THE FORGOTTEN Immigration Problem

WebToday ^ | 8-29-10 | WebToday

[Moose4]

Gee, no, I didn’t. My company, an offshore IT contractor, is actually transferring people off from my current customer and to others because the customer company is drastically slashing costs.

I have no personal beef with (virtually) any of the Indian folks I’ve worked with, either here or at the other end of a phone line 9000 miles away. I’ve got a major beef with our messed-up immigration system that lets companies use huge loopholes to bring foreign talent here at rates that American workers can’t survive on.

}:-)4

[Tax-chick]

That’s what I figured. It’s not that Indian engineers are bad people or not adequate, but the bigger picture of our economy.

[Moose4]

Let me elaborate about that “wages American workers can’t survive on” line. Take me. Pushing 44, married, one kid, don’t own a house, own two cars (one of which runs). I have a lot of bills for various things, as you’d expect, and twenty-three years experience in various bits of the IT industry, about five of which are pertinent to my current job. So somebody employing me would have to pay me fair market wages for this area, right? Only makes sense.

Contrast that with Pradesh from India. He comes here on an H-1B visa for a short time, say 9 months. The “body shop” that owns his visa sets him up in a corporate apartment with three other people. He probably doesn’t bring his wife and kid(s) over, if he has them, because spouses have some very strict rules about being able to work on H-1Bs. So first off, he’s splitting the rent and utilities in a two-bedroom apartment four ways instead of paying for the whole thing like I do. He carpools or vanpools. He probably doesn’t get paid insurance, or he has to pick up a lot more of the bill than I do at my employer. No wife, no kids, communal living...he doesn’t need the same amount of money that I do.

There’s any number of tricks that the contractor can use to avoid paying him anywhere near what I’d make, even though that’s the law. They list the jobs at lower paygrades, they tailor job openings for specific people, all sorts of things. Plus the pay scales in India are VERY low. So if Pradesh is making, say, 50% of what I do, he’s still making a ton more than he would’ve in India. The contract company puts him at a customer site and charges the customer, say, 80% of what they would per hour for me. Everybody wins...Pradesh saves a huge amount of money for his family when he goes back to India, the contract company gets a huge margin, and the customer gets labor 20% below market rates. Everybody wins...except the local employee that can’t get a job because of the Pradeshes.

}:-)4