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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."
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?
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."
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'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
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.
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
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?
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?
I have worked in the software industry since 1984. Not once did I meet an H1-B who was MS, PhD, or other top talent. Every single one of them has been ordinary software engineering jobs. I have witnessed how companies make fake jobs ads that cater to the specific person, and HR admitting they automatically pay H1Bs $10k less because they can...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?