Skilled American's Jobs May Be in Jeopardy Again

Pending Threat of Outsourcing and the Controversy of the H-1B Work Visa

Word has it that their may be plans yet again to "outsource" highly skilled American jobs to other countries. Approximately 40-million American jobs could be at stake and yet U.S workers have not been told or consulted about it, until now. Just to put the number of 40-million into perspective, that is more than twice the amount of people that are employed in a manufacturing job.

According to Alan Blinder, an economist from Princeton University, the "choice" jobs of skilled Americans could be lost and given to foreign countries within the next decade or two. Some jobs that are up for grabs include computer programming, graphic design, and bookkeeping, along with several others that were once considered "skilled American jobs".

Apparently Blinder was sitting in at the business summit in Davos, Switzerland when he heard some executives from the U.S talking about outsourcing. They were very enthralled in the fact that they could outsource so many professional jobs to lower-wage countries.

The government, who offers the H-1B visa program to educated foreigners, may be doing more harm than good in the end. The H-1B visa allows the foreigners with an education to work in the United States for three years and now many of the leaders in Congress want to double the amount of visas to around 115,000 a year.

The partial positive of the H-1B visa program is that it allows foreign graduates of Universities in the United States to stay in the U.S until they can get their green card. However the downside is when the person that is working on the visa comes to the U.S, learns about American business practices, and then when the three year limit is up they return to their country and are more capable to interact with their customers in the U.S.

A professor of public-policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Ron Hira, has done studies on the down side of the H-1B visa program. He has noted that "the top applicants for visas are outsourcing companies, such as Wipro Technologies of India and Accenture, which is based in Bermuda".