https://m.economictimes.com/tech/it...-offshoring-captives/articleshow/76536123.cms Biased as I'm an immigrant and child of immigrants myself but I don't see this as a positive. I also think this will hurt middle class more than any other job group. Especially with a test case of remote working from Covid seeming to not impacting productivity that significantly. Instead of having workers here to do the job, this will give companies incentives to offshore more instead of hiring locally. This will mean that all the support jobd around them will need to offshored as well. For example if we had a development team of 4, and they all work in the US on H1B visas. The HR person that helped hire and support them, the product manager for that team, their insurance, medical, lawyers, banking, restaurant, real estate, retirement and taxes and etc. are all needs that become real jobs for Americans. If they move the H1B jobs overseas, then other jobs are gonna follow.
I used to work in IT Consulting and there was a legitimate need for skilled H1B workers. It' was never - OH THEY'LL DO IT FOR LESS that an American. It was - ****, there's nearly nobody with these skills available in this country at this time. What do we do? Pay more to attract talent? We're a smaller business, we cant compete with Facebook, Netflix, Google. In reality sometimes adding that single H1B IT job would actually create other jobs for employees with other skills more readily available in the US. Also, with H1B talent - they'll work ANYWHERE - you can send them to work in KKK, Alabama where no Bay-area talent would ever dare go.
I know people say that it's keeping the wages artificially low, but I don't think that's the case for good talent. Overseas labor especially those from a 3rd party agency isn't always that cheap. The thing is the best and most driven talents are the ones that also want to come to the U.S., which means you won't get to hire them unless you offer H1B. The question is not just if theres talents here that we can replace with, but would you hire a lower quality talent vs investing in offices and infrastructure over seas. If a tipping point of having to hire a much larger work force over seas happen, then the real cuts in the US (things like professional training,HR support and etc.) will be felt. Instead of hiring decisions of can the oversea teams support US associates good enough to explore exporting the role, the decison might become who can leverage the overseas teams output the best, a team in the US or a team overseas.
This very well could be the case. Even without COVID-19 this could happen anyway. I've been very critical of this Admin.'s immigration policies but I don't think this is too much of a big deal now. With the COVID-19 suppressing the economy and limiting travel I don't think getting more H1-B's visas are really relevant now.
