[snip]
Unemployment is about 4.1%. That's under what is generally called "full employment." So yes, I will assert that we don't have enough workers and that you can't find enough Americans to do the jobs.
A portion of work visas are for very high paying jobs. It's not that there are plenty of qualified computer programmers who are sitting unemployed while Microsoft imports people from India and China to pay them tiny six-figure salaries. It's that there is more to do than there are people here with the skills to do it all. [snip]
Josh, you are naive if you believe this is only happening to jobs at the low end of the skill set curve
https://www.latimes.com/business/hi...dal-of-engineering-visas-20160226-column.html
A phony STEM shortage and the scandal of engineering visas -- how American jobs get outsourced
A year ago, the wholesale firing of IT teams at Disney, Southern California Edison, and other tech-dependent companies and their replacement by offshore workers with so-called H-1B visas caused a national scandal. We exposed this loophole at the time, and followed up by showing how Congress connived in the visa subterfuge.
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Despite claims that H-1B visa holders have advanced educations, most hired by the Indian outsourcing firms hold bachelor degrees or less. (EPI / Ron Hira)
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Wages of workers imported by the two major Indian outsourcing firms fall below the average for SoCal Edison workers in the same categories. (EPI/Ron Hira)
Yet, as was documented in testimony by immigration experts Ron Hira of Howard University and Hal Salzman of Rutgers, most of the H-1B visas aren't being used to hire people with specialized skills. "The vast majority of H-1Bs who are coming in have no more than ordinary IT skills," Hira testified.
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-uc-visas-20170108-story.html
How the University of California exploited a visa loophole to move tech jobs to India
UC San Francisco, the system's biggest medical center, announced in July that it would lay off 49 career IT staffers and eliminate 48 other IT jobs that were vacant or filled by contract employees. The workers are to be gone as of Feb. 28. In the meantime they've been ordered to train their own replacements, who are employees of the Indian outsourcing firm HCL Technologies.
The training process was described by UCSF managers by the Orwellian term "knowledge transfer," according to Audrey Hatten-Milholin, 53, an IT architect with 17 years of experience at UCSF who will be laid off next month.
"The argument for Disney or Edison is that its executives are driven to maximize profits," says Ron Hira of Howard University, a expert in H-1B visas. "But UC is a public institution, not driven by profit. It's qualitatively different from other employers."
UCSF officials say the decision to outsource 97 IT jobs, about 20% to the total IT headcount, was forced on it by daunting economic challenges. The state requires UCSF Health, which encompasses the university's hospitals, to be fiscally self-sustaining, collecting its revenue entirely from patient fees, Chief Executive Mark R. Laret says.
The hospitals recorded a $42-million deficit in the last fiscal year on $3.4 billion in revenue, he told me. The red ink was partially the result of an increased caseload from Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program, which was expanded under the Affordable Care Act. Medi-Cal reimbursements are so low that UCSF loses 40 cents on every dollar it spends on those patients' treatment, he says.
In searching for costs to cut, USCF concluded that the most expendable IT employees were systems maintenance staff, whose jobs could be done for so much less by foreign workers going without high salaries and fringe benefits.
So, you can see it has nothing to do with a shortage of qualified workers or workers willing to do the work. It is strictly about lowering wages. And I can tell you from personal experience when I was consulting in Cali over the years that the LA Times has consistently held this editorial opinion of the H1B program and bolstered it with factual reporting for over 20 years