H1B Visa program was on paper INTENDED to provide foreign labor for jobs where no domestic labor could be found to meet the requirements. It has been abused to be used for hiring for hiring cheaper labor from foreign sources when domestic labor wouldn't do the same job for lower wages. The rationalizations don't add up to what it's actually being used for.
The sheer numbers of people hired through this program, how fast the quota gets used up, and how congress critters are being lobbied to remove the quota altogether, exposes that the REAL purpose is to get lower wages, not to hire people that "can't be found here with the right qualifications". There may be occasions for that happening, but the number that fit that category I would argue should be far less than the current quotas that are set in place allow.
And please don't call me racist. Some of my best friends are foreign workers here, (Indians and many others). One of the reasons I moved from the midwest to the west coast was to be around a more diverse populace where I work.
But I've worked in the trenches in Silicon Valley and other places and have seen how this system works for myself. Not just the statistics, which also back what I'm saying:
http://www.cis.org/articles/2005/back1305.htmlThis situation has been around since the early nineties at least. It isn't just George Bush now that's responsible for this situation. Previous administrations and congresses share in the responsibility for this program of basically legalization of institutionalized indentured servitude to happen.
I've arguably lost a contracting job due to competing with "cheaper" H1B contractors. I've seen and heard mid level managers joke about finding ways to get cheaper labor costs by outsourcing their tasks to contractor "body shops".
The H1B program is SUPPOSED to ensure that H1B workers get paid the "prevailing wage" for what a domestic worker would be paid for an equivalent job. This is just on paper, but it is easily worked around by these "body shops" who hire ONLY H1B employees, and therefore have no domestic workers on their staff to compare wages to, which allows them to pay whatever wage they want. THAT is why you see them collectively make less wages than domestic workers. And I've seen these same mid level managers make a point of saying they had to make sure they wrote up getting these contractors from body shops as obtaining a "service" from this body shop, rather than hiring a "worker" from them. That way it shields the contracting company that much more from the equivalent wage/benefit ratio restrictions.
When I was in the Bay Area, I used to live in an apartment complex where the landlord was one of many in that area that were taking advantage of the dotcom bomb housing shortage at lower ends of the spectrum when the top of the market bottomed out and the supply of mid range and lower end units was way to low to meet the demand of increased number of renters looking for houses that weren't being moved out of any more when noone wanted to buy new houses and were sitting in their old ones. This landlord was jacking up people's rents 40% or so when their leases expired. When my neighbor moved out, she STACKED that unit way too full with a lot of H1B Visa people in it, who were placed there by their employer. Then the employer arbitrarily kicked them out and moved in there himself. The people hired in these programs didn't even have a lot of the freedoms of where you stay like you or I do, when the employer hangs the "do as I say and work for what I pay you or be deported" message to them.
Consider the other variables here too:
1) India provides FREE bachelors degrees to its universities for its citizens. Now I know that their schools aren't as good as ours are here domestically, and therefore it isn't equivalent to our university educations. But it certainly is better than our free education we get here through high school. They are mainly trying to decide whether they should get a graduate degree or not when they are going to school over there to go to a job market where that sort of degree has a STRONG chance of getting them a job, compared to our kids looking at the high cost of a bachelor's degree here which might get outsourced. Our educational opportunities are SO slammed against our citizens getting into high tech jobs. Even though I love working in the high tech profession, if I were a student today looking at this market, I probably would be smart to find a different career than the high tech career which doesn't have the same prospects I had many years ago, or that of many other countries have looking at the same profession. Heck, even now I'm facing prospective layoffs if Microsoft (who hires a HUGE chunk of their people in Bangalore) takes over the company I work at now too (Yahoo).
2) People working here in "guest worker" programs such as H1B aren't here to LIVE here and become citizens as applying for citizenship or even some with green cards would be looking to do. They want to come here for a short time, make a LOT more money than they could at home, and move back and have a decent retirement nest egg with the difference in cost of living versus what they earned in their own countries. They then take those skills back to their country and foster the outsourcing industry more too if they then work there instead to be closer to their families then. We should be looking for immigrants who want to move here permanently. We should encourage people who want to work here to go through getting citizenship, or applying for green cards, so that they can be competing on an even basis with everyone here, and therefore keep the demands for salaries higher and more at market rates rather than artificially lower rates.
3) People who come here and work in guest worker programs also don't have the rights to vote or the rights to organize in a union. That is also not talked about a lot and is significant. The more companies can hire people from outside instead of domestically, the less represented our work force is in government to ensure we have adequate worker protections. If those people became citizens instead, they'd give us more power to change the dynamic away from the corporatist dominated government we have in place now.
4) Think about the outsourced labor overseas as well. These people are often working there at depressed wages, specifically because our trade policies that "dump" subsidized corn products and other similar products don't let them compete fairly as farmers and have forced them to sell off farm land to elites who turn that farmland into factories that hire these same people for cheap. That also depletes the prevailing wage, and forces down our wages here as well too. If these companies move some place else cheaper than these overseas plants where they hire people in this way, then those same people will look to come here for jobs at lower wages. That is all part of the neocons' master plan for creating a new sort of feudalism where they can live like royalty at our expense.
5) The increased reliance of moving around labor to different countries, and also shipping goods around globally from "cheaper" places also screws with our global warming problem that much more too. We should be focusing on trying to foster as much as possible a "work local" atmosphere, where people don't have to travel too much or ship too much of goods and services to make a living and live a decent and rewarding life. This globalization of the work force is hurting our prospects for solving the global warming problem as well.
This should NOT be about harrassing or holding grudges against those working with H1B Visas, or undocumented workers working here illegally, or for those working in outsourced jobs overseas. It should be about making sure that everyone gets a chance to have a job locally working for a decent wage where they are.
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