Help Wanted – No Americans Need Apply

How has it come to pass that in the American high-tech industry, especially Information Technology (IT) that Americans need not apply?

It started with the desire for cheap labor. Through a massive disinformation campaign, high-tech corporate lobbyists were able to persuade politicians, the media, and the public that foreign labor was required. Both the Democrat and Republican parties jumped on the bandwagon, perhaps with different interests, but supporting massive importation of foreign labor just the same.

Once again, we are hearing fabrications from high-tech companies such as they are “seeking a number of highly educated computer engineers and others and can't find them in this country." This has been the mantra of the high-tech industry for almost 20 years, while at the same time it has been trying to expand the amount of cheap foreign high-tech labor that they can import into the US.

From a different perspective, government economists with an interest in keeping inflation statistics under control found that limiting wage growth via the importation of cheap foreign labor was an opportune way to keep inflation numbers down. Wage inflation was a convenient and dominant parameter in the total inflation equation to allow to stagnate, while concealing inflation in other areas. There would be no criticism of the massive importation of labor from these economists.

From the American standpoint, this was the reasoning for importing cheap labor, and later, exporting jobs via outsourcing. It was all about labor cost control.

But wait, there is more to the story. While the government and corporations would like to view employees as plug in numbers and head counts, this is far from the case. Employees are people, who are members of other groups, with their own motivations, ambitions, goals and agendas.

Enter The Indian Mafia

India is a country that is a rapidly growing democracy. We hear this praise over and over again. But it is also a country with a rigid and ancient class system, which is rampant with discrimination, corruption, nepotism, and favoritism

It is a somewhat inside term, both serious and humorous, for Indian high-tech workers and entrepreneurs to loosely call themselves the “Indian Mafia.” For instance, a group of smiling, fun-loving, young Indians might caption a picture of themselves with the tongue in cheek label of “Indian Mafia/Hindu Pride/Brown Power”. Or another example is the organization of Indian Entrepreneurs in the US (TiE), which is sometimes referred to as the Indian Mafia.

So what does this mean in terms of American high-tech jobs? It means that while American companies wanted cheap labor, the cheap labor that they chose to import had an agenda of their own. And it has been very successful.

The first part of that agenda was fairly innocent and common; it was group-promotion. Once an Indian worker was imported into the US, they would aggressively promote the abilities, availability, and cost effectiveness of more Indian workers, usually friends and family. The result was the importation of more Indian high-tech employees. But this widespread and understandable practice was just the start. A less politically correct practice was to follow, which may be more usual in Indian culture than in the modern American culture of diversity and equal opportunity.

The Brown Wall

We have all heard of the famous term “glass ceiling”, where some people were excluded from promotion for discriminatory reasons. A new term has been coined for the exclusion of American workers from Information technology jobs: it is called “The Brown Wall”.

The initial success of imported Indian workers led to the next step in the domination of the Information Technology business, which was the hiring of more Indian workers at the exclusion of all others. This was accomplished in a couple of ways. Once an Indian worker became a hiring manager, it was very simple for them to justify and hire many more Indian employees. This led to entire IT departments that consisted of only imported Indian labor. Even if the final hiring decision is not in the hands of an Indian manager, simply being included in the interviewing and input process allows someone to give a thumbs up to potential Indian employees, and a thumbs down to all others. The end result is the same, which is that future workers are part of the Indian high-tech labor force (the Indian Mafia), and all others are excluded. It is now common for an IT department to be staffed by nothing but Indian workers, at almost any company. For an American attempting to get one of those jobs, there will be no getting around the “Brown Wall”. No Americans need apply.

The New Old Paradigm

So here we are, where imported workers dominate an entire industry within the US, and Americans are excluded from even getting a chance at those jobs. Some may say that this is part of the American Dream, and that to even point this out is politically incorrect or racist.

It is ironic that political correctness and the American Dream are used to defend the growth of the opposite of that: a culture of racism, discrimination and favoritism.

It is a sad day in America, when issues such as these cannot be discussed because of political correctness, and where reality must be ignored. A day when young Americans are labeled less capable, and discouraged from entering high-tech, because they know there will not be a job for them. Where laid off American high-tech workers are replaced by imported labor, and must then look outside their areas of expertise for jobs, for instance at Home Depot, Wal-Mart, McDonalds or a cyclical job as a real estate agent.

Perhaps it is time to pull our heads out of the sand, and take a look around, before the America of equal opportunity, diversity and justice is lost.


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Note: This article contains many generalizations. As we all know, generalizations are often useful, but should never be applied to an individual, or to all members of a group. Just as gross generalizations are globally used about America or France, they are also followed by the caveat that most Americans and French are good people. Thus, this note follows the above story. This is not an indictment of the hard working Indian or imported high-tech professionals, just an interpretation of a current situation. It does not change the crux of the story though, which can be verified by an unannounced walk through the IT department of any US company.