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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)."
Clearly the private, for profit schools produce more competitive students.
We have all the people we need
I'd kind of prefer if the US had more smart people, even if we have to import them...
I'd kind of prefer if the US had more smart people, even if we have to import them...
So would I, but this program doesn't accomplish that. It just gives the offshoring companies a couple of years to train the "graduate" before sending the job to Asia.
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
... probably aren't high on the recruiting list for IT and technology professionals. MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, ... several state universities, and on down are where the action is for engineering and computer science. So clearly there are more "tech" jobs in the specialties where these schools are hiring, likely those requiring less education. The problem with this data is that it has no basis for comparison to how the visa program is actually changing anything.
I had tried to recruit some talented MSEE grads for some time back in 2007 and found, frustratingly, that most were here in student visas and the pool of H1-B visas were much smaller. 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.
A better data point would be to show the percentage of student visa holders that have remained the in U.S. with this program.
And if anyone wants to complain about these programs taking jobs from U.S. citizens, then it should start by reducing the number of student visas on offer. Once someone is well trained by our schools it's insane to not let them stay and add to our GDP.
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.
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.
My company (a giant company that purveys giant software to giant customers) and my customers have a never-ending thirst for technical candidates who can speak and write good English, in a way that someone who barely passed TOEFL would not be able to handle.
The question is not about how "those damn foreigners" are taking jobs away from "us". It's about how we can re-tool ourselves to consistently stay ahead and take advantage of our own unique abilities.
Think about it, a good programmer isn't just writing code, he or she is also writing specs, writing documentation, and presenting the same. With good communication skills borne of many additional years communicating in English, a domestic candidate has a natural advantage over a foreign candidate. Plus, as people advance in their career and become either engineering managers or architects, what do you think they do more of? Communicating or solo coding?
The irony is that what I see happen a lot is that the foreign colleague is far more eager to take on what might seem as a less desirable job. Nobody really likes to write 50 pages of specs today, even if they know that it's the specs and the author by-line on those specs that will get spread throughout the organization and live on for years, whereas code only gets unburied from source control where there's a bug. A person's brilliance is demonstrated in their English, less so in their C or Java. Somehow, even though everyone sees this, many people willingly give away this opportunity to a few who are eager for it. And it seems that those who should have a natural advantage, inexplicably, more often give away their edge to those who are less suited, but are hungrier and more eager.
The University of Bridgeport is pretty much run by the Unification Church and its leader, Sun Myung Moon. For years now they have heavily recruited international members of the church to come to the United States and attend the University.
The Unification Church uses the University as a means of extending their empire further into the United States and the extended visa program works exceptionally well for this. I'm not one to say if this is a good or bad thing.
Sapere aude!
Ya right dude, no one wants to do that kind of farm labor. It's not easy. Imagine climbing up and down ladders all day, moving your hands faster than you thought possible, picking cherries or something. And then at the end of the day getting paid almost nothing because you are too slow to keep up with everyone. That's how it starts out. After a month or so you get a lot better at it, your stamina goes up, and if you are lucky, you'll get paid $8 an hour. You can get as much on welfare and watch TV all day. I only did that kind of thing when I was a teenager and had no other skills (incidentally most of the other white teenagers I was working with got fired because the Mexicans are so much better workers. White teenagers have trouble focusing on work, sorry if that sounds racist, I'm not looking down on either race). Mexicans truly do the jobs no one else wants to do. If you have any skill at all, you can do better than picking cherries.
Incidentally, most cities have places you can go to get day labor work. The WSJ did an analysis a few months ago of the kinds of jobs that are available now. They found that there are lots of jobs for unskilled workers, and lots of jobs for highly skilled workers (like programmers), but not much demand for medium skilled workers (like middle managers). And that matches my experience. If anyone is having trouble finding a programming job, it is because A) they suck, B) they have no clue how to find a job (one of my friends is like this: every time he goes in for a job interview he tells them he doesn't want to work hard. And yet he still has an ok job....at a university). or C) you are looking in the wrong place. You won't find many programming jobs in Modesto, California.
Qxe4
And even then, the real difference is probably going to be that most of them will be paying US income tax instead of Indian / Chinese income tax.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I'm more interested in why U.S. citizens are consistently found unqualified. And why, in that scenario, we watch as citizens go jobless and even legal visa holders get those jobs.
Where I'm working, the workforce is changing from fairly well split between U.S. citizens and Indian nationals to a three way mix between citizens, Indians, and Asians. I'm not sure how that is happening. I also see various silos of technical work in many regions, on every continent except Africa and Antarctica. Every continent. Oh, with the notable exception of Europe, where it seems we do precious little development work. Hmm...
If I had to guess, I think current work allocations are favoring nations where the workers get little protection (Australia, for example has some interesting laws, while Chile doesn't) or the workers have already done the onshore shuffle and rotated back 'home'. Oh, and I dare not start asking about the visa status of some of these workers. It's a sensitive subject. Many will just get up and walk away.
It's frustrating to see what is clearly basic, everyday work going to visa holders when you know someone who is truly overqualified, but couldn't get past the first interview. As far as I can tell, pay is not the issue.
But I'm hypersensitive to this. I may be wrong about a lot if what I think, but I'm not yet convinced.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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?
People have the skills, they just dont have the experience.
I see it time and time again on IT job sites. I see companies that ask for "3 years experience in " yet no-one is willing to give people like me (someone who has plenty of skills but not enough experience) a chance so that I can GET the jobs where they want experience.
And I see the same job listed again and again.
I see article after article where people claim there is an "IT worker shortage". If IT firms were more willing to hire people who have University qualifications and good skills but havent necessarily done real world work, there wouldnt BE a shorage.
"IT worker shortage"
Marketing-speak to English translation: The market is full of highly experienced and expensive talent. We're looking for cheap talent, and nobody wants to work for what we're paying.
See also: Teacher Shortage; Pilot Shortage; Nurse Shortage; [________] Shortage.
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.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but if you're still at college, look for internships, part time work and graduate roles, where experience isn't a criteria. If you're out of college but looking to change careers, or just plain out of a job, volunteer with local NGOs, charities and associations. You might not get the 3 years experience they're looking for exactly in the roles you want exactly, but often you can get your foot in the door with less experience but a demonstrated ability to go out and chase opportunities yourself.
And remember at all times, the criteria listed is for "ideal" candidates, so if the same job is still listed a month later, chances are if you hit some of the requirements you're in with a pretty strong chance - basically, don't let the listed requirements put you off.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
and most american employers expect submissive, exacting, dress-code clique conforming 'team players' who simply accept whatever bone's thrown at them, who are also, paradoxically, brilliantly innovative 'go-getters' who actually care about their jobs.
A lot of these jobs aren't going based on skill. Sure, some of the H1B's are legit. But there are are lot of them out there like the two guys I trained who turned out not to be additions to the team, but my replacement at under $25 an hour. Now supposedly they have to be paid market rate, but they never are.
You say develop the skill. What you should be saying is, "Develop the credentials (legit or not) and work for half as much even though legally you should be offered fair market value."
You see the same thing competing against grad students in college. There is cheating on a massive scale in foreign countries to place students here as is easily evidenced by the large numbers that seemingly speak no English at all.
Of course, those grad students typically pay full rates, so nobody will be kicking them out any time soon.
t
So would I, but this program doesn't accomplish that. It just gives the offshoring companies a couple of years to train the "graduate" before sending the job to Asia.
For a program that works, simply mandate that employer initiates a sponsored green card process as soon as the new employee is hired. That would filter out those who don't actually want to stay.
We went to Disney in Florida a couple of years ago, and as an experiment, I tried to buy an American made product/toy for my daughter inside the parks. I just couldn't do it. Cheap seems to be the focus of corporate America.