Elon Musk and the opposite tech moguls fluttering round Donald Trump declare that Silicon Valley wants extra H-1B visas to usher in overseas employees as a result of there aren’t sufficient Individuals finding out science and tech. American innovation requires “essential folks” from overseas like Musk himself, they are saying, as a result of Individuals simply don’t wish to study that stuff.
There’s some reality to that. However what they don’t inform you is that for greater than a decade, Individuals working within the tech business have been systematically laid off and changed by cheaper H-1B visa holders.
I found this in 2013 when I reported an investigative challenge for The Boston Globe about widespread fraud in and abuse of the H-1B visa program. On the time, three firms acquired the most important variety of visas within the H-1B lottery: Infosys, Tata and Cognizant. All three used a enterprise mannequin that minimize prices by bringing over short-term employees from India and leasing them out to American corporations like indentured servants. Outstanding firms have been jettisoning their domestically employed I.T. departments and outsourcing these jobs.
Not a lot has modified. Immediately, these three firms are nonetheless among the many high 5 recipients of the visas. When Individuals notice they will’t make a residing as software program engineers, they go away the business. The H-1B program worsens the very shortages it was supposed to deal with.
Most H-1B visa holders are lower-paid labor, not high expertise. In Might, Musk laid off greater than 14,000 Tesla employees, together with many H-1B visa holders. Reddit threads crammed with laments by employees who had moved to the US from India solely to be let go along with no warning. They have been determined to stay within the nation, however as a result of H-1B visas are owned by the employer, they’d few choices for doing so.
That’s why these employees keep compliant and low cost: They’ll’t go away the businesses that management the visas. In the event that they have been actually high expertise, they need to be getting inexperienced playing cards, not enduring six years of underpaid servitude.
Such mass layoffs within the tech business ought to make us query the premise that extra H-1B visas are wanted.
“How do they get away with mass layoffs — then declare shortages?” Ron Hira, a Howard College professor who has written about this challenge for twenty years, requested me.
Confronted on X with proof of comparatively low pay for H-1B positions, Musk admitted what many people already knew: The “program is damaged and wishes main reform.”
Does that imply he’s going to push for it to be mounted by elevating the wages for short-term employees and making it based mostly extra on distinctive expertise than on a lottery? Don’t maintain your breath.
