Infosys Single-Handedly Destroying America

31 May, 2006. 333 words.

Following up on More H-1b abuses from American Techno-Politics, wherein it was stated that 2,392 H-1B Programmer/Analyst jobs were approved by the DOL in 2005 for under $30k salary (or $15/hour).

I’ve been playing with those DOL databases myself for a couple of days, and I confirmed the above 2,392 H-1B programmer statistic. But… I found that some interesting information was left out. First, only 217 Programmer/Analyst jobs were approved in 2005 for under $30k in Virginia (which is what I’m interested in). And 200 of those 217 jobs were approved for one company: Infosys Technologies Ltd. Incredibly, widening the search back out to the whole country, Infosys Technologies Ltd. accounted for 2,200 out of those 2,392 H-1B positions mentioned on American Techno-Politics.

This leads me to several conclusions. I noted that Infosys applied for 100 immigrants at a time, whereas the vast majority of other applicants only applied for 5 or less at a time (with most only applying for 1). This makes me wonder if Infosys is actually getting all 100 of those immigrants at a time or if they just drastically overestimate their requirements so they don’t have to keep re-applying. If they’re actually hiring 100 foreign programmers at a time, I think I can categorically say that those must be some greedy, America-hating mofos running that company. (It also must be some of the crappiest software imaginable.) Oh, now I see. Infosys is an Indian company operating in America. That explains it. :)

Anyway, with fully 92% of the under-30k foreign programmer jobs going to one company, it puts a small dent in the notion that H-1Bs are seriously compressing the salaries of American programmers.

On the other hand, one could easily imagine Infosys being able to outbid any American competitor for consulting work, since all their programmers work for peanuts. So in that case, who would actually be to blame for outsourcing American jobs? Infosys or the companies who buy Infosys’s services? Things that make you go hrmmmm.

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