There is a highly interesting paper at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/PrevWage.pdf that investigates the actual intent of hiring foreign workers (although it refers to the US H-1B visa, it is pretty similar to the FT hiring problem in Singapore and the 457 visa issue in Aussie) to replace the skilled labor shortage that are so-called "prevalent" in these countries.There are a number of points that the paper has found:
"Training employees in IT would seem to be a win-win for both worker and employer. And often that is the case. However, extensive training creates other issues. “You take a $45,000 asset, spend some time and money training him, and suddenly he’s turned into an $80,000 asset,” says Mary Kay Cosmetics CIO Trey Bradley. That can lead to another problem. New graduates trained in cutting edge technologies become highly marketable individuals and, therefore, are attractive to other employers." -N.B the last line -now you know why yr company or dept. always harps on why there is not enough budget for training!
"Fully 56 percent of the workers are rated by their employers as Level I, which is defined by the Department of Labor as “beginning level employees who have only a basic understanding of the occupation [and who] perform routine tasks that require limited, if any, exercise of judgment.” This clearly shows that the H-1Bs are not brought in for innovation. Only 5 percent are rated at Level IV, which consists of workers who “plan and conduct work requiring judgment and the independent evaluation, selection, modification, and application of standard procedures and techniques...” -this is a predominant trend across the board if the statistics of foreign work visa are truly examined !
"As part of a congressionally-commissioned study, the National Research Council subcontracted Hal Salzman, then of the University of Massachusetts, to study the question of cheap labor and other issues. The NRC states that, “...based on interviews with some H-1B employers, Salzman reported that H-1B workers in jobs requiring lower levels of IT skill received lower wages, less senior job titles, smaller signing bonuses, and smaller pay and compensation increases than would be typical for the work they actually did"- pay more to attract talent ? Think again !
"A recent study has been much cited by industry lobbyists, because it finds that immigrant tech workers have been involved in founding a number of companies and in many projects that were awarded patents. However, as confirmed by the lead author, Vivek Wadhwa, the report’s data show that the immigrants have the same rates of entrepreneurship and patenting as the natives do. In other words, the influx from abroad is not bringing “better” engineers to the nation.
The industry lobbyists highlight some of the famous immigrant entrepreneurs in the industry, such as Jerry Yang and Sergey Brin, co-founders of Yahoo and Google. Yet neither of them immigrated to the United States as an H-1B visa holder; both came to the United States as minors with their parents,
and thus are irrelevant to the H-1B issue. The lobbyists also like to cite Andy Grove, an early Intel employee (and NOT a cofounder), yet he came to the United States as a refugee, not under employer sponsorship." - Do foreign "talents" really bring their true worth and can they really be nurtured ?
"many of our most innovative young people are avoiding the field in the first place, as it is simply not financially attractive. Just consider, for instance, the fact that Microsoft pays its new PhDs in computer science around $90,000—but pays its new lawyers $140,000" -not only lawyers actually but even the growing crop of human resource consultants and headhunters who usually do not have sufficient understanding in matching an applicant's true jobworth!
"Type II savings stem from the fact that older workers are perceived as being more expensive than younger ones. In many cases, when employers exhaust the supply of young American workers, they turn to hiring younger H-1Bs in lieu of older Americans. In this manner, the H-1B program is providing employers with cheap labor." -there you go - this will ultimately lead to an early brain drain of experienced people
"contrary to the industry claim that H-1B and L-1 visas enable them to avoid offshoring work, the visas actually play a key role in facilitating offshoring, so crucial that the Indian commerce minister, Kamal Nath,
called H-1B “the outsourcing visa.” Ronil Hira, an Indian-American professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, showed that the typical setup for an offshoring project is to have one worker onshore (as an H-1B or L-1) for every two workers offshore. The onshore workers handle liaison,gets training, etc." -ironic, isn't it?
Being a migrant worker personally, I have seen firsthand of this (paying high taxes and medical insurance while stationed in a foreign land, guess who gets to reap these in their coffers?) while and can understand the full-extent of this issue which has oft been guised as globalization when the actual goal is ultimate profiteering by cost reduction with an exploited legal loophole....
Posted by pui-chee
at 11:27 AM NZT
lyrical
surprised