CT Blue

From today’s Globe:

In another sign that the economy might be turning around, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services has filled this year’s quota of 65,000 applications for H-1b guest worker visas, which allow companies to hire foreign workers for jobs they say they cannot fill with US-born applicants.

Unlike previous years, it took nine months for companies to use up the allowed visas under the program, because the sharp recession cut into demand for workers. In 2007 and 2008, the quota was exhausted in less than a week.

Companies apply for the visas, and then use them to hire foreign workers with special skills who work in the United States for three to six years. H-1b visas are popular with high-tech companies and are often used to hire scientists and engineers.

Most of the visas are obtained by American subsidiaries of Indian outsourcing firms, such as Infosys Technologies Ltd., Wipro Ltd., Satyam Computer Services Ltd., and Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. The Indian companies hire skilled workers abroad, then send them to US firms as contract workers.

Things are apparently looking up for corporations, but not for American workers. This is an issue that hit a bit close to home for me a few years ago when my sister, a computer analyst at the Hartford, and her co-workers were suddenly informed that their jobs could not be filled with Americans and that they would be expected to train their H-Ib replacements, after which they would leave the jobs they had just discovered they really didn’t want to perform. Imagine their surprise at finding this out!

The H-IB program is a scam whereby American corporations can replace American workers with cheaper foreign workers. As the Minneapolis Star-Tribune noted in an editorial in 2008:

Four years ago, the Office of Management and Budget found the program “vulnerable to fraud or abuse” and made several suggestions for reform, none of which has been implemented. In most cases, the H1-B program does not require that employers hire a U.S. worker who may want a particular job, and a U.S. worker can be displaced from a job in favor of a foreign worker, according to the Department of Labor. In fact, contrary to widely held belief, most employers using the H1-B program do not have to search at all for a U.S. worker willing to fill a job.

This program is brought to you by the government of the United State, which would rather allow its corporations to give jobs to foreign nationals than spend money on educating its own people to fill these “professional” positions. Why spend money on educating our people when you can get someone from India for a fraction of the price, while India pays the cost of educating them?

Another part of the scam is that these people are not even being hired directly by American corporations. Instead, they are hired by Indian outsourcing companies that basically rent them to companies like the Hartford. In fact, were in not for those Indian companies trying to sell their wares, companies like the Hartford might never have discovered that their American workers really didn’t want to do their jobs anymore.

So, if this is a sign that the American economy is turning around, it’s also a sign that the turnaround is -surprise, surprise- only going to benefit the folks at the top.

The H-1B workers, by the way, are subject to a variety of abuses. Their status is tenuous; if their “employer”, the Indian companies, for instance, decide they are getting uppity, they can get the Visas revoked. As I noted in a post years ago, one such company was sued by a worker for systematically taking income tax refunds due to its workers and depositing them into its corporate coffers.

In a country with unemployment of over 10%, much of it in white collar jobs, it is difficult to believe that sufficient workers cannot be found to perform almost any job out there. We’re not talking about jobs picking lettuce; we’re talking about skilled jobs that people here can and will perform. Here’s Bernie Sanders talking about the problem on the Senate floor.

This is the way with empires. They fall apart because they hollow themselves out. We are in the process of doing that now. We produce less and less that is real every year, and what is done here is increasingly done by people from elsewhere flowing to the center of the empire. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against immigrants. This is a different process. This is exploitation of American and foreign workers alike. If, in fact, America is not producing people educated enough to fill these jobs, then we need to ask why. The fact is, that for large numbers of these jobs, qualified American workers are available. They just want to get paid enough to pay back those student loans they had to take out to get an American style education, with medical benefits sufficient to help them if they get sick and need to use the “best health care system in the world”, with enough left over to pay for a home at the still artificially high prices caused by a housing bubble created by a bunch of paper pushing greedheads. Those kinds of demands are too much for our corporate masters, so they are looking elsewhere. It’s only a matter of time before the gulf between the rich and the rest gets even wider in this country, probably too wide to sustain even the illusion that this is a representative democracy.