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I can attest to everything this guy/gal has written, because I live and breathe it everyday. I am not sure what the L-1 program is, but the acronym H-1B is so common that most people simply refer to it as "H" in my hallways.
I work for one of the largest software companies in the world and, as a Caucasian woman, my group comprises less than 12% of the workforce. To put it into a more understandable perspective, people of Indian and Mid-Eastern descent occupy approximately 50%. The rest is comprised of 20% Latino that we relocated from several country locations in South America, and 30% are Americans (white, black, hispanic).
Now, while that seems outrageous on its own, this is the demographic makeup of real live people at a 2,400 U.S. support site in the United States (similar to what the poster's article referred to.) If we factor in the entire 25,000 man total company job force, including our Development employees, the Indian/MidEast ratio goes up to about 62% and that includes all of Sales, Marketing, and Consulting.
I can only speak for my company's Support organization at this point, but what the poster alludes to, and what is more devastating for us, is the fact that the Big IT's have very quietly replaced attritioned U.S. jobs at their sites in India.
Here's how that works: When someone leaves voluntarily (i.e., found a better job, decided to stay home with new baby, died, just plain quit) from one of our U.S. sites, the managers have known for over two years that they can't replace the "head count". The "head count" moves over to our Support Center in Hyderabad, India. So while the "head count" numbers look the same to the public, or shareholders, the profit margin skyrockets.
Here's the tradeoff:
1. U.S. customers are getting very ticked off because of language difficulties, but more so because the support they are receiving is in a time zone that is at least 12 hours different.
2. U.S. Support employees are getting very ticked off because they start their day "picking up the pieces" from angered customers because of #1 above.
3. Morale is at an all time low for U.S. IT Support employees because they know their companies are pushing for their replacements in India.
4. The U.S. public perception of the need for local IT workers is horribly skewed.
5. Support costs for U.S. customers is at an all time low -- BIG PLUS. Information Technology Operations (IT) is an outrageously competitive industry and decisions for all kinds of things must be executed immediately without time for evaluation. (Think IBM and their failure to do this.)
When the first IT company opened up shop in Hyderabad, the rest followed. Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Oracle, Gateway, Intel, HP and more all have profitable new operations in gorgeous new buildings in southern India.
The irony of the situation is that there were several IT Consulting companies already based in India when this revolution occurred. These companies are now claiming that the U.S. influence is boistering the price per hour of their workforce and they are now going to be forced to go to China for IT employees to stay competitive with their Indian customers!
As far as I'm concerned, the biggest travesty to this mess was the call "we" (the U.S.) put out to future graduates 10 years ago and told them all to get trained in IT-related fields. As the poster learned, we are so saturated with Computer Science grads with no place to go, but like he first encountered, it's not because of their lack of "job experience" that they aren't getting hired. They are not getting hired because there is someone halfway around the world that is willing to do the same job for $.60 an hour.
H-1Bs and L-1s visas for foreign workers are no longer an obstacle. The companies were tired of those limits so just moved their whole operations out of the country. Only time will tell if that was the right decision.