RE: Request to remove Information
> From: Michael Marsh [mailto:michael.a.marsh@gmail.com]
> Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2005 4:50 PM
<...>
> What companies *can* easily do in the U.S. is to require that
> applicants be either citizens or permanent residents. You can't force
> an employer to pay for your visa. The "permanent resident"
> requirement can put up a sizeable barrier. Many tech companies choose
> to pay for employee visas because it either makes it easier to fill
> the position or it allows them to hire people who, even with the cost
> of the visa included, ask a low enough salary to keep average pay
> levels down.
Good point. Let's not forget that we annually grant somewhere around
140,000 H1-B visa for "guest workers" where employers certify that they
can't hire a U.S. citizen or permanent resident for the job. This
certification is normally bogus, as the unemployed engineers in
California will attest. The Federal government takes the corporations'
word regardless. These employees are truly at the mercy of their
employer, without whom they will get a quick trip back to their country
of origin. They do not complain about unsafe working conditions,
excessive overtime or any other abuses and will work for much lower
salaries than their U.S. counterparts. The company is required to
certify that they are paying the same wages to the "guest worker" as
their U.S. counterparts, but that is also widely known to be untrue.
These visas only cost the hiring company around USD$500, so it is a tiny
price to pay for a low-cost employee who will not dare complain about
anything.
There is also the L1 visa program, where an multinational can transfer
an "employee" from a branch in another country to their U.S. operations.
The non-U.S. employee often turns out to be a temporary hire, often from
a subcontractor who provides temporary workers, then sent to the U.S. to
work for below market wages. As this is a "transfer" within the
company, there is no need to make any certification about the wages paid
or the availability of U.S. workers for the job. Recent legislation
that would have raised the cost of the L1 to USD$1500 was recently
rejected, so this is cheap and easily abused. I believe the number of
L1 workers in the U.S. is around 50,000 annually.
The end result of outsourcing coupled with abuse of the H1-B and L1 visa
programs is to lower the wages of technology workers in the U.S. In
this respect, it has been successful. In its biennial salary survey,
the IEEE reports that the median wage of U.S. engineers has gone down in
real dollars for the first time in the 30 years the IEEE has conducted
the survey. IMHO, we are just at the beginning of the decline.
Already, manufacturing firms who make electronic hardware in China are
finding that prices are rising there and are considering moving
production to lower cost places, such as Africa. There is always
someone who is hungrier.
--
Seth Goodman
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