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Immigration Attorneys: Industry Pushes Foreign Labor, Claiming 'US Students Can't Hack It In Tech' (breitbart.com)
geek writes: According to Caroline May from Breitbart News, "The tech industry is seeking to bolster its argument for more white-collar foreign tech workers with the insulting claim that the education system is insufficiently preparing Americans for tech fields, according to pro-American worker attorneys with the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI). [In an op-ed published at The Daily Caller, IRLI attorneys John Miano and Ian Smith take the tech industry to task for its strategy to promote the H-1B visa program -- alleging a labor shortage of apt American tech workers while importing thousands of foreign workers on H1-B visas from countries with lower educational results than the U.S.]" John Miano and Ian Smith write via The Daily Caller: "But if the H-1B program really is meant to correct the failings of our education system, as BigTech's new messaging-push implies, why is it importing so many people from India? According to results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global standardized math and science assessment sponsored by the OECD, India scored almost dead last among the 74 countries tested. The results were apparently so embarrassing, the country pulled out of the program all together. Not surprisingly then, there isn't a single Indian university that appears within the top 250 spots of the World University Rankings Survey. And unlike American bachelor's degrees, obtaining a bachelor's in India takes only three years of study."
But you're making the quite flawed assumption that you should only ever compare the cream of the crop. I'll give you a hint: 99% of H-1B workers aren't IIT graduates and wouldn't have made it to the top 50% in the entry test. The argument that just because one well-known outlier in India is good, that this is a "propaganda piece" is laughable.
The truth is far, far simpler: the companies are looking for cheaper workers, and India is happy to provide. Quality is of little concern.
I employ a lot of IT talent in Canada and the US. Here's what see in the marketplace:
* North American talent is the best, bar none but ... ...
* North American talent is produced in small quantities.
* Indian talent is (among the?) worst, but
* Indian talent is produced by the thousands.
I also work with many business partners, some of whom are Indian outsourcers and some of whom are large US corporations that have outsourced a large part of their IT work to India.
The work that gets done in India is usually shoddy. It takes 3 Indians to attempt the same job that one American will do.
So what's wrong? Are Indians dumb or something?
Turns out, they are exactly as smart (or dumb, take your pick) as anyone else. But they operate in a toxic work culture:
* Their organizations encourage cheating, which begins with those very difficult University entrance exams.
* Corruption permeates the workplace. You do favours for managers, so they will later help you advance your career.
* If you are really smart, you get poached from one outsourcing firm to another every 6-18 months. You never settle into a job long enough to get productive. Indian outsourcers literally have talent scouts on their payroll that have full time jobs at competitor firms.
* If you are not very smart, you stay in the same job for much longer, but you will never be very productive for the same reason that a not very smart American will never be very productive.
As a result, Indian outsourcers tend to have incredibly poor productivity and work quality. Firms that hire them are fools, because they look only at the low (and rising) hourly rates, but not at what an hour of labour will buy you.
I also see Indian workers (H1B or just normal immigrants) working in North America. First, I assume these are among the best and brightest, as they obviously had the motivation to relocate and had to get through whatever filters immigration authorities apply. These people fit in quite well and after a few years are (aside from accent) indistinguishable from their native-born cousins.
So the problems are basically this:
* North American education is good, but should scoop up a bigger segment of the population to compete.
* Indian education mostly sucks, with a few exceptions like IIT.
* Indian workplace culture is dysfunctional, and it's better to hire immigrants from there than to either send work over or give work to temporary workers. Don't outsource to Indian firms - that's a disaster.
* Employers frequently mistake hourly rates for total cost of ownership. They harm themselves and their former local workers through this mistake.
That's the world we live in.