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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."
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.
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
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".
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 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
Thank you, cyberspittle, for volunteering to have your salary equaled out with the world average in your field. Since I presume you're in the first world, this will mean about an 80% pay cut for you. Please report to your employer Monday and inform them of your noble sacrifice. And God Bless You, cyberspittle!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.