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2013 H-1B Visa Supply Nearly Exhausted
CowboyRobot writes with news on the FY2013 allocation of H-1B visas. From the article: "As of June 1, the government had issued 55,600 standard H-1B visas out of the annual allotment of 65,000, according to United States Immigration and Citizenship Services (USCIS). The feds also issued 18,700 H-1B visas reserved for graduates of advanced degree programs in the U.S., out of 20,000. " CowboyRobot continues, "Last year work visas did not run out until late November, but this year the pool of visas is almost entirely claimed and it's still only June. One interpretation of this is that the tech industry is hiring much more actively than it was a year ago. Some companies, such as Microsoft, have been lobbying to increase the number of available visas (currently limited to 65,000) while others argue that offering visas to foreign workers reduces job prospects for Americans."
A bit more from the article: "Industry lobby group Partnership for A New American Economy last month released a study that claims the U.S. will face a shortage of 224,000 tech workers by 2018 unless immigration rules are loosened."
Maybe the visa numbers are stored in an unsigned short and can't go above 65535 anyway....
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
H-1B is a scam by which white collar companies (not blue collar, because they aren't cool enough) can fire American workers and then replace them with foreign workers who are so happy to get to the States that they will work for $10,000 less per year. (There are laws against this kind of wage fuckery. They work the same as speed laws in Saudi Arabia: No one cares to obey or enforce them. The "shortage" of workers is a lie manufactured by Oracle, Microsoft, etc. in order to cut costs. Most of the comp sci classes I took were filled to the gills, and the program I got into in college was so impacted that I had to go in on another major and switch after the fact. It's like that in lots of places. Fuck all this H-1B nonsense, and fuck all the liars and misinformed idiots who think we are just gagging for foreign labor. We aren't gagging for foreign labor. Larry Ellison and Bill Gates are gagging for foreign labor because they can be paid less.
Just go to H1B v6 and you'll get a HUGE number of available slots.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Someone needs to figure out a way to get the people who are out of work in touch with these companies who are "desperate" to fill these open positions. It's a win-win situation.
Won't work. Many of those Americans aren't skilled in tech, and none of them are willing to be treated as slaves. That means that they'll have the temerity to demand proper training and pay! That would never do, as it might slightly cut into the fat bonuses given to part of the 1% lording it over the tech industry...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
AC wrote:
>Americans ask for more money than they are worth.
No, Americans ask for more money than H1B visa holders are willing to work for. Wages as a share of the GDP peaked in 1972 in the U.S. yet profits over-all are still going up --- H1B visas are a tiny part of how corporations are able to get more work done for less money paid so as to maximize profit.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
When my former employer started hiring H1B, the government did a check of salaries compared to market values in the area. The other programmers had to get a raise. There are laws about salary, especially for the guy managing an H1B employee which turned out to be me. He also turned out to be one of the best programmers I've worked with.
I used to have strong feelings against the H1B program, but after seeing jobs unfilled at several employers now, sometimes it makes sense.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Thyr T'rk 'r jewrg!
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Study: When highly skilled immigrants move in, highly skilled natives move out
In the first study to measure the temporary impact of highly skilled immigrants on native populations, University of Notre Dame Economist Abigail Wozniak and Fairfield University's Thomas J. Murray — a former Notre Dame graduate student — found that when highly skilled immigrants move to a city or town, the U.S. natives in that area who are also highly skilled tend to move away. However, the study found that the same immigrant group's presence decreases the chances that low-skilled natives would leave.
"High skill" refers to those having some post-secondary education or above, while "low skill" are those with a high school diploma or less education. "Natives" refer to U.S. citizens by birth.
According to the study, which will appear in the July issue of the Journal of Urban Economics, smaller and more geographically isolated cities show the biggest impacts. There was little difference in results between growing versus declining cities.
"We conclude that natives with less education take longer to adjust to the arrival of immigrants in their local labor market than do natives with more education," Wozniak says. "These effects are more pronounced in smaller, more isolated communities, from where it would be more difficult and expensive for less skilled natives to relocate."...
Seastead this.
Most of the comp sci classes I took were filled to the gills, and the program I got into in college was so impacted that I had to go in on another major and switch after the fact.
Right but the top ten percent of your classes is still only ten percent of that. The companies that are arguing for more H-1B visas are licking their lips at countries that have a top ten percent they can still tap. The government likes it because it equates to a brain drain with the added benefit that the really smart ones actually get to stay. "The cream of the crop" doesn't just apply to American masses and I'm sure these H-1B employees help them toward their diversity and EEO goals.
The willingness to work for less is just icing on the cake. The reason Microsoft is railing for more H-1B visas is simple: they win as far as they can tell. What critics might be correct about though, is that this is being used to learn how Americans do business and then move these workers back to the foreign country and lobby for outsourcing after mimicking their American counterparts. This is evident in stats like this:
In 2006, these [outsourcing] firms collectively were issued 19,512 of the 65,000 H-1B visas granted, with 4 outsourcing firms among the top 5 receivers of H-1B visas. These are Infosys, Satyam Computer Services, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro Technologies. Critics have argued that granting H-1B visas to these outsourcing firms is not the real intent of the H-1B Visa program.
So, even worse for American workers and unemployment is that it could eventually lead to even more off-shoring of work.
My work here is dung.
I'm an older worker (47) and be more than happy to take what I can get. I'd be more than happy to learn a new language, platform, tools, etc .... I'm just a C,C++, Java, SQL guy on UNIX and Windows so my skills are out of date and no one uses those languages and platforms anymore. And I haven't been working for a few years in the industry - just developing software for my businesses that tanked in the economy.
I hear this sort of thing all the time when I'm intervewing candidates. People say to me, Yeah, I'd really like to learn [Java,C#,Ruby,SomeOtherLanguage]. Then I ask them what they think about [FreeDevelopmentEnvironmentForThatLanguage]. And they say "Oh, I haven't downloaded that yet." .
Next...
If you've been unemployed for months and have nothing to show for that time, you're probably not somebody I want to hire.
You mean, ways to find workers like Monster.com or Dice.com?
These companies aren't hiring anyone that they would have to train unless they're just looking for an H1B worker. I work for a large multinational company in the U.S. and I have seen the job postings they put out. They're so full of precise specifics that the worker absolutely must have that an American engineer won't be able to fit the bill. Then they hire the H1B from the overseas office that they had in mind in the first place (and who fit the onerous job requirements exactly, strangely enough) and pay him less. It's a scam. What we need is a nice, well-funded PAC for IT workers and engineers that can lean on the lawmakers and tell Oracle and Micro$oft to get bent. The only way to get the lawmakers to listen to us is to bribe them with campaign contributions. It sucks, but that's the system we have in this country.
Oh, and this Project for a New American Economy reminds me a lot of the Project for a New American Century, which brought us the Iraq war.
First they whine about having to pay too many taxes, and they complain about being oppressed by too many regulations. They want to pay no taxes and have next to no government interference in their profiteering.
They want to pay zero taxes, yet they want the government to give them a strong military, police and justice system so their profits and interests are adequately protected. They want to pay nothing to the IRS, yet want a well designed and functioning infrastructure in which to operate.
And now they want to create a false sense of emergency with regard to their work force, to hire complacent, affordable foreign workers via H1-B, rather than hire domestic workers some of whom may be unemployed by no fault of their own.
Why is it we continue bending over backwards for these unpatriotic "people" again?
CEOs of tech companies don't want to pay taxes or decent wages and benefits and want a large pool of educated people to hire from. They have a two part strategy: (1) work deals to avoid paying taxes thus screwing Americans out of a decent education (California is a great example), and resulting in "not enough qualified applicants",which justifies (2) expanding the H1B visa program.
H1B visa workers are essentially slaves. They have to accept whatever pay and working conditions they are given because if they don't like either they have to go back where they came from. It's perfect for tech employers. The extra 65000 slaves per year coming into the US drives down the wages and benefits for American workers who have to compete against people coming from 3rd world hell-holes.
I used to be an engineer and worked for HP, TI, Motorola and a couple other companies. I've seen how the companies conspire to fix wages and benefits and I've seen and known several H1B slaves. I saw the writing on the wall several years ago and went back to school and became a dentist. Engineering is a dead end in the US. If you're in school for engineering now I'd start thinking about doing something else.
Also many young Indians no longer want to work in USA. Almost all the popular entertainment is now available in USA unlike the situation some 10 years ago. All the TV channels of all the languages are available either via satellite or via internet streaming. Cricket clubs are popping up everywhere and cricket channels are available from UK and Australia too. Vegetarianism support has increased tremendously over the last decade. Technically the life of a fresh immigrant Indian is much easier now than it was when were coming in, the early 1990s. But the biggest problem is the domestic chores. In India labor is so cheap, these people usually employ a maid and possibly a cook. Back then when I was earning 200$ a month as a government scientist I was spending 10$ a month on a maid. (All seven days a week, scrub the cement floor with wet rags and disinfectant, do the dishes, do the laundry and clean the bathrooms). So they don't do any household chores and consider cleaning the bathroom beneath their dignity. So now USA has lost its luster for the younger generation of India.
It is a pity. They don't know what they are missing. They are highly misinformed about America. They think India is going to be the super power in 20 years. They have absolutely no idea of the depth of the strength of America and the time it would take to build a society like America. Of course it would take just a few decades to undo it. But to build it, it would take a few centuries. They don't know that.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You know they could be bringing these people in because all the decent, diligent, intelligent and reliable local workers have jobs already and those without jobs are crap at what they do. Or am I mistaken and actually all Americans, even the thick and stupid ones, are better workers than highly-educated and motivated people from countries like India or from within the EU?
Just a thought.
Troc's dubious podcast and blog: http://www.trocnet.net
As it says "Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers. See what Bush and Congress really mean by a "shortage of skilled U.S. workers." Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and thousands of other companies are running fake ads in Sunday newspapers across the country each week.
Here's a video of one of their conferences. It's pretty harsh.
How to put out fake ads, how to find ways to disqualify qualified americans.
Quote" The goal is not to find a qualified and interested worker"
http://youtu.be/TCbFEgFajGU
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You're screaming at the wrong guy, dude. We hire a ton of people who've been out of work. As I said, we bring them in for interviews. Even after we've seen their resume that says they've been out of work for months. You've apparently had two years off to pursue your dream programming assignment. I've been laid off; I know what it's like to have lots of free time and no disposable income. But that's the great thing about being a computer geek. You already have a computer, and many development environments are free. Hell, McDonalds will give you the electricity and wi-fi for the price of a cup of coffee. And you get the cup of coffee.
So, I'll pose the same question to you... In the last two years, what have you accomplished? What non-profit did you help with their IT needs? What open-source software did you contribute to? What project did you begin in the hopes that it will be the next big thing?
Your problem may be your attitude, not your skills.
by large IT companies: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2012-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx Guess what? H1B is the only reasonable route for educated people to immigrate legally to US (aside from marriage and family ties, and lottery.) Due to annual cap, that is mostly taken by large IT companies, other folks are out of luck. I went to school for 10 years in US, got doctorate degree, and can't just open my own clinic and practice. I am not taking anybody else's job - I'll create jobs. But current immigration system does not allow that, unless you are rich right out of school and can invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in your business in order to get E2 visa. Even then, you cannot get residency and citizenship later, ever; only renew E2, if you are lucky. So, H1B is the only reasonable option: get hired, work for several years, and then get residency through permanent employment. However, most private clinics do not want to spend time and money to start H1B paperwork in April and wait until October for the worker to start working. Immigration system is ridiculous and that's why there are so many illegals. People just cannot get through the system even when they try to do it legally.
..apparently the answer is Yes
The world last Superpower is only that based on it's military, which is based on manufacturing strength
The more that is outsourced and done elsewhere the less US corporations will have to deal with US workers ... you already have one of the largest differences in Pay between Management and Workers, weak or non-existent unions to protect workers rights..... I see a future when a few corporations will get very rich, and the US population will be out of work
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
Surely the last remaining world super-power could manage that?
Well yes, they probably could, but I fail to see what China has to do with any of this...
Belief in slavery, that's why.
I've encountered many who really believe slaves make better workers. This includes the slaves. "I owe, I owe, it's off to work I go" is practically the national motto of the US. They don't call it slavery of course. They call it commitment, reliability and stability. They believe people must be pushed hard, and will do their best when they are in "do or die" situations, there's a gun pointing at their heads, their necks' are on the chopping blocks and the ax is ready to fall. Even better when they have volunteered. "Ability to work in high pressure environment" is a popular and sought after soft skill. They believe this so strongly that they put a higher priority on their ability to get and maintain holds over a job candidate than the abilities and skills they're seeking. Being financially responsible counts against you! They want you set up so that you're in a world of hurt if you lose your job. This is why the US does not have sane health care spending. Relieving employers of the burden of paying for and managing a health care program is seemingly one of the most business friendly things government could do. Yet business opposed it. Why? Employers like having holds over employees, and health benefits make a good one.
Ever had a boss observe that you haven't bought a new car? And this despite the fact that your current car works fine? I have, twice, and my mother once. Why is the boss so interested in your car? No one else cares. One of these bosses explained it, saying that because I wasn't making car payments, I could afford to leave my job and this was bad! At another job, the phrase "flight risk" was used to refer to employees who could afford to leave their jobs. At still another job, a fellow employee told me that he was a better employee than I because he had to have the job in order to afford his crushingly high house payments (he paid $500,000 for a small house, in California, in 2003), and his wife and new baby daughter, whereas I was living in an apartment. He made sure everyone, especially management, knew how screwed he would be if he lost his job, and that he was willing to work long hours. Often, managers are also slaves, and tend to be jealous of peons who have freedoms they don't have. Had one manager who groaned theatrically about his massive credit card debt, but it was easy to see he was really kind of bragging about it. He even held a little pissing contest one day, asking everyone how much credit card debt we had. He "won" by "virtue" of having the most. I refused to answer, and this was met with hostility, and the suspicion that I must not have any, and jealousy.
So of course H1Bs have massive advantages over the natives.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
You know they could be bringing these people in because all the decent, diligent, intelligent and reliable local workers have jobs already and those without jobs are crap at what they do. Or am I mistaken and actually all Americans, even the thick and stupid ones, are better workers than highly-educated and motivated people from countries like India or from within the EU?
Just a thought.
You only have a point if you can quantify the items in bold above. The fact is that is that:
1. Not everybody that is currently unemployed is crappy at what they do.
2. Not everybody currently employed is good at what they do.
3. Not every H1 Visa worker is highly educated and motivated.
4. Not every H1 Visa worker is crappy at what he does.
All you are doing is building a counter-argument based on simpleton-level emotion. Markets, even free markets, do not operate in a vacuum. They operate (or should operate) in the context of national interests. Every developed country sans the US operates on this premise.
So when you have a H1 Visa worker coming here, he should only come here when it is amply demonstrated that indeed, he is above average.
This is not the case. We should not be replacing our crappy people with crappy people from other countries. We should replace them (or more appropriately, enhance our intelligentsia) with actual foreign talent. And that brings me to the next hole in your argument:
There is no guaranteed path to residency (and eventual citizenship) for H1 Visa workers. As it is, it is a system of exploitation of foreign workers (talented or crappy) at the expense of our workers (talented and crappy.)
The situation is so bad that even legal residents or naturalized citizens of Indian ancestry are now looked over in favor of H1 visa workers. I KNOW THIS FOR A FACT.
So it is not just the mythical phat American as you put it that gets screwed by this. The talented foreign nationals that have now made the US their permanent home and country are also being systematically sidelined.
The H1 Visa system needs to be revampted, the quotas reduced into formulas dependend on the current national situation and unemployment/employment levels. It should not be static.
Furthermore, the requirements should be stringent so that only the real talented come aboard. Moreover, there must be greater guarantees that H1 Visa workers do not become hostages to contracting agencies, cramping them into dorms, threatened with deportation if they don't meet the unpaid 60hr/week work quota (yes it happens in US soil, a lot.)
Most importantly, there should be easier paths for legal residency (and nationalisation) for H1 Visa workers who wish to stay permanently.
Your pick.
If you've been unemployed for months and have nothing to show for that time, you're probably not somebody I want to hire.
I was an admin for 5 years and have worked in IT for more than a decade. Two years ago I lost my job because it was a 'cost cutting move' by the board of the group I worked for. When I went looking for work, I looked at any IT jobs I could qualify for. Which goes from helpdesk work up to admin work of various types. Any job less than my last I heard back from said I was overqualified and wouldn't hire me. Any job equal to or slightly more than I had done wanted a degree higher than what I had and wouldn't even give me an interview.
I did plenty of things during that period, but none of them where specifically for any company. I even tried to do a bit of consulting and had a little bit of work as such. However after a point everyone assumes that if you weren't working for another company during that time you did nothing and you therefor are not hire-able. In the end I found a college that was willing to give me a job as a onsite technician for pennies and it looks like I'll have to rebuild my entire career because a change in the market. That is frankly silly.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
There is nothing to distinguish the primary sentiments expressed here from the hatred of European Jews, Italians, Irish, West-Africans, etc. that have been voiced by the most backward and unthinking bigots throughout American history. Each of the individuals seeking work here has - in our founders' terms - an inalienable right to pursue their happiness in any peaceful manner they choose.
When they ask for a job at a given wage, they are infringing no one else's rights - noone has a "right" to a job at a higher wage than the employer is willing to pay. It is only by dropping this context that someone can complain about the so-called "unfair" competition imposed by other individual job seekers, no matter where they come from. There is no un-bigoted reason to prefer that someone born in America gets a given job over someone born elsewhere.
Yes, the H-1B visa program should be abolished - in favor of absolutely free immigration and job-seeking by any non-criminal from any place in the world. This is America's promise, as expressed eloquently on the Statue of Liberty. Where has that spirit gone?
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
Earing 50K - 100k is not low wage slave work. H1b have saleries higher than most Americans. While temporary they contribute to the economy by buying American goods and buying American services while they are here. Only a fraction of their saleries leave America in the form of money sent home. A outsourced worker living in India spends his pay in India.