Thread: Invasion of the Body-Shoppers

http://www.citybeat.com/cincinnati/arti ... ppers.html

Invasion of the Body-Shoppers
Special visa allows firms to fill jobs with foreigners for less
By John Lasker

In the age of the Great Recession, if you tell any well-educated and out-of-work professional from Greater Cincinnati that thousands of non-citizen foreigners with advanced skills are employed locally and making bank, they just might flip their lid.

And if you take into consideration that one of the globe’s largest outsourcing firms bringing these non-citizen guest workers to the United States has a major office in Milford, any unemployed Cincinnatian probably should hold onto to the top of their skull.

The visa bringing these foreigners to Cincinnati and across America is the H-1b, which allows American corporations to hire foreigners with advanced skills — mainly IT professionals, engineers and professors — to come work in the U.S. for six years.

Quietly, the H-1b been around for over two decades but is now gaining a notorious reputation because many labor and IT unions claim the H-1b has displaced American workers, depressed wages and exploited the foreigners who use an H-1b.

The crux of the problem, critics say, is that U.S. corporations are blatantly ignoring federal law requiring them to only hire an H-1b if there is a serious shortage of Americans with the same qualifications.

Also, critics allege American corporations utilize the H-1b to keep wages low; studies have shown that most H-1bs working in the IT sector are initially offered a wage that is thousands of dollars less than the prevailing wage for entry-level IT pros who are U.S. citizens.

Proponents of the H-1b, such as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who has called for an “infiniteâ€

The traitor Bill Gates recruits computer grads from the University of Waterloo which is in Ontario. I used to live very close to it. He would come up and personally meet students who were graduating all the time. I saw him around town when I lived up there.

Good post but does ignore the other side which has an arguement however not a great one.

There are 3 major fields I know of first hand now pounding away at H1B visa's. IT, Education, and Medical.

Far as Medical with healthcare costs so high and many clinics and hospitals trying to tone down with Unions its become increasingly hard. Many areas wages are just to high on the American field of Medical jobs when trying to keep costs down with the idea of driving healthcare costs down. However hiring a foreigner to do the job they can bypass the Unions and generally pay 1/3 less on the payscale along with far less other benefits.

They do have a point about Unions driving costs and benefits to high. However even with them doing this more and more hiring foreigners to fill positions costs keep going up so its hard to see a benefit as they still fill their pockets at the top.

Education, foreign english teachers are becomming more popular and starting to even branch into other subjects. With teahcers Unions and tenure along with very high benefits a school trying to stay within a budget is getting increasingly harder. However getting a foreign teacher bypass's unions and if they have to lay off they can lay off from the bottom of the unions tenure w/o laying off the foreigner teacher. A prime example of Union abuse.

IT. Simply no excuse. Standard IT jobs are fairly lower starting pay at least for the ones outsourced on average of $10-18 an hour. The firms never reported loss's related to too high of labor costs and are generally just trying to up the bottom line. Unions are not a real factor in IT jobs, extravagent pension plans and retirement bonus's are not either. Its a standard field with a salaray or hourly wage with only basic benefits. This one is just about greed.

So anyways I understand in some cases there is a valid reason to support work visa's even when we have available people in the US for those jobs. But its fairly limited.

Just wanted to point out the side left out of the article, which does in a few minor circumstances have a valid point.