STEM fields by definition are almost universal in nature. I would think the biggest concern for the U.S. would be the out-migration of STEM industries to foreign countries.
Why would a U.S. employer bother hiring Americans — or even H-1B immigrants — if it’s easier and cheaper to do the work in India or the Philippines?
They don’t.....some do but the major ones don’t....
I’ve seen it first hand, Bank of America and Disney have in the past replaced entire IT staffs with foreign workers who come over on H1-B visas, get trained by the people they are replacing and the return to India making a fraction of what a veteran IT worker makes in the US...
Ok here we have a typical Republican defending the indefensible....
I would think the biggest concern for US citizens is having gainful employment. Get it?
HIPAA laws and Information Security (Financials, Social Security numbers) make offshoring a lot of this work prohibitive.
...and our AA quota sheets get boosted when we hire brown people over white american kids.
Where I work (in Dallas). Africans from Africa are interviewed more often than local white kids from DFW for engineering jobs, because we don’t want a Poverty pimp shaking us down, because dallas is 40% minority and our engineering dept is only 20% minority.
As someone who works in Financial Services and has dealt with this issue repeatedly over my now thirty year long career I think I'm qualified to answer your question: Because it's not cheaper and the quality of work (software, labor, time to remedy issues, etc..) suffers horribly.
American high-tech workers are far more diverse in their skill-sets (generally speaking) vs. their India and other Asian counterparts. In the environments I've worked in, American information and high-tech workers are in-tune with business requirements and workflows whereas India and other Asian counterparts are not.
I can go on, but I point to these two specific things because they matter the most. Knowing how a business actually works vs. focusing on technical requirements (which is what I've seen the large India based outsourcing firms do) makes a dramatic difference in software usability and reliability from an end-user perspective. They have tremendous impacts to things like uptime, availability and reliability.
American information technology and high tech workers far more often than not maintain more diverse skill-sets across platforms and tools to craft solutions that work out of the box and are easy to mature vs. the "specialized" nature of India and Asia information technology workers who more often than not require far larger teams to accomplish tasks.
Those far larger teams may be cheaper per hour per individual however when taken as a whole, they are more expensive and they take more time to accomplish tasks.
The global financial services firm I work for outsourced three years ago. The promises of saving money lured the bean counters and business folks to shove 2/3rds of my IT friends out the door within 60 days of inking the outsourcing deal. After year one they wanted out of the contracts they signed with IBM, Infosys and WiPro because cost skyrocketed.
Our three year contracts expired in January of this year. Our CIO and CTO announced we are re-insourcing almost 1,000 highly paid jobs and cutting ties with Infosys and WiPro while leaving our very large mainframe complex managed by IBM because frankly, they have us by the balls.
Then the China Virus hit. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find and onboard people right now? Not because they're not out there, because finding and onboarding quality people right now is damn' tough. Onboarding in a remote-work scenario is not something my employer was fully setup to do.
And yet, our uptime, availability and reliability dramatically improved vs. Infosys and WiPro almost immediately after not renewing those contracts. Yes, it takes a little longer to implement new systems however they're done right without performance or downtime related issues (bugs, configuration issues) and our KPI's show it.
IMO one of the best things that's happening to this country is not allowing cheap foreign labor (which is NOT cheaper when properly accounted for!) to displace American workers in any industry. American workers are the best. Period.
“Why would a U.S. employer bother hiring Americans — or even H-1B immigrants — if it’s easier and cheaper to do the work in India or the Philippines?”
The intent of slowing the influx of foreign workers is to create American opportunities for American people. According to Investopedia, “it is estimated this change will result in only a 16% increase (5,340 workers) in the number of U.S. advanced degree holders selected each year.” But even that little an adjustment will force the market into a more competitive employment balance.
Furthermore, earmarking visas by employment positions to certain people, and not allowing the market to be free to handle its own needs, creates a monopoly in employment opportunities and visa chances for other immigrants wishing to come into the country legally by assuming someone other than the Hi-B applicants are not computer capable. Not every immigrant attempting to get in is trying to get on welfare.
This type of program is no different than anchor babies, DACA, and ignoring the rules for migrant employees like when they are supposed to voluntarily depart the country, and the “sanctuary city” comes into effect as ICE is forced to activate. After all, when their H1-B visa expires and they are no longer eligible to stay here, if they don’t leave, are they any different than the border jumpers? And it affords the companies using them with a steady supply of cheap “throw away” labor they can replace at will. And then the US is faced with illegals that were brought in with the illusion of permanentcy but now are just an overage with nothing but existence and their hands out.
rwood
rwood
They tried that. They found out the hard way that its not so easy to outsource lots of things. Its especially means a loss of control for managers and C-level executives. Its so much easier to walk down a row of cubes and duck in for 5 minutes to check up on your employees and/or to be able to stand there both looking at the screen discussing how you want something done anytime that is needed than it is to schedule a skype call to India and still not have the direct contact you would have if your team was located a 30 second walk away from your office.
So senior managers......are you comfortable having much less control over your business?
The universal answer is “Hell No!”
Thus their desire to import a flood of cheap labor.
Most large American companies have already been there/done that/bought the T-shirt with "low cost" asian outsourcing.
My company probably wasted at least a $Billion on "Low cost" asian outsourcing over the last 20 years with very little to show for it.
Now we are trying Puerto Rico.