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How the 'Tech Worker Visa' Is Remaking IT In America
theodp writes "Back in 2008, the Department of Homeland Security enacted a controversial 'emergency' rule to allow foreign students earning tech-related degrees in the US to work for American employers for 29 months after graduation without a work visa. The program would allow US companies to recruit and retain the 'best' science and tech students educated at the top US universities, explained Microsoft. But two-and-a-half years later, it turns out the top US universities are getting schooled by less-renowned institutions. Computerworld reports the DHS program is dominated by little-known, for-profit Stratford University, whose 727 approved requests for post-graduate Optional Practical Training (OPT) STEM extensions tops all schools and is more than twice the combined total of the entire Ivy League — Brown (26), Columbia (105), Cornell (90), Dartmouth (18), Harvard (27), Princeton (16), Penn (50), and Yale (9). In second place, with 533 approved requests, is the University of Bridgeport. In another twist, the program's employers include IT outsourcing and offshoring 'body shops' like Kelly Services, whose entities snagged about 50 approvals, more than twice the combined total of tech stalwarts Google (15), Amazon.com (2), Yahoo (2), and Facebook (3)."
"Back in 2008, the Department of Homeland Security enacted a controversial 'emergency' rule to allow foreign students earning tech-related degrees in the U.S. to work for American employers for 29 months after graduation without a work visa.
While citizens who could use the training and work, are given the short shaft, thanks to various loopholes in need of closure. They have the skills, it's time we made companies actually recognize that.
Think about it before you throw your exception to the rule about a specific thing not being found.
The program would allow U.S. companies to recruit and retain the 'best' science and tech students
Bullshit. We have all the people we need, we just aren't willing to engage in fraud. Businesses however, are.
But two-and-a-half years later, it turns out the top U.S. universities are getting schooled by less-renowned institutions. Computerworld reports the DHS program is dominated by little-known, for-profit Stratford University, whose 727 approved requests for post-graduate Optional Practical Training (OPT) STEM extensions tops all schools and is more than twice the combined total of the entire Ivy League -- Brown (26), Columbia (105), Cornell (90), Dartmouth (18), Harvard (27), Princeton (16), Penn (50), and Yale (9). In second place, with 533 approved requests, is the University of Bridgeport. In another twist, the program's employers include IT outsourcing and offshoring 'body shops' like Kelly Services, whose entities snagged about 50 approvals, more than twice the combined total of tech stalwarts Google (15), Amazon.com (2), Yahoo (2), and Facebook (3)."
This might be the real story. Either the fraud's moved over to those universities, or the fraud shops got seriously blindsided.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
This reminds me of the Stephen Colbert + Mexican farm workers demonstrating how even when offered US workers didnt take the farming jobs. It is not that Americans dont have the skills - it is just that the ones with the skills didnt want to do the back breaking work for the pay offered.
IT consulting is a legitimate need. You may not think so - but most companies dont want a hoard of IT employees. Most of them want a few dozen when starting on some boring implementation (Say Oracle ERP.. or SAP), and once done - they want these dozens to leave. They dont want to train them - they want consultants who can come do the job and then leave. Google etc. do cool stuff and get the best - unfortunately such jobs are few - most IT jobs are now boring jobs which involve pedestrian work.
Most americans want to join Deloitte and Accenture and become 'Functional Consultants' not coders - or they want jobs where they can code something interesting - and at a good wage. They get paid a starting salary of 60K-70K to be analysts who neither program, nor know the applications. All the boring coding is done by Kelly services or other 'body shop' consultants who are here on H1B or F1-Opt, and they get paid around $40-50K. These jobs which involve travelling 4-5 days a week, coding something in PLSQL or JAVA or even just testing are not usually taken by Americans because most americans CS grads want a 'programming cool stuff' job without any travel.
Give these indians and chinese H1Bs.. or watch the coding completely move offshore. Virtualization and companies like oDesk have already provided enuff technology to make coding offshore completely viable. Then - the result will be what happend with manufacturing - nothing here at home! You cant expect to get paid 2x-4x for similar skills and productivity.
As long as mexicans are required to pluck fruits in Cali... you can be sure there will be indians here to do testing and boring IT coding. And just like a Stanford degree doesnt help much in plucking fruits - ditto with basic dirty IT jobs - you need warm bodies ... not ultra innovative geniuses to do the job!
The contractor that Serrano trained at IBM was from China, but Serrano didn't know her immigration status. And despite having to train her replacement, ...
I had to do the same thing at another company and he was the one who asked me what the '*' by variables mean and "what's a pointer?"
That's why when I hear some big shot at Intel, IBM or any other big corp says that they are hiring overseas because 'they can't find qualified Americans", I have to go off and mumble "Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. ... "
Just tell the fucking truth. They want cheaper labor. That's why as Indian salaries go up, they move to other countries.
Nope. It's corporate America. How do you tell when a PR person is lying? Their lips move.
Of course the economists will say this is good for the entire economy. Really? Then why have real wages been stagnant for over a decade - for everyone?
Go up the food chain? How can we when even the upper food chain jobs are leaving. Except of course upper management. But that will change. Some foreign based company without the obscene upper management pay of IBM or Intel is going to come in and eat their lunches - you'll see.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
How about we eliminate H1-B and L-1 visas and start hiring Americans again?
The economy is going down the tubes because greedy corporations aren't willing to pay a living wage. They don't even want to hire Americans, because the indentured servitude of the H1-B visa is too attractive to them. This is the primary reason why the middle class is shrinking: there aren't that many good jobs left (unless you're an ivy-league child of the rich, in which case "daddy" or one of his friends will make room for you somewhere).
Between the end of WWII and the start of this outsourcing nonsense, spending by the middle class was the engine that drove our economy. Now that the middle class is in rapid decline, corporations are trying to expand third-world markets to preserve their profits. So Congress is writing love letters to India and China by doing things like expanding foreign-worker visa programs.
This in turn is eliminating any desire for young people to study science or technology. Why should they, when all those jobs have moved overseas or are being handed out to visa holders? The kids are going to study law or business, things they can use in a third world economy (i.e. the future America).
The corporations are run by idiots who think the executive levels are the only important parts of the corporation to keep in the U.S. They are going to find out the hard way that they should have kept their tech staff on board, when India Inc. and China realize that they can manufacture their own executives TOO. All they have to do is drop-kick American corporations out of the country, and replace them with home-grown alternatives. This will happen within a decade, I think.
By then, there won't be ANY Americans bothering to study STEM subjects in our schools -- it'll be nothing but foreign kids, who will go right back where they came from when they graduate. We Americans are already a minority in graduate programs here. And it'll simply be too late. The professors are all foreign. The kids are all foreign. When they all go home, we won't have anything left at all.
It's all so pathetic. Rich people are so petty and stingy they're destroying their own future to make a little extra bread in the present. If they weren't destroying our future as well, I'd wish them bon voyage, but as it is they're taking the whole country down the tubes.
The only ones among us who will still know anything are hobbyists and small-scale manufacturers and hackers. And we aren't going to be inclined to try and help the corporations when they finally realize they need us.
Thus spake the master programmer:
"When the program is being tested, it is too late to make design changes." (Tao)
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
It's amazing how Slashdot's usual libertarian attitude to just about everything develops a strong protectionist bent as soon as American tech jobs are on the line.
how about starting by moving the manufacturing sector back to the USA, it will definitely create millions of more jobs (compared to a very few thousand in IT) leading to a flourishing middle class and turn the economy around like a miracle... when was the last time you saw something made in u.s.a.?
Like the old saying goes - penny wise pound foolish, there are bigger things we should be worrying about..
That's true, but the idle rich tend to not take technical courses... It's a safe bet that Ivy League CS are smarter (on average).
But that's tangential; even if intelligence were the same, the training is totally different. These private mills are turning out day laborers (of whatever intelligence) and, as the original poster pointed out, not a whole lot of them.
Still, that there is more demand (in raw numbers) for code monkeys than theoretical computer scientists in the DHS (which I can imagine is a true bastion of intellectualism...) shouldn't be particularly surprising to anyone. It follows immediately that a program for generating the former would be more successful.
If one were from Mars, it would seem a little bit strange that the US is running a welfare program (DHS) whose principal recipients are private companies and foreigners, but for anyone living here it ought not be surprising.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Dude. Nuclear stuff would be top secret - meaning foreign scientists wouldn't be allowed to work on them.
Uh, dude, nuclear weapons were largely developed by foreign scientists in America.
This system pisses me off greatly (and I am an American citizen, born in the US; but I have seen many good colleagues end up deported under this idiotic legislation). If a student from another country comes to the US to do their PhD, they will - on average in the hard sciences - be here for 4-7 years doing work for an American lab. That time they are doing important research, in our country, in English. Then when they finish, we give them an agonizingly short amount of time to get a work visa or leave. I am being far too kind to call this shortsighted on our part. If there was any law I could change in this country today, it would be this one. Students who come to the US for doctoral research should be, in my opinion, short-tracked for citizenship.
And it is even worse if that student wants to visit their birth country while studying here or immediately after finishing. I know someone from an Eastern European country who did her PhD here and was told if she went back to see her family after finishing she would not be allowed back into the US for 6-9 months minimum. She has spoken English since she was about 3 years old. Why should we punish her for doing her research (and contributing to American science) here?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
No, but your chances of being able to afford it would've been significantly less. Good for you that you were motivated to bust your butt to get in. But for every Ivy League student, there are a hundred other students who are just as smart who are attending other schools because they couldn't afford the tuition.
What I object to is the implication (as embodied in the post I responded to) that Ivy Leaguers are somehow automatically better than everyone else.
I find it hard to believe that there are not enough smart domestic students who could use a scholarship.
I don't. Not after seeing the people that come in to interview for job openings.
Look, kids, it's just like /.'s view of musicians and the RIAA: the world doesn't owe you a living working in IT just because you want it. I hire the best I can get and if some non-American is better than you, I'm going to get them a visa and hire him/her without batting an eyelash.
While foreign IT workers come cheap, I don't think that is the biggest draw.
They are deportable indentured servants, who are dependent on their sponsoring companies for their right to pursue a visa and remain in the US. Companies like employees who will put up with anything, and not complain. I doubt that they have the same labor rights as citizens, and even where they do, are they going to try to enforce them against their sponsor? And how would they go about enforcing any rights they actually have after they've lost their right to live and work in the US?
Importing labor doesn't just import a worker, it imports entirely new labor rules.
But more importantly, don't think of a corporation and treat it like it is one entity with integrated goals.
Sub contracting firms provide one big advantage - huge opportunities for kickbacks and corruption. If your company hires individual citizens, it's unlikely that kickbacks are paid, and they're certainly difficult to concentrate. Sure, friends, family, and former coworkers get hired, but that is more an issue of limiting risk through trust and knowledge. But if you subcontract a dozen positions to a head shop, the relationship with the headshop is now associated with a continuing revenue stream that is worth a good chunk of change, and those who make the decisions about the relationship with the head shop have concentrated power over that revenue stream.
So if you're a crook and in a position of power to make the decision, do you want to hire a bunch of random citizens, or do you want to have a relationship with a head shop where a fat revenue stream is entirely dependent on your decisions of which head shop to choose?
It's not the ones who are the best who are the problem. Maybe 1% of the H-1Bs are among the best. The other 99% are code monkeys who went to the local equivalent of a tech school, know barely enough Java or whatever to get by, and have resumes "enhanced" by agencies who specialize in such things (because their qualifications are foreign, they are unlikely to be verified by a US company). This has all sorts of bad effects, including cutting off the bottom rungs of the ladder for American grads. Why hire an unproven new grad from a non-top-10 school when for the same price or cheaper, you can get an H-1B with "5 years experience" in anything you like?
We couldn't count on obtaining an H1-B and had to turn down a few very talented people. And, no, at the time we did not find as many U.S. citizens available.
Maybe that is because smart American's would have to stupid to study for a STEM career. US companies are offshoring as many STEM jobs as they can, and what jobs can not be offshored, are being filled by guest workers. Do you really expect that Americans would get an MSEE, only to train his/her H1B replacement two years later?
When US companies stop offshoring/inshoring at furious pace, and start hiring Americans, then maybe the field will be attractive to Americans again.
You are complaining about a situation that you are helping to create.
FACT: less the 25% of IBM employees were born in the USA.
They're not. They're found to expect a pay rate which sets them up for a decent life in the US rather than an upper class one in some other nation.
It's not a case like with agriculture where by the time you can prove that you need guest workers the season is over. There at least is a quasi legitimate problem in need of solving. This is a case of companies using the H-1B visa to artificially deflate wages while claiming that they can't find qualified applicants here. If you don't believe me, look at the job requirements they post. They tend to inflate them way beyond what the jobs really require just so that they can claim that they looked and couldn't find anybody.
I don't think there is a single qualified and skilled American who is unemployed in sectors where H1Bs are applicable.
You clearly do not know what you are posting about. I could introduce you to a woman who has twice had to train her H1B replacement, even though nobody denied that she was doing a good job. Now, she is unemployed again because her entire department was offshored - which is the end game to all this H1B non-sense.
And in case you have not heard, US tech workers were laid off by the hundreds of thousands in 2009. Practically every major tech employer laid off thousands of US workers. And the USA is suffering it's worse unemployment since the great depression.
There is a *constant* shortage of good people.
I'm sorry, but the only explanation is that you don't want to pay enough. The idea of a *constant* shortage makes no sense. It defies the basic laws of economics.
If there was a real shortages, then wages would spike up sharply (which has not happened since 1999 btw), that would attract more people to field, and everything would normalize.
I doubt it, in my experience, motivation isn't just a matter of ones own interest. It takes a bit of arrogance to expect something to come of it. Ever wonder why equally motivated folks living in the Ghetto don't get into the Ivy League with similar regularity? It's not because they're all morons or because they're lazy, it's because they don't have the luxury of applying their efforts to something as abstract as going to Harvard.
I think that's a point that a lot of the upper class and other folks that go to those schools fail to grasp. It's a luxury that a lot of folks don't have to spend that much time with nose stuck in a book doing homework.
Some of us had to settle for an equally good education at a state school that we could both get into and afford because we were too busy picking up the slack for our parents as kids.
And even I getting the degree at all have to acknowledge having it easier than some others, that didn't live to see 22 let alone 18 for their high school diploma.
Indeed, this isn't like hiring illegal immigrants because you legitimately can't prove you need guest workers before the picking season is over. And quite another to do it because you don't like what the American candidates are demanding.
Theoretically that's how the free market is supposed to function, if you're not offering enough pay and benefits to attract workers you have to either raise your offer or do without. None of this pulling in folks from over seas because you don't feel like paying a living wage.
Considering that a lot of those firms are receiving tax incentives from the government to be here, it seems to be lacking any sort of gratitude for the perks.
So, let me see if I got this right: you're -against- allowing educated college graduates to stay in the US and perhaps immigrate because they're merely generic graduates not ivy league graduates?
US companies claim they need more H1Bs because the H1Bs are the "best and brightest." In fact, they use that very expression in practically propaganda article that they use to flood the pop-media. But, now it seems that the truth is: H1B's are just ordinary people, doing ordinary jobs - jobs that could be done by US STEM workers.
BTW: if the H1B nations are so full of geniuses, then why don't they have anything to show for it? Are why isn't the O-1 visa enough for the H1B hogs?
There are 75K openings on Dice right now. 20K over 2 years is a drop in a ocean.
There are 75k listings on Dice. Most of those are duplicates of the same job listed by 3 or 4 different head hunters. So you are talking more like 25k unique listings. Then you have to count out the listings that are in place specifically to meet the requirements that allow the company to hire foreign works, by creating unrealistic requirements. This ranges from asking for more experience than is possible (10 years experience with something that has only been around for five), or setting unnecessary requirements (Master Degree required for a job that can be accomplished by a high school drop out).
Now I don't know the actual numbers, but if you take the time you will find out that your short analysis is certainly far from accurate, or even useful.
It's gutting engineering and science in general, not just IT.
these are apparently well skilled people that possibly may stay longer and create prosperity in the visited country also when they stop visiting and become citizens for real. What is wrong with that? It is definitely better than having unskilled immigrants polluting labor market at low end.
OK executive, do your foreign nationals get paid as much as your US nationals?
Yes or no? Don't equivocate.
Going to an Ivy League school doesn't necessarily mean you're smarter; it just means your parents have a lot of money.
Or very little money.
How about the ticket? You are aware that Disney is an American company? So you bought an American product the moment you entered. How about the food? The drinks?
The rides themselves? The movies the rides are based on?
Sorry, but next time try a bit harder. For instance, go into an Apple store and try to buy a product build in the US. A lot harder. But you just have to buy non-Apple to get a piece of hardware not made in a dictatorship. But that would mean giving up the shiny. Oh and if you dislike Disney for outsourcing its toy production, don't buy Disney. There are still locally made toys. Even handmade ones. Cost a bit more but that shouldn't be a problem. Unless you are focused on cheap as well.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
But you're still hiring the cheapest you can find. Given you have two candidates of equal qualifications (more or less; no one's exactly the same), you'll still hire the one who'll accept the least money.
[John]
Shit better not happen!
Getting kicked in the balls is better than being beheaded with a dull lawnmower blade. I still do not wish to be kicked in the balls.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
They won't do that. The whole reason they are "competitive" is that they are going back to their homeland with a lower quality and cost of living, thus allowing them to get more bang for their buck. This, in turn, allows employers to depress wages using them as an excuse.
As I said, the practice lowers wages for everyone. Good for the owning class, bad for the working class.
You could simply refuse both, and use tariffs to protect domestic industry from offshoring.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The problem I have with the Democrats is that they don't even try.
Learn to love Alaska