Australian IT Workers Concerned About Migrants

sien writes "In Australia it is being asserted that Australia's intake of migrants skilled in IT is taking jobs and lowering wages for Australian citizens. It appears that in all developed countries, not just the US, the case that immigrants are lowering wages for IT workers is being made. Would programmers in the developed world be better off without immigration that favors IT or is there an overall benefit for the industry with skilled workers going to the developed world and thus making the industry larger?"

Comments

Oh geez....

[vishbar]

Here comes the deluge of South Park "They took our jobs!" quotes...
 
fp?

Re:Oh geez....

[Richard Steiner]

Probably things like disease, unstable political situations, difficulty of obtaining work visas, etc. Or maybe such a concept is too far outside their comfort zone to consider.

I know I would have to think long and hard before moving outside the US, even if I knew that there were no inherent risks. My friends and family are here, and I like the community in which I live.

A perfect world

[Da3vid]

If this were a perfect world, maybe the competition would be welcome, where the most skilled would still get their high paying jobs. The problem really is in figuring out who is the most skilled. I see no reason why the most skilled shouldn't have the best jobs, and if you're the best man for the job, then more competition is no sweat, right?

-Da3vid-

Re:A perfect world

[Ex-MislTech]

Funny,

I have worked for close to 30 years, and I have found lately that the bottom line is king .

A lot of the reason ppl are being hired from overseas is cost, not quality .

Don't get me wrong, some are quality ppl, I met some good and some bad while at cisco systems .

There is a perception that americans are fat and lazy, and I have met them too, but then again
I have met ppl that were awesome, but were paid very little because they were young .

I also see that older ppl are generally not accepted into the tech sector as being
considered unable to embrace new things and stuck in their ways .

Some old school telecom ppl got screwed on this HR techno-babble mental mindwash .

They need to just test the ppl, and have technical interviews in addition to the
personality assessment done by HR .

I have seen ppl hired at cisco that were pathethic , and they stayed even after the
DOT bust and ppl that stayed and left were both utterly amazed by it .

For the big corporations the accountants are driving them now, and 3dfx is a good
example of what happens when accountants and marketing droids take over .

Like I said, don't get me wrong, good ppl on both sides of the ocean, but some of the
most experienced ppl in the tech sector are being driven away by new visa workers
just for the cost savings .

As an american you can go apply at some of the foreign IT head hunter shops and no
matter your credentials you won't even get an interview .

They want ppl they can leverage with fear of being sent back home as well, knowing
it is the difference between a 3rd world job or being here making more than they would
in their resident country by far .

The flaw I see in this is that if money is made here, but most of it sent out of the country
to support their family back home, then money that would go into the economy here ends up
being sent out and deflating our economy .

They cry about a trade deficit, but they themselves employ foreign workers who send a great
deal of money home . "Just" sent via Western Union, "just" to mexico $6 billion USD .

http://www.businessweek.com/1997/19/b3526155.htm

I don't know how many ppl from other countries work here, but I know the figure is in the
millions, and I know it is from MANY nations . I also know generally the mexicans make
the least as well . So with that in mind, you can guesstimate the math .

When the corporations whine about the trade deficit, they can keep this in mind .

As for the government puppets protecting US jobs, that is a bunch of BS , and they should
all be flown to hollywood to pick up their oscar awards .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:A perfect world

[MikeFM]

As an American (white male - lower middle class) I just want people to realize that immigrants aren't the real problem - foreign workers are the main problem. The best solution is to make it easier for those foreign workers to migrate here and get decent jobs here. We have minimum wage laws and free competition that other countries don't have. A large number of foreigners working for $2/hr would move here where they can make $20/hr. I'd sure as hell rather compete locally where all workers are under similar laws and living expenses than with someone that lives in a dirt hut and gets dirt pay. There would be a dip in wages as competition grew but it'd be much less drastic than the dip from jobs moving out of the country. What do we really think is going to be left as a source of income for us as companies keep migrating jobs? Blue collar jobs have been leaving us for years, white collar jobs have been following - what is going to be left?

Make it easier for those workers to move into our western countries and encourage buying products produced within our own countries. That's how to keep wages high. Not by slowing migration. We want to force foreign countries to raise their minimum wage, improve their working and living conditions, etc and compete on a level ground with us. Pretty simple.

Re:A perfect world

[MoralHazard]

Sometimes for whatever reason, a nation might produce fewer skilled workers per capita in an industry than another nation does. But the fact is that a nation does need to protect its citizens, and an unmitigated deluge of skilled workers in an area from a nation with great capacity to produce them (perhaps they have a population that is 30 times larger) can be devastating to the local economy.

I like this post, because you actually display more sophisicated reasoning here than most of the talk-radio types that usually complain about this phenomenon. But I would like to point out something important.

The costs of producing something have an impact of the price of what's produced. If steel suddenly becomes more expensive, you can expect to pay more for refrigerators and cars--not quite as much more as the literal cost impact, but something approaching it. (There's some economic analysis that underlies this, but it's not important.) If the costs of production decrease, you have the opposite effect, where the cost of the product/service decreases.

Labor is the same way, and in many industries (IT being a perfect example) labor costs are almost the entire cost of production. Sure, there are servers and ethernet cables to buy, but commodity hardware has made it so that the vast majority of IT costs are in terms of actual dollars paid for salaries, benefits, etc. to the people that run the servers, write the code, make it all happen.

So if the market for IT jobs is suddenly or gradually flooded with people who are willing and able to work for lower wages, the costs of IT services will tend to go down, too (assuming there's some competition in the market, of course). You can buy hosted web services from lots of competiting companies, so the price of web hosting will go down. Outsourced helpdesk support will also get cheaper. The price of Windows won't necessarily go down, but that's because they have a pretty effective monopoly on desktop OS software (slightly different rules apply).

Since IT services are a cost of doing other types of business, the costs of producing everything that relies on IT will tend to fall, too. Whether and how much depends on those particular markets and how much of their total costs are IT-related, but there will be an effect. In the end, the costs to end-consumers across the economy will go down. And it doesn't take an economist to realize that to the consumer, lower costs are the same thing as having more money.

Like you pointed out (and this is the part I liked), this can be pretty messy if it happens overnight, because the original IT workers who are losing jobs and seeing less in their paychecks will just be SOL. Costs might be lower for everybody, but it may be a net loss the the family depending on a sysadmin's (now decreased) income. The breadwinner might have to retrain or change jobs into a new field in order to get back his/her original income level.

But modern, 1st-world economies can absorb these changes decently well. As long as the percentage of IT workers in your work force isn't too high, and the change doesn't come too quickly, the retraining and job-switching will happen incrementally and people will have time to adjust. And it's not a zero-sum game, either--after people do adjust and retrain back to their original salary levels, they're by definition working in fields where the "home" economy has more competitive advantage, so the net economic effect is positive. Everybody gets lower prices, and (assuming people retrain to original salaries), everybody is making as much as they were before. It doesn't work out perfectly, but that's the general idea.

Job protectionism works out to be the same moral give-and-take as any other kind of trade protectionism: if you protect the current salaries of IT workers, everybody else in the economy (including a lot of other poor, working stiffs) pays for it with higher prices. If you let the market do what it wants to do, you let the IT people take a hit in the short-medium term in exchange for greater prosperity in the economy as a whole.

Re:A perfect world

[ichin4]

An unmitigated deluge of skilled workers ... can be devastating to the local economy.

Bzzzt! Return to Econ 101.

The local economy = everything produced locally. More skilled workers = more produced locally = economy grows.

Now, wihile said deluge certainly won't the devastate local economy, it certainly can devastate those displaced workers foolish enough to cling to the idea they are somehow owed a job in their former industry.

Re:A perfect world

[Ex-MislTech]

Bzzzt! Return to Econ 101.

The local economy = everything produced locally. More skilled workers = more produced locally = economy grows.

Yet again,

The shell game, you can get a different job, ad naseum .

How many degrees will you have to get to "keep getting new jobs",
When the old one is "SOLD OUT" .

When does the cost of the new degrees exceed the pay from
restarting your career everytime the "corpocracy" decides to
sell your job to ANYONE who will work for less .

Under this theory, if they can do any job for less, then they
will do ALL jobs for less, and thus their will be no jobs for
workers that are citizens .

Your grandfather or great grandfather may have died for your
country, but that doesn't matter anymore .

Business as usual, the bottom line is to be fed .

Greed wins again .

http://www.engology.com/E-News1375.htm

Now, wihile said deluge certainly won't the devastate local economy, it certainly can devastate those displaced workers foolish enough to cling to the idea they are somehow owed a job in their former industry.

I don't need a job, I own my own company now .

I am not so moronic that I cannot see that total replacement of all citizens by
L1 visa workers living in corporate owned slums sending most of their pay back
to their home country would have a negative impact .

During this time my and other London guest worker's corporate housing was frequently without heat, hot water and electricity.

http://wwwa.house.gov/international_relations/108/ sha020404.htm

I do not blame the ppl of other nations for wanting to get money to take care
of their families, but I think they and their country would be better off in the long run
fixing their country rather than picking the low hanging fruit off their neighbor's trees .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Ex-MislTech

I don't know what they're talking about

[MadLep]

I work at a software development firm in Melbourne, Australia. We've had a lot of new work recently and have had to recruit extra developers. It has been very hard to find competant staff. Sure, there are a lot of wannabe grads and deadwood who have drifted through a few years experience, but it's slim pickings in general.

Re:I don't know what they're talking about

[pookemon]

We recently advertised for a graduate developer through a very well known Job Search website at a very well known University (and hospital...). Of the 2 dozen or so replys we got we binned close to half almost immediately simply based on the terrible cover letters (Eg. I would like to work for your Origination). 2 of the applications were Aussies, the rest were foreign students. Out of the dozen or so left (the ones we read past the front cover) only 3 could actually string a sentence together (the 2 Aussies and one Chinese guy on a student visa).

When we interviewed the 3 the Chinese guy had obviously copied his resume from someone else as he hardly spoke a word of English. The other two we pretty much ended up flipping a coin to pick our new employee.

I used to work for the parent company of an IT Employment Agency that organises the immigration of significant numbers of people from India. When their Candidates couldn't find work they'd "organise" a contract with us. Whilst their resumes often looked good (Gee I wonder why) they generally didn't have anywhere near the skills claimed.

I have also worked with alot of the Deadwood (having worked for Aus' biggest Telco and with a few ppl from Big Blue). IMO alot of the dead wood in the market is their because they were released into the market by the transfer from the Telco to the Big Blue.

That being said you hire Graduates because they are cheap - and you train them. If you want someone with experience you go to one of the many Employment Agencies and they'll find more than enough candidates for you.

my 2c

boom bust cycle

[bobby1234]

Once again the boom bust cycle continues...

1. high demand results in increasing supply (more uni graduates and immigration)

2. demand deminishes resulting in supply being met

3. demand bottoms out => oversupply

4. low demand => less uni graduates and less immigration

5. demand begins to increase

6. goto 1

Somebody get it straight

[246o1]

Either the skilled immigrants are taking our jobs (competing under our labor laws), or the skilled foreigners are doing our jobs remotely.

Either the poor immigrants are responsible for all the poverty and crime, or else the birthrate is too low.

Admittedly, I didn't RTFA before deciding to post, but i have read it now. Basically, it's all summed up in the title. Some immigration analyst interviewed by what appears to be a newspaper says that too much skilled labor is causing a glut. Nothing new, for those of you who follow this kind of news in America, or any other country, i guess. damned foreigners (not that it's not a legitimately difficult situation).

A single source gave them the gist. Then at the end, here's the kicker:

But Australian Computer Society chief executive officer Dennis Furini said that while there was possibly an oversupply of entry-level programmers, there was a shortage of specialists in areas such as e-commerce and network security.

An Immigration Department spokesman said it relied on information from the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations to draw up the skilled occupation list.

"The Immigration Department has no information suggesting IT jobs should be taken off the skilled occupation list," he said.

Experience tells Otherwise

[femto]

The IT immigrants I know in Australia are getting paid more than the locally produced talent!

In my experience the immigrants aren't coming from third world contries and being used to force down Australia's wages. Rather they are from other countries with major (well paid) IT industries and Australia is poaching hard to get talent from these contries.

Hence the higher wages for the off shore talent. They are commanding higher wages as there is hardly any competition for the job from within Australia.

Others may have different experiences, but I can only comment on what I have observed. The people I know aren't 'entry level', though not all of them have a degree (lots of experience though).

Spinning out of Control or Spiralling Upward

[Quirk]

An introductory Economics text will speak to the need for labour to be willing to move to where there is work. Whether as individuals or as groups, those who battle the idea of economic globalization are irrelevant in the face of the movement toward freetrade zones and trade agreements. The current troubles arising from the implementation of globalization is causing friction and will for some time to come.

It's unlikely that isolationist nations can survive because trade secrets and laws protecting IP aren't sufficient to stop the flow of knowledge. The requirement is to stay competitive. Staying competitive requires a series of tradeoffs including bringing in cheaper labour.

Bite the bullet, it's better than the alternative of isolationist states at a constant threat of war.

protectionism is retarded

[circletimessquare]

assuming equal proficiency, if someone will do for $10 what i want $100 for, then obviously the guy who will do it for $10 will get the job

whether he lives in bangalore, san francisco, or melbourne

go ahead and fight that, go ahead and wail about the injustice of it all

what are you going to do about it? what can you do about it?

are you saying it's exploitation of the guy who makes less? well he doesn't have to deal with the real estate market in san francisco... so rather than complain about how little the guy in india is getting paid, why isn't the problem that you are getting too much money for what you do?

Re:how much more of this crap

[TubeSteak]

When you have a high standard of living (USA, France, Australia) workers in high paying industries expect decent hours and good wages.

Foreigners from countries with lower standards of living (large parts of Eastern Europe, Africa, portions of Asia) tend to willing to work long hours for what we'd consider a shitty salary, but for them is relatively high.

The worker Visa program also creates something of a hostage situation (in the U.S. at least). If cheap foreign laborers start bitching about their wages or working conditions, they can easily get their Visa revoked and sent back home. Australia also has work visa programs, so I imagine it is somewhat similar.

presumably that'd be....

[Alex]

All of the Aussie IT workers that aren't working in London ?

Alex

ps - Hi Neil.

Re:how much more of this crap

[Mateito]

willing to work long hours for what we'd consider a shitty salary

C'mon. Everybody I know (including myself) in this industry in Australia work shitty hours. Programming deadlines, upgrade windows, tender responses, support calls. Even just the reading to stay on top of the technology. We get paid well because we know stuff and we put in the hard yards.

Looking around my office, if there are "foreigners" taking Australian jobs, then those foreigners all come from NZ (Out of 18 people I can see from my cube, 4 are kiwis). Kiwis don't even need a Visa to come work in Aus.

As far as these "unemployable" grads, I'd like to see their profiles. I still get people turning up with a three-year CS degree from a non-brand university, a CCNA and an expectation of a six-figure salary. Sorry guys, not going to happen when I can get somebody (either Aussie or Foreign) with a hell of a lot of experience for that money.

We don't discrimiate on race or background, but nor do we import people to work for us. Actually, I can't think of any reason to import "cheap" foreign workers: The hoops you have to jump through to get the Visa are still pretty stiff, they have no knowledge of the local market and if I just want to use them for programming, why not leave them where they are and send the work over?

No. I think at least a decent proportion of these grads don't have work because they don't have the skills or experience to land the jobs, nor the nouse to go out and get the requisites.

Age old rhetorical question

[redblue]

Why is a global free market for goods considered good, but that for labor bad by so many inhabitants of "developed" nations?

No, I'm not.

[Kris_J]

As an Australian IT worker, not only am I not concerned about migrants taking my job, I actually work in an educational institution that trains international students. Migrants are not "taking Australian Jobs", that's just a tired old stereotype hauled out whenever some, usually, right-wing nutjob wants to rally support for whatever cause he or she is abusing at that moment.

This is a small planet people, and everyone is just trying to get through life as best as they can.

Aus has too few IT jobs anyway...

[linuxlover]

I attended a major Austalian University majoring in Comp Eng. Now I work in Silicon Valley. So I can talk about both worlds on a personal test.

Australia is a country with small population (20 mil) compared to US (~300 mil). There isn't a robust IT job market. This has lead to a massive 'IT recruiting' industry. These are the people who advertise with ludicrous(sp?) terms like
                5years + Java experience is a must (this was when Java was publicly available for only 3 years)!
Also the recruiter guy interviews you has very little knowledge of Tech field and will throw some standard tech questions
      - why virtual destructiors for C++ ..etc

Also other useless crap like
      - where do you see yourself in 3yrs, 5yrs, 10 yrs (do I really want to tell the guy, that I will start my own company in 5 yrs!)
      - what is your weakness, how do you over come it

Also there is no shortage of other 'BS' like
            - writing a good cover letter, cover letter?!
            - going to interview with full suit & tie

When I came to Silicon valley (during the dotcom bubble), I went to a career fair, aced 3 interviews on the spot, went to the company for more interviews. Had another 5 interviews with Eng team and got a job offer, all within days. All interview questions were spot on, trying to figure out if I had really done the things I have mentioned in my resume. I was interviewed by geeks and architects who knew their deal. All the while wearing jeans & t-shirt!

When I went back to Aus (my wife is Aus) a recruiter tried to set me up for an interview. He said 'wear a business suit with a tie'. After working in Silicon Valley culture for years, I didn't have the stomach to go through the BS again. So I declined.

thanks for reading.

Wanted: Immigrants --or anyone-- with PHP skills.

[kale77in]

I work for a Gov't dept in Australia -- web stuff mainly, a large system using PHP, Linux, database. We've been trying to hire new people for weeks (we're advertising in Sydney).

We use an interview plus a timed skills test which all current employees have passed -- it differentiates the sheep and goats better than anything else we've tried. Even (?) after being referred by a HR company, and having a sufficiently interesting C.V. to make an interview, most applicants have been very seriously underskilled, and at least a few have seemed dangerously incompetent.

All of which means (1) Our current staff are feeling pretty good about their job security, and (2) we really do not care where applicants come from. We just want to find them.

No Southpark here.

[raehl]

It's an extreme example, but we used to have laws that made it illegal for black people to learn to read. Why? God forbid a black person should achieve the same ability to do a job as a white person.

We can't (ethically) prevent other people on this planet from educating themselves. We shouldn't (economically) prevent them from doing so either - a world with 50 million educated engineers is better than a world with 50 million people who can't read.

Australians (and Americans) don't lose jobs to immigrants because of migration. They lose jobs to them because the other person is better at doing the job, despite the inherent advantages they have in language and culture.

I work with immigrant engineering workers on a regular basis. These guys wern't born in the US, their families didn't speak english natively, they didn't grow up in this country - if these guys can do a job in a foriegn (to them) language, in a foreign culture, and to it better than a native.... whose fault is that? Getting (and keeping) a job is a competitive effort. I'd much rather see someone lose because the other person is better at the job than see someone lose because they were born in the wrong spot or have the wrong skin color.

And, at least in America, immigration is GOOD. Immigration lets us get young people to help fix our demographics problem. The best way to pay for all these damned baby boomers is to let a whole bunch of 20-something, educated immigrants into the country to pay taxes to support them (instead of letting them work in India where we don't get the money for our social system.)

The US and AU are very similar

[Alan Cox]

In both cases the people doing the complaining are themselves almost all immigrants, they just got there a bit earlier.