This H1B American worker replacement program for multi-national megacorporations is getting real. It isn’t limited to the IT industry workers and Disney actors training their own H1B visa replacements any more. It is now hitting the American health care industry in the skilled medical technician level, many of whom are college educated American citizen minorities, at least here in Dallas.
I just saw the local CVS pharmacy I use replace several college educated, Black Female, Hispanic female and Hispanic male Pharmacists, with Indian H1B workers last week.
The reason this sticks out in my wife went to pick up a changed 30-to-90 day prescription of mine for which the CVS Pharmacy has insufficient meds. A typical case of Indian “IT help desk hell” occurred with two people with incomplete knowledge of the issues of my meds, with the H1B worker trying to get 90 days of prescription price from my wife for 30 days of meds. No transaction happened.
I can only wonder what a seventy something retired senior trying to get his or her meds are dealing with this corporate H1B visa imposed communication problem?
And I also wonder about all those minority med-techs I see replaced here in Dallas are dealing with this?
The same way white male 40-to-50 something White male electrical engineers have in Silicon Valley for the last 15 years? The corporate versus middle class politics of this are poisonous in this Presidential season.
Consider the implications for the Black vote for Trump in Nov 2016. Trump’s Florida polls show him with _40_%_ of the below $25,000 a year black males over his plan to close the Mexican border with a wall. If Trump gets the same 1-in-5 vote that Richard Nixon got in 1972 with Obama’s 2008 and 2012 turn out percentages, he will take at least 45 states in the electoral college.
This is the electoral power of a real “closed borders” Presidential candidate.
And the corporate K-Street political contributor class behind both political parties still doesn’t see it coming.
Guh … I just spent the weekend trying to get a situation with computer software resolved – online chat sessions with two techs with what I judge to be Indian names. Went through all the hoops, didn’t resolve problem, kicked it upstairs to a higher grade of tech who was supposed to call me on the cellphone within twenty four hours or so. No call yet. I have figured out a way to route around the problem, but it is still annoying as heck that I will HAVE to route around, in order to complete this process…
I remember reading several years ago that a lot of call centers were outsourcing to India … and then months later, quietly slinking back to using American-based call centers again because of the cultural and language hang-ups.
Sgt. Mom,
Almost everyone has an Indian help desk service horror story.
Corporate America is importing that into our local pharmacies for our seniors to experience with their medications…in an election year.
And Corporate America is treating a more culturally diverse American citizen medical-tech work force to the wonders of H1B worker replacement…in an election year.
All of this the year Trump for President is running against open borders immigration and H1B worker expansion.
Companies are desperate to reduce the costs of their helpdesks….which is understandable when you consider how quickly a little bit of human time can gobble up the entire margin on a product sales, and more…but most of them do a very poor job of *organizing* the support process in a way that makes it as efficient as possible for the company and as effective as possible for the customer.
I’ve got to arrange some L-1 visas (intercompany exchange) for the engineering firm I own. We’re bringing some engineers familiar with European regulations over on a periodic basis to help on some international projects. The form for an L-1 is the same as for H-1B. I did notice that there were significant ($4500) for H1-B’s if the company making the request had over 50 employees AND more than 50% of them were H-1B!!!! No legitimate visa request would be possible from a company with more than 50% short term visa workers. These firms are Indian organized service companies that are the real abusers of the system. They sell contract workers (who could just have easily be US citizens) and their bids are low because they essentially sell indentured workers.
The question is who is buying influence for these firms? As for the Donald, I’m pretty sure his Casino’s (oops now bankrupt), Resorts, and Condo’s use plenty of these kind of workers (he’s not using e-verify I’m sure).
Bottom line is you could keep a legitimate guest visa program by simply limiting the numbers for any firm as well as the total number of visas. Two lines of new law/regulations.
News flash–there are a heck of a lot of Hispanics who are here legally who fully understand what happens to them and their families and friends due to illegal immigration and overly-loose policies such as H-1B, and the pol who can make a credible and honest appeal to them (without the ethnic slurs) stands to pick up a lot of votes.
Yes lets pass some more laws.
It is not either prediction nor hyperbole to call this wholesale population replacement. We’re being wiped out by replacement.
If slow genocide is too strong for certain gentile tastes then no matter, the fact is the fact.
We’re not talking our way out of this.
/nod
I worked as a senior-level technical writer, instructional designer, and process analyst in Silicon Valley for a decade, then up and down the state for most of another. More and more I saw the Indians crowding out the native-born engineers, and saw the knock-on effects on the rest of the industry. Curiously, web design and network support seemed resistant to this; the industry mostly wanted cheap coders, and I developed good pidgin-English interview skills to write down what they were doing. (In all fairness, I also ate a helluva lot of good Indian and Punjabi food. At its best it is like Central Asian Tex-Mex, and I got very fond of it.) Unfortunately those unemployed engineers went into support roles like mine, because that was all that was left them. So did every unemployed Millenial with an all-but-worthless BA in Comp Sci.
I am now working a part-time retail job in my semi-rural home town because after three years of searching — including a fruitless several months in Austin TX, supposedly the new hi tech mecca — I cannot get a (usually Indian; they have almost completely taken over the job shops as well) recruiter to look at me twice. Why should they? For every job I am qualified for, there are twenty or thirty or fifty scared-spitless twenty-somethings or massively overqualified forty/fifty-somethings who will do what I used to do for half the money, badly. But they can also do a bit of web design or coding on the side (even if they don’t know what rivers of white or widows or orphans are, or what a target audience is, or the difference between active and passive voice, or how to write to a given level of expertise, or any of the other myriad rules of my profession) and all of this is pleasing to the pointy-haired people in management. Graphics! Glitz! Put it all online! Everybody will have access to everything…! (and never see it, because you must interrupt your workflow and then ask typewritten questions of an idiot piece of software that breaks both the two-click and fifteen-second rules).
I am excellent at what I do. I have made presentations to Carly Fiorina’s staff when she ran HP and written cheat sheets for semi-literate Mexican housewives who staffed call centers and admin guides for multi-billion dollar-a-year databases. I would accept a contraction in my wages and in my standard of living. I would gladly attend night school to brush up on my skill sets. But that is not what I am up against. Had I not relentlessly socked away cash like a starving wolf with raw meat for fifteen years, like any poor-country-boy-made-good, I would likely be living in a homeless encampment.
It’s cold out here, now that the government and the captains of industry have shoved me out of the barn. Very cold.
First, do you have any idea how many x-rays are now read in India ? Everything is digital and radiologists of unknown provenance in India are reading your MRI of the brain.
License ? Schmisence !
There was joke 30 years ago that the reason Indira Gandhi died of her gunshot wounds was that all the doctors were in Fountain Valley (An Orange County lower middle class suburb).
Britain is replacing all the young doctors who are emigrating with Indians and Pakistanis. The Muslims (females) won’t scrub their arms and infection rates are up like global warming.
People and businesses respond to their environments in a manner that makes sense to them.
If you can simply use a H2/H1 visa consultant, (it’s a business) to bring in better employees who will work for less, who wouldn’t?
I propose a $50,000.00 fee on every H1b visa with an additional 25% tax rate on wages above 100k. This would not discourage GS or FB from bringing in the desperately needed expert from overseas, but would make hiring a US worker far more attractive.
It’s worse than indentured servitude. At some point the indentured servants got out of it and become settlers/farmers (some or all colonies required the master to provide them with goods to enable this). The visa workers can be fired at any time and sent back. The employer can cycle through them quite easily.
Since they’re temporary, they aren’t going to be buying houses or starting families. And the people being displaced will probably have lower wages affecting their ability to buy houses and start families.
And the same thing has happened with mass illegal immigration. Employers who can get away with it have replaced their workers with illegals.
U.S. workers have been abandoned by both parties. The establishment Democrats abandoned them in favor of electoral advantage. The establishment Republicans trust business groups/leaders too much (what’s best for those businesses might not be best for the country).
Same thing is happening in medicine and it’s not just H1B visas, it’s an attempt to telemedicine as much as possible. The corporatization of medicine is hollowing it out too. It’s disgusting and docs did this to themselves by not paying attention when manufacturing jobs were outsourced/”roboto-sized”. I loathe Silicon Valley TED culture.
Most of contemporary medicine occurs in big hospital oligarchical groups aND the first thing these guys do is fire nurses and docs, push each doc left to see more and more patients and quality of medical education is second. You’d be better off training up current citizens at any expanded US med school or even better the Caribbean schools and cutting out all the HR managers and marketers but the opposite happens. They could care less about patients, just profit margins. It’s not just Indian docs here but anyone they can get cheaper from abroad, anyone at all, easter european, indian, what have you.even if the European ones are trained better they often seem afraid to challenge the admins. Well, all docs do. Just bring in another cheaper person.
Sorry about spamming comments but I am passionate about this subject. The med schools are awful too. I could take a good bio major, have the student do one year of basic medical school classes and the they could sit with me for a few years. Just as well trained and could provide good care. We don’t need all that overheaf. More nurses, docs and less corporate dross.but the how would the mbas make all their sitting in a conference job money?
Can’t type on a phone sorry
Madhu…”Same thing is happening in medicine and it’s not just H1B visas, it’s an attempt to telemedicine as much as possible. The corporatization of medicine is hollowing it out too. It’s disgusting and docs did this to themselves by not paying attention when manufacturing jobs were outsourced/”roboto-sized”. I loathe Silicon Valley TED culture.”
But manufacturing jobs have been getting “roboto-sized” for a long, long time…from power looms and the Jacquard circa 1800 to numerically-controlled machine tools circa the early 1970s.
If a job that requires only very limited human capabilities can be automated, should it not be?
I’m an investor in a company whose business involves a coating process. When I visited the factory a couple of years ago, there was a guy with a spray gun who applied one layer of the coating to the product as it went by on an overhead conveyor…then the next one, and so on all day long. They mentioned that a used robot could probably be acquired to do this job for about $50K, and that this would probably be done in the next several months.
In the case of this particular company, there is enough growth that there would easily have been another job for the coating-spraying guy: of course, there are also many environments where this would *not* be the case.
Would it really be best to continue with the manual process?
The h1b people make the same argument, don’t they? It depends. Sometimes machines are beyter, somtimes people are better and governing is not the same as running a business. If it was, why not let the rich pay to get out of jail sentencrs…well..mYou can see someone in Mumbai or Malaysia over your phone for medicine if you want to do that. I’d like to see a real doc as a patient with MS. We are beyond twentieth century ideologies now. How shall we do this? The last ceo gave himself a multimillion bonus took off and seeded the hospital with substandard docs.
Seriously, he fired a bunch of people, took a multimillion bilonus, and left the last hospital I worked at in a mess.it’s dangerous how many pts ppl r being asked to see. There is no magic answer but why building a fence without taking on corporate cronyism is like fighting a war on terror without confronting saudi arabia. It just depends with robotics, some things make sense, some dont. And especially then, you have to think how you are going to hire and train people for new jobs ad old are being displaced.
The point is that no one thought about the guy being diplaced. Hence, Trump and Sanders.
I give up typing this way. I’m old, can’t text type lol
What’s the alternative to this tech-driven displacement? In practice it’s likely to be laws that do more harm than good in the long run.
Madhu, stop typing on your phone! Go back to an old-fashioned computer like I use :))
You are assuming tech displacement is always better. Why make that assumption? Microsopes are pretty cheap technology and about fifty percent of our overhead is collecting metrics that don’t matter for pt outcome. Details and experience matter
What I’m really saying is that management guys don’t always know what they r doing and substitute business theory for reality
>> The point is that no one thought about the guy being diplaced.
Actually, they do. I think almost everyone has been laid off or fired or displaced by technology at some point in their career. That’s why we provide social safety nets like unemployment benefits. However, a business is not a social services program. It’s mission is to provide a product as efficiently as possible. If they don’t, someone else soon will and the entire business goes bankrupt and closes, which impacts _everyone there_ plus all its suppliers.
>>You are assuming tech displacement is always better. Why make that assumption? Microsopes are pretty cheap technology and about fifty percent of our overhead is collecting metrics that don’t matter for pt outcome. Details and experience matter
My guess (I don’t know) is that is an example of bureaucracy in action. Someone at the CDC or similar institution decided their job would be easier if everyone was required to collect metrics on every patient so they could analyze trends or discern common indicators for particular disease categories. That requirement got put into a bill somewhere ( …if it saves just one life, it’s worth it! ) and now everyone has a requirement to do that, raising the cost of healthcare for each patient. Now multiply that scenario hundreds or thousands of times and health care costs climb and climb and no one knows why.
“You are assuming tech displacement is always better. ”
Yes. Hospital administrators have hated doctors for 50 years. One admitted it to me in a casual conversation. We make their lives miserable.
In a case years ago, a patient was charged 150% markup on a pacemaker that was not covered by Medicare. I complained and told the administrator I would testify for her if they sued her.
My wife has been admitted to the hospital where I used to practice twice in the past year and each time she had to pay $500 before he could be admitted. I’d never heard of that before. The only reason she went there was because this pulmonary doc is on that staff and the pulmonary guy at the other hospital is a jerk.
I have been going up to USC for the past few weeks for some cardiac workup. For years we tried to keep our quality of care high so that patients did not feel the need to go to the big city for care. Now, the administrators don’t care. Medical care is a profit center. I would not seek care in the hospital where I worked for 25 years.
About 20 years ago, I developed a proposal for a research project to study the care of the frail elderly and to see if it could be improved. The UC, Irvine medical faculty group was enthusiastic. We had everybody on board for the study, which would also increase the amount of Medicare business the medical center did, except one person who was able to veto the entire project. The administrator of the UCI medical center. He said NO and it never happened.
He became the UCLA Medical Center CEO although he seems to have retired by now.
All prices for care and procedures should be clearly posted and available to all patients. The costs are guarded by hospitals and insurance companies like they’re proprietary secrets. No other industry works like that.
“The costs are guarded by hospitals and insurance companies like they’re proprietary secrets.”
Yes, and a doctor who treats someone and charges less, is in violation of his/her contract and could be fired. If you treat a Medicare patients and charge less, it is a crime.
This is why cash practices are growing rapidly.
What I’m really saying is that management guys don’t always know what they r doing and substitute business theory for reality
Say it ain’t so!
There are certainly of cases where unwise, badly-thought-out and/or premature automation has done harm…a classic case is Roger Smith’s vast investment in robotics at GM. Meanwhile, Toyota was putting a lot less emphasis on automation and a lot more emphasis on the intelligent organization of human work.