US Senators Question Indian Firms Over H-1Bs

xzvf sends us a link to a BusinessWeek report on the campaign of two US senators to get answers to how H-1B work visas are actually being used. Yesterday Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Richard Durbin (D-IL) sent a letter (PDF) to nine Indian outsourcing firms that, among them, snapped up 30% of the H-1B visas issued last year. The senators want to know, among other things, whether the H-1B program is being used to enable the offshoring of American jobs. "Critics say outsourcing firms, including Infosys Technologies and Wipro, are using the visas to replace US employees with foreign workers, often cycling overseas staff through US training programs before sending them back into jobs at home."

Comments

I'm amazed no one's said it yet

[PeeAitchPee]

These overseas folks are here principally because of a lack of skilled US citizens in critical areas. The ire being posted on this thread is largely misplaced. Instead of ranting about foreigners suckling "your" jobs out of this country, perhaps we should have better funded engineering education programs and engineering-related incentives for prospective college students so we have enough Americans to do the work? Banning the H1Bs will only make it harder to fill these vacancies, which helps no one.

Honestly, I've never understood the sense of entitlement some have about their IT jobs. If you're half as good as you say you are, you should have no problem landing your next gig.

How about...

[Belial6]

How about we just require that H1Bs get paid 1.5 to 2 times the prevailing wage. This would stop companies from hiring them to save money over local workers. It would mean that if a company hired them, they really needed them.

Re:Why this years visas were filled in one day

[Copid]

A while ago somebody here proposed auctioning off the visas. I think that's a fascinating idea, as it would guarantee that nobody was hired simply because they were available below market rates. The auction process would immediately make the median wage equal to or greater than the market wage. At that point, the companies do battle over how special their special talent is.

Another positive effect would be that the people who actually are most valuable will get the visas rather than the people who got lucky in the lottery. Imagine a brilliant person whose employer would gladly pay $500K to sponsor getting sent home because some other average schmuck got the visa. Kind of sucks for everybody but the schmuck. That's not exactly what we were hoping for when the program was instituted.