Everywhere I look the downturn is because of “outsourcing”, “India taking our jobs!!”, “cheap overseas labor” and never, never ever porky’s fault. It’s the dirty immigrant labor, not the guys who talk about having “properties”. I’ve always seen this shit floating around in white collar jobs as long as I’ve been working but it’s been really amped up the last few weeks. I am not surprised that people are just this racist on their own but at least some of it feels very manufactured.
H1B visas are just work visas for “highly skilled labour” to immigrate to the United States. There’s a cap of ~65k issued per year, and it’s usually used by large tech conglomerates and other large companies to hire foreign labour and bring them to the United States. A lot of these H1B visa immigrants are South Asian because India has the most IT specialists in the world and many of them speak good English. There’s like a right wing civil war going on right now where Elon and co say they need H1Bs because native born Americans don’t work as hard as immigrants (which in my experience is true, immigrants always work harder, highly paid or not, since immigration is already self selecting and they went through a lot of work to immigrate and are primarily motivated by money hence the economic migration) and the white supremacist MAGA guys saying H1Bs are contributing to the Great Replacement or whatever.
Oh yeah, H1B visa recipients in my experience tend to be extraordinarily hard working. I know a few and literally they work 7 days a week, at least 12 hours a day (many times, 16).
Yeah it’s often because the H1B is a particularly precarious visa as it’s tied to your employer, so if they don’t do a good job and get fired or laid off or whatever they also then get deported. It’s not exactly “slave labour” since like they’re earning good money and can leave whenever etc etc but it’s certainly exploitative with an added reward of deportation for not doing 150% of your job.
I mean gilded shackles are still shackles.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense