Should foreign workers be the first to get canned?

It’s certainly not a good time to be a techie. There have been nearly 200,000 layoffs in the tech sector since last August, according to TechCrunch — 80,000 in January alone. In fact, the overall economic picture is pretty darned bleak. Job losses overall last month hit almost 600K — the highest since December 1974. Can bread lines be next?

So Cringester J. G. e-mailed me what I think is an interesting question.

I’m curious about something that would certainly fire up the comments section on InfoWorld… When Microsoft lays all these employees off, do they target the H1B folks first? It seems to me H1B visa holders should be the first to go, while the American jobs are protected. What say you?

This isn’t an entirely original thought. Republican Senator Charles Grassley suggested as much in a letter to Steve Ballmer last month.

On a gut level, this feels right to me. Americans should have first crack at American jobs. But when it rises up from my gut and enters my brain, my point of view starts to change a little bit.

First, these jobs are gone. It’s not like Patel the Coder departs and is replaced by Joe the Programmer. Firing H-1B workers doesn’t make things better for U.S. workers, it just makes things worse for the Patels.

Second, it’s not like they’re taking their paychecks and mailing them home halfway around the world. H-1B workers are being paid in U.S. dollars and paying U.S. taxes on them. They’re spending their money at U.S. supermarkets and paying rent or mortgages to American landlords and banks. The net economic effect of laying off a U.S. citizen or a nonresident legal alien is the same.

So to me, it seems like the only reason to cut H-1B workers first is to a) score political points, and b) penalize them for taking those jobs in the first place. And it’s a much harsher penalty than if an American citizen were laid off. If an H-1B visa holder doesn’t find a new position within 60 days, it’s back to the homeland for them. Here’s your hat, and please don’t come back.

But I don’t have a horse in this race. So far, InfoWorld hasn’t yet figured out how to replace me with a nonresident alien (but please, don’t give my editor any ideas). And I am certainly no expert on H-1B visas or the job market. I don’t even play one on TV.

So I’m putting this out to all you out there in Cringeville. What do you think? Does it make more sense to cut foreign workers first? Is this really going to help pull us out of the mess we’re in?