“The H-1B program worsens the very shortages it was supposed to address,” says an article by a member of the New York Times editorial board.
Farah Stockman wrote:
Elon Musk and the other tech moguls fluttering around Donald Trump claim that Silicon Valley needs more H-1B visas to bring in foreign workers because there aren’t enough Americans studying science and tech… There’s some truth to that. But what they don’t tell you is that for more than a decade, Americans working in the tech industry have been systematically laid off and replaced by cheaper H-1B visa holders.
“When Americans realize they can’t make a living as software engineers, they leave the industry [so] the H-1B program worsens the very shortages it was supposed to address,” Stockman concluded.
On January 3, an American manager in Silicon Valley described the orchestrated exclusion of fellow Americans throughout the tiers of his Fortune 500 company:
When I go to work, in Silicon Valley, it’s rare I see any Americans at all. Everyone, literally, is Indian, with a smattering of Chinese. Just recently I was at a meeting of all director and above leaders for my product, and I was the only one (of about 25) who was not Indian male. Picking a random senior director of engineering at random from our corporate directory, who is Indian, he has 36 US-based employees. Of them 2 are American, 2 are Chinese, the rest Indian. All of his bosses up to the CEO are Indian. This is not an outlier. This is a typical director and I could pick virtually any in our engineering org and see the same thing.
The nationwide, investor-driven, nepotism-fuelled displacement of American professionals by Indians and Chinese graduates is most advanced in the U.S. information technology industry, especially in Silicon Valley start-ups.
But the same process is underway in federal science programs, where university researchers — including many Americans — hire foreign post-graduate students as lab researchers via the J-1 visa program. Often, those hires are Chinese post-grad students because the academics are Chinese –and the result is that many would-be American scientists lose a vital career bridge.
The result is less technological innovation, more institutionalized racial and national discrimination, a hollowed-out national defense, and rising anger in the American middle class among both Republicans and Democrats. A December poll showed 60 percent opposition — and just 26 percent support — for the inflow of white-collar migrants.
Each year, the federal government allows employers to hire roughly 800,000 foreign l0w-skill, mid-skill, and elite white-collar visa workers — regardless of how many Americans want those jobs or are more skilled in those jobs.
These contract workers are not immigrants, although many start working long hours at low wages in the hope their employers will nominate them for green cards.
That huge inflow has created a resident population of at least 1.5 million salary-cutting foreign contractors in a very wide variety of white-collar jobs. The contract workers hold many of the career-starting, cutting-edge, and management-track U.S. jobs that are needed by U.S. professionals and college graduates.
Many of the migrants are imported to cut costs — and raise stock bonuses for managers — at investor-owned Fortune 500 companies. Also, many C-suite managers welcome the often-incompetent Indian workers because the workers have no rights and cannot argue against managers — as was once expected of American professionals.
Many of the migrants are hired via ethnic networks that allow foreign graduates to buy Americans’ jobs in exchange for kickbacks to multiple layers of co-ethnic managers and recruiters. Some of the white-collar migrants are experts, but most are mid-skilled or inexperienced graduates from low-quality Indian universities. Top U.S. executives usually ignore the nepotism that excludes skilled Americans, partly because the U.S. executives delegate oversight of their Indian workforce to Indian managers.
The WatersofBabylon account described the process:
The Indians favor their own. As a hiring manager, I’ve been sent resumes many times by Indian colleagues of friends, always, in 10 years, ALWAYS for other Indians. When I tried to source a diverse candidate pool for a recent requisition, and was about to hire a diverse (i.e., non-Indian) candidate, my Indian exec pulled the budget from me. Meanwhile, another Indian leader in my organization had a [open job] at the same grade level and closed it immediately by hiring an Indian buddy. As is always the case, the buddy had no expertise in the product or technology domain. They will hire Indians with no expertise and train them up, but never Americans.
U.S. banks tend to hire high-IQ Chinese migrants, but Silicon Valley investors often hire younger Indian migrants to rush the growth of start-up companies. These younger migrants are paid with dangled offers of green cards and citizenship, which allows the investors to avoid paying American experts with equity shares in their new companies.
But according to Elon Musk ally Vivek Ramaswamy, “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). … “Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.”
