Firing Americans and Hiring Foreigners

For decades American manufacturing jobs have been going to places like Mexico, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and so on. Part of this was facilitated by NAFTA, but most of it is due to the vagaries of international trade, which is generally considered a Good Thing for our economy.

In recent years non-manufacturing jobs have also been fleeing these shores: many call centers and help lines have been outsourced to India (which American customers absolutely detest because they can't understand the accents), much software development has been outsourced to eastern Europe and India. Even legal research and medical image analysis have been outsourced overseas.

I have personal experience with this. In the early 2000s, after the company I worked for was bought by a British multinational, a policy came from on high that all American software contractors be replaced with Indian programmers from a specific contracting company.

But American corporations, like Disney World, aren't satisfied with this solution because some jobs just can't be outsourced to foreign countries. The employees need to be in-country. The solution? Bring in foreigners with H-1B visas and replace American workers with them.

[A]bout 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.

Yes, Disney (as well as other companies such as Southern California Edison and Fossil) is firing Americans, hiring foreigners for the exact same job and then forcing Americans to train their foreign replacements. For that last ignominy, they get a 10% severance bonus. Nice, huh?

What are H-1B visas?

According to federal guidelines, the visas are intended for foreigners with advanced science or computer skills to fill discrete positions when American workers with those skills cannot be found. Their use, the guidelines say, should not “adversely affect the wages and working conditions” of Americans. Because of legal loopholes, however, in practice companies do not have to recruit American workers first or guarantee that Americans will not be displaced.

These companies are clearly lying to get foreign workers: they're laying off qualified people and replacing them with foreigners using the H-1B program. This isn't about finding qualified workers: it's about firing Americans and hiring foreigners for less money.

And American companies still aren't satisfied. The US Chamber of Commerce wants to double or triple the number of H-1B visas. They say they can't find enough qualified American engineers and programmers: what they really mean is they don't want to pay American-level salaries.

To make it worse, the H-1B program is a nightmare for many of the people who get the visas: they are essentially indentured servants. The Indian "in-sourcing" companies that snatch up many of the H-1B visas create phantom jobs and then try to shop around the employees they bring in on false pretenses. They tell the immigrants to falsify their resumes to get jobs they're not qualified for and then force the employees to pay the fees the companies are supposed to pay to get H-1B recipients into the country.

Now, I'm not some whack-job nativist who thinks that furriners are destroyin' Merica and we gotta take it back! In the 1990s I worked with several people from India and Pakistan who had H-1B visas. They were competent and deserving of the jobs.

But the H-1B program clearly has become a cesspool of corruption and greed. It must be radically reformed. But how?

The H-1B visa holders I worked with were directly hired by the company to work for the company. The corruption in the H-1B program is due to the way American companies treat workers: they don't want long-term employees, they want low-cost slaves they can dismiss at a whim.

So companies like Disney and SoCal Edison hire consulting firms and staffing companies, which are usually based in India, to find disposable employees at the lowest possible cost.

These corrupt middlemen should be eliminated. If a company can't find the employees it needs in the United States, then it should find and hire foreign workers themselves. If these companies need employees that badly, then they should be required to make a long-term personal commitment to them, to ensure that they remain gainfully employed for several years and won't be taking other Americans' jobs.

Right now these companies can bring in foreigners, employee them for a couple of months, and then lay them off. At that point the workers will be competing with Americans for any job, not just the one they were hired for. Companies are even using the H-1B program to fill low-wage jobs, not just tech specialists.

If American companies can't find Americans with the skills to do the jobs, they should be investing in the American education system and training Americans to do the job.

American companies like Disney have huge profit margins and are sitting on huge piles of cash. Instead of whining that they can't find enough programmers and have to get them from India, they should endow scholarships at American colleges and universities in the specialties they need.

Robert Iger, CEO of Disney, was paid $46.5 million dollars last year. That's enough to endow 2,000 scholarships at American public universities.

Instead of trying to get Congress to pass laws to allow them to import more wage slaves from India, or expecting someone else to create employees for them for free, American companies should be investing in the future of this country.