Why do companies need 10K H-1b visas?
I was watching Ron Hira speak about common misconceptions about the H-1B visa program. He mentioned that last year Wipro (a big Indian outsourcing company) applied for 10 THOUSAND h-1B visas.
Wipro is a services company. They sell services to US companies. Let’s say you have a chain of grocery stores. You think the IT dept is a cost center…it brings no revenue in but it cost a hell of a lot to run. Some salesperson from Wipro calls and emails and spams you until you agree to talk with them about their services.
Wipro promises to come in and do all the IT work for you…after all, it is not your core business initiative. Wipro promises if you let them come do the IT work, you can forget all about that geeky stuff and concentrate on selling groceries. You think, wow great idea, and sign them up.
Since your entire IT staff is now unnecessary, you have to lay them off. Wipro moves in. Some of the IT development work is moved offshore, and their employees -all of them on H-1b visas- do any on-site work required.
However, the transition may not go as smoothly as you thought it would. After all, you are replacing people who knew your systems, your business processes, and your people, with strangers who have to rely on accurate information from your users in order to maintain and improve your processes. Oh and add a cultural and language difference to the mix…..so it may take a while to get things right.
In a nutshell, that is what an IT services company does. My question is…why does a foreign IT services company need 10K H-1B visas? Why aren’t they hiring Americans? They displace US workers when they come into a shop to take over, why not absorb those folks into their company? Why bother recruiting folks in the US on other visas..…as a potential labor pool?
Scarily enough….Wipro’s chairman wants more H-1B visas because the cap is inflating the wages for current H-1b workers. Those visa holders are already paid less than their US counterparts, but Premji still wants to flood the market so they bring US IT wages down even further? How much richer does this guy need to be?
Bottom line, all the rhetoric supporting huge increases in this visa category is about control of the labor market. Big companies don’t want to pay for IT talent, but they will happily charge customers top dollar for IT work.