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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