Writing at the Huffington Post, Norm Matloff points out the obvious, that tech companies want foreign workers to keep domestic wages low:
To see how this works, note that most Silicon Valley firms sponsor their H-1B workers, who hold a temporary visa, for U.S. permanent residency (green card) under the employment-based program in immigration law. EB sponsorship renders the workers de facto indentured servants; though they have the right to move to another employer, they do not dare do so, as it would mean starting the lengthy green card process all over again.
This immobility is of huge value to many employers, as it means that a foreign worker can’t leave them in the lurch in the midst of an urgent project. In a 2012 meeting between Google and several researchers, including myself, the firm explained the advantage of hiring foreign workers: the company can’t prevent the departure of Americans, but the foreign workers are stuck. David Swaim, an immigration lawyer who designed Texas Instruments’ immigration policy and is now in private practice, overtly urges employers to hire foreign students instead of Americans.
This stranglehold on foreign workers enables firms to pay low wages. Academics with industry funding claim otherwise, but one can see how it makes basic economic sense: If a worker is not a free agent in the labor market, she cannot swing the best salary deal. And while the industry’s clout gives it bipartisan congressional support concerning H-1B and green card policy, Congress’s own commissioned report found that H-1B workers “received lower wages, less senior job titles, smaller signing bonuses and smaller pay and compensation increases than would be typical for the work they actually did.â€
The actual evidence that there’s a shortage of labor in IT is meager. If there were a shortage, you’d expect wages in IT to rise faster than the rate of inflation. They aren’t.
But, hey, have a heart! Without chaffering the wages of workers down, how do you expect Bill Gates to get his next trillion?
Steve Jobs was front and center in exporting jobs to China. Yet he’s a cult hero to millennials. Go figure. ZH had and interesting export by country list which I will attempt to find.
Here we be
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-06/what-americas-top-trading-partners-export-us
Ah, Zero Hedge again. One of the three guys writing as Tyler Durden – because they’re apparently 14 – is out:
Great source.
Unfortunately, no one cares and these immigration practices will continue. It’s one of the dwindling number of areas where right and left meet.
I am hiring my first H-1B. It isn’t actually taking all of that long and the paperwork (I sing everything) hasn’t been that bad, but it is costing us a few thousand. I think a lot of this is just that the visa holder has to worry that they could be fired when they attempt to leave and could be deported if they did not immediately have a sponsor.
Steve
Steve:
I would normally never call out a mis-type for fear of having my own pointed out, but I quite liked the image of you ‘singing’ all the paperwork. The world’s dullest opera?