Slashdot Mirror
US Senator Blasts Microsoft's H-1B Push As It Lays 18,000 Off Workers
dcblogs (1096431) writes On the floor of U.S. Senate Thursday, Sen. Jeff Sessions delivered a scalding and sarcastic attack on the use of highly skilled foreign workers by U.S. corporations that was heavily aimed at Microsoft, a chief supporter of the practice. Sessions' speech began as a rebuttal to a recent New York Times op-ed column by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, investor Warren Buffett and Sheldon Adelson ... But the senator's attack on "three of our greatest masters of the universe," and "super billionaires," was clearly primed by Microsoft's announcement, also on Thursday, that it was laying off 18,000 employees. "What did we see in the newspaper today?" said Sessions, "News from Microsoft. Was it that they are having to raise wages to try to get enough good, quality engineers to do the work? Are they expanding or are they hiring? No, that is not what the news was, unfortunately. Not at all."
There's very little reason for an American to go work in Western Europe, since both are highly-civilized places with talented native workers.
An American who wants to work a Western European job could most likely find the same or an equivalent job in the United States. The same goes for a Western European who wants to work an American job. There's no need to move to a different the people or the jobs to a different continent.
The global economy is all about unskilled, or insufficiently-skilled, labor from third world hellholes like India trying to perform jobs they are not capable of performing. Sometimes the work is sent to them, like in the case of call centers or some software development. Sometimes they're brought to civilized nations, like in the case of H-1B visas. But the end result is always inferior results. I'm sure we've all had a horrible experience with an Indian-based call center, where "Steve" has a thick and nearly incomprehensible Hindi accent. Or we've had to work with an offshore software development team that lies about their work and sends us totally unrelated and unusable code they found on Stack Overflow (or worse, they send you "C# code" that's actually JavaScript).
Regardless, we don't naturally find these jobs arising in these third world hellholes because the foundational talent just isn't there. If the work is being done overseas, it's because some Western corporation has basically forced it over there, or forcefully brought the labor back to the civilized Western nation.