Froma Harrop: Close loophole that replaces skilled U.S. workers with foreign labor

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-harrop_03edi.State.Edition1.1c588cb.html

01:28 PM CST on Friday, January 2, 2009

Barack Obama's pick for commerce secretary, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, vows to create millions of technology jobs that can't be outsourced. Sounds good, particularly in this melting economy.

On the other hand, Richardson supports expanding the H-1B visa program, which had greased the departure of good-paying tech jobs to lower-wage countries. The program lets U.S. companies employ up to 65,000 temporary foreign software designers, engineers and other skilled professionals a year.Indian outsourcing companies account for almost 80 percent of the visa petitions approved for the top 10 participants in the program, according to BusinessWeek. The Indian commerce minister has called H-1B "the outsourcing visa."

For the record, Obama also backs issuing more H-1B visas, as does his pick for labor secretary, Hilda Solis.

Many American companies have a genuine need for specialized skills from abroad. And the H-1B visa can usefully serve as a bridge for foreign graduates of U.S. universities awaiting their green cards.

But it also helps companies replace their skilled American workers with cheaper foreign labor. An example:

At the drugmaker Pfizer's Connecticut campuses, American information technology workers train their H-1B understudies. Pfizer's apparent long-range plan is to have some of these jobs performed by guest workers in the United States and others taken overseas, according to The New London Day.

FULL story at link.

[David Dunham]

1. The H-1B program will not be stopped.

[thunder rising]

2. A note to America's Brightest youth ... There is no future in engineering, science or any other

discipline that is being outsourced. As soon as America figures that out the faster we can start building our own middle class instead of India's.

[Earth Bound Misfit]

3. Bbbut H-1b visas attract the best and the brightest...

to America to study, work,seek permanent residency, start families and pay taxes. Didn't Bill Gates say so (or words to that effect)?

BWAHAHAHAHAHA...

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/12/business/visa.php

Outsourcers corner market for U.S. skilled worker visas

After four years at Harvard, many foreign students there will have to leave the United States this summer. Some of them, wielding lucrative offers from Wall Street investment banks and other American businesses, will have to start at those companies' overseas offices thousands of miles away.

Few of the students may think to blame far-off foreign companies for their plight, which was first reported by The Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper. But India's thriving outsourcing industry is guzzling ever more of the coveted H-1B visas that the Harvard graduates and thousands of others would need to stay in the United States.

Enacted in 1990, the H-1B visa law allows skilled, specialized foreigners to work in America for up to six years and then pursue permanent residency.

The visa has been championed as a way to attract the world's best and brightest to America to study, work, start families and, like Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, stumble upon innovations that generate vast wealth and jobs.

"Where innovation and innovators go," Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, said recently, "jobs are soon to follow."

--snip--

This month, the annual quota of 65,000 H-1B visas evaporated in a single day after U.S. officials received more than 133,000 applications. Last year, the quota lasted nearly 60 days.

If the past is any guide, many of those applications were for people with no intention of staying in the United States for the long term. Eight of the 10 largest H-1B applicants last year were outsourcing firms with major operations in India, according to a tabulation of U.S. Labor Department statistics by Ronil Hira, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, and a critic of the visas. A year earlier, the figure was four in ten.

--snip--

Consider the deployment of Atul Pevekar, a 29-year-old Indian engineer for Tata Consultancy Services, an outsourcing vendor. A year ago, and five years out of college, he was sent to Minnesota on an H-1B. His assignment: to work with a U.S. retailer to relay its information technology needs back to TCS's Indian staff, to which the retailer has outsourced scores of jobs.

"I am a link between the people who are doing coding in India and the client," Pevekar said by telephone.

He earns $60,000 a year, five times his pay in India. But he must leave the country within a year or two. Like many Indian vendors, TCS does not seek permanent residency for most employees, even though the H-1B lets companies do so.

And so he will not join, at least not now, that narrative of the industrious outsider who makes a fresh start in the United States, brings his zeal and drive, invents something grand, creates jobs and pays taxes. Instead, he will empty his bank account, take his savings home and vanish from the country as quietly as he arrived.