9.3.2012
The IT consulting/contracting business is in many ways an exploit to the US worker as well as to the foreign national. This is how the system works:
US corporation wants to save money on IT development, and after realizing that outsourcing may be not an option due to a complexity of the project, it asks an IT staffing company to provide "consultants" that would work on a particular project. The staffing company is an international company with offices in India and US, so it is allowed to transfer workers between the offices without any special visa provision (visas are granted almost automatically), so now the Indian company can ship as many workers as they want. Now since these "consultants" are Indian employees of an Indian company, they are paid "Indian" wages (with some extra bonuses + living expenses), but still being very cheap compared to local US consulting rates. The Indian company usually offers the consultant to the US client with a discount while still making a huge profit of them, so both the client (US company) and the Indian consulting company are very happy; moreover, even the consultant is very happy because she is living in the US and making more money than at home. Sounds like a win win win... so who is here to complain? Well, first it's the team of local IT professionals that lost their job before the US company decided to use "foreign" workforce to replace them. This situation also drivers the rates of local IT people down, who got their expensive education in the US. Mainly, this is really exploring an immigration loophole, where normally, in other industries it is impossible to have other people work in this country without going through a complicated immigration process. The US Immigration is aware of this, and tried to crack down on the inflow if these "consultants" checking if the immigrant has a first level working relationship with their US client (what was literally happening that these consultants were even being "sold" to other staffing agencies creating chains vendors, and why not, the margins were so large that even if a few companies take took a cut, there was enough money to be made.
In the end, there is one last person who might feel exploited after a while. After the foreign consultant lives in the US for a while, she might start feeling more like a an immigrant than a business visitor working on a project, but since they are bound to their employer through various "immigration law dependencies" they have to first "work off" their "freedom." Yes because of the immigration laws it takes years to become US resident, and the longer it takes, the money can an Indian consulting company make of a person who depends on it, and that is definitely a screw over. Why should another country make money, I mean big money off US immigration laws and backlogs?