 Tom Friedman shills for Corporate America (shocker!) and attacks those who want American taxpayer money spent creating American rather than foreign jobs, because – dontcha know? – outsourcing American jobs is good for American workers:
While I think President Obama has been doing his best to keep the worst protectionist impulses in Congress out of his stimulus plan, the U.S. Senate unfortunately voted on Feb. 6 to restrict banks and other financial institutions that receive taxpayer bailout money from hiring high-skilled immigrants on temporary work permits known as H-1B visas.
Bad signal. In an age when attracting the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world is the most important competitive advantage a knowledge economy can have, why would we add barriers against such brainpower – anywhere? That’s called “Old Europe.” That’s spelled: S-T-U-P-I-D.
For background, Friedman is referring to the Senate amendment passed by Bernie Sanders and Charles Grassley – an amendment so uncontroversial and bipartisan that it passed by voice vote. And really, it’s hard to know where to begin with someone like Friedman who is theocratically devoted to ignorance.
In Friedman’s world, the H-1B program does one thing and one thing only: it helps benevolent corporations attract “first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world,” which therefore makes our country and our economy stronger.
He’s aggressively uninterested in the concrete data that show the H-1B program is most often used to lower a company’s labor costs, not improve its intellectual capacity, and to offshore the very knowledge-based information sector jobs that Friedman says he wants to attact to the United States.
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| How does the H-1B program do this? By being deliberately structured to let companies fire qualified domestic workers and replace them with H-1Bs at lower wages. Indeed, the program doesn’t mandate that a company even look for a qualified American worker before using an H-1B visa – even if there is a qualified (or more qualified) American worker who wants the job, the company can use the H-1B visa to import a cheaper worker from abroad.
In fact, as Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ron Hira shows, the H-1B doesn’t help “attract” workers to this country – it actually helps companies transfer good-paying jobs and technical expertise offshore, because those H-1B workers are often trained in the United States, and then reassigned to the company’s facility in the lower-wage home country:
“In reality, the H-1B program has been thoroughly corrupted. Rather than providing firms with workers who posses unique skills, the program is dominated by low wage workers with ordinary rank-and-file skills. And rather than preventing work from going overseas, the program is speeding it up.
First, [the program] facilitates their knowledge-transfer operations, where they rotate in foreign workers in to learn U.S. workers’ jobs. In fact, U.S. workers are often “transferring knowledge” under duress.
Second, the H-1B and L-1 programs provide [corporations] an inexpensive, on-site presence that enables them to coordinate offshore functions. Many functions that are done remotely still require a significant amount of physical presence at the customer site. For example, according to its own financial reporting, Infosys’ on-site workers, almost all of whom are foreign guestworkers, directly accounted for 49.2 percent of its revenue in its most recent quarter.
Third, the H-1B and L-1 programs allows the U.S. operations to serve as a training ground for foreign workers who then rotate back to their home country to do the work more effectively than they could have without such training in the United States.”
This says nothing of the fact that H-1B workers have no basic labor rights, because their immigration status is effectively determined by their employer (ie. you’re not going to demand a raise or a union if you know your employer can get you deported for making such demands). But I’m sure Friedman subscribes to the Nicholas Kristof school of sociopathy when it comes to such moral issues.
No, where Friedman really comes up short is in his basic ignorance – or dishonesty – about the very H-1B program he touts. Either he’s the same know-nothing Tom Friedman who bragged about writing columns in support of the Central American Free Trade Agreement while simultaneously admitting he never even read the pact. Or, he’s being the Tom Friedman who knows all the data about the H-1B program and prefers to ignore it in service to his corporate friends. Either way, the basic facts of his argument are, to use his phraseology, S-T-U-P-I-D.
NOTE: As I wrote in my book, and in other places, I’m not opposed to immigration – I’d like to see legal immigration rise, and I’d even support a reformed H-1B program that actually served the economic interests of both foreign and domestic workers. But that’s not what we have right now in the H-1B program – as constructed now, the program is designed to exploit both foreign and domestic workers. That’s good for no one. |
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