With the H-1B visa filing period for fiscal year 2010 beginning tomorrow, we can expect a lot of discussion about the role of international talent and foreign skilled workers in supporting economic growth and innovation for the United States. This discussion is rightly focused on today’s reality of a global economy and global job market in which talent is both scarce and highly mobile
Today, NAFSA released a statement urging Congress to “enact comprehensive immigration reform. Such reform should include the removal or adjustment of unrealistic caps on temporary and permanent employment-based visa categories, which include H-1B visas and green cards.”
The fact is that some of our country’s greatest innovation success stories, from eBay to Google, were led by skilled immigrants. The foreign students and scholars who graduate from our universities are a key part of the pipeline of talent that fuels our economy, and giving them opportunities to put their skills and knowledge to use in our companies is a win for America.
In a recent opinion piece in The Washington Post, researcher and former technology entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa argues that “when smart young foreigners leave these shores, they take with them the seeds of tomorrow’s innovation.” Addressing limits on employment-based visas is critical to our ability to remain competitive for the best and brightest from around the world.
As well intended as NAFSA’s statement seems, it implies that we are not capable to invest and succeed in increasing the national talent pool of home-grown scientists, engineers, and other highly skilled workers to be competitive in the global marketplace. It also implies the consequent dependence on foreign talent at the expense of other countries that might need it even more than the United States. This is not the American way of facing a challenge.
Instead, we should invest in our neglected PK-12 schools, especially those that enroll the vast majority of our minority populations, and in Minority-Serving Institutions that educate the majority of college students of color with scant resources and enormous demands. This is the best way of addressing the issue strategically and it is the American way.
We should resist the temptation of a quick but spurious fix and go for the smart and right strategy. The race is not a sprint for a single gold medal; it’s a marathon of many winners.
The DOJ is investigating numerous companies for L-1 fraud, and the DOL is auditing all H-1B dependent companies.
The H-1B and L-1 Visas are modern day Jim Crow laws, subjecting American hi-tech professionals to abuse at the hands of India, Inc.
Here’s my letter to David Boies (famed attorney):
Mr. Boies,
I am reaching out to you for some advice.
I am programmer and have been working in I.T. for about 15 years. Recently I started having a hard time finding new contract gigs, and the contract rates have been cut drastically to the point that they are about the same as a full time employee, minus the benefits.
I know my industry has been impacted by offshoring, but even more stunning is the massive influx of low-wage, mostly low-skill workers from India. These workers come over under the H-1B and L-1 visa programs to fill a mythical programmer shortage. This is a canard created by the hi-tech companies so that they can suppress wages and displace American I.T. professionals.
Recently, I was forced to start looking for work all over California because I couldn’t find anything in O.C. I even flew to Sacramento to interview for a contract in Modesto, and was prepared to leave my family for a few months. I never got the offer, which was good.
Instead, I spent three weeks contracting at an Indian software company that develops systems for the pharmaceutical industry, and worked on programs for Amgen. The experience was a nightmare. I was the only white male on a team of 15, with four being non-Indians. The staff spoke Hindi all the time, and it was a sweatshop. The company had flown in seven coders and QA people from New Delhi and they lived in a motel around the corner.
Fortunately, I found another contract and was able to walk out of the place. I didn’t give notice and enjoyed departing. One of my contractor buddies had interviewed for one of the two programming positions, and he was rejected. He is a really sharp guy and could run circles around the folks they brought from India.
I was so disgusted with the whole situation that I reported the company to the Dept. of Labor for H-1B fraud. They should have hired locals and instead flew in a crew from India. A DOL agent in S.F. took the case, and I talked to him yesterday. He said very few cases are prosecuted because there are so many loopholes. He is filing a report but said that their preliminary investigation determined that the case was out of their jurisdiction. He urged me to contact the Civil Rights department of the DOJ that handles L-1 fraud.
Companies like the one I worked for bring in millions of workers under intra-company transfers through the L-1 program, and they are supposed to prove that no local worker can fill the spot. The system is so corrupt and full of loopholes that any company can be technically compliant and still avoid hiring Americans. An immigration lawyer even gives seminars on how to avoid hiring U.S. citizens:
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jun2007/db20070621_912042.htm
The reason I am contacting you is because I feel that there is rampant discrimination against American workers in the I.T. industry at the hands of the Indian software lobby. If you walk into some of the I.T. departments, you will see 80-90% Indian staffs. They have a monopoly, and exploit workers from India by confiscating their passports and forcing them to work unpaid overtime. These workers show up in big companies and American workers are forced to train them, and then the citizens are fired. IBM just laid off 5,000 U.S. employees, and many were forced to train their Indian replacements. There is massive fraud and corruption in the system, and American programmers are being decimated. Many are leaving the field.
With the bad economy, displaced I.T. professionals are starting to organize and agitate to abolish these guest worker visas. It is becoming evident that offshoring software development doesn’t save companies any money, so they are trying to use these visas to ship in programmers who can be onsite and compliant. The infrastructure is horrific in India, and there are so many obstacles to creating and running corporate computer systems that it has become a fiscal liability to do all work offshore. But the big companies like Wells Fargo, State Farm – anybody that needs massive I.T. manpower, are now bringing the cheap labor here.
The net result is that guys like me see their wages declining and work scarce. I know people that have been looking for jobs for months. They can’t get interviews because the Indian lobby has cornered the market and staff only their own people.
I think there is a potential for a large class action lawsuit against American tech companies, the Indian bodyshops, and the Indian offshoring consulting companies like Infosys and WiPro. You may have heard about the Satyam scandal. There is plenty of anecdotal and statistical evidence that Americans are getting forced out of the global I.T. industry. For example 55,000 of the 65,000 allotted H-1B visas in 2007 went to Indian workers, who are essentially indentured servants, forced to work for one company and frequently abused. The companies have pitted the foreign workers against the local employees and the industry is in chaos; the imported workers lack the skills to do the work, and the Americans are forced to train them or get fired.
I suggest that the time is ripe for a civil rights battle. American I.T. professionals are getting displaced in large numbers, and the H-1B lobby and India, Inc. want to lift ALL visa caps. This is nothing more than an attempt to arbitrage employee wages.
What say you?
Regards,
Kevin Flanagan
Our position is not that we are not capable of investing in growing our own talent pool—we are—and we absolutely agree that we need to reverse our under-investment in K-12, especially in educational opportunities for minorities. However, keeping out foreign talent doesn’t get us there. We strongly support and welcome efforts to produce more Americans educated in the scientific and technical fields. Attracting foreign talent – to teach our students at our universities, and to collaborate with our graduates in our labs and at our companies – is part of the way to do that. The short-term reality is that there are not enough Americans graduating in those fields or seeking those jobs. To support our economic recovery and to advance our ability to innovate – and to support efforts to encourage the preparation of more Americans in those fields – we have to remain open to foreign talent. In the longer term, the dynamics of a global marketplace are such that talent is a scarce and mobile resource, and domestic talent cannot fully substitute for foreign talent. In today’s global economy, people are moving across borders with unprecedented ease and frequency. To the extent that the best minds in the world – American and foreign – want to spend some of their time in this country, that’s a win for everyone.
For anyone who thinks Mr. Flanagan is exaggerating, he’s not. My spouse and several of his colleagues in IT have witnessed this in the industry firsthand at numerous companies. When times were flush it wasn’t so hard to swallow, but when half of everyone you know in IT has been laid off it is absolutely outrageous.
I’m a 1099 contractor, working at a large insurance firm, that in the last few months decided to kick out all their contractors, and reduce their staff and replace them with InfoSys. All while getting bailout funds from the US Government (my own tax dollars at work).
All their employees are here for the next 30 days while people like me are expected to train them. I don’t want to be unprofessional and refuse, but I’m seriously considering it and just walking out the door.
CCHamberland,
If its not to late, you can report Infosys to the Office of Special Counsel at the Dept. Of Justice. Infosys probably has L-1s here, with dubious visas. Either way, a cavity search is in order. I have a case open with them.
You can get the form here:
http://www.itgrunt.com/FillableChargeForm091.pdf
And if these imports are so good, why do we have to train them?
The only people that will need training are the I.T. executives that have been trafficking in this hi-tech slave trade and throw Americans under the bus daily in favor of these guest workers.
By training, I mean training to live in a wheelchair. American I.T. workers have had enough of this garbage, and there are millions that have been displaced in a rather sordid manner by American I.T. managers.
Time to get a bodyguard, Mr./Mrs. CIO/CTO.
There are millions of hard working and highly skilled Americans that are unemployed. We bring in these Guest Workers who can barely program and talk english and replace Americans because they are cheaper and younger.
If we stop these guest worker visas, American students will be encouraged to take up Science, Engineering and Computer Science. Americans schools and students are still the best in world. Why would the want to live and come here if we were not the best?
Invest in America and we will be a better country.
They are temporary guest workers and not immigrants (on immigrant visas like the green card).
We have probably all seen the continued push for glorified globalization of America in advertising from IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft. To this same end, there is misinformation, rhetoric, and propaganda to continue to invent a new reality: in- and outsourcing is beneficial to all Americans.
1. Bringing in “highly-skilled” workers displaces a large percent of skilled American workers.
2. Bringing in more foreign workers will create highly-unskilled American workers over time (as it is now doing) because Americans will lag behind technology since they are out of work for extended periods of time.
3. We all hear about constant stories not highly publicized (or accurately publicized) in the media. IBM did have a massive layoff in America while moving much of their business to Brazil. Cisco, in CA, laid off many American workers while keeping H-1Bs. Thomas Publishing is moving much of its IT work to Kiev.
4. Per your website, other corporations have and continue to bring in workers from other countries. However, for those of us who are American and still in IT, it is overburdening us with needless additional work. English from those workers is so poor it reduced the role of a QA Analyst into a proofreader. The defect tracking mechanism was brimming not with technical defects but with grammatical errors that had to be fixed since the work was on a high-traffic, public-facing website. This is not unusual.
5. Those large companies, who received bailout money, are paying it back so they can continue to provide golden parachutes to executives and bring in lower-paying foreign workers. Of course, this information is not touted by the media.
The text on this website does not make logical sense to those of us who are astutely aware of this transition. We all see unemployment rates going down slightly but the unemployment rates fail to take into account those who no longer are collecting unemployment. It does not mean those people have jobs.
Many of us have been desensitized to pharmaceutical advertisements (so people accept drugs more readily because, after all, each one produces potentially major side-effects). However, we are not desensitized to the reality of what’s really happening to our livelihood.
“However, keeping out foreign talent doesn’t get us there. We strongly support and welcome efforts to produce more Americans educated in the scientific and technical fields”
Why would American students go the expense of getting a tech degree when they’re going to have to compete on salary with cheap imported guest workers? And that’s what it is about, being cheap, as the majority of the imported workers are not highly skilled at all . It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
“The short-term reality is that there are not enough Americans graduating in those fields or seeking those jobs”
The short term reality is that America is FILLED with unemployed and productive IT workers. Does it make any sense to have them burden the unemployment rolls? They were laid off in droves to be replaced with H1B and L1 workers.
Instead of blaming American education for not preparing students properly, and for not encouraging minorities and women to enter the engineering field, why not look at the real reason students no longer want to enter this field—no job prospects. With American engineers and computer programmers no longer able to compete against a huge influx of cheaper imported labor via H-1B and L-1 work visas, and with many more high-tech jobs going “offshore,” it’s simple economics. Students do not want to invest many thousands of dollars studying in a field for which there are no job prospects.
Me and my IT colleagues lost our programming jobs when our company imported programmers and made the Americans train them in order to receive severance. The company posted LCA sheets as required by law, and thus, we learned that the visiting programmers are earning about half of their American counterparts. Whenever I contact my elected representatives, the Dept. of Labor and the Dept. of Commerce about this, their shoddy excuse is that Americans aren’t educated enough or prepared enough or smart enough to do high tech. But I’m not surprised. That’s what the corporations and the media tell them.
Myths:
1) These are Temporary (Guest) Worker Visas and NOT IMMIGRANT VISAS
2) They are paid the same wage as Americans, they are paid about 12,000 or more less
than their American counterparts
3) They are just average programmers and in fact some of them are incompetent
4) There is no labor shortage with millions of highly skilled Americans and Permanent Residents unemployed.
Hire local it’s the American thing to do.
Greedy Companies use them to replace Americans with:
1) Cheap Foreign workers – These companies don’t want to pay the prevailing wage.
2) Younger Foreign Workers – Those over 35 are discriminated because of their age.
Hire Americans and Permanent Residents. Help America.
Yet another sellout of the American worker, just so a few executives can make a few more million.
Hiring or continuing to employ an H1B worker (or any other VISA) in the US in our current time of crisis is un-American.
Let freedom and equality prevail. We all live in a shard world.
“Shard” world is the right way in which to phrase the dessication of the capitalistic republic. We have shards of glass and mirror greeting us with our own faces and those faces who helped smash our world.
An unemployed (developer) friend told me about this website. How he found it, I do not know.
The problem in attracting the best and brightest is that it’s displacing American workers. First, it was the blue-collar worker then it became white collar workers. What’s left… I recognize some of the people here as being displaced in IT (including me). So, in our world, bringing in foreign workers has caused a negative shift to our existence. The “best and brightest” brought poor coding practices (I also come from the old IBM), which added a mountain of work on those of us who remained.
My major (in the 70s) was elementary education. I left it behind due to the onslaught of teachers. So, while there is a teaching shortage now if it remained such and appeared lucrative to teachers in America, that hole would probably be filled. People from outside the U.S. are used to working for lower salaries. So, no, I’m not in favor of that because it will further drive down lower-paying salaries. In IT, it drove down higher-paying salaries. This isn’t being pompous, it’s simply stating facts.
I believe with globalization will also come the downfall of America. We’re already very-much foreign owned and operated. The floodgates were opened. The trend is obvious and capitalism (not democracy – that’s an illusion) will win.
To prove that bringing in more foreign workers to any field does not reduce wages in a field, one would have to disprove the basic supply/demand price model.
Stating “bla…bla…bla…’prevailing wage requirement’….bla..bla..bla” is a red herring, because the prevailing wage will automatically be adjusted by the said basic supply/demand price model.
Raise the price(salary) and the supply will increase.
Admit it, if new teachers were paid $100,000 per year to start, would there be any shortage of new graduates in this field? Of course not!
What about $90,000? $80,000?
I assure you, there is a price point at which there will be equilibrium in the market.
Bringing in foreign labor upsets the basic model.
Ah, concisely well put, Let Logic Prevail. The point of equilibrium appears to occur when even the lower wage-earners know the wage is too low and living here is no longer affordable. Hence, H1Bs going back home (it’s fine to work for American companies on your own-affordable turf) while outsourcing in America is hemorrhaging.
In either event, as you also state, “Bringing in foreign labor upsets the basic model.” So, a new model will be invented because corporate America is already owned by foreigners. Those of us in America are their indentured slaves in one way or another.
Skilled immigrants? Americans are TRAINING them.
Google? It was founded by an American (Larry Page) and a Russian immigrants who emigrated to the U.S. at AGE THREE, grew up here, and was educated here. Same with Yahoo! – one American founder and the other – Jerry Yang – emigrated from Taiwan at age SIX. I noticed you people stopped mentioning Yahoo! because Yang got FIRED didn’t he.
And why don’t you mention all the companies DESTROYED by these 3rd world immigrants – BELL LABS (Arun Netravalli), Sun (taken over by Indian and Chinese ‘talent’ in 2000), and Microsoft (shipped work to India in 2002 which resulted in the junk pile called VISTA).
We’ve been importing these workers for 10 years already and look a the economy.
I watched PeopleSoft die a slow death too as an invasion of faking Indian workers invaded it and took it over. Then it died and the shell had to be sold off to Oracle so that Tata, Wipro, etc. could avoid the embarassment of having another company run by their workers go out of business.
Google “Quark Debacle” and see what you find. An Indian conman CEO took over Quark and shipped the work to his cousins’ village in India. Quark almost died but they fired him before it was too late. 95% of all H-1B guest workers are FRAUDS with 7th grade educations.
“What is byte-swapping”? “What is the difference between Big Endian and Little Ending”? “Please help me Mr. American programmer”.
It’s ridiculous.
1. Yes, all responses here are negative for valid reasons.
2. Propaganda and rhetoric strike when you show a photo of “American-looking” people. My gosh, it’s an insult to all of us. A) We are a melting pot. B) Where are the people from Mexico, China, and India? You’re not showing them because you do not want to even imply that’s where the jobs went.
3. Bobo made a lot of great points. I was at Prudential when NJ QA, DEV, Quality Assurance (CMM) taught people from Ireland then Tata. My friends were then evaporated. IT will be evaporated at Thomas Publishing as their DEV/QA slots are outsourced to Kiev. I’ve been watching the flow since 1997. Yes, WE ARE TRAINING PEOPLE OVERSEAS and people here.
4. I just finished my degree at an accredited school with lousy-overworked teachers (but I made it a point to learn) and the degree is worthless because I cannot compete. My future is a minimum-wage job – if I can get that.
I have heard time and time again, one story after another, of the success of companies and thousands of jobs created because the international students I help to educate in the U.S. have contributed to breakthrough technologies; the dramatic advancement of research; or innovative business practices. These are advancements for the U.S.!! The jobs and patents and taxable profits are being made here.
Further, the number of international students who remain in the U.S. to work for even short periods after they complete their studies is market driven. When the jobs are available, they fill them; when they are not available, they return home or elsewhere to move forward in their field. Processing excessive paperwork, paying the prevailing wage, and suffering the temporary gaps in productivity caused by the government’s bureaucratic delays and errors are actually deterrents to hiring foreign employees. Many employers would choose an equally qualified worker first. So, if they are choosing foreign employees, that tells me that the market is working normally and that we all benefit from the expertise and hard work of international professionals.
Companies ARE choosing foreign workers. The government is “selling” highways and bridges to foreign companies for them to maintain and make profits. Companies that used to be American companies (“made in America”) sold out to the foreign bidders.
I will not agree with James who says, “Many employers would choose an equally qualified worker first.” Companies are choosing cheaper workers – not qualified workers – and the quality of work produced, starting with their lack of a grasp on English, is inferior. Ask American workers still in information technology. Ask those who were replaced by the “educated” foreign workers. James is wrong.
If James considers American being owned and operated by foreign-controlled entities, then James has what he wants. Millions of hard-working, intelligent Americans are, and will remain, out of work.
I went to my bank today where all the workers had red/white/blue hats on to commerate Memorial Day. I scoffed and asked to see a hat on a person. I showed him it was “Made in China.” America is not benefiting because nothing is produced here anymore – except American faces.
yes, we lose when company executives turn their backs on US citizens.
And we lose when US knowledge and research methods are transferred over-seas.
We should cut the numbers of student visas, and set higher standards for all visas.
The reason there are so many foreign grad students in STEM fields is because of the explosive increase in student visas, the availability of OPT, and the existence of vast numbers of work visas. NSF knew, in the mid-1980s, that these would drive down compensation and opportunities for US STEM workers, and, by altering financial incentives, reduce the numbers who entered graduate programs.
“A growing influx of foreign PhDs into U.S. labor markets will hold down the level of PhD salaries to the extent that foreign students are attracted to U.S. doctoral programs as a way of immigrating to the U.S.A. A related point is that for this group the PhD salary premium is much higher [than it is for Americans], because it is based on BS-level pay in students’ home nations versus PhD-level pay in the U.S.A… [If] doctoral studies are failing to appeal to a large (or growing) percentage of the best citizen baccalaureates, then a key issue is pay… A number of [the Americans] will select alternative career paths… For these baccalaureates, the effective premium for acquiring a PhD may actually be negative.”
http://www.nber.org/~peat/PapersFolder/P apers/SG/NSF.html
http://www.nber.org/~peat/ReadingsFolder /PrimarySources/TimeLine.html
Policy and Research Analysis Division of the NSF
http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/pres/commen ts/numbers.html
Instead of blaming American education for not preparing students properly, and for not encouraging minorities and women to enter the engineering field, why not look at the real reason students no longer want to enter this field—no job prospects. With American engineers and computer programmers no longer able to compete against a huge influx of cheaper imported labor via H-1B and L-1 work visas, and with many more high-tech jobs going “offshore,” it’s simple economics. Students do not want to invest many thousands of dollars studying in a field for which there are no job prospects.
Me and my IT colleagues lost our programming jobs when our company imported programmers and made the Americans train them in order to receive severance. The company posted LCA sheets as required by law, and thus, we learned that the visiting programmers are earning about half of their American counterparts. Whenever I contact my elected representatives, the Dept. of Labor and the Dept. of Commerce about this, their shoddy excuse is that Americans aren’t educated enough or prepared enough or smart enough to do high tech. But I’m not surprised. That’s what the corporations and the media tell them.
Myths:
1) These are Temporary (Guest) Worker Visas and NOT IMMIGRANT VISAS
2) They are paid the same wage as Americans, they are paid about 12,000 or more less
than their American counterparts
3) They are just average programmers and in fact some of them are incompetent
4) There is no labor shortage with millions of highly skilled Americans and Permanent Residents unemployed.
Hire local it’s the American thing to do.
Greedy Companies use them to replace Americans with:
1) Cheap Foreign workers – These companies don’t want to pay the prevailing wage.
2) Younger Foreign Workers – Those over 35 are discriminated because of their age.
Hire Americans and Permanent Residents. Help America.
Yet another sellout of the American worker, just so a few executives can make a few more million.
Hiring or continuing to employ an H1B worker (or any other VISA) in the US in our current time of crisis is un-American.
Yup. You folks south of the border are having it pretty hard with off-shoring and migrant workers. But let me tell you something, the same thing is happening here in Canada as well. I’ve been in small, medium sized, and large organization, I.T. shops and it’s all migrant workers. This applies to all areas in I.T. and not just Help Desk type jobs, but all jobs.
Also, there not smarter or better educated than their American or Canadian counterparts as some would have you believe. As a matter of fact, I’ve seen some of the results here and it’s disastrous to say the least.
I’ve seen infrastructure that’s so poorly managed that data loss/data unavailable is a common occurrence.
I’ve seen I.T. shops that run at a crawl as a result of poor decision making and lack of understanding of I.T. fundamentals and how changes/additions to infrastructure affect the overall performance.
I’ve seen thousands of dollars being spent on hardware and software, unnecessarily and only to have the hardware sit around collecting dust.
I’ve seen sensitive information stolen/compromised (most often in the media).
I can go on for hours here..
Truly sad state of affairs.
Your original blog said this about H1Bs, “…Either way America wins.” That is blatantly not true.
Let’s look at it from a teaching perspective first. Colleges collect many thousands from students to get an education. Why are colleges in the U.S. then considered party schools? The answer is the parents and the college administration don’t care about the education as long as they get their money. Some students are lucky because they learn despite the atmosphere.
Many postings here are in regards to the computer field. James had the audacity to be proud of the international students he helped educate in the U.S.. I’m glad he’s proud but the international students are no smarter (in my opinion) than the American students. That’s not saying much. I agree with others here that corporations choose the cheaper person and that will, in all likelihood, be the foreign students who ask for less money BECAUSE the cost of living in their poorer country IS CHEAPER.
This website is a sham. It doesn’t care about what’s really going on in this country due to H1Bs and their successors. I was born here and even though the color of my skin is darker I’m also seeing the rampant corruption of water/money flowing through the path of least resistance. The influx of open immigration (though it’s not called that) is affecting me.
In closing, let’s do one final reality check. It takes about three years to get a B.A. in India and also less time to get a master’s and ph.D. American corportations see those credentials and think they’re getting marvelously educated people. They need to think again. I watched a ph.D. be hired then fired because he was inept for the job.
It is a pity that an organization that supposedly knows that “meeting the needs of students from diverse educational and cultural backgrounds required special knowledge and competencies” throws away American students so easily. Perhaps Americans aren’t diverse enough to be included in the NAFSA world of warped logic! What a shameful disgrace non-profits have become!!
There is no shortage of Americans educated or skilled to perform tech jobs, so there is no need for the H1B “talent” for pennies. Ask any laid off American formerly in the tech field who has received an automated notice of foreclosure from an Indian-owned “accounting” firm (like the one Satyam used?!).
I hope Americans march in front of your conferences and buildings to protest this propaganda you spewed in this “give me money for more H1Bs” hogwash you published.
Amazing how many negative comments are here. Evidently the perpetrators of this web site either are completely ignorant of the reality ‘on the ground’ in America or they are attempting to put lipstick on this pig.
It’s not fooling anyone.
JUST TO LET YOU KNOW, I AM A ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER/ HR recruiter FROM INDIA and NOT COMPETING FOR ANY OF THE JOBS, people in this blog are looking for.
Friends, i really agree with few people but strongly disagree with few thoughts. Here are few facts you would like to consider about Indian programmers before drawing conclusion
1) The wave of H-1B immigration started from 80′s and it was in it was very high during 90′s. First thing, most of these people who came on H-1B’s were actually some of the smart brains of the
India and coming from really high profile education. In fact most of them are coming from Schools and universities which is mostly funded by the government( with an intention to serve their own country). But eventually these brains were attracted to this country for money reasons as well as better opportunities in terms of technology. And these are the Indian’s who helped the software industry to be grown aggressively ( When not many Americans were available).
2) As Mr Patel has said it takes only 3 years to finish a degree in India. That is partly true. Only Science and commerce field require 3 years of education. Engineering requires 4 years of education and you will find most of the software engineers with engineering background. In terms of education most of the software engineers are at par with people over here. I STRONGLY DISAGREE WITH FAKING ABOUT EDUCATION.
3) Here is the real problem- most of the engineers who came to this country until mid 90′s and certain percentage of Indian population of software engineers ( who are coming today) are very smart and needed. I do agree the rest are not highly educated ( from really good schools back in India or good Masters program from USA, not counting on PHD students) and they secure jobs through wrong means in this country. They are not even smart enough to work for IBM or Microsoft ( for example).
4) If all the H-1B’s/L-1′s are canceled the immediate consequence is most of the US IT companies who are having operations outside America have to double that for very simple reason- better and cheaper availability of Human resource. Understand friends, it is business and these companies would not mind paying higher tax’s and operating in places where they can find 100 people for one position rather working in an environment where they find 20 people for a position.
5) Also commenting on companies which has gone out of business because of Indians. Than lets talk about NAFSA which has huge population of Indians and what about Microsoft and NAFSA. No SMART HR MANAGER WOULD HIRE A GUY IF HE IS NOT SUITABLE FOR A JOB, than COMES THE PAYMENT PART.
6) IF this problem has to be solved here are the possible solutions
a) better availability of human resource in IT field.
b) better service to be provided by American companies which can compete with companies like Infosys and Wipro.
c) Simply mercy and sympathy will not grow the business but toughness and competitiveness can grow it. AND WE ALL KNOW AMERICA IS A LEADING EXAMPLE FOR THAT.
d) Only get the right brains and use for good, and not allow wrong people to sneak in. But you know nothing can be perfect so you have to bear with some ill percentage of people. Atleast you can bring it down by taking initiatives of this nature.
7) Further i am not here to support Indians or Americas. My interest is to provide some feedback from other side of the river which can help in making informed decision.
I am sorry to hear that wrong Indians are causing people to lose jobs. But if you are honestly outsmarted by anybody, i guess it should be taken in a positive way.
“No SMART HR MANAGER WOULD HIRE A GUY IF HE IS NOT SUITABLE FOR A JOB, than COMES THE PAYMENT PART.”
One can be smart and not be able to verify information from people who do not live in the U.S. as one can be a smart hiring manager and still be mislead.
As water flows down the path of least resistance, so does money. America is the land where if someone can work multiple jobs for less money or the same job for less money, that’s what happens. American workers are then displaced. We will become the third world country in time.
Ravi, many of us have the “information” you’re touting. We live it and breathe it. Don’t call me friend if you don’t know me; it’s meaningless while insulting… Hence, a cultural difference and a glaring, though ostensibly trivial one.
If there were 4 million tech jobs in 1995 and there are 4 million tech jobs in 2009 and during this time we imported 6 million indians 5 million of whom stayed…
does that not mean 100% unemployment is the current rate for american citizens in that field?
prove me wrong.
For those ill “Americans” above suffering due to “foreigners” please consult chapter 21 for a prescription to your anxiety….I hope this helps…
http://www.amazon.com/reader/0975927639?_encoding=UTF8&ref_=sib_dp_pt#reader-link
To all those who are foolish enough to think immigration to America is the answer: Get your facts straight because you’re being duped by Congress and the elite (and their believers) by rhetoric and propaganda. We’re infamous for it.