Day: June 23, 2007

Industry has long maintained that they don’t use the H1-B visa program to drive down wages for technical professionals. There have been many allegations but until recently I hadn’t seen good evidence of an organized effort to avoid hiring American tech workers.

That was until earlier this week when GrrlScientist posted about this issue complete with a damming video courtesy of The Programmers Guild. In the post is this comment from “Human Resources Rep” who gives further details of this disgusting practice. I suspect there are many people in this country who have knowledge of this abuse of the system but blowing the whistle is a sure way to cause you and your family financial ruin. That’s why the people who know can’t say so publicly and leaking documents can also cause legal problems.

A few days later she posted again about this and included a video clip from Lou Dobbs CNN show. It is nice to see this issue getting some press again. I think Congress should launch a formal investigation into the bad practices of H1-B visa abusers. There will need to be extraordinarily good guarantees of anonymity and immunity from prosecution for whistle blowers who can provide evidence.