Let’s open a window onto the Beltway battle over the offshoring of high-tech jobs that’s contributed to high unemployment in the U.S.
As people, you have to love those cool, competent, charming and hardworking kids, many from Asia, who come to the U.S. under corporate sponsorship. But the H-1b program that gains them entry to the U.S. needs a second look in a time when American engineers and skilled technicians have an especially high rate of unemployment.
Major high-tech companies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had a hissy fit in 2009 after Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Chuck Grassley of Iowa tried to tack on an amendment to the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief) program that would have prohibited firms receiving bailout money from laying off Americans and replacing them with foreign workers with H-1b visas—the opposite end of the immigrant labor spectrum from the more-publicized nannies, gardeners and restaurant workers.
“H-1b and other work visa programs were never intended… to allow a company to retain foreign guest workers rather than similarly qualified American workers, when that company cut jobs during an economic downturn,” Grassley wrote Steve Balmer, CEO of Microsoft.
(A study done in 2005 and based on government figures showed that H-1b visa holders usually worked for $13,000 less than Americans doing similar jobs. Subsequent studies differ as to the disparity but also find that H-1b workers earn less than Americans doing comparable work, which suggests why the H-1b program is popular with the business community.)
This chapter in the history of job outsourcing is told in How the Economy Was Lost, by Paul Craig Roberts. According to Roberts, “The offshoring of American jobs is the antithesis of free trade. Jobs offshoring is… an activity that David Ricardo, the originator of the free trade theory, described as the betrayal of one’s own country in pursuit of ‘absolute advantage.’ …The ‘free market’ shills on the payroll of the U.S. Chamber, N.A.M. [the National Association of Manufacturers] and in economics departments and think tanks that are recipients of grants from transnational corporations are whores aligned with elites who are destroying the American work force.”
Roberts is so livid about what’s been happening to American workers that he uses language you’d expect from a red-hot lefty blogger. But his points are hardly the product of “liberal bias”: Roberts was assistant secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan.
