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Ask Slashdot: Reasonable Immigration Policy For Highly-Trained Workers?
davidwr writes "What are a reasonable temporary-worker or immigration-visa rules to apply to workers whose skills would quickly net them a 'top 20th percentile wages' job (about $100,000) in the American workplace, if they were allowed to work in the country? Should the visa length be time-limited? Should it provide for a path to permanent residency? Should the number be limited, and if so, how should we decide what the limit should be? The people affected are already likely eligible for special work-permit programs, but these programs may have quotas, time limits, prior-job-offer-requirements, and other restrictions. I'm asking what Slashdotters think the limits and restrictions, if any, should be. (Let's assume any policy to keep out criminals and spies remains as-is.)"
let them stay. Educated immigrants are more likely to start their own business. So where do you want that business to be?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We should favor workers who are looking for permanent residency. They are good for the economy and the community.
We should make sure it costs no less to hire a foreign worker to work in the US than it costs to hire an existing resident.
We should not be using foreign worker visas to train people as a prelude to off-shoring.
I'm wondering if an auction system for tech visas would work out.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Should now read:
"Give me your inventors, your geniuses,
Your bored singletons yearning to spur economic growth,
The fertile intellects left from your teeming chaff.
Send these, the able, patent-ers to me,
I lift my GDP beside the golden door!"
Let's face it, work visas are handed out like bouncers controlling admission to a club. You are asking these questions that sound like they treat people with respect and offer them opportunity but what I hear is basically: Are you going to be a net positive for the United States? And how do we accurately measure the Nikola Teslas and Yao Mings from the Dr. Nasser al-Aulaqis (Fullbright Scholar and father of Anwar al-Awlaki).
You know what? It's a dirty business and I don't want any part of it. In my own humble opinion, it's unethical. Your questions sound like "Can we implement a brain drain on the rest of the world with little or no risk?" I think it should be all law-abiding individuals or none and, despite 9/11 and the Mariel Boatlift that consisted of criminals and mental patients, I personally lean toward letting everyone in unless they are known to have committed or been convicted of crimes in their country of origin that are 1) credible sentences and 2) also misdemeanors or higher in the United States.
My work here is dung.
Trolling for opinions on immigration is not "news for nerds." Believe it or not, I come here to get informed, not to get drawn into pointless flame-wars.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I was fortunate enough to have a company sponsor me on a H1B. It took me six years of waiting and thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees to adjust my status, i.e. go from H1B to Green Card. It's not that easy. The people on the Mayflower would be turned back if they made that trip today.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
As has been pointed out before, the point of H1-B visas is to get rid of older American workers who with education and experience have become highly trained, and replace them with less trained, cheap foreign labor. In 2010, during record-high unemployment, 117,409 people came in on the H1-B visa. Which is just one of many visas that people come to the US and work on. Professor Norm Matloff has a web page about this.
I was with you until your hyperbolic Mayflower comment. Half of them died before the first winter was over ...
Obviously, they did not have the appropriate skill set. They should have been turned back.
.
This sucks.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Let 'em all in. If you're going to pull down six digits (and pay taxes on it) then I say: WELCOME TO THE U.S.A.
Here's the thing. We Americans don't actually build stuff, grow stuff or put stuff together anymore. Well, we do, but it's becoming more and more rare. What do we do? We make software and design stuff. Unfortunately, the kind of endeavors one might easily imagining doing somewhere else. We really, really don't want that to happen, since it's this kind of activity we're going to rely on moving forward to support the rest of the economy, which is inwardly focused (medicine, finance, service industry, etc.) That's why we really want all the world's bad-ass scientists, engineers and developers to re-locate their Hindi / Mandarin / who-the-hell-cares-as-long-as-they-also-speak-English selves stateside and get to work building the next Facebook Google.
It took me six years of waiting and thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees to adjust my status
Too little too late but you could have just done 6 years of waiting and zero dollars of lawyer's fees. The information on the process is all out there and free. There are filing fees and waiting periods, but the lawyer, despite what they might tell you, doesn't get it done any faster or better.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Don't you believe in a free market?
I think it is silly to restrict people because of where they are born. If somebody is better then I am, why should he NOT be able to take my job.
If _I_ am better then somebody else, why should I not be able to take his job?
If you are an employer, why should you not have the ability to hire the best people that you can?
Do you want to be hired on what you are able to do, or because of your race, sex, religion or nationality?
I have a different nationality from the country where I work. My company thought I was the best for the task, so they hired me. They thought higher of me then of people of their own country. The reason why? Because they cared about the job, not about the passport.
And when people speak about me not being from their country I say: I have chosen the country I live in. I have made a very calculated decision as an adult. That means I deserve it MORE to live here then those who are born here. That always brings up interesting discussions. :-D
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Mod parent up. The notion that some people on Slashdot portray of an easy life for H1B workers is a complete falsehood.
Unless you have a masters degree (or equivalent), you will most likely be in the system as H1B status for years. This means that:
* You need somewhat of a life here, but if you lose your job for any reason you need to leave in ~10 days, which may involve selling property (cars), and ending lease agreements. If you take too long to leave you may be barred from re-entry. Technically the 10 days is not legally granted to you, but generally overlooked.
* If you manage to/have to change job and were in the middle of a green card process, you will have to start over again. Changing jobs isn't easy, you have a very limited set of options if you need to do this.
* You probably won't see any family for a while. You're unlikely to get time off any time soon to return home, and when you do you may very well need to spend part of that time traveling to embassies for visa interviews that are not necessarily anywhere near your home, even if your status was fine before your travel.
* Depending on your home country, tax situations can be complex
Shaving $5k off "native" pay isn't a bad thing. I'd vote for eliminating all quotas over a 5 year period (giving the market some time to absorb any change in immigration).
Rules:
1) must have an advanced degree capable of pulling in $100,000 or more per year in the US market.
2) No violent convictions.
3) No pre-existing medical conditions (TB, AIDS, smoking, cancer).
They are issued two 6-month visas and four 1-year visas (not at the same time, but sequentially), where they must be employed at $100,000 or more and have no criminal convictions of any kind (I used to have to put in "other than minor traffic tickets" but Texas finally decriminalized traffic tickets sometime after 2001, when I moved away, and I think they were the last where 1 mph over the limit and such was a criminal misdemeanor).
At the end of those 5 years, give them a green card or citizenship or something like that. It would suck for those who would make $102,000 in today's market, but $95,000 in a market filled with others like them so that a quota would help them, but the real effect is that the $110,000 per year jobs would settle in around $100,000 per year, and immigrants looking to move to the US would aim for the $150,000+ jobs for the extra cushion.
If 1,000,000 can get in after 5 years (no quotas), then let them all in, they'll make $100,000,000,000 minimum (taxes and economic value).
My "fix" for H1-B was always to charge the same for the visa (to the sponsoring company) as it would take to train someone into the position. Then train someone into that position and revoke the H1-B visa. I'm not sure it would have the effect I'm desiring, that companies would begin training themselves, rather than outsourcing the training to the US government, but I'm sure someone smarter than me could fix that.
Learn to love Alaska
What field do you work in?
It took me three plus months of searching to find a good IT employee to help me with my workload. I'm at a company that has tripled its revenue in the last two years. I have more work than I can handle on my own, but I need someone competent to do it... not someone who I need to train and hold their hand. I need to be more productive, not less productive. I need someone I can delegate work to and know that they will do it just as well or better than I can. Those people are not easy to find. I had to sort through a whole slew of unqualified candidates before finding the guy I hired.
And right after I hired him, I asked for a raise because going through the hiring process made me realize just how limited the supply of qualified technical workers really is. They gave it to me, because the company knows it too.
There is a serious problem with Americans. Too many people think that they deserve a high paying job. They think they can go "get an education" and get hired by a company that will give them a career track.
Most of the people I know who are doing well are doing what they enjoy. They are in IT and they like computers. They are doctors and they are fascinated by life and the body. They are engineers and they are complete geeks for building things. They are into biochem and are thrilled to be working with the building blocks of life. They all have passion and they work hard and are constantly thinking about work... not because they have to, but because their brains are wired that way. They enjoy it. It fascinates them.
Too many people get too focused on being "successful". They do not realize that success comes from excelling at what you do. The drive to excel only comes from passion. Either passion about the task, or passion about the reward. People who are passionate about the task will be successful their entire lives. People who are passionate about the rewards will eventually burn out.
Might need a bit more historical data to back that up... It's pretty well known that Vikings did come to the new world, but I haven't seen anything yet to suggest they were pushed out by the natives.
I'm not even saying you're wrong, just that I haven't heard about it (and would find it fascinating...)
I only learned about this lately myself. Have a shuftie at this:
The Myth:
Our history books don't really go into a ton of detail about how the Indians became an endangered species. Some warring, some smallpox blankets and ... death by broken heart?
When American Indians show up in movies made by conscientious white people like Oliver Stone, they usually lament having their land taken from them. The implication is that Native Americans died off like a species of tree-burrowing owl that couldn't hack it once their natural habitat was paved over.
But if we had to put the whole Cowboys and Indians battle in a Hollywood log line, we'd say the Indians put up a good fight, but were no match for the white man's superior technology. As surely as scissors cuts paper and rock smashes scissors, gun beats arrow. That's just how it works.
The Truth:
There's a pretty important detail our movies and textbooks left out of the handoff from Native Americans to white European settlers: It begins in the immediate aftermath of a full-blown apocalypse. In the decades between Columbus' discovery of America and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in human history raced up the East Coast of America. Just two years before the pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England's written history, the plague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts.
In the years before the plague turned America into The Stand, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as "densely populated" and so "smoky with Indian bonfires" that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea. Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years after Columbus landed there is like trying to understand what modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend.
Historians estimate that before the plague, America's population was anywhere between 20 and 100 million (Europe's at the time was 70 million). The plague would eventually sweep West, killing at least 90 percent of the native population. For comparison's sake, the Black Plague killed off between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population.
While this all might seem like some heavy shit to lay on a bunch of second graders, your high school and college history books weren't exactly in a hurry to tell you the full story. Which is strange, because many historians believe it is the single most important event in American history. But it's just more fun to believe that your ancestors won the land by being the superior culture.
European settlers had a hard enough time defeating the Mad Max-style stragglers of the once huge Native American population, even with superior technology. You have to assume that the Native Americans at full strength would have made shit powerfully real for any pale faces trying to settle the country they had already settled. Of course, we don't really need to assume anything about how real the American Indians kept it, thanks to the many people who came before the pilgrims. For instance, if you liked playing cowboys and Indians as a kid, you should know that you could have been playing vikings and Indians, because that shit actually happened. But before we get to how they kicked Viking ass, you probably need to know that ...
More...
I haven't done a huge amount of research into this, but if it's true then it sounds to me like someone needs to get busy digging deeper into American history and bringing Hollywood up to speed on it.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
RI, and arguably CT are the only 2 of 13 that were set up that way. Most that specified "religious freedom" named the one and only one religion to be granted freedom. The US was founded on religious persecution more than religious freedom. What, they don't teach history in school anymore because it's inconvenient? The Constitution banned the establishment of a religion because it was expected that if they didn't, there would be religious fighting (verbal more than physical, but who knows for sure of alternate pasts?) over whether to formalize the US as Puritan, Quaker, or other.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
The first thing in the Bill of Rights was preventing establishment of a religion (followed by free exercise thereof). The first thing to do is to ban a state religion. After that, they address the issue of exercising ones personal religion. The reason being that so many of the colonies were explicitly religious, with explicit official religions that having them fight for religious control of the country would cause a civil war.
Learn to love Alaska
If I may make a modest proposal here... why send them home? Consider this: 40 million Americans live in poverty. 3.5 million American children are at a risk of hunger every day! Meanwhile, foreign workers are rich in fats and protein - a good part of which, I must add, coming from them being well-fed and well-cared for in an American society, courtesy of the American taxpayer! How can you possibly support shipping all those valuable nutrients to third world countries like UK and Germany when American citizens are dying without them? Not to mention all the CO2 emissions produced by planes flying them back.
Think of the children! Think of the environment!