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Feds Consider H-1B Changes After Uncovering Fraud
CWmike writes "A Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman said today that the agency is weighing a series of reforms to the H-1B application process, including the use of 'independent open-source data' to obtain information about visa seekers or the companies that file the petitions on their behalf. The move follows a report by the agency that found widespread problems and evidence of fraud in the nation's H-1B program, including forged documents, fake degrees and shell companies being used in H-1B applications. It also comes after the controversy caused by changes to the H-1B rules earlier this year."
Even if the H-1B program had no fraud it would push wages down in the US by artificially changing the demographic in the workplace.
Older experienced high tech workers are more likely to stay at home with their families. Younger recent graduates are more likely to travel for work/opportunity. They also earn less because they have less experience.
But, it doesn't surprise me that greed leads to fraud in a situation that already drove wages down.
Look at how greed is affecting the economy now. Greedy people want houses they cant afford, greedy bankers want to make money by giving risky loans and turning them over. Greedy companies want to reduce wage costs by defrauding the H-1B program.
It's just par for the course!!
No! It can't be! paying a resource 10k USD/yr to replace a 70k/yr resource offers a lot of incentive to skirt the rules. You would have thought that the sub-standard work would have been outrageous enough, but companies keep offshoring.....
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"On the other hand lower wages make the US' economy more competitive"
If this is true, why don't the CEO's set the trend by taking less? I'm not asking for a lot, just limit you total compensation (salary & bonuses) to something reasonable like a million dollars per year. A million dollars is an amount that many people can't achieve in a lifetime but some CEOs get more than 100 million each year.
And this is why the government is out of control. People would rather blame "the other side" than call a spade a spade.
The least they could do is require H1-Bs to buy a portfolio of stocks and keep it all until they leave the country. I'm sure Wall Street would approve of this plan!
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when it comes to immigration they [congress] are doing exactly the opposite--trying their best to keep the world's best and brightest from darkening America's doors.
Consider the annual April Fool's joke played on applicants for H1B visas, which allow companies to sponsor highly-educated foreigners to work in America for three years or so. The powers-that-be have set the number of visas so low--at 85,000--that the annual allotment is taken up as soon as applications open on April 1st. America then deals with the mismatch between supply and demand in the worst possible way, allocating the visas by lottery. The result is that hundreds of thousands of highly qualified people--entrepreneurs who want to start companies, doctors who want to save lives, scientists who want to explore the frontiers of knowledge--are kept waiting on the spin of a roulette wheel and then, more often than not, denied the chance to work in the United States.
This is a policy of national self-sabotage. America has always thrived by attracting talent from the world. Some 70 or so of the 300 Americans who have won Nobel prizes since 1901 were immigrants. Great American companies such as Sun Microsystems, Intel and Google had immigrants among their founders. Immigrants continue to make an outsized contribution to the American economy. About a quarter of information technology (IT) firms in Silicon Valley were founded by Chinese and Indians. Some 40% of American PhDs in science and engineering go to immigrants. A similar proportion of all the patents filed in America are filed by foreigners.
These bright foreigners bring benefits to the whole of society. The foreigner-friendly IT sector has accounted for more than half of America's overall productivity growth since 1995. Foreigner-friendly universities and hospitals have been responsible for saving countless American cities from collapse. Bill Gates calculates, and respectable economists agree, that every foreigner who is given an H1B visa creates jobs for five regular Americans.
There was a time when ambitious foreigners had little choice but to put up with America's restrictive ways. Europe was sclerotic and India and China were poor and highly restrictive. But these days the rest of the world is opening up at precisely the time when America seems to be closing down. The booming economies of the developing world are sucking back talent that was once America's for the asking. About a third of immigrants who hold high-tech jobs in America are considering returning home. America's rivals are also rejigging their immigration systems to attract global talent.
Canada and Australia operate a widely emulated system that gives immigrants "points" for their educational qualifications. New Zealand allows some companies to hand out work visas along with job offers. Britain gives graduates of the world's top 50 business schools an automatic right to work in the country for a year. The European Union is contemplating introducing a system of "blue cards" that will give talented people a fast track to EU citizenship.
The United States is already paying a price for its failure to adjust to the new world. Talent-challenged technology companies are already being forced to export jobs abroad. Microsoft opened a software development centre in Canada in part because Canada's more liberal laws make it easier to recruit qualified people from around the world. This problem is only going to get worse if America's immigration restrictions are not lifted. The Labour Department projects that by 2014 there will be more than 2m job openings in science, technology and engineering, while the number of Americans g
Not conservatives but Neocons, personally i don't see much difference between being anally probed by big government, big religion or big business; at the end of the day I feel violated and am expected to kowtow to the fuedal lord du jour.
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America has forgotten that it built its success on the back of the geniuses that migrated there.
Not really. The real problem is that certain people are blurring the distinction between legal and illegal immigration.
What really pisses me off in the current public "debates" regarding immigration and housing loans is that the people who are getting screwed the hardest are the ones who have obeyed the law and applied common sense.
That's just wrong.
I have been living in the US for less than a year now. I have been working for more than ten years. This is the first time that I have been living in the US. Here is what I think of the whole matter.
1. The H1B program, in spirit is a wonderful, clever thing. I have lived and worked in Europe, Japan and India. I love to travel and take in new experiences. Thanks to the H1 program, it allows for me to actually live and work here. In all honesty, it has been a great experience.
2. The H1B program allows for _american_ companies to actually fill in a labour gap as and when required.
3. Does the H1B program get abused as the article states ? Absolutely. I have seen it happen myself. There are huge number of shell companies ( called consultants ) out there who are absolutely flooding the H1B channels with applications for requirements which do not exist. The article is spot-on with its observations. The biggest victim of this whole thing however is the H1B program. Due to this channel-stuffing, legitimate american companies cannot actually recruit an employee when it is _really_ required since the quota has already been filled by fraudulent/redundant applications. These redundant and fraudulent applications really really need to be stopped for the H1B program to actually deliver what it actually set out to deliver.
4. There is a lot of talk about salaries and cost, and this is what I think. The H1B program is a cleverly crafted law in some ways. The H1 application belongs to the employee and and not the employer. The employee is free to change his employers as and when he or she wants to. If an employee thinks that he is being paid less than the market value, he or she is free to seek out an employer who will pay him as much as he or she deserves. The free market will, at the end of the day take care of it. Also if there is a company which pays its employees based on his legal status and not his skills and ability, please do not consider working for it, whatever might be your legal status.
5. In my professional career, I have worked with some of the biggest bozos and some of the most exquisitely talented engineers. Race or geographical location had absolutely nothing to do with their abilities. There are smart people and idiots everywhere. Supposing that a H1B worker to be inferior in terms of ability, is not a very clever viewpoint.
There is a big flaw in your reasoning. H-1B workers are NOT "immigrants". They are "guest workers". Thus, your founder examples are misleading. If they were made immigrants, maybe companies would not treat them like indentured servants.
Further, even if visa workers benefit the average person in the US (perhaps disputable), it may still hurt those in *specific* careers. Foreign cars don't help factory workers in Detroit, for example, even if it benefited car consumers in general.
Table-ized A.I.
Amen! Mod parent up to the clouds. There is no objective evidence of a "shortage". It is a lobbyist gimmick for cheap labor pure and simple.
Sure, some companies complain about finding an exact fit, but that's because they are unrealistically expecting an exact fit. Pay for somebody smart and flexible enough to adapt.
Table-ized A.I.
Hey seth: you are a bigot.
Yes because corporate lawyers who put out videos like this one were all just telling lies. LIES! Seriously though,who DIDN'T know that the H1-B was being used to turn a college education into a McJob?
I personally loved how they told everyone "Get a tech education! All the manufacturing jobs will be shipped overseas so you need a degree!" and then once folks graduating high school did just that they bring in the H1-Bs who can work the same job for peanuts. I'd love to see one of those congress critters look the camera in the face and try to explain how someone who has to pay 60-100K for a degree is supposed to compete with someone who pays 25K or less.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That entire HUGE HOST of others that are speaking about would be dwarfed in terms of numbers by a single year's worth of H1B's. Your argument is specious: all the guest workers are not Einsteins. The whole point of this article is that many of them are not only not Einsteins, but nowhere near as educated and useful as they say they are.
... why, that's fine too, so long as they work cheap enough to justify firing the domestic workforce. What, you think quality is an issue here? Are you blind?
Get a grip. This is about corporations wanting cheaper labor, and about corrupt politicians aiding and abetting them. It's not about immigration, not about improving our society by bringing in worthy people from other cultures and assimilating them into our own. Not by a long shot.
Furthermore, if it were about immigration, we'd be perfectly justified (by your own logic) in being selective as hell and only allowing the best and brightest of those people to work and live in our country. But we don't: we just want them cheap. Period. If they happen to be good, fine. If not
You can't put a price on an Einstein, or a Tesla, or any of the other great men who came to this great nation and more than repaid our generosity. You can, however, put a price on yet another Unix server admin, database consultant or Web developer.
And that is what this is about. Don't try to make it any grander or more poetic than it is. It's down and dirty politics and money-grubbing, and none of your references to intellectually accomplished immigrants will ever change that.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
and you are judging Americans by a few comments on slashdot?
though now, I'm willing to bet that bright Americans may be looking to do the same and flee the US for better opportunites in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Anyone with a feel for numbers need only look at the debt being hoisted onto young Americans via Social Security, Medicare, etc. The system is nothing more than a huge pyramid, and the sucker on the bottom (Gen x, y, millenials) will be the ones left to pay. Add on a few trillion more to bail out Wall Street, foreign wars and other adventures, defecits, etc. and the average young worker in the US starts their career out already in the hole for half a million dollars.
One needs only look to other countries (e.g. Chile, Argentina, Russia) that have had this same problem recently, and the conclusion is that those that are bright will see the writing on the wall and look for greener pastures abroad.
The ironic thing is that the typical American loves to spout the mantra about how immigrants left their facist and corrupt homelands in 'Old Europe' in exchange for the freedom and liberty of America. Work hard and you'll do better here was how the story was sold. Of course, when young Americans realize they've been sold out and decide to do the same thing, they'll be labeled terrorists and traitors by the Boomers who need them to support their retirements...
I don't know what you think universities cost today, but $40,000 per year is not uncommon. Whether or not it is worth it is another matter, but you can find somewhere willing to charge in that range easily.
The university that I went to is now up to $46,000 per year, although only $34,000 of that is for tuition and another $1,000 in required fees.