Originally Posted by BetsyRoss
Age discrimination here is illegal. In most jobs there is no reason to presume that a younger person is better. There is no good reason to displace older American workers from their jobs and replace them with younger foreign workers, yet this is a main threat of global labor arbitrage.
America faces a crisis in terms of funding Social Security. One main mitigation strategy - which is often overlooked - is to protect older workers in their jobs and make sure that they are allowed to keep working instead of forcing them out and turning them into drawers of resources instead of contributors. (Note: Scandinavia is already leaning towards this) Most of them want to keep working, many of them need to. The answer is not to replace them with younger foreign workers. The baby boomer generation is not aging the same way that earlier generations did. Previous generations had to run a gauntlet of infectious disease and hit-or-miss nutrition that the baby boomers did not. Modern medicine also plays a strong role in keeping baby boomers functional. Some will follow the traditional patterns of aging, many will not.
When I look at foreign job advertisements, I often see shocking examples of blatant age discrimination. Although they have become less obvious about it, it is still possible to find ads with an age ceiling. Many ads still list a maximum experience range that assures that accepted candidates will still be in their twenties. This practice is vile and must not come to America. America fought long and hard to eliminate this, and the last thing we need to do is waste our local talent by turning back a century of labor law progress and regress to the cutthroat competion of the third world. Nobody here wants that. The discriminatory practices seen are products of overpopulation, where there are too many people chasing too few jobs, and that's not how we want to live.
America already has a staggering problem with underemployment, caused by too many people (many of them foreign) chasing too few jobs. America's first responsibility is to the citizens who are legally here, who have no homeland to return to if America doesn't work out for them. There is nothing racist or wrong about this - all the other countries feel the same way and are not shy about framing their laws to enact preference for their own citizens.
The fact that some H-1Bs are indeed paid well doesn't change the fact that most requests are for a low skill level, paid at the 17th percentile of the prevailing wage, which results in pay $12-20K below the real prevailing wage here. How can you tell that H-1B is being abused - it was NEVER supposed to be used to displace an American, yet it often has. A stroll through an LCA database will quickly answer any questions about whether Americans are being denied job opportunities or are being displaced with lower paid foreign workers. Just check it out for yourself.
Other practices associated with international labor arbitrage: fake credentials, puffed up resumes, ethnic discrimination (i.e. foreign managers hiring their own folks), violations of tax law (i.e. lawsuit against Tata) are also vile and must not take root here.
If employers don't want to hire older workers, that must be punished as the age discrimination that it is, not merely accepted and endured. America faces a crisis: the baby boomers will either be the biggest burden or the biggest asset, and our decisions about keeping them working will determine that. We baby boomers are not going anywhere, any time soon.