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.
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.
I doubt that very much.
It is extremely hard to manage offshore operations, especially when they are located on a different continent. Most executives do not know how to do this and do not want to be bothered with it. Also the project failure rates are too high to conceal.
Executives want a captive and disposable workforce of skilled technicians that they can rent for less than the cost of the store clerk at a 7-11.
The H1B program undercuts local wages and provides an indentured work force with no political recourse.
Another featured import of the h1b program is the practice of suppliers bribing executives to obtain contract awards. This is standard business operation in India and most of the rest of Asia. It is supposedly unlawful in the United States. You can bet with good odds that key executives of Southern California Edison took some kind of "commission" or "consulting fee" as part of the deal with Infosys and Tata Consulting. Such payments are often made to relatives or close friends of the executives.
The H1B program should be terminated. Executives and politicians who keep supporting these types of programs should be thrown out of office.
We don't have a shortage of skilled American labor. And we already bring in 1.1 million legal permanent immigrants a year, 50% of whom lack even a high school diploma. We also import 650,000 temporary workers a year with about two million guest workers being in this country at any one time. If we truly had a shortage of labor, wages would be going up, not down. And we would not be having the lowest labor particapation rates since 1978.
Horse manure....
You’re telling me that in all the decades of the ‘skilled labor shortage’ high tech IT companies did not have the ability to hook up with colleges around the country and create pipelines for students tailored to do that kind of work??
Wrong...they don’t want to. They want to import cheap labor. How can you possibly explain away firing American workers who were doing those jobs, and replacing them with cheap imports?
