Creating A Wage-Cutting Race Is Not 'Humane,' Good for Immigrants or Good for America

Posted by David Sirota, Open Left at 9:02 AM on April 25, 2009.

Following on my last post about immigration, I wanted to make sure everyone saw this important - if buried - piece from the trade press:

April 17, 2009 (Computerworld) The use of H-1B workers by U.S. companies is decreasing wages for computer programmers, system analysts and software engineers by as much as 6%, according to a study released this week by researchers at New York University's Stern School of Business and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania...

"In this paper, we simply sought to dispel the myth that globalization generates no losers," wrote Prasanna Tambe, an assistant professor of information, operations and management sciences at the Stern School, and Lorin Hitt, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton.

The high-tech industry would have us believe that the H-1B program exists to help them find workers when they can't find qualified American workers, and a mythology has emerged that claims H-1B workers have to be paid the same as domestic workers, and therefore avoids creating a wage-cutting competition.

All of that, of course, is untrue. We know it from the data showing that the H-1B program creates that wage-cutting competition, and from the fact that, as RIT professor Ron Hira shows, the statutes creating the H-1B program allow it to be used to create such a wage-cutting competition.

Again, the point here is not to blame temporary workers who come here through the H-1B program. It is to point out that corporate interests use the veneer of "tolerance" and a "humane immigration policy" to create a situation that is bad for both foreign and domestic workers. Rather than advocating a reform that increases legal immigration and therefore gives immigrants the same workplace and wage rights as domestic workers, corporate interests want "reform" that creates temporary workers like H-1Bs, whose visa status is controlled by employers and therefore creates the wage race to the bottom.

Real reform - genuinely humane and tolerant immigration reform - is one that will help lift everyone up. It is one that will be good for immigrants and domestic workers. That is what we must advocate when the immigration debate heats up. There will be many voices like the Chamber of Commerce trying to confuse us on what a "humane" immigration policy is - and we have to be able to cut through the bullshit and know the difference between "reform" and reform.

Tagged as: immigration, wages, reform, jobs