H-1B Visas Increased In 96-To-1 Vote

Quite a number of people have written in about about the vote to pass more H1-B Visas for the USA. The vote means an additional 80,000 visas, bringing the total to 195,000. So -- good thing? Bad thing?

Comments

The way to solve you unemployement fears

[malice95]

• Stop whining about foreign workers.
• Improve you skills every single day of your life. I have kids and a home yet I still find at least 1+ hours a night to learn. (I only sleep 6 hours total through:).
• Become a leader at your workplace. Dont just do the bare minimum to get by. Go beyond what you are expected to do.
• Make suggestions regarding new ideas you might have to your boss and sell it to others
• Make yourself essential in your work environment by getting into important projects
• Teach others in your workplace and expand their knowledge. It will only help you in the long run and display your leadership skills (but dont teach them every trick:) gotta keep a few tricks in the bag:).
• Train, Train, Train! Get a job at a company that offers 2 weeks training a year. Take it! Use it to make yourself more valuable.
• If you are working on mainframes or fox pro or other dying technologies.. then get off your ass and learn some new tech.
• Keep up with tech news and industry trends.
• If you dont LOVE computers then become a cop or fireman or something. Computer work requires that you love doing what you do.
• Wake up! Life moves very fast. If you dont stop and take a look around every once in a while you will miss it, Buhler:)
• 
  
  Malice95

Re:GOOD thing

[Bilestoad]

You are uninformed. As a H1-B worker I can change jobs, it just requires a delay while the new employer handles the transfer of the visa. That takes a couple of months, maximum. I can ask for more money - in fact I just had a review and was given a good salary increase and extra stock on top of my already-generous grant. Extra holiday to go home and visit my family? Four weeks, not a problem.

You seem to be underestimating the demand for labor in the professions that qualify for this kind of visa - there are still nowhere near enough good employees available! I interview people every week (current and potential H1-B candidates as well as US citizens) and a lot of them aren't fit to maintain a Macintosh. It's not like we're not offering good money, stock, health plans, all kinds of other benefits - we get plenty of applicants, just not many quality applicants.

If the USA wants to maintain technical leadership, expansion is exactly what the H1-B program needs. The countries losing the professionals that qualify certainly wish they weren't all leaving for greener pa$ture$.

If an industry wants something, that means it's going to screw people over.

Knee-jerk, jealous leftist rubbish. I'm sorry if this is not the case where you work (if you ARE a H1-B worker) but at my company I've never seen employees treated so well. If people aren't happy they are NOT productive - and if they are unhappy enough they leave. It costs money to train new hires - screwing people over doesn't even make business sense.

If there's a real need, give them a green card.

[xtal]

I can't believe that the US congress is buying the bill of goods the tech industry is feeding them. H1-B visas are a liscence to import economic slaves - specifically for their natural talent - sounds a little like prostitution, no?

Six years is a _long_ time in the technical fields. These people can't advance very far in their careers, because after the six years are up, adios, nice seein' ya, don't let the door hit you on the ass, etc.

Since this is what, the third? time the limits were increased, it would be apparant to ME that this isn't such a temporary demand, and your American universities are failing to get enough trained, compentent people working. (This of course probably isn't the case, as I'm sure many of you will be posting). Since the demand is no longer temporary, you have a serious problem. Would it not make more sense then given this scenario to offer qualified Engineers / CS grads whatever a green card, and allow them to become permanant citizens? Then you'll solve this "temporary" problem for good. Uh oh! You might find those temporary workers demanding more.. and you can't flush 'em down the toilet any more and blame the big bad INS. Damn.

There's another interesting arguement here too. If the demand is temporary, does that mean that all these companies are projecting a massive downturn in their own industries? (After all, they're only needing more people for 6 years). Perhaps they should adjust their stock prospectii and inform their investors of dire roads ahead - we're not going to need 200,000 workers in 6 years!

These arguements are, of course, bunk. We know why they want more H1-B's - they're cheap labour who probably don't understand their rights, regardless of quality, because companies don't want to pay for native talent. Call a spade a spade, fellows.

For the record: I'm Canadian, and can get a much more perferable visa, a TN-1 - which is a true temporary visa - if I was interested in temporary work, which I'm not. One year sounds a lot more temporary than 6 - enough time to get comfortable, start a family, and get the shaft.

You want to come to North America and you're skilled? You can get permanant residency in Canada a lot easier, and some would argue it's a lot nicer place to live.

kudos!

Bravo! Green cards and citizenship instead of H1-B

[Ars-Fartsica]

I agree 100%. We need to get these people on green cards and eventually citizenship. In the past, immigrants were encouraged to pursue citizenship. Its time to get back to the cherished notion of an America that welcomes and nurtures immigrants.

This absolutely sucks ...

[Naum]

... replace older working American programmers with cheaper H1-B Visa programmers ...

Yes, it is happening ... the shop I work for is now evaluating proposals from several bodyshops - some offshore, some on-shore but still comprised mostly of H1-B imported foreign programmers ... the employees are urged to seek "management" path careers as the trend is to farm out the coding (both support and development to "bodyshops") ... and this has already occurred for many of the departments of the very large company I work for ... it is getting hard to communicate in English - for a global firm that predominately does mostly U.S. business ...

How is it these clowns (the US House/Senate think they are doing high-tech industry good by this action? They are pandering to the lords of industry ... it sucks ... I will find work - even now, my management is urging the bodyshop to retain some of the "professionals" who know the system well to enable a smooth transition and ensure the same quality support ...

Make no mistake about it - this is not about a shortage of programmers - it is 100%, absolutely about cheap labor ... and the management in my company makes no bones about it - as their #1 goal is to reduce costs 10% per year in providing systems support/development for the business units ...

I am so angry ... I have nothing against the talented professionals that wish to perform their craft ... but call a spade a spade ... this charade is infuriating ... I wish there was something I could do - I am only one voice, but as it happens to others, they will feel the same way though most of the country probally could give a rat's ass ...

These people (US House/Senate, lords of industry, etc ...) are taking the bread out of my children's mouth ... I urge all to read Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Labor Shortage

And I'll sign off with some words from Phillip Greenspun in his famous book on web publishing ...

My personal theory requires a little bit of history. Grizzled old hackers tell of going into insurance companies in the 1960s. The typical computer cost at least $500,000 and held data of great value. When Cromwell & Jeeves Insurance needed custom software, they didn't say, "Maybe we can save a few centimes by hiring a team of guys in India." They hired the best programmers they could find from MIT and didn't balk at paying $10,000 for a week of hard work. Back in those days, $10,000 was enough to hire a manager for a whole year, a fact not lost on managers who found it increasingly irksome.

Managers control companies, and hence policies that irk managers tend to be curtailed. Nowadays, companies have large programming staffs earning, in real dollars, one-third of what good programmers earned in the 1960s. When even that seems excessive, work is contracted out to code factories in India. Balance has been restored. Managers are once again earning three to ten times what their technical staff earn. The only problem with this arrangement is that most of today's working programmers don't know how to program. Companies turn over projects to their horde of cubicle-dwelling C-programming drones and then are surprised when, two years later, they find only a tangled useless mess of bugs and a bill for $3 million. This does not lead companies to reflect on the fact that all the smart people in their college class went to medical, law, or business school. Instead, they embark on a quest for tools that will make programming simpler. Consider the case of Judy CIO who is flying off to meet with the executives at Junkware Systems. Judy will book her airplane ticket using a reliable reservation system programmed by highly-paid wizards in the 1960s. There is no middleware in an airline reservation system. There is no Microsoft software. There is no code written by C drones. Just one big IBM mainframe.

Judy changes planes in the new Denver airport. She could reflect on the fact that the airport opened a couple of years late because the horde of C programmers couldn't make the computerized baggage handling system work (it was eventually scrapped). She could reflect on the fact that the air traffic controllers up in the tower are still using software from the 1960s because the FAA can't get their new pile of C code to work--billions of dollars, 15 years, and acres of cubicles stuffed with $50,000-per-year programmers wasn't good for much besides a lot of memory allocation bugs. She could compare the high programmer salaries of the past and their still-working software to the low programmer salaries of the present and their comprehensive collection of bloated bug-ridden ready-any-year-now systems. However, these kinds of reflections aren't very productive for a forward-looking CIO. Judy uses her time at the airport to catch up on what passes for literature among MBAs: The Road Ahead and Dollar Signs : An Astrological Guide to Personal Finance.