I’m going to let you in on a not so well kept secret. Slave labor never really went away. All that changed is how people are kept indentured (and perhaps I am slightly bending the definition of indentured).
In my years as a Software Developer in various capacities I have met literally dozens of indentured servants. How am I classifying these people? Easy … these people in one way or another became acquainted with a company that sold them “The American Dream”, in many cases charged them a life’s savings in their country of origin to get them to America and then got them a visa to work here. They now owe the company for that legal work, the transportation here, etc. To pay the charges off, they will utilize their technical skills as computer consultants, earning the same fee (on the low end for their skill set to make them more attractive) as any other consultant in America. But that fee doesn’t go anywhere near them … it goes to their ‘firm’. Often it goes their by route of 2 or even 3 intermediate firms! By the time everyone has taken their cut, what’s left would not pay anyone in America anything they’d be happy with. Let me say that again, they are not getting paid anything that ANYONE would be happy with, not even the McDonald’s worker, the garbage man, whatever you want to say.
Why are they doing this? Like I said, they are indentured. Why else? By the time they pay back the dept, they are now some period amount of time in to the acquisition of their green card. If they quit and move on, it starts over. It takes a MINIMUM of two years to get a green card. If they’re significantly in to it, and the companies make sure they will be by the time the transportation expenses are paid off, it is real easy to SCARE them in to not moving because their green card is ‘right around the corner’. I have seen people strung on a month at a time for years. They are PETRIFIED, and of course they have no idea of the legalities of any of this.
A quick Google of the terms “Indian Workers in US” yields more results than you can imagine. Here’s just one. More interesting perhaps is that the issue is FAR MORE broad than just computer contracting.
This is what the H-1B Visa is for. When you hear that technology companies need more H-1B visas to bring in “talented worked” what you should be hearing is they want more cheaper workers to replace equally capable American workers. Since my trade is Software Engineering you might all be thinking that my real purpose for this article is elimination of the H-1B Visa since these Visas represent American jobs. I definitely do feel that the H-1B Visa is abused in this way. I know for a fact that there are qualified American software engineers that are unable to get jobs when H-1B Visas are said to be in short supply.
But I also know, personally, many of the H-1B Visa possessors, as fellow human beings. And as stated earlier they have been lied to and manipulated to increase the wealth of another. In truth, elimination of the current H1B Visa system would be a benefit to both Americans and those that want to use it to become Americans (of which I have no desire to stop).
A proper H-1B Visa program is necessary. I don’t want to put a wholesale stop to immigration. That is one of the things that, in my opinion, defines this country as a special entity in the world (well, normally … today that may not be so true). That said, I do think that any country’s first duties is to the citizens it already has, and to that end we can’t be creating Visas that displace jobs for Americans. Lobby’s can’t simply be allowed to pressure politicians in to creating Visas for positions they “can’t fill because their is insufficient talent in the American workforce” when the truth is they “won’t fill the positions with available American workforce if they can get far cheaper foreign labor”. Anyone working in America should be earning competitive salaries … the cost of living here is the same regardless of your background. So if you are able to get along on less money there is a reason, and as we’ve seen, that reason is corruption and abuse.
Can we bring people over to work at a reduced rate without the corruption and abuse? Let’s put aside whether it is fair to Americans or not for a minute … an argument could be made that if a foreign laborer can get along on some amount, Americans will need to adopt or perish. But to answer the question, how will the laborer that needs so little to survive on get to America? Who will pay that bill? Once here, the laborer still has to pay America cost of living. If the laborer in question has a low cost of living to begin with, they almost definitely won’t have the funds necessary to travel to America on their own. If they did it would likely be their life savings! What a risk! So they probably need corporate sponsorship to get her. But would a corporation do that without any guarantees? No, they’re going to want some form of guarantee that the investment in moving the individual here and paying the legal fees for the visas, etc, is going to be paid back. In fact, this is what we already have, and we already know the potential for abuse. How can we do it without that potential? I don’t have the answer, because as soon as you establish that the corporation will need some sort of assurance of payback you have identified an indentured state, and that’s where the potential starts.
When we look at immigrants that came to America to pursue “the dream,” whether they be Italians, Irish, English, French, whatever, we see people that came here on their own. They used their own fortunes, whatever that might be, and completely uprooted themselves to come here. There was no looking back, and indeed it WAS a HUGE risk. That is what makes America the country it is!
Coming here on a work Visa and sending money back is frankly an entirely different story. This isn’t investing in the American Dream at all, its siphoning others ability to do so and worse sending money out of our economy, which worsens the trade imbalance.
Coming here to work on a Visa and not sending money back is better, but still not the same. Again, my big problem with this is the deprivation of an American’s pursuit of the same dream. If the laborer is not planning to live here permanently, then ultimately the money earned IS going back, so its not that much different.
Now if the ultimate goal is immigration, that’s a great use of a visa, one I support whole-heartily … and yet still I will only support that if the immigrant is not taking jobs away from Americans. That’s been a long time problem. We can look back in our history and measure all sorts of periods when different immigrant races seemed to be displacing American’s from jobs. Today, however, we have the ability to calculate something called “the jobless rate,” and thus we KNOW if they are jobs or not. We even know WHERE there are jobs and where there are not. And we have a different visa program for that, called the H-2B visa.
Competition is a healthy thing, and if there are jobs of a certain kind (enough jobs that the jobless rate in that area is statistically the same as normal turnover), then some immigrant jobs in that area should be welcomed as well. But if the job is one that there are already Americans having trouble finding jobs, that isn’t the right time to be filling Visas for positions in that area.
By the way, in the Software industry as a whole, there really are VERY FEW technologies that are SO SPECIALIZED that there can only be a small group of people WORLD WIDE that can fit that position. Software engineering is not that specialized. There can be related technologies that make it more so (perhaps a software engineer that also possesses advanced graphics/mathematical skills), but this merely narrows the pool. It doesn’t shrink it such that there aren’t enough in the country. At least, that hasn’t really happened yet.
Its time for America to TRULY abandon slave labor. Tell your politicians you want fair immigration laws. (And, FYI, this is a bipartisan issue. Both sides screw up equally.) One thought is to eliminate the so-called dual-intent visa status. This is what allows an alien working here under an H-1B Visa to apply for a green card at the same time. Removing this ability would protect those drawn to the American Dream and abused by money hungry abusive corporations engaging in legal human trafficking and indentured labor. The H-1B will remain for its intended purpose: to supplant the workforce as needed with skilled employees from around the world.
Interested in this topic? Here is some additional reading material:
