a different continent. Most executives do not know how to do this and do not want to be bothered with it. Also the project failure rates are too high to conceal.
Executives want a captive and disposable workforce of skilled technicians that they can rent for less than the cost of the store clerk at a 7-11.
The H1B program undercuts local wages and provides an indentured work force with no political recourse.
Another featured import of the h1b program is the practice of suppliers bribing executives to obtain contract awards. This is standard business operation in India and most of the rest of Asia. It is supposedly unlawful in the United States. You can bet with good odds that key executives of Southern California Edison took some kind of "commission" or "consulting fee" as part of the deal with Infosys and Tata Consulting. Such payments are often made to relatives or close friends of the executives.
The H1B program should be terminated. Executives and politicians who keep supporting these types of programs should be thrown out of office.
Post/thread BUMP!
We don't have a shortage of skilled American labor. And we already bring in 1.1 million legal permanent immigrants a year, 50% of whom lack even a high school diploma. We also import 650,000 temporary workers a year with about two million guest workers being in this country at any one time. If we truly had a shortage of labor, wages would be going up, not down. And we would not be having the lowest labor particapation rates since 1978.
Yep....been happening at my company for the last several years. H1B workers are beginning to outnumber American workers.
1000% agree with you, key for H1b visa is bribe/down payment of house.
Current quality of H1B visa is horrible, they come here on fake resume, they even pay for there own H1b visa. As soon as they land here they jump for another higher paying job.
IT is a global market—you can’t effectively create just a local market with higher costs and prices while the rest of the world operates differently.
What you describe is why many companies contract with offshorers to do that offshore management. You don’t describe an environment whereby many companies can afford to ignore the global pattern and trend.
Foreigners are cheaper . Obama is doing the same to the Military ,fire A Sergeant and hire a Private
As I tried to explain—many of the low-skill job markets operate within local markets, and thus what you describe is perfectly apt for them.
The higher-skill markets tend not to be localized, and thus don’t follow the rules you outline.
Professional labor, such as legal research, doesn’t depend so much on phone communication (and the quality of Indian-accented English). Outsourcing for such involves smarter and more highly-trained overseas employees. Thus, it is if anything more of a threat than traditional, consumer-oriented customer service—and yet even outsourced traditional, consumer-oriented customer service isn’t going away.
Because its easier. Think about it. Doing the right thing has always been harder.
How pray tell, does someone in India comprehend a local US issue?
I didn't outline any rules. The fact is that our legal immigration policies are destroying the American worker, skilled and unskilled. Add to that the illegal alien problem and you have the destruction of the American worker, skilled and unskilled. Workers have become a disposable commodity for employers who prefer to hire the part-time and temporary.
The myth of the shortage of STEM workers is perpetuated by the Chamber of Commerce and their RINO allies. They want cheap labor and the way to do that is to create a surplus of labor by importing foreign workers. It used to be that we need foreign workers to do jobs Americans won't do. Now, we must also import foreign workers to do jobs Americans can't do. It is a lie and a travesty.
For Every New Job, Two New Immigrants Since 2000: 9.3 million new jobs, 18 million new immigrants.
In 1970 one in 21 was foreign born in this country; today it is one in 8, the highest in 90 years; and within a decade it will be one in 7, the highest in our history. Something very significant and ominous has been happening in this country since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. We are being colonized by the Third World.
They live in a global media world and lots of local research exists within a narrowly defined set of documents anyway.
If you want to buy it, be my guest. I will do my own legal research thank you.
Labor shortages are closely linked to salaries and labor costs—and for many high-skilled areas, global market forces now pertain.
Low-skill workers are having their situation degraded by illegal immigration (and, to a degree, technology), but high-skill workers are more likely to be having their situation degraded by globalization (and, to a degree, technology).
Silly statement. You can say that about other commodities and services. What responsibility does a government have to its people? Should we allow the unlimited importation of cheap foreign labor to enable our businesses to compete in the global market? What happens to the native born? Is the idea to drive down wages to third world levels?
There are many examples of developed countries competing successfully in global markets whether it is cars, energy. or agriculture.
We are artificially creating a local market with lower costs and prices by importing cheap foreign labor. It has social, cultural, electoral, demographic, and economic consequences.
So why are IT wages essentially stagnant? Wage trends are one of the best measures of labor demand. If STEM workers are in short supply, wages should be increasing rapidly. But wage data from multiple sources show little growth over the last 12 years.
Real hourly wages (adjusted for inflation) grew on average just 0.7 percent a year from 2000 to 2012 for STEM workers, and annual wages grew even less — 0.4 percent a year. Wage growth is very modest for most subcategories of engineers and technology workers.
Boo Hoo, liberal IT workers lose their jobs to ‘legal’ HB-1 workers, but cheer importing unskilled illiterate illegals that will vote demonrat.
Liberals want it both ways, “protect our jobs, but screw everyone else if we get more votes out of the deal.”
How about a new HB-1 program to import about a million Asian K-12 school teachers? That might get the hypocrites attention.
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