Slashdot Mirror
Cringley: H-1B Visa Abuse Limits Wages and Steals US Jobs
walterbyrd sends this snippet from an article by Robert X. Cringely:
"Big tech employers are constantly lobbying for increases in H-1B quotas citing their inability to find qualified US job applicants. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and other leaders from the IT industry have testified about this before Congress. Both major political parties embrace the H-1B program with varying levels of enthusiasm. Bill Gates is wrong. What he said to Congress may have been right for Microsoft but was wrong for America and can only lead to lower wages, lower employment, and a lower standard of living. This is a bigger deal than people understand: it's the rebirth of industrial labor relations circa 1920. Our ignorance about the H-1B visa program is being used to unfairly limit wages and steal — yes, steal — jobs from U.S. citizens."
This needs more attention. Congress needs to be forced to think about this.
I've known even the Federal government to use H1B visas to employ virtual slaves at reduced cost who will be deported if they don't perform.
There isn't a shortage of labor, there's a shortage of cheap labor.
Industry just wants to keep making massive amounts of money, but pay their staff less than the salaries the market created.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This article fails to even mention that H-1B visas are dual intent - green card applications are common for H-1B visa holders, and many large tech companies encourage green card application as an employee retention mechanism.
Willingness to accept substandard wages?
Jobs shouldn't have a nationality and national boundries are overrated anyway.
That this isn't common knowledge, corporations are trying to return us to 1800's regulation, it isn't just the H1B's, it's every facet of the larger corporations.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
So there are a lot of these H-1B visa holders I know of in the health care industry that the program is a wedge that opens the door for them to become US citizens. Does it really take away jobs from US citizens if those H-1B holders become US citizens eventually?
DEY TOOUK ERRR JERBBBBZ
Without making light of the situation, this is not cool. They abuse this "looking for jobs from other countries" for even entry level jobs that require NO training other than on the spot in person on grounds training. They can get them over on a visa, and since those people would never make anything near what our minimum wage is, they have no issues taking minimum wage, and "staying" at minimum wage by the companies.
Pure profiteering, screw the locals!
what is the average H1-B wage?
I don't think H1-b workers are cheap, plus the Visa+lawyer fees
If they weren't working in the US they would be doing the same work for US companies overseas. Visas allow the workers to work here where they also contribute more to the US economy as well as US society. They might also start companies and create jobs. True, wages may fall in the short-term, but having a larger educated and working population will help us in the long run.
and are free to study for 4 years to attempt to secure a seat in top colleges around the world
Could you elaborate on what you meant by this?
This sounds like union talk as they are against H-1B visas. Unions are bad therefore H-1B visas must be good. Remember, if you don't want to get paid the same wage as an H-1B then get another job as there is somebody else in line!!
I'm a Canadian, and I guess, a reasonably talented EE. One avenue not mentioned is the TN-class visa; same general idea, but yearly renewable. (Canada/Mexico)
The process to actually _immigrate_ to the US is a real pain and very lengthy. So much that the logical extension is that they don't want skilled immigration on a permanent basis - at least from Canada. However, exporting work from the US is made very easy.
What's the problem with opening it up? Why not just find a way to document, all the undocumented? Am I missing something?
..don't panic
For the software industry leaders, H1-Bs are used for bringing in MSc's, Ph.Ds, and other top talent from other countries. Ordinary IT jobs aren't at stake because that type of job is beneath them.
Is this really true? I have yet to find a single example of someone on an H1-B and is being paid below the average. I myself am paid at par with my American colleagues. One of my friends does contracting work and is paid roughly 50% more than me.
Or are you getting confused with outsourcing?
If there is a global market on the price of oil, why is there not one for labor? Is it because global high tech customers see employees as worth less than western/US counterparts? I suspect no. People should all be treated equally and not be discriminated based on nationality.
I suggest you read this before you marvel at the opportunities Americans have for education.
You know why H1Bs threaten American jobs? Because they mainly come from countries where education is better and free, so they come better educated and debt-free. Debt-free people accept lower wages and employers prefer people with a better education.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I wish the editors at ./ would have their jobs stolen so we would not have to read this socialist drivel.
The whole US economy is based on exploiting an underclass of labour. Currently mostly Mexican.
H-1B is at least somewhat transparent on what it is trying to accomplish.
This is a recurrent topic on Slashdot. I will not pretend I know how it's done in every single company but, as an H1B I have:
- paid the same amount of taxes as citizens in my company - had the same wages (even higher actually) as citizens - had the same access to healthcare as citizens - created an extra legal cost to my employers for maintaining my immigration status - not worked more (at least hours-wise) than citizens
The BLS (bls.gov) regulary publishes a list of the jobs with the most potential on the market. There is a lack in STEM. It's a fact (unless BLS is conspiring against the people, this is Slashdot after all).
In my field there are roughly 20% of citizens that fill positions, in any given company. Not sure why. Maybe head over to the engineering department of a big university and see who's attending and getting top grades. You have a sh*tton of people from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, and also now Latin America, working their asses off. Not many Americans... no they're all at the Business School learning 1- blah 2- blah 3- profit. Let's fix that first, then complain.
signed: former H1B, now permanent resident, one day citizen
Oh, and obligatory: "I took yer jerb".
Yes, taking the cream of the crop of foreigners who you don't have to pay for their education or upbringing and having them work in tech or science fields is terrible economics. A mediocre American who the government has to subsidize $200k for education is such a better investment.
By the way, how many H-1Bs were issued last year? 65,000. Out of a labor force of 150 million.
This is just xenophobia.
Wage arbitrage now was caused by labor mobility barriers set up in the past.
Lesson: Don't set up a large potential difference if you don't want to get a big shock arcing through down the road.
Set your phasers on "funky"!
There is absolutely nothing new in this article. A cursory look at Wikipedia tells me that these criticisms and studies have existed for almost a decade. This article is only trying to get pageviews with sensationalized headline.
The problem is that if you don't grant H1-Bs the companies will pretty much move operations offshore if they are large enough to support that sort of operation.
With H1-Bs you at least keep the tax revenues in the US.
The *really* bad aspect of this is that it weakens US educational institutions. With these people coming into the US it discourages US citizens from going after these sorts of technical degrees in the US. That's got all sorts of negative effects.
Perhaps one sort of H1-B visa that would be less damaging overall is the type that is granted to foreign students holding a degree from a US university.
H1B's are not only artificially driving down wages and generally screwing over American programmers, engineers, etc., but they are also a blight on the job market for another reason: fake jobs.
There are a LOT of fake job ads are out there right now that employers are only posting so they can run crying to Congress and the Labor Dept. later, claiming that they can't get enough "qualified applicants" (and to beg for more H1B visas). You know, that ad that asks for a programmer with 20+ years of Java programming experience, or with qualifications so specific that it HAS to be tailored to a specific H1B candidate, or that asks for an experienced programmer with a salary range of $30,000-$35,000, or that never seems to get filled no matter how many qualified people apply? These are the jobs that colleges cite when they try to sucker in new programming and CS students, that applicants waste valuable time and effort on, and that create an artificially rosy appearance of the technical job market. They make it look like there are way more jobs than workers out there (that's what they're designed to do), when in reality the REAL job market is a lot more dismal, especially for newbies. They're a blight for honest job seekers, and a tool for the dishonest to use to con Congress, the Labor Dept., and desperate potential students.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
I came here on from India an H1B and am a citizen now. While I got lucky and escaped abuse by chnanging employers, it was pretty common for these H1B sponsors to plan layoffs around visas. The more egregious issue was around Green Card though. The GC process was non-portable then. Companies would encourate folks to file GC ASAP and then slow walk the labor approval, resulting in poor saps stuck in low-paying positions for 7-9 years, even as they took on greater responsibilities and played bigger and better roles. They were little more than bonded laborers, essentially working on far lower pay than equivalent US employees.
There is no need to have so many H1Bs and if they do forge ahead, insist on providing 100% easy and transparent job portability to those who are sponsored. Then, just watch the demand dry up.
The situation might be different in a hotbed like Silicon Valley but even there you should compare the H1B salary and employment length to those of citizens.
You're assuming that the foreigner is the cream of the crop, that the American is mediocre, and that unemployed (or even underemployed) citizens don't cost the government anything.
May have something to do with the fact that most Americans don't live in slums with open sewers, on a salary of a few hundred dollars a year.
It's is a real uphill battle for congresscritters, especially the long time reps, to understand this.
Post WWII until maybe mid-80s I think it might have been a valid belief that doing whatever helps the biggest corporations will automagicly help the economy. I think high speed communications invalidates this idea completely.
In other words, it used to be that if a company grew that it would force them to help the individuals that needs jobs. If that ever was the case it isn't so now. So pouring money and tax breaks into a big company does nothing but enrich the few people at the top of that chain because they can just as easily hire someone offshore.
I don't think people in Congress understand this. And it extends to H1Bs, because if they get the "smart" immigrants then it means more domestic jobs under similar logic. I think many reps in Congress probably want to help their local constituents but haven't been able to break out of this logic. Look at how dumb our legislation with tech is... it falls in the same category of ignorance.
Again, I think there are some that just don't care if they are helping normal joes or not. Personally I thin Romney falls into that camp.
Are you kidding me? Congress has lost its goddamned mind and now works for the "job creators" who complain about a shortage of cheap labor. There's plenty of domestic labor in this country, its just not being considered because it has the audacity to ask for a living wage. I swear, the rich want to drag us back to the gilded age.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
What about higher COSTS for business which get passed on to ALL consumers? And don't cry me a river about corporate profits as I suggest you go look to see what is in your 401k or other retirement plan - public or private. The sad reality is that the US can no longer command the wages it once could, whether thats in tech or in digging ditches.
Willingness to accept substandard wages?
I'm not sure the Chinese guy with an H-1B would agree with your definition of "substandard". I think he must be over the moon about his new material prosperity.
Ezekiel 23:20
If the labor statistics on unemployment are to be believed, and I'm rather sure we have worse unemployment than the labor statistics show, Cringley is correct in his assertions. I know so many slashdotters get all emotional about national borders being irrelevant in a perfect world, and fairness in employment across the world being a great thing in their logical minds, and I agree for the most part, logically at least, but as of now we are working in a system where we still have national borders. Central governments still DO take care of their populations currently, (some better than others) and there is no current world fixture in place to assure society functions properly across these borders. So within these known constraints we still must do right by our own nation's citizens currently first. Unfortunately we are not, and I would like to see foreign programs like this cut back and eliminated based upon employment statistics.
Anyone that feels they are entitled to a job is a fool that doesn't deserve a moment of my time. The idea that someone could "steal" your job is silly. You find a job, you create a job, you work for a job, but never are you entitled to a job. If we want to hurt our economy to help those less entrepreneurial to have jobs so be it. It worked for the automotive industry. Taxes, tariffs, and quotas are a fools way to pretend to stay competitive.
I know this is an unpopular topic, but I see that throughout history that diversity -- of any form: religious, ethnic, cultural, racial -- has failed wherever it has been tried because it offers people a choice between having no culture or being ostracized for maintaining a cultural identity.
Immigration seems to be popular with the construction industry, cheap labor employers, and serf-masters like the big Silicon Valley companies. Cheap lawn mowing and cheap software production are high on their agendas. However, it's not really working in that this country continues to have clashes between value systems, including those rooted in culture, and increasingly, between our lack of values and anyone who does have cultural values.
Can anyone name a time and place in which diversity has thrived? It seems like all of our accounts come from a couple centuries later when the experiment has failed, and left behind a culturally-confused third world nation.
Perhaps instead of just walking lock-step with the rest of the herd, we should think independently about this issue, and unlike the rest of our society, question whether it's a good thing at all.
Futurist Traditionalism
Read the article. there are about 700k H1-Bs in the US today
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I myself am paid at par with my American colleagues.
...and that's the problem. If $MEGACORP can get employees for a lower price by way of H1-B, then the local people trying to get a job there are forced to accept the same lower wage, or they don't get the job.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
An unemployed citizen isn't going to cost the government nearly as much as raising and educating a citizen to the level to work in a tech or science field. And this foreigner will almost certainly become a citizen. In effect, an H-1B allows the US to steal the valuable labor and contributions to society from another country.
From my experience, the people who oppose H-1Bs tend to be very xenophobic. Have a conversation with them and soon it will digress to topics like self-deportation or worse.
Or just cheap US talent?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU&feature=youtu.b
Hey that sounds familiar... the guy's pretty much parroting the stuff that European far right nationalists / would-be fascists vomit out every time they need more votes. Oh no we're losing jobs and money to those dirty rotten immigrants (which invariably are anyone who is NOT a white anglo-saxon)! You'll learn to shut out the droning soon enough.
There is another reason for this type of advert: Labor Certification in support of a green card application. Making the ads too specific isn't actually allowed, but I have no doubt that it happens.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
When I was a H1B, I was the highest paid member of the team, at a Fortune 100 company.
Now that I'm not a H1B, I'm still the highest member paid.
This is a net benefit to me, and to the country, IMO.
[obviously, I'm the highest paid because I'm damned good, not because they like to pay me more than anyone else for no reason]
Is anyone really surprised with this report? I know people who have worked as "contractors" with H1 B and if you ever see the way these IT contracting companies exploit the system, you will be shocked. It is a machinery in place in pretty much all of California and North East where folks that cannot get jobs here apply. Once they get in, they are given a quick training on some IT stuff and then their resumes are modified to make them look like "experts" in that area. After that they are fitted into companies mostly banks in NE and big companies like Cisco/IBM ( because there they are just 1 in a hundreds of thousands of employees and no one cares how they got in.) by way of contracting. Half of their pay is docked by the contract firms as part of the agreement and they are not given any health benefits. But hey, with even what those people make, they somehow still survive. They would rather be here than go back!
The solution to the H-1b abuse problem is to simply evict corporations from the US. Outsource not only IBM's programmers, but their entire executive suite and board of directors. The political zeitgeist of immigration is basically that no nation has a right to its territory when there are people elsewhere -- even if numbering in the billions -- that want to "seek a better life". Why not take the "better life" to them where they live? GIVE them IBM, HP, et al and good riddance.
Seastead this.
I disagree with this article. I believe there a shortage of developers. I know there are cited studies but in my experience there is a serious shortage of developers in the USA. Being part of the industry for ten years now I've never seen a time where a developer was unemployed for any reason other then personal choice. Tucson, for example, has been steadily adding/employing about 100 additional programmers each year while graduating 90 (most of whom immediately relocate). High paying software jobs sit unfilled for months, in some cases years at Ratheon, UofA, IBM, and many more places.
While I'm hardly an expert in the area I rather suspect a part of the problem is the utterly crap and overpriced education system in the US.
From what I've heard is that the generic collage isn't really appreciated atall. The expensive schools that are highly valued are extremely expensive. Not to mention you spend money on non-academic people for selecting students without money (Football).
So logically what happens is, you get a small sampling of random rich people, who might be stupid or intelligent, but unlikely to be very motivated, a few middle class who have managed to figure out a way to pay for it, a bunch of random athletes (who are unlikely to get interested in engineering), and a few gifted people, who have an elevated likelihood of being socially limited.
What you really should get is:
a) No idiots (academically ungifted)
b) No totally unmotivated (rich, or otherwise)
c) The generic academic student.
d) The gifted
I won't claim the Nordic model of free schools is optimal either, it rather creates long graduation times and wasted effort with dropouts, but merit should be valued over money. Or football.
...and that guy that took my job also jumped and committed suicide!
That could have been me at Foxconn!
Oh, wait...
"where education is better"
If this is true why do we have a major influx of foreign students studying in US universities?
Otherwise known as a fair market wage?
Whoever's writing as Cringly is just being racist here. There's no moral wrong when a non-American gets an "American job", whether through immigraiton or offshoring. Everyone deserves to compete for any job, without prefernce given by race or place of birth.
Sure, I'd personally like to see all the cool developer jobs reserved for somewhat overweight middle-aged white guys, but that's because I'm a greedy bastard, not because it would be some kind of moral virtue!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Before the global infrastructure built up, before so much of investments were made by big companies in India, before many mid level execs have hitched their wagon to the out sourcing horse (which was stolen from the barn mentioned earlier), it might have been possible to reduce H1B and kept the job in USA.
But right now, if you reduce H1B, it is going to move the whole damned job to India. At least they (or us, because I am an ex H1B) work in USA, pay taxes in USA and spend most of their money in USA and save and invest in USA. The outsourced job lives, spends, invests and pays taxes in India.
I ran the rat race in India, and won it. And the prize was US Citizenship. I don't want my daughter fighting for jobs with the next generation of me who wins the rat race in India. But that makes me sound like the guy who dynamites the bridge after crossing it himself. This is quite complicated.
As Obama said in the third debate, "Some jobs are not coming back. They are low wage low skill jobs. I want high wage high skill jobs here", it would be great if we could make sure the jobs that were lost are all low wage low skill jobs and keep the high wage jobs here. Even if that means my daughter has to fight with the next generation rat-race winner from India.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Not *every* company using H1B is doing it for evil reasons. But some of the larger ones certainly seem to be. I have seen "help wanted" ads posted looking for Masters' degree in Comp Sci with some extremely specific qualifications and ridiculously low salary. I refuse to believe that there are not any US citizens who could do that job. I doubt anyone who went through a US university could afford to take it, though.
No one deserves a "living wage" or any wage except what someone is willing to pay. No one deserves anything from another, except to be left alone when desired. It's on you to gain some skill that others need so much that they'll pay well for it!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If this is true why do we have a major influx of foreign students studying in US universities?
They weren't smart enough for IIT so they had to settle for MIT.
This video sums it up pretty nicely. Posting fake job ads, claim there aren't enough qualified local folk to fill this job, then claim an H1-B is necessary!
"What's our goal here? Well our goal is clearly NOT to find a qualified U.S. worker. That sounds funny, but that's what we're trying to do here!"
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
The reason you're paid on-par is because American wages have dropped a massive amount in the past few decades. It's a plan that's been at work for decades. We were warned about it but failed to listen.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/the-1992-campaign-transcript-of-2d-tv-debate-between-bush-clinton-and-perot.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
"To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
"So we -- if the people send me to Washington the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last part here -- I decided i was dumb and didn't understand it so I called the Who's Who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They say, "It'd be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, "well, how does it stop being disruptive?" And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We've got to cut it out."
So yeah, it's great for people who come from other countries to work, but it came at the expense of the American people who used to be able to afford vacations, health care, and college but now no longer can.
My economics teacher explained it thusly:
From an 'American' point of view why would you not want every smart and hardworking person to come to America and work for US companies? (Possible answers: 1. Xenophobia 2. It's hard to face the fact that someone might be willing to work harder and accept a lower standard of living than americans have grown to expect/feel that they deserve)
India is going to have more honors graduates graduating from their education programs than the total number of people that graduate from US schools. From a global perspective Americans are going to be vastly outnumberd if current trends continue.
So you can have some really smart, hardworking, foreigners come to the US to work, and maybe it does lower the average salary. But then US innovation continues and the economy and the country prospers (hopefully).
Or you can go protectionist and instead of these people coming to the US, the labor and mind power stays in another country where they will work for even less, giving the competitive advantage to a foreign company that will ultimately 'beat' the American company (all things being equal, etc etc). This is a negative outcome that is only realized over the long term which is measured in years.
As it stands 'foreigners' come and get educated in US schools and end up being supported in part by any subsidy the school receives. So technically we are already incurring some of the cost of associated with educating some of these students. From an 'american' point of view, why would you want them to leave? Let them stay, get citizenship, pay taxes, contribute to the local economy and become a part of the melting pot that we always tout america as being.
I don't really want to live in a United States that really is closed to people immigrating here. Especially smart and hardworking people looking for a better life.
And I don't buy that them being willing to work for less money is the be all and end all of competitive advantages for those workers. Over coming language and cultural barriers is difficult. If the job you're talking about is cheap menial labor, then ok yes, whoever will work for cheapest wins... until you get down to a minimum wage discussion. But that's not what we're talking about here.
Both political parties dutifully ignore the issue, as they have been paid to do.
They are "Guests" who never go home, essentially.
Look up the writing of Kim Berry, John Miano, and Norm Matloff for more.
Wages became too high? No problem, bring the less overpriced dudes. I hear all the time about people claiming they have an added value over outsourced dudes. Well, talking is easy... it's time to prove in quantitative terms where the added value is.
Just thought I'd add that TFA also indicates that H1-Bs are specifically for technical positions, the domestic labor force of which is 2.5 million, not 150 million.
Don't forget that the only contact info listed for the job is an email address like "humanresources14@hotmail.com"!
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Given that the original complaintant has such a poor grasp of his native language that he got the title wrong ... "Hear, hear" is correct, not "Here, here"
H-1Bs are used when there is pressure on employers to pay higher wages because a certain skill is in high demand. Bringing more potential employees drives wages down because they increase the supply and because they will usually accept a lower wage. Plus they're often locked into the employer who sponsors them, it's much more difficult for them to job hop.
And that 65,000 number? That's per year, and most stay for at least six years. You can do the math but remember, H-1Bs aren't brought in to greet you at Wally World or make your latte at the local coffee shop so the 150 million doesn't apply either.
Why are they unable to compete other that sheer incompetence and laziness?
what you say if great if american workers are welcomed around the world with open arms, but the truth is that other countries are much more protectionist than the US when it comes to foreign workers.
This is a requirement for H1-B application and green card.
Candidate submits the job description to the department of labor (Prevailing wage determination). According to the job description, category, amount of experience required DOL determines the minimum wage the position should be paying.
When I was starting the green card process the Sr. Systems Engineer position with Undergrad + 5 or more years of experience in North NJ area was determined to be 112k$.
When I was applying for H1-B in year 2006 the wage requirement for Analyst with 6 months of experience was 40k$.
I've worked with a *lot* of H1-Bs, been to college, and your assumptions? They suck.
* Cream of the crop? H1-B employees more often than not present a language barrier that often blows productivity, and many need remedial training very quickly in nearly any subject that isn't in the specialty being hired for.
* Subsidized $200k? Man, I'd love to know where I could get that kind of subsidy money! (I had to pay my own effing way through school.) Hint: even if you count governmental loans, only a doctor (as in "MD") at a top-flight school would need that much money to keep tuition paid.
* 65,000 in one year? Two bad assumptions here: One, you only count one year, which is misleading. Two, those 65,000 positions filled last year were for higher-level (thus otherwise higher-paying) positions. We're not talking entry-level desktop support jobs here.
HTH.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I am an H1-B immigrant and I am paid more than my American colleagues. And all other H1-B's I know are in the same boat, same wages.
I also routinely am involved in interviews, and there *is* a shortage of qualified workers in America.
The are also *great* people here, but not enough for the Software Industry, not nearly enough.
When employers want to hires people for a bargain they don't even look at bringing them to the US, they simply open a R&D lab (usually with funding from the local municipality too) abroad. Whoever thinks employers would ever go through the costly and burdensome H1-B process for cheap labor is delusional, or unqualified, or both.
Whoever's writing as Cringly is just being racist here.
Not necessarily racist (though that is a possibility), but definitely isolationist.
It is something like a cry of "America for Americans," but without realizing that phrase means shipping all the white people back to Europe.
Yes, this is because the 65k plus 20k caps are annual caps. Thank you for pointing the accumulative effect of this policy have been in place for 20 years! Out of hundreds of H-1Bs I have worked with, I have personally seen only one return home, and it was because of a medical issue.
Ah, the race card. It took way too long for it to rear it's ugly, ignorant head. Thank you so much for playing it!
Not from around here, are you...?
U.S. of A. citizens can't compete with foreign nationals who:
-- don't pay federal income tax (if they're in the US for less than so many days - can't google the #, somewhere around 150);
-- don't plan on buying a home (remember, they're temps), so don't have to deal with property tax, etc.;
-- willing to live multi-family in a single home;
-- are not up to U.S. educational standards (especially true in the IT field);
-- willing to work many hours OT without compensation (what else are they going to do here).
The U.S. is their gold mine. They work here for a few years and return to India and are then very, very well off (if they saved
while in the U.S.)
You're right, but that's only half the truth I'm afraid. Of all the H1Bs that I've met in corporate America (and I've met with a lot in my lifetime), almost all of them have have come from a middle to extremely wealthy background. That is to say, it was their parents that fronted the money in sending their child to a western university prior to landing a job in the states. That's nothing new. What *is* interesting is how their parents got their wealth. Generally in nations such as China and India, a good portion of that wealth is illegitimate. That is to say, much of it was either obtained via politics or corruption (paid for by the tax payer of course) vs say...an honest salary based on a free market competitive wage.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yes, since once he's done working he can move back to China and retire on the money he's made. A US worker could live for a few months on those same savings.
Like, the job of President of the United States!!! Um, like, because Donald Trump told us that he is going to tell us something like that maybe sometime in the future . . .
That's kinda sorta right, isn't it . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Industry has used the H1-B Visa program to consistently keep engineering salaries depressed. Easily importing cheap overseas talent are depressed rates prevents American engineers from obtaining jobs and the resulting depressed salaries results in fewer college students from opting for an engineering degree. Engineering is hard and should be compensate accordingly. When companies lobby and makes statements before congress everyone should remember that we have a global market and that these corporations' only objective is to maximize profit then hide it when it comes time to pay taxes. Corporations are citizens of the world, not the US. Corporate interests, in general, are not aligned with those of the average citizen.
Also, Corporations, according to the US Supreme Court, are people. People that can't go to prison and only get fined if they kill someone but people just the same.
They just stole my job and those of 461 of my co-workers. Replacing us with foreigners that do not know how to do the work. F them all.
How is it substandard if the H1B worker is living in the same city at the same wage?
Increase the amount of Payroll taxes charged to non-citizens (and include the Employer Portion with this) of course you will need to ramp up the numbers over say 5 years but your EndGame is
15% of workforce Non-Citizens= 130% of Base Values
17% = 140%
19% =150%
21% = 175%
22+= 180% + 2% for every percent above 22
this will have 2 benefits
1 this will raise Massive Amounts of Money
2 Companies will get very creative in employing LOCAL folks
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
"Americans have MORE opportunities than non Americans for education if they are wealthy"
I finished your sentence for you.
I find it funny that some foreigners think that the USA is the land of plenty for education... Try a $60,000 debt hanging around you neck to go with that education and not being able to find a job that pays more than $18.00 an hour because the rich assholes that get $1500 an hour think that your skillset is not worth more than that.
In america it's not what you know but who you know that will deliver a high paying job.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Otherwise known as a fair market wage?
Whoever's writing as Cringly is just being racist here. There's no moral wrong when a non-American gets an "American job", whether through immigraiton or offshoring. Everyone deserves to compete for any job, without prefernce given by race or place of birth.
Sure, I'd personally like to see all the cool developer jobs reserved for somewhat overweight middle-aged white guys, but that's because I'm a greedy bastard, not because it would be some kind of moral virtue!
The problem is that it puts a net drain on the local market, both in terms of skilled workers and in terms of money. An H1-B takes a low paying job that would traditionally go to an entry-level local worker, works for several years, and returns home with enough money live on comfortably for the rest of his life due to the exchange rate. This means that the local entry-level worker can't find a job and becomes disenfranchised, and a total loss of ~50k * 3 yr = $150k is permanently removed from the local economy. Now maybe this is not ethically wrong, but it is not in the best interests of the local economy or the national economy.
i worked at a large successful company -- H1B folks were hired at lower wages simply by offering the position at a lower MTS level and then combined with the rules for H1B folks that they do not have the freedom to move from job to job as a citizen. While the later may appear to be a constraint for the H1B person, it become anti-competitive for the citizen. How? Because many H1B folks would move to better jobs and cannot and this actually creates an "employers market" by not allowing people to move around freely. Personally, what I would like to see is that H1B folks can move as freely as they desire once in the country. But since they are being invited to the country because there is a shortage of citizens with the desired skills -- both the H1B person and the hiring company must provide X hours of training to any qualified citizen in that specific area. For example, if the H1B person was hired because they have Big Data/Analytics experience, then that person must provide tutoring to citizens in that area X hours a month and paid for by the hiring company. What requirements would a citizen need to qualify for the tutoring? If they have been a database engineer/developer in an orthogonal discipline (RDMS/C++) and the Big Data gig is Hadoop/Java -- currently in Silicon Valley, it is very common to see folks not upgrading their skills and it has nothing to do with lack of ambition -- it has everything to do with the number of hours the typical engineer is required to work -- basically, most folks are working long hours and fully committed to the day-to-day work to get their products out the door, there is little time left for developing skills for tomorrow -- sadly most companies will not grow/train within, but will go outside and hire for the specific skill set. In the mean time, the person that has been working for many years, long hours is stuck in a rut using 5-7 and sometimes 10-15 year old software stacks.
Ok, how do you gain skill/experience if you can't even catch a break in your own country because you have to compete with the rest of the world? What if you were born poor? Starting from zero is HARD. What if someone becomes disabled through no fault of their own, are you also against taking care of people who can't care for themselves anymore? I guess the people who can't make it in your society should just starve to death in a gutter someplace. Ayn Rand would approve.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
Oooh my. Your ignorance hurts my skull. If I, an american born citizen, am making 40k a year and I have a H1-B buddy who also makes 40k do you know who costs more to the company?? The H1-B does. FACT. Its not free to get them here. It costs money. So why do I get paid as much as them if they cost more? Employee's are stupid. We assuming take home == pay.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I didn't see any mention of ethnicity or any sort of racial slur in the comment, what are you talking about?
You have never been to most of the south have you....
You're assuming that ..... the American is mediocre
Well, you can't blame anyone for THAT part.
H-1Bs are used when there is pressure on employers to pay higher wages because a certain skill is in high demand
In other words, capitalists don't like it when the negative part of capitalism applies to them.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
There's a huge difference between "stealing" and "infringing". That's one thing I've learned here on Slashdot.
IT unemployment is about 2% across most of the nation. So.. pretty much everyone with a couple brain cells to rub together has a job in IT.
Nice straw man there.
Yea, starting from zero IS hard. I did it. Not saying everyone can but oh-fucking-well
All your points are really just whiny/bitchy in nature and sound more like someone who doesn't like having to deal with the byproduct of living (problems).
Then you go and insult some writer for no reason.
Are you anti-social or just trolling?
Um, the free market, applied to labor/companies, would say that salaries and job demand will level out over time. If you bring in a lot of outside labor, you drive salaries down. Students entering college will look at these lower wages and say, hum, I'll go for a degree that's not engineering related. Which gives employers their ammo that "we just can't find qualified US applicants." Stop the H1-B visas and wages will rise until supply and demand settle out. It's has nothing to do with racism: , By artificially increasing supply, H1-B visas keep wages low for jobs that tech companies cannot offshore.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
The problem is that if you don't grant H1-Bs the companies will pretty much move operations offshore if they are large enough to support that sort of operation.
This
Except the part about being large enough. A company doesn't have to be large to off-shore. It is routine now for startups with fewer than 20 employees to have half of them off shore. Many VC's impose an off-shoring strategy as a pre-requisite for getting funding.
Frankly, complaining about H1B's is fighting the last war. If a company uses H1B's they will hire fewer Americans but they will hire some and even the H1B's contribute to the local economy. If they off-shore, no Americans will be hired and none of those employed will contribute to the local economy.
But wait, some say: "We can just move up the food chain. The architects and lead designers will still be here, right?" Well, they might work here (questionable if their subordinates are overseas) but the engineers in the best position to move up are the ones working overseas. That's because they are working and because they have been allowed to learn on the job rather than be required to arrive as a fully-formed expert.
herpa derp. says the libertarian who probably went to a school my tax dollars help support, drives on the roads my tax dollars support, is defended by the military my tax dollars support. nobody deserves anything from anyone!
You didn't really think that global capital owes you anything because you were born in America, did you? That's the name of the game we play... America wanted to be the center of the world economy, the center of global capitalism. And I'm telling you right now, business owners aren't in it for America--as someone else posted, it makes more business sense to hire cheap, skilled foreigners than to hire expensive, incompetent Americans.
Nice strawman, you prove your own point about the mediocre American whose education was subdized...
Lets try to do an apples to apples comparison:
700k h1b issued work visa
total US IT workforce of 2-3 million
yes increasing the workforce size by a third or. Quarter is HUGE, if you didn't have such a mediocre education that would be obvious to anyone with Econ 101 under their belt.
You hide behind the AC mask yet you say you made it by starting from zero. How exactly did you manage to succeed where so many others have failed? (and spare no details) If it's actually true maybe the rest of us could learn something.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
I think it varies a lot. Some people probably do genuinely need good people and therefore it is about skills and they pay for it to ensure they retain you. But I've seen Java developers getting paid only a couple thousand more than people I know who work in a stores room packing things to ship off somewhere.
That's the problem. We don't necessarily need more visas. The ones we have need to go to those who actually need them.
Aha, so in some tricky contorted way socialism is really to blame for all this. Damn, I knew it! Why take responsibility for your own economy when you can blame foreigners!
Off the top of your head, name 5 skills that are hot right now. Take 5 minutes each, and think about how you'd gain demonstrable skills in each. Now go execute on each of those plans.
Want to be known as a Ruby guy with good skills -- on your off hours, learn the language, pull together some Chef recipes and offer them to the world. See, no one had to hand you anything to get 3 strong buzzwords on your recipe (Chef, Ruby, Open Source). All it took is your own effort and a little time.
Anyone not willing to invest in themselves to improve their own lot *should* starve in the gutter.
Cumulative effect over 20 years : You can be in H1-B status for 6 + 3 years. The 700K visa holders show this well, being close to 85K * 9 years.
And of course you have not seen the visa holders return home, most of these people get a green card and stay in the US, eventually becoming US citizens.
As AC pointed out above : US gets the best minds from abroad, without paying for their education. If this is not good for the US then I don't see what is...
Unless of course you are an exec then you can command wages far in excess of those we once could.
prolly feelsgoodman.jpeg
So, the H1-B worker, by your calculation, lives of donuts he steals in the break room and sleeps on a park bench? While there are probably some H1-B workers who remit a fraction of their income to their home country, most live in the community like every one else, renting a house, buying a car and groceries, and try to get ahead in the new country. As for the "stealing American's jobs", we graduate some 5,000,000 people a year from US colleges. Compare that to the 85,000 total H1B visa given out annually, less than 2% of the total job market entries.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
I swear, Libertarians are like big stupid dogs which lick the very same boot that kicks them.
Dont you have community college and a decent public school system which are free and anyone who is a citizen can get in with trivial effort?
That studying costs major amounts of money, which usually takes the form of loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Thus, it requires a certain level of wages.
In other news, egoistical libertarians are egoistical. News at 9.
Were you an out of state student? No? Then you were subsidized. That is why there is a difference between out of state and in state tuition.
Did you also go to a private school for your primary and secondary schooling? No? Then your education was subsidized. Did you parents get tax breaks for your existence? Subsidized. Etc, etc. All of these are items the government doesn't have to pay in the case of an H-1B worker.
Otherwise known as a fair market wage?
I would agree with you except for one big, fat caveat:
With H1-Bs, business and government are colluding to depress wages (albeit with government as a semi-unwitting partner in this affair).
If someone shows up from overseas and applies for the position at a lower wage, then it would be perfectly fair. Because of this, race doesn't mean a damned thing in the equation, at all.
But, when government steps in, things definitely get hinkey. Because companies can now knock down wages across the board for a given position, they can use the overall savings to actively seek and bring in H1-B workers, and still come out ahead.
In other words? Don't think micro-scale, think macro-scale.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Doesn't matter. Why are you comparing wages from a 1st world country to a developing nation? If you want a fair comparison, you should be asking if someone from the UK or Germany would consider those wages "substandard".
True. But that doesn't mean we can't to encourage employers to be willing to pay a living wage.
We can do this lots of ways, such as limiting their ability to import cheap workers, or by instituting fines for them paying too little (to expand upon this, I think we need to rais ethe minimum wage a la Australia to an actual liveable wage). I don't see a problem with 'nudging' employers to be willing to pay a living wage. You may, but that's because you're a pseudo-anarchist.
That's your opinion, and I respect that. I disagree, however, and I believe that we, as a whole, owe each other the opportunity to pursue action at the societal, rather than the individual, level.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I hear what you're saying but the problem is that self improvement isn't always enough. More often than not you need X years work experience with skill Y before employers will take it seriously. Meanwhile, your competition already has the skills/experieence so they beat you out of the job.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
The same speech was also used by Adolf Hitler, following Goebels advice.
There is always "another" group guilty of "our" problems.
Surely you don't need to plain make stuff up if you have a valid argument?
160,794 H1-Bs were issued last year (potentially more if there were any that were succesfully appealed after September)., so you are only off by about 250%.
http://www.travel.state.gov/pdf/FY2011NIVWorkloadbyVisaCategory.pdf is my reference for the count, straight from the department of state. Where is your number from? Did you just assume that a limit with a bunch of exemptions to it will only reach the on-exemption limit? Or did you just make it up?
And are you also seriously claiming there are 150 million people working the US in the fields that H1-B visas apply to? Or did you make that up as well.
An unemployed citizen isn't going to cost the government nearly as much as raising and educating a citizen to the level to work in a tech or science field. And this foreigner will almost certainly become a citizen. In effect, an H-1B allows the US to steal the valuable labor and contributions to society from another country.
From my experience, the people who oppose H-1Bs tend to be very xenophobic. Have a conversation with them and soon it will digress to topics like self-deportation or worse.
I'm about as left as it gets, but I oppose the H1B status on the fact that it puts a large portion of workers at a major negotiation disadvantage. The problem isn't that there are foreigners taking these jobs, its that the foreigners are not able to negotiate on a level playing field, which drives down the wages for everyone. A similar and far more dramatic shift has happened in blue collar jobs involving illegal immigrants. The reason you don't see Americans picking fruit in California isn't because they don't want to do it, it's because the farmer can pay the illegal immigrants half the minimum wage, is not liable if that worker is injured on the job, and can arbitrarily change the deal at any point with no legal repercussions. Slave labor is bad for us as a nation, whether it be white collar or blue collar.
I work in NYC with a number of immigrants. I think we are under the misconception that, on the macro level, there is a finite amount of work to be done. There isn't.
Supply can create its own demand. And having a number of foreign engineers and comp sci people is a good thing which benefits us as a whole.
I'm not sure where the limits to that is, when we can only absorb so many people at a time.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Clearly that's what the employers are thinking.
Tell me, why is it OK for employers to not want to compete for talent, but it's the greatest sin when workers want to have fair competition for jobs?
And all the "native Americans" back to Siberia!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Nope. If you're going to offer a job, it damn well better be at a living wage. If you can't afford that, then tough shit, you make do without the labor, and go out of business.
That's amazing, as the quote is only 85,000 annually, with a maximum of 6 years (not sure if the renewal after 3 years counts against the quota). So there shouldn't be more than 510,000 in the US at any given time. But the real reason we use the H1-Bs is that most US graduates won't stay in school for the advanced degrees the industry requires. You can't run a research oriented business with BS. You need the PhDs and MS, and there are probably less than 25% of those with US citizenship.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
There is no right to cheap.
...wages are artificially high in the United States and only maintainable at that level when the government limits foreign competition.
The H-1B program should be abolished---and along with it, the government's power to prevent anyone, citizen or foreigner alike, from working here if they choose.
Liberty in your lifetime
I've been immigrant my self, and now I am on the other side of the table. I look for good talented folks to hire, and to be precise it's very hard to find in US. At the same time what I've seen is that H1-B quota is really taken away by Outsourcing firms, to bring in cheap labor in US for in site consulting. I've seen very few skilled labor come out of this arrangement, as most of the Skilled Labor is already working on good job in their own country where Outsourcing job is considered as low level job.
So in essence if H1-B is really used by companies for full time employees, it's good but the way it's been utilized, it's terrible.
Were you an out of state student? No? Then you were subsidized.
Only at state universities. Private and non-state colleges don't get such things.
Did you also go to a private school for your primary and secondary schooling?
In my case, the answer is "yes" - Catholic School. However, the claim of subsidy or largesse at this level also falls flat when you realize that the source of that "subsidy" comes from taxation, which the child's parents paid. In other words, TANSTAAFL.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It's not xenophobia. How many US employer post a job listing so specific they know no one qualifies for, then they hire the H1B and train them via senior developer oversight and feedback.
Many of them do just that.
The supply is the world supply. H1B visas don't change the supply, they just move some of it to a more expensive place. If there are too many programmers (there aren't yet), the job should pay so little that society as a whole generates fewer of them. Work is only valuable because someone needs that work, not because it's what you'd like to do.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
As you probably don't know, the outside of US isn't uniform. Maybe H1Bs workers and foreign students don't come from the same places.
The wages dropping has nothing to do with people coming to America to work, and everything with moving jobs out of America to countries with much cheaper labor.
It also depends on the accounting, Most places I've worked, the full-time worker's salary comes out of operational expenses, while contract resources come out of capital expenses, usually tied to a project of some sort that's been through a business case to get capital funding.
Your $40k wages have lots of hidden company costs as well, up to 35% of gross salary.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The problem is that we also get these visa holders taking the place of citizens, so saddling us with educated candidates that can't pay for that education.
But no matter, the schools were paid. The government fronted them the money, the loans go unpaid because the borrowers cant afford their education, and taxpayers pay for it all.
Sound familiar? It SHOULD.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Generally in nations such as China and India, a good portion of that wealth is illegitimate. That is to say, much of it was either obtained via politics or corruption (paid for by the tax payer of course) vs say...an honest salary based on a free market competitive wage.
How do you think most wealthy families in the West got started back in the day?
Vast majority of wealth in the world is taken away from other people (sometimes illegally, and sometimes simply by writing laws in your favor). It's just that this has happened ages ago in Europe, and is only happening now in developing countries.
He is not a horrible person for getting a good job, but you are for implying he is.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Please identify this "community college"..."which are free"...
Our best coders are all from India. They run circles around our in-house guys, including me. Anyone that's willing to come to this country, work hard, not break the law, and contribute to our country should be allowed to do so. The shame here is that they are getting Visas instead of citizenship. WE are robbing India of their talent... not the other way around.
I've never seen a free community college where I lived. As for public education, that is "free" because it is paid for by taxes but the USA has a fixation on "getting your degree" that means that if you don't at least get a useless piece of paper like a "communications" degree you are going to be discriminated against even in jobs that don't really require college education. Higher education in the USA is paying $40k+ for the honor of getting your first "real" (remember - the USA also hates people who do work such as janitorial, food service, and stockroom) job.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Ok, how do you gain skill/experience if you can't even catch a break in your own country because you have to compete with the rest of the world? What if you were born poor?
I was born poor. My first programming job paid less than we now pay most freshers in India, and I was living in a major US city! Now I make a ton of money. Your first job will totally suck - get used to the idea.
guess the people who can't make it in your society should just starve to death in a gutter someplace. Ayn Rand would approve.
False dilemma. Your choices are not "do this one thing I want to do" and "starve". There are always jobs with an actual labor shortage, and society would benefit if people did those jobs instead of what they do now.
Programming pays more than the median income in pretty much every nation - as you would expect for a job that's hard to train for, and hard to do. But your first job in the field is for your training, not your enrichment.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
do you know exactly what all of your colleagues are paid? would you know if they were making 5-10% more than you? 5-10% isn't something you'd make a stink with your manager about, but to a company that's employing hundreds of engineers it's a big savings. by subtly paying H1-B resources 5-10% less, they put downward pressure on everyone's wages.
Ok, so that's cool and all. Did you bother thinking?
H1B workers only come into "in-demand" careers in highly competitive fields where large amounts of sensitive data is concerned. You're ignoring crucial things like:
* This diminishes domestic demand for employees, resulting in both fewer people entering the fields and lower wages
* These people are taking jobs in industries with a fraction of that 150 million number. (How big is the IT industry? The biotech industry? Etc.)
* On the lower side of the pay scale, there are illegals taking jobs and driving down the price for cheap labor as well.
We're already at the point in the US where people well into their 20s can look forward to "dorming" well into their 30s with housemates and roommates, and where many are still living at home because of higher costs and minimal opportunity. This is partially their fault (for picking something like an English major in college), but not everyone can be an engineer. God knows even those who are (regardless of race or culture) are rarely up to snuff.
My personal experience with Indian H1B workers is that there are a lot of them. They're upwards of 10%-30% of the IT workers I've seen. Some are very good, exceptional even. Many, if not most, are no better than and not as good as "common" DeVry types. Most of them lack crucial problem solving skills which are a "given" in Western cultures. Now, imagine for a second if there were 10% more jobs in IT oriented fields than there are now, and had been since H1B workers became common place. Would wages be lower? No, they'd probably be higher than they are now by a fair margin, making comparable amounts to other "skilled professional" careers with similar experience - as opposed to markedly less than eg. civil engineers or the like. A crucial point to consider is that there is a very large number of skilled, experienced, and unemployed people in the US right now who are looking for work (or in some cases, have stopped trying) who are "unemployable" because they're too old, too experienced, or two "American" (what with being insistent about only working 40-45 hours a week, or the like).
I wonder if either of the Presidential candidates would dare to say that on their first day of office, they would create 65,000 high-paying, skilled domestic employment opportunities. It could be done fairly trivially, and there are certainly close to that number of Americans looking for work in in-demand fields. So why not hire a 22 year old college grad from the US than a 21 year old Indian with questionable education or experience?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
says the libertarian who probably went to a school my tax dollars help support, drives on the roads my tax dollars support, is defended by the military my tax dollars support. nobody deserves anything from anyone!
I suspect you pay no taxes. I had year in which I paid six figues in taxes. That's my tax money you're talking about there! And, yes, I did build that, than you.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's on you to gain some skill that others need so much that they'll pay well for it!
All those H-1B CS, engineering, science and other degree holders ( undergrad and grad) have skills that you CANNOT get in the US! So, US businesses MUST hire H-1Bs because American Universities just aren't producing qualified graduates! Which means the US higher education system is a SCAM!
Frankly, I think US firms should protest and not hire ANY graduates of US universities until they start producing graduates of the caliber that is coming out of Indian and Chinese and eastern European institutions.
Why when I was training my H-!B replacement for the C programming job I had, he learned all about pointers and memory management in days! An American couldn't do that!
And we had this American company come in and I asked, "Are your programmers, engineers, and management team American or at least educated here in the US?"
They proudly said, "Yes!"
"Sorry, you're just not good enough because if you were any good, you'd have brown skin and an H-1B". I had to send them packing.
I tell you, you are so right!
No one deserves a "living wage" or any wage except what someone is willing to pay. No one deserves anything from another, except to be left alone when desired.
Couldn't have said it better. Why in the free clinic I volunteer at, we have all these Wal-Mart workers. I just shake my head and think, "Why can't these losers go to medical school and get into a career that pays? Fucking free loaders!"
This is also affecting my investments. I won't invest in a company that's based in the US or has an American CEO.
Frankly, American businesses are too incompetent. And why should I hire them when they'll farm the work out to an H-1B? I'll just hire my own and cut out the stupid American who's just making money by marking up the work of smart people anyway.
No IBM, Oracle, HP, Peoplesoft, SAP, etc: they are just marketers: cut out the expensive white person and hire the smart ones directly.
Things are working out marvelously! And I keep the revenues overseas so I don't have to pay taxes, too!!
You and me baby! Us job creators-masters of the Universe got to stick together and keep these unwashed peons from screwing the World up!
So, the H1-B worker, by your calculation, lives of donuts he steals in the break room and sleeps on a park bench? While there are probably some H1-B workers who remit a fraction of their income to their home country, most live in the community like every one else, renting a house, buying a car and groceries, and try to get ahead in the new country. As for the "stealing American's jobs", we graduate some 5,000,000 people a year from US colleges. Compare that to the 85,000 total H1B visa given out annually, less than 2% of the total job market entries.
No actually the ones I worked with were living 5-6 people in an apartment supplied by the company that they were contracting for. I'm guessing there is some kind of company store arrangement which paid back the company out of the wages for rent.
They all would carpool together to their work sites.
And this foreigner will almost certainly become a citizen.
foreigners never ever leave? they never send money and wealth back to their country of origin?
You didn't pay attention. The post implied that everyone who opposes the well established fraud of the H1B program are racists and/or xenophobic. It couldn't possibly be there is any legitimacy to the complaint. Basically its the argument of an idiot; standing ground on the basis everyone else is racist.
Why should that be true? Why should I not have the freedom to offer work for what I can afford to pay? If the work isn't worth the pay, no one will take my offer, and then I'll be forced by reality to offer more or do without. If you're not the potential employer or employee, you're opinion about the proper wage means fuck-all. If you are one of those two, then you'll realize that you have to reach a wage both sides can accept, whether that's some uninvolved party's idea of a "living wage" or not!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So it's ok to complain that Microsoft is charging for their operating system, when you can use Linux instead. But when cheaper and sometimes more skilled labor arrives to the US you have right to complain? We live in an international world. It's time to you learn that you compete in that and not in your hometown workforce.
*sigh* All right, all right, everybody back to Africa. We'll start over from that and see if we can get this sorted out.
As a long time H1B holder I am a bit offended by the article and there are quite a lot of inaccuracies.
* The people that I know who have H1B visas both at my company and others are definitely not scraping the bottom of the barrel wage wise.
* To get an H1B visa you generally have to find a company in the US that is willing to go through the hassle of getting you a visa (And the time this takes before you can actually come over and start working).
* H1B is a "dual intent" visa, meaning you are legally allowed to aspire for permanent residence while you are here. It takes forever though and during this time you have to stay at your company (It usually takes at least 8 years). While you are applying for a green card you can extend your H1B indefinitely (I'm just about to extend my own for 3 years and I have already been here for 9).
* O might not be attainable even if you have a exceptional talent. To get one for working in IT you are pretty much required to have a masters degree. I would contend that exceptional talent in the IT field have fairly little to do with official schooling.
* Some of the H1B visas that are "fraudulent" are also people who have gotten promoted while here and the company didn't refile the proper paperwork indicate their new job titles. This usually means that they have a more qualified job and are paid a higher salary. I am not saying actual fraud doesn't happen, just that I doubt it is as prevalent as the statistics might show.
And finally, on a macro economical note, why would you not take as many people as you could that are skilled earn a good wage, can't be unemployed and generally use social resources (If I loose my job I have 30 days to get out).
" It's has nothing to do with racism: , By..."
It has nothing to do with racism: By...
Can't. Type. Or proofread, apparently.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
Even when there are plenty of qualified works in a field, businesses love to hire H1B workers for a number of reaons.
1. Get more qualified people. The job may only require a BA/BS degree of skill, but they can get an MA/MS for the same price.
2. No worry about threats to quit and leave for a competitor. It's a bitch to get your job visa changed and most companies don't want to bother.
3. H1B works will work longer hours without bitching for the same reason as #2.
4. You can skip paying bonuses and giving raises, again, see #2.
So hire an overqualified H1B worker, treat him like shit, don't give him raises or bonuses, and you don't have to worry about them leaving for the competitor. What's not to like? The way to fix this is to make it very easy to change an H1B to a different company. Once the involuntary servitude aspect is removed it will be less likely businesses will abuse the H1B system (it won't eliminate the abuse, just reduce it).
I remember sitting at home without a job while the tech industry was crying to congress that the needed more H1Bs because they couldn't find qualified workers. Fucking lying sacks of shit. This was not long after the tech bubble had burst and threw tens of thousands of us techies out of our jobs.
-- Will program for bandwidth
One of the guys I worked with was from Pakistan. When I talked to him, he had 2 physics Masters degrees and could blow me out of the water with my High School level physics knowledge. He was going to apply to some research facilities for a job because at the time, he thought $25k was an awesome wage in the Chicago area. He didn't find out it was pretty crappy until he actually got to the point of looking for an apartment and having to actually live on that. He found out later that the company was offering up the lower wage because nobody here would take the wage and they could bring in someone on a Visa who thought that wage was livable.
He ended up working IT support because it paid better...
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
So, the H1-B worker, by your calculation, lives of donuts he steals in the break room and sleeps on a park bench?
*fweeeet!*
Reductio ad absurdum, five-yard penalty!
What he is saying is actually rather common, though definitely not to the 'sleeps on a park bench' level.
It is very common for immigrants (legal or illegal) to spend only on what is necessary, and send every spare penny back home to family. After a few years, a sum is saved up which would be considered moderate here (say, saving off $50-$75k in aggregate from a middle-class job). After a few years, the immigrant returns to his/her country of origin, and either lives off the saved money for life, or uses it to start a business. The cost-of-living differential is high enough to return home a fairly prosperous person, and none of that money does anything in the local economy.
Renting a house? No problem - In an H1-B holder's shoes, I can rent a cheap 2-bd apartment with four of my friends, bunk two to a room, and pay a mere $200/month for that. Buy a car? No problem - a cheap-but running POS off of Craigslist cost what, $1000 at the most? Groceries? A minimal expense if you know where to shop, and don't get too picky on what you're eating. Given those low expenses, in three years as a DBA @ a (way low for the job!) wage of $80k here in the Pacific Northwest, I could eke out a semi-comfy cheap-assed living, and send home at least $100k to use for when I get back to my family. After all, it's no problem to live like a pauper in some strange land, especially when I know that in just a couple of years I will live like a deity in my own home neighborhood.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I'm not sure I agree.
There are just 65000 H1-B visas available each year in the US (this has a few caveats, so you might see up to double that in visas being given).
In the EU any worker from *any* EU nation can work in any other EU nation. There is no visa application, you just have as much right to work there as you do in your home nation. So a British worker can choose to work in Britain, France, German, Ireland, Portugal etc.
There are *no* caps on numbers here, unlike in the US.
You do realize that "Keep America American" has been a Klan motto since the aforementioned 1920s, right?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Wow, a sane response! Our values clearly differ so much I'm not sure what to say here, but at least you're making some kind of sense!
As workes in the industry we encourage employer to pay more by doing something else if they don't. That's a lot of power, right there. But if in fact we're willing to work for less, for one reason or another, then that's fine too.
We can do this lots of ways, such as limiting their ability to import cheap workers
But this is just disappointing. That "cheap import worker" has every bit the same right to the job that you do. There's no moral reason to deny it to him. And from my own selfish interest, I'd far rather complete with him here, then in his home country!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Boo fucking hoo about costs. You and I know that they do not reduce prices when costs go down, unless they absolutely have to.
I am not saying you are wrong with what you say, but your example is very bad you are comparing 65000 high tech worker with , say , street sweeper when you compare to 150 million. A much better comparison would be to the number of job in the same branch as those H1B, and that will be a much greater percentage by at least two order of magnitude.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I read somewhere, probably here (a month or two ago?), a very interesting proposal (paraphrased):
Increase the number of H-1Bs and similar programs. Tax them. Pour money from that tax into education so we can compete in the next generation. This has numerous benefits: it levels the playing field, it invests in our future, and it encourages the kind of immigration that, once upon a time, made this country great.
Several of my coworkers are here on H-1Bs. They are very smart and very talented. Their presence and perspective helps my team's diversity and encourages us all to do better and be better people. If a tax were enacted that made them effectively cost more, we'd be happy to pay it for them*, and we'd think nothing of paying it when it comes to the next round of hiring (and not just for those reasons; we'd have to. The talent pool really is that small).
Consider the alternative; if there really isn't enough workers here in the States with the right education, and the tech industries can't attract them to the States, the tech industries will open offices in places they can attract this talent, outside of the States. Isn't that worse?
* I do not speak for my employer, yada yada yada
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Further, what good is seeing stock prices go up when you're not paid enough to actually invest in them in any meaningful way.
I totally agree with Cringely. The US is stealing our best Engineers and Scientists. They are expensive to educate and should stay in our countries. The US H-IB Visas are a curse that takes away our best students. Furthermore giving the US a competitive advantage over Europe, technology wise, because of that "brain migration" Let's hope that this becomes an issue to you over the pond, and please see if all this visa nonsense ends. Sooner rather than later. It could/should be a presidential campaign issue
You defined capitalism. And, frankly, if the cheaper person does as good a job as you do, why would I hire you? And if he/she doesn't, does it make enough of a difference to me? If my company can survive and run on cheaper labor, as a capitalist, I'll take it.
You want "fair competition"? Meaning, no foreigners? Then start isolating your country from the world.
Are you saying that with 100+k/year you won't be able to afford vacations, health care, etc? 'Cause that's a typical H1-B salary in IT and I can assure you it's quite adequate for a decent standard of living. Jobs that pay much less don't qualify for the H1-B program, unless corporations that hire those workers are not being honest with the US government (oh, the horror).
Not true. When approaching full employment, which is usually about 4% unemployment due to churn, wages start going up to attract people. Fine, but it also means work goes undone from shortage as only the more profitable projects can afford it. Good for you, bad for the country as a whole.
If you find yourself being turned down for a job which is then filled by an import, point it out to your local state. They're very cognizant of monitoring contracting companies that import workers while citizens are unemployed.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Yes, I want skilled people to come to the US. However, that does still leave the problem of people already IN the US not being able to find jobs to sustain them due to having to compete with countries where the standard of living is much lower. That causes other costs in the form of UI, welfare, food stamps, increased crime, etc.
And has been shown over the last several years, the company prospering usually does not equal the workers of that company prospering.
You can have it one way or the other, not both.
Either
A) 65K is a trivial fraction of the workforce, so that 65K won't make even a tiny bit of difference, even if we completely shut it off.
OR
B) We really need 65K workers, and they're going to make a huge difference.
If A, then the visa program is worth nothing to employers in the grand scheme of things. [Clearly the employers don't think so.]
If B, then the effect is lots larger than you imply and thus will have very substantial impacts on the wages paid etc.
I think given the stance employers have, that B is a much more likely option. In fact, in any sane system, you'd bet far more heavily on B than A, even knowing nothing other than employers are pushing hard for it.
H1B visa's are likely to increase the pool of labor substantially thus lowering wages.
Additionally, the lowed wages probably has knock-on effects that depress the number of in-country people who will enter that particular labor force, thus exacerbating the problem and putting more pressure to increase the number of H1B visa's and the cycle reinforces itself.
Finally, it can be xenophobia AND true all at the same time. And I expect for some people it is.
But for those who aren't out to keep the "furriners from takin' our jobs" the case is still valid - H1B visas are highly desired by many firms, so they must have some reason for wanting it.
The only business-rational reason is cost. It will cost too much to get in-country people to do the work, and we're not willing to pay.
No matter the current supply, with enough cash you'll find your labor pool. And perhaps it's higher than you'd like. Just give it time. The increased wages should provide increased supply in a few years.
-Greg
The solution is to be more discrete, and avoid drinking the university's koolaid.
Universities are notorious for:
1) pressuring you into taking a student loan
2) pressuring you into living in student housing
3) pressuring you into needlessly expensive univeristy courses, which you could take elsewhere less expensively.
4) pressing you into their lucrative "4 years to graduation" paradigm.
To combat this, start from the bottom, and work up.
4) there is no truly pressing need to graduate in 4 years vs 6. Take fewer courses at a time, so you don't bankrupt yourself on the costs. Keep 12 credit hours, but DON'T go over. Prioritize your own class lists. Its ok to use some of the bulk filler the university tacks on to keep 12 hours. Only attend in spring, summer and fall semesters. Ignore the ravings of the guidance councelor.
3) you are only concerned with the state definition of "full time student" for the tax break. NOT the university's. Get a list of transferrable classes from other institutions for prerequisite classes, like english, public speaking, and math classes from student affairs, even if you have to be a pest to get it. It is worth more than its weight in gold. Take the community level classes for these prerequisites, and count the credit hours for your tax return. Transfer them later.
2) DO NOT LIVE IN STUDENT HOUSING. You can get an apartment, with better accomodations, cheaper. Feel free to pimp out your washing machine to the people who fall for the student housing gimmick. You only have to undercut the cost of a laundromat by a few bucks, and those places scalp. Use the laundry money to offset differences in bills and transport. Feel free to use public transportation. (Remember, spring, summer, and fall semesters only.)
1) by reducing your obligations in time to the college by increasing your graduation deadline, you can work a part time job, and seasonally switch to full time in the winter. By reducing your tuition costs by price shopping, and by avoiding the vampiric leeching of student housing, you can now afford college without the student loan, and its oppressive interest debt penalties. So don't take the loans. Ever.
You can get the education that way, and not be financially assfucked for 20 years.
What the hell do corporate profits have to do with your investment portfolio? Seriously? Amazon missed earnings badly and it closed up 15 bucks today. Other companies come in looking good and drop instead. There is no effective correlation now.
If you want a more meaningful figure, look at corporate assets. They're swimming in cash. How much of it do you have?
Try thinking instead of tossing right wing talking points about as if they're facts.
I used to work as an H1-B worker. I 100% agree that the work visa program lowers wages and steals jobs from Americans.
From my personal experience I know, that if I was not dependent on my employer I would have asked for higher than the market pay rate, rather than take lower than the market rate. However, since US government "helped", none of the companies I worked for had to offer proper wages to job applicants. I have seen many tailored job postings that were not really looking for applicants, but were posted only to fulfill requirements set forth by the government. Prevailing wage analysis and numbers that come out from that are mostly irrelevant and do not have to be lower than the wage being paid to the H1-B worker. My approved green card application had much higher wage than I was/am getting.
The program does not protect American workers at all. I used to hate H1-B due to somewhat slave labor legal conditions associated with it, but now that I am almost a citizen, I hate it because in its current state it does not benefit Americans and actually harms them.
Another things worth mentioning, although many people apply for green card after being on H1-B, the work visa is not considered to be a proper path to citizenship by US government. Partially due to this, none of the experience gained while working on H1-B can be used in green card application to prove that person is an asset to the company or to the country.
says the libertarian who probably went to a school my tax dollars help support, drives on the roads my tax dollars support, is defended by the military my tax dollars support. nobody deserves anything from anyone!
I suspect you pay no taxes. I had year in which I paid six figues in taxes. That's my tax money you're talking about there! And, yes, I did build that, than you.
You just blew your credibility. If you were the successful genius you claim to be, you wouldn't be paying six figures in taxes, you'd be doing like your fellow millionaires and getting tax rebates, instead. Apparently you couldn't even afford a good tax consultant. Maybe you should get Warren Buffett to refer one for you.
And if you think that your taxes made you someone special, go out and price how many feet of road a couple of hundred thousand will buy out. It took a lot of other people's taxes as well. You didn't "build it", you only built a small part of it.
I don't care how you justify it. Corruption overseas shouldn't be allowed to feed our corruption in America. Corruption feeding corruption is not acceptable at any level.
Life is not for the lazy.
The question makes inaccurate assumptions. You are assuming that employers value education and experience over how little they can pay their employees. That, and both potential hires are pretty much blank slates in terms of whether they can actually effectively use the education/experience they have gained.
I mean think about it: Your college grad more that likely has very little to no experience, and you can't be sure if the foreign worker actually has the experience he/she is claiming. So, the experience/education factor is basically a wash.
In the end, what is an employer at a for-profit private business going to do: Pay the US college grad $X or the H1-B worker $X * .75? I'll give you a hint: They'll hire the H1-B every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Plus, the domestic worker is going to want silly things like "health insurance" and "a 401k" and "dignity in employment", while the H1-B worker not only will accept work without benefits, they are far more likely to eat the shit that the employer feeds them in the form of unpaid overtime and slave-labor working conditions. I mean, what are they going to do, complain? Complainers get fired no matter their nationality or status, but the difference is that the H1-B faces deportation if he/she gets fired, so he/she is much less likely to do anything if he/she is poorly treated.
Employers like spineless worker bees that they can pay peanuts. Period.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
can only lead to lower wages, lower employment, and a lower standard of living.
I don't know how he can say that lower wages, etc are the ONLY possible outcome. It might be the PROBABLE outcome, but is it not possible that one or more of those H1Bs goes on to start one or more new companies in the US or contribute meaninfully to the start of one or more new companies thus creating lots and lots of jobs and more than making up for the ones taken by H1Bs?
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Interestingly enough I DID see a hand full of desktop support job listings in the Bay area this summer ago pulling the classic "4 year CS BS + 10 years experience*...and must be fluent in Mandarin and other Asian languages". Several even had at the bottom of the page, in bold italics, "THIS YEAR'S ALLOTMENT OF H-1B VISAS HAS BEEN EXHAUSTED".
Months later, out of curiosity, I went and checked on those listings only to see that they're still there and being reposted every several weeks. Either we Americans are right and proper dumbasses for not being able to have ANYONE in the Bay area who can do desk support or this just sounds like a group trying to put an artificially empty plate in front of Congress.
*Seriously? I don't understand how an HR drone decided that a computer science degree and such a number of years experience was even close to necessary for an entry level desktop support gig.
Due to inefficient distributed immigration software they pretty much accepted every app until the deadline. They did not have a definitive way of priotitizing the apps. This nearly doubled the actual amount in popular years.
Cost of studying has nothing to do with lower wages that H1-B workers are getting.
I was a foreign worker. I got my undergraduate and graduate degrees in US. I am going to go ahead and claim my education costs were higher than that of an average American.
All of the tuition had to be out-of-state tuition, since foreign students can never qualify for in-state tuition. I had no access to government loans or grants. Vast majority of scholarships were not accessible to me even with 4.0 GPA. I had no family or friends to fall back onto, and due to that my out of pocket costs were higher.
In the end, my wages still were lower, because when an H1-B worker can't say "I quit" as easily as an American. Under the H1-B rules after you quit or get fired you have 10 days to get out of the country. That 10 day grace period might still be used against you even if you are lucky and find another job and process all the paperwork in time.
In the EU any worker from *any* EU nation can work in any other EU nation.
can a thai worker work in any EU nation? an american worker? a brazilian worker? if not, then what's your point?
What IS wrong (and definitely not market oriented) is limited a visa-holder's ability to change employer. Employers must love visa restrictions (or, better still for dodgy employers, employees breaking immigration law who can't find legitimate work) on their staff because it stops them having to compete with other employers in conditions and wages. Then, in turn, local employees not subject to the restrictions have to compete with people who are and can be pushed around easily by employers. Visa restrictions are too often used as a sop to nationalists and anti-immigrant types, but they only make employing immigrants more attractive...
Most H1B Visa owners work through large, multi-national Engineering firms like HCL or WIPRO.
They do NOT receive the wage that is paid to the firm per employee, nothing even close. Many have over 80% of the hourly fee the firm charges taken by the firm, who often charge them rent for their apartment and a per diem charge for clothing and food, then hold their Visa/Green Card hostage so they cannot leave their employment (or complain about it.) If they do, they are sent home, and fired.
The US companies love this kind of "rent-an-employee" because they are treated fiscally like ambulatory office furniture. They LEASE them, they don't hire them, and they pay no employment taxes, no S.S. wages, no benefits, no pensions, no health insurance, no nothing to them (and frequently get kickbacks from the Engineering Firm on a per project basis.)
They also provide a wonderful scapegoat for poor managers who often blame "the contractors" for the failure of a project, and ignore them if it somehow succeeds despite their crappy management.
Do you spend all of your time constructing false arguments based on stupid personal prejudices or do you just save that for Slashdot?
US Graduate education is valued by foreign students, companies and also valued by US companies.
The OP has a point about debt, however, entry level jobs for many US citizens should help them get rid of their student loans fairly quickly. Unfortunately, many of them change their life styles altogether, causing them to live on permanent debt. If they (as many foreign students) could keep up with their life style, pay their student loans faster (lower their net interest) and sacrifice again going to grad school paid by a scholarship (giving up the life style during that time as well), they could come out better prepared and rule in many US corporations.
The main issue to me, is that foreign students see the scholarship as an investment, while US Citizens see it as a hit to their life style compared to its peers. Why would you live as student on ramen for 4 more years if you can go to industry right way and easily triple that amount. The investment for foreign students is that they won't get paid as well in their countries, so they invest in the education and come out with 5 times or more the figure.
I'm not sure how you think employers aren't competing, but it does give me a bit of insight into your thought processes that allow me understand why you hold a foolish opinion.
. Ayn Rand would approve.
Yet she used medicare at the end of her life
You forgot to mention the part where if it wasn't for them bringing you buddy and many more like him, you would be making 75k a year instead of the 40k a year you are making now.
But as they artificially rose the number of qualified applicants while making sure they would work for less than the local would, over time, they have driven down the wages without you even noticing that your wages and raises didn't come close to matching the rate of inflation anymore. And many, if they couldn't get the visa's just outright hired illegal labor.
Reminds me of the local Smithfield packing plant we have out here. About 8 years ago, you couldn't find anyone there making over $8 an hour and complained how the management were slave drivers. They claimed that was all they could afford. Then they make nation headlines where thousands were deported followed by thousands more Mexicans walking off the job in protest of it and a Union forming. Now I got friends making $13 an hour after only 2 years there, probably about $14-15 now.
The more people you can pump into an area looking for a specific job, they more you can drive the wage of that job down, especially when you are cherry picking your labor pool from areas where they work for MUCH less than your current area is.
I've seen the "live on the cheap" version before, typically with Indian and Chinese graduate students, so it might very well exist in the DBA H1-B world too. And maybe DBAs are more interchangeable than scientists, and having true short term employees is not a detriment for Microsoft. But in most fields you want to keep your technical staff around, not having to replace it every 3 - 6 years due to visa rules.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
Leaving aside unjudged all of the arguments back and forth discussed above, do you really trust the motives of companies like Microsoft in appealing for more H1B visas? They do so because there's something in it for them, not out of any kind of altruism, and surely without any concern for anything except that which benefits their bottom line.
I am posting anonymously because I still have a relationship (slashdot included) with previous co-workers. My previous employer is a major analytics company for a multitude of companies you consume from everyday. We were a small shop, but were just below a $10M company. I left because we were bringing in indians poached from InfoSys on H1-B visas. When these employees started becoming harder to get, we just "partnered" with InfoSys. If I can bring anything to the table, is that these visa's take away a physical presence in an establishment
You should try thinking too. Over the long run stock performance is correlated to profits. Companies that do not make money ultimately fail. Companies which do not make money do not grow. Why have people gone batshit over Apple the past 8 years? Because they liked Steve Jobs? In the case of Amazon, while they have bounced around making and losing small amounts of money, they have also reinvested large sums of cash into their business. Ultimately though, to justify the stock price they will at some point need to turn that investment into hard dollars or else guess where the stock will go?
And I again remind people that if you have a 401K or are part of a pension plan (now a days mostly unions), your retirement money is mostly in equities.
As to CEO salaries, the US is not the only place with high salaries for CEOs, though people also have a very limited selection of information about CEO salaries. Very few make the megabucks complete with government sanctioned golden parachutes. A quick look shows salary.com reporting a median of $731K, probably not the millions that you were expecting. Thats not to say there aren't any, of course there are, usually among the very large companies where the average (not median) is just below $10M. CEO's like Apples and a few others do pull that average up.
Bingo.
When it comes to outsourcing/contractors, it is all about the stock numbers. Many places will lay off employees before getting rid of contractors. Payroll hurts stock outlooks while contractors can be buried in the paperwork.
True. But there is a moral issue with allowing the company, who benefits from local society (infrastructure, security, etc), to receive those benefits without contributing appropriately. We can impose restrictions on a company's behavior in exchange for allowing them to benefit from our collective activity.
The key there is what behaviors we choose to permit or deny in exchange for what we give to that company.
For example, it is common for a locality to provide public roads, police service, emergency fire and medical coverage, education, etc to a company in exchange for that company providing jobs and workforce development in that location. To me, this is an specific abstraction of the general societal contract between employers and the general public. When a company decides to import cheap labor to avoid paying market rate on local labor, that is a violation of the societal contract, and thus is immoral.
Employers get the benefit of being located in the US, without bearing their share of costs. Not good.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I had year in which I paid six figues in taxes.
Pull the other one.
It is a complete myth that any portion of the college educated in the U.S. have spent in excess of $100,000 for their college education. The average student debt accrued by people graduating college in 2009 was approximately $20,000.
13MM unemployed, 8MM underemployed, like 12MM dropped out of workforce but would return if situation improves. Do you honestly believe that 0.7M H1Bs make any difference?
An unemployed person can flip burgers for the H1-B visa holder when they shop at our stores and use ours services.
Yes and its this short term thinking that will leave the USA a "services economy" aka McJobs. BTW notice you didn't have the guts to take 3 minutes to make an account or use the one you have if you already have one, nice.
Let me break it down, let's say we don't have enough...ohhh...let's say network engineers. What SHOULD happen? Well the price for network engineers should go up, people see there is a demand for network engineers, they go to school, the price levels out, classic supply and demand economics.
Now let us see what ACTUALLY happens...they lobby for more H1-Bs, more scabs brought in, no American dares learn how to be a network engineer because they can't compete when their education costs $75K+ and the Indian is paying less than $10K, but then The Indian goes home and raises the quality of their workforce and the USA becomes the training ground for other countries while our own systems? ROT.
We can see this all over the place. How many would recommend to a friend's child a future in IT? Shiiit, most of the old guard are bailing because the H1s are making that into a McJob and between that and outsourcing its becoming worthless. But what if there is an economic shift as is already happening, and they no longer want to come here and work for peanuts? Then you have NO IT and nobody to hire as they can get paid better in Asia which is looking to be the next area of growth thanks to the USA being run by retards that can only see the next quarter while THEIR leaders are building infrastructure and looking at the next quarter of a century.
The H1-B is the perfect example of Lenin's old saying "The capitalist will gladly sell you the rope you intend to hang him with" because it insures we have highly educated Americans in fewer and fewer roles while the nations like India and China use the USA as a learning ground before they come home and then make better products and services and kick our asses.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Let's take an example, my wife and I live in a city far wealthier (London) than the region I come from. Although well paid and living a very confortable life, we are under the level of salary that would be required to start a family (2/3 bed instead of 1. Area with good schools, ... makes price go through the roof and that does not even include the price of daycare for kid). So we save money and plan to move in a cheaper place. So in a sense, we did work for less than a fair price for our situation. We probably take the job or at least reduce the salary level of people that would like to live their whole life in London.
Obviously, that's not the same, there is no visa involved, we stay in the same country, ... but the dynamic is the same. H1-B worker that plan to move back to their countries can and will accept lower salaries than people that plan to stay in the US. That is a red herring though, first it would require the majority of the H1-B worker to both want to return and then actively plan for it and secondly, unless you flood the market with H1-B worker, I doubt that will make a significant difference, considering that even locals affect the wage level.
An interesting thing however, that I notice with people with visa, not sure if that applies with H1-B, is that they have a strong legal incentive to stay with the same employer for many years ( time to get naturalised run in decades and the job market is quite tough to change your visa sponsor ). That, however, must have an effect on the market.
H1B's are ... artificially driving down wages and generally screwing over American programmers, engineers, etc.
They are not artificially driving down wages. They are doing it naturally. The artificial part is where barriers to immigration keep wages artificially high.
Yes people who come over take domestic jobs. But they also create more demand for other products. If Mexicans are stealing your farm jobs, you can open up a food truck and start feeding them. If people are taking your software jobs, you go make software that they want to buy from you. More people means more demand.
You might be joking, but seriously, there are about 5 universities in the world that are a step above the MIT/Stanford/Berkley holy trinity.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
You nationalist fool, you never lost your job to outsourcing. At least the H1Bs pay taxes.
I suppose you're a Native American/Amerindian/whatever they are called today. If not, please excuse me while I'm savoring the irony of former immigrants/former immigrants' kids despising the new immigrants.
So being a local no longer means being from an area, it means you have to be native to the area? Well I think after a few hundred years even my family can be considered native, otherwise we are all only native to africa.
Shhh, they'll hear you! They always believe they're being so clever when they trot out this cliche.
Don't point out that everyone else is snickering at their specious reasoning behind their backs. It seems no one has ever had mercy and informed them that false dichotomy and continuum fallacy are logical fallacies.
H-1B doesn't change supply at all. It just moves the supply into the USA. Those Indians with 10 to 15 years experiance and master degrees are not going to retire if the USA gets rid of H-1B visas. They will just work for less money out of India. Or work out of Mexico, Canada, Europe, or China.
Its called survival of the fittest. If there is a H1B applicant who can get the job done with respectable quality as any other American for less money, why will the companies even consider the American. Its called globalization.
But in most fields you want to keep your technical staff around, not having to replace it every 3 - 6 years due to visa rules.
From what I have seen, that kind of turnover happens regardless of national status, at least in the high tech industry.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
The article disputes just about everything you've posted.
Why don't you post what you do, what you're paid, and what area of the country you are working. Then we'll decide if you're being paid the same or more than a US citizen.
Maybe head over to the engineering department of a big university and see who's attending and getting top grades. You have a sh*tton of people from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, and also now Latin America, working their asses off. Not many Americans... no they're all at the Business School learning 1- blah 2- blah 3- profit. Let's fix that first, then complain.
And how many of those people are getting a free ride from their respective governments or are from very wealthy families? Colleges LOVE those students because they're paying full price. Those American kids are borrowing money, working, and doing everything they can to get through.
Also, why should an American kid bust their ass in engineering only to be passed over for a H-1B? Go to B-School and become the guy hiring the H-1Bs. (Or go to medical school and actually make a living.) And businesses also need accountants, operations people and marketing, btw.
See, IT wages have been stagnate and even declining since the 90s. With inflation, a Sr programmer analyst/software engineer should be making $114K+ in most areas and in the Bay are MUCH more than that. And yet, they're not because wages are being suppressed by an increase in supply of cheaper labor, which then lowers the "norm" and continues with a spiral down - a spiral that you're part of - a spiral that's exploiting you. Simple Economics - one of those "loser" 'B' school subjects.
Here's something to keep in mind: you're being exploited. You have fallen for American business' propaganda and you're ignorant enough to think you've got this great opportunity - and maybe from your point of view it is. But think if you were really paid like an American would have been before ALL wages were suppressed by the H-1B program, how much better off your family could be.
You're part of this ridiculous game and they fooled you into playing along and you are thanking them!
What a rube!
Or, like anyone who engages in trade of any kind, they seek the best value: the most bang for their buck. They think that foreign-born labor gives them better productivity for the total cost of labor than American-born labor does, and if their numbers are any indication, they aren't wrong. We're being undercut.
If you want to attack this problem, you have to attack those four numbers one way or another: lower foreign productivity, raise foreign costs, raise American productivity, or lower American costs. Lowering foreign productivity isn't going to happen by any means short of war, which is clearly unacceptable, so that option's out. Raising American productivity pretty much requires educating a new generation of workers, and that takes, well, a generation. We don't have that long, so it's also out.
That leaves the cost-based approached: lowering American costs or raising foreign costs. Raising foreign costs tends to require cooperation from some notoriously uncooperative governments (governments who fight to keep their own wages low precisely because they know they can undercut the cost of American labor this way). In some industries you have other tools that can be used to raise foreign costs -import duties, for example- but those don't apply so well to virtual goods. If you can find another way around it, then more power to you, because if you can't, that leaves only lowering American costs, and we all know where that leads.
Do I like this? No. But I'm having a hard time arguing against the math.
Our companies are making record profits, I am not sure that costs are the issue, it is more greed. I will use the great MS layoff of 2009 that I was a part of. They layed off thousands of people just to keep investers happy, and then turned around and rehired the same number at a lower wage.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
it's not racist, it's simply selfishness. there are billions of unemployed people in the world that would do your job for food and a shitty place to stay. if we had to compete in a fair market 90% of currently employed people in "first world" countries would have a massive drop in wage
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Fucking stupidity. In a lot of cases, the American public is the one paying to educate foreign grad students (stipend + tuition - federal research grants - joe + jane public). So, they'd rather lose the talent that you paid for to China / India / some other country?
I dont believe that H1Bs are taking the place of citizens. My experience is that there is no shortage of work, only a shortage of people who are capable of doing it.
As for taxpayers paying for it all, all those H1Bs are paying far more tax than the government ever paid out in unpaid loans.
It is very common for immigrants (legal or illegal) to spend only on what is necessary, and send every spare penny back home to family.
*fweeeet!*
a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter, five-yard penalty!
I've seen immigrants who both spend only what's necessary and who spend normally. I pay a fair bit for my 1-bd apartment, buy a lot of organic and local groceries (which are expensive), drive a BMW Z-4. I know a lot of people who do this.
Because artificially controlling supply in order to artificially control costs is an abusive market tactic that can destabilize an otherwise solvent system with its disruptions.
That is why when private enterprises get powerful enough to try it (rackets, monopolies, et al.), they meet the hammer of the FTC and RICO/Antitrust penalties.
The labor market on the other hand, has several serious problems.
1) there is a price fixing scheme in effect. (Min wage)
2) the supply side is being actively padded (illegal immigrant laborers, H1-B workers, etc.)
The effects of the two would nominally be cancellary, however, illegal immigrants and H1-B laborers get various leves of excemption to min wage controls.
The illegal immigrants sidestep it completely. On paper, they don't even exist. No SS gets paid. No medicare. No healthcare. No education taxes. Nothing. Just a few bucks and grueling work for someone else.
H1-B's have to be paid min wage, but sidestep healthcare and a number of other things.
With the exceptions to the min wage controls these demographics have, coupled with the legal min wage for everyone else, and the active procurement of the excempted workers over time, you end up with a very very large disruption in the labor pool.
The kind that crashes whole economic systems.
compare to 13 + 8 + 12 = 33 millimeters, yes, .7 meters is pretty significant.
Yes, the unfairly low wages and horrible working conditions offered by companies like Microsoft, Google, etc. to their workers are notoriously known. A day does not pass that I do not see these poor people begging on the street with placards like "Microsoft Senior Programmer, need money for food!" or "Google Engineer, can't afford food or shelter, please help!". The government should intervene and stop this abuse and get every US citizen a fair chance to work for Microsoft (to be able to experience these unfair wages by themselves, I assume).
And look at these big companies: they are willing to pay for relocation, pay lawyers to get visas arranged and they pay "prevailing wages" as required by law to those damn foreigners - why are they doing this? Why don't they just hire Americans? Obviously, they hate America. This needs to be stopped. Everybody should be mandated to hire Americans first and only when there is no American candidates can you hire any foreigners. Wait, what? This is already the law? Obviously, it's not working. They should be mandated to hire Americans no matter what, until no Americans left unhired. America never was a place where any foreigner can just come in with their background, education and talents and start contributing to the society as if they were born there, while building a better life for himself and paying a shitload of taxes - and there's no reason to introduce such novelty now. There's a thing called "American dream" - not "foreigner's dream" - so it should be for natural born Americans only. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free - and I'll send them damn back to their foreign countries where they belong.
Also, requiring to pay prevailing wage is not working either - everybody should be getting at least 150% of average wage. This will ensure everybody is getting their fair share.
P.S. Please somebody show me they guy (or gal) whose job I stole coming to the US. I really want to hire him/her (well, my company wants, but I'm pretty sure they will go with it). Seriously, we need good people. I'm sure the wage won't be unfair. Just tell me who it is. So many people tell me I stole my job - I want to know to whom it rightfully belonged.
Well, that *MAY* be the case. But as far as I know in the tech industry, companies look to H1-B hires simply because they can't find the right talent here at home. If the government continues to cut funding for schools, the size of workforce without appropriate training and talent will continue to grow.
Not from around here, are you...?
U.S. of A. citizens can't compete with foreign nationals who:
-- don't pay federal income tax (if they're in the US for less than so many days - can't google the #, somewhere around 150);
-- don't plan on buying a home (remember, they're temps), so don't have to deal with property tax, etc.;
-- willing to live multi-family in a single home;
-- are not up to U.S. educational standards (especially true in the IT field);
-- willing to work many hours OT without compensation (what else are they going to do here).
The U.S. is their gold mine. They work here for a few years and return to India and are then very, very well off (if they saved
while in the U.S.)
Not from around here, are you...?
U.S. of A. citizens can't compete with foreign nationals who:
-- don't pay federal income tax (if they're in the US for less than so many days - can't google the #, somewhere around 150);
If you are on H1B you are here for good, not 150days and are a resident for tax purposes. You pay Federal/State/City/Social Sec/Medicare, the works, even though when you go back to your country to live off your riches (50-100k really ?), you forgo all the benefits of SS and Medicare that you paid into. You are welcome.
-- don't plan on buying a home (remember, they're temps), so don't have to deal with property tax, etc.;
I though they were here for good, 6 years on H1b then green card then citizenship, that is how we got the millions/billions of H1B stealing all the jobs. How does not having to deal with property tax depend on your visa/immigration status. A lot of people dont buy their home til much later, but that is irrelevant to the discussion, unless they're living the american dream, oh I got a job for 30k let me buy my dream house, 3mm no problem.
-- willing to live multi-family in a single home;
So, cutting spending is a bad thing now
-- are not up to U.S. educational standards (especially true in the IT field);
Depends, on the top, I dont see a big difference, on average, yes maybe, but overall no.
-- willing to work many hours OT without compensation (what else are they going to do here).
The U.S. is their gold mine. They work here for a few years and return to India and are then very, very well off (if they saved
while in the U.S.)
Visa holders displace local student jobs
Local students can't pay back their debts and end up on welfare
Taxpayers pay for the debts and welfare
Who are the taxpayers? People with jobs
Who has the jobs? The visa holders!
The cycle is now complete
Please refer to the comment above where it is pointed out that H1-B's are specifically for technical positions, and the domestic labor force for this market segment is 2.5 million, NOT 150 million. In that context, 700k workers is %28 of the workforce. I would say that makes a very large difference.
I have worked with many H1-B's, and found that they are neither more or less competent than our American colleagues, on average. The problem is that they are an exploited resource (no real market negotiation, depress true market wages, easily threatened with deportation). I hold no grudge against any of them. My ire is directed entirely at the corporations who abuse the system to the detriment of all.
I'm all for eliminating H1-B's, and allowing open work visas for any qualified candidate. With appropriate safeguards in place to prevent artificial wage deflation, it would attract valuable foreign talent without depressing domestic wages.
Sadly, the vast majority of H1b PhD's are from crap universities that we would never accredit.
Such PhD's aren't usually even worth a single Bachelors here. I've met such PhD's that think using exceptions as goto's is a great idea.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Is this really true? I have yet to find a single example of someone on an H1-B and is being paid below the average. I myself am paid at par with my American colleagues. One of my friends does contracting work and is paid roughly 50% more than me.
Or are you getting confused with outsourcing?
What you said is correct. It is impossible to find someone on an H1-B to be paid below the average, because the law requires their minimum salary to meet the prevailing wage. In San Francisco, a certain type of software engineer can have a prevailing wage as high as $85,000.
This is a real problem. My anecdote:
Several years ago I interviewed for a job with a software company that specialized in analytics. At the time I had almost ten years of enterprise java development experience. I sailed through all the interviews and was told I was by far the strongest candidate and they were about to make me a job offer. At final phase, HR director calls and says they want to send me an offer, they just want to know what my degree was in. I told them that while I went to school for computer science, I dropped out before completing (dot com bubble era) so I never finished my degree. After hearing that HR lady was like, "oh... lemme call you back" ... called back a few minutes later saying they were not able to extend the offer, even though I was the strongest candidate, because if they hired someone without a degree it would jeopardize their ability to hire H1-B workers. When I asked why, I was told it was because they use degrees as the primary indicator of qualified workers. If they hired someone who didn't have a degree, it would demonstrate that there really are more qualified workers in the US than they claim, and they would no longer be able to hire H1-B.
So, while it may not be that my job was directly taken by an H1-B worker (I don't know for sure if this was the case), my job went to someone less qualified because of H1-B bureaucracy.
H1-Bs were intended to prevent wage depression along with providing skills not available. And what would you do differently?
You can't defeat the corporations on this, short of establishing the prevailing wage and then 'surcharging' them the difference. Good luck getting that through congress.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Oh noes, cheap foreign labor is affecting white collar jobs. I'd play my tiny fiddle for you , but I hocked it, because cheap foreign labor took my blue collar job. Opps mustn't complain about Latin Americans taking jobs in the trades, that's racist. Complaining about South, and East Asians taking IT jobs is OK, though.
There's a difference between "capitalism" and "free markets", and you're talking about markets here. The free market pushes the cost of labor up in this case, so employers lobby the government to allow them to bring in cheaper workers to push the cost back down. The problem is (as usual) government.
Do you have ESP?
.. for reminding me over and over again that H1B workers are not welcomed here in America. And thank you all for reminding me that Americans no longer tolerate dirty, money grabbing, opportunistic foreigners. Even though I make more than my American peers, you keep reminding me that I make less and crushing the American dream for everyone else. Even though I'm very qualified and work hard, you guys label me as cheap labor with low standard of living in mind.
So here's for you who think you're good enough. Smart enough. And dog gon it, deserve that job. Visit one of big ones campuses and see how many locals are there. Then talk to them. Then devise a plan to generate that amount of brain power locally. Done? congratulations, you just solved the industry biggest problem. If not, maybe it's time to accept the fact that you can't create smart people on whim.
Good day.
The reason you don't see Americans picking fruit in California isn't because they don't want to do it, it's because the farmer can pay the illegal immigrants half the minimum wage, is not liable if that worker is injured on the job, and can arbitrarily change the deal at any point with no legal repercussions.
This is ridiculous. Californians don't pick fruit because of the wages but because they don't want to work that hard in the sun for minimum wage.
Disclosure: Ex-H1B here.
People coming on H1B are in great majority just starting their prime productive years. Each of them represents about $500K in brain and muscles which US people are getting at slightly negative price. Each of them represents about $2M to $5M future lifetime earnings. A lot of them will also bring their inheritance later in life which may be 100s of $K. That's the reason why other countries are crying out loud about "brain drain".
I'm sure, some dumbfsck that thought that his US birth certificate entitles him to $70K/y for life will find what he's worth when hes job is taking by H1B. However, US people at large should be kissing H1B's assess - literally.
"If this is not good for the US corporations then I don't see what is."
Fixed that for you!
I'm looking at a posting right now. Skills listed are creating testing and deploying shell scripts, troubleshoit hardware ans software, O/S, WebSphere, http server, ibm server, nwtwork, routing. Hours are 9-6, 40hrs/wk.
5years exp. Additional skills include J2EE, SOAP, REST, Struts, Spring, Hibernate, ReatEasy, Mavens, Oauth, Google AppEngine, Python, MEMCached, Web Services Gateway. That's all.
Bachelor in comp sci or related, prevailing wage >$105k.
This doesn't really seem like a uniquely special set of skills unavailable in the US southwest.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That simply isn't true about paying illegal immigrants half minimum wage.
I work at a newspaper in Southern California and we do stories for Riverside County, an area with an exceptionally high unemployment rate compared to the national average. We just recently did a story on local farmers unable to find enough workers even though they are offering 14 to 20 dollars an hour jobs. Too many immigrants, legal or otherwise, have simply left the area (for whatever reasons that we don't need to argue about).
With unemployment that high in the region, and those wages being offered, you'd think the locals would be all over it. But American simply do not have the stamina to do the job. They usually wouldn't last a day.
This truth behind this story is that we don't mind foreigners working the crap hard jobs we don't want, as long a they stay out of view, don't live near us, don't go to our schools, don't cost tax payers any money assisting them in anyway, and don't mind us occasionally harassing them or using them as scapegoats for political means. But skilled technical labor jobs? Those are ours, get back in the fields.
Corporations don't care about what you look like or where you come from. They care about how much you cost to hire and how well you do your job. Instead of bitching about H-1B's, you should be bitching about high costs of education in the U.S. and our inability to produce competent workers. Taking your toys away and locking yourself in your room isn't going to solve anything.
If you ever wondered what it was like for the rest of the world when WE dominated the skilled labor force, when we had OUR workers being brought over to foreign countries to do THEIR skilled labor.. wonder no more. Shoes on the other foot now.
link to the story: http://www.myvalleynews.com/story/66288
I am sorry, but I thought being born in America makes me an American.. Otherwise no one is an American
When you cant win, ad hominem.
My wife is from the Philippines where she became an RN pretty much specifically so she could move to the US. There's an entire industry set up between here and there to bring nurses into the US.
She worked a few jobs when she came to the US, but when I met her she was working at a nursing home. Nearly all of the RNs there were from the Philippines, and they were being paid below-market wages. It was also understaffed. I encouraged (ahem) her to get a better job after we got married and she did. The nursing home ended up having a nasty fire that killed a couple of the residents a few years later.
I keep seeing "capitalism" here. This has nothing to do with capitalism. It's about free markets. In the free market, there's a slight nursing shortage so the wages paid to nurses goes up. As a result, people see that nursing pays more and so more people decide to become RNs. At some point there's an equilibrium established and the wages stabilize but at a higher level than the original.
The government screws up the market. Businesses claim that they can't find nurses (and, in fact, are required to swear to that claim to hire H1-Bs) but in reality they can't find nurses who will work for the crap wages that they want to pay. So they lobby the government to allow them to bring in workers from overseas. They are required to pay them at the same rates that they would pay Americans, but that's irrelevant for three reasons. First, the government doesn't check so nobody does it. Second, by bringing in a bunch of nurses they are messing with the supply/demand curve (adding supply) which results in a lower wage (Econ 101). Third, there's a terrible imbalance of power which results in much worse working conditions and wages. A company can fire an American worker and they'll have to go find another job. But an H1-B? "Firing" means "move back to your home country". My wife mentioned that this was always on her mind.
The bottom line is that we need to let the free market do its thing, which means that wages will rise. It also means the cost of staying in a nursing home will rise. That's how markets work. It's preferable to our workers getting screwed because companies don't want to pay enough.
And I say that as a business owner. I'm familiar with the process because I've actually looked at it from the employer standpoint.
The bottom line is that if you can't find people to take your job, you're not paying enough. Raise your salary offering and you'll get people. Quit using the government to skew the market in your favor.
Do you have ESP?
I need eight one-in-a-billion sorts of people! Wait... Shit.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Yes, I've seen that - the agency charged the corporation $120/hour for services, while only paying the H1-B visa graduates $35/hour. The difference was kept by himself.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Apparently economics is not your strong suit, friend. America through the 70s and 80s protected its middle class by managing a complex structure of trade barriers intended to keep American wages high and prevent the flood of dollars into the world economy diluting American wealth. At the same time American corporations began to globalize and build strong networks with the other global enterprises, and opening American borders to trade was great for them but sadly destructive to the American middle class as it began to have to compete for jobs with people who could afford to work for pennies an hour for labor jobs and just a few dollars an hour for technical jobs. These people lived in economies where the cost of living was a tenth of what it was in America and so American Nationals had no sane way of competing. So you want to get something clear off the bat, fair market wage is a fantasy. Until you homogenize the economies of the world so everyone has the same cost of living, same tax burden, same access to educational resources, medicine, and civil liberties, there can be no such thing as a fair market because your trading apples and oranges.
America has been bled dry so that the dollar and the rupee are quick approaching the same value. The American people will soon be able to compete with laborers in the global market because their wages will be in fact the same. This is not a good thing for Americans. We have been reduced to a third world nation and our wealth has been squandered on multinational corporations who no longer owe American any allegiance. I've personally known hundreds of engineers who don't engineer anymore, because after the Dotcom crash, their jobs went away and they never came back. I lost my retirement in two massive stock crashes. I work for 60% of what I made in 2001, and if I account for the real value of the dollar that's probably closer to 45% (and don't let them lie to you about inflation, the dollar is a shadow of its pre 2000 value.)
I'm not big on waving flags, but let me ask you a few questions. Do you believe that the vast majority of dollars foreign workers are paid remains in the American economic system, or does a lot of it go back to the home country to support family there, and what is the impact of dollars flying out of out economy? Do you think that foreign workers have any loyalty to America, or do your think they take what they learn back home to start businesses that compete with us? I could actually go on quite a while, but hope I'm painting a picture here for you. The wealth of all kinds leaves out country and makes us all poorer. This is the place your children will inherit. What will be left of it when you've taken your share?
All I need to say, is what is the state of the middle class in this country, and what is the state of technology workers in the U.S. today, and my first question is how many of the AMERICAN workers were American in 1995 and how many are today.
There's also a shortage of choice. Companies don't want to pay and wait for training, so they look for very specific combinations of skills and programming languages that match their company. If they can search the entire world for those combo's, then they have a better chance of a close match. However, this means that they are more likely to skip Americans.
Pro-H1B pundits say that Americans simply need to "get more skills". However, that's an unrealistic request for two reasons: first, we cannot predict and target what combinations a specific company wants; and second, companies want paid experience. But, you can only gain a fixed amount of paid experience per time (unless you hold two or more jobs).
Table-ized A.I.
They laid off our american staff and replaced us with indians from INFOSYS.
We asked- how can they do this on H1B Visas?
Ney ney ney. Not H1B Visas. They are legally employees of Infosys working in the US temporarily. Doesn't even require an H1B Visa.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's an unfair market. They are bringing in workers from across the world, from different markets and economies, to drive down wages. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market. They have accomplished this, as Cringley illustrates, by lying and cheating. If they were not permitted to lie to us and to cheat us, our wages would be much higher, their profits would be a tiny bit lower, and the low wage workers would be working in their own countries where they *would* be paid a fair market wage, that is, a wage proportionate to the local standards. This isn't just about fairness, or about the simple purpose of this duplicity is to make our lords so much more rich - it's about national security, *real* national security, not the militaristic crap about being prepared for China to bomb us. To have a United States with citizens that can advance their careers, earn more money, buy homes and educate children, we cannot compete with workers from countries made impoverished by too many babies too quickly added to the local economies. This isn't a game - this is killing our middle class. This is converting the US into a country of bosses and slobs, with the money more and more going to the bosses. Numbers bear this out. It's ain't the debt that's killing us, it's the wealth redistribution to the top tier.
This is about *your* survival. The wage pressure is always downwards, with pauses to get used to the new lower levels.
You may have yours, but, so what? A good chunk of us will not have ours, and more importantly, the coming generations will get even less. Even Jerry Pournelle, free market idealist extraordinaire, said himself a few days ago on TWIT that to succeed in the future, people will have to make themselves valuable to those with the money. In other words, make yourself useful to the rich people. Even he's seen that the middle class is rapidly converting into a servant class for the wealthy.
Curtail the H1Bs. Let the home countries take care of their own workers by building their own industries. That's how markets work. O class workers can come here as much as they like, because the are exceptional, and by that, it is meant *few*.
Lying to us about a worker "shortage" when there simply isn't one? This isn't about "business", this is about government run by businesses for businesses' purposes, not for the benefit of the actual citizens. Government, under orders from businesses, opened up the H1B program quotas. That is not a free market move, that is a straight-out government-mandated interference in our local markets so that businesses can gain profit and leverage over US citizens. Wages stagnate and fall, H1Bs work without complaint else they be deported. Free market for whom?
Yes. Isn't that enough to lower us from 7.6 to under 7% unemployment?
And once unemployment drops enough- won't workers stop working 60 hours a week?
And when that happens 6% unemployment becomes 4% unemployment over night.
Was reading in USA today that 25% of US workers are now burned out from overwork and their primary goal is just to go into the office and not get fired. No innovation or creativity left. We have people dying of heart attacks from overwork. They worked me 70 hours a week for close to a year.
Change is coming. Part of it is the retiring and dying boomers. By 2016, 16 million boomers leave the work force (that's 8 million more workers than left in each of the 4 years from 2001-2004 and 2005-2008.)
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You have that backwards.
H1-B's were intended to prevent wage escalation due to skill shortages.
Go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
Watch them openly teaching companies how to avoid hiring american workers; how to place false ads; how to call in a manager to disqualify and american who somehow made it through the process.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Let them eat Cake, eh?
There's no way that millions of american's won't turn to violence like every other country on earth once the wealthy push hard enough.
It's no good for anyone if the rich are allowed to lose sight of reality in their overwhelming greed.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Dey turk err jurbz!!!
That five million are not programmers and engineers. The H1Bs are. They are imported precisely to counter employment of local graduates and to drive down wages. This is not a supposition. There is more than enough corporate money to pay increasing salaries to college graduates - but they want to keep that money, which they pay to themselves, of course. So they flood the tech market. It's not a huge overall effect, but it is targeted and successful in reducing American salaries. And in case no one notices it, we live in our own country. We'd like to see our wages increase proportionally to the increasing megawealth of our employers' bosses.
This program was created in 1990, not 1790. It exists only to drive down wages. It exists because the employers are lying about the purpose of the program. There is no worker shortage. There is a shortage of workers who will work for cheap so that the corps can increase profits 20% a quarter.
That money that is not being paid to us is not being used by us to buy a house, an education, buy goods, or to raise our children. That money is being diverted from us to make rich people far richer. It is helping to inhibit the wage growth of the few occupations left to the American middle class that could conceivably use real, actual free market forces to their advantage. It is shutting the free market down, not advancing it.
Willingness to accept substandard wages?
1) The vast majority of Americans ARE getting substandard wages.
2) The jobs that people on H1-B visas have are not paying 3rd world rates, so your comparison is invalid.
The simple fact is that employers are looking for the best candidates.
"Best" doesn't mean "most skilled" (though Americans would largely lose out if it did).
"Best" means "can do the job quickly and reliably, and is affordable".
I have exactly zero fucks to give for people who think slugging through highschool and a 4-year university warrants some sort of guarantee of gainful employment. Unless daddy owns the company / has a seat in public office, or you have more looks than self respect, you have to be useful and productive for someone to pay you to do things.
You do realize that "Keep America American" has been a Klan motto since the aforementioned 1920s, right?
No, I haven't gone to any of those meetings to find out. So tell us, do they serve refreshments when you go to Klan meetings?
Be seeing you...
Dey took r jubs!
That's true. Some places in the USA are simply shit-holes of drunk creationist rednecks and only the desperate would ever look for a job there, let alone raise a family there. H-1B workers are mostly looking for a nest-egg to take back home to Timbuktu, and so tolerate the shit-hole for the shorter term.
Here's a thought. Lets divert some of this Military spending into Education spending. Lets get Americans retrained for what the current market place needs. Sure, I'm talking about free college. I'm also talking about improving the K-12th grade also. Big ass overhaul. Smaller classes, more teachers, kids all get books, equipment.
People that aren't currently working can have a chance to get retrained, then placed in a job. We go full bore. Not only improve our education, but improve our economy for the future.
Currently the USA is like on unemployment, getting a small check every month. Instead of spending the money on food, bills, and keeping the family safe, the head of the house (The Government) is out with his friends spending all the money on beer, bars, and drugs. He (The Government) is not taking care of the needs of his family (The U.S.A.), instead taking care of the needs of himself and his friends (corporations).
This has to stop, we need to take back control of our house. Divorce is in order.
Be seeing you...
>> There's plenty of domestic labor in this country,
Yes, there may well be, but any attempt to hire in tech is inundated by visa-seeking applicants. Try this. Put up a job posting for a skilled software professional. My experience is that you'll get several hundred, perhaps 1000 electronic resumes within a few weeks. Without exaggeration, 50:1 they will be from F-visa (student) holders in STEM graduate programs in the U.S. looking to get a position they can leverage into an H1-B, or current H1-B holders looking for employment that will tied them over to their green card. Typically the student will have come to the U.S. for graduate school, after completing a technical degree in their home country. (Yes, the U.S. is subsidizing that part of their education.) Most of them will have about a 500 word working speaking vocabulary if they are not native English speakers since they've only been in this country for a few years.
A small fraction will be from foreign (E.U. countries with rampant unemployment) countries where the H1-B program is sadly of no use. A large fraction of the total will be in-eligible to work on a wide range of technology like MS Kinect hardware because of State department country-specific technology export restrictions.
This trend has become so ingrained in high tech hiring that, for someone who is not a recent graduate of a U.S. graduate education program, they probably wouldn't have a clue about what they are competing with.
So of the remaining perhaps 20 resumes culled out of the total, perhaps 4 are from U.S. native born professionals. The military will pay a premium for them, since they form part of a minuscule labor pool that is eligible for clearances. For any well-placed already employed native-born professional, its unlikely they'd have sent you a resume, since they are probably getting hit up by recruiters regularly, and they don't see a need to enter into the resume pool.
In short, out of the 1000 -odd resumes you receive, its likely not one is a suitable native-born candidate.
In short, if you are looking to hire a skilled high-tech professional, you need help from a professional staffing or recruiting firm just to find your way through the jungle.
That's what they say. I know too many colleagues who are unable to find work in the field to believe that statistic.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'm about as left as it gets, but I oppose the H1B status on the fact that it puts a large portion of workers at a major negotiation disadvantage. The problem isn't that there are foreigners taking these jobs, its that the foreigners are not able to negotiate on a level playing field, which drives down the wages for everyone.
That's the first intelligent thing I have read in this thread. The H1B program has two flaws: first, it is too expensive, slow, and restrictive for getting a Visa. At our startup, If we find someone really good we want to hire from europe (which is not so seldom, since we know a lot of people there) we have to wait for next year's quota, so (s)he can't get started until october next year. That can be over a year of waiting time! We're talking people we know, with a PhD and a strong track record.
Second, as the parent poster mentioned, it puts employees at a negotiation disadvantage because they cannot be unemployed while on the H1B. Also, if they are in the middle of a green card application and they change employers, they have to start from scratch. Solution would be to de-couple immigration H1B status and green card applications from employers. E.g., if an H1B holder could be unemployed for up to 12 months before he loses his visa, his negotiating position would be about as strong as a citizens', so he could ask for a fairer wage.
And before anyone starts the xenophobic rant that we should be hiring americans, nobody in the team that started this company was born in america. Now we are bringing money and jobs here. If the rules had been only a little bit more restrictive, this company likely wouldn't exist.
Whichever country can attract the best qualified people will have the strongest economy... this is what the US has excelled at so far. Now already the US doesn't allow people who study here and get degrees from top universities to transition to a job and eventually a green card. That is one of the dumbest economic policies currently in effect in this country.
I myself am paid at par with my American colleagues.
...and that's the problem. If $MEGACORP can get employees for a lower price by way of H1-B, then the local people trying to get a job there are forced to accept the same lower wage, or they don't get the job.
Precisely, the 1% get richer, 150 years of people fighting for labor rights gets undone, Republicans and Tea Partly get a reason to rejoice. Where's the problem?
So yeah, it's great for people who come from other countries to work, but it came at the expense of the American people who used to be able to afford vacations, health care, and college but now no longer can.
We can still afford it, we just use credit to make up the difference. The only time we should worry is when the banks stop handing out that credit... like 4 years ago.
Not to mention, if they lower the caps the large tech companies will just create more offices abroad.
... whatever it is (debate?). I don't live in an apartment with four other immigrants, and never have. I own a house and have a wife (so I could actually switch out of H1-B). I spend my salary locally. I get paid well for the work I do. Yes, the salary is more than where I'm from, but the cost of living here is higher so the salary is proportionally higher (rent of a 2 bedroom apartment here is 5x what it costs where I grew up). I could easily go back to my country of origin, and buy a house there instead of here and spend my money there instead of here, while working for the same employer.
It's beneficial to have your work force centered in one location, but not necessary.
I'm in the US on an H1-B status, and am really getting tired of this
Reducing the number of H1-B's in the tech industry will have very little effect on making jobs available, and drive outsourcing higher. It will only really affect non-international companies and companies that require the more permanent presence of the worker.
Baver
Fake job ads are not for H1. You dont have to show squat to hire someone on H1B. Fake job ads are for green card applicants on one of the 'advanced' categories. The US government mandates that the company have looked for an equally talented American and failed. This is obviously a stupid, populist regulation that is easily surmounted by fake ads. Yeah the ads are super annoying but it is not the companies' fault, it is the government's.
Simply put I want the H1-B brains here ---> working for USA NASA - Werner Von Braun, Intel - whole group guys from India and can go on and on. This H1-B crying about is just from lazy and intellectually disabled.
we have a right not to engage in the race to the bottom that is the 2nd world. And from your sig I can tell you subscribe to that fiscal cliff nonsense that's been going along. Just an FYI, we're not broke, there's 30 Trillion with a 'T' in offshore accounts (google it). As Bruce said, We take Care of Our Own. Anyway, I'll let the president sum it up for me.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yes, taking the cream of the crop of foreigners who you don't have to pay for their education or upbringing and having them work in tech or science fields is terrible economics. A mediocre American who the government has to subsidize $200k for education is such a better investment.
By the way, how many H-1Bs were issued last year? 65,000. Out of a labor force of 150 million.
This is just xenophobia.
I always make two points.
Point 1: Corporations like Intel, Apple, etc have choices, they can create jobs in the US, or in other countries. If you make staffing hard, they'll just move the jobs overseas.
Point 2: if anything it's the restrictions on qualified H1B workers from job shopping that drivers down wages, not the workers themselves. The solution is to allow anyone that can pass something like the Engineer in Training exam to get a work visa.
Point 3: Polices both by the US government, Federal Reserve, and by central banks in other countries to keep the US dollar strong, destroys jobs in the US.
So, the H1-B worker, by your calculation, lives of donuts he steals in the break room and sleeps on a park bench?
Far from it! The H1-Bs I knew lived in the lap of luxury with only 6 of them sharing a single 2 bedroom apartment and one car.
I don't know if they saved their money up and lived like kings when they went back to India. Unfortunately, after I trained them how to do my job and was then let go, I had to move out-of-state to find a job and didn't ever hear how they worked out.
we graduate some 5,000,000 people a year from US colleges. Compare that to the 85,000 total H1B visa given out annually, less than 2% of the total job market entries.
So, I assume there must be a need for 5,085,000 new people in the economy every year , and with our 0% unemployment, we had no choice but to look outside our borders.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
You make some very good points and you elucidate your perspective clearly. I think this point is key:
[...] fair market wage is a fantasy. Until you homogenize the economies of the world so everyone has the same cost of living, same tax burden, same access to educational resources, medicine, and civil liberties, there can be no such thing as a fair market because your trading apples and oranges.
What it all boils down to is whether we want to homogenize the economies of the world or not. If we want them homogenized then we must let workers compete globally for jobs. Unfortunately, the only practical way to homogenize is to greatly reduce the affluence of Americans -- the very process you are lamenting.
To many Americans the wisdom of keeping the barriers up is obvious. To many non-Americans the wisdom of removing the barriers is equally obvious. IMO, options are rapidly disappearing. The only real choice left is whether the US empire is going to go gentle into that good night or whether it is going to go down kicking and screaming, making a very bad situation much worse.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Yes, I've seen that - the agency charged the corporation $120/hour for services, while only paying the H1-B visa graduates $35/hour. The difference was kept by himself.
I have been in this exact situation and I cannot understand how it is allowed to go on. Basically, full time employees of a company are let go, and replaced by consultants. Every single, solitary one of which is on an H1-b. The company sponsoring them is an Indian owned company which has exactly 100% of their employees on H1-b. Of course, none of the displaced workers from America would be able to hire on at this company. Indian companies tend to be fiercely nationalistic and won't hire anybody that is not on an H1-b from India.
I don't understand why these people are allowed to so blatantly replace American workers with people who are only supposed to be here because we couldn't find someone in America with the skillset of the person they just fired.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I agree with your general post, but I've never seen a job posting like you describe: 20 years of Java experience and $30K/yr salary.
I understand you may have meant it as hyperbole, but can someone post a link to a job like this?
There is an explanation apart from the kickbacks that the polticians get.... "The Lima Declaration of 1975".
Basically, Western governments at the time of the oil crisis, were forced to promise 30% of their wealth to developing countries in perpetuity (wealth = jobs).
When they couldn't offshore any more jobs, they had to inshore employees instead.
Without H-1B, more American works would be shipped overseas. What do you prefer: to have Indians working in Silicon Valley or to have Silicon Valley relocated to India?
Coding etudes
My first programming job paid less than we now pay most freshers in India, and I was living in a major US city!
Really? When and where in the U.S. was this? It must have been a while back, if you've now accumulated enough skills and experience to be making a "ton of money" as you put it... except that programmers being paid paltry wages is a rather recent phenomenon; in the 80's and 90's, programmers, even entry-level, were able to earn significantly more than "freshers" in India now do. I call bullshit.
The higher level language you use, the less effort it took you to master it. No wonder that Java developers aren't the top earners.
Coding etudes
1) I doubt that H-1B workers want to return to their country :) Maybe some do, but that is probably a minority. It would have been easier for them to get employed by an American company in their own country - that would have given them 60-70% of American wage without the additional hassles.
;-) I don't think that you can find such a place on Earth these days, though.
2) US workers could also relocate to cheaper places where they would be able to retire on their few month savings
Coding etudes
The best way to stop OUTsourcing is to bring highly skilled labor *here*. After someone from India starts a business here, raises a family here, and goes to town meetings to discuss replacing the town sewer system, and votes for a president, where do you think his loyalty lies? India? Make it easy for skilled labor to get H1-Bs and citizenship. Concentrate the world's brains *here* instead of sending them back home.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That's true. Anyone who gets to IIT undergrad will never come here. Lot do come here for post grad / MBA. Remember you can pay a shitload of money to get into a ivy legue, you can't do that with IIT. Either you are absolute best or no entry.
What on earth are you talking about? The majority of American are stockholders, directlty or through pension plans. We are all the "investing class". The only ones protesting are recent grads who were increibly ripped off by our borken, corrupt university system, and have every right to be pissed - they just haven't realized who the con man is yet.
None of which has anything to do with making it illegal to pay the neigbor kid $10 to mow my yard, if that sounds fair to him. Employees have no more right to force employers to work for them then vice versa (and if you think running your own business with a few employees isn't a ton of thankless work, just try it!). If employer and employee are both willing to agree to a given wage, how is that anyone else's business?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Can't say anything about Indians, but I don't know of a single Russian who went to work to America with the intent to return back. They all are applying for permanent residency.
Coding etudes
Now if most Americans were as zelious about their jobs as the foreigners were we might have an argument here. The problems is that Americans don't want to work, the vast majority of us just want the paycheck. But any of us who received the quality of work that we are willing to give at the artificially inflated wages we want to work at, we would complain. (and yes the wages are artificially inflated, it's a direct result of minimum wage, and sums up the reason why employers are picky and many are jobless) If you look at our ethics then it's no wonder businesses want foreign goods.
What a pile of crap. I have employed those H-1Bs. The chinese are crappy programmers. They are here for one reason only - 2 kids.
You make yourself competitive, have better credentials than the guy who's been studying 12 hours a day in a foreign country and you'll get his job. But Americans are too fat and lazy to do any real work.
They do send money, but that's usually less than they spend locally. And no, most don't plan on leaving. Your grandparents didn't plan on returning back to their home country, did they? Nothing changed since then.
Coding etudes
I don't really understand this. Many here are sympathetic with illegal immigrants, yet vehemently oppose H1-B.
Illegal immigrants have been rather hostile here in Arizona. I'm not making this up, they've actually invaded farmer's homes and murdered them while using their house as a temporary staging ground for either human smuggling or drug smuggling. Let's not even mention the literally miles of trash that they leave in washes around the border.
Sure, they might do some jobs the rest of us won't, but they aren't ideal citizens and end up being much more of a burden than a benefit. I've worked with them a lot, they can't even spell in their own language or even pronounce it right (and Spanish is a very easy language to both spell and pronounce.) When they have kids, they automatically become citizens, and are immediately eligible for welfare, food stamps, and literally the best medicaid program in the US, in addition to free or subsidized section 8 housing.
An H1-B visa (which I do support) recipient actually does work that is very valuable, and doesn't rely on government benefits. I've seen company recruiters that are trying desperately to hire IT people, and actively recruits from local schools, but the talent just isn't there. It's not about getting cheap labor, because they pay H1-B people very well. It would be easier to hire local talent, if it existed to begin with.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I'll grant you that there are obvious advantage to the rest of the world for an open America, the problem you miss is that now all those nations hold a tremendous amount of American debt. What happens when the American economy implodes? Just as there is goodness for everyone to take now, there will be unhappiness galore for everyone to take a nice fat slice of. American are suffering terribly. Some say in a year or five everything will be better, how long can you hold your breath?
Our government threw a trillion dollars at trying to bail out the deep water American middle class is in, and the banks took that earmarked money, gave it to one another as bonuses and hid it in foreign banks. If you think the very same bankers will treat anyone else on the planet with any more grace I think you don't know bankers. We are all playing at a crooked poker table, and the dealing is dirty. All of this is an exercise in manipulation and misdirection. The problem is that we of the American middle class, and all the good people of the world are focusing on the wrong hand. Our masters are greedy and without compassion. We need to find our own way, and we best get about it soon while there are ways still left to us.
It's bad because the carot of working hard in a technical field is gone. When you work hard, go into debt... Then the top companies in the field get somebody slightly better overseas.
I've mentioned before, part of the problem is simple numbers. You have the top of the Chinese and Indian middle class sending their kids here because of political reasons (racism, etc). Those countries EACH have 4x the population, so their "top 5%" graduates outnumber our top 1% grads.
First US workers do not own jobs or have some special rights to onshore jobs just because they are US citizens. If they cannot do the work or do it as well then they will not get the job. US education levels and particularly tech education are overall dismal. China alone graduates 100x as many engineers and scientist as the US at Masters and PhD levels. In an increasingly tech heavy market there is increasing demand for these skills. You can't solve it locally or in US much of the time as I know from experience. Your company needs the workers to survive and grow. Why do you have very limited rights to hire workers that can provide what you need just because of some asinine visa restrictions. I have personally lost really good co-workers because the visa process kept them out for so long I could no longer afford to wait. Or a snafu sent them home. I have one co-worker and friend who has worked and lived in US for 13 years and only a year ago got his green card. He is not eligible to become citizen for years after this. PhD level professional and obvious asset as professional and hopefully citizen and he has to jump through such hoops? Clearly illogical.
The author is simply trying to making political hay with people that have no idea what they are talking about and think that merely being an American entitles them to all kinds of things including jobs they don't have the skills to do.
Let's just move the jobs overseas. This way, the US economy does not benefit from the multiplier effect when those workers buy food, clothing, shelter, cars, cleaning services, carpenters, etc, etc. NOT!
How come you got to come here, claim free land, enjoy the freedoms that other people fought for, get a subsidized education, and benefit from the US social safety net, but no one else can?
Why are you asking the government to protect your job? With all of the advantages you have over someone coming from the third world, why haven't you found a way to be more valuable than they are?
I say this as a flaming liberal, not as a plutocrat outsourcer (I've done that kind of work, and found it distasteful). I just don't see why you deserve special treatment. I say throw the doors open and let anyone come who can hack it here. We need more people with gumption and fewer entitled whiners. Emigration is a human right, and we as a society benefit when more ambitious and talented people come here.
It is debatable whether these H1-B put a drain on the local market. If they are equally productive and get paid half as much as an "American", that means the other half an "American" would be getting paid is still available for investment locally. This other half could manifest itself in a number of ways: * profits for the employer * more affordable products for the local market * additional hiring by the company, creating more jobs (albeit possibly low-paying ones) Maybe it's the pricey, effete, overpaid local workers who are a drain on the economy? Additionally, those workers still must eat, buy gasoline, etc. in the local market. While they may send money home, they certainly have to spend some of it here locally. The most obvious and disconcerting aspect of free trade is when locals are fired and jobs go overseas. The less obvious results are when impossibly cheap goods (appliances, clothing, electronics) appear on the local market. There are some profoundly interesting examples of folks who have come to the US and brought tremendous intellectual force and entrepreneurial spirit. Andrew Carnegie, Albert Einstein, and Elon Musk come to mind. I am no economist, but I think it's pretty self-evident that countries who promote free trade benefit tremendously over the long term. Closed ones not so much.
That's why wage earners will always be chumps. You paid 35% on that... If it was investment money you only would have paid 15%.
Side note: that's why sports and entertainment stars have so many tax problems.. It's all "bad of money" on 1099 with "creative accounting"
Can you imagine the tax mess if you got 2011 paycheck.. On April 16 2012?
No and No.
Most parents that care for their kids to get a real education pay for private school. I was paying $200 a week for my child to go to a school that did not have metal detectors at the entrances and actually taught things like physics and required the kids to learn useless things like advanced algebra.
Public schools you can graduate and not know how to read, the teachers are overworked and under paid so they just cant care enough and kids will fall through the cracks.
And then you have the crack....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But, when government steps in, things definitely get hinkey. Because companies can now knock down wages across the board for a given position, they can use the overall savings to actively seek and bring in H1-B workers, and still come out ahead.
I'm confused. Is the government stepping in when it approves the visa or when it denies the visa? Seems to me that denying the visa is more interference -- you have the government interfering with the free movement of people to conduct commerce.
What about retarded executives at corporations that REQUIRE a degree to be the receptionist? because there are a LOT out there that require degrees and have no business requiring a degree for the position.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
as i understand it, h1-b visas are distributed by lottery, but are otherwise free.
but what if h1-b visas were auctioned? so those companies that wanted them had to bid for them pay a fee, say several thousand $ for each visa. companies complaining that they can't get enough tech employee visas could then be told to bid up the price and they could get al the visas they want. those that insist on using the visas for cheap tech labor will basically be forced to use the labor market.
it might suck for the workers on the h1-b visas who will see their wages reduced to pay for the visa.
i welcome people to speculate on how an auction for h1-b visas may affect the tech labor market and how companies use the h1-b visas.
also, if an auction is a viable option, should the auction be open or should it be through sealed bids? how should the auction be run?
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
That may be true but earning less than a PHP developer for doing Java is insulting no matter how you look at it especially when PHP developers consitently earn less than pretty much every native born Java programmer.
Friend, I'm happy for you. There will always be the pro fro Dover who is a person everyone needs and will pay dearly for. Would you say your rare? We're talking about the fact that I worked for a company in 2001, and they let go of over 100 perfectly skilled and capable engineers to they could offshore to India instead. Three support centers, one in San Jose, Another in Austin, and the last in Mass. Please explain any justification for that save fiscal, and explain to me how wiping out the technical labor force of California from 2002 - 2004 was in way conducive to the general well being of America?
[...] the problem you miss is that now all those nations hold a tremendous amount of American debt. What happens when the American economy implodes?
What you are referring to is exactly the "very bad situation" I was talking about. By holding on tighter and tighter you are only making the eventual implosion worse. If you are interested in a perspective from outside the US I suggest Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World by Kishore Mahbubani.
Our government threw a trillion dollars at trying to bail out the deep water American middle class is in, and the banks took that earmarked money, gave it to one another as bonuses and hid it in foreign banks.
If you are referring to the stimulus then you are wrong. The stimulus worked pretty much exactly like its proponents had predicted it would. The problem wasn't money being funneled off by evil bankers; the only problem was that politicians neutered and watered down the stimulus in an attempt to damage the economy for political gain.
If the original stimulus plan had passed or if even the first watered down version passed then the US economy would be in much better shape than it is in now. But even the highly watered down stimulus package worked. When it was put into effect the US economy was in free fall and was hemorrhaging jobs. The stimulus stopped the bleeding but it wasn't large enough to bring the economy back up to its previous levels.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Ah, the race card. It took way too long for it to rear it's ugly, ignorant head.
I didn't see any mention of ethnicity or any sort of racial slur in the comment, what are you talking about?
I'll guess "From my experience, the people who oppose H-1Bs tend to be very xenophobic."
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
This sort of thing goes beyond the H1-B situation. More often than not, H1-B is merely and anchor for the intent to become a permanent resident to a path of naturalization (naturalization only goes so far for certain facets of their condition cannot be naturalized).
* More often than not, the immigrant who starts a business here in the USA is either a sole proprietor, one-human LLC, and/or they hire their own kind.
* More often than not, they have a college degree for which they have no debt.
* More often than not, if all does not work out well, they have a return plan.
* They benefit from their immutable characteristics placing them in a "protected class".
* They are averse to military service or they will instruct one of their sons to join the military to serve as an "anchor person" and/or to deflect criticism about loyalty
You all will rue the day when reasonable people start mumbling "The bigots were right all along".
Exactly, so now an entire generation owes the bank for crushing college loans WHICH NEVER GO AWAY, and now that debt is over a Trillion dollars, and with most of those kids unable to find work because foreign nationals are doing those jobs... well you can figure out the rest. It involves Soylent Green.
You've got the cart before the horse -- the requirements for the advanced degrees are there to justify the H-1Bs, not vice-versa.
Not just stock numbers contractors don't get benefits (med costs are going through the roof these days.) Contractors can hired and fired at the drop of a hat, and there is little or no drama. Contractors can be buried in the accounting of project and can improve the apparent cost of a project. Point is, the American corporation no longer has any sense of obligation to its employees and their only interest is getting the most for the least and if they have to do that over your dead body, well it doesn't matter if its white or brown.
Let me introduce you to my wife.
H1-B holder for many years with what I'd consider a substandard wage. She received a green card and...
instant 10% raise.
She'll have her citizenship in about a month...
Tell me that her salary has nothing to do with indentured like conditions that revolve around the H1-B program. Clearly, a green card gave her mobility, the company knew she could leave at any time, and they did what they needed to retain her with a competitive wage increase (she didn't ask for it).
Apples and Oranges... Mexico is a mess, and you have to face the fact we are more than a little responsible for the sucking going on there. The drug cartels have made Mexico hell, and those same cartels are using American money and American weapons to wreak havoc. Part of the problem with Mexican labor is that Corps like Walmart HEAVILY grease politician's hands to keep the gate open so they can have cheap labor. You and I try to close the gate, but who's got the Senator's ear? I do have sympathy for people in a hard place not of their choosing and through no fault but accident of birth.
I don't have a problem with HB-1 recipients. I have the same problem with the Corporations that use them as I do with Walmart screwing with our border for its own bottom line. I don't like people messing with my livelihood, and putting me in a fiscal hard spot, because they want that third McMansion in the Hamptons. I find that more than a little hard to swallow thanks.
Then fix your schools. A school year (for a single student) should not cost much more than 3 monthly paychecks on senior position in the area of work the student is being educated for. That is with all those countries that produce the H1-Bs holders, and they manage to do it sustainable over and over again. Go fix the cost of education in US.
Tell you what. My company has been trying to hire a senior C/C++ developer who is a US citizen, due to the nature of the work we do. All the wise kids that know what they are talking about want to work for some "big" name like Apple or Google or Oracle. Regardless of pay. May be fix this large ego first?
Work is only valuable because someone needs that work, not because it's what you'd like to do.
I work for myself you Insensitive Clod!
Tell me, why is it OK for employers to not want to compete for talent, but it's the greatest sin when workers want to have fair competition for jobs?
They've been brought up on the mantra, "He who has the gold makes the rules", which is very sad. We could be taking so much pressure off their shoulders for them, but they insist on absolute control instead. They don't want to be partners. They want control over their employees. Considering how fscked up tax and employment law is, I can see their point, but I don't have to like or agree with it.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
To simplify that, roughly 28% of all US technical positions are filled via H1-Bs.
No one deserves a "perfect employee" slave or any employee except what someone is willing to pay for. No one deserves anything from another, except to be left alone when desired. It's on you to pay so much that they'll be willing to sell you their skills and tens of thousands of hours of hard earned experience!
Just the converse of your argument.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
> Otherwise known as a fair market wage?
It's not a "fair market" when someone is monkeying on the supply side.
Do I like this? No. But I'm having a hard time arguing against the math.
Well it's not hard to do.. After all, these companies still find outsourcing too expensive or too low in quality, so they ask the government to make it artificially cheaper for them to hire foreign employees that have no bargaining rights. The solution would be to disallow this, forcing them to either pay market price for workers or move their operations overseas. I'm pretty confident based on some of the outsourced nightmares I've encountered that most companies would get burned once or twice on outsourcing, then decide to pay market price for workers.
As an aside, I would be happy to have some sort of citizenship track visa that allowed skilled workers to live and work in the US, pay US taxes, and not be deported merely because of loss of employment, thus being able to negotiate wages on the same playing field.
Figure out for yourself if it is better to offshore, or to keep the work here, but have a bigger mix of H1Bs, even if it drives wages down.
Though, it should be noted, H1Bs are not paid less than prevailing wages. It is against the law.
Ayn Rand would approve.
I wish you people who are so quick to invoke her name and presume to know what she thought and believed would at least read one of her books. Start with "We The Living." No, you're not going to like it; I didn't either, but I learned from it.
Rand was not the Tea Party or a Corporatist. She hated being fscked around with by connected assholes, just like we do. Romney and Obama probably hate her lots more than you do.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
America has not been reduced to a third world nation: it just happens that third world nations are growing extremely fast and catching up. Protectionism will not save you.
Foreign workers will for sure leave after their H1-B visas if it is too difficult to become permanent residents, and then citizens. Then they will compete with you remotely. Why wouldn't you want them to compete with you right here? Would you rather have them write business software from their home countries instead? I do not see how that is good for the American IT worker. Then you also have to take into account how good that is for Americans in general. Imagine the same thing with, say, doctors. Restrict access to foreigners, and make doctors make a whole lot more per hour. Imagine they now make $500 per hour in family practice. How do they make their money? Someone has to be paying them that much money, and that would be Americans that don't happen to be doctors. Lower salaries for doctors then become great for America. With IT, it's the same issue.
And if you are so afraid of the dollar being a shadow of its value 10 years ago, it's all very easy: Just hold your wealth in non-monetary assets. Currency is a method of exchange, but not a good way of holding wealth.
If your company doesn't sponsor green cards, the turnover of H1-Bs will actually be faster: They will jump through the hoops that they have to to change jobs into another one that does.
If anything, H1-Bs provide stability, because if you, say, start sponsor after the 3rd year, and it takes from 6 to 10 years to get a green card on top of that, you are talking about keeping the poor H1 there for 15 years: Just getting 3 years in the same position out of an American is hard.
Making green cards easier to get for H1s would make them much more mobile quicker, increasing their salaries.
This article's author and his proponents are xenophobes. There are no reasonable arguments to shut our borders and those in the past advocating such were xenophobic idiots. Derka jerbs!
not sure I care if others have jobs. After all I don't. But I do care if work gets done well. And if anyone gets paid for work done here, taxes are paid and they buy stuff. Labor's place is in helping dumb companies live for the long run and be places capable people prefer to work for, not in (only) looking for immediate pay at the highest level as can be achieved. Speaking as a former leader in a very large union...
I want to complain about the Indians too but they always know what I type on my personal computer in my off hours, so there's that.
Ooh boy.
As the article says, H-1Bs are NOT cream of the crop. That's O visa. RTFA.
I appear to be the only ./er who cares enough to mention that it should be "hear, hear", not "here here".
That said, I agree with the sentiment, if not the spelling. My former employer, who shall go unnamed, is a dynamic Silicon Valley hi-tech company, once one of the best places in America (pre-Google) for bright geeks to work. It is now a sea of H1Bs. A small percentage of them are stars; the rest are merely inexpensive. And the worst part is that H1B managers rarely hire Americans; they prefer to manage other H1Bs.
Bullsh*t. Americans don't want to work that hard, and won't unless it pays well. Ask farmers in Georgia how much luck they have had finding americans to fill the roles of migrant workers if you think otherwise. Crops rotted on the vine because they couldn't find labor, even by jacking up wages... an ordinate number don't even make it through a single day.
If people want to work and can find or create a job, let them. All of economic theory states that the economy will grow with more people, especially highly skilled people, rather than shrink. If anything we should remove the restrictions on working and living in this country if we want to see a boom.
Let's go back 15 years. when the US was lobbying hard for (say) India to lower their import duties.
let's say we don't have enough...ohhh...let's say car seatbelts. What SHOULD happen? Well the price for car seatbelts should go up, people see there is a demand for car seatbelts they start up/retool factories , the price levels out, classic supply and demand economics.
Now let us see what ACTUALLY happens (by opening up import markets by 3rd world countries) ...they lobby for more import duty cuts, more car seatbelts brought in, no Indian dares learn how to make a car seatbelt because they can't compete when their manufacturing technology costs $7500K+ and the American is paying less than $1000K, but then The American with this extra economy of scale raises the quality of their factories and products and India becomes the dumping ground for other countries while India's own systems? ROT.
Nice.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I don't know, our company DOES NOT hire H1Bs, just because we hadn't done it historically, but they're seriously considering it.
At one point last year, we had upwards of 50 technical job openings (in a company of under 600), we were offering a $5,000 referral bonus for anyone referring an employee who got hired. They were offering a signing bonus and high 6-figure salary. The positions were open ANYWHERE within 1 hour of a major US or Canadian airport and were advertised as such. The only downside was that many of them required about 40% travel and at least 6 months of consulting experience. Granted, this is a niche market to some extent and requires very specialized skills and they're not the type that can be trained up in a few months...
Despite the bonuses, it took several full-time hiring staff almost a year to fill those positions and half a dozen were filled from outside the country by sponsoring various types of visas. We were having to turn down work because we couldn't fill the positions.
That's been our experience anyway. Many of the postings had dozens of applicants, but so few of them were even close to qualified, a few that I saw were downright funny. This is technical stuff we're doing and we got a lot of apps from folks who were tech support at DirectTV or something similar for the last number of years... pretty wild, and certainly not someone we could put in front of a customer and wow them with expertise. The hiring staff automatically trashed applications from outside the country at first, but eventually gave in and started accepting them because they just couldn't find enough qualified people.
lol
If the government says "yes" to these lobbies, the problem is the government.
If the government says "no" to these lobbies, they're "obstructing" and the problem is the government.
If the government refuses all immigration, the problem is the government.
If the government doesn't enforce any immigration rules, the problem is the government.
This is easy, I can play too!!! yay!!
As usual, eh? What is the solution then, Mister Super Smarty Pants Economist?
This reminds me a bit of those "Keep your government hands off my Medicare" signs at the tea party rally a few years ago.
Having health insurance tied to job offers is the most disturbing part of your whole post.
Just a Canadian sharing his 0.02 (worth 0.021 in USD) ...
The wages dropping has nothing to do with people coming to America to work, and everything with moving jobs out of America to countries with much cheaper labor.
The wages dropping has nothing to do with people coming to America to work, and everything with businesses not increasing wages.
Over the last 40 years, the average inflation-adjusted wage has barely increased.*
The current $7.25/hour minimum wage is actually less than the average wage of 40 years ago.
And yet, in that same period of time, the Dow Jones avg went from ~735 to ~13,500**
(actually, it peaked at 14,100 in late 2007. Then crashed to 6,500 in 2009 and recovered extremely rapidly)
TLDNR: Massive amounts of wealth have been generated and almost none of it has trickled down to the working class.
*Be careful which graphs you look at, not all of them are created equal.
**You can look up the S&P 500 if you prefer, they're the other market index that's existed before the 60s
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I work for an IT consulting firm as an executive. We actually are finding it pretty fucking impossible to staff $100K+ paying positions. We are hiring H-1Bs because there are no Americans able to fill these positions. Period.
We'll use our professional networks and post openings on our website and on Monster and other sites. Zero bites from qualified citizens or green card holders. We don't discriminate on any basis, but it's definitely something I've noticed—there just aren't enough qualified US citizens to fill all the positions there are. And we're not even a big company!
H1B Visas are a scam. Period. Tech workers need to understand exactly how/why the scam works...
1. Companies run "help wanted" ads with narrow/irrelevant requirements... Like an entry job requiring a masters degree and 10 years experience, or a job requiring VERY specific and obscure experience; this is done to satisfy US Govt requirements to offer the job to Americans first while not actually attracting an American. Sometimes the very odd requirements are pre-selected as the exact resume of the foreign worker they intend to import (some businesses bring a candidate to the US on a "vacation" visit first (to meet and evaluate him). The absurdly high education requirements, relative to the job, are generally a sign that a foreign worker will be imported with a masters or doctorate from some obscure foreign school of dubious standards and accreditation. A masters degree from CalTech is not interchangeable with a masters from bing-bang-bippity university in East Draconia ... except in a job listing and in satisfying the US Govt H1B paperwork.
2. No company brings in a large number of H1B visa holders... and they do not need to. The point of bringing in a H1B holder is to say to every other individual employee "we can replace you if you do not work hard enough or for low wages". The point of H1B visas is not to import workers because America lacks skilled workers (there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed experienced engineers and programmers in the country) and it's not to replace the workers at one location... it's to suppress the wages in an entire facility, or company, or industry. Most employers do not really want to have to deal with a large number of employees with unusual accents, unfamiliar holidays and cultural/religious issues possible lawsuit-causing bigotries, etc. and if you look through US Govt stats, you will see that a very large number of firms import only 1 or 2 H1B holders... (not rational to claim each really found it impossible to find and train even ONE unemployed American)
3. No company needs to underpay an H1B holder for this to have the desired effect. If the goal of the company is to keep anybody from asking for HIGHER wages/benefits then the company only needs to import a worker at the current wages. This imported worker will happily not ask for even more, because his/her H1B can be dropped and he/she can be sent back home to vastly inferior wages/benefits
4. Entire industries use the H1B visa process to say to American workers: "you are no better than these foreign workers...AND we in management can work with these foreigners". It's one thing for business to directly say it to the workers (something they will not generally do, particularly in public where it might become a YouTube video, or surface in congressional hearings or lawsuits) but it's an entirely different thing to say it by implication and direct demonstration with an imported worker (where anybody who complains can be publicly branded as a racist and a xenophobe). The H1B employer can smugly deny any nefarious intent and wait for his critics to step into the "racist" trap.
5. Bill Gates is being tremendously dishonest when he advocates for H1B visas... He is implying some rather strange and incongruous things and is never challenged on them: First, he tells us Microsoft is the top software firm in the world with the best methods and practices... so presumably anybody arriving at MS to take a job should need some amount of training to adapt to the systems/methods/procedures etc of his top-notch firm. Then he tells us there are not enough American workers who meet his very high standards (which in theory nobody meets before they arrive at his campus anyway) or who he can even train to meet those standards (we're supposed to believe that one of the most profitable companies on planet Earth cannot afford to train a few already skilled, experienced and educated but unemployed American workers?). Finally, he tells us he need
Where are you getting your 1% figure from? Cringley's article claims around 20% (of the IT market), and he at least has some evidence behind it.
Amazing level of drivel gets marked "Informative" around here. How does your H1-B buddy cost more to the company? The $1000 odd application fee?
You forgot to mention the part where if it wasn't for them bringing you buddy and many more like him, you would be making 75k a year instead of the 40k a year you are making now.
Really? The guy is capable of doing 1.875 times work as the H1-B guy? That's real smart move on the part of company, then!
"DEY TURK R JERBS!" scream the autistic shutin computer janitors that have thrown the american poor under the bus for decades by allowing hoardes of cheap labor to cross the border unfettered (restricted immigration = racism), yet lack the awareness to realize that nobody will care now as the exact same thing happens to them.
Why not just crank up minimum wage to $100/hour, and then we can all be rich?
Don't hide the "violence inherent in the system" behind euphemisms like "encourage", "nudge", "owe each other", or "society"; if you believe that threatening people with harm, and harming them if they don't conform, is a legitimate way to get them to conform to social programs you like, be proud!
Is this really true? I have yet to find a single example of someone on an H1-B and is being paid below the average. I myself am paid at par with my American colleagues.
It is actually against the law in the United States to pay an H1-B worker below the so-called "market rate" of their labor. And I know a few H1-B's (in reputable companies), they are very good programmers, and they are paid on par with their colleagues. I haven't RTA but it sounds like the issue is with a minority of dodgy companies that try get away with paying below market rate.
What seems to escape the attention of those crying 'loss of jobs', is that IT jobs are already being outsourced ... and if a skilled programmer can't get into the United States, he/she can anyway do the equivalent work - and will do it for far less than if on an H1-B - from his/her own country. We're talking about a field that still has a shortage of skilled labor ... it makes more sense to have these people in the US, where they are usually paid market rates, and where they create many indirect jobs.
Another thing, with the chronic deficit problems, and an economy not really growing, then to pay down the national debt and still maintain quality of life for those on social security etc., immigration actually helps grow the absolute size of the economic base, allowing higher tax revenue.
This makes no sense. H1-B is an immigration-path visa ... if you just want to work temporarily in the US and then go back, there are much easier and more reliable ways. If you're going through the pain of H1-B it's because you want to stick around.
The reason first-generation immigrants from some countries are sometimes very tight with their money is from habit - they are usually those that come from previously very poor countries, and probably spent the equivalent of their life savings just to get into the US. These people then tend to have children - second-generation immigrants - who grow up and live like ordinary middle-class Americans. I guess you don't spend much time with such people, but you might learn a few things if you did ... some of your friends might even be second-generation and you don't even realize it.
Which gives employers their ammo that "we just can't find qualified US applicants."
I don't think you have the first clue how H1-B hiring actually works, do you? It's very costly, it involves hiring lawyers and enormous amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork, it's a very lengthy and time-consuming process (can easily take multiple years to get someone in), and it's very risky and unreliable from a hiring perspective (because at least half of H1-B's are rejected (at random!) due to the highly limited quota, and if you don't make it, it's literally a year before you can try again - and the company must wait a year and try again.
The fact that companies hire H1-B's in spite of how badly artificially crippled they are (and how much of an artificial advantage an American citizen has ... there is no wait, no extra costs, you can walk in off the street and start immediately etc.), suggests that maybe, just maybe, it really is difficult to find qualified people in the US in the skills-shortage fields.
To be fair, historically, one of the reasons for this unprecedentedly massive glut in cheap global labor is that countries like China had been artificially made very poor by Communism. The Cultural Revolution and its effects were brutal and massive. So you have a billion people right there who are rising up out of dire poverty due, and that is why are they so desperate and so willing to work for so little.
But this distorted imbalance is a historical blip ... the global Gini coefficient has actually been improving for decades, quality of life is rising in the East, more and more historically 'cheap labor' jurisdictions are enacting minimum wage (e.g. in many parts of China even) and implementing other labor improvements, so what we are arriving at is that this imbalance is leveling itself out.
Just in time for the rise of automation, robots ... technological labor redundancy ... a far bigger threat than immigration, but could be a panacea if managed well.
We need to think about the problems of the future, not the problems of the past.
Apple would have miraculously kept its work in the US if the price of going offshore was that all their patents, trademarks, and copyrights became free for any American to use.
If American citizens are good enough to pay the taxes to support the IP laws and the courts that support them and American citizens are good enough to be subject to those IP laws, then they are good enough to work at Apple. If Chinese respect for IP laws is good enough for Apple, then that level of respect for IP laws is good enough for Apple in the US.
If CocaCola can sell its soda in India why can't an Indian sell his soul in good old America?
I think most of them who come from Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys and HCL earn much lesser than 80K and save up close to 100K. Since I live in India and work in the industry I know a handful of people who work for these outsourcing companies and are working in the US on H1-B Visa. Usually they would rent a one room apartment where four people would stay together. Some of them would go even cheaper, one of the persons who I know, stayed in a Gurudwara (Sikh Temple), where usually the people who can't afford a place to stay would usually go.
I find ironic that Cringley accuses companies of greed but fails to recognize his own (and the tech workers' which he purports to represent) and he succumbs to protectionist bias. The net effect of immigrants on the country, including that of qualified tech immigrants, is positive but he fails to consider the various effects.
He mixes in various economic fallacies, such as the idea that jobs are owned (and therefore stolen), or that competitive offerings (for products or labor) are harmful to society.
The pool of job is not fixed, and immigrants add to demand, to the brain pool, and to the job pool. Having more brains and human ingenuity in a country is a goof thing.
Also, if companies consistently hire sub-par workers (as he claims a study found), then surely smarter companies stand to gain by hiring more capable locals. Somehow CEOs don't seem to have received his memo, could it be that they evaluate the trade-off of hiring decisions differently than he does?
Immigration restrictions are inhumane and un-economical. If Cringley can prove a negative effect on a certain category of workers (studies disagree on this but any negative effect on wages seems insignificant or small depending on results), then he should recommend a redistribution program (from said immigrants to the specific group affected). Instead he is narrowly and wrongly defending a mistaken law, instead of considering the broader ethical and economic issues. In short, the many benefits of free exchange of goods and services apply to labor too.
See economist Bryan Caplan's excellent talk on immigration restrictions, which addresses the key issues raised against open borders: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYk00Ufiqb4.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.
54% of americans own stock but most stock is owned by the top quintile and over 40% of stock wealth is owned by 1% of americans.
We need to remove the unforgivable nature of student loans and get government backing out and that will prompt the market to fix the problem. One reason tuitions are so high is that free money is available.
Wages only work when there is a balance between labor and demand. When there is a glut of labor you get really abusive situations. Fortunately we are exiting that situation and headed towards a shortage of labor. In theory, I agree wages should not be enforced by the government. In practice, it's necessary given the power of corporations.
And the government isn't getting between you and the kid mowing your lawn. At least not in my state. Not unless you pay the kid a lot of money and then they want their cut.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How is a job "American"? In order for something to be stolen, someone else must already have a right to it.
This may be true, but it is a case of supply and demand. By granting 1000's of H1B visas, the supply of people that can do this job is artificially increased within the USA. That, combined with the other labor evil, outsourcing, combines to dramatically lower wages for those that choose to do software in the USA.
Eventually, if this works out right, there will be NO US citizens graduating with programming degrees. If they're smart, they'll go into lawyering or doctoring, rather than get abused by the government and business. Let the average wage of software people plummet to $60K or somesuch, and US citizens will instead choose to do something that pays decent money, and never darken a computer science degree program threshold again.
And then US industry REALLY WILL be unable to find US citizens to abuse. Poetic justice.
Actually a 'perfectly' free market would imply companies could bring anyone in they wanted to work for them. The Government actually keeps them from being able to completely flood the market with workers willing to work whatever amount they are willing to take and nuking our internal market. The current system at least limits the raw numbers coming in (though obviously not enough with about half of the entire tech industry being visa holders). If they were limited entirely to the US market however I have a feeling that many of them would simply create offshore sites and still hire about as much foreign labor as they do now.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
In the tech industry in the US, I have never heard of immigrants earning less than the citizens. If there is an immigrant you spot to be occupying your chair, its probably because he is better than you. In the long run, good economics is one where you compete and collaborate with the best in the world. The moment you start seeking help from the government asking them to come up with policies to save your own chair, its a sign of weakness. This is a good read that explains this exactly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/business/12immig.html?pagewanted=all
The Lima Declaration of 1975 is a good explanation.
It doesn't take the place of a citizen.
It takes a place of work. Or are you saying that they are not citizens?
Just because people have a different nationality, they are people nevertheless (and citizens, albeit not of USA), it it was better for US to stop be so xenophobic, you know... it's bad for the blood pressure.
Or you would prefer to send the slave boats to India, round up the new graduates, have their teeth checked and embark them in chains?
First job in the field of programming is normally support oriented.
In my case started with general IT helpdesk, then i migrated to web site maintenance, the finally to full flagged programming jobs.
The problem is that those entry level jobs moved all to India, China, Brasil, Russia (and others) where they have an huge quantity of tech savvy workforce that does those jobs for a few bucks.
The result is that here, you don't get any positions for those entry level jobs. This basically makes impossible for new graduates to enter into the professions of choice, because yes, there are no entry level positions in the first place!
If Americans don't want big US-based tech companies to hire Canadians, should they expect Canadians to want to buys US tech company products?
People keep saying this, but it does not gel with reality (at least what I've been observing lately).
From the employer's side of things, I can't even tell you how many candidates we brought in to interview (mobile C++ and Objective-C) who simply don't know what they are doing. Most have great resumes: lots of referenced work experience and good education credentials, but when you ask them to write simple programs or describe a data structure or algorithm, they're kind of lost. When you dig deep on a topic, you find they don't really know. It's all surface knowledge. They can talk and talk and talk, but there's no depth. It's as if there's some interview prep class out there that is teaching people to just keep talking and saying buzzwords, even if you don't know what any of it means.
This isn't an American thing or an H1-b thing, it cuts across nationality. It REALLY is tough to find qualified technical labor, domestic or otherwise. If there's an opportunity to bring more into the labor pool, it would be welcome.
That is why it is called a market. If there was external demand for your (and other) ex-MSFT employees services, they would not be able to hire replacements at a lower wage. Do you recall the dotcom bubble? Insane amounts of money were tossed at anyone who could spell HTML. Not making this personal or anything, I sympathize with anyone who has lost a job and as a result must take a lower paying one. But this about much more than 'evil corp makes big profits and laysoff employees.' The commanding lead that the US once had in the technical fields and their staffing has dwindled to the point where workers can no longer command a premium compared to their peers from other locations (yes that is a general statement and sure there are exceptions.)
Easier to compete, if they are here, where cost of living is highest, then if they remain in their own countries, and develop software over there, where the costs are lower.
you might as well hire students. That's how most students live.
And a lot of the stimulus money was in the form of loans to banks so they's have the liquidity needed to pay their depositors when they needed their money, thus preventing an even more drastic destruction of the money supply.
If I recall correctly, most of that money has since been repaid with interest, so the government eventually made some kind of a profit on the whole deal.
It's damned hard to get into IIT.
I believe America is great country, one of the reasons being, because of it's openness to accept hardworking immigrants w/o much prejudice, right from it;s inception as a nation.
I know of no other country that does it so well.
I think we should remember that govt's always tend to have a socialist/populist agenda while corporations are purely economical in approach.
It's always difficult even for the best of leaders (govt & business) to balance these 2.
there is also some in-balances here that H1B people profit from, for e.g. education, even upto a Masters, costs about a 10th of that of a similar overall program in U.S..... most H1B guys probably would find it uneconomical to work for low wages, as an option, if they had invested as much as their American counterparts on their education...
The H1-B program is EVIL!! In a time of major unemployment big companies like IBM, Wells Fargo, Mickeysoft etc are selling our jobs over seas or bringing foreigners over here for the one single reason that they are cheaper that US workers. There is no shortage of skilled tech workers in the US, just a shortage of IT workers who will work 60+ hours a week for slave wages and no overtime. REPEAL H1-B!!!!!!!!!!
Sure, there are costs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Hidden_costs_and_risks_for_employers I recall reading on /. comments that companies would hire H-1B workers, have US workers train them, then let the US workers go. Even if we assume that a lot of the statements were hyperbole, employers aren't going to go with a more expensive solution if they can avoid it. It's still manipulation of supply and demand, and IMO causes a catch-22 for employers trying to find qualified US workers.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
Anonymous suits you well.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
That much travel is a niche. It sounds like overnight/extended stay travel also. I woudl do it, but my wife is against it.
I used to do field service work, 60-100k miles/yr, regional car travel. I can fly fine, but it's in my past now.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
One thing you miss is that when immigrants send dollars back home, they must first convert to their local currency. In other words, it's not correct to say the money is leaving the US. To the extent that this becomes a common trend, this will drive down the value of a dollar (since people are selling dollars to buy local currency), and thereby make US labor cheaper and internationally competitive.
MIT is the best engineering school in the world (as far as reputation). Are you suggesting that's incorrect?
For more general science education, places like Harvard and Princeton would be ahead of MIT.
But not IIT.
The supply is the world supply.
Then H-1Bs still aren't the answer. Open borders are. Unless you think applying a "world supply" argument is only valid when it's an advantage for you.
By definition national borders limit the movement of people and goods. Those limits will always help some and hurt others. H-1B visas are a manipulation of local supply and demand, one that helps employers at the expense of US workers.
I can mend the break of day, heal a broken heart, and provide temporary relief to nymphomaniacs.
Who is this ignorant fool ranting !? I am an Indian on H1B visa working as an software engineer. It is ludicrous to claim that there are enough qualified workers in the US to do the SE jobs indians/chinese/else are doing? Stop projecting the results of a failed state public education system onto foreign H1-B employees. Plus, almost 25% of start-ups in the valley are started by Indians. I am sure a similar number must be true for Chinese. So stfu.
God forbid Americans live in a efficient and frugal manner.
Anything that has the slightest chance to steal your God given right to drive expensive cars (alone) to work, and living in a large house, must be destroyed in the name of Americanism.
I suppose anyone who accepts a job offer below 100k is un-American, because that's basically how much it takes to live your "normal", undegraded, full-experience, American life.
Whoever has the power will abuse it.
Case: Employers - will abuse their power to get the best people as inexpensively as possible.
Case: Educators - will abuse their power to stress themselves as little as possible to get their salaries [and benefits].
Case: Young people - Have very little power - Some work hard to prepare themselves to get ahead. Some play away their youth, and claim that having been born in the USA is a reason to favor them.
Wake up and smell the coffee!
An H1-B takes a low paying job that would traditionally go to an entry-level local worker, works for several years, and returns home with enough money live on comfortably for the rest of his life due to the exchange rate.
That's hysterical. I don't know what countries you think all these people come from for that to be possible. Your American dollar is not worth that much to the vast majority of countries.. You need a good education to get a job in America and so American jobs are not being lost to developing nations where your statement might have a chance at relevance. (with the exception of the ones being outsourced by "loyal" American companies which is a far bigger problem.) How long do you think 50k would last in Europe or most of Asia?
Not the AC above, but considering where I am now to where I was just a couple of years ago, starting from zero requires several things:
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
If software piracy isn't really stealing from the publishers because they don't already have the money for the product, how is a foreigner getting a job stealing it from a domestic worker who doesn't yet have the job?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Except it doesn't work that way because FREE TRADE IS A LIE...Want to get into India or China? Thanks to their tariffs you'll have to hire them and build a factory there because they are what is nicely called "nationalists" aka having a fucking brain. Meanwhile because our country is run by PHBs that only see the short term profits we have been the training ground for the world while our own education and higher learning? ROT. Look at how you have record numbers of defaults on student loans, why? Because they can't compete with someone who paid $10k for their degree, duh! Look at IT, its a wasteland, in fact my local college is shutting down their IT education dept which had been one of the biggest programs for over 20 years, why? because students wised up and saw you simply can't survive in IT anymore so they won't take the classes, now those classes are practically empty.
So I'm sorry but globalist free trade theory has already proven to be a MASSIVE failure, because nobody plays by the rules. They can export all they want but YOUR products aren't allowed in, this is why everyone builds in China dn India while the USA has business districts that are looking like something from "Escape From New York".
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
What you're saying is that when an h1b gets a job he's taking a job away from a citizen and that the citizen suddenly becomes unemployed, or is unable to find work at all.
That makes no sense at all.
The citizen may not get the job that was taken by the h1b but he'll get a similar one with very slightly less pay on average.
The guy that loses his job is the guy at the bottom of the ladder. But that improvement to productivity, trade deficit, etc should ensure that doesn't happen.
Cringley's talking out of his arse. His argument has no solid economical basis.
How many Indian h1bs are taking jobs away from those English majors?
Up until this summer, the U.S. Auto companies depended on this practice. For some reason, they all have decided to use more natural citizens. Auto companies aside, there are still quite a few companies in the area that continue to use the practice, and salary is definitely the motive.
The wages are substandard in conext with the cost of living in the US but not so much in India, Vietnam, China, etc.
BillWG in his greed is trying to create a self fulfilling prophecy. Look at the state of CS at US universities. CS has gone from being a major pillar of many universities back to nothing but a math curiosity. Who would want to spend 60k on getting a degree so you could struggle against some foreign worker with made up credentials to be paid less then most executive assistants. If the politicians don't do anything about the visa abuse and rein in outsourcing you can kiss IT goodbye in the US.
American is not a race.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
And thats why Americans don't want STEM degrees. The H1B program is a scheme to prevent upward mobility for intelligent lower to middle class Americans.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Otherwise known as a fair market wage?
Whoever's writing as Cringly is just being racist here. There's no moral wrong when a non-American gets an "American job", whether through immigraiton or offshoring. Everyone deserves to compete for any job, without prefernce given by race or place of birth.
Sure, I'd personally like to see all the cool developer jobs reserved for somewhat overweight middle-aged white guys, but that's because I'm a greedy bastard, not because it would be some kind of moral virtue!
The problem is that it puts a net drain on the local market, both in terms of skilled workers and in terms of money. An H1-B takes a low paying job that would traditionally go to an entry-level local worker, works for several years, and returns home with enough money live on comfortably for the rest of his life due to the exchange rate. This means that the local entry-level worker can't find a job and becomes disenfranchised, and a total loss of ~50k * 3 yr = $150k is permanently removed from the local economy. Now maybe this is not ethically wrong, but it is not in the best interests of the local economy or the national economy.
===========
Not all H1B visas are for lower salaried people. Rarely are there unqualified Americans, the problem is
a) We need them now, whereas the American is finishing off a contract and cant accept the position
b) He wants to be home weekends to tend to family -- wife,children,himself,shopping,grandparents, etc.
The H1B person can work 6 days per week. He has no family to contend with.
c) There is always a question of moraity. Do you keep staff, and have a smaller dividend for yourself, or do you dump them because it is more profitable. And when you need a recall, you can't get them back.
If I was a true blood American, I would say f**k the shareholders, keep the employees working, so they can spend and maintain the economy by spending. (Kensian economics basics). If you need to, pay them for 4 days per week, until the economy revives. Banks today have so much debt because of high director salaries and, foreclosures on houses, and hedgefund losses, that they will not lend money if there is any risk involved. They have so tightened credit and loan approvals, that the company has no choice but to go offshore for H1B technocrats.
Here is what I see as a rule for H1Bs. Have the company show proof of advertising for the position to be filled. This advert must have been posted for a minimum of 180 days. Company to show proof via headhunters, newspapers, corporate website, etc. that they have in fact done a proper search. If after that time, with no results, then then allow the H1B for a that project.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
To paraphrase Bobby Fischer: I like to see Americans squirm.
As the American bus plummets down the hill towards national bankruptcy driven by a man voted in for color rather than competence it is hilarious to see the endgame unfold.
Of course the visa system is rigged. Companies do the old one-two bait and switch. Claim they need a worker with advanced esoteric knowledge in one or other SW technologies; interview a few Americans (who naturally don't fit the bill); lobby for visas and then by the time the third worlders arrive - surprise, surprise needs have changed. But we employ 'em anyway. If you don't like it...well.... you must be a racist.
Nothing can stop it now. The denouement comes. Blinded by liberal education and past (or should it be passed) affluence and bullied into submission by false charges of racism Americans continue to destroy themselves. Twenty million peasant invaders to bring the national IQ down. Southern California and several border states are already lost as the demographics shift. Mexican peasants fucking their way to victory. Hispanic babies winning back vast tracts of America for the Mexican side.
Meanwhile petite American young girls demand birth pills as a right. The oddly named Sandra Fluke helping the demographic destruction of the Republic. The American tide goes out, the Hispanic tide comes in.
Soon Texas will be reclaimed without firing a shot (just shout racism Jose and Americans immediately surrender). Meanwhile the willful blind eye of the Feds waits with glee for more Democrat voters. And to resolve intellectual disparities the solution is easy.....just dumb down the educational system - pass one, pass all becomes the new mantra. And that is the underpinning of the H1-B system.
Standards slip and.....well..... we just don't have any qualified Americans any more say the greedy tech companies. We need foreign labor. Americans are just not that well educated anymore. Don't know why. Fortunately our graduate programs are now predominantly peopled by Asian students - plenty to choose from.
The real collapse is the H1-B system. (Remember Srikant, if Americans complain, just shout racism. No Shen, not 'lacists', say after me 'rrrrracist' you must learn this term. It is the key to success in America)
So millions of Asians are imported via the H1-B program and then act as conduits to send Americas expertise and intellectual property to Asia. Software secrets to India; hardware and manufacturing secrets to China. (Strict instructions from home base: just accuse those who object of racism if they complain. Universities, professors and lefty American media will help. )
The result is the greatest transfer of wealth and expertise in human history. 50 years and trillions of dollars of computer/software/manufacturing expertise and R&D effortlessly moved around the world in milliseconds. And jobs follow. What a surprise. Of course, politicians help too. No good just blaming the Internet. Clinton OK'ed selling America's satellite gyroscope secrets to Chinese for campaign donations and a little profit for Loral. And now China has the capability of shooting down US satellites. The Rhodes Scholar's greatest achievement no doubt. Oxford University and the presidency for Bill and unemployment for tech workers. Fortunately, Bill tells us, he feels your pain.
Time is short now. By 2017 China will pass America as the largest economy in the world. The expertise transfer is going well. And the smart and affluent are starting to leave America heading to the promising shores of Asia. They know America is toast. Take a walk through Singapore or Shanghai or Guang Dong province and wealthy Americans are everywhere. Smart, they have already left the sinking ship. By 2030 China's military will be stronger. Growing ever bolder they will demand more and more technology transfer, a.k.a. intellectual property theft, to China as the price of doing business there.
And the liberal Americans dream will have come true. Looking around t
Most H1Bs *are* from developing nations like India and China. $150k, invested wisely, would provide acomfortable living in the countryside of such a nation for life. That is, of course, beside the point; regardless of whether he retires on the money or spends it on hookers and blow, as long as its spent in his home country it's a net loss to the local community.
I disagree. It's not at all unusual for someone to be unable to find work at all once displaced from their field of expertise. And Cringe is not alone in this assessment.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I work as a regional dev manager for a large multi-billion dollar software company and I have first hand experience with the issues cited by the OP.
H1b labor is predatory, and its low quality. My company is currently struggling to do things right because we depend too much on cheap, low quality CS contractors who are either brought onshore to take an americans job, or because we have to hire an american to remotely manage offshore people in India. We have headcount, budet, etc and its all going back to offshore instead of keeping american jobs here.
Worse, our american onshore devs have to about 80% of the time rewrite what the offshore teams do; And if we do get a good offshore dev he leaves for a few pennies more before we can offer the same. We cant keep people so we end up training the competition UNLESS we pay them the same as rates we could get here onshore. I honestly dont see an economic benefit to the - publicly traded - company, but its out of my hands and I cant push back no matter how much we try. Its cut-throat, the contracting companies in india are greedy and will gladly lie and cheat you to grow their own business at your expense while at the same time smiling and acting like they love to work with you as a business partner.
Why are H1Bs more privelidged than the Mexicans who provide our farm labor or the Guatemalans who serve in restaraunts in New York, illegally?
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Here we go again. This is a moot discussion, there are not enough American citizens out there to fill the positions, period. And as far as wages go the DOL is pretty strict on what needs to be paid. Also its more expensive for the company, since it has to pay for immigration fees. Yeah, it can be used as a tool to keep people from switching employers, since they always require sponsorship. But this is like the old slogan all politicians use "Bring manufacturing jobs back to America", never going to happen. So wake up, get your kids into science and engineering and they may still have a job. Or better still save up for them, since they are going to be hanging out in your basement playing WOW.
The fact is that American capitalists have an interpretation of "the free market" meme that is indistinguishable from some ephemeral "right" to get rich through any means.
By their own analysis, wages go down when the supply of available labor goes up and wages go up when the labor market is tight.
So they act as though they just don't know whatever it is you're on about , and maybe you're a little racist or xenophobic or protectionist -or all three - when you point out that by prevailing on Congress to flood the market with H1Bs, you're putting your thumb on the scale of the "free market" in favor of business owners and to the disfavor of labor .
American capitalism isn't now and never was about the free and fair functioning of a market for goods and labor. It was is and always will be about crony capitalism.
If wages are up, the free market solution to that problem is something we briefly had in the late 80s and early 90s - massive enrollment and enthusiasm on the part of the job seeking portion of the citizenry for Computer Science as a major. More labor chases those dollars and the labor market swells stabilizing wages. Everyone wins. But the idea that everyone wins makes American business owners want to puke.
You have to read Ron Hira from Rochester University and Norm Matloff - two guys who actually crunched the numbers on this topic - in order to understand that absolutely, indisputably, the H1B program is nothing but another of the ways the rich prey on the middle class and undermine their opportunities so that the rich can pocket a little more money:
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/do-we-need-foreign-technology-workers/
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2011/09/answers-for-sen.html
http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-foreign-stem-graduates-get-green-cards/broad-stem-grad-green-card-exemptions-would-distort-labor-market
Have lived through massive abuse of the H-1B program. In fact the program is fundamentally flawed.
1: A foreign national on an H-1B has to leave the country (a few months? I don't remember the time limit),
if they lose their job. This means that the worker is far less likely to complain about lower wages,
unpaid overtime, or any other type of abuse because losing the job is far more serious than for a US citizen.
This makes the second class citizens. Something that is unconstitutional.
(Probably means that the entire H-1B visa program is unconstitutional.)
2: H-1B visas were being used for everything from high-tech to summer labor for beach resorts. Check
out the complaints back in the early 2000's from the Cape Cod, MA. hotel and restaurant owners
when the cap on H-1B visas were hit. Definitely not a situation where local workers with sufficient skills
were available. Specifically targeted at lower labor costs.
3: Bill Gates has sat in front of congress and stated that we need 600,000 H-1B visas a year because
he can't find qualified workers. Suggestion: How about doing what all of the companies for the last 100 years
before his type came on the scene did, TRAIN new workers. Does anyone remember the Edison Engineering
program of GE? They trained their own. If we cut taxes on the wealthy (for some unknown or completely
ridiculous reason), and as a result cut funding to education across the country, why is it surprising that
we don't have a strong workforce? Further, how can industry expect to find exactly the skillsets needed
for specific jobs, if there isn't both a strong education infrastructure and a commitment to continuing
education by businesses?
Its enlightened self-interest to want to promote and grow local talent for businesses. Romney
was right in one aspect of his infamous line "businesses are people too". Businesses are run
by people. We all want to live in vibrant communities. Nobody (at least I think nobody), wants to
live in an environment of desperate poverty all around them. Money can only build the
walls around your mansion so high. The H-1B visa program is the antithesis of this.
eh, i'm not too worried about automation, most jobs don't actually produce tangible results. couple billion extra billion people wasting resources like we do is a little scary tho. i try not to think about it.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
Except it doesn't work that way
Except it did. Lots of 3rd world countries, including India, Thailand, Indonesia , Sri Lanka reduced import duties by an order of magnitude during or around 1990s.
FREE TRADE IS A LIE
The US itself told this lie to numerous 3rd world countries to get them to open up their imports.Now when it bites the US back, you say it is a lie NOW? It has been a lie all along.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
I have seen plenty of competent American software engineers laid off and replaced with a H-1B or folks in an overseas office. The idea that it's an education / training problem is total bullshit in my experience.
And yes, those folks overseas aren't even paid a quarter of what SEs are paid here.
If it's a loop of earning and spending they'd better be giving uncle sam their cut.
"There's no moral wrong when a non-American gets an "American job", whether through immigraiton or offshoring. Everyone deserves to compete for any job, without prefernce given by race or place of birth."
Moral wrong: It's not immigration when it is H1B. Nor it is off-shoring.
To address your larger point ( global competition ), it is stupid, because the competition is not based on excellence, but on costs at the location of the worker. I would love to be able to compete with off-shoring, etc, but I cant secure food and housing where I am at those wages. So, my wages creak down ( or fall dramatically ), my ability to buy creaks down ( or falls dramatically ), the economy as a whole suffers an infinitesimal amount based on me at this time slice. Rinse repeat, for me, and multiply for all the other schmucks in my boat. Which then has a knock on effect for the rest of the US economy spiraling down. I believe that is why the US economy is in the gutter. Trade is good, but not when one side is open ( mostly ) and the other side plays games ( Japan in the old days, China today ).
Without preference given by race or POB:
Cool developer jobs should not be reserved for anyone, but China, India, etc are not open to non- citizens seeking work, they are closed on this issue ( the five token overweight middle ages white guys dont count ). Why is this criticism only leveled at the countries that are partially open?
I'm sorry but if you're having trouble finding a job right now in a field that can hire h1bs then you're doing it wrong. It has nohing to do with the h1bs.
I'm very interested to know what specific skills you're looking for and how to get in touch with you.
In Reason We Trust
I was granted an H1-B (Canada) in 1999 to work for a video game company, met and fell in love with an American, and married her. I'm now a permanent resident who consults to companies in Canada and the UK, but I live, work and pay taxes in the US. Because I'm bringing foreign money into the US every month and keeping it and spending it all here, I've been personally responsible for expanding the US economy by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I realize my case may be unusual, but it CAN'T be unique, and the first node in the vector for my permanent residency was my H1-B 13 years ago. Were it not for the H1-B, I would not be married to my awesome wife, the business I started here would not exist, nor would its income, my spending, or my taxes. Also the promotional, marketing, and other businesses I've hired here would not have been connected to foreign income.
Maybe I'm missing the point but I feel like the US has treated me well, and that I've certainly treated her VERY well in return. If H1-B pays long term dividends like me, does that outweigh some of the negatives?
Clearly you haven't been paying attention.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Non Native Americans.
It's interesting to see how a country can forget its own history...
Obviously not. I have been too busy trying to find talented people to fill headcount. I wish we could hire h1bs then maybe we wouldn't have to keep wasting our time on all these kids that should have stuck to liberal arts...
You must know different Americans than I do. I know of no Americans who are willing to engage in back-breaking farm work. That is not to say that there are none, I'm sure there are, but I think you're overestimating the number of Americans who would be willing to engage in such work and, even if they DID such work, would not work as hard as illegal immigrants. It's a matter of desperation and native Americans are simply not very desperate.
The higher COSTS only get passed on to the consumers who are their customers. I am not the customer of ALL corporations. Your logic is the same idiocy used to justify why corporations should pay no taxes and that is BULL****. There are many, many, many companies I will never patronize. All of us individuals should not be expected to subsidize the costs they impose on our infrastructure just because they will 'pass the costs off to their customer'.
I don't know anyone with a CS degree who is getting under $45k/year, and almost all of them are getting 60k+. I also don't know anyone with a CS degree who has been unemployed for more than 6 months. CS graduates have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country. Maybe H1Bs hurt individual developers, but why should we developers get any more shielding from market forces than factory workers? On top of that, we move the jobs into the US where they pay US taxes and contribute to our economic multipliers. To me, it just seems moronic to not make H1Bs more or less unlimited.
When I say current jobs, I mean the workers replace jobs that Americans lost.
This IS what is happening.
Look at US worker employment in the field. It has dropped since H1-B visa's were raised. As a consequence, look at new US citizens entering the field -- you will see this figure has dropped because the number of positions for US citizens has dropped). These are current effects -- not about lost future opportunities.
Second -- look at salary & wage benefits -- as the number of H1-B visa's increased, increases in salary and wages flattened, and as demand increased in the field, salary and wage benefits didn't increases proportionately -- whereas H1-B visa's increased. That's lost $$ and lower standard of living for current workers ON TOP of those who were "let go" because there was no longer a position for them (and their job was given to a foreigner).
I'm not sure why you are trying to conflate the two issues ... they are very different.
Software, music, -- are about making copies at zero cost and making profit on them and the artificially created right (by corporate lobbying) for those rights to be extended. The "right" (not an inherent right at all, but one explicitly -- **conditionally** **allowed** to be granted by congress for the purpose of benefiting the citizens, "the public good".
Jobs cannot be reproduced at zero cost. They are physical objects that have a 1:1 cost to reproduce. Some employer has to pay 1 "employee-cost-unit" to "buy" (rent?) an employee. It cannot be reproduced for zero cost.
The two issues are extremely different and any attempts to compare them have no objective basis.
OTOH, jobs, in the US -- while not a 'right', are a *pre-condition* in this society for the assumed human right to pursue happiness. We don't have a society that allows people to live happily without some sort of money to live on. Most people are in the working class -- they must work in order to have money to be part of of our mainstream society. Therefore, for most people, a job is a necessity. It is in the public interest and for the good of the people that the government provide the basic support so that people can HAVE jobs... it can't guarantee them -- as that is left to the 'free market', however, if it doesn't provide the basis for them, the public good will go belly up and the government will be failing in it's mission to promote the public good and protect its people (its citizens).
If it implements policies that hinder or hurt this goal, then it can arguably be said to be not representing the best interests of those who it is not serving -- as that group -- say those who unwillfully unemployed, increases (unemployment has been (don't know about "today's" figures) at the highest levels since the great depression -- when clearly, most historians and economists agree that the government failed to properly regulate the capitalist robber barons.
Today the capitalist robber barons have stronger representation in the government -- and rather than being forced to allow bad ones go belly up, the people, as a whole had 1/3-1/2 of the entire years output in 2008, go to make up losses of over-greedy robber barons (finance industry in this case). The interest on that and previous bailouts makes up about 40-45% of our annual economic output, now.
Sins started in the Reagan era who offered "easy money" gave an unreasonable high growth rate to everyone -- and high expectations -- that are only satisfied by continuing to sacrifice Americans and our freedoms -- we have to wage wars to guarantee us cheap oil, we have to support a war-time military budget during times when we should be at peace -- and to maintain the illusion of a thriving economy, we have to displace American workers with foreign workers via job export and importing workers under various programs like the H1-B visa program.
IP piracy is a result of Americans not having sufficient income to afford the high prices corporations must charge to maintain the il
Three points:
1. Opposition to immigration is NOT necessarily due to xenophobia. Other issues like crowding, environment, water...are why I oppose it.
2..If the H1-B crowd is so valuable, why are their governments not trying to keep them home? Perhaps it is to send them here to learn our ways and send $$ home?
3. Do we have a right to brain-drain all those countries because our plutocracy doesn't favor an educated electorate?
We need to kill the "Nation of Immigrants" myth - what nation wasn't until overpopulation turned it into an eco-disaster and people had to leave? So let us stop accusing those who disagree with immigration of being xenophobic - environmental issues do not respond differently to different ethnicities.
I won't argue that replacing a domestic worker with a foreign one could reasonably be considered to be stealing jobs from Americans. My only point was that the mere act of companies choosing to hire foreign workers instead of domestic ones reasonably be construed as stealing anything from the domestic workers since the latter do not possess them yet I likened it to the notion of piracy, because some conglomerates like to argue that pirates are stealing from the publishers by depriving them of income they otherwise could have had, which of course, is a completely ludicrous concept of stealing.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Also why does everyone have to be a programmer ? Why not a DBA professional ? There are many great tech jobs worldwide that need a position filled. Only problem is that there are not that many knowledgeable people available. In the end if you want to be a programmer, why not learn a language that is in huge demand or is so obscure that very few know it. Cobol for example ?
Actually, if I took any of those recent job offers I got from US corporations, I would move to the US with my wife and 3 kids. So the argument that money is sent abroad wouldn't be viable. Additionally, we all live in a global market. If people from Europe can move to work in USA, why can't Americans move to Europe or Asia for a suitable job. I can understand that you don't want to move. I on the other hand like to see and live in new places worldwide.
It's been a while since I've seen a consceintious study.
The last one I saw examined the allegedly "best of the
best of the best", those H-1Bs being sponsored
for a green card. It turned out that their compensation was 1.0001 times (100.01% of) the local market median salary for the general occupational category. This is interesting because if they really were great, they should be getting 150% or 200% or 400% of the median. (And, yes, the gov't figures are very dissatisfying, very vague aggregates. They should be reporting it by percentiles or giving the average, median, standard deviation, skewness and kurtosis.)
What is the average H1-B wage?
What is the average US citizen STEM Worker salary?
Are either of these relevant?
What is the average US citizen vs. H-1B salary and total compensation package (including retirement benefits) for software product developers? What is the average US citizen vs. H-1B salary and total compensation package... for bodies shopped (programming services, bidness data processors, CRM which many believe should be expanded to CRiMinal activity...)? How do those compare with developers of software products used in science and engineering? (Does a bean counter require a higher or lower skill level than the guy designing a new sky-scraper, high-speed train, automobile, or that robotic surgery system?... or is it the same level but just different?)
Suffice it to say there is plenty of room in the H-1B visa program for under-paying, as Tata VP Vandrevala confessed, by 25%-35%, for hiring cheap young foreign labor with flexible ethics when able and willing US job applicants exist, and for age discrimination.
...
Also consider why it is that the primary process almost always guarantees the worst candidates reach the general election instead of the best.
Sorry, the USA doesn't have "classes". Even under the recent, increasingly corrupt executive regimes and congresses and judiciaries, we have a lot more economic and "social" mobility than the old class and feudal and caste systems.
...
And if the job ads are placed where the experienced native citizen worker won't see them, if the immigration lawyers fabricate pretexts to declare him "unqualified" to even USE the kinds of software development tools he has actually CREATED, he remains unemployed longer, and then many agencies refuse to even consider him regardless of re-tooling, university classes he has taken or taught in the mean-time, etc.
...
Of course, the same applies as for the entry-level worker as well; if the employer jumps straight from candidates living within 2 miles to the cheap, young, pliant foreign labor with flexible ethics, refuses to fly experienced US candidates in for interviews, refuses to relocate able and willing US candidates, refuses normal training investment, then any local down-turn strands able and willing talent, and any period of unemployment becomes essentially permanent.
If the job ads do not contain e-mail addresses and desk and cellular telephone numbers of the hiring managers, but instead of the corrupt immigration attorneys, the US economy simply slides down the tubes.
Why, you ask, do I point out that cross-border bodyshopping is, in part, aimed at labor with flexible ethics, those who do not have the US cultural background where cheating on exams is punished rather than condoned, where violating the rights of others is not an acceptable "business plan"? Because that's exactly what we've seen develop. Can't find US candidates willing to do evil things? Bring in someone from outside. Keep the privacy violations expanding.
...
The US State Department tells us that over 110K H-1B visas are issued each year through consular offices, not 58,200, not 65K, not 85K. 117K were issued in FY2010, an early estimate has it at nearly 130K for FY2011 (though the docs I usually rely on for these figures won't come out until next May or June)... with no changes in the existing loop-holes.
US citizens earned 48,542 C&IS degrees (as the US Dept. of Education calls them) in academic year (AY) 2009-2010, 310,586 STEM degrees, and 2,354,678 total.
From AY1969-1970 through AY2009-2010, US citizens have earned over 9 million STEM degrees, and since then, nearly 12 million capable US citizen STEM workers have been added to the talent pool (based on figures from both DoEd and NSF).
Several studies have shown that only about a third of new US citizen STEM workers with degrees have been employed in STEM work. Unemployment rates in the USA over the last 20 years for STEM occupations have been running 2-3 times their full employment levels (source: BLS).
Also looking at BLS employment/population ratios, the USA now have a jobs dearth of about 30 millions...
That sounds like a lot of minds and a lot of knowledge and a lot of skills going to waste, and a lot of economic destruction.
(oops. Time to stop discussing and back to data retrieval; the new BLS report is out!)
So, the H1-B worker, by your calculation, lives of donuts he steals in the break room and sleeps on a park bench?
*fweeeet!*
Reductio ad absurdum, five-yard penalty!
What he is saying is actually rather common, though definitely not to the 'sleeps on a park bench' level.
It is very common for immigrants (legal or illegal) to spend only on what is necessary, and send every spare penny back home to family. After a few years, a sum is saved up which would be considered moderate here (say, saving off $50-$75k in aggregate from a middle-class job). After a few years, the immigrant returns to his/her country of origin, and either lives off the saved money for life, or uses it to start a business. The cost-of-living differential is high enough to return home a fairly prosperous person, and none of that money does anything in the local economy.
Renting a house? No problem - In an H1-B holder's shoes, I can rent a cheap 2-bd apartment with four of my friends, bunk two to a room, and pay a mere $200/month for that. Buy a car? No problem - a cheap-but running POS off of Craigslist cost what, $1000 at the most? Groceries? A minimal expense if you know where to shop, and don't get too picky on what you're eating. Given those low expenses, in three years as a DBA @ a (way low for the job!) wage of $80k here in the Pacific Northwest, I could eke out a semi-comfy cheap-assed living, and send home at least $100k to use for when I get back to my family. After all, it's no problem to live like a pauper in some strange land, especially when I know that in just a couple of years I will live like a deity in my own home neighborhood.
If they are willing to do it, why not, and why not you. Do it for 3-4 years, have a nest egg, and use it to buy a house, or return to school. An employee occasionally has to sacrifice lifestyle to have something for the future.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
The reason you're paid on-par is because American wages have dropped a massive amount in the past few decades. It's a plan that's been at work for decades. We were warned about it but failed to listen.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/16/us/the-1992-campaign-transcript-of-2d-tv-debate-between-bush-clinton-and-perot.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
Time to stop being American and move to one of those countries where the cost of living is low
"To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young -- let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature work force -- pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care -- that's the most expensive single element in making a car -- have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
"So we -- if the people send me to Washington the first thing I'll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it's a two-way street. One last part here -- I decided i was dumb and didn't understand it so I called the Who's Who of the folks who've been around it and I said, "Why won't everybody go South?" They say, "It'd be disruptive." I said, "For how long?" I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, "well, how does it stop being disruptive?" And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it's leveled again. But in the meantime, you've wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We've got to cut it out."
So yeah, it's great for people who come from other countries to work, but it came at the expense of the American people who used to be able to afford vacations, health care, and college but now no longer can.
So... your butthurt over the mere implication of racism justifies your complete dismissal of his other points? You say he called you a racist, and therefore you're so offended you're going to act in a way indistinguishable from blatant racism?
Yeah, OK, Mr. Klansman. I totally believe that.
To say that businesses and the government are "colluding" to depress wages is akin to saying that people who shop at Walmart conspire to put Bloomingdale's out of business. Wage depression is a side effect, not the goal.