Posted on 01/31/2003 11:36:32 AM PST by JimRic54
A crime against Americans BY REY DAVID Special to The Examiner
I HAVE BEEN a software engineer for the past 15 years, and a good one at that. Seven months ago, my company decided to give my job to offshore software outsourcers from India, and I got laid off.
Unemployment has caused me tremendous hardship. Like so many others in the Bay Area, landing a paying job has become a Herculean full-time job, fraught with tedious daily tasks and crushing frustration.
I have come to accept that there would be difficult periods like this during any business cycle. But I was stunned and aggrieved when I observed a crime being perpetrated at a time like this -- an unconscionable crime against hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying, patriotic IT professionals like me.
Allow me to explain. There are many job ads I come across for which my skills and experience are ideal. The reason I have not successfully landed one is that, according to at least four of the recruiters I asked, there are around 500 applicants for every job opening. That's an astonishing number. With so many applicants, it would be reasonable to assume your chances of succeeding are not very good.
Here is where I first discovered the crime: I noticed a few ads advertised that they sponsor H1-B visas. I found that the companies who sponsor H1-B visas are invariably owned or run by Indians. There are thousands of unemployed IT professionals in the Bay Area who are U.S. residents and desperately looking for work. And here we see some Indian-owned companies who will spend the time, effort and money to bring people in from India to fill their job openings. That is unconscionable!
I thought that there had to be a mistake. This is the United States of America. Surely the authorities would not allow such crimes to take place. To my horror, I learned it has become a common practice for some Indians to set up dummy corporations, create dozens of bogus job openings, sponsor H1-B visas for candidates in India and arrange a temporary home for these "successful candidates."
These candidates pay their "sponsor" a fixed fee for his "services." They then stay with other successful candidates in an arranged home until they find a paying job for themselves with some bona fide American company.
But why would the companies bother to advertise openings to the public when they have no intention of hiring locally? They advertise to satisfy the INS's minimum requirements for H1-B sponsorship.
This despicable practice may explain why there has been exponential growth in the number of Indian IT professionals in the Bay Area.
I am not being discriminatory or racist. I don't care about someone's ethnicity or skin color. What I care about is behavior! And the fact is, people have systematically taken jobs away from deserving Americans right from under our feet.
The problem keeps getting bigger. I observed that when an Indian rose to a position of authority, he would hire Indians whenever possible.
Friends have shared with me that when they succeeded in getting an interview at an Indian-owned company, the interviewer and almost everybody else in the office was Indian.
My friends would feel like the interviewer had no intention of hiring anyone who wasn't Indian. The Indian companies invited non-Indians to interview only for the sake of appearance, and for state Equal Employment Opportunity reporting purposes.
In any case, some enterprising Indians have learned ways around the law to bring Indian nationals here for profit.
Indian professionals who have been brought in here through illicit means are swamping the IT jobs marketplace. It is hurting hardworking, law-abiding, tax-paying, patriotic Americans like me who are desperately looking for honest work.
And it has got to stop!
Comment: letters@examiner.com
Rey David has been a software engineer for 15 years. He lives in Livermore.
It ain't a crime. It's globalization. I'm not sure how it can be arrested, but we also shouldn't have our government making the loss of jobs easier.
But welcome to the Reservation. The Indians, ranchers, miners and manufacturing workers are already here. We have a nice selection of used single- and double- wides, not too heavily used, and a low-paying service job. If you're lucky, you can get a job at a resort waiting on the very people who sold your job out to India.
Once at Nortel Networks in Richardson Texas, and once here in Austin at a small startup.
Nortel never resembled America when I was there. The company reeked of American hating Canadians, Pakistanis and your average liberal/progressive idiots. I met several Pakistanis who always supported the liberal views in America. Hmmmm, why is that? Could it be, that the American left hates America too, which is a view in common with the average Pakistani? When I went to job fairs, I would mostly see Americans looking for jobs.
Richardson Texas was also the place where several raids took place against Islamic "charities".
I submit myself in anyway that I can to reverse this idiotic policy against American workers.
You can always come frame houses in the winter here on the coast of Massachusetts. Maybe get some inside work, hanging rock and laying floor with me and the rest of my 40yr old and plus friends. Boo-hoo.
I got a friend, needs some PLC on an old Allen-Bradley, got a guy in for $750 a day, RT ticket, meals, rent a car.... I guess some people can hustle and don't look for that sweet corporate chair. No offense, but I wouldn't hire you either.
I do hope that you have your tongue firmly in your cheek.
Setting up fake companies and fake "jobs available" ads in order to abuse and exploit H1 visas is not a crime?
Please tell me it's not true!
The thing is, is it a joke ... or isn't it? For example, it's against the law to require someone to give their social security numbers - but the government doesn't eforce the law. It's against the law for someone to be in the country illegally - but governments at all levels look the other way. So the abuse of the H1-B program is illegal - but I sincerely doubt the feds will enforce abuse of such. After all, since the entire concept is now predicated on a lie, namely that there is a shortage of American IT workers, what makes you think enforcement of the H1-B laws will be any more honest?
Yeah, just like the INS routinely makes raids to catch firms hiring illegal workers ... whoops, they don't anymore, nevermind...
Learn business as well as computer skills. We had several H1-B programmers at my previous employer, but they simply could not translate technical knowledge into effective business solutions. Just as with manufacturing, rote tasks can be done anywhere. But specialized work requires specialists. Become one.
Writing software is not a "rote task", nor will it ever be such. Software is very "specialist".
Sorry, but writing a compiler or even accounting software is fairly rote, in the sense that someone with technical knowledge but little business knowledge can follow a spec and write the code. The American technical workers who will keep their jobs in the future will combine business and technical knowledge, especially as it pertains to the particular culture of American business. I was laid off a year ago and was out of work for eight months, and when I was re-hired it wasn't because of any specific technical skills but because of my specific business knowledge that I acquired in my last job.
My last employer had several H1-B programmers, all with masters and doctorates. But the two college dropouts ran the IT department, because we understood business better (and could out-program them as well).
I noticed you signed up today and I, too, am a newcomer.
Many Americans have awakened to the fact that manufacturing has moved outside the USA and inside China. Customer service for GE, IBM, American Express, etc. etc. has moved to Bangalore, India! GE service schedulers are located in Bangalore. Of this, of course, many Americans are unaware.
Our role in the global program is to be consumers, but it will become exceedingly more difficult to consume what is produced (outside the USA, for the most part) when all important jobs are gone leaving only poor paying jobs that involve flipping burgers.
Saying all this, I don't know whether to take your comment in a humorous vein or consider you to be another alien America hater who will willingly sell your sole for the decaying "American Dream."
When all Americans wake up to the insidiousness of NAFTA and WTO it will be too late.
Now, does that make you happy?
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