H-1B: Rhymes With Slavery
If you've been 'outsourced' and are having a hard time finding another job, or if your boss is hanging Damocles' Sword of job outsourcing (either to someone based in another country, or to a H-1B or equivalent worker in your country) over your head as an incentive to work ever harder, the results of a recent salary study will likely be of great interest. It validates what I've long suspected; that one of the fundamental reasons why many tech companies are so strident in their demands for relaxed visa quotas is because they can then exploit the resultant lower-cost workforce.
Here are a few particularly damning quotes from Ephriam Schwartz' column in InfoWorld:
On average, applications for H-1B workers in computer occupations were for wages $13,000 less than Americans in the same occupation and state
Miano [who wrote the report] went out of his way to be balanced, and whenever possible he gave the benefit of the doubt to the employer.
The average salary for a programmer in California is $73,960, according to the OES [Occupational Employment Statistics]. The average salary paid to an H-1B visa worker for the same job is $53,387; a difference of $20,573.
Don't get me wrong; unlike some politicians and vigilante groups, I am absolutely not in favour of locking down the US borders to immigration. With the exception of Native Americans, we're all immigrants to within a generation or a few: my father's side of the family hails from Germany, for example, my mother's parents moved from Belgium to the United States after World War I, and my wife's parents came here after Castro rose to power in Cuba. But the results of this study point to rampant abuse of the immigration system, which benefits no one; not the employee who's displaced, not the replacement employee who's exploited, not the company itself (considering factors such as overall employee morale, corporate image in the minds of progressive-minded shareholders, customers, and partners, etc), and not the country (in the eyes of its fellow world citizens) who sets the immigration policy and looks the other way when the abuse occurs.
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