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NY Times: Temporary Visas To Import Talent Help Copycats Take Jobs Abroad
ErichTheRed writes: A new article from the NY Times surprised me. It describes what we in the IT industry see all the time — H-1B visas being used way outside of their original purpose. I think this is significant because the article describes the problem well and shows how Tata, Accenture, etc. are offshoring regular office work as well as IT work. I feel that showing the average Joe/Jane that their nice safe middle class office job isn't so safe is the only way to sway popular opinion on this important matter!
Reader theodp notes that Congress is making H-1B visa less costly for India-based IT services providers.
Just saying, since according to the story immediately below this one, any controls of any type on the immigration of young fighting age men from Middle Eastern countries is apparently inherently racist*.
Consequently, any story about temporary work visas being bad must be racist x 1000.
* Unless of course the countries who don't let them in are also Middle Eastern countries. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, etc. etc. etc.? Won't let a single refugee in. That's OK though because it's only racist if white people do it.
BTW --> China? Not on China: Not only do they refuse to take a single refugee, but the state-run media calls the US racist for only taking in tens of thousands of refugees instead of millions. Truly the real leader of the world and a shining example to all of us.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Living in India.
Market Forces do not guarantee optimal, or even beneficial outcome to everyone affected. Just most profitable outcome for decision makers.
This is a clear case where US is bleeding jobs and wealth to other countries, so few individuals can enrich themselves while passing the costs/consequences "downstream".
FTFA it states that the irony is that many who are losing jobs to outsourcing to India via H1B are in fact immigrants to the US themselves. People from all over the world who moved to the US to go to school then found jobs here.
To look at this from a macro perspective, it is the continuing "flattening" of the Earths wealth, whereby the oft used phrase "redistribution" actually means wealth flowing from the First World middle class to a sprinkling(crumbs off the table...) onto the lower classes of the Second World countries, and the meat of the wealth going to the "non-aligned" (for lack of a better phrase) 1%.
The non-aligned would be those who have no loyalty to country, race or religion. Their loyalty lays only to the brutal Social Darwinism, whereby profit isn't enough, where rendering our planets environment a wreck isn't enough, where forcing homeowners onto the street isn't enough, while they themselves get cushy bailouts, tax breaks and special treatment at every turn.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
People are commodities, nothing more. I need to improve my P&L sheet, and the work just has to be good enough. The more I can outsource, the better, because I've cut my OCOGS, I've improved EBITDA, and I've got a good track record on my c.v. that will help me get promoted to Director. This is the way of the future: unless you go into business for yourself or get an MBA and ascend into the management classes, you will all be replaceable peons and I'll make my money off that. And don't bother hitting me with morality arguments. There is no God, and no afterlife--we all end up the same so I'm going to get mine while I can.
And people wonder why rich are getting richer and the middle class is shrinking.
But hey - free market is good and socialism is bad, right?
Sure - until you have to live on that socialist welfare because your capitalist company owners dumped your ass cause you cost too much.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
When I saw this in the Times yesterday, the thing that surprised me was that a major news outlet was reporting on this in very matter-of-fact terms. As we've seen, these discussions get heated, and for the record I'm not one of the "they took our jerbs" people for the most part. What I don't like is the abuse of the system by these offshoring companies, and the erosion of any sort of stability throughout the workforce.
As originally intended, there's nothing wrong with the H-1B and L-1 visa programs. I work for a multinational company and we often use these to bring in very talented employees who just happen to be citizens of another country. The difference here is that most of these people are designing products and providing the exceptional advanced-level knowledge that the visa was originally intended to allow. In the article, and indeed in most IT departments, this is just a flat-out replacement of a low level office job. Tata or Accenture or whoever is just bringing in the few people in their offshore centers who have the capability to learn the target job and teach it to the hundreds of other interchangeable workers they have back home. This is what I think has to be looked at; companies simply don't want to pay for any labor anymore if they don't have to and now we have an environment where they can easily avoid doing so. I like how the article puts it right in peoples' faces -- it's no longer the problem of some anonymous factory worker in the rust belt or an IT worker that makes a higher salary and has a higher perceived degree of stability than the accountants they were profiling.
What bothers me more about this is the loss of economic stability. People are going to avoid buying things if they aren't secure in their jobs, period. The 30-year mortgage was designed around the idea that people would at least stay in the house for 10 or 15 years, preferably for the full 30. Someone who's picking up stakes and moving every five years chasing the jobs around the country to the lowest-cost environments is wasting a huge amount of money in real estate transfer taxes, realtor commissions, loan fees, mortgage interest (since it's front-loaded), etc. It easily costs mid-5 figures when everything is added up to move, but most people just pay for it with their next mortgage and don't think about it. Not to mention the cost -- moving a family with kids around constantly does not make for a stable home life. Ask any military family about that; every military kid I've ever talked to says they hated moving every year or two because they never got to settle in somewhere and put down roots.
It sounds really mean to say this, but think about your average corporate worker. Not management, not a hotshot developer, just a random cubicle dweller producing reports or processing customer records. The jobs in the article, like low level corporate accounting tasks and such, were where the vast majority of average, C-student college graduates have wound up for the last 30+ years. The progression was thus - get into a big state university, party your way through 4 years and get a generic business or communications degree, show up at corporate recruiting events during your senior year, and get hired on for some sort of entry level task. If you kill off all the middle class jobs out there, what do you propose doing with these educated people who previously bought houses, paid property taxes, and felt secure enough in their lives to have a family? If there's no good answer for this, why are we bothering telling students that college is worth it in the long term? These are the questions that need to be asked, and no one is doing it because companies are only focusing on today, not 20 years from now.
Of course the Luddites were right about their own personal situation, but let's gloss over that part.
This one hits close to home for me. Having worked for Accenture for a number of years, I saw the H-1B visa scam play out over and over. The campus I was staffed at originally hosted several thousand employees, then Accenture started bringing in the visas. Every year Accenture would grab as many visas as possible, train those people in at an existing jobs, then send those people back to their home country with someone else's job and make a round of layoffs locally. By the time I quit, those thousands of jobs had been cut to hundreds and the campus was a ghost town.
Having seen this repeat so many times, the whole political theater over illegal immigrants seems ridiculous. If our representatives aren't trying to save good paying jobs that require government approval to be shipped away, it's clear that the whole immigrant debate is just a political red herring.
To be clear, I have no problem with immigrants who come to stay and make what they can in this country. Pretty much all of our ancestors did this at some point. People that come here to swoop up a job and bring it home, however, that's another story.
I've got kids and plenty of family in the toy-consuming age bracket......and I can't remember the last time we set foot in a Toys R Us.
With any luck, internet retailers will kill the Toys R Us model anyway - its about efficiency (for me) you know.