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 'Because our current immigration system is outdated and inefficient, many high-skilled immigrants who want to stay in America are forced to leave because they are unable to obtain permanent visas,' the letter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."

Comments

At the same time

[maroberts]

...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.

Re:At the same time

[nukenerd]

Loufoque wrote :-

Of course you need to search all over the world if you only want highly skilled people.

What bollocks.

I know highly skilled and qualified people (in the UK this is) who are cleaning offices for a living, while the politicians and businessmen are believing that such people can only be found abroad. In fact some of those office cleaners DID come from abroad under the delusion that they could get good jobs here and they are STILL overlooked by employers.

When did the bosses acquire this obsessive delusion that someone coming from abroad must be a superior worker to a home-grown one? Not in my experience anyway. How ironic it is that our UK universities are half-filled with overseas students - because UK teaching is held in high regard world-wide - and yet the bosses believe that people educated abroad must be better.

It is racial discrimination, although of the opposite sense to what is always assumed, but they get away with it.

Re:At the same time

[b4dc0d3r]

Sounds like tech companies should spread themselves out a little. If Silicon Valley needs piles of specialists, it needs people who are willing to move from anywhere - same country or different, visa or not.

Hiring specialists in the non-Valley would be a lot cheaper, you would find talent easier, and everyone would be happy. Let me summarize the business plan of a Silicon Valley company:

1) Mine the area talent as thoroughly as possible
2) Keep mining the same source
3) Repeat until Congress lets you hire barely qualified people from another country.

I can see a giant shift coming where the Valley is where the HQ sits, but you have projects centered in other large cities, which are largely autonomous. It doesn't work for smaller companies, but if the larger ones realized they are resource-starving their own ecosystem, it would come close to balancing out. Someday they will have to.

I have no family, and no reason not to fly out to the Valley and work for piles of money. I just do not want to be part of that culture 24 hours a day, at work and away. I would be fine with telecommuting, but as Yahoo found out it is easy to abuse that if not kept in check. And a just-barely-big-enough company doesn't want to split itself.

So it's not about talent - it's about willingness to relocate. And by concentrating in the same place, the industry giants are starving themselves while claiming location is a vital benefit they don't want to lose.

Make up your mind what's important - people or location - and stick with it. Tough choice, but at least let's frame this as a resource issue caused by choice of location. Then we can talk honestly about it and find a solution.

"Not enough talent" is an outright lie - one of omission. "Not enough talent willing to relocate" is the problem, and H1-B is seen as the solution. How long do you expect to be able to import resources before you give up and re-locate?

Re:At the same time

[tqk]

... It's no joke that tech companies have a problem finding people regardless of salary.

What a load of crap. I don't believe you. If you offer enough, people will jump ship to get it. You're obviously cheaping out, so of course you can't draw them out. Try shaving a hundred Gs off your CEO's multi-million dollar salary and spread that around among your line troop positions. That'll fix your HR problem overnight.

It astonishes me that greedy, thick headed morons like you are what we have to work for.

Re:At the same time

[Jane Q. Public]

"Of course you need to search all over the world if you only want highly skilled people."

According to a recent study mentioned in Mother Jones and elsewhere, H-1B workers are not even close to the "best and brightest" as these companies claim. In fact they probably don't hold up to American workers. All they are is cheap.

Re:ageism

[Anonymous Coward]

If they didn't refuse to hire anyone over 40, they wouldn't have a problem...

If people over 40 could put in the 60+ hour weeks needed to for US firms to stay competitive in the global market, instead of whining about needing to spend time with their families, then maybe they'd wouldn't lose out to younger people in hiring.

Re:ageism

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If people over 40 could put in the 60+ hour weeks needed to for US firms to stay competitive in the global market

If US companies *need* to force techies to put in the 60+ hour weeks to stay competitive, perhaps they're doing something wrong.

Re:I call bullshit...

[jamstar7]

"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.

I've seen the 'less restrictive laws' at work.

[johnlcallaway]

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.

Re:ageism

[Anonymous Coward]

If they didn't refuse to hire anyone over 40, they wouldn't have a problem...

Why should they hire anyone above 40? How many 40 plus athletes are there? How many hostesses or security guards/soldiers you know above 40? IT is just another industry and there is no reason why companies should not prefer younger cheaper employees. Perhaps you should look at jobs where experience _really_ matters, e.g., Medicine, Aviation, Academics etc.

Considering the crap quality of so much of today's software, maybe a little experience would be a good idea.

Re:Two issues with taking educated immigrants ...

[fruitbane]

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.

Re:ageism

[novium]

Except study after study has shown that a 60 work week produces about as much as a 40 hour work week. Productivity goes through the floor the longer the hours get. So there's nothing to gain. (With the exception of one-time, short-term periods of longer hours, but it's not sustainable after a week or two).

Re:Marissa Mayer

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

On No Child

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:ageism

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Why should they hire anyone above 40? How many 40 plus athletes are there?

Why should people over 60 teach at universities? Hire people under 30 for professor positions! Oh, wait, it's a different field, this is about brains, whereas programmers are about muscles and beauty, that's why you mentioned athletes and hostesses, right? I mean, if your argument were stupid, I'm sure you wouldn't be mentioning it...or not?

Re:Two issues with taking educated immigrants ...

[buybuydandavis]

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.

Letter Signers Secretly Blocked Labor Mobility

[theodp]

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").

Won't work

[rsilvergun]

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.

It's not complicated

[rsilvergun]

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)

Re:ageism

[Immerman]

Fortunately IT people are legally excluded from overtime laws, so those extra 20 hours actually come for free. We can milk them for all they're worth, and since everyone is doing it we also maintain a job shortage so they're afraid to leave. I don't understand why the IT people don't appreciate our brilliant strategy, there's no down side!