Trump’s $100,000 Visa Fee Spurs Confusion and Chaos
Comments 941
Bernie
The Hundred Acre Wood
9h ago
As the former head of strategy for one of the world’s largest IT services companies, I know a lot more about the abuses of the H-1B visa program than most people. It is a simple fact that this program has been abused for years. Virtually no one hired by Accenture, Cognizant, Capgemini, Wipro, Infosys or Tata Consulting Services has rare skills Americans lack. That’s ostensibly why we hired such workers, but that’s not the real reason. The real reason was simply this: they were cheap and compliant.
When losing your job means you’re probably going to be deported (most likely to India which receives the supermajority of these visas), you can’t afford to put in mediocre work or complain about long hours or tight deadlines. That’s especially true when your deportation lops a zero off your compensation.
All of the “body shops” in the IT services sector employ the same strategy we used at my old firm. We did so because some of our US-based clients wanted US-based workers handling their tech implementations, and the most profitable way for us to do that with the lowest turnover was to use H-1B workers. They were not more skilled than American IT workers. They were cheaper and more compliant. The relationship was exploitative. This should surprise exactly no one.
I can’t speak for Amazon, Microsoft or the other tech majors, but I assume a not insignificant portion of Amazon’s 10,000 H-1B hires last year fall into the same category.