Breaking the Visa Backlog

bart_scriv writes "As anyone who has dealt with H1-B visas can attest, the process can be a nightmare of long lines, waits and inexplicable delays. In this interview, the State Department's Tony Edson discusses what's being done to speed up and expedite the process, ranging from procedural changes to the use of new technology."

Comments

Here comes the chorus

[Anonymous Coward]

"They took our jobs!"

Re:Here comes the chorus

[SEWilco]

Well, at least they're not speeding things up by using offshore outsourcing of visa processing.

Re:Here comes the chorus

[hey!]

I'd argue that the H1-B program, if properly administered, would increase jobs in the US.

When you are starting a company, or a development team, and you have a choice of places to do it, you do it where developers are (a) cheap, (b) convenient to access and (c) plentiful. Generally speaking, if you are a US company, you can have two out of three. You can go domestic and get b & c, or you can offshore for a & c.

So, a program that moves talent from offshoring centers to the US increases the probability that teams are formed in the US.

The key though is to bring in the best. The top tier US talent is not going to have difficulty in finding jobs, provided there are teams to join. But flood the market with cheap, middle-grade talent and the domestic middle-grade talent is going to feel the hurt.

If I were King of the US, I'd put a billion dollars a year into a McArthur style "genius" program, which would be like a commercial version of the "merit scholarship" programs. Every year, I'd pick the thousand top technologists I can find, and invite them to spend ten years working in the US. Every year they'd get a check for $100,000, in addition to what their employer pays, provided they work for most of the year. At the end of ten years, if they establish permanent residency, they'd get the accumulated interest on the principle as a lump some payment.

What I'm suggesting is a crass and selfishly orchestrated "brain drain".

For less than the cost of a week of the Iraq war, we'd be seeding hundreds of new technology teams annually. It's virtually certain that we'd be bringing in several people who will create new technologies, possibly even new industries. There would be a stupendous multiplier effect in US technology jobs.

Re:Here comes the chorus

[Marxist Hacker 42]

OTOH- if we could streamline and de-corrupt the process, then it's potentially possible that all H-1bs would be filled in the first few microseconds after October 1st Federal Fiscal Year rolls around- thus lending credance to the argument that we need *better* protectionism for American Workers.

In other words- makeing the process more efficient is a positive no matter which side of the "guest worker" debate you are on- it's good news both for anti-indentured-servant activists AND cheap-labor free traitors.

Re:Here comes the chorus

[Marxist Hacker 42]

It's virtually certain that we'd be bringing in several people who will create new technologies, possibly even new industries.

The problem with that is if foreign cultures were actually capable of producing people who could innovate, they wouldn't need to send people here to make money. So therefore your theory breaks down because there *are* no "best and brightest" to come here- they're all mired down by inefficient and technologically backward cultures that produce crap.

Re:Here comes the chorus

[hey!]

The problem with that is if foreign cultures were actually capable of producing people who could innovate

Yeah, and the Japanese don't know how to manufacture anything that isn't junk, as we all knew back in the 1960s. OK, maybe they could make decent, cheap pocket transistor radio, but not big things like cars.

they wouldn't need to send people here to make money.

This is completely wrong. They send people here to make money because we live in a place where labor is dear and they live in a place where labor is cheap. The problem is that they are starting to look for work at home, because home can no compete with the US.

Furthermore, no innovator is an island. You need a people (skilled) to turn an innovation into a business. Which is the point: you keep the skilled positions here. Finally you need infrastructure: banking, marketing and dsitribution, research institutions, venture capital etc. If the state of these things in the 1970s US was on a par with 1970s India, you wouldn't have had a computer industry develop here, no matter how many geniuses we had.

Re:Here comes the chorus

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Yeah, and the Japanese don't know how to manufacture anything that isn't junk, as we all knew back in the 1960s. OK, maybe they could make decent, cheap pocket transistor radio, but not big things like cars.

They still can't- which is why my Izuzu pickup died after less than 8 years, where my 7 year old Ford Escort still gets 50 MPG.

This is completely wrong. They send people here to make money because we live in a place where labor is dear and they live in a place where labor is cheap. The problem is that they are starting to look for work at home, because home can no compete with the US.

Let it. It's in our best interest to compete with countries that we can destroy militarily on a whim.

Furthermore, no innovator is an island. You need a people (skilled) to turn an innovation into a business.

I'd argue that if you need skilled people to turn an innovation into a business, then you don't deserve to be in business- you're not an innovator, you're a parasite.

Which is the point: you keep the skilled positions here.

Yeah, right- except for you're not, you're replacing all the skilled people with H-1b indentured servants, insuring that no American will ever be able to afford to pay for the training to become skilled.

you need infrastructure: banking, marketing and dsitribution, research institutions, venture capital etc.

Two of those 5 are infrastructure, the other three are unneeded parasites that will cause your project to fail if it is not profitable within 4 months. I wonder if you know which is which.

If the state of these things in the 1970s US was on a par with 1970s India, you wouldn't have had a computer industry develop here, no matter how many geniuses we had.

Except, at least three of those geniuses used NO venture capital, no marketing, and no banks.

It's supposed to be complicated

[orthogonal]

It's complicated for a reason.

You know what's faster? Hiring an American.

Give me a call.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[bersl2]

I know that I'm comparing apples to oranges, but it's that kind of attitude that has created for us this big shitstorm over illegal immigration: People want to work in this country, and our companies are willing to hire them over American workers, and they aren't going to take no for an answer, so you might as well let them have what they want, but on your terms.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[bersl2]

Those "they"s in the last three clauses is supposed to refer to the workers, not the companies, though I guess it works for both.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure. How's your experience with extreme UV lithography? Mixed analog/digital ASIC design? FPGA verification?

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what's faster? Hiring an American.

Or a Canadian. They're eligible for TN visas under NAFTA. TN visas are quick, cheap, easy, renewable and virtually no paperwork. As long as you're a professional with a job offer, not a criminal and not a threat to national security, you'll get one.

Similarly, USians can get NAFTA visas to work in Canada.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

No, see, they're willing to hire illegal immigrants over American workers. Know why? You don't have to report them to the IRS. For every legal employee who pays their taxes, the company also has to pay a share of the social security tax. For every illegal immigrant, the foreman hands them a $20 at the end of a 10 hour workday, and if they don't like it, the boss can call the INS for them.

Of course, we've seen the Republican's socialist welfare for corporations in action. Bush went from a high of 1023 companies fined for employing illegals in 1998 to 3 in 2004, so it's not surprising to see the Republicans push for more and more cheap labor, even when we can't employ 100% of our own people.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Arjuna Theban]

I have experience in all of those, and I happen to be an H-1B worker.. Go figure..

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[pla]

it's not surprising to see the Republicans push for more and more cheap labor, even when we can't employ 100% of our own people.

Corporate America (aka "Republicans" as you used it) doesn't want 100% employment. 100% employment means that, rather than the plebes fighting one another over who will accept the lowest pay for a given demeaning job, the employers actually need to make honest, fair offers to get good employees, then treat them like humans to keep them.

That describes the Republican nightmare, a market where employers rather than employees compete for resources. Of course, don't think I'll let the Democrats off the hook so easily - They only want us to make more so we don't complain when they take a progressively bigger cut of our income to give to those who consider "reproduction" a state job with full benefits.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[ivan256]

100% employment means that, rather than the plebes fighting one another over who will accept the lowest pay for a given demeaning job, the employers actually need to make honest, fair offers to get good employees, then treat them like humans to keep them.

Less than 100% employment doesn't mean that companies don't have to make honest, fair offers to get good employees. Damned close to 100% of good employees are either already employed, or will be unemployed for only a very short period of time.

100% employment, however, means no incentive to better yourself as a worker. That leads to low domestic innovation, low productivity, low job satisfaction, and eventually economic decline, increased poverty, etc.. Look at the long term unemployment statistics (people in good health, but out of work for more than six months) and you'll have a pretty good ideal of how many people we've got that don't posess the attitude required to remain employed. If we stoped teaching our children that work was that crappyt thing you do between weekends of beer and football, that number would go down. If we stopped handing out H1-Bs, it wouldn't.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[llefler]

Giving blanket amnesty to people who violate our immigration laws is 'on our terms'? Damn, that's some serious spin.

Our terms should be; streamline guest worker program, all illegals leave the country and apply for re-entry, any immigrant currently employed can be fast tracked assuming they pass the requisite background checks. But everyone has to enter legally.

Anyone still here illegally after 1 year is deported and banned, permanently. And any employer that doesn't comply risks severe fines and mandantory jail time.

If you want to be accepted as part of our society, we require that you respect us and our laws.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Marxist Hacker 42]

If I was going to give the corporations what they want on my terms, it would be this: A separate tax bracket for corporations with overseas offices or that buy and sell ANYTHING overseas of 75% gross proceeds tax. And that includes those who hire "illegal aliens" or "guest workers". Simply make it unprofitable to do so.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Less than 100% employment doesn't mean that companies don't have to make honest, fair offers to get good employees. Damned close to 100% of good employees are either already employed, or will be unemployed for only a very short period of time.

If that was true, stockholder profit would be 0. All the money would be going to retaining the good employees.

100% employment, however, means no incentive to better yourself as a worker. That leads to low domestic innovation, low productivity, low job satisfaction, and eventually economic decline, increased poverty, etc.. Look at the long term unemployment statistics (people in good health, but out of work for more than six months) and you'll have a pretty good ideal of how many people we've got that don't posess the attitude required to remain employed. If we stoped teaching our children that work was that crappyt thing you do between weekends of beer and football, that number would go down. If we stopped handing out H1-Bs, it wouldn't.

Unless we stop handing out H*-* visas entirely, there will be NO opportunity for our children to learn to work, because there will be no jobs available for them to learn to work IN. That applies more to H2-* visas than H1-* visas, but the idea is the same- if you give away all the entry level jobs, there will be no way to enter the workforce.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Karl Cocknozzle]

it's that kind of attitude that has created for us this big shitstorm over illegal immigration: People want to work in this country, and our companies are willing to hire them over American workers, and they aren't going to take no for an answer, so you might as well let them have what they want, but on your terms.

Actually, I think they WILL take no for an answer if we start exposing some of the sleaze inherent in the H1-B scam.

How many of you have seen ads for "DBA/Programmer/Network engineer" positions paying $25k in the paper? Ever wondered why those positions are even advertised? So that, when they can't find any American that can afford to work at that price, they can go off an get another H1-B into the country so they can hire somebody at this slave wage, and then abuse them for six years. In the H1-B scam, everybody loses, except the short-term-manager, whose quarterly bonus is long-since paid and spent before anybody notices how much it sucks that their most important technical-expert employees have visas that expire every six years. Instead of grooming future generations of technical team leaders, managers, and directors, that expertise gets sent back to India/China/wherever and is used to found your next competitor.

What the H1-B scam does is creates a perpetual, false, "shortage." This enables them to import a "cheap" Indian, Chinese, or Russian professional for what Americans would consider slavery-wages. In turn, this makes more Americans available to other companies. Recall from Economics 101 the law of supply & demand:

More supply (available American workers) + less demand (one fewer job available now that the H1-B has it) == lower wages for all.

When you factor in the long-term organizational "dumbing-down" that this type of hiring practice leads to, nobody is winning except the snake-oil salesman/MBA-fucker who proposed this deal in the first place.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[ivan256]

Unless we stop handing out H*-* visas entirely, there will be NO opportunity for our children to learn to work, because there will be no jobs available for them to learn to work IN. That applies more to H2-* visas than H1-* visas, but the idea is the same- if you give away all the entry level jobs, there will be no way to enter the workforce.

We've been handing them out for decades, yet we seem to have near record low unemployment... Yet countries like France, which have very protectionist policies, seem to have a serious problem getting their young people into the workforce. Something seems seriously wrong with your theory.

If we don't let US companies hire foreign workers in the US, the companies will move to a country where they can hire those workers. Here's a pop quiz: Which company is likely to hire more US citizens, a company with offices in the US with a mixture of US and non-US employees, or a company with offices overseas?

I suggest you weigh your ideas against some real life data and reconsider your position.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[antifoidulus]

You are describing the abuses of the system, and that hurts the system in 2 ways:
1. Most obvious is the fact that now someone else is doing a job that unemployed Americans are qualified to do, the only reason the company didn't hire the American is because they consider it to be too expensive. That hurts the person who could have had the job, but probably the overall effect on the economy is minimal if the number of H1B visa holders is kept low.

2. However, the more subtle way it hurts the economy is it prevents people who actually need experts from abroad from getting them. According to this(yeah, it's a lawyer site, but there are better articles out there if you look) the H-1B visa cap is reached months before the year is up. Where is the problem? Well consider the following scenario:

A robotics start-up launches in Maine. The people who founded the company are some awesome AI guys, but when it comes to figuring out the best way to build and manufacture the robots, they are at a loss. So they look for people to hire and cannot find anyone in the US, but they do find some people in Japan who are very well qualified to do the job. They want to bring them over, offer them a good salary, and the Japanese agree. Now the easiest way for a company without a team of lawyers to do this is to sponsor them for an H1-B visa. However, the start up finds out that the cap had been reached because as soon as the new year started a bunch of huge companies who could afford to hire qualified Americans wanted save a couple of bucks and be able to abuse their workers got in line first with their teams of lawyers to carry away as many of the H1-B slots they could get their hands on. Now our little start up is left with few options. They could outsource the work, but for such a small company that would involve a huge amount of overhead, not the least of which is dealing with labor laws in 2 different countries. They would have to find their Japanese counterparts offices in Japan, make frequent trips etc. All that stuff could spell doom for a small company, so the people who found it might go belly up costing even more jobs.
Abusers of the system really do need to be punished, and stricter limits on the number of visas individual companies can have should be enforced.
That is just my 2 cents

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Marxist Hacker 42]

We've been handing them out for decades, yet we seem to have near record low unemployment...

Only if you fail to include in the workforce all the people the BLS puts on "disability" to lower the unemployment numbers artificially.

Yet countries like France, which have very protectionist policies, seem to have a serious problem getting their young people into the workforce.

Actually, they don't have very good protectionist policies- they've got a huge influx of Islamic Africans and Arabs who serve the same purpose as our H* workers do here- a completely disaffected, disenfranchised workforce to keep the unemployment numbers high.

If we don't let US companies hire foreign workers in the US, the companies will move to a country where they can hire those workers.

If they're that unpatriotic- let them. But when they do, we should confiscate their assets here, and exile their C-level executives. Oh yeah- and that company should not be allowed to sell *anything* in the United States, nor provide any services. Cut such traitors off completely is what I say. Send them to India and let them try to get a job there.

Here's a pop quiz: Which company is likely to hire more US citizens, a company with offices in the US with a mixture of US and non-US employees, or a company with offices overseas?

In my experience, neither company will hire US citizens at all, because both are enemies of the United States- our competitors in the global marketplace, at war with us.

I suggest you weigh your ideas against some real life data and reconsider your position.

My actual position is this- other countries are our competitors in the global marketplace, and when a competitor threatens your market, you do whatever it takes to bring him down- including guns, bombs, and genocide.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Karl Cocknozzle]

You are describing the abuses of the system, and that hurts the system in 2 ways

I would hope the H1-B system is designed to help startups, but we all know it wasn't: Otherwise there wouldn't be loopholes to exploit big enough for the Fortune 500 to drive a cement-mixer through. The reason should be fairly obvious if you've been following politics in the U.S. in the last thirty or so years: Money.

Startups with a dozen employees don't make massive campaign contributions to keep Congress-critters in office. If they did, you'd see safeguards in the H1-B program to make sure it was actually being used to benefit companies with legitimate needs to import labor. But those safeguards don't exist for a simple reason: It was in the best interest of the campaign-funders that they not exist.

It has been said many times, but failure to put safeguards against abuse into a system is tantamount to inviting the system to be abused, and should not be seen as an "unforeseen circumstance" when it, inevitably, happens.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Marxist Hacker 42]

And when your honest opinion is flamebait- you really know you're in trouble!

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Anonymous Coward]

If we stoped teaching our children that work was that crappyt thing you do between weekends of beer and football, that number would go down.

What, do you propose that we lie to them?

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[ivan256]

No, I propose we lead by example so they can understand that work can be enjoyable... if they're willing to put the effort in up front to get that enjoyable job.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[ivan256]

Uh, yeah...

What's it like off the deep end? It's not enough to have ideas you think will work. They have to take basic human rights into account too.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Marxist Hacker 42]

What's it like off the deep end? It's not enough to have ideas you think will work. They have to take basic human rights into account too.

Why? The stock market obviously doesn't think we deserve basic human rights. The Chinese don't take basic human rights into account. Mexicans don't. The Hindus don't. The Moslems don't. Basic human rights are a LUXURY- one that we can't afford in a globalist economy. I may be off the deep end- but I've been pushed there by a bunch of free traitors. I have to compete with Chinese, Hindus, Mexicans, and Moslems for my right to exist- I can't afford basic human rights anymore. 9-11 taught me that once and for all, we have no allies in this world- only competitors that want to destroy the American Middle Class. And that was the fault of globalists too (if we had never imported a drop of oil from the Middle East, 9-11 would never have happened). The only safe way is to develop the technology needed to manufacture everything you need yourself- you can't depend on ANYBODY else to do it for you. Trust nobody- they're all trying to steal from you. Especially the ones wearing suits saying "Trust me".

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[ivan256]

The Chinese don't take basic human rights into account. Mexicans don't. The Hindus don't. The Moslems don't.

Ever hear the saying "Two wrongs don't make a right"?

Basic human rights are a LUXURY- one that we can't afford in a globalist economy.

We can afford them, but we won't be able to for long if we become isolationists... Unless, that is, you'd like to be a farmer. You and everybody else...

We MUST afford them. Otherwise we won't have them for ourselves.

you can't depend on ANYBODY else to do it for you. Trust nobody- they're all trying to steal from you. Especially the ones wearing suits saying "Trust me".

The world isn't black and white. Perhaps trusting nobody is a reasonable default policy, but you have a brain and five senses that you can use to refine that outlook on a case by case basis. Not everybody is trying to steal from you. Corporations need employees just as much as citizens need corporations. Many corporations even realize that. You can't do *everything* for yourself and continue to live in a modern world.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Ever hear the saying "Two wrongs don't make a right"?

A loser attitude in the 21st century.

We can afford them, but we won't be able to for long if we become isolationists... Unless, that is, you'd like to be a farmer. You and everybody else...

I grew up farming- I know that we only need 2% of our population to create enough food for everybody if we're not stupid enough to give it away to the third world below cost (which is what we're currently doing- which destroys THEIR farming market, encouraging their people to come here and take our jobs).

We MUST afford them. Otherwise we won't have them for ourselves.

We gave up having them for ourselves when we joined the global community and trade law became supreme over constitutional law.

The world isn't black and white. Perhaps trusting nobody is a reasonable default policy, but you have a brain and five senses that you can use to refine that outlook on a case by case basis. Not everybody is trying to steal from you. Corporations need employees just as much as citizens need corporations. Many corporations even realize that. You can't do *everything* for yourself and continue to live in a modern world.

We're no longer living in the modern world- that left 30 years ago when we stopped having a positive trade balance. Corporations need employees- but they've got 80 million new people *each and every year* elsewhere than the United States to find those employees, most of whom are willing to work for under $2/day because there are no "basic human rights" in those countries. If we're going to compete with them for employment, we will have to sink to the same level. That is the cost of not being isolationist.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[ivan256]

but they've got 80 million new people *each and every year* elsewhere than the United States to find those employees, most of whom are willing to work for under $2/day because there are no "basic human rights" in those countries. If we're going to compete with them for employment, we will have to sink to the same level.

There is no reason to have free trade with countries that are not on the same level with us human rights wise. You don't have to be isolationist to have standards.

You're right that we can't let corporations have *everything* they want, but there is middle ground. You don't have to run to the extremes.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Marxist Hacker 42]

There is no reason to have free trade with countries that are not on the same level with us human rights wise.

Tell it to the money- that is, the WTO. According to them, we have the choice between FREE trade, or NO trade.

You don't have to be isolationist to have standards.

As long as corporations exist, as long as there are artificial people in this world whose *only* moral is profit, then that is truly the choice- no standards or isolationism.

You're right that we can't let corporations have *everything* they want, but there is middle ground.

Not as long as corporations have the power of government over us there isn't. The only choice is between government and corporations- and government should rightly be isolationist, because their customer base is citizens. Corporations, whose customer base is profit-seeking stockholders, will go for cheap labor every time- they're pre-programmed to do so.

You don't have to run to the extremes.

I've yet to see any country successfully not run to the extremes- and 21st century America is no exception. Which leads us back to the original question- since we're getting our asses handed to us by groups of people who don't believe in basic human rights, what makes you think we can hold on to basic human rights and survive?

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[ivan256]

Corporations, whose customer base is profit-seeking stockholders, will go for cheap labor every time- they're pre-programmed to do so.

That's only true if you turn a blind eye to all but the largest and most institutional of publically traded corporations... And even some of those aren't that way. The assumption that corporations are profit driven is fairly accurate, but the assumption that cost cutting increases profits is not. Good, happy employees are essential to most corporations. Good public rapport is essental for many companies.

Corporations only have the power of government over us because people are lazy and don't bother to learn about what is important, who is in who's pocket, and vote on those issues. They'd rather pick some stupid-assed 'moral' issue and vote on abortion or gays or some other nonsense with utter disregard to corporate law, etc. That allows every politician on the ticket to be in the pocket of some corporations. An uninformed, passionate electorate is the enemy.

Re:It's supposed to be complicated

[Marxist Hacker 42]

That's only true if you turn a blind eye to all but the largest and most institutional of publically traded corporations... And even some of those aren't that way. The assumption that corporations are profit driven is fairly accurate, but the assumption that cost cutting increases profits is not. Good, happy employees are essential to most corporations. Good public rapport is essental for many companies.

I've yet to meet any company of that form. After all, profit is the difference between what you can lie and soak your customers out of, and the costs of manufacturing or purchasing to begin with. If your customers cut out the middleman and just manufactured and purchased for themselves, you'd have no profit. If you paid your employees what they are truly worth to you, you'd have no profit. Thus profit must be based on a set of finely balanced lies. Yes, you need to keep your customers and employees relatively happy- but you must do it by not letting them know their true worth, ever, or they'll be likely to demand that worth.

Corporations only have the power of government over us because people are lazy and don't bother to learn about what is important, who is in who's pocket, and vote on those issues. They'd rather pick some stupid-assed 'moral' issue and vote on abortion or gays or some other nonsense with utter disregard to corporate law, etc. That allows every politician on the ticket to be in the pocket of some corporations. An uninformed, passionate electorate is the enemy.

Agreed- however it's now to the point that politicians who aren't in the pocket of corporations, simply never get their names on the ballot at all. But it wouldn't be that much different if we had honest politicians- we'd merely swing to the other protectionist side of the spectrum, like we did in the 1950s when the only income tax loophole was payroll, and capital gains tax rate was 93%. EVERYBODY in the United States used to make $8000/year- even those who earned $100,000/year- because of the tax rates. That was of course slowly destroyed by the Bacero legislation- letting in guest workers who were willing to work for only $4800/year. When that guest worker program ended, agricultural workers got a very sudden 40% increase in pay.

The way I see it, the modern corporation is an abberation- a monster we created. We can either kill the monster and return to distributionist cottage industries and strictly regulated and controled "fair profits"- in which case you'll be forced to buy locally and start rebuilding those local production centers- OR we can become slaves to the system and have to compete with the third world for jobs. Those are our ONLY choices left. We're 30 years to late to take any kind of "middle way".

What is an H-1B?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is an H-1B?

The H-1B is a nonimmigrant classification used by an alien who will be employed temporarily in a specialty occupation or as a fashion model of distinguished merit and ability.

http://uscis.gov/graphics/howdoi/h1b.htm#what/

Re:What is an H-1B?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

In other words, an indentured servant with no hope of citizenship without losing their job.

Re:What is an H-1B?

[James_Aguilar]

It's not that bad. If you are good enough, the company will sponsor you for permanent residency, and there are other ways too. Remember, H1-Bs sign up for it, and it is hard, but there's a reason why they want that visa.

Re:What is an H-1B?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

It's not that bad. If you are good enough, the company will sponsor you for permanent residency, and there are other ways too. Remember, H1-Bs sign up for it, and it is hard, but there's a reason why they want that visa.

If there is any way for them to get permanent residency, then the visa has failed in it's primary purpose as a "non-immigrant" visa. Much as I hate the entire concept of a non-immigrant visa, there most certainly should be a hard line between immigrant and non-immigrant visas; which will make it easier to limit and reduce the second.

Re:What is an H-1B?

[James_Aguilar]

Changes of status from non-immigrant to immigrant are typical, not just in work visas either. How is it any different to change your status by changing it while in the country versus changing it after leaving the country in order to come back? But you do have a point, I hate the idea of non-immigrant visas. :)

Re:What is an H-1B?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The basic idea of a non-immigrant visa is selfish brain drain- An American corporation gets the skillset far cheaper (in terms of time and money) than training an American to do the same job *because* it is assumed that the person will be retireing back home where cost of living is much less. Subvert this by allowing in-country status change from non-immigrant to immigrant, and the cost savings will disappear upon the change; I've known several H-1bs who lost their jobs upon winning the green card "lottery" due to this fact. To me, it was the ultimate proof that the H class visas are much more about cheap labor than they are about actual skill.

And that's also why I dislike non-immigrant visas; the only protection the middle class has in this country is that an increase in skill level means an increased salary- the H* visas subvert that part of the job market directly.

Re:What is an H-1B?

[James_Aguilar]

You and I disapprove of non-immigrant visas for different reasons. ;) I thought it was illegal to pay H1-Bs less than the equivalent permanent resident/citizen worker though, in order to deincentivize the hiring of foreigners to jobs for which there are Americans who can do the work. Am I wrong there?

Re:What is an H-1B?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I thought it was illegal to pay H1-Bs less than the equivalent permanent resident/citizen worker though, in order to deincentivize the hiring of foreigners to jobs for which there are Americans who can do the work. Am I wrong there?

That was part of the 1999 compromise bill that:
1. Increased the number of H-1b visas to 195,000
2. Required an Labor Condition Application to attest to paying prevailing wages and advertising the job, except for businesses that were not H-1b dependant (defined as more than 33% of the employees being H-1bs, including unskilled employees)
3. Required an additional $1000 fee to be placed into a fund for retraining Americans to do these jobs.

These provisions sunnseted in FFY 2003 when the number of H-1b visas returned automatically to 65,000. Even when they were in effect, though, employers found loopholes. We had a contracting company in Beaverton that never hired any American citizens, yet claimed on their LCAs to not be H-1b dependant. For a while it was also common to advertise jobs halfway across the country, to take advantage of lower standards of living and thus lower prevailing wages, as well as fullfill the advertising requirment without actually getting any American resumes. Another way to fullfill the advertising requirment was to require in the advert outlandish amounts of experience- that's when you saw all the adverts in 2001 for .NET programers with 10 years of experience, even though .NET beta had just come out. And finally- all of the retraining money was spent on people displaced from manufacturing jobs. Since Software Engineers did not produce a "real" product, they were denied access to the retraining money.

In many ways, the sunsetting of these provisions makes paying H-1bs less at least legitimate, no games involved. More honest somehow. But on the other hand, high tech is adding positions like crazy right now that American citizens have NO chance of even hearing about, let alone actually being hired for.

I don't mind the wait if it's done right...

[Mindwarp]

Speaking as someone who's been through a couple of visa processes I can honestly say that I wasn't overly bothered with the wait times. I'm completely aware of the need for border security and consider the wait times, the queues, the forms and procedures to be almost a 'rite of passage.' It's an unpleasant procedure that's for sure (I'd go so far as to describe the whole experience as soul destroyingly frustrating) but I'd rather it be there than not.

The two biggest issues that I have with the whole process were the employees, who were hands down the most unhelpful and unpleasant people I've ever had the misfortune to deal with, and the error rate (at the time of issue of my Green Card somewhere in the order of 40% were issued with a mistake on them. Come on people! There are only four pieces of identifying information present on the card! How can 40% of the cards issued have a mistake in one of those? And let's not even talk about the nine month process you have to go through to get an error corrected...)

Re:I don't mind the wait if it's done right...

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking as someone who has hired several H1B's for my startup (three of my best engineers), it annoys me no end that the government gets involved in how I run my business. I am paying these people well above going wages ($100k+) and I am unable to hire any US citizens with their knowledge despite having tried for a year. Ensuring that should be the end of the governments involvement, but in fact it is just the beginning. Once you've jumped thru the hoops set up the Dept of Labor to protect local workers, then you need to deal with Homeland Security (USCIS) and the Dept of State. It's a three ring circus from bureaucrat hell.

The visa wait times are unacceptable, the conditions draconian and the amount of stress on the employees is unfair. The capricious and random nature of the Dept State and USCIS reminds me of the movie "Brazil". I didn't know we were living in a totalitarian state until I experienced it for myself. Sometimes I want to ask these guys what they REALLY think of the US, because I know I would be as mad as hell having being forced to keep my life on hold for months and years at a time.

Re:I don't mind the wait if it's done right...

[pcgc1xn]

One way to reduce the backlog would be to shoot the monkey who designed the forms and processes, and hire someone with half of a brain. Perhaps they tried, but the only candidate they had needed an H1B candidate and gave up. A few of my favourite questions from the application forms... List all countries you have visited in the last 10 years, and the date of the visit. Followed by a box about 1.5 inches by 0.25 inches - enough space to write 'see attached page' Do you have any special skills, eg nuclear or biological. Is this a trick question? By definition, to be applying for an H1B, I MUST have special skills - you have my resume. Do I know how to make a nuclear bomb? no, my special skills are in different areas. Are you a nazi war criminal? (paraphrased but only refers to Nazi war criminals, not others). I would suggest that very few H1B candidates were born early enough to be able to have been Nazi war criminals, why bother asking the question? If you get a 90 year old German applying for an H1B, ask him at the interview, asking 30 year olds this is a waste of time. If the forms are this bad, I would hate to think what they backend processes are like. All government forms are bad, it is one of those universal rules, but INS forms have to rank up there as some of the worst in the world.

Re:I don't mind the wait if it's done right...

[HardCase]

I didn't know we were living in a totalitarian state until I experienced it for myself.

When you really live in a totalitarian state, you'll know it - you won't be able to make comments like that.

I know I shouldn't be, but I'm still amazed at the hyperbole and hysteria on /.

Re:I don't mind the wait if it's done right...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

When you really live in a totalitarian state, you'll know it - you won't be able to make comments like that.

I don't know about that- almost every totalitarian state I can think of has at least one person (the dictator) and usually a class of people (the ruling/oppressing party in question) who can make a comment like that with a straight face. In fact, I'd have to say, it would be incredibly hard to have a totalitarian state without a class of people who don't think the state is totalitarian.

Re:I don't mind the wait if it's done right...

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I am paying these people well above going wages ($100k+) and I am unable to hire any US citizens with their knowledge despite having tried for a year.

Did you try going to a university offering a degree in the program and sponsoring a scholarship for a graduate student to study to gain this knowledge, or did you just give up early?

Re:I don't mind the wait if it's done right...

[Anonymous Coward]

and I am unable to hire any US citizens with their knowledge despite having tried for a year.

Bullshit. All you have to do is walk over to your competitor and tell their staff you'll bump their salary $10k AND offer them a cooler stocked with mountain dew. "Well over prevailing wage" my ass. You're just refusing to compete for quality employees. Are you looking for the top 10% of engineers? Then you better be paying in the top 10% of salaries. This is simple math, but hey, take the cheap way out and hire some servants. Hope you enjoy it when their visa runs out and they move back home to set up shop and sell your product to your competitors at a fraction of your cost.

How about this?

[pegr]

No troll... How about holding off all H1B visas until the IT umemployment rate is zero?

Because that would not force the price of IT workers down as big business wants...

Re:How about this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Enforcing zero employment is an excellent plan. We should turn the US into a command economy. History proves that goverment controlled economies are 100% successful at ensuring prosperity for all citzens. Welcome to your work camp, comrade!

If you didn't learn why that won't work in school, then America has a problem a lot bigger than the fact we absolutely need to import skilled labor. It seems like our schools aren't even teaching basic economics or history, let alone science or math.

Reminds me of a guy a few years ago who used to spout off about H1B's all the time. He was an IT expert - with a highly developed speciality in OS/2. He refused to learn anything else, despite IBM having cancelled OS/2 years earlier. I imagine he is probably still spouting off - and still unemployed.

Re:How about this?

[minus_273]

considering H1b visas cost about 2k not including the legal fees (goes to about 4k per person overall) and they have to be paid the prevailing wage, the issue is not that is it cheap labor. In fact it is more expensive. The question is, why cant they find people competent enough to fill those positions? obviously it would make sense to not use an H1B since it is cheaper not to.

I think there are two reasons why they cant fill those positions:
a) people are used to dot.bomb rates and want too much
b) the people who are unemployed or applied were not qualified

neither are things the people hiring can fix.

Re:How about this?

[hibiki_r]

So, if you need a Swing expert with at least 4 years of experience to be a lead on an important project, and your market has plenty of Americans with a CS degree and no experience, should you hire an inexperienced american that will not be able to perform his duties?

In the St Louis area, my company has had problems hiring skilled programmers. Only 1 in 10 resumes come from Americans, and those tend to be quite weak. In one occasion, after looking for 8 months we got a single qualified applicant, who just happened to be an H1-B holder. Why not hire him?

Besides, some unemployment is healthy. If you've ever had an actual job, you'd probably know that there's plenty of programmers out there that are so incompetent that they create more work than they do. Those guys SHOULD be unemployed, regardless of their country of origin. Who in their right mind would want to hire a dog like that over someone with talent?

Re:How about this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all H1-B visas are entry-level - in fact, most of them aren't. I have one myself for frequent visits to the US on behalf of my employer, and the work I do is *highly* specialized and requires a lot of detailed knowledge, both technical and corporate.

Re:How about this?

[way2trivial]

consider the obverse..

they must pay prevailing wages? where prevailing wages are 44-102k they can pay 4k in costs and 44 in salary.. where the cost of living would require the position to be closer to the 102k scale...

Also consider.. if the h1b visa holder loses his job, he/she goes home.. now.. imagine you are Gary Cole looking to fill some unpaid overtime on the weekend.. who is more likely to turn Lumbergh down? the native or the visa holder? think that can't make up 4k in productivity?

Re:How about this?

[cfulmer]

Uhh... First of all, "Prevailing wage" is a red herring. If it's a factory job and everybody's making the same thing, prevailing wage is easy to calculate. If, however, it's a high-tech company and everybody is on a different payscale, it's nearly impossible.

In any case, the problem is with supply-and-demand: the availability of the H1-B visa drives the prevailing wage down, or at least keeps it from rising as it would if there were not an alternative source of workers.

As to your (b) point, H1-B visas allow employers to decide "Well, I could retrain this American, or I could get an H1-B visaholder." If there were fewer H1-B visas, then there would be more Americans retrained.

I think that the entire H1-B visa system needs to be modified: rather than having the first-come, first-served model where all the H1-B visas run out on the first day, the right to have a visa should be auctioned off. Those employers who actually need those with skills that are difficult to acquire domestically will be able to hire into those positions. But, those employers who are just getting an H1-B visaholder because they don't want the additional cost of retraining an American won't.

The other advantage of such a system is that it will give some feedback about whether there are actually too few or too many H1-B visas issued annually: If the prices fetched at auction are really high, then we could release more visas into the pool on the next offer. If the prices are low, that indicates that people are hiring H1-Bs in lieu of Americans, and we could reduce the number of visas.

Re:How about this?

[notea42]

Economists will tell you that a 0% unemployment rate is extremely unhealthy. Although they won't agree on the exact numbers, consensus figures of around 4-5% are usually cited.

Re:How about this?

[Alioth]

It's not quite as simple as that. I worked as an H1B visa worker for a while (I have since returned home) - there were only about 20 people on the entire planet qualified for the job and they _all_ worked in our department (a highly specialized piece of software). In the bespoke software business, this happens from time to time.

Not only did the company have to spend on the order of $4K or so on the process, I was paid the same salary as my colleagues PLUS an international service allowance; I was around 15-20% more expensive than my colleagues. I'm sure if the company could have trained a US worker in sufficient time they would have because it'd have saved them quite a bit of money.

Re:How about this?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

So, if you need a Swing expert with at least 4 years of experience to be a lead on an important project, and your market has plenty of Americans with a CS degree and no experience, should you hire an inexperienced american that will not be able to perform his duties?

Either you should train that American- OR you should consider perhaps using a tool that has more of a following in the industry. OR, just perhaps, you should consider paying a large enough wage to get an American Swing Expert with 4 years of experience?

In the St Louis area, my company has had problems hiring skilled programmers. Only 1 in 10 resumes come from Americans, and those tend to be quite weak. In one occasion, after looking for 8 months we got a single qualified applicant, who just happened to be an H1-B holder. Why not hire him?

Did it ever occur to you to perhaps increase the salary to equivalent to your CEO?

Besides, some unemployment is healthy. If you've ever had an actual job, you'd probably know that there's plenty of programmers out there that are so incompetent that they create more work than they do. Those guys SHOULD be unemployed, regardless of their country of origin. Who in their right mind would want to hire a dog like that over someone with talent?

Somebody who realizes that a good programmer can be trained to do anything?

Re:How about this?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Near as I can tell, economists as a class are a bunch of traitors willing to sell their research to the highest bidder. It would be a miracle for them to perscribe economic decisions that supported a middle class, let alone an economy that actually supports people instead of people as resources to be consumed by the rich.

Re:How about this?

[nasch]

How many of these workers being imported do you suppose are working in the areas of science and math? 2? 3? There is no shortage of skilled labor in the IT area, so why import workers? So they'll work for less, that's why.

Re:How about this?

[HardCase]

considering H1b visas cost about 2k not including the legal fees...

$130.00. Cheap at twice the price!

We hire H1B engineers because finding an experienced signal integrity engineer who wants to work in flyover country is pretty damn tough - and that's with above-industry salaries.

It's a shame, too, because you guys who won't consider anything more than 200 miles inland are missing out.

IT guys I don't know so much about - all of them (except for the freakin' loud Scottish guy) that I see around my building are from the US.

-h-

Re:How about this?

[Bobzibub]

What about about Marxist Economists then?
-b

Re:How about this?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

What about about Marxist Economists then?

To a large extent they're JUST as corrupt- the only difference is that their highest bidder is The Party instead of a Corporation. There is no difference between encouraging a totalitarian government with promises of economic freedom that are never fullfilled OR a totalitarian corporation with promises of economic freedom that are never fullfilled.

Re:How about this?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

We hire H1B engineers because finding an experienced signal integrity engineer who wants to work in flyover country is pretty damn tough - and that's with above-industry salaries.

Have you thought about going to the local state university and funding a scholarship or two to make some homegrown ones? Or didn't it occur to you that businesses that do this get to set the cirriculum and end up with more sales as the lower achieving class members end up working retail (and knowing YOUR product!) or for your competitors (and knowing YOUR product!).

Re:How about this?

[Bobzibub]

Just joking really!
To your question, there is a difference: One is Communism, the other Facism.

I have had some economics training. One of my profs used to say that he'd get interviewed on the news and to provide a balanced approach, he'd be on a panel with an absolute wing nut.

I think that in general there are professional economists (typically with the brown cordorroy sports jacket and brown tie) and the "pundits" who dress very well. You might think that that is a shallow comment, but it speaks to the idea that some mean to describe and some mean to persuade.

The pundits are the ones who use neoclassical economics ideas and turn them into a justification for any old thing. Seen that alot in the current administration. And you know that they are not just wrong, but they are mis-applying the theories to support ideology.

Professional economists are more interested in ideas than ideology. I'd bet, for example, that most professional economists in the US would avocate socialized medicine because the costs to society as a whole are lower. A pundit would argue that consumer choice and the market place are the best way to allocate scarce resources. Nevermind that there are externalities galore, informational asymetry, and empirical evidence to support socialized medicine.

Professional economists attempt a difficult thing: modeling real life. Pundits are paid to advocate some position. Not the same.

Cheers,
-b

Re:How about this?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

in sufficient time

You sound like a true rareity to me- one for whom the H-1b visa did as it was advertised it was going to do. I think the keyword is right there- in sufficient time. Just about any business can sponsor a scholoarship for a graduate student to learn just about anything in America- given 4 years and $40,000. Perhaps that's what we need it to take to get an H-1b.

Re:How about this?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Just joking really!

I didn't catch that, because I'm not. I'm incredibly pissed that the promises of true capitalism (cottage industries, you can do anything you like) and true communism (the state takes care of all of your needs in exchange for a relatively minor portion of your time, and you can still do anything you want) are lies.

To your question, there is a difference: One is Communism, the other Facism

:-) I like you- you're completely correct....mine's based on effect to the average citizen, in which case there is no difference between communism and facism other than who is giving you the orders.

I have had some economics training. One of my profs used to say that he'd get interviewed on the news and to provide a balanced approach, he'd be on a panel with an absolute wing nut.

We seem to have quite the bumper crop of the later in recent years- either trying to convince you to give away more of your income in taxes in return for services, or that hard work will make you rich, neither of which is true. The services and the riches seem to never materialize.

I think that in general there are professional economists (typically with the brown cordorroy sports jacket and brown tie) and the "pundits" who dress very well. You might think that that is a shallow comment, but it speaks to the idea that some mean to describe and some mean to persuade.

The man in the suit is always trying to sell you something; else he would not be wearing a suit. Hacker's Ethic Rule #4.

The pundits are the ones who use neoclassical economics ideas and turn them into a justification for any old thing. Seen that alot in the current administration. And you know that they are not just wrong, but they are mis-applying the theories to support ideology.

Saw a lot of it in the last 3 administrations. Heck, in fact, I've seen nothing else in my conscious, adult life; and the lies go all the way back to 2nd grade for me. Work hard, and you will be rich.

Professional economists are more interested in ideas than ideology. I'd bet, for example, that most professional economists in the US would avocate socialized medicine because the costs to society as a whole are lower. A pundit would argue that consumer choice and the market place are the best way to allocate scarce resources. Nevermind that there are externalities galore, informational asymetry, and empirical evidence to support socialized medicine.

Yeah, but thanks to the pundits, I have to wonder if the excess taxes for socialized medicine will result in anything real as far as quality is concerned- or just the same set of people getting rich at our expense like in Hillarycare (I thought that was funny- they called her a Marxist, but what self-respecting Marxist would design a socialized health care system that left the HMOs in charge?).

Professional economists attempt a difficult thing: modeling real life. Pundits are paid to advocate some position. Not the same.

Yeah, but there's another thing that has been bothering me- I've yet to see any "Professional Economist" come out against Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage- DESPITE 30 years worth of real data to the contrary (it's been that long since the United States ran a trade surplus). It seems to me some parts of the model need some *serious* reworking, thanks to the pundits misusing them to destroy the middle class worldwide.

Re:How about this?

[HardCase]

Have you thought about going to the local state university and funding a scholarship or two to make some homegrown ones? Or didn't it occur to you that businesses that do this get to set the cirriculum and end up with more sales as the lower achieving class members end up working retail (and knowing YOUR product!) or for your competitors (and knowing YOUR product!).

Interesting that you should mention that. The engineering program at my local university exists almost entirely because of a huge endowment that my company made. We fund many scholarships and hire at least a hundred interns every year, just at one site - and rougly 75% of those interns receive job offers upon graduation.

However, a degree does not make experience, particularly in the area of signal integrity engineering. Even so, we have hired interns as full time engineers - three of them in the past five years. However, it's not possible to have a well-developed signal integrity program without engineers who have many years of experience.

Since you obviously aren't familiar with the field, I can tell you that, typically, a signal integrity engineer stays with the same company for years - often for his or her entire career. Experience is precious in the field and companies work to keep those engineers.

As far as the donating business setting the curriculum, that's not really true. The curriculum, at least for a BSEE, is fairly standard from school to school and is set to meet the standards of the ACE. Speaking from experience, there is very little room in an undergraduate engineer's schedule to provide meaningful university training in a specific field. We do use internships and co-op programs to fill in knowledge that we require, but a year-long internship is not the same as a year of full-time work experience - and it's nothing like the 5+ years of experience that we really look for in a simulation engineer.

Fortunately, we can use H1B visas to make up for the lack of experienced engineers who don't want to leave the Bay Area or the Pacific Northwest.

-h-

Re:How about this?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Actually I'm in the Pacific Northwest- and I remember in MY undergraduate degree, which had almost nothing to do with what you're looking at (I'm a software engineer) we *still* used Tektronics osciloscopes...and Microsoft operating systems...and HP computers and calculators...Mentor Graphics chip programmers and ASIC designers...Orcad circuit designers...Microsoft UML and project managment tools. All of which had a huge influence on the cirriculum offered; if that's the only thing available in the lab that's what you are going to use. I'm absolutely certain all of these companies not only got good engineers out of the program- but also made quite a few sales to lesser companies that other graduates went to.

Which is why I brought it up- perhaps in 5-6 years you'll start seeing graduate students come out with that experience, if your company keeps going the way they have been. The more of this sort of thing your company does- the more experience the graduates will have and the less you'll have to rely on importing them from other states and other countries.

It just bugs me (being in an industry where the H-1b is much more commonly misused to reduce costs) hearing about these companies complaining that there is nobody trainable- and then to a large exent doing nothing to remedy the situation.

Re:How about this?

[LionMage]

considering H1b visas cost about 2k not including the legal fees (goes to about 4k per person overall) and they have to be paid the prevailing wage, the issue is not that is it cheap labor.

Except that in practice, H1B visa workers in the IT industry never get paid what their native-born counterparts get paid. As another poster in this thread pointed out, "prevailing wage" is hard to compute for IT companies where pay scales vary widely... and the standard practice at companies where I've worked is, the management always low-balls the estimate of "prevailing wage" when looking to hire H1B visa workers.

It's this disparity between the letter of the law and the actual practice of the law that has a lot of IT workers like myself steamed up.

Another related practice is the hiring of "perpetual contractors." It's so much easier to have a work force made entirely of disposable people, even if it means paying a small premium (higher hourly wages) for the flexibility of being able to get rid of someone at a moment's notice. (And let's not forget that most contractors get no benefits, or typically poor benefits if they work through a consulting company.)

Re:How about this?

[LionMage]

Besides, some unemployment is healthy. If you've ever had an actual job, you'd probably know that there's plenty of programmers out there that are so incompetent that they create more work than they do. [Emphasis mine.] Those guys SHOULD be unemployed, regardless of their country of origin. Who in their right mind would want to hire a dog like that over someone with talent?

Somebody who realizes that a good programmer can be trained to do anything?

Um, if you paid attention to the section of the grandparent post (which I helpfully emphasized in boldface), you'd see that the grandparent poster was talking about incompetent people who should remain unemployed. Sorry, but if someone is incompetent, it usually isn't because of lack of training, but typically because of lack of raw talent. There are plenty of incompetent programmers out there, and I wouldn't want them on my team in the hopes that they might actually rise to the level of skill where they'd be useful.

Yeah, a "good" programmer can be trained to do anything. I guess in my vocabulary, "incompetent" typically precludes an assessment of "good."

As for why there is a glut of incompetence and mediocre talent out there, I suspect it has a lot to do with all the degree mills running full tilt during the dot-com boom.

Re:How about this?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Um, if you paid attention to the section of the grandparent post (which I helpfully emphasized in boldface), you'd see that the grandparent poster was talking about incompetent people who should remain unemployed. Sorry, but if someone is incompetent, it usually isn't because of lack of training, but typically because of lack of raw talent. There are plenty of incompetent programmers out there, and I wouldn't want them on my team in the hopes that they might actually rise to the level of skill where they'd be useful.

At which point you've created a self-fullfilling prophecy, is my point. If no company is willing to put in the time/money to turn incompetant people into competant people, then how can they possibly expect to be able to hire competant people? I don't believe in ingrown talent for coding, aside from a few autistics (which other people would most certainly call incompetant due to their lack of ability to interact with customers). Give me 8 years, and I can train ANYBODY to code adequately. Of course, I'd start them out on an interpreter, and only slowly move them up to modern OOP programming....with stops at assembly, scripting, state machine theory, database normalization, database denormalization, procedural, RPN, SP, and multithreading along the way.

Yeah, a "good" programmer can be trained to do anything. I guess in my vocabulary, "incompetent" typically precludes an assessment of "good."

All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.

As for why there is a glut of incompetence and mediocre talent out there, I suspect it has a lot to do with all the degree mills running full tilt during the dot-com boom.

I would agree with that. Most of them skipped some of the neccessary steps I mentioned above. But the important part is- so do most of the foreign degree mills, such as IIT. I'll bet that among H-1bs you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who can code MOD 2 in assembly in any less than five instructions.

Re:How about this?

[LionMage]

If no company is willing to put in the time/money to turn incompetant people into competant people, then how can they possibly expect to be able to hire competant people? I don't believe in ingrown talent for coding, aside from a few autistics (which other people would most certainly call incompetant due to their lack of ability to interact with customers). Give me 8 years, and I can train ANYBODY to code adequately.

You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. I've seen quite a few sorry cases cross my path in the past, and although it's possible to break some people of bad programming habits, it's impossible to teach some things if the student is simply incapable of learning them. You can cure someone of ignorance, but you can't cure stupidity.

I have a big problem with your definition of "incompetence." For example, in the above quoted passage, you speak initially of incompetence in the programming domain, then you speak more generally about "incompetence" in the social-intelligence domain. These are two separate domains which you are conflating. If someone lacks social skills, you don't put them in a customer-facing role.

All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.

Depending, again, on what you call incompetence. The problem is, you don't seem to acknowledge that raw talent (which for programmers equates to general and mathematical intelligence) is a huge component of competency. You can't really teach someone to be smarter, although it seems to be true that people can "train up" various kinds of intelligence in their own brains.

The primary factors in the development of intelligence are genetics and the early childhood development years -- two factors that you have no control over when evaluating a candidate.

Unfortunately, employers in the United States are prohibited from administering intelligence tests. And as previous studies have shown (sorry, don't have the Slashdot link-o-matic for this), incompetent people are usually too incompetent to realize that they're incompetent, yet they usually do well because they are overly-confident in their own skills. Because of this, employers have to resort to domain-specific aptitude tests, which discriminate against otherwise talented candidates who lack experience with a specific API or a specific coding style.

Give me 8 years, and I can train ANYBODY to code adequately. Of course, I'd start them out on an interpreter, and only slowly move them up to modern OOP programming....with stops at assembly, scripting, state machine theory, database normalization, database denormalization, procedural, RPN, SP, and multithreading along the way.

And what you've just described is a college Computer Science curriculum, more or less. (And a few of the things you mentioned have a kind of "buzzword" feel to them, which makes me think these are things you find specifically useful but which should be covered as part of a more general curriculum. For instance, RPN -- assuming you meant Reverse Polish Notation -- is a specific subset of various notations and syntaxes that can be used in programming languages.)

An employer should not be expected to provide the foundations of a computer science degree. Unfortunately, most degree mills have programs that focus on "practical knowledge" and which gloss over general-but-useful information, such as determining the efficiency of an algorithm and expressing it in O-notation; hence, such degrees dilute the meaning of degrees issued by more prestigious institutions with more rigorous academic standards, so employers' standards have fallen as a result.

So, yeah, if you're an employer and you have 8 years to waste on teaching someone from ground zero, great. Most employers don't. An employer should be expected to train people up on the domain-specific knowledge they need, such as operational knowledge specific to how the company does business.

You als

Re:How about this?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You and I are going to have to agree to disagree. I've seen quite a few sorry cases cross my path in the past, and although it's possible to break some people of bad programming habits, it's impossible to teach some things if the student is simply incapable of learning them. You can cure someone of ignorance, but you can't cure stupidity.

The biggest cause of stupidity is instructors who fail to realize that there's more than one way to learn. I've run into a few of those myself in my career- and every time, by finding a way to break down their assignments to something they could handle, they excelled. Unfortuneately, I have had, at times, managers who did not support this idea- at which point I would give you some credit. You can't cure stupidity if your superiors are so infected with it that they thing any project that takes longer than four months is a failure.

I have a big problem with your definition of "incompetence." For example, in the above quoted passage, you speak initially of incompetence in the programming domain, then you speak more generally about "incompetence" in the social-intelligence domain. These are two separate domains which you are conflating. If someone lacks social skills, you don't put them in a customer-facing role.

Well, you don't unless you want to teach them social skills. I thought my Asperger's would forever be a barrier to working with customers- until I was placed in a role of having to examine 60,000 Access databases on 4,638 customer machines for an upgrade to Office 2002 from Office 97. Now I include that experience on my resume- along with some very nice e-mails from some of the later customers. (And yes, to a certain extent stupidity played a role there as well- about 40,000 of those MDBs were named db1.mdb and had nothing in them).

Depending, again, on what you call incompetence. The problem is, you don't seem to acknowledge that raw talent (which for programmers equates to general and mathematical intelligence) is a huge component of competency. You can't really teach someone to be smarter, although it seems to be true that people can "train up" various kinds of intelligence in their own brains.

Ah, you're coming at it from THAT angle. Well, you'd probably call my 11 year career only mediocre programming- I have almost *no* mathematical talent, but my talent is more poetical- I can read code and know when something doesn't feel right. There's more to talent than just mathematics- which I see as just another language with arbitrary axioms, which pretty much describes every computer language I've run across.

The primary factors in the development of intelligence are genetics and the early childhood development years -- two factors that you have no control over when evaluating a candidate.

A good instructor can take any combination of the two- and train a savant ability where none existed previous. I've even started with 50 year olds and taught them to code well enough to be on my team- I don't let them have a whole lot of creative control though.

Unfortunately, employers in the United States are prohibited from administering intelligence tests. And as previous studies have shown (sorry, don't have the Slashdot link-o-matic for this), incompetent people are usually too incompetent to realize that they're incompetent, yet they usually do well because they are overly-confident in their own skills. Because of this, employers have to resort to domain-specific aptitude tests, which discriminate against otherwise talented candidates who lack experience with a specific API or a specific coding style.

They could replace both of those with funding a good postgraduate ciriculum in what they need, then hiring the graduates of that ciriculum.

And what you've just described is a college Computer Science curriculum, more or less. (And a few of the things you mentioned have a kind of "buzzword" feel to them, which makes me think these are things you find specific

Re:How about this?

[DiscoDave_25]

IANAEconomist however I did study this at College.

The ideal balance is referred to as the Non Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU).

This is essentially the level of unemployment at which the inflation rate holds steady and is a function of many aspects, one of the most important being job security (or insecurity). This is the magic point at which all wage pressures and spending controls balance out to maintain the stability of inflation (which can still be >0 just not changing).

It's one of the figures that few people can agree on so 2% - 6% have all been banded about, also as it has a sociological basis it also means that it will vary over time and location.

In essence if you are less than this value people will demand more money (as there are other jobs out there) and wages rise, causing inflation to rise in a spiral so 0% unemployment is a good way to cause serious problems in the country.

As an aside there are a number of people looking at how social welfare programs impact this calculation, especially true where the welfare programs are generous, although there are no solid conclusions aside from a very general opinion that good social welfare (a la Scandinavia) is a good thing.

Re:How about this?

[Qzukk]

All good programmers start out as incompetent programmers.

Sorry to butt in on your argument, but it's a pretty pointless one. The real issue you two should be arguing isn't one of competency or not, it's one of experience. The original poster whined that there weren't any Swing programmers in his city with 4 years of experience applying to his job. The suggestion was to hire an inexperienced programmer and teach him/her to use Swing. Or to raise the pay to the level necessary to steal a swing programmer from another employer (and I'll add a third option:*shock* *gasp* offer to relocate a programmer to the area). (or at least offer to accept resumes from out of state employees... I can't count the number of jobs I applied to that I called to follow up only to find that they trashed my resume simply because I wasn't "local" even though I was more than willing and able to relocate myself out of this humid pit of a city)

All good programmers start out as inexperienced programmers. Refusing a good programmer because he hasn't got 10 years of experience in C# doesn't help anyone.

Simple

[voice_of_all_reason]

Just point at random people in line and shout "ter'ist!" Since, as we all know, Being Accused of Terrorism is now a class A felony. Department officials can simply pack 'em up to the nearest concentration... err immigration camps. And the lines get shorter, too!

My solution to the problem

[Brian Stretch]

1) Automate the heck out of the system. Duh.

2) Put skilled workers on the fast track for citizenship and skip this H1B visa nonsense. Any country that makes our marginal tax rates look good deserves to lose their best and brightest, and keeping those workers tied to a given employer is just plain wrong.

3) Annex Mexico. Seriously. Allegedly 30% of the Mexican work force is already here and there are an awful lot of American retirees down there. Auction off Pemex and distribute the money to the Mexican states on a per-capita basis to finance the transition to greater state and local control. Make English the official language of the unified federal government. We'd pick up some nice beachfront property. Pass the Flat Tax and return Socialist Security to its original mission of being old age insurance (kicking in at 3 years past average life expectancy, which was 65 when FDR got us into this mess) first to simplify things. Anyhow, this would reduce the workload on the INS quite a bit.

Re:My solution to the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: #3... Why annex Mexico? Why not let the 31 Mexican states join our 50 under the US's constitution and form an even stronger nation?

While I don't agree with him completely, a buddy of mine has been doing some writing about this: http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/03/29/dra wing-north-america.html and http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/04/11/ann ex-mexico.html

I'd be posting this under my own name but I was forced to mod someone down earlier before seeing your post.

Re:My solution to the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

How the fuck this imperialistic shit got modded insightful?

Re:My solution to the problem

[Brian Stretch]

Re: #3... Why annex Mexico? Why not let the 31 Mexican states join our 50 under the US's constitution and form an even stronger nation?

While I don't agree with him completely, a buddy of mine has been doing some writing about this: http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/03/29/dra wing-north-america.html and http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com/archive/2006/04/11/ann ex-mexico.html

YES! That's more-or-less what I meant, though having 31 states join could pose problems in terms of Senate representation. Thanks for the links!

What H1-B is FOR

[sakusha]

The original intent of the H1-B program is still encoded into its operational law. It was originally intended for the sole purpose of importing unique talent that could ONLY be found outside the US, specifically, foreign language instructors. Since the USA has a miniscule talent pool of foreign language speakers and instructors, they MUST be imported from other countries.
I know many Japanese language instructors working on H1-B visas, since the new post-9/11 procedures were implemented, they have extreme difficulty renewing their visas every year, which makes it almost impossible for them to commit to jobs in universities, which are renewed annually. This is almost solely due to the visa program being clogged up with visa seekers who want to work at computer companies. Let me make this clear: there are NO jobs in the US IT industry that cannot be filled by Americans. IT talent can be educated and created in the US, unlike native speakers of foreign languages, which MUST be educated and created outside the US. Every H1-B visa granted to a foreign IT worker displaces a job that could be granted to an unemployed American IT worker. The demand by companies like Sun and Microsoft to increase H1-B workers for IT jobs is because they don't want to hire Americans at regular wages when they can get a foreigner to work at slave wages on an H1-B visa.

Re:What H1-B is FOR

[LionMage]

You know, I can see why some of the other comments on this article got a "Troll" moderation, but I really fail to see how this comment is a troll.

In short, this poster is correct -- the original intention of the H1B visa was to import unique talent that could not be found here. I'm going to disagree with sakusha on the scope of that -- s/he seems to think that this was primarily to lure native speakers of other languages here for foreign language instruction, and I don't think the scope was quite that narrow. (Specifically, there are foreign-developed technologies that we'd like to have here, and providing a path for foreign workers to come here to help us get up to speed on those technologies is a good thing.)

I'm sure there are those who would take exception to the suggestion that H1B workers are paid far less than their American counterparts, since the law says these workers are supposed to get paid the same... However, the reality doesn't match the letter of the law, as most employers who hire large numbers of H1B visas can play fast and loose with their estimates of a "typical salary" for any given position might be. And if an employer advertises for applicants for a position, but the posted salary range is far lower than what most Americans would be willing to work for, the employer can use the lack of response to the advertisement as evidence of a lack of skilled talent.

Re:What H1-B is FOR

[sakusha]

Well thanks for the support, but I don't think I quite got my point across. The intent of H1-B was not to just import talent that is not found in the US, but to import talent that could NEVER be found in the US. Foreign languages were specifically raised as a reason for implementing H1-B visas, you must have native speakers educated in a foreign land to teach the native accents and expressions properly. Of course this could equally apply to any specific technology that is exclusive to another country, say for example, if Latvia had a worldwide monopoly on some specific machining technique to make some device, then you'd need trained Latvian machinist immigrants if you want to make those devices in the US.

But this does NOT apply to IT skills. Anyone in any land can learn the same programming languages and concepts, and besides, most computer systems are designed (if not built) in the US anyway, we have a headstart on the technology. Importing C++ and Oracle programmers from Bangalore makes as much sense as the fabled importation of coals to Newcastle.

Re:What H1-B is FOR

[LionMage]

Actually, thanks for the clarification... although I still think the "bootstrapping" rationale is valid even for IT. Let's use your Latvian machinist example as a starting point; presumably, after we'd had Latvian machinists here on H1-B status for a number of years, there would be some absorption of the basic technology and talent to use the technology here in the U.S. After some time, there should be no more need to hire these famed Latvian machinists, as the technology and requisite skills would have been absorbed and taught to U.S. workers.

To bring this back to IT, suppose there's some new programming technology or methodology that isn't currently well understood in the U.S. -- a technology or methodology that was developed in another country. Naturally, you'd want to import the people who have these skills using H1-B visas. I don't think the H1-B visa regulations were meant to bar guest workers who have skills that could be learned by an American -- only to allow guest workers who have skills that no American currently possesses. Naturally, once the knowledge transfer takes place and a pool of domestic workers with this new skill is developed, you should no longer be relying on a pool of H1-B visa talent.

The Future of IT Is Clear

[Baldrson]

The Future of IT is clear:

US contractors are paid by the State Department to streamline the H-1b visa workflow.

Then they go on unemployment until they realize why they can't even get a minimum wage job.

Then they volunteer for The Minuteman Project.

Then Congress passes "immigration reform" to put all illegal aliens on "a path to citizenship".

Then....

Re:The Future of IT Is Clear

[PinkPanther]

Yes, now it is absolutely clear. Because, of course, people applying for H-1B visas are all illegals...

Please, don't let Lou Dobbs (et al.) guide your world. He's an idiot. Don't follow suit.

Check-list for job applicants

[VP]

1. Does the applicant show initiative, is he/she proactive?

No. (Give me a call)

2. When presented with a problem, does the applicant find a general solution, or is he/she looking for a temporary shortcut?

Temporary shortcut. (You know what's faster? Hiring an American)

3. Recommendation for hire?

Not recommended.

Re:Check-list for job applicants

[drewzhrodague]

I realize what you posted was meant as a joke, but that is not a good solution to either unemployment of American workers, and the current influx of unauthorized immigration.

1. Does the applicant show initiative, is he/she proactive?

No. (Give me a call)

Actually, GP is showing initiative by suggesting you contact an American worker, rather than an unauthorized immigrant. Seems to me that he's looking for work, and inviting you to call him.


2. When presented with a problem, does the applicant find a general solution, or is he/she looking for a temporary shortcut?

Temporary shortcut. (You know what's faster? Hiring an American)

Doesn't that seem like a permanent solution -- hiring a local employee?


3. Recommendation for hire?
Not recommended.

And the local worker doesn't get the job, and company pays extra to do a visa. I'm quite iritated at the whole hiring process these days, and I had to pipe up.

And while I'm at it, I say let Future Americans come. Let 'em come by boat, by plane, bus, and by foot. If they can get themselves here, they should be allowed to be here, and work, and pay taxes.

Not THAT Vista

[DesireCampbell]

I didn't read the summary and just dove into the story, thinking it was about what Microsoft is doing to speed up production of 'Vista'.

Then I thought, "it's some kind of metaphor?"

Nope, it's actually about vistas. Next time I will RTFS. :P

Re:Not THAT Vista

[Radres]

What's really going to blow your mind is when you realize that it's "Visa" and not "Vista". And then you're going to probably think that the article is about the credit card company and not immigration.

Re:Not THAT Vista

[DesireCampbell]

Aw fuck, I can't even read. I'm going to kill myself now.

so many ways to rebut/mock this...

[way2trivial]

1- fashion model is not a specialty occupation?
2- what defines 'ability' of a model?
3- what about distinguished merit and NO ability models like XXX (insert your own answer)

etc...

Re:so many ways to rebut/mock this...

[antifoidulus]

3- what about distinguished merit and NO ability models like XXX (insert your own answer)

Holy shit, they give away H1Bs for porn stars now? I guess it is a special talent.

Re: Breaking the Visa Backlog

[stevey]

You know you've been reading Slashdot too long when you assume the title of this article contained a typo for "vista".

Having been through it

[Alioth]

Having been through the visa process (and I'm not in a 'high demand' country like India), they do it to themselves mainly as far as workload. Part of the problem is that the people they are accountable to (the US voter) are not the people they serve (the immigrant), and INS and US Embassy jobs seem to attract more of its fair share of jobsworths and "little hitler" bureaucrats who just love to mess people around.

Take for example this. The US Embassy in London rejected my APPROVED visa application (it was an extension to a visa, and the INS in the United States had approved it, and all the embassy was required to do was to stick a new visa in my passport) because one of the forms was "out of date". So I downloaded the new, up to date form off their website. I couldn't believe it when I looked at it - it was absolutely identical to the old form, except the date at the bottom was different!

On a previous application, they rejected my application because the company I worked for hadn't filled out the form right (according to them; according to our international assignments department, generally they find a formula that works with the forms - and the forms will be processed OK by the Embassy for about 6 months, and then without warning they start rejecting them. Then they have to to-and-fro in a trial and error process until the Embassy begins accepting the forms again. And about 6 months later, the forms start getting rejected again - rinse and repeat). I had to go to London, sit in the Embassy for 4 hours.

The Embassy itself was quite interesting. You sit in this large square room, and at the end are a bunch of bank teller style windows. There is a delicatessen-style number system. You are given a ticket and wait until your number is called. Of course, prior experience with the Embassy means that you know for sure if you miss your number, they will NOT call it out again and you will be sent away - so it's incredibly difficult to do something like read a book to pass the time just in case you miss the number. There are these 'newspapers' they leave too, I think they were called "Going USA". The first half of this paper is devoted to how great the USA is (land of opportunity etc., it seemed mainly to be stories about people who wanted to immigrate to run gas stations), and how awful your home country is by comparison. The second half of this paper is dedicated to telling you how you will never, ever get a visa! So anyway, my number was called. The question?

"How long have you been working for this company"
"3 years so far"
"That's fine" (stamp stamp). "You'll get your passport back in about 3 days"

They could have asked me that over the phone rather than incurring the cost of going all the way to London, waiting 4 hours, and then sending me away.

The Embassy is probably even worse now. I've heard that the ones in India will reject your application unless you turn up in a business suit (but that's just hearsay, I can't substantiate that). They have all sorts of petty bureacratic rules they won't tell you - they just reject applications with nothing except a very vague reason, and you have to keep retrying until you satisfy them (and even then, after a few months, forms that were completely satisfactory are suddenly unsatisfactory with more vague reasons for rejection).

Then there's the obvious bias. An Irish friend of mine actually got naturalized as a US citizen. He's a doctor. There was a family in front of him for one of the interviews done by the INS. They got given a real grilling - not in a private interview room, but in front of everyone in the waiting room. When he got there? "Oh, Doctor Smart, yes this is acceptable" >stampstamp. It seemed like if you were a doctor, you weren't subjected to the INS Dehumanization adn Demoralization Programme.

Re:Having been through it

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that the USCIS system is broke.
Havning gone from L2,L2+EAD,renewals,H1b, and now onto perm residency, I can assure you that at every single point USCIS has been late beyond the X days advertized. Except for the original L2. (That one is on demand at the border.)

But how about this for a policy:
By law, these procedures have a number of days from filing date and then after that, you can get a temporary version while they sort their issues.

However, they have done an end-run around the law: If they review an application, they can request a document (In my case a copy of Marriage Certificate, which they already have at least five other copies of) and then the 90 days is not extended by the time to fill this information request, but actually reset to zero! Extra-legally.

The processing is done in regional centers that have their stats published. Apparently, this procedure is regularly used to manage work flows and, I believe, inflate their numbers.

So why should Mr. Yankee Doodle care? Well, I'm from a western country, and it has pissed me off. But so what? If I was an unstable guy from a middle eastern country, I'd be pissed off too. Furthermore, I'd think that they were yanking my chain because I was swarthy. Or the wrong religion. Now ripe for an indoctrination by an evil organization, which nobody wants.

The fact that many USCIS people are about as pleseant as the school bus driver on South Park doesn't help matters either. Ask someone who's been through a green card interview process: I haven't done mine yet, but I've heard horror stories first hand. Like USCIS making an obvious clerical error such as entering a little island nation that starts with A instead of Australia, and then the USCIS person grilling the clearly Austrailian couple for 20 minutes on the USCIS error. Or being fingerprinted for the third time...

That doesn't helpl anyone's security. USCIS has a long way to go.

Re:Having been through it

[EvilMagnus]

I, too, have been thru the H1-b and green card process, and I agree with your experiences.

Fortunately I never had to do consular processing (I got my H1b, and had my green card application underway, before 9/11/01), but I got caught in a nasty backlog for my EAD (Work Authorisation document for folks waiting on a green card application, for those of you who are following along).

What happened is this: EADs are good for 1 year. Up until 2 years ago, you used to apply for a new EAD 6 weeks prior to the old one expiring, and could get it renewed at your local INS Office. The entire process took about two weeks, so a six week window was considered appropriate and prudent. Two months before my EAD expired INS changed how they handled things ; you now had to apply to the local Regional center, and wait times shot up (in the space of 1 day) from about two weeks to *over three months*. I think at one point the backlog hit six months - on a document that's only valid for a year!

So by INS fiat I was immediately barred from working for at least a month because there was no way I could get my EAD renewed in the time before it expired. INS moved the goalposts on me, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Simple math suggests this process change affected at least 5% of all EAD holders - INS effectively removed the ability to legally work to tens of thousands of legal immigrants and applicants, for a period of weeks or months.

In my case I appealed through my local Congressman and got my EAD after (only!) going a month without working (or being paid, naturally). I was reasonably fortunate.

Ironically, my Green Card was granted about two weeks after my EAD was renewed. I suspect it was because the Congressional inquiry got INS to look at the entire file, and just decided to approve it instead of deal with the hassle of putting the file back in queue.

Because US Citizens don't need jobs

[pkcs11]

Good thing someone is speeding up the process to remove jobs from US citizens.
For a while I was worried that too many 3rd world nations and emerging markets were simply being ignored.

H-1b aren't minimum wage

[Baldrson]

Illegal aliens aren't on a path to H-1b visas, which are being targeted mainly at lowering middle class wages. Illegal aliens are the ones who:

1. Remove the job market "safety net" for falling middle class families so they no longer can support themselves even at the level of minimum wage poverty.
2. Provide an outlet for frustration over the rising price of real estate relative to wages by virtue of being "illegal" -- which is a more politically defensible target than "they're taking my means of support!".

The answer can always be heard from the employers:

"So learn to live like the "hard working" Mexicans!"

/. takes side against users, film at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny that /. would take the side of the H1B people, who are in effect running many American IT people out of business, and forcing them into lower paying jobs. Because /. is run by American IT people, and the vast majority of its readers are American IT people. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

We don't need more H1B's, we already have all the low quality indian programmers here that we need (and yes in general for every 1 good indian programmer we get 20 tht just SUCK). There are still a lot of IT people here who need jobs, and don't need a green card (you know they call them citizens), if it weren't for having so many H1B's they all have good paying jobs now.

and for all those who will moderate me as flamebait, please, grow up, this is a huge issue in the Bay Area and the other tech centers in this country. That or please go home.

Rite of Passage

[LithiumX]

The process of getting a visa is not meant to be a punishment. It's meant to introduce you to our country by showing you what it's like to be a citizen.

DMV

(or DPS for us Texans)

Until you have stood in line, and felt the mind-numbing soul-sucking near-lethal apathy of waiting to get your driver's license or anything else from those godforsaken offices, or waited to pay local taxes... you cannot truly be prepared for the US.

The visa application process is merely to weed out the weaklings, so that they don't keel over and die HERE when suddenly faced with our lines.

Re: Breaking the Visa Backlog

[lordmage]

You got me..

I really thought that for a minute..

CHEERS to you !!

Mod Parent UP

[Banner]

This isn't a troll. This is why it is supposed to be hard. You're SUPPOSED to hire an American First. That is the law surrounding H1B visas. That it isn't enforced doesn't change that fact.

Troll MOD BS

[Anonymous Coward]

You can tell the number of non-american's posting to this forum by the fact that all of the factual posts about H1B's are being modded to troll.

What BS.

I love the unemployment figures

[phorm]

If 99% of your population were able to just get by on a MacDonald's job filling french-fry orders and living in a 6x9' apartment it would still give you a 1% employment rate. What it doesn't consider is the fact that they're in jobs that suck, at least partly because the higher jobs don't pay shit either as they've been filled by H1B's who work double hours unpaid overtime for slightly more than said fry-fry job pays...

Re:I love the unemployment figures

[ivan256]

If our tax system wasn't broken, minimum wage jobs wouldn't have to be poverty level jobs. Though I have a bit of a problem with that too, because minimum wage applies to everybody, but there is no good reason we should be obligated to pay, say, a 16 year old highschool student, a living wage.

All the H1Bs at my company with the same job title as the US workers all make approximately the same amount of money. And yes, I know, because they have to post the salaries as part of the application process. It's a myth, for the most part anyway, that H1Bs are low pay workers. They come here, persue an academic program most Americans were taught is too nerdy by US primary education, and pay taxes and contribute to the US economy. We should be giving them citizenship and kicking out the illegals instead. The reason that an H1B got the higher paying job and the American is flipping burgers is because Americans don't take education seriously anymore. It's part of the culture of the 1950's. The attitude is that it's the government's job to take care of that, that work isn't fun, and that your highschool prom is the most important day of your life. When you combine the fact that education should start at home with the mess politics has made of our education system, what you get is people who are unqualified for high paying jobs. Worse, they're unqualified to learn how to become qualified for a high paying job in a different field. Then you combine that with the '90s where a lot of unqulified people got jobs anyway, and you end up with a lot of unqualified people bitching that an H1B has "their job".

Find me a plumber, or an electrician who is bitching about H1Bs having their jobs. Those are some of the highest paying jobs around once you have several years of experience. Why aren't the H1B displaced fry cooks of the world going out and learning a trade? Why don't they have the basic skills for that already after going through the public education system? Why do people with a BA in philosophy or psychology expect to be employable after college, and why don't schools tell them that when they sign up?