Today there are a flurry of stories in the press on American workers being outraged because corporations are firing U.S. workers and keeping their temporary foreign guest workers.
Guess what. Corporations have been replacing U.S. citizens, U.S. workers with temporary guest workers for quite some time now.
This is not the best and the brightest or worker shortage or skills we cannot find, it is outright labor arbitrage. Corporations fire U.S. workers and replace them with guest workers because it’s cheaper and also for their offshore outsourcing agendas.
The scenario goes like this. A U.S. worker who is highly skilled, exceptional job performance hits say age 35. Magically a younger worker on a guest Visa needs to be trained by that experienced worker. Then, magically that U.S. worker is fired.
Bloomberg and Reuters while acknowledging these corporations are keeping H-1B and L-1 foreign guest workers and firing Americans, go on and on about the plight of being unemployed for a H-1B Visa holder.
Wake Up Journalists!
It is not like if a H-1B goes home, magically they fall off the edge of the world. There are some very nice U.S. savings which go pretty damn far in costs of living in many of these countries. And you also forget these other countries have engineering and tech jobs….just like the United States.
My question is: Why are you not covering the plight of the U.S. Tech worker?
Is it somehow ok for a person who has worked very hard all of their lives, has advanced skills, advanced degrees to go homeless, be foreclosed on, lose their health care, have nothing for retirement, sit idle, not have enough food to eat?
That is what is going on! We have had suicides people become so despondent. Through no fault of their own, their careers, their livelihood are cut short and they cannot find another job, simply because they are over the age of 35 or not a guest worker. This is for jobs in their own country.
Do you think it is right to let America’s Best and their Brightest, the U.S. tech workforce, be treated this way? Literally being discriminated against for jobs in their own country?
How about focusing in on the U.S. workers for a change and having some compassion and sympathy for them. It’s only America’s future we’re talking about here. An underclass of highly educated and skilled workers who are losing their careers and livelihoods due to global labor arbitrage.
Bob
The Reuters article was written by a Anupreeta Das. You know that Reuters pioneered the practice of hiring large number of H1-B and L1 journalists or just planning off-shoring much of its reporting altogether. Besides one would expect that Reuters would simply unapologetically claim that its goal should be to provide its readers with an international “globalist” perspective. Over the years I have seen numerous articles in the past from Reuters that reflected a wacky almost “Brand India” if not downright “Hindutva” agenda.
Except for Lou Dobbs on occasion nobody at CNN or PBS rolls their eyes when Fareed Zacharia shameless peddles his own version of “Brand India” nonsense like telling listeners that it is perfectly safe for American Businessmen to walk the street of Mumbai because the terrorism situation over there is now under control.
Does China or India have an HB-1 or guest worker program? If so, the Employment Development Department
would like to know since it currently has a fresh supply of surplus labor it’s having trouble processing.
First timer, so perhaps you’ve dealt w/this before. I appreciate the point of this article and agree Americans, who do possess the appropriate skills, should not be replaced by foreign workers. However, when will someone actually address the hundreds of thousands of construction, food service, manual labor jobs done by ILLEGALS. I am an employer who refuses to employ these people who will send most of their money out of the US, overwhelm public services and many pay no taxes. This costs me more but I will NOT sell out American workers. Until Americans are willing to swallow hard and buck up by insisting on legal American labor, the wage base, job security and economic stability will continue to erode. Globalization is damning the US and it’s citizens to a bleak future unless we start taking care of our own. Send all but the most gifted, who do not displace Americans, packing!!! Cheap foreign labor, seductive as it is, is a predicate of the demise of the middle class, a necessity for a strong US.
Scream from the rooftops because those special interests, corporate lobbyists try to stop any enforcement of any law at all and it’s clearly insane!
Good for you on trying to implement the obvious and I imagine Congress should hear from employers trying to do the right thing, and how it is clearly cheaper to use illegal labor.
Selin said:
“I am an employer who refuses to employ these people who will send most of their money out of the US, overwhelm public services and many pay no taxes. This costs me more but I will NOT sell out American workers.”
It is the law breaking employers hiring illegal workers that should be busted. Because of their CHEATING, they are forcing HONEST employers, like Selin, out of business.
By not enforcing the law, the US has a system that rewards the CHEATERS (that exploit cheap, often illegal, labor) and punishes HONEST employers.
Why do Americans have to be treated as second class citizens in our own country. With millions of Americans unemployed Please Obama send these temporary ARROGANT guest workers home. We don’t need these temporary workers anymore.