IT Hiring: Foreigners
Organizations (government, business, media, etc.) have
overwhelmingly taken to hiring foreigners for IT (for
government, see
IT
Hiring: Government, Business, and Outsourcing; for media,
see
IT Hiring:
Media). As discussed, part of the reason for this is
diversity and political correctness pressures (see
IT
Hiring: Trading IT Competence for Diversity and
IT
Hiring: Trading IT Competence for Political
Correctness).
There is also the misperception, often by self-hating
Americans ("familiarity breeds contempt"), that foreigners are
smarter than Americans.
Americans for example, feel British accents imply
intelligence. Years ago this was admitted to
me
by a British consultant at Andersen Consulting as why she got
her job. (Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, a leading
provider of IT services to the U.S. Government, was the
company, as Arthur Andersen, that was dissolved, actually
turning into Accenture, due to its complicity in the massive
Enron fraud; see
Fed
IT Run By Enron's Corrupt Accountant, IT Incompetent
Accenture.) Indians (from India) have a British accent
— part of the reason they are often unintelligible to
Americans — and are American business' favorite
foreigners to hire for IT.
This foreigners are smarter than Americans perception is just
wrong. As indicated in
No IT Education:
Foreigners, foreigners stampede into American universities
because they are the best in the world (although diversity and
political correctness pressures may be changing that). And
early on, only the smartest foreigners came, giving the false
impression that the rest, now coming, are smart. Further,
smart does not mean IT competent; it is a necessary but not
sufficient condition for that. The smart still need a good IT
education; see
The
Most Important IT Credential: An IT Education.
However, the bottom line for why organizations have
overwhelmingly taken to hiring foreigners for IT is, as
always, the bottom line — cost — and salaries are
usually the greatest cost in any organization. It is falsely
believed foreigners are cheaper.
That foreigners are cheaper than Americans, even if it was
true, should not matter. The H1-B visas that Microsoft and
the Silicon Valley companies (Google, Facebook, etc.) so
egregiously misuse are explicitly by law
not for
allowing cheap foreign labor to steal American jobs. They are
to allow expertise that cannot be found in America, which
there really isn't any since foreigners come to America to
gain such expertise.
That foreigners are cheaper than Americans is, at the very
least, because of the security risks, not true.
As discussed in
No IT Education:
Foreigners, foreigners are likely to be IT incompetent.
Being IT incompetent,
data
breaches are more likely. Data breaches can ruin a
company;
Equifax
for example. It is thus much more costly to hire the IT
incompetent, like foreigners.
Foreigners are inherently less loyal (because foreigners are
likely to be IT incompetent; see
IT
Hiring: IT Incompetence Breeds Disloyalty and Corruption)
and have less respect for U.S. law (i.e. are more corrupt), so
again data breaches are more likely, in this case from the
foreigners themselves.
Foreigners are inherently less loyal and have less respect for
U.S. law because they were not born here and they can flee to
their native country if they break U.S. law (that's why New
York City cabbies are so dangerous). For example,
Imran Awan
was born and raised in Pakistan before he came to the U.S. He
attended a community college (see
No
IT Education: For-Profit and Community Colleges, Other
Training, transferred to a university business school, and
then, months before graduating with a degree (so the degree
couldn't have been too hard), became an IT incompetent tech
for Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives;
see
IT
Hiring: Trading IT Competence for Political Correctness.
He was discovered committing multiple serious crimes in his
job, including possibly espionage. Before his trial he was
caught at Dulles Airport (Washington, D.C.) trying to flee
back to Pakistan.
It's perfectly legitimate to question the allegiance of a
foreigner, even after they become citizens (dual citizenship
is even more problematic). The U.S. Constitution clearly
stipulates that the U.S. President must have been born in the
U.S. The Founding Fathers, who were smart men, understood
human nature and the danger of pretending otherwise.
Civilizations have fallen because they brought too many
foreigners — cheap labor, like slaves — in to do
the work; for example, Rome and the American
South.
Trust is also very important in IT, particularly since so many
are IT incompetent so have to trust others to do the IT, and
a foreigner, in any country, is inherently not
trusted.
I
was born, educated, and have mostly lived and worked in the
U.S. — see my
Credentials — but
have several years experience living and working, including in
academia, in foreign countries.
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