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Silicon Valley Presses Obama, Congress On Immigration Reform
walterbyrd sends this excerpt from the LA Times:
"In a rare show of unity, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer were among a coalition of high-profile executives and venture capitalists to send a letter on Thursday to President Obama and congressional leaders pressing for a fix to restrictive immigration laws by year's end. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors and executives are also planning a virtual "march" on Washington in April. 'Because our current immigration system is outdated and inefficient, many high-skilled immigrants who want to stay in America are forced to leave because they are unable to obtain permanent visas,' the letter says. 'Some do not bother to come in the first place.'"
The letter also offers these suggestions: "We believe that numerical levels and categories for high-skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant visas should be responsive to market needs and, where appropriate, include mechanisms to fluctuate based on objective standards. In addition, spouses and children should not be counted against the cap of high-skilled immigrant visas. There should not be a marriage or family penalty."
IT workers not realizing they control the means of production
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guSdjsctrUQ&feature=player_detailpage#t=2458s
If they didn't refuse to hire anyone over 40, they wouldn't have a problem...
...the US has a problem with high levels of employment.
Why can't these firms set up educational establishments to train US citizens to the skill levels they need? Or have apprenticeships? Or....
Actually I think it seems a cynical way to keep labour costs down, so perhaps companies ought to be allowed to hire from overseas providing they demonstrate they're paying that worker 25% more than a US citizen would earn in the same role.
I'm not a US citizen, but I think this, like offshoring is a way of trying to force labour costs down. Paradoxically I think you want labour costs up, as increasing the affluence of the lower/middle classes creates a larger market for your goods.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"We believe that numerical levels and categories for high-skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant visas should be responsive to market needs and, where appropriate, include mechanisms to fluctuate based on objective standards. In addition, spouses and children should not be counted against the cap of high-skilled immigrant visas. There should not be a marriage or family penalty."
We should improve the education system and encourage our fine American youth to make use of it rather than importing immigrants from abroad. Why is the knee jerk reaction from these greedy corporate bastards always to import talent or export jobs rather than fix the what's wrong at home?
Marissa Mayer needs immigration reform, because she won't let them work from their home.
I'm here all night.
The brain drain is hurting the nation that the educated immigrant left behind (e.g. that immigrant is not filling positions nor creating opportunities in their homeland).
The immigrant is taking opportunities from educated Americans and likely reducing the potential wages of that educated American.
...hasn't learned the lessons that manufacturers and call center managers have learned?
That seems odd.
You never know...
The current state is a really bad deal. The smart ones realize this and stay away (well, that and the US looking more and more like a fundamentalist state...). Hence the quality of foreign workers drops and they cannot be used to depress the wages of the US workers so easily anymore, which of course is bad for corporate US, but good for US citizens looking for a job.
Just look at who complains and the story becomes pretty clear.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
How about hiring some americans at competitive wages, instead of indentured servants?
As I said before: those foreigners coming to the USA are more than happy to work for half your wage, which is 5 times their usual national wage.
Furthermore, when you see "they're not allowed to switch jobs", they see "we have job security".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
immigrant minority citizen computer scientist here.
this whole thing is a bullshit ploy to provide high tech companies with skilled labor for less money along with a nice tax write off for the taxes that they don't pay anyways. between facebook, google, and apple they robbed california blind on the balance sheets. i say if they start paying taxes like the rest of us, they should be able to import whatever the fuck they want.
im tired of how stpid/lazy/fat americans have become. they are not inherently less intelligent. they are just drowning in media and eating fast food with no access to education. only children of the rich and immigrants have access to education in the usa.
people who go to school in the usa think that christopher columbus discovered the americas (lol). they think that edison invented the lightbulb (fucking thief). they think that lincoln faught the civil war to free the slaves (he apologized for it, and as an attorney represented slave owners). they think god gave israel to zionist colonizers (the rothchilds are better propagandists than hitler). they think terrorists hate america because of freedom (not even touching this one).
fuck the h1b visa. let americans learn to read. give them maps. take away their burgers. turn of their televisions. let them work respectable jobs. dont let them use calculators until after they graduate. most importantly, fuck silicon valley. the internet means anyone from anywhere can do anything. if zuckerburg cant find noobs in the bay area, he can hire from the rest of the usa so facebook can continue to peddle their crap.
Globalisation is something we don't all get to benefit from. It about letting immigrants, generally from poor countries, come to a western country and probably working for poor wages. He'll be ok with that because we have clear water and hide our poverty away better, right?
But we still get web sites, films, games, etc divided up into regions. Why can't I take advantage of globalisation and buy games from anywhere? Why is it harder for an American to go to Hong Kong and take a job where he may be needed more?
Maybe if they'd push for the negotiation of free movement treaties and provide content on a global basis then people would be happier to support them. Instead, I can't help but feel all they really care about is driving down costs.
" include mechanisms to fluctuate based on objective standards."
How about objective *tests* for these positions that supposedly there are no competent citizens available to perform?
If no citizens can pass the test, and H1B candidates can, fine, let the H1B candidate win.
The bogus thing is, the H1Bs hired by pimp contract agencies aren't the best available, they're just the whores that the pimp with the employment contract happens to own, and indentured servants who you can kick out of the country if they displease you make better whores than citizens with the right to be here.
Of course it will be a virtual march for them:
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, investors and executives are also planning a virtual "march" on Washington in April.
They will be underpaying highly skilled immigrants to march for them.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
In the last three months, our company has hired THREE H1B employees, one being a programmer. They had to post the jobs, so I got to see the salary ranges.
'Less restrictive' is code for 'lower paid'. There are plenty of out-of-work US citizens that could have done these jobs, but if they hire H1B, they can pay less and keep them longer because of the sponsorship requirement. I was able to review resumes for one position, and there were definitely capable US citizens to do these.
I'm not against hiring talented, smart, folks. I'm not even against companies paying less and driving down wages if it makes products cheaper.
I am against lying about why they are doing it. Just be honest, and admit Mr. Zuckerberg that you just want to hire people you can pay less money.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
replacement?
This is also pushing Americans away from the tech field. Which will, eventually, cost the US it's technological edge.
If you want Americans to be attracted to engineering jobs, provide jobs for them.
Really, can you provide some examples of how you "take more immigrants" and i don't mean "temporary" H1B's but real immigration with full citizenship.
As a Canadian on a H1B i find the system incredibly unfair. The corp "owns" my ability to enter the US. If they don't sponsor my GC i get to go home. Unlike in Canada where the relationship is between the individual and the government.
I think that many Americans dont understand the immigration system as they have never had to deal with it, just as when i lived in Canada i had no clue how canadian immigration worked.
By having the corps control your entry, well you can see the problems.
or from her home.
Look. I work in a major US tech company and am involved with hiring from a technical level, and I can tell you first hand that the quantity of quality people in North America IS lacking. Out of all of the employees you hire, maybe 1 of the 10 is the rockstar you need for your project... the rest are OK, sure, but when you are working under tight timelines and need creative solutions on a global stage, you don't need a bunch of churned-out code monkeys, you NEED those rock stars.
This is NOT about cheap labor. Do you think it is cheap to pay a lawyer to handle the visa process (about 10K minimum), to handle the annual renewal (about 5K minimum), to pay global relocation expenses (another 10K)? On top of this, the wages and benefits we're talking about here in Silicon Valley are some of the highest in the country. We're not bringing people over from India and paying them 40K / year to work on Facebook - it is just not happening, it is a myth.
There are two problems we have here
- We are not getting enough kids into STEM at an early age. Only kids who are really into STEM in middle and high school are the ones who go onto be the rock stars this country needs to compete. Someone who goes to university just to get a job in CS that pays well on graduation, and does not have a PASSION for technology, is not going to be this rock star.
- The US, like most countries in the OECD, has a declining birth rate. The US is one of the only remaining countries in the first world that still has replacement population birth levels, but very soon (maybe end of 2014), it won't anymore. Combine declining birth rates with accelerating boomers retiring and you have a very poor economic picture. WE NEED more skilled immigrants just to maintain the economy. Otherwise, you are going to have a very very scary picture developing in the next couple of decades.
>> Actually nothing in Article 1 section 8 states that Congress has the right to prevent anybody from moving in and out of States.
Actually it is the right of any sovereign country to prevent anybody (except its citizens) from entering the country. They aren't even obliged to explain the reason. It's like the right to prevent anyone from entering the house.
for a small sliver of the population. That's why these immigration programs are so great for companies. There's a small group of people that are fully productive working 60 hours a week. Thanks to the H1B program you're competing head on with all of them at once.
I tell ya, what we IT people need is a Super Pac. If everyone that touched a computer got together and pitched in $5 bucks a month in we'd at least be able to buy some House reps, maybe even a senator. If that's how the game works, I say we start playing.
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If globalisation is so great then why can't we have region free digital goods
Decades-long exclusive territorial distribution contracts agreed to before home broadband became affordable make that difficult. So do exchange rate discrepancies caused by historic lack of an export sector in a country's economy. So does a dearth of local advertisers in some regions.
really it's not. I don't understand why people get confused and bemused when they see Capitalism as it's always been doing what it always has.
Australia OTOH, a largely socialist country, just voted a guy in on a platform of job protection.
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in a place with lots of H1Bs. They're code monkeys and entry level sys admins. We're not importing their physicists and mathematicians. India is smart enough to take care of those guys and see that they don't leave. We're bringing in guys at the entry level. If you can read, write and type I can have you doing it in 3 months. Sure, I can do it with an H1B in half that, but that's because they'll work 80 hours a week until they get the job down.
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Then why hasn't a Thirteenth Amendment lawsuit been filed over the indentured servitude-like aspects of the H-1B program?
it's not designed to reward underachievers. It pulls funding from failing schools for God's sakes (you lose funding if you're kids don't pass the tests). It's goal is pretty obvious: gut the school system so education can be privatized for profit.
There was just a really nice article on why the US Healthcare system is so bleeding expensive and the conclusion of an extensive multi-year study was: because it can be. My buddy drove a school bus until they privatized that and cut his wages. Did the district save money? Nope, not after 3 years. They're just so short on cash they wanted to sell their bus fleet so they could operate another year, and hope the voters would take a 1% tax raise to pay for schools (they didn't). Now the company that has the contract is jacking up prices because they know the district can't afford to buy back their fleet and make it public again.
But yeah, it's a nice side effect that it makes a weak, dumb populace.
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What they are doing is importing cheap skilled labor willing to work for below market rates. They are trying to cheat the free market of supply and demand within the United States. The is no shortage of people able to do the job. There is a shortage of people willing to work at half the market rate in a slave type manner.
I will agree that the laws are outdated. Congress shouldn't be limiting by artificial numbers but rather by the going market rate of employees. Lets start at 25% over the market rate and have it exponentially increase from there.
We should start a web sites for tech workers looking for work and their qualifications and then the companies have to prove why there are not hiring these Americans. They should be forced to show why they let go of past employees and how they could not perform the task that some imported worker could.
I would in fact favor laws that forced companies to hire and spend money proportionately from all the countries in which they derive their income. If Facebook makes 90 million a year from France then it should be obligated to spend at least half of that in that country and have a proportionate number of workers (total salary) not only from that country but actually in that country.
you think labor laws are enforced. IBM got caught and nothing happened. What? You thought that 30 years of tax cuts would have no consequences? None of the labor regulators are funded. They exist on paper only. There's no money to hire anyone. In your zeal to cut bureaucrats, red tape and waste you've only succeeded in making the world a worse place. Those bureaucrats did good work, the red tape held back a tsunami of evil business practices and there never was that much waste to begin with when the entire budget is looked at. Shit, you waste more on sodas and coffee in a year than the gov't does.
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Really, can you provide some examples of how you "take more immigrants" and i don't mean "temporary" H1B's but real immigration with full citizenship.
For example, the US takes in more immigrants per thousand people than the EU countries, except for Luxembourg, Spain, and Italy. During the 90's, the immigration rate was considerably higher and the US probably outmatched any other developed world country.
It looks to me like most of the slow down, while occurring in the restrictive 9/11 era, also was due to the economic and political weakness of the largest states, particular California, Illinois, and New York. For example, the fraction of California's population that was foreign born jumped by 4.5% between 1990 and 2000 and increased a further 1% between 2000 and 2010. Meanwhile, its increase in population dropped from 14% increase between 1990 and 2000 to 10% between 2000 and 2010. That probably is most of the decline in immigration for the US just in that state. There are some smaller states that show similar trends of high immigration in 1990-2000, but not in 2000-2010. The rest of the big states (for example, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio) don't show that.
reform higher EDU / more trades based schools / apprenticeships?
Right now we have lots college who are turning out people who have skills gaps do the over load of theory that can be over kill for most jobs.
The Trades / techs schools get passed over even when at some of them you can learn more in 2 years then you do at a 4 year school.
Also in tech there are lot's things where you need to work hands on to learn and that is where a Apprenticeship system can work good.
Some of the H1B's only have paper skills / are good at passing tests.
They exist for the sole purpose of keeping the slave trade alive. The rich countries have just moved the plantation offshore, and business is better than ever. Contrary to all the propaganda we see and hear on the TV, we have been living in a post scarcity world for over 70 years. We can transport anything anytime anywhere, and if not for the paperwork, it can be done in less than 24 hours. Only a very class group of people actually benefit from the present system. It's long past time to tear it down and allow people to move to 'where the food is'. Nations are prisons, quite literally for some.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"Yes, those reforms need to be passed. It's getting harder and harder to find highly skilled professionals willing to work for 20K/year.
All American IT workers payed between 60K-120K are standing in the way for companies to be competitive in the global market.
Let MBA's make the rules. Unemployment will be history and everybody happily will earn $5/hr."
20k/year? are you serious. Here in New York in Brooklyn and Queens the apartment rentals cost between $18-$27k/year without utilities. Obamacare(will fail) which is not even implemented fully yet, because the insurance companies, doctors, and states are confused how to go about it. If successful this will force individuals to purchase regular healthcare insurance and it will go up with less treatments available. I was paying 2 years ago $650Month/$7800Year which I got rid of. Expenses are going up while salaries are stagnant. So 20k a year? I don't think so.
Whichever side of the issue you stand on, it's worth noting that arguably the most prominent signatories to this letter and/or the companies they represent - Intel and Google - came under fire for allegedly secretly conspiring together to block worker mobility ("The no-hire paper trail Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt didn't want you to see"), so a cynic might suggest perhaps they're not quite as concerned with labor's free-and-natural-flow when it doesn't suit their needs. Also, Ireland seems to be finding that importing tech labor isn't quite the rising-tide-that-lifts-all-boats that it was cracked up to be ("Ireland too scared to tax big tech, Let the poor eat potatos"), "Google paid only £5.6m tax despite £10bn turnover").
Unions only work when everyone is in one place and you can organize them. What we need is something more like the AARP but for tech workers. Focus on specific goals, send out political communications so you know when to bombard your reps, etc, etc. It's not a union because you're not negotiating, your lobbying.
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When did the bosses acquire this obsessive delusion that someone coming from abroad must be a superior worker to a home-grown one?
It's not complicated. The workers are here on visas. They can be sent back on a whim. This gives the employer enormous leverage to make the H1B employee work harder. Also it lets them bring in a lot of extra workers, increasing supply and lowering demand. That drives down wages by $10k - $20k (USD, convert to your own currency)
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Because the laws regarding H1-Bs are quite fair to all involved, and certainly constitutional. The real problems with underpaid H-Bs come from companies breaking existing law. It's already illegal to pay your H1-Bs less then locals (but many companies just cheat). It's already fairly straightforward for someone on an H1-B to changes jobs (but many companies just lie to young employees about this).
There's no constitutional problem here, because the existing laws, as written, are fine. It's the real-world consequences of the laws, not the laws as written, that are the problem. What we need are more quite ordinary class action lawsuits against companies illegally underpaying H1-B workers.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If you have two people working 60 hours you need to replace the manager.
Your sovereignty over your factory is limited by the laws set by the government. Whether you like this or not.
Coming from the greedballs like Melissa Mayer, Bill Gates, John Chambers and the rest of that crowd who PROFIT by encouraging this race to the bottom. It's disgusting, and a blatant betrayal of the American worker.
Here are some references that *accurately* put the lie to the claims made by these lying SOBs. Does that sound harsh? It's meant to. These so-called "American leaders" are betraying the very workers who helped them make their unreal wealth. They need to be called out.
http://www.epi.org/publication/bp356-foreign-students-best-brightest-immigration-policy/
http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc_23_2/tsc_23_2_nelson_printer.shtml
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/silicon-valley-h1b-visas-hurt-tech-workers
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/07/report-for-first-time-in-decades-us-is-bleeding-high-skilled-immigrants/
So now you've got a choice. Ship cheaper workers in (the lesser evil), or ship jobs overseas, and never punish corporations for doing so. Happy unregulated market. Is there nothing you can't do? Of course, you voted for it in your 20s, when you weren't going to be the person with obsolete skills that got laid off, before you had a spouse and kids. Before you got sick and got the hospital bill that bankrupted you. Before you were conned into buying an overpriced house because you actually were stupid enough to believe the value would keep going up, forever. Before you decided that the benevolent Wall Street geniuses would make stock markets go up forever, and never down. Before you were bought the oil company line that gasoline would always be cheap and plentiful. Before you realized that companies wrote contracts that allowed them to change the terms of your retirement health care at will. Before if finally soaked in that laws are purchased for corporations, not voted in for the benefit of the citizenry. Before it dawned on you, finally, that you might not be the big winner in the casino of capitalism.
You, who voted for Reagan. For Bush, and Bush again. You voted for it. You got it.
So, enjoy the increasingly unregulated, conservative, free market capitalism you ranted about in your 20s as it comes back to bite you ever so slowly and painfully in the ass.
I will now sit back and wait for the legions of morons who will tell me this is all the fault of over-regulation, liberals, muslims, taxes and evil spirits. We've all heard it all before. Have at it.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Clearly the US has a problem with overpaying it's executive staff and numerous studies have shown that US based executives are radically overpaid.
We need immigration reform to allow immigration for reasonably paid executives from abroad who don't run amok and seek to undercut immigration for their staff so they can pay themselves 200x the global average for executives.
Belgium, France and Norway appear to be good countries to relax restrictions for:
http://www.verisi.com/resources/us-ceo-compensation.htm
They said "We believe that numerical levels and categories for high-skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant visas should be responsive to market needs"
IMO, laws should serve the general interest of citizens, not market needs.
We do know the other guy is in charge now, right? Two elections ago? And we also know that free-market conservatives are generally against immigration? But don't let that stop you from spewing hatred against people who don't share your political views.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
While I sympathize with those forced to leave, I am one of those "experienced" software engineers who feel they have been "pushed out" of the I.T. job market due to the influx of foreign talent. We need to take care of our own first, but the American corporate culture persists in not following through with that for a variety of reasons (I am sure greed is among them). Before anyone jumps on me and accuses of me of being solely responsible for my situation by not keeping up technologically-speaking, have a gander at my LinkedIn page: http://www.linkedin.com/in/caryscofield . I'd be interested to know if anyone really thinks my perception of the overall situation (not just my own) is misguided and wrong, and, if so, why.
be a shame if facts came along and did somethin' too it. You're just repeating the old "There's lots of waste to cut" bullsh@t we've been hearing for 30 years. Also, you managed to make (without irony) an argument Fred Pohl made in the Space Merchants:
"Better a thousand innocent men punished than one guilty man go free".
But anyway back to the meat of the matter, which is increased spending. Fundamentally the problem is that the rich can't spend enough to keep our civilization going, and when they do spend it's on big monuments to their greatness that don't really get us anywhere (think more corporate jets than Sphinxes, it is the year 2013 after all). Given the chance (and they got it) the rich will cut your share of the pie so they can have more themselves. Gov't counteracts / fixes that. It's the only thing that can, since it's the only thing with enough power to say *FU* to a Rockefeller. Individuals can't do that. They get blackballed. Which is why the term "blackballed' exists (and why my spell checker doesn't see it as a misspelled word).
And evidently I'm not the only one that thinks $3.8T isn't enough to fund a labor department, since WE ALREADY CUT THE DAMN THING, JUST LIKE I SAID IN MY POST ABOVE. Sorry, getting tired of this conservative Astroturfin' nonsense. At least, I hope you're an Astroturfer or at least a troll. Nobody should believe the stuff you wrote honestly and without pay.
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It only makes sense - corporations have found out that while outsourcing to the developing world results in cheap labor that's easy to abuse, there are all kinds of nasty side effects. Instead of going to all those poor countries full of brown people, why not *bring the slaves to the US*? That way, you can still pay them next to nothing and abuse them as much as you want, but you don't have to deal with flying to some remote part of the world! You can keep them in line by danging their visas just out of reach. That way you can have a nice breakfast, abuse your slaves all day, and get in a nice round of golf! And all it costs is some really minor payments to congresspeople. It's win/woin, really. Well, except for the slaves. But who cares about them? It's their fault for being born poor and in the wrong country.