32,000 jobs offshored: Influencers claim H-1B visa crackdown backfired; jobs went to India owing to $100,000 fee – The Times of India
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/32000-jobs-offshored-influencers-claim-h-1b-visa-crackdown-backfired-jobs-went-to-india-owing-to-100000-fee/articleshow/126205982.cms
Posted by sofaking-cool
10 Comments
“Influencers claim”
Fucking Times of India – its YOUR job to report accurately. Wtf, your on ground reporting is “influencers claim?” What a rag.
The jobs were always destined to India, my company and many others I have connections to were already building out their India-based campuses/offices even before Trump was re-elected. As always, these companies love finding scapegoats for their moves, but this was the plan all along.
With the new offices now reaching completion, the plan being executed is US layoffs -> US hiring freezes -> new budget only approved for hiring Indians, no new US-based positions unless it’s absolutely necessary and there is literally zero way to get it filled in India.
This is tech btw, so software development/engineering but also is applicable to other sectors.
That doesn’t count the number of jobs offshored by Wall Street. Overly broad protectionism doesn’t work. People fell into the *lump of labor* fallacy. But at the end of the day, globalized, specialized jobs either follow talents or disappear.
The source of the issue lies in education. The US higher education also relies a lot on international talents. The visa hurb will also damage the higher education.
Even as the H1B crackdown as happening, I was bitterly chuckling to myself because I had just offshored nearly 50% of my team to the Philippines. They were perfectly good, right-out-of-college entry level jobs, too. I *wanted* to hire some folks from the local college, but I was handed too little money by leadership to hire even one person in the US. They all but said “you MUST hire in the Philippines to get this money”.
The idea that this was ever going to bring jobs to America was always ridiculous so long as loopholes like this exist.
I have to wonder what happens when American can no longer find well paying jobs? Houses in my area are like 700k which is crazy……400,000 for a townhouse. If regular people can’t afford the homes are we looking at another housing crash? Or can rich purple just keep everything afloat? The car prices are going to have to come down too. Also, this discourages people from going into tech, so we’ll fall behind on that if everyone is in tech is in India or the Philippines.
While the $100K fee seems great, ultimately you have to use taxation to be the practice, along with restrictions on companies who use offshore/migrant labor getting government contracts, tax incentives, etc.
This was to happen anyway. Let’s not ALSO have every local job compete with low cost overseas labor. I ❤️ India and people from there and the Philippines. I have worked with people from India and China all during my career. They have come to (my continent) America (Neil Diamond reference) and the industrialized countries in numbers like the Europeans during the Industrial Revolution. The unemployment rate is no longer accurate. Each country needs to focus on internal demand and getting its own house in order. The world needs to be more cellularized such that each continent or region is more self sufficient so that geopolitical events and disasters of all kinds don’t result in the one factory in the world that makes cheap widget X suddenly being offline (or worse). Economics does not capture the concept of anti-fragile economic / market architectures well. Unfettered capitalism does not result in efficient markets, but in stead results in over concentration and regulatory capture. Economics is enlightening but don’t treat it like a religion.
Jobs are going to India where wages are low and companies can find people qualified enough for these jobs, visas or not. But given AI, I don’t know how long they’ll last.
Jobs have been going offshore – Eastern Europe, India, central and south American a bit too. There is no US policy or action that is driving this. Only corporate greed and competition is. Even if I accept to get pain same wage as someone in India lets say 35k a year for engineering. They wont hire me in US. I have too many rights. We need laws that lock in US jobs for US based companies.
Anytime anyone brings up the offshore bogeyman to scare workers or policymakers I like to mention that major tech corporations continue to employ relatively low numbers of overseas employees despite the fact that…
1) It is obviously in their best interests to hire cheaper talent where all else is equal
2) They have the resources at their disposal to build office campuses for their overseas workers and generally fix any impediment to overseas employment, barring time zones or local laws.
The fact that they still employ relatively high numbers of domestic talent years, if not decades, later, seems to suggest that there’s a pretty compelling reason to keep talent at either the main office or at a domestic satellite office.
And sure, maybe they’re stuck in the past or whatever and slow to embrace change, but you have to remember that these are tech companies we’re talking about, and this still applies to relatively new companies with a more flexible attitude to work. Most of Notion’s open roles are for locations in San Francisco or New York. Same for Figma (albeit its India office is in Bengaluru).