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The H1Bees Want You: To Rock and Roll
The H1Bees, from left, Alisha Thomas, Kartik Venkataramanan, Srikanth Devarajan and Swathi Raman, are releasing a CD that details what it's like to work at information technology on a visa.
(By Preston Keres -- The Washington Post)
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"Srikanth's cousin is married to one of my mother's friend's cousins," explained 16-year-old Swathi Raman, a senior at Thomas Wootton High School who also performs.
The American-born teenagers are separated by more than age from the H-1B immigrants. They cannot read or write in Tamil, so Devarajan writes the phonetic spellings for words and helps with pronunciation. In a song titled "Dollar Income," Thomas and Raman sing as though they are children talking to their H-1B parents. The song debunks the myth of expatriate Indians living the good life.
"As soon as Dad got his H-1, he is forced into a wedding.
As soon as she lands, they give birth to a U.S. citizen.
Sixty percent of Dad's paycheck goes to tax.
Thirty percent goes to the body shop.
Leaving just 10 percent for them."
The "body shop" refers to the middle party who offers the services of computer programmers to companies at a profit. At times, the artists fretted over whether they were getting too preachy or political, Srinivasan said.
"The idea we're putting out there is that we're worker bees. Is this going to be a controversy?" he asked. "We're saying things have happened and we're putting this conflict out there in a humorous way. The sad thing is that H-1Bs are being exploited."
During the dot-com boom, U.S. companies couldn't get enough of the H-1B program, successfully lobbying Congress for an increase on the numbers they could hire on the temporary visas. When the boom went bust, the cap returned to 65,000. Last month, the U.S. government announced it had already exhausted that number of H-1B visas for next year-- two months before the fiscal year even begins. Lobbyists are expected to ask for more visas.
Despite the band members' now permanent status, they say they plan to watch the debate closely because of the effect on the information-technology sector -- and because the H-1B has already made their very particular American Dream come true.
None plans to give up his day job yet.
"We'll stay in IT," Venkataramanan says. "What else do we know?"
