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Complaints Filed Over Firms Seeking H1-B Holders
Vicissidude writes "Since May, the Programmers Guild has filed 100 complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice, accusing several companies of advertising that they specifically want H-1B workers, a violation of U.S. law. The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act requires that U.S. jobs must be available to U.S. workers. The complaints stem from ads containing wording such as "We require candidates for H1B from India," and "We sponsor GC [green card] and we do prefer H1B holders," the Programmers Guild said. The Programmers Guild, looking for ads on major online job boards, has so far targeted only ads seeking computer programmers, the guild said. It plans to file 280 more complaints over the next six months."
Yes, this has completely gone out of hand. Call it 'domestic outsourcing' if you will - the end result is the same: hardworking and highly skilled American engineers have a tougher time finding a job. The H2B visa was never meant as a carde blanche for companies to replace native qualified workers with cheaper immigrant workers. It's time to nip this in the butt once and for all - surely the companies greatly enjoy this situation and it won't change or even get worse if we let 'the free market decide'.
In the dot-com rush of the late 1990s, yes, we needed H1-B workers because there plain simply was not enough workers. Not today. Today, any job posting made public gets hundreds of resumes. Jobs are getting filled quickly; people who have jobs in the tech field are working long hours for a fraction of what they would have made in the hight of the dot-com bubble. More and more companies are laying off workers; Sun just recently laid off 5000 workers. The US job market is weak and the H1-B workers just make it harder.
They don't just want to pay less, they want a carte blanche to treat their employees like crap. An H1-B visa worker will put up with a lot more abuse from an employer since they depend on the employer to keep them in the country. This is the evolution of the idea of preferring people with families to single workers. The theory is, if they have a family, they also have a mortgage, car payments, college tuition, etc... to provide for their family, making it much less likely they will up and quit if the employer treats them unfairly.
The IEEE , Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO and researhers such as Norm Matloff speak up against the H-1B abuse.
Lots of folks speak up against it.
The hired gun lobbyist Harris Miller loses to Jim Webb. Miller ran an unaplogetic pro H-1B and pro-outsourcing campaign. Seems the voters in Virginia don't like Harris Miller's record.
Heck, even Milton Friedman calls it a subsidy.
Ah-ha! There is the real damage being done to not only our economy, but our society as a whole! The idea that it's ok to fill entry level positions with cheap foreign labor/workers it a cancer on our society. Those entry level positions may not be that important, but you learn a lot in those jobs, especially right out of college. If you can't get real world experience, how will you ever get that "nice job"? Get a friend to tailor a job for you in a position you have zero experience with? Fake it on your resume and hope they don't find out? If you do not have entry level positions for those graduating from college, they will never mature into experience programmers/engineers and we'll have to pull from the H-1B visa holders again for the experienced positions. After all, they were the ones in the entry level positions, they got the experience, so they should get the jobs at the next level too. Soon even the most experienced positions will be available for foreign replacement. And where will you be then? In the unemployment line or busing tables like the rest of us educated types who never got our careers off the ground because there were no entry level positions for us.
Space for rent, inquire within
I'm not sure what the Programmer's Guild does, other than make a big stink about H-1B visas.
Might I suggest going to, say, their web site and reading the plain-English ByLaws page? In particular, "ARTICLE 3 - PURPOSE", which contains a bulleted list of, well, what they do.
but if the H-1B situation was really as cut and dried, criminal and downright treasonous as the Programmer's Guild says, wouldn't there be some other parties chiming in on the issue?
Follow the money... Who benefits by driving down the cost of competant IT work? Hint - not "everybody but IT workers", because when we have money, we spend it as though the apocalypse will happen tomorrow.
As for whether or not companies really engage in such reprehensible hiring practices, you need look no further than the employment section of your local paper. See the tiny, unappealing buzzword-laden ads for experienced coders, paying a third the going rate in your area? Those companies will not get responses from anyone but interns. They can then claim they couldn't find anyone to take the job despite "honestly" trying, and can then hire H1Bs.
Regardless of your opinion of outsourced labor, I don't think anyone would consider such transparent tactics as anything but a legal farce.
wouldn't there be some other parties chiming in on the issue?
While IT people may have extremely well-organized personal lives (social and desktop notwithstanding), we don't tend to organize into larger bodies. The "I" in "INTP/INTJ" doesn't stand for "I likes large crowds".
I only care about the country I was born in. The rest of the world can die in nuclear fire as far as I care.
And there was I about to feel sorry for you....
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.