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 heard the ‘RATS and some RINO politicians say last week that foreigners are far superior to Americans.
Impoting the workers for the jobs that can’t be exported.
That’s what’s going on.
It is not immigration.
The sorry truth is that much more IT work and chunks of the tech and tech-associated industries would be completely offshored without these programs.
This is completely different from the low-skill jobs that illegals tend to perform: they would be domestic positions, filled by Americans, though with some upgrades in technology and efficiency, if the illegals weren’t hired.
The best thing is to favor the smart and the skilled for legal immigration and to kick out the illegal (who are mostly low-skilled and politically Leftist) folks here.
Where’s Occupy to protest this?.../s
We heard the same at a Family Law conference, that firms are outsourcing their legal research to India, it’s quicker and cheaper. We all know how well that works for customer service call centers, right?
> I heard the ‘RATS and some RINO politicians say last week that foreigners are far superior to Americans.
They just meant their bought and paid for votes...not them themselves...
Oh, and I speak from experience in having to deal with many of them on a daily basis. Couple high-tech and english as a 2nd language and it's a whole new ballgame...
To make things worse is the scope creep of other visas to add workers, such as letting those who came on a student visa work for a year after graduation and spouses of those on some types of visa work.
> We heard the same at a Family Law conference, that firms are outsourcing their legal research to India, it’s quicker and cheaper. We all know how well that works for customer service call centers, right?
I’m sure it would be excellent customer service ....if not for the fact they can’t understand me and I can’t understand them, the phone calls that get disconnectly unexpectedly, and the fact that I don’t solve the poblem I called them about in the first place...
More foreign workers = more democrat voters
Let's face it, democrats play this game a lot better than we do.
Or, the companies would start raising the wages offered for those positions and, voila! we would see more IT majors being graduated.
Either that, or we can just import more people that are so thankful not to be bathing in the river that they will work for peanuts.
Where?
Yeah...right...Microsoft....thats why a friend of ours trained his east Indian replacement and then was laid off...over 10 years ago.
A huge chunk of crafting good software is gathering good requirements. Customers don't often know exactly what they want at first, or even how to ask for what they want.
I believe that the Obamacare website fiasco was just as much about poor requirements gathering as it was about poor coding.
Importing low-level coders from foreign countries is a sure way to guarantee that good requirements will not be gathered and will not be responded to correctly.
This is what happened at the companies I worked for that hired H-1B folks.
> We heard the same at a Family Law conference, that firms are outsourcing their legal research to India, it’s quicker and cheaper. We all know how well that works for customer service call centers, right?
I’m sure it would be excellent customer service ....if not for the fact they can’t understand me and I can’t understand them, the phone calls that get disconnectly unexpectedly, and the fact that I don’t solve the poblem I called them about in the first place...<
Exactly. They won’t solve your problem and act like you are an ugly American to boot, and you feel like an usgly American when you hang up with your problem still in tact.
That is exactly what Jeb Bush has been saying. They are more family oriented and they are more entrepreneurial. Jeb likes them better than Americans, and I'll bet he gets a higher percentage of their votes.
Just my personal take, since have worked in IT since the mid-80's ... American colleges crank out enough comp sci grads, they just happen to be foreigners. Part of this is for the sake of diversity, part of this is a money grab. State colleges and universities account for a large percentage of all college grads, comp sci included. They charge two different rates for tuition; in-state and out-of-state. The foreigners pay out-of-state tuition, which is much more than in-state tuition.
I have found that there are very few foreigners that match the abilities of a good American college grad. This begins with the most important thing when come to technology - communication; as in oral and written communication. Deloitte and other IT consulting firms are filled with people that can't communicate. Reason being, they don't speak American. Second to communication, foreigners don't have an American work ethic or an ability to creatively/effectively solve problems. Unfortunately, this has bleed over into a good chunk of the young Americans entering the work force since too many college educators are also foreigners. As they say, those that can't do, teach. We're left with foreigners teaching the few Americans that go into technology degree programs. Those same foreigners doing the teaching can't speak the language and they have no real world experience. Why Americans are willing to pay for a half-ass, over-inflated product they call education is beyond me. It is as if once people get into college they immediate stop being customers and demanding value for their money.
Perhaps it is time to consider a tax penalty on visa based jobs. I can see a social security type tax. One that is split between the employer and employee of some significant percentage.
Think about it, even if you are a good programmer, if you don't understand English you are next to worthless.
Also how much actual work and experience can these people have before coming over here? How much of our computer technology in general originated in India?
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