A startling look at how Americans are losing jobs to workers from India.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: A report from a leading tech news source sheds some startling light on the state of American IT workers who are forced by their employers to train new hires from India, before promptly being shown out the door.
The report, by technology news site ComputerWorld.com, is a penetrating look into an unnamed US-based IT company, through the eyes of an unidentified employee who was told that he was being replaced, ordered to train his replacement – who came to the US from India, along with many other fresh employees – before finally being handed a severance package and sent into the oblivion that is unemployment.
The subject of the report, identified only as “A.B.,” explains in the report that about 220 jobs at the IT company for which he formerly worked were replaced by foreign workers, the vast majority of which were from India. While the company is not said to be one of the leading offshore outsourcing firms – in other words, we can assume it’s not IBM, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), or any of the other IT big boys – IT workers still felt the blow of having their jobs replaced by workers who were willing to sacrifice fair wages and professional freedom for the allure of coming to America.
A.B. says that eventually, once he and his now-doomed employees learned more about the H-1B visa system – which grants US entry to high-skilled workers, and is mostly used by offshore, outsourcing IT companies – they became incensed at their company for gaming the system and depriving them of their jobs, while also harboring similar, though less intense, feelings for their Indian counterparts.
The person interviewed for the story says that the Indian workers were first trained overseas, via a video-conferencing program called WebEx, and were then brought to the US. These Indian employees were said to be not particularly savvy in terms of practical experience with the technology they were hired to work on, and would ask the same questions over and over again.
While freely admitting that the replaced workers were not friends with the Indian replacements that they had to train, they say that the companies and the US government themselves are really the ones the blame, and that the Indian employees didn’t really understand what was happening in terms of how they were taking US workers’ jobs – and that many of these older IT workers would likely never be able to get IT jobs again.
A separate report from this past March, also by ComputerWorld.com, quotes another unnamed IT worker as saying that the main source of resentment was that many of the workers who are getting replaced during this process, all across the industry, will not get jobs anywhere else.
These US workers are being forced to train their replacements, and are then forced to go find a job elsewhere, even though the practice of hiring cheaper workers from foreign countries is now endemic throughout the industry. Older IT workers are seen as an anathema to newer technologies, and often never find work again, while the younger workers are offered jobs that are typically lower paying and have fewer benefits.
Both reports are important in that they lend some credence to the notion that if the H-1B visa program is not overhauled, racial tensions against Indian workers may rise. While that may not be a problem now, and both stories say there is no outright hatred against Indian-origin IT workers, there is certainly resentment – a feeling that can only grow if a solution is not found soon.
Last week, The American Bazaar spoke to RIT professor and legal immigration expert Dr. Ron Hira, who also insinuated that there could be a backlash against Indians and Indian-origin IT workers if the H-1B cap is raised by the immigration reform bill, thus allowing more IT jobs to be taken by workers from India.
That, however, now seems unlikely, with the immigration reform bill’s momentum taking a huge hit now that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary race in Virginia. It remains to be seen how Congress will move forward on the contentious piece of legislation, but the bill’s hopes of finding life in an increasingly crowded 2014 political agenda are now dim, at best.
5 Comments
Oh I am guessing I struck a nerve; the truth hurts don’t it?
I am honestly waiting for entire workplaces to be staffed by indians… and this ‘Equal Opportunity Employment’ and other ‘playing field levelers gets out of work american workers suing companies for unfair labor practices… face it… companies want to make money; they want to use you until they burn you out and simply replace you with another worker who is desperate to work… they use them rinse – repeat – reuse … that is why you see companies offering terrible benefits…that is why you see less people taking vacations… that is why you go into these apartment neighborhoods around tech centers and see nearly an entire building of indian and other ‘insourced’ employees living there… and this broken system is a grand example of this country not caring about our shrinking middle class… they will just ‘INSOURCE ANOTHER’ ….
Agreed. I just finished work in IT at a major bank. 80%+ of the workers are H1B.
It is doing great damage. The H1B visa program has destroyed the American middle class.
It’s really a simple case of supply and demand.
CONSIDER AN ANALOGY
Consider an analogy. Consider, for example, what would happen if H1B were applied to plumbers instead of engineers.
Pick any city, let’s say, Denver, Colorado. Now, bring in 100 busloads of freshly graduated Indian or Chinese plumbers (4,000 new plumbers), who want to enter into the plumbing business in Denver, and make a living.
The result? Wage rates for plumbers will become depressed. The existing 960 American plumbers in Denver, once busy every day, and making a good living, will now have much less work, or no work at all.
All the Denver high school kids hear from their fathers and uncles that plumbing is no longer a good way to make a living. The plumber wages are going down, down, down. In droves, they choose some other path in life. Who can compete with impoverished hordes of plumbers from India who will work for any price? India has 1.17 BILLION people, and many of them are coming here, flooding our labor markets.
The H1B visa law was created, written and lobbied for by large American corporations as a means for decreasing their engineering labor costs. Indeed their corporate profits have zoomed up, up, up — while the wage rates paid to their American engineers have gone down, down, down.
This is what the H1B visa has done to the American engineering profession. H1B has already brought in over one million foreign engineers to America, thus driving down American wage rates, and discouraging American kids from majoring in engineering.
….You are welcome to come to India ….