Freedom Folks: H1-b: The Outsourceing Visa?

Source: iht

Enacted in 1990, the H-1B visa law allows skilled, specialized foreigners to work in America for up to six years and then pursue permanent residency. . . The visa has been championed as a way to attract the world's best and brightest to America to study, work, start families and, like Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, stumble upon innovations that generate vast wealth and jobs," says Anand Giridharadas in the International Herald Tribune. "But the H-1B visa is being put to a starkly different use: It is now a critical tool for Indian outsourcing vendors to gain expertise and win contracts from Western companies to transfer critical operations to places like Bangalore. 'It has become the outsourcing visa,' the Indian commerce minister, Kamal Nath, said by telephone this week while attending global trade talks in New Delhi, at which India is pushing the United States for a larger H-1B quota."

He continues, "As Indian outsourcing companies have become the leading consumers of the visa, they have used it to further their primary mission, which is to gain the expertise necessary to take on critical tasks performed by Western companies, and perform them in India at a fraction of the cost."

And of course that's what they're for, it's just nice to hear someone come right out and say it!