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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 'Because our current immigration system is outdated and inefficient, many high-skilled immigrants who want to stay in America are forced to leave because they are unable to obtain permanent visas,' the letter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
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.
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Karma: Chameleon
The immigrant is taking opportunities from educated Americans
Nonsense. This is like those idiots who say things like, "You stole my job!" No, he/she didn't; you didn't have the job to begin with, or someone in charge willingly decided to give your job to someone else. Whatever the case, you're not entitled to a job.
These people also aren't entitled to come to my country.
"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?
Because training workers from scratch to do the job costs MONEY. Rumor has it, way the hell back when, Steve Jobs hired people with zero coding experience who had the 'proper hacker mindset' and taught them inhouse, then worked them 80+ hours a week cranking out Apple II software. Reputedly, it took a couple years for Apple to recoup their investment on training them.
Quickest way to destroy a country? Keep the people ignorant and uneducated. Implement programs like 'No Child Left Behind' designed to reward the underachievers and make everybody 'feel better about themselves' rather than teach them the skills they need to survive in today's society. Defund education to the point where nobody learns anything anyway, and jack up the cost of college to the point where only the richest 5% can afford it, even though most colleges in the US these days tend to be run as 'profit centers' rather than as institutes of learning. Politicize the few remaining 'real' universities to the point where students either obey the Party Line or get kicked off campus and handed a bill for their 'education'. Rig the student loan system so that borrowing to finance an education incurs a lifelong debt to be paid,
Trade schools? Why bother with those when the people learning those trades will be replaced by robots in a few years anyway? I did a stint of a couple years learning 'high tech electronics that would employ me for a lifetime' back in the 70's. The 'career ' I trained for was obsolete in 10 years. NOBODY repairs tvs anymore, they toss them and buy a new one. You can't repair one anyway, you can't find the ICs on the open market for less than the cost of a new set.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
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.
Trying to fight globalization on the whole is ineffective, but fighting the demand for more H1B visas with factual data isn't. Recent studies show that companies have been lying about their inability to find domestic talent AND about how much they pay their H1B visa employees. The long and short of it is, the experts exist within the US but the companies want to save money on H1B visas, so they lie to congress, all the while, claiming we need more tech-savvy Americans. When we produce the appropriately educated Americans, the companies won't hire them because they are too expensive compared to their H1B shortcut. All this fight is doing is creating over-educated Americans who will have lots of education debt and no jobs.
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.
But hey, we've figured out where the shift key is.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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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I read somewhere that Mayer's salary package for Yahoo works out at $117 million over her five year contract. Now, if saving money is important, and companies aim to get skills from anywhere in the world, then why don't they get rid of Mayer and hire an Indian or Chinese CEO? Pay them, say, $5 mil a year. There would be hundreds of possible candidates willing to work like dogs for that sort of money.
But this never happens for the upper echelon of management. CEOs (wherever they're from) are paid the same ridiculous sums, even if they tank the company in the process (can Yahoo afford to dish out $117 million to one person? Don't think so).
So essentially the Zucks, Mayers and other bosses make sure their sky-high pay packets are protected. Yet if they really believed in the 'free market' they'd be happy to see their job go to someone paid less. Of course they'll tell us that their skills are irreplaceable and therefore they deserve that sort of money. Then in the next breath they'll say they can't get certain skilled engineers so therefore... they need to buy in cheap ones from abroad implying the skilled engineers are replaceable cogs in their cash-making behemoth.
Sure there's issues with education in most countries, but put yourself in the position of a teenager thinking of going into this sort of business. They know if they go to MIT or Stanford they'll be okay. However if they graduate from a normal college they'll either be working for peanuts, replaced by an immigrant or worked much harder than their peers in similar professional roles for less money. Meanwhile respect for their job will be pretty low, management will see them as mere 'code monkeys' & the popular culture is likely to portray them as comedy geeks. Being a 'rock star' in the computer world is about as easy and likely as being an actual rock star. Is it any wonder so many of the youngsters don't give a shit?
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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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?
Because training workers from scratch to do the job costs MONEY.
Who said about "training from scratch"? Schools an universities should do much of the training. And if someone is going to be good at something it will have been a hobby too. I am a senior professional engineer and was model engineering from about the age of 8. My son was writing games programs from about that age too and is now an IT consultant.
Once intelligent people have the basics of a subject it does not take them long to adapt to a particular applications.
But bosses tend to look for exact matching previous experience. My wife sat on an interview panel for a book-keeper and favoured the obviously most intelligent candidate. But the company used Sage book-keeping software, and the bright candidate had previously used Quickbooks, not Sage, so the boss chose a duller candidate just because they had used Sage before.
It turned out that the woman who got the job was absolutely f#@king useless . She just sat and moaned all day and had to be shown everything and even then could not do it (including using Sage). The boss pushed her out after 3 months, but no doubt, and this is the point, she would now be able to say that she had "experience" of Sage in two jobs - at her next interview with the next stupid boss who believes experience = capability.
My wife's theory is that the boss (like many) was frightened/envious of employing someone more intelligent than himself.
But hey, who wants to study economics anyway? I am sure they are all full of shit, like the geologists or the biologists.
The problem is that many parts of economy is more like meteorology combined with (group) psychology, since there's so many butterfly wings flapping and crazy hordes of investors, customers and suppliers trying to outsmart each other and because almost everything in economics happens by a decision, either it's to buy, sell, produce, decommission, hire, lay off, in-house, outsource, integrate, specialize and choices of technology, markets, distribution channels, promotion and so on. It is very much unlike geology/biology where most things happen by the laws of nature and the process isn't influenced by geologists/biologists at all. Throw in a ton of positive/negative feedback loops and I assure you nobody really "understands" the macro economy. And yes, I know enough about it to know how much I don't know.
Don't get me wrong, certain parts of economics is very well understood like accounting, also known as "bean counting" but unlike the engineers who want to make regardless of cost and the sales people who want to sell regardless of price it's rather important to the business whether it turns a profit or a loss. But I think most here who's ever been forced to make or read a business case knows that unless there's some explicit existing costs that are replaced by a fairly certain new development/maintenance cost you are starting to try predicting the future, much like the entire stock market. You want to be there when the flock stampedes to smart phones and tablets, but not when they all stampede away from SUVs (in real life, I'd probably prefer the opposite), but I don't think you'll find the answer in an economics textbook.
Anyway, to actually say something useful on social economics vs business economics, in business those who aren't your customers aren't your problem. In social economics, unless people choose to emigrate (which no significant amount of the population ever do due to friends, family, homestead, culture, language and so on except under the most grave circumstances) you can only shuffle them around in various categories such as employed, job seekers, students, invalids, black labor, criminals, prisoners, alcoholics, junkies etc. that all have costs to society. The ROI of getting a job seeker into a job is thus much greater than the tax income of the job, it is also avoiding all the other costs. But when your credit limit is maxed out like Greece, well you don't got any money to spend at anything no matter the ROI.
That is actually a pretty well known fact from individual life as well, it's expensive to be poor because you can't afford to make the good long term investments. You're always skimping and saving to make it go around short term, while the people with disposable cash can take the opportunity to invest in something that'll last longer or be cheaper to maintain in the long run. Not to mention the people living ahead of their paycheck on credit card debt, the financing costs are huge for really very little benefit at all. But it's worse for the macro economy, because when they cut spending, they also cut income so really the only way not to get screwed is to not get that stuck in debt in the first place. But it's always tempting to take one step closer to the edge, only to find out it was one step too far.
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My understanding is that supposedly they do that. They advertise somewhere, rule out the locals, then hire the H1B.
Trouble is, there's no objective demonstration that the H1B can do anything local hires can't. Elsewhere, I suggest objective *tests*. At least give locals a real chance to compete, instead of having their applications thrown out in a bogus "we're pretending we're looking for local hires" kabuki dance.
But even if a company demonstrates that a H1B is more qualified, why should that put the company's needs for a worker ahead of the needs of everyone else who would like to use that immigration slot? Just more crony capitalism.
The immigration slot is a valuable asset. Any slots set aside for economic reasons should go to the highest bidder.
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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I seem to recall actually that the studies that said 40 hours were the magic number were actually for manual labor, and after that point you did start get errors...and injuries. Studies on desk work were around 30 or 35 hours of productivity. You could have it all in 35 hours, or you could get 35 hours spread over 60, but it all works out the same in the end.
So this culture of putting in more and more hours to prove that you're really dedicated or have a better work ethic than everyone else is ridiculously toxic. For one, it hurts business, because fried employees are not particularly productive employees anyway. Two, it hurts employees, because the ones that do play that game are sacrificing their lives to do so. And three, it keeps qualified, talented people from moving up the ladder. Not every employee is single, and free of dependents. If someone is capable of doing the job, but isn't spending an extra twenty hours a week at the office playing solitaire to prove their "dedication", that should be more reason to give them the job, not less.
It's not quite that simple, but it is roughly approximated by a parabola. After about 30 hours, you get rapidly diminishing returns from the extra hours. So the next 10 hours (to 40) get you about 5 hours of actual work (35 total), and the next 20 hours (to 60) get you about 5 hours of work (40 total). And when you cross the threshold where your work hours begin to reduce your sleep below 8 hours per night, employees' cognitive abilities and immune function decline markedly, resulting in more sick days and less productivity than at a lower number of hours.
For very short periods—two weeks or less—you can get away with 80 hour work weeks if and only if the employee is really excited to be working on a particular project. But after about two or three weeks, biology gets in the way, and the employees crash and burn. And that can never work if it is driven by management. When an employee decides to spend extra time because they feel that it is for the good of everyone, you get that productivity boost. When management asks an employee to spend extra time, you don't get any significant productivity boost. Fun with psychology.
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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.
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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
Actually, schools and universities should focus on what they were originally intended for: developing the underlying skills that allow intelligent people to learn new things and adapt that basic knowledge to different situations.
When I was a teenager with a couple of identified talents, I spent most of my free time honing them at home and believed that apprenticeship-style "education" would be far better for me; I only resentfully took unrelated classes intended to make me a "well-rounded" student because the university I wanted to attend required them. It wasn't until I'd been there for a while that I realized that the wide variety of classes (sociology, philosophy, literature, psych, C programming, math, etc.) had been strengthening my mind's ability to make sense of new kinds of concepts by building on bits and pieces of seemingly-unrelated old subjects, and then to blend the old & new concepts together to tackle problems.
I also came to see much later on that all of the knowledge & abilities from my education let me view society's problems with scientific, historical, and a wide variety of personal perspectives rather than just my own experience/beliefs. If even half the population could do that, corrupt politicians & industries wouldn't be able to get away with a fraction as much, and we'd have some of our worst problems under much better control.
The above is why Western countries started making basic education compulsory and encouraged people to attend college: a good education will make someone more capable of making wise voting & personal decisions and a better citizen in general. Whether someone learned a trade or became an educated professional wasn't (and isn't) a fraction as important to their country's longevity as whether the population knew that they were stronger as a united force than all fighting for themselves or which voting decisions would most likely cause harm down the road.
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