Student Projects:Outsourcing PPF:Visas

From discussion page

User:kirkal yes, we would like to examine this problem from an Indian point of view...if only because Indian problems and conditions represent, to a large extent, the problems and issues involved in outsourcing - from both perspectives, outsourcer and outsourcee,as it were.

now to argue both sides of the issue you brought up:

H1b visas ARE causing significant number of India's skilled workforce to migrate to the EU/USA. however, since most of them remit money back home, the country ,as a whole , is better off - brain drain ,definitely, but in the long run, maybe not so crucial for the country's progress.

h1b visas being cut, though result in the following:

• possible shifting of jobs from us to india as engineers can no longer be brought across as easily.
• reduction in foreign exchange remittances to india.
• more jobs in india...solving unemploment , however temporarily and inadequately.
• from an american viewpoint, lesser indian/chinese engineers coming over to take over american jobs...but since these will anyway be shifted out, i don't know if it makes much difference.
• from an american viewpoint, again, policy might be formulated to prevent jobs shifting overses...companies might respond,as they have already done, by relocating entire development centers overseas.
• indian software policy is pretty liberal...in that the govt. has declared tax holidays for all sw firms till 2010, income tax breaks for individuals who set up new companies and suchlike. they even encourage outsourcing from the outsourcee's point of view in that i think there are extra tax incentives or suchlike if involved in outsourcing which generates jobs in india.

Anti-Visas references

• http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html
  • "Employers are not required to recruit Americans before resorting to hiring H-1Bs."
• Deleting American Workers: Abuse of the Temporary Foreign Worker System in the High Tech Industry
• Lack of Employment Visas Shows Myth of High-Tech Labor Shortage
• http://www.fairus.org/ImmigrationIssueCenters/ImmigrationIssueCenters.cfm?ID=1216&c=15
  • A lot of good data and quotes
• http://www.fairus.org/Legislation/Legislation.cfm?ID=2357&c=58
  • "'L' category visas has permitted labor contractors to transfer overseas workers to the U.S., who are then contracted out to American clients... Thus, the Indian subcontractor can underbid a competitor that pays prevailing wages to American employees. The unintended consequence of these sorts of unrestricted transfers of overseas employees is that higher paid American programmers are laid off."
  • "The India Times News Network article cited above stated, 'Employers looking to slash costs have discovered that they can use firms that hire L-1s to dump high-paid Americans in favor of cheaper workers from abroad.'
• http://www.fairus.org/ImmigrationIssueCenters/ImmigrationIssueCenters.cfm?ID=1224&c=15
  • "The NRC committee did not find the 'shortage' of high-tech workers, that the industry had been bewailing in their congressional lobbying efforts. Rather, the committee found that employment conditions could best be described as '“tightness.'”
  • "Alan Merten, chair of the NRC workforce committee and George Mason Univ. president, told the Washington Post 'We feel [the population of foreign workers] is so large that we are totally dependent on it, and it depresses wages.'”
  • "Thus, decisions to reduce or increase the cap on H-1B visas are fundamentally political."

Pro-Visa

See my notes from Bringing the Jobs Home