Lack of skilled workers vs. layoffs of US-born workers.
AB Wire
There is high demand for H-1B visa workers in the city of Charlotte, in North Carolina, because of a dearth of skilled domestic workers to fill up technology jobs.
According to a report in the Charlotte Observer, ‘hundreds of employers filed initial applications in 2015 for more than 16,500 H-1B workers located in the Charlotte metro area. Most of the applications were for technology jobs, while the 16,500 H-1B workers represent a figure that’s bigger than the entire workforce of some of Charlotte’s largest employers.’
Those in favor of the H-1B visa program, which includes many local employers, highlight a lack of skilled technology talent, which has left thousands of computing jobs open across the state, reported workpermit.com.
Officials in Charlotte stated that: “A lack of computer science majors graduating exacerbates the problem.”
Bill Chu, a professor at UNC Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics, said: “In some instances, companies that are bringing in H-1B people at the same time are having staff reductions in the same area – generally speaking, the IT area. There are lots of H-1B people in Charlotte.”
Across the Charlotte metro area, nine out of 10 employers initially filing an application for visa workers in 2015 were outsourcing firms, according to a review of official federal data. The Charlotte Observer states that the Charlotte-based Bank of America was the only exception.
The bank lodged applications for around 380 workers, which ranked it ninth for the number of visas applied for. Across the entire state of Northern Carolina, 33,400 were applied for by employers in 2015.
In recent years because of the H-1B visa quota most of these applications were not approved. For Charlotte that’s bad news, given that federal data shows a 39 percent increase in the number of applications filed by city companies in 2015, compared with 2014. The number of applications lodged nationwide increased by 25 percent, reported workpermit.com.
For US-born employees in Charlotte, the city’s continued dependence on H-1B visa workers has raised concerns about their job security. A technology employee at the Bank of America said: “It is a real concern.” The employee expressed his concerns anonymously.
According to the Charlotte Observer, a number of applications being filed for by the Bank of America are for positions previously held by American workers who were either laid off or deployed in other job roles.
The anonymous employee said: “I’m working more and more with H-1B visa developers than American developers within our company. We’ve seen them pretty much replace a lot of the developer/programmer-type roles. If you go into any development team in the bank, I don’t know of any American developers that I’ve worked with over the last couple of years. They’re all Indian.”
Some of the positions being filled by H-1B workers require only basic computer skills, the employee claimed. The jobs that we’re replacing here aren’t rocket science. It’s database developers, skills you can learn through a four-year program … at any major American university,” the Bank of America employee added.
Bruce Morrison, a former US Republican and a principal author of the 1990 law that led to the creation of the H-1B visa, said: “The original goal was to help companies fill a skills gap. I’m frustrated at how companies, particularly outsourcing firms, are using the program. Such companies hire large amounts of H-1B visa workers to temporarily fill jobs in the US before eventually sending those workers – and the jobs – overseas where wages are lower.”
An estimate submitted by an IT industry group to a Senate committee claimed that employers in Charlotte stand to save an average of $17,678 a year, per visa worker they hire.
3 Comments
This is one informative and very interesting article, thanks for sharing. :)
Hopefully Trump will stop the massive influx of foreign visa guest workers who are taking US citizens jobs; which has led to the failure of US States and the complete economic collapse we are now witnessing. There is no STEM education weakness as Americans held these stolen jobs and trained their mostly Indian replacements!
Why is it that American companies are firing Americans and replacing them with offshore or onshore visa (H-1b, L-1a &b, OPT, B-1, O-1 etc.) guest workers? The problem is, politicians want to “fix” US immigration by letting everyone in for cheap labor; while American citizens want just the opposite.
Bruce Morrison said: “The original goal was to help companies fill a skills gap. I’m frustrated at how companies, particularly outsourcing firms, are using the program. Such companies hire large amounts of H-1B visa workers to temporarily fill jobs in the US before eventually sending those workers – and the jobs – overseas where wages are lower.”
Bruce Morrison should not be frustrated he should be ashamed of not designing the legislation to require the so called “original goal” instead of allowing for the replacement of Americans as it is being legally used today. As Trump would put it the H-1B is yet another bad deal negotiated incompetents like himself.
Moreover, why did he not rely on free market capitalism to fill the alleged skills gap. Under free market capitalism those scarce skills would be price rationed and a higher price would have produced additional supply. The H-1b was created to address a skilled labor shortage in 1990. It is alleged that the shortage persists to this day. That says that either free market economics do not work or that the H-1b keeps price (wage) below the market clearing rate.