I have sympathy with those who think that the legal immigration H1B visa program should be revisited to take into account effects on US citizens and current legal residents.
Is this person being replaced because of his Caucasian race as some kind of reverse discrimination? That should be illegal.
If his replacement is solely due to the lower salary, that is tougher. It needs to be part of the consideration of the numbers of H1B visas granted. This came up recently in Congress. I believe the high tech companies who want more cheap labor won.
A sad but true fact is that this pool of low cost educated Indian labor exists. If they don’t come here, they will go to jobs outside the US. This makes our tech companies less competitive unless they can compensate in some other way.
Hiring lower cost labor generally is not illegal.
It is tough to choose between protecting employees like your acquaintance and helping build stronger foreign tech competitors. I think it is in our national security interest to have the tech companies here.
But that is what is at stake.
My point is that once immigrants are here legally, they should be protected. That does not address how many should come here in the future, which is a completely different question. That is a subject of compromise. There will be some losers.
We let the semiconductor fabrication industry substantially leave the US for foreign locations that were more attractive to do business for cost, environmental and other reasons. I hope we don’t Make the same mistake again.
It would be much easier to just take the ones with the highest salaries, and then say they could change jobs after one year in the US.
That would call the tech giants bluff. They might find that US citizens are cheaper.
Politicians will always pander to large companies due to their campaign donations and that the politician owns stock. It’s in their best interests to use cheaper labor. This is nothing more than selling out the American worker and is ultimately unsustainable. It is also ignores national security and the critical infrastructure we should require to be secured, the globalists don’t care - if it falls apart it probably won’t impact them.
I know of one person in Palo Alto was instantly displaced when a new Indian director came onboard.
I re-written resumes for US tech workers who are sleeping in their cars due to displacement by H1B.
I know some of the Disney workers who were displaced by H1B. Their lives were destroyed in the process.
Now, I’m paying welfare for these folks, so the caste system + cheap labor can continue?
Intel’s current woes are due to Curry.
95 percent of them need to be shipped home.