A few years ago, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer informed hundreds of tech workers at its Connecticut R&D facilities that they’d soon be laid off. Before getting their final paychecks, however, they’d need to train their replacements: guest workers from India who’d come to the United States on H-1B visas. “It’s a very, very stressful work environment,” one soon-to-be-axed worker told Connecticut’s The Day newspaper. “I haven’t been able to sleep in weeks.”
Established in 1990, the federal H-1B visa program allows employers to import up to 65,000 foreign workers each year to fill jobs that require “highly specialized knowledge.” The Senate’s bipartisan Immigration Innovation Act of 2013, or “I-Squared Act,” would increase that cap to as many as 300,000 foreign workers. “The smartest, hardest-working, most talented people on this planet, we should want them to come here,” Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla.) said upon introducing the bill last month. “I, for one, have no fear that this country is going to be overrun by Ph.D.s.”
To be sure, America’s tech economy has long depended on foreign-born workers. “Immigrants have founded 40 percent of companies in the tech sector that were financed by venture capital and went on to become public in the U.S., among them Yahoo, eBay, Intel, and Google,” writes Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior VP of “people operations,” which, along with other tech giants such as HP and Microsoft, strongly supports a big increase in H-1B visas. “In 2012, these companies employed roughly 560,000 workers and generated $ 63 billion in sales.”
How H-1B Visas Are Screwing Tech Workers
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