Profiteer's Rob Indian Workers
& American Jobs
America's future is dim if we make nothing and import and outsource everything
Educational Editorials© by William M Wright BBA, MBA writtten: 10-07-2006 / updates 12-01-2008 & 03-22-2009
Let’s not blame foreign workers for wanting a job and better life just like Americans. Instead, we should be angry at those who seek a fast fat profit, at the expense of both foreign and American workers.
American's should be outraged by our own governments encouragement of outsourcing and simultaneously allowing the mass importing of Foreign Workers to replace American born IT / Programming Professionals. Corporations are no longer interested in hiring American born college degree labor to do the IT jobs. In fact they have openly lied for years about a skilled labor shortage that never exsisted. They will always take the easy and cheap path. And the major India IT firms and their lobbist have sold American CEO's that they need to outsource all their IT labor needs to them to maximize corporate profits. You want proof? We got it-lots of it.
The Urban Institute reports between 1985 and 2000, the US workforce produced 3 times the number of American tech and science grads than jobs they were trained to do.
According to the study, Americans and green card holders received 435,000 Bachelors, Masters, and PhD.'s in science, engineering and computer science yearly from 1985 to 2000. However, the economy could only produce 150,000 jobs annually for these graduates during the same period. That's a deficit of 280,000 jobs annually. High-tech employers couldn't produce enough jobs for 4.2 million STEM graduates, with two-thirds of these graduates never able to practice their craft. Separate studies by Harvard University, Duke University, the Rand Corp, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation also report an oversupply of STEM graduates.
The H1-B visa-hiring program allows American high-tech firms to bypass these graduates and hire foreign workers. The second video was of an annual seminar sponsored by lawyers to advise employers how to discriminate with out getting caught. The program was designed to allow American firms who could not fill jobs because no American was available to hire foreign workers. But most of the H1-B visas are given to India outsourcing firms to import workers.
Years from now CFO's may wake up to find the numbers do not add up to the savings sales pitch. They may ask themselves the question, "If we have to pay the prevailing American wage plus a profit mark-up to the on site India IT workers -how is that cheaper than are former American born IT workers where we paid no profit mark-up?" Oh, I forgot. It gave them the opportunity to legally eliminate the older more experienced and higher paid workers. And it gives the India IT firm the opportunity to hire people just out of college and mark-them-up for a profit.
Dell learned the hard way when they outsourced tech support for American clients to India that American customers find it hard to understand India English. Dells stock has fallen from $40 to $10. But outsouring calls to India and programing work is only 1/2 the story. Importing is the other 1/2.
America has lost a generation of talented American born IT workers. And if you believe the paid lobbist who say American companies need more H-1B visas because we have a shortage of IT workers then our government and corporate policies created that shortage. And India's brightest and highest degreed PhD's wanting an H-1B visa get no better chance than an India IT person with no degree in the current lottery system. So, the most talented and highest degreed India Ph'Ds are also upset.
The importation business of getting workers from India American H1-B and L-1 visas is so profitable seminars are held annually in America to teach firms how to not hire American born IT workers. View this video for the shocking truth. This mass discrimination has reached epidemic levels inside our boarders within large American corporations. So massive is the discrimination trend that the largest IT employer service
companies in America today are
companies from India and you will find they only hire workers from India. Now ask yourself why enrollment is down by almost 2/3 for American born students enrolling in American IT degree programs. As one American born IT graduate of
India descend put it, “I feel like I have to fake an
India accent to get hired.”
According to the American Computing Research Association: The percentage of incoming undergraduates indicating that they would major in Computer Science declined by over 60 percent between the Fall of 2000 and 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than its peak in the early 1980s The number of students seeking US computer-science bachelor's degrees plummeted by 40 percent from 2001 to 2006 (a key reason was fear of job loss, due to outsourcing and worker importation).
Now our
government wants to make it even easier by allowing Foreign Students to transition directly from student visa status to green card status. Already US Universities are turning down top American born students in favor of Foreign born students. According to the President of the American Semiconductor
Industry Association (America's second leading exporter) 51% of master's and 71% of Ph.D. graduates in electrical and electronic engineering from U.S. Universities are foreign nationals. Wake-up America, look around you, how will America compete in the 21st century World Economy when even our Universities are reserved for foreign students?
A Letter from the American Programmers Guild -2007
CNN Reports on the H-1B impacts American Born Students
CNN Reports on how American Jobs are Traded
After 27 Years This Vet Was Not Even Given The Choice To Accept India Wages
Dr. Ron Hira Explains How The H-1B Program is Sold
November 2008 Report Finds Some Fraud
We Have Created Many India and China Jobs -at our expense
Below is a comment left in response to a Blog discussing the H-1B Topic and Obama's position.
This is just one comment. At the very bottom below you will find many comments from many viewpoints.
American and Foreign Profiteer's are taking advantage
of foreign labor
But lets now take a look at how American and Foreign Profiteer's are taking advantage of foreign labor too.
If you thought profiteering from transporting illegal Mexican workers into the USA was bad wait till you learn how a local American Sheriff’s deputy profited legally! After reading how he and his co-profiteers charged foreign workers $15,000-$20,000 each, ask yourself why is he still a local Sheriff ?
And if you thought the concept of indenture worker or company run worker camps was abolished in the 18th century, learn how employer Signal International required imported foreign workers to live 20 to a trailer and
pay $35 a day in the 21th century. But wait, there's more. Signal was the sub-contractor for Northrop Grumman, working on a American Taxpayer paid government project!
But this story is only the tip of a Titantic Iceberg, on the American jobs lost since the expansion of guest worker visas to H-1B (specialized skills such as Architects,Engineers,Software Engineers and IT Networking). This well intended program, opened the flood gates for Profiteers seeking a fast fat profit. American and foreign firms profit off importing younger less experianced cheap foreign labor into America. The Profiteers hold-out
the promise of a fast backdoor citizenship into America while earning higher wages relative to the workers home land (most often India). American IT workers often claim they are training less experianced foreign workers so compaines can then transfer the work offshore. Just one example, Patricia Fluno, also a technology professional, said she lost her job at a Siemens unit in Florida to a worker on an L-1 visa. Fluno said Siemens replaced her and other U.S. employees with lower-paid employees of India-based Tata Consultancy Services. Fluno also said she was directed to train her replacement. "This was the most humiliating experience of my life," she said. Ms. Fluno was giving testimony during a 2004 meeting with members of Congress on this topic.
In the mid-90's there was a tremendous demand for IT workers in America, created by gigantic spending on Enterprise Networking, Y2K and Internet projects. This promoted greater support for importing foreign workers under the H-B1 visa program. But buy 2001 the Y2K work ended and by 2002 the Enterprise Network and Internet boom had turned bust. There had been tens of thousands of lay-offs in American IT workers.
I recall a CBS story about an American software engineer of 25 years who needed to become a truck driver to support his family. And when the boom returned age discrimination and a flood of foreign H-B1 labor eliminated any chance of returning to his profession.
The number of students seeking US computer-science bachelor's degrees plummeted by 40 percent from 2001 to 2006 (a key reason was fear of job loss, in part to outsourcing). Meanwhile, companies that profit
from outsourcing and the importation of H-B1 foreign workers whine America needs more foreign IT labor to stay competitive while government bureaucrats say we need more education. America has the most highly educated under-employed and out-of-work skilled labor force in the world thanks to these policies.
The Wright Question©: Economic expansion and contraction along with individual sector booms
and bust is a fact of life. Why after over 40 years of downsizing, layoffs and outsourcing to foreign lands
has America made no lasting effort at retooling American workers for work in areas were employers have shortages? If we expect workers to learn new, in demand skills, should we not expect big government and business to create solutions that do not encourage the importing of foreign labor or exporting of American
jobs? If the H-1B program is not a sham then why do immigration lawyers hold annual seminars on how to not hire quailfied American's so they can earn more fees by importing foreign workers?
How can there be a shortage of IT and Software Engineers when hundreds of thousands lost their jobs back in 2000-2003 due to 9/11/2001, the elimination of Y2K and the internet bust? How can America have a shortage of welders and pipe fitters when thousands have been laid-off? Has American corporations and the government just become to lazy to recall or retool American workers into new positions or has the profit motive just become to great?
After you read this story ask yourself, “Why must America import workers for jobs paying double what America's largest employer Wal-Mart pays?
Excerpts from the article:
Human trafficking of Indian guest workers alleged
in Mississippi shipyard
by Lindsay Beyerstein and Larisa Alexandrovna
Published: Friday April 13, 2007
Signal says they detained the 290 H-2B guest workers at the advice of US immigration officials, in an attempt to forcibly deport them following a labor dispute. Though the workers were later released into the custody of community groups, the incident has shed light on a longstanding immigration problem – the vulnerability of guest workers who travel to the United States on H-2B visas, and their exploitation at the hands of so-called “recruiters” and the companies they work for.
The bigger story is in the details: These 290 Indians paid upwards of $15,000 each to travel to America, lured by the promises of a Mississippi sheriff’s deputy.
Deputy Michael Pol is also the president of Global Resources, Inc., a placement firm that recruits Indian workers to fill jobs in the US. Global Resources works with local recruiting firms in India to enlist talent and with U.S.-based immigration attorneys to secure visas for the workers.
The Indian workers recruited by Signal International paid on average between $15,000 and $20,000 to Pol.
Overseas recruiters lure guest workers to the U.S. with lavish promises of permanent residency, high-paying jobs and better living conditions, charging thousands of dollars in “processing fees.” Guest workers are usually deeply in debt by the time they arrive in the U.S., where the companies that hire them often charge additional fees for boarding, food and expenses.
Those companies have an incentive to charge by the day, because they save money on taxes when they deduct living expenses from an employee’s wages instead of paying an equivalent sum to the employees and letting them secure their own housing and food. Signal charges residents $35 a day for living expenses.
John Sanders, who manages Signal's workers’ camp, says his firm was also tricked by Pol, who promised to supply the company with badly-needed Indian welders and pipe-fitters and arrange their passage free of charge. The camp manager says he was shocked when workers told him that they had borrowed thousands of dollars at what he calls “usurious” interest rates from money lenders back in India.
Sanders says Pol lied to Signal about how much the workers were paying him because that enabled him to arrange their passage to the US for free. “We thought, somebody's paying something, otherwise you wouldn't be in business,” Sanders added
Signal management called Pol to their offices last November to ask why he’d told the company workers were only paying $2,000 apiece. Signal demanded that Pol refund half the money that each worker had paid. When he refused, Signal terminated Pol’s contract.
The Employer was Signal International
Workers complained they had been tricked by American and Indian recruiters operating in India, who had
lured them to the US with false promises of green cards, good wages and comfortable living conditions. Workers said Signal was unresponsive to complaints about wages, discipline and housing
Signal’s guest workers are paid $18.50 an hour, a comfortable wage in India. But the amount can pale in comparison to the sums they borrowed to get to America. Signal’s Indian recruiters promised the workers $18.50/hr for first class welders, dispatching staff to test the applicants in India. All the workers who traveled
to the US passed Signal’s tests. However, after their passage, Signal tried to cut the wages of some Indian laborers from $18.50 to $13.50/hr or in some cases less. Signal says that it cut wages because the workers didn't have first class welder skills. Jacob says the company tried to make about 30 people sign papers to
cut their salaries. If they didn't sign, the threat of deportation hung over their heads.
Sanders confirmed that Signal tried to cut a number of workers’ wages. He added that Signal wanted to cut some laborers’ pay to $9.50 but the firm's lawyer said it wasn’t legal. The firm had certified to the Labor Department under penalty of perjury that workers would be paid at least $13.50, the prevailing Mississippi welding wage.
Profiteers get rich at the expense of foreigners and the loss
of American jobs
Signal’s workers aren’t the only Indian employees caught up in the H-2B visa system. Patricia Ice, a staff attorney at the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, says her group is working with a separate group of approximately 200 Indian H-2B visa-holders in Mississippi. These workers, also pipe fitters and welders, are working on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
These men tell very similar stories, explains Mark Massey, a Pentecostal lay preacher and worker’s rights advocate. Massey has spent nearly a decade helping Indian H-2B workers, first in his native Oklahoma and later in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida.
In emails and phone conversations with RAW STORY, Massey recounted stories of skilled workers who
spent everything they had, only to find that the jobs they were promised didn’t exist or had dried up, or that greedy recruiters had hired so many extra workers for the bounty fees that there wasn’t enough work to go around. Jacob’s case is typical. He made contact with Dewan Consultants in India, then met Louisiana attorney Malvern C. Burnett and Mississippi sheriff’s deputy Michael Pol. Jacob says his payment was
divided between Dewan, Burnett, and Pol’s company Global Resources. At first, he was promised permanent residency through an American company called J&M Associates, but after waiting 2 years, he was told
that his previous application had been canceled and that he would have to go
through Signal and pay even more money.
Indentured workers under the employers control
Approximately 66,000 H-2B visas are issued every year. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, the
H-2B process begins with the Department of Labor. The Labor Department is responsible for certifying that
an employer needs temporary workers and that the employee’s wages will be at least as good as the
prevailing wage in the area.
There are few, if any, regulations about what recruiters can promise workers before they arrive, and guest workers often find living conditions and wages are not as they had been promised. Under temporary one-year visas, they have little legal recourse. Peggy Abrahamson, a spokeswoman for the Department of Labor, confirmed that the Department has little power to arbitrate in disputes involving H-2B employees who were brought to the US under false pretenses.
The Department “only has so much power to adjudicate” between workers and recruiters, she said. “Beyond that, the worker has to sue for general breach of contract.”
Mary Bauer, an attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center and author of a report on foreign worker conditions in the US titled “Close to Slavery,” says workers have “virtually no way to assert their legal rights.”
Click on the complete Article link below to learn how they live:
The Wright Solution® is searching for business trends impacting you today
At a 2004 US House Committe on International Relations, members of Congress, were advised by Michael Gildea, the AFL-CIO's executive director of the department for professional employees. He said guest-worker visas are fueling the shift of highly skilled work overseas. In particular, he said several India-based companies are using visas to gain knowledge in the United States.
"Once the team of temporary workers has the knowledge and technical skills--sometimes after being trained
by U.S. workers--as much of the work that is technically feasible to offshore is then carted back to India," Gildea said in written testimony to the committee.
Gildea's point echoes an argument made by Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute
of Technology. According to Hira, as well as to publicly available information, Indian information technology companies with operations in the United States are some of the biggest applicants for H-1B visas and are heavy users of L-1 visas.
India isn't the only lower-wage country that is taking on technology work from the United States. Other countries gaining from the trend include Ireland and China.
Guest worker visas come under fire
By Ed Frauenheim
Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: February 4, 2004
Article excerpts:
L-1 visas and other guest-worker visas have been misused by companies to harm U.S. workers, witnesses told a congressional panel on Wednesday. And a number of members of Congress made it clear they are ready to change the visas, which have been described by critics as a vehicle for shipping middle-class jobs overseas.
"We can certainly do better for America's workers," Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., said at the hearing. "It's time for reform."
The hearing of the House Committee on International Relations focused on concerns that the L-1 visa program is fraught with fraud and abuse. L-1 visas allow companies to temporarily bring in employees from other countries for managerial or executive work, or for work that entails specialized knowledge. There is no annual cap on L-1 visas, nor is there a required pay rate. The number of L-1 visas issued by the U.S. government has tripled during the past 20 years, to about 113,000 in 2002, according to Hyde's office.
Another controversial guest-worker visa program is the H-1B program. It lets U.S. employers import highly skilled workers, such as computer programmers, for a period of up to 6 years (two 3 year terms). There is an annual cap this year of 65,000 new H-1B visas, although some exceptions apply. But this cap does not include the prior years workers and all are allowed up to 3 year work visas. Employers also are supposed to pay the prevailing wage for the job.
Both programs have come under scrutiny after massive job losses hit the technology sector. Defenders of the visas say they help keep U.S. employers competitive and that more work would transfer offshore if the programs were eliminated.
According to Hyde's office, a State Department memo from 1996 presents documentation indicating that, at that time, "ninety percent of the L petitions investigated by the American Consulate in Guangzhou proved to be fraudulent."
Two witnesses at the hearing said they were directly harmed by L-1 visas. Sona Shah, a U.S. citizen and computer programmer, told the committee that a former employer had abused the L-1 and other visas in the course of underpaying foreign guest workers and failing to give U.S. employees work assignments or training. Shah said a subsidiary of computer services company Automatic Data Processing had kept her and other U.S. technology professionals around temporarily to obscure its use of cheap foreign labor.
Patricia Fluno, also a technology professional, said she lost her job at a Siemens unit in Florida to a worker on an L-1 visa. Fluno said Siemens replaced her and other U.S. employees with lower-paid employees of India-based Tata Consultancy Services. Fluno also said she was directed to train her replacement. "This was the most humiliating experience of my life," she said.
More Samples of recent profiteering in trafficking human foreign workers:
Low Pay and Broken Promises Greet Guest Workers
The New York Times, 02/28/2007 by Steven Greenhouse
To a rice farmer from Thailand making $500 a year, the recruiter’s pitch was hard to resist — three years of farm work in North Carolina that would pay more than 30 times as much as he earned at home.The pitch was so persuasive that the farmer, Worawut Khansamrit, put his farm up as collateral to pay the recruiter $11,000 to become a guest worker. He along with 30 other Thai workers was promised $16,000 a year for his work. But the work only lasted a month and they
earned just $$1,400-$2,400.
Abuse of Skilled-Worker Visas
The Christan Science Monitor, 10/22/2007
Immigration reform skidded off the road in Congress this year, but that hasn't stopped interest groups from restarting their engines. The technology industry, for instance, is revving up the pump for more skilled guest-worker visas. Meanwhile, the number of students seeking US computer-science bachelor's degrees plummeted by 40 percent from 2001 to 2006 (a key reason was fear of job loss, in part to outsourcing).
Here is just a sampling of companies formed to profit from this
multi-billion dollar industry
Below is a comment left in response to a Blog discussing the H-1B Topic and Obama's position.
Unemployed IT Worker Why don’t we have a count of American unemployed IT people that are trained and qualified (BSCS), but looking for work? Many studies have shown that we, in fact, do NOT have a shortage of skilled workers in the US.
Isn’t that something we should have?
There are still many, many professionals out there that were laid off due to the H-1B surges in 200, 2001, and 2003, as well as the cumulative effects of outsourcing. They are underemployed, or have had to change fields and work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Do not forget that this visa is called the “outsourcing visa” because it accommodates and streamlines the ability to MOVE WORK OUT of the US.
Do we expect Americans to study hard, pay big tuition fees, preparing for a career - and become qualified (by BSCS degree) - only to find out that they are not first in line for jobs in their own country? (Think - What is wrong with this picture? Is this a Set-Up?)
The skills for IT jobs that you see in internet job postings are presented in very narrow specific terms with numerous listed skills - including even version numbers of products used. The chances of an individual having the exact mix of skills listed is improbable. And, any smart IT person would not be able to work locked into a specific, stagnant skill set. The nature of this work is to problem solve, to constantly learn and incorporate new skills into your skill set. This use of very specific skill sets in job postings is a means to disqualify American citizens on paper, so that less expensive foreign labor can be used.
Obama talks about a “bachelor’s degree or its equivalent” - the “or its equivalent” means what? a big loophole to bring in cheaper foreign workers without any rights.
Do not be fooled. Any well trained BSCS (Bachelor of Science in Computer Science) professional can easily and quickly learn new skills, and needs to, to keep an interest in work and to do a good job.
It sounds like Obama is trying to play both sides to me. I am hesitant to believe anyone that doesn’t talk about cleaning up all the well documented abuse in the H-1B and L-1 visa programs before they even mention ANYTHING about increases.
Haven’t we all heard about Lawrence Leibowitz, the Director of Marketing for Cohen & Grigsby now best known for teaching companies how to NOT HIRE AMERICAN WORKERS?
There are NOT enough new jobs in this field being generated right now to employ all the new graduates we have, forget about all the people that have been displaced by the previous serges in H-1B and L-1 visa use and the ongoing increase in outsourcing.
Increasing H-1B will promote and streamline more, faster outsourcing - that is NOT what Americans need. Women and minorities, as usual, are the hardest hit.
So when evaluating presidential candidates, we must really think about, who do they REALLY work for?
You can investigate this issue at: http://www.numbersusa.com/hottopic/H1B.html