Replacing Americans with Cheap Foreign Labor No Longer News

By John Miano on April 23, 2014

The cheap labor industry is now having the same problem with the American media that Americans workers have had for a while: its short attention span.

In past years, the exhaustion of the H-1B quota served as the vehicle for companies to plaster the media with stories about a crisis: A huge mythical shortage of workers coupled with a shortage of H-1B visas.

Those stories have gotten old, so there are not many of them this time around.

The same thing happened to American workers years ago. When I first started following H-1Bs in the mid-1990s, nearly every article on the program was about the shock over Americans being replaced by lower-paid H-1B workers.

Now, replacing Americans with H-1B workers has become so common that it is no longer news. You have to read the trade press or the Indian papers to find out about it.

The Indian press tells us that Cargill is going to offshore its computer operations to Tata Consultancy Services, one of the largest users of H-1B visas.

Computerworld points out that:

Cargill is based in Minnesota, the home of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a sponsor of the bipartisan I-Squared Act of 2013, which would allow H-1B visa caps to rise to a maximum of 300,000 annually.

Americans beware. If you elect senators like Klobuchar, you can expect your jobs to be sent overseas.

Computerworld informs us that Americans at Southern Edison are being H-1B'd as well. That article contains more links to the same.

While it does not make the mainstream media any more, the practice of replacing Americans with cheap foreign workers still goes on.

I remind readers that the ability to replace Americans with lower-paid H-1B workers is not an accident. It exists because of actions by industry lobbying groups, the same folks that prattle on about labor shortages.