To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Wed Oct 31 20:56:54 PDT 2012 Here's an article I've been meaning to discuss: http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/A-foreign-concept-in-hiring-3946413.php The issue of government agencies employing H-1Bs, L-1s, etc., and the related issue of offshoring, come up before. Bills have been introduced in state legislatures to ban the practice; see http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/Drozda.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/DOC3.txt But they have been weak to begin with, then watered down, then finally failing to win passage anyway. It's interesting that the New York state government, in fact a putatively pro-labor Democratic administration, is so defiant in the above article. And they apparently are also saying that giving priority to U.S. citizens and permanent residents over foreign workers violates discrimination laws, an argument that the old Sun Microsystems used to make too. The H-1B employer quoted in the article makes a rather incriminating comment, in my view: Bhatia says there is a "misconception" that companies that use workers from places like India do so to save money. But using H-1B workers, he says, is the only way that companies like his that provide programmers and software engineers can fill slots because most U.S. graduates with computer programming degrees would rather work at more exciting jobs. He says he rarely gets a response from job ads in local newspapers and instead gets almost all his candidates from job websites such as Dice.com that are popular around the world. If Bhatia's jobs are indeed "unexciting," there is a classical answer: Pay them more! He's apparently paying most of his H-1Bs only $60K. My point is that he is admitting H-1B is indeed used as a source of cheap labor, including by him, quite contrary to his claim of a "misconception." Norm