Editor's Note: The Real Facts About The H-1B Visa

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As the number of H-1B visas (which essentially allow companies to hire foreign workers for much less than they'd have to pay American-based workers) has increased in the past decade, the argument over the program's impact to the IT workforce has just gotten louder each year.

And now the argument is being heard in the hallways in the nation's capitol. Lawmakers are deciding how to change the visa program, how to lock down its many loopholes and how to ensure that American technology workers don't get pushed out of their career paths.

As a great article by Alice LaPlante and Marianne Kolbasuk McGee over at InformationWeek reports, there are more than a few myths when it comes to the H-1B visa program.

For example, companies using H-1B visa employees claim that they do so because they can't find skilled workers in the U.S. However, the truth is quite different:

When it comes to H-1Bs, most employers aren't required to prove that they couldn't fill a job with a U.S. worker. The exception is H-1B dependent companies--those that have more than 50 employees and have more than 15% of their U.S. workforce on H-1B visas, or companies that have been caught committing "willful failure or misrepresentation" on past H-1B forms. Those companies must attest that they've made "good-faith steps" to recruit U.S. workers for the job and that they've offered the job to any U.S. worker who applied that was at least as qualified as the H-1B candidate.

The tech industry also claims that the H-1B program isn't hurting the workforce. But here's the true fact:

Due to both outsourcing and insourcing, many young people are concluding that technology is a bad place to invest their time," says Mark Thoma, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

All this begs the question: Do you think that the outsourcing mania is hurting your career options and future employment?
Write me and tell me your take and I'll responses in the next newsletter note.

Judy