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| Weekend Brew |
Lately, there has been much fuss over the Trump administration's stringent policy regarding the H1-B visa program.Here are some hard facts about the H1-B visa program as it relates to how it actually works.
A corporation will pay say $60.00 per hour for a temporary worker. The $60.00 per hour goes to a consulting firm. For an H1-B visa, it is normally an Indian consulting firm. For an American, it is maybe a local consulting firm.
If it is an Indian consulting firm, they may take 40 percent and give 60 percent to the H1-B visa consultant of that hourly pay. Or maybe there will be two consulting firms involved, and the consultant may get 40-50 percent.
For an American, the split may be a 34/66 split with 66 percent going to the consultant and 34 percent to the consulting firm. In either case, it doesn't make much difference. The big winners of the H1-B visa program are the consulting firms. For the corporations, it is also a win since they don't have to provide any benefits to the consultant(s) and they can end the contract at any time.
The H1-B visa program helps East Indians migrate to America and subsequently take control of the IT industry with help from International Corporations. I have worked with H1-B visa consultants and for the most part, they are at best average and are definitely no better than American trained consultants. The truth is that most of these India-trained consultants can easily be replaced by American workers.
The usual routine is an H1-B comes to the United States and gets a contract, thus displacing, in most cases, a better trained US worker. Then within 6 months they have to go back to India for a month and marry someone they will meet for the first time when they are face-to-face during the marriage ceremony. Then nine months after they've gotten back to the US with their new wife under their H1-B visa, they have what is known within immigration circles as an "anchor baby."
You'd be surprised how many Indians who have been married in the US for ten years and have only one child. And that child is a year less than when they first came to the US. Thus, in addition to circumventing the economic system, the process also serves to do the same to the immigration system and it is rather unfair to those folks who work hard and do it by the book, especially immigrants from other parts of the world, who come to the United States legally.
It is no secret that the Indian H1-B workers have a big advantage. The international corporations
have spent probably a quarter of a trillion dollars building Training Centers, aka Technology Centers in India. I'd say about 15 years ago,
Corporations like Intel, Microsoft and GE spent upwards of $10 billion each to build Training Centers in India. In IT, you learn by doing. Either you use it or lose it.
As soon as someone graduates from college in
India (where cheating is rampant by the way) they are hired by a Training Center and go to work.
Conversely, a US graduate, that is, a US citizen finds it harder to get a job and starts learning on the job, mainly because the jobs they would have
gotten to start their careers are being filled by an H1-B visa. When I worked for EDS as a consultant, an old timer told me how it used to be. They would train
people to be programmers. There were secretaries who the company let take programming
classes and EDS taught them. A lot of workers ended up becoming programmers and
bettering themselves.
But over time, corporations decided to purchase an Indian Consulting firm and ship jobs
to
India and also ship Indians to the US through the H1-B visa program to displace American workers for one reason alone, MONEY! It is all about cost savings or should I say, greed!
In the end, the fact remains that the India-trained consultant is no better than the US trained one. The former is however a lot cheaper and also a lot easier to get rid off, with less complications.
Those are the facts!
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