What exactly is a non market wage? The lowest bidder settles with the highest asker. It’s called supply and demand.
What I see is resentment and a victim attitude on behalf on those that have been laid off, are without work, or think they are underemployed. They want someone to blame, be it white people in management, Indians, Wall Street, rich Republicans, the Jews ...
I have no position on the limit for H1-Bs and I’m not advocating that we increase, or even keep it at the same level, right now. I also agree that those on H1-Bs who have been laid off should go home.
However, the tenor in the H1-B/immigration discussion is what strikes me.
It’s one thing to oppose immigration because immigrants are coming here illegally and are mooching off of our public services (the Bill O’Reilly types). It’s another thing to complain about foreigners taking your job because you’re just not that good at it but you need someone to blame for your lot in life (the Lou Dobbs types).
The Bill O’Reilly types make a good argument. The Lou Dobbs types, ironically, feed into the amnesty crowd by making it seem that illegal immigrants do a better job than lazy Americans.
Actually....in a true free market....if there was a real demand for Indian labor...they would be paid equal to or above what Americans make.
There are plenty of Americans willing to work...so the supply is there....more than meets the demand. The only reason the Indians are brought in is to reduce wages, non-market....the demand is for their low pay...not for their services
Dobbs understands this “free market” when it comes to labor..since there is no market demand for Indian labor....the supply of Americans is there. Of course, the low wage Indians mean that there is fewer $$$ for retail, services, government revenue (the last one forces tax increases on Americans)
The real racism is from the Economic Anti-Americans who think its great because “we can pay them dark skinned Indians less than Americans”. Coolie labor...21st Century style
What exactly is a non market wage? The lowest bidder settles with the highest asker. It’s called supply and demand.Not in the case of H1B's. It's more like a form of indentured servitude. If you google a little bit you'll find everything you need.
Companies abuse the system like this:
They come up with a job description intentionally mangled so that no Americans can apply for the job(i.e. 5 years experience for a technology that has only existed for 3 years).
They advertise the position in the states and give some courtesy interviews, coming up with excuses not to hire an American.
Then they hire a guy from India/China who costs them >20k less than an equivalent American for the same job and they have complete control over the poor sap(Don't like working 80 hour weeks? Ooops then we can fire you and send your butt home, hope you like going back to $10,000 a year).
If we really cared about the H1B system we'd do two things:
First, we'd have some sort of independent metric for job postings(i.e. you need a Foo programmer? he should be able to do X,Y,Z. I'd imagine it'd be something similar to the way we certify regular engineers). You'd also need some form of independent metric of how many available engineers of that type you had available. That way you really could be sure that *if there were qualified Americans available* you could hire them.
Second, make the H1B not tied to employment status. If a foreign worker(now presumably better qualified than the current bunch) came over and doesn't like his job he should be able to quit and find another one(which presumably would be easy, a true H1B should be a star). Which would get rid of the indentured servitude aspect.
Of course employers would never go for it. They'd prefer cheap slaves that don't talk back even if they're less talented.