Foreign labor is a threat to people's livelihoods in the tech industry. I've lost two jobs due to the work (our entire team's jobs) going overseas. I've been squeezed out of another job due to management aggressively trying to bring in as many H1Bs as possible.
Action is sorely needed, but the anger is very misdirected.
It's not the immigrants fault, they are doing what is in their best interest to make their lives better. They absolutely should not be the scapegoat.
The problem is the employers. They are more interested in higher profits than the best interests of the employees. And it can be a huge cost savings to offshore work or bring in H1Bs. The savings of.offshoring is obvious, but H1Bs are less so. The program requires the foreign worker to be paid a competitive wage. And while this gets fudged a little, the real savings is in hours. An H1B worker is far less mobile in the workplace, and it is easy for.an employer to overburden them into working 60 or 70 hours a week. Most domestic workers would quickly leave for another company, but guest workers can't due to complicated sponsorship requirements. So the employer gets 1.5 person's of work out if one person with no extra expenditure and little fear of the worker quitting.
The other argument is that the foreign workers are needed due to a shortage of domestic talent. This is true but misleading. The reason for the shortage of talent is few employers are willing to train and deal with the learning curve that comes with an inexperienced employee, plus they might just up and leave after coming up to speed. This essentially creates a barrier to entry and keeps the talent shortage ongoing. Much easier and profitable to bring in someone from overseas.
We do need reform in this area. My idea is twofold: make all guest workers (H1B and other programs) hourly and subject to overtime. It removes the financial incentive to exploit these workers. The second part is financial incentives to create what would essentially be white collar apprenticeship program to build talent.
As automation expands we are going to have a lot of people not just losing their jobs but losing their existing career. We need to rebuild our labor market so they can find new careers.
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