Posted on 04/12/2009 2:23:14 AM PDT by Scanian
In between establishing new national policies on healthcare, education, financial regulation and energy, the Obama Administration said last week that it is getting ready to tackle immigration, too. Part of this involves deciding whether to allow up to 85,000 foreign technical workers to enter the country under the H1-B visa program at a time when hundreds of thousands of American engineers and programmers are losing their jobs.
H1-B visas shouldn't be eliminated, as some protectionists suggest, but they also shouldn't be made unlimited, as industry leaders like Microsoft's Bill Gates once requested of Congress. The H1-B program is useful, but only if it can be protected from abuse.
The idea behind H1-B visas is a simple one: companies sometimes need to hire foreign technical experts when there are no qualified US citizens to do a job. In practice, however, the program has been used to lower overall labor costs and as a form of age discrimination.
If a US employer said out loud, "Gosh, we have a lot of 50-something engineers who are going to kill us with their retirement benefits so we'd better get rid of some," they would be violating a long list of labor and civil rights laws. But if they say, "Our cost of doing business is too high, so we'll be importing a few thousand engineers from India," that's just fine -- even though it means exactly the same thing.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
“I know this because I am both a victim of it as well as one who did it.”
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I wonder if HR is functioning this way under orders from upper management. There seems to me to be an increasing disconnect between those responsible for IT and those who dole out the money to pay for IT.
It’s a huge disconnect. And over the years it hasn’t gottem much better.
What I used to do was to stop by HR and ask for the resumes that came in which were outright rejected. After reviewing them I would go back to HR and question why they were rejected.
Ping!
The Japanese company benefited because they got foreign worker visas for which they were willing to pay the premium.
The Japanese worker benefited because foreign workers actually bid their wages up instead of down.
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