Let me tell you a little story about an MIT conference a few years back before I uncover the surprisingly easy way our good President Obama can instantly recover an estimated 2 million high paying jobs without spending an extra cent in tax or borrowed money.
A few years back at an annual IT leadership conference attended by many Fortune 500 Chief Information Officers, a keynote speaker warned that the continued rate of outsourcing to countries like India would harm the USA's ability to both maintain it's IT infrastructure as well as render us incapable of innovating in IT.
Over drinks at the dinner afterwards, do you think these powerful CIOs debated the merits of the keynote's speaker's message?
HELL NO.
They were too busy comparing their compensation packages and golden parachutes. It soon became a pissing contest over who had the best exit strategy. My point to the story is that the Executives in charge of our most powerful corporations don't care about the future of our country. All they care about is what's in it for them.
The warnings of that keynote speaker went unheeded and all of the CIOs that heard that speech promptly accelerated their efforts to outsource as much as they could to India. Why pay $80K per year to a US citizen to code a job when you can get an Indian that's billable at $6.00 per hour? That's what the Indians sold those greedy CIOs. (I'll tell you at the end how the Indian outsourcing has actually cost more per line of code than any US coder would have cost).
So what does that have to do with President Obama?
The largest single consumer of IT services in the USA is the various Departments of the Executive Branch controlled by President Obama. Whether it's the Department of Defense, or Medicare or Medicaid or the Social Security or the IRS, all of these entities contract out IT support to various corporations. These corporations bid on the service contracts and compute the billable hours based upon THE PREVAILING RATE FOR A US CITIZEN.
Once these companies get the contract, they turn around and very quietly subcontract out to Indian firms with Indian employees. What do they do with the cash differential? The C-Suite of the company (CEO, CIO, CFO, etc) pockets the cash in the form of bonuses.
An example of companies guilty of this: GE, Amerigroup, Xerox, and CVS Pharmacy.
The net result is a direct or indirect loss of 2 million US jobs (conservative estimate). And we are talking high paying jobs here, not minimum wage burger flipping.
Solution: By Executive Order President Obama can require all companies that service any federal contract to only use US citizens living in the USA for any IT, front office or back office business process related to the servicing of the federal contract.
By the way, those greedy CIOs who took the bait and hired the Indian companies? They are getting serious buyer's remorse. One industry insider revealed that although the Indians may charge $6.00 per hour for a coding project, they will charge 10 times the hours to get that job done because of the incompetency of their employees. Meanwhile a high quality USA coder would have completed the same task in an hour. How do they still make money? The contractor passes along the additional hours to the government with a lame excuse like it was more complicated than we thought. End result: Government pays more, contracted company makes more, Indian company makes more, US IT workers get screwed.
One last insider tip regarding IT: When the C-Suite whines about the lack of coder talent in the US, they are lying! They just want to protect their bonuses.
PS: Some states including Ohio and California are making this demand with their state's healthcare related IT.