Labor Department's Aid to IT Workers Displaced by H-1B Helps Big Tech Instead

Recently, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced the creation of the “H-1B One Workforce” apprenticeship program designed to help more Americans enter industries frequently occupied by H-1B visa-holders. According to the agency’s press release, the program would fund “training for middle- to high-skilled H-1B occupations within key sectors in the U.S. economy, including information technology and cyber security, advanced manufacturing and transportation…” The $150 million-dollar program, we are told, is intended “to upskill the present workforce and train a new generation of workers to grow the future workforce…”

Sounds good for U.S. workers, it would seem, especially given the present state of our COVID-crippled economy. Not exactly. Like a lot of what’s traditionally come out of the H-1B-managing agencies, it is the usual suspects who look to be the real beneficiaries here.

Details are still sparse, but plenty of red flags present themselves in the new announcement. To start, the H-1B program channels the large majority of its foreign workers into the IT industry, not transportation or advanced manufacturing. This same problem arose last year when then-secretary Alex Acosta proposed an iteration of the program that included health care training; another industry not affected by H-1B workers.

So, taxpayer-funds will be going to industries without an H-1B problem. Not a giant public-policy mismatch, but one that’s glaring enough error to question whether helping H-1B displacement is truly the motivation here.

As UC Davis computer science professor and seasoned Big Tech-critic Norm Matloff recently said about the new announcement: “Worst of all [about it] is the implied message that we have a tech labor shortage in the first place, which no study (other than industry-sponsored ones) has ever found.”

[...] these sorts of retraining programs only perpetuate the narrative that there is an IT labor shortage. This amounts to little more than a PR-benefit seemingly designed for Big Tech. Matloff is right about the nonexistent IT-worker shortage. The U.S. has plenty of them. For instance, minority IT grads apparently far exceed their numbers in Silicon Valley and tech hubs elsewhere.

[...] Big Tech wants foreign workers, not U.S. ones, because their jobs are tied to their visa. Such guaranteed pliancy is coveted by the industry. They’ve even admitted as much.

[...] We’ve heard about the H-1B’s displacement and wage-levelling effects on the IT industry going all the way back to the 1990s. A working paper published last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research still finds these dispossessing effects occurring. For instance, it found no broad offsetting benefits to the program nor that it fills real American tech-sector shortages as intended. It suggests in sum that the program’s basically a handout to the trillion-dollar tech industry.

Amen!

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