There is a very real immigration policy problem and that is the domination of human resources positions in many tech companies by Indians (usually south Indian males), a domination that leads to two different kinds of discrimination: against non-Indian workers of all kinds, including U.S. citizens, and a bias in favor of young, male, Hindu workers from the south of the country and of the right castes, as we have reported in the past.
Aggravating that problem is the fact that virtually nothing has been written on the subject.
We now have found a mixed blessing, a lengthy “report” on the subject, but one that is deeply flawed by overly sweeping generalizations and a hard-breathing bias against all things Indian. It is called “Why dealing with Indian recruiters is futile for domestic workers”. The author is Shaun Snapp of Brightwork Research and Analysis, and was published about four years ago. I had not previously heard of either the author or the organization.
The report echoes what I have been hearing for years from U.S. tech workers: that inevitably jobs in the IT sector are in the hands of Indian HR people, that it is hard for citizen workers to compete with Indians (and H-1B workers), that it is sometimes difficult to understand the HR people, and that sometimes they appear to be in India. In one case reported to me recently, the phone interview went nowhere as the HR person could not speak English.
What Snapp adds to the debate is a flurry of anecdotes about this process — I do not recall any statistics in the report. He writes that many of the interviews of domestic candidates for IT jobs are just for show so that the hiring unit could say “we interviewed both citizen and H-1B candidates for the jobs in question”, but for other motives as well.
In some cases, text from the U.S. workers’ resumes is, he says, lifted and installed in the resumes of rival Indian candidates for the same job, making them more attractive than they would have been otherwise.
In other cases, the U.S. workers’ descriptions of their job at Employer A is used as background information in the re-write of Indian workers’ resumes when they seek jobs at the same place.
These are two dirty tricks that were new to me.
The report also states “It is easy for Indians to trick Westerners because Westerners think that Indians are following Western rules.”
The report is seriously flawed, however, by its consistent and strongly stated bias against all things Indian. Had it been substantially less prejudiced it would be more valuable.
Can Domestic Workers Avoid Indian HR Staffers? My faithful informant, an unemployed domestic IT worker, who called the Snapp report to my attention, did so with a question: “How can I avoid Indian HR people?”
It turns out that there is a way to do so that is simultaneously quite obscure, totally public, and very time-consuming. I have never seen it discussed in print and it is not mentioned (that I noticed) in the report. The technique leads not only to the full name of the HR person for a given H-1B-using firm but also to that person’s office email address.
I stumbled on this information in connection with a previous posting on the use of foreign workers by two of the candidates for the White House: Donald Trump (who hires as lot of them and pays them peanuts), and Vivek Ramaswamy (who hires a few of them in his tech firm and pays them well). That is, by the way, the only favorable thing I will ever write about that man, whom I regard as more dangerous than Trump.
Back to the question of contacting HR people, in this case at Ramaswamy’s firm, Roivant Sciences, Inc. We know that it hires H-1Bs and is listed in the Myvisajobs website. We pull up the file for the firm, and then ask the system for the 2022 uses of H-1B workers; we find that the employer contact at the firm is Katie Koprowski, who is probably not an Indian. We also see the name of the firm’s agent or attorney — it is Sarah Schroeder, who works in Brooklyn or at least did in 2022.
In many, many other cases the employer contact has an Indian name.
The author is grateful to the informant for calling my attention to the document in question.