Trego's Mountain Ear

I see that Governor DeSantis (Florida) is moving to eliminate H1-B visas from Florida’s university system. My experience with the H1-B visa holders is limited – and at least ten years out of date – yet DeSantis’ comments match my experience: “They come in with these brokers who make a fortune of this with arbitrage. They bring them in and they are indentured to the company. So, the company can basically pay them low and they say no, we got to do this. You have to prove there are no Americans. They will put an ad in the classified sections of a newspaper. Nobody reads that section of the newspaper… It’s all become a total scam”

The article explained the numbers: “The H-1B program exists to bring workers specifically from India and China: • 283,397 Indians in 2024 • 46,680 Chinese • Philippines came in at #3 — with 5,248.” My limited experience confirms DeSantis’ comments – Prasanthi was from India, and asked me to serve as a reference on her job applications as a way of getting out of the ‘indentured servitude.’ The last I heard from her was a very appreciative thank you note as she managed to get a job out of SDSU. She was hired to teach faculty to do distance-education courses, and it was a job I would not have taken – the technique was to assign busy work instead of academic inquiry. I will admit, I’m no fan of busy work. It fits right in there with group projects.

The point is, she was hired to do a job that this American would not do. I can’t say H1-B is always bad – but she was hired to teach me to present in a way that didn’t really improve my students’ research skills (in my opinion – I could be wrong, but don’t believe I am). DeSantis said  “I don’t understand how is that specialized knowledge that only someone from these places can do. A $40,000 a year job working as the assistant at the athletic department? That’s an abuse of this whole idea. If there are things that the universities need, that somehow they just can’t find in Florida, to me, they, of all employers, would be the ones most responsible for why they can’t find what they need.”  Like I said, his comments are pretty much in line with my experience.

Yet I learned a lot from working with Prasanthi – that there is a color discrimination in India that exceeds our own cultural racism, and that was a reason to accept the limitations of the H1-B to get to America. As I look at immigration, both legal and illegal, I realize that there is a lot more opportunity here than over there. And it seems to me that the difference between coming into the US as a mojado or with an H1-B isn’t so great – either way, it’s better to be in the land of the big PX.