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Let Spouses of H-1B Visa Holders Work In US, Says White House
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Carolyn Lochhead reports in the SF Chronicle that the White House has announced a plan allowing spouses of H-1B visa holders to work in the United States, a coup for Silicon Valley companies that have been calling for more lenient rules for immigrants who come to the United States to work in technology. 'The proposals announced today will encourage highly skilled, specially trained individuals to remain in the United States and continue to support U.S. businesses and the growth of the U.S. economy,' says Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. 'A concurrent goal is for the United States to maintain competitiveness with other countries that attract skilled foreign workers and offer employment authorization for spouses of skilled workers. American businesses continue to need skilled nonimmigrant and immigrant workers.'
Currently, spouses of H-1B visa holders are not allowed to work unless they obtain their own visa but tech companies have been calling for more H-1B visas, and supporters of the rule change argue that it will bring in more talented workers. Critics say they believe expanding the H-1B visa program will allow lower-paid foreign workers to take American jobs. The plan immediately drew fire from Republicans. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, accused the administration of acting unilaterally to change immigration law and bring in tens of thousands of potential competitors with Americans for jobs. 'Fifty million working-age Americans aren't working,' Sessions said in a statement, adding that as many as 'half of new technology jobs may be going to guest workers. This will help corporations by further flooding a slack labor market, pulling down wages.'"
Currently, spouses of H-1B visa holders are not allowed to work unless they obtain their own visa but tech companies have been calling for more H-1B visas, and supporters of the rule change argue that it will bring in more talented workers. Critics say they believe expanding the H-1B visa program will allow lower-paid foreign workers to take American jobs. The plan immediately drew fire from Republicans. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, accused the administration of acting unilaterally to change immigration law and bring in tens of thousands of potential competitors with Americans for jobs. 'Fifty million working-age Americans aren't working,' Sessions said in a statement, adding that as many as 'half of new technology jobs may be going to guest workers. This will help corporations by further flooding a slack labor market, pulling down wages.'"
To getting two H1Bs for the price of one!
These are already being abused by tech companies to force lower wages on those already legally in the USA, be they citizens or resident aliens, this will make it worse.
3..2..1... oh wow... looks like there are way more gay H-1B people coming on in with STEM degrees. How convenient.
Given the gender ratios in IT-related fields, does this mean there will be a much stronger push to legalize gay marriage in the US?
lol
You really need to ask, who do these politicians really represent?
along with their spouses.
Indian programmers coming to the US on H-1B visas will be gay married for immigration purposes so the second programmer doesn't absorb a visa quota. Win-win!
have a high H1B min-wage / let them work anywhere with them being tied to the job.
make the min wage say 100-150K + COL with payed OT. and or an H1B tax.
So if you want h1b you can use them to get cheap workers tied to the job. that can be payed low with forced OT.
I'm surprised you guys haven't revolted over this entire thing yet. Up here in Canadaland we've had something similar happen with regards to the TFW program, similar to H-1B. Shit hit the fan about 3 months ago and ever since then it's been all over the news and at the rate it's going the entire program will be dead by years end.
Om, nomnomnom...
Enough. No more anchor babies, no more 'spouses', no more bringing whole families over. This has to end now. Every time we do this, we make the immigrant countries' problems our problems. Right now there are americans living in the sewers because they can't get jobs. They get priority..or they should.
How about no? Wages are already suppressed far enough as it is without doubling the number of foreigners these companies can bring in.
We don't have a workforce problem. We have a wage problem. Companies will do anything they can to pay people less. Just look how they've already latched on to this H1B BS.
I say end it. Revoke them and send folks home. We have plenty of workers available, just not at rates employers want to pay.
Pardon my single tear for them.
I'm extremely liberal and want the best for everyone in the world. But here in the US, we have horrible social welfare. Work is survival for us. If you don't have a job, you fall fast and hard, and it's hard to get back up. Hell, it's hard to get a place to live without guarantors and evidence of an income, and having a place to sleep and eat safely is fundamental to being a biological being. So I call shenanigans on the government allowing more people in to take jobs. Until we've got a robust safety net in place so everyone has a safe place to sleep and can be confident of their next meal regardless of whether they have a job, our focus should be on getting jobs for all citizens that pay what is needed to have those things.
This. If you set the minimum H1B wage at 120% of the average wage in that area for that type of work and experience, then we can have confidence that the purpose of H1B is to fill skill shortages. By allowing them to be employed for less than the going rate of a local, employers are just encouraged to find loopholes to enable them to employ lower wage workers. And by not tying them to a specific job, you remove the ability of employers to find other ways to abuse the system (such as paying them 120% of the average wage to work 150% of the average hours) since the employee can always go elsewhere.
As for spouses working - if someone is good enough to import for their labour skills, at least have the decency to treat them and their family like you would anyone else. If you think this will have an adverse impact on the local labor market, then you probably shouldn't be letting them in in the first place.
Americans like to talk smugly about how corrupt China and Mexico are. Well guess what, great U S of A is pretty goddamn corrupt.
Facebook and Microsoft want cheaper workers, they lobby the gov't (i.e. grease palms with money) for more H1B. Disney wants to milk more money out of Mickey Mouse, it lobbies the gov't until copyright laws extend for centuries. And please explain how this benefits the public (as opposed to benefitting Microsoft/Disney).
That's the current state of affairs. If you are mad about something, check your facts first.
H-1B visa holders will be gay married for immigration purposes, so their employers will only have to use one H-1B slot.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Do you know that skilled programmers still continue to exist even if they don't migrate to the US? Which would you rather have, a skilled programmer competing with you in a globalized market inside the US getting paid ~$100K/yr and helping to create more local jobs (i.e. by spending his income in the local economy), or that same skilled programmer sitting in India still competing with you in a globalized market for your job, but at less than half the salary? Which do you think depresses your income more? And do you think that depresses your income more or less than the Apple wage fixing cartel that Steve Jobs had going for years?
My other UID is three digits.
Does the administration sincerely believe that bringing these people to America will make us stronger? I tend to agree. Give them green cards, so they can stay. H1B visas with little hope for a green card are indentured servitude.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
As long as they halve the number of H1-B visas, too.
"And by not tying them to a specific job"
This. By tying H1B's to an employer, they effectively become chattel for the employer for the duration of their H1B work - beholden to the company, they have no real negotiating power and this is what really drives wages down (or more accurately, prevents them rising).
My other UID is three digits.
Let. Them. Change. Companies.
If a foreign worker is important enough to the country that we'll give him or her a shortcut through our (admittedly ridiculous) immigration system, then it shouldn't matter WHICH company they're working for, as long as they're working for one of ours.
Locking them into one company only encourages the formation of sweatshops, and we're supposed to be better than that.
Why should it matter to him whether the skilled programmer who got the job he wanted lives down the street or across the world? Either way he's still unemployed... But that only matter for jobs that are cleanly exportable. Not all jobs are, some people do still prefer to hire locally, and those jobs are the ones that I assume GP is talking about. For that matter, if the job IS cleanly exportable, why would the employer hire an H1b for nearly twice the price of the same guy in india anyway? obviously it only matter for jobs that are hiring locally, and clearly having more competition locally is a bad thing if you're a job seeker.
We might be granting too many H1Bs, I don't know. I haven't seen reliable, relevant numbers. That's a separate discussion.
However, IF you're going to allow a couple to come into the country and IF you're going to allow one of them to work, it makes sense to allow the other to work legally. If you don't , they'll probably work illegally, but having them here and not working isn't helpful. As long as they are here, the best thing for America is that they are being productive. It's best that they be doing something useful and then paying taxes like other workers. The other options are that they aren't doing anything productive, in which case they are just an extra incremental load on the infrastructure, or they are working unlawfully and probably not paying their fair share of taxes.
Neither of these situations should be allowed, nor should the price fixing. If you want that job in another country, you apply for citizenship in that country and once you become a citizen, then get a job there. That's the only fair method.
Face it, these big companies are just siphoning off every last bit of profit, leaving the workers and the public with nothing. They have completely turned their backs on the country and people that made it possible for them to get where they were.
Yes, it's interesting that there's so much opposition to something that's really just basic human decency.
The usual reason given is "taking jobs". But that doesn't hold up to careful thought. In the simplest reasonable model, the number of jobs is proportional to the population. So if you increase the population (either through births or immigratino) then you increase the number of jobs. And, in an efficient jobs market, wages would adjust until everyone who wants a job has a job. There shouldn't be any unemployment. And if you do attempt to manipulate the market by artificially constraining wages then you'll just create a shortage of jobs - or perhaps drive the jobs overseas (e.g. the Detroit auto industry).
There's a lot that the US government could do to reduce unemployment in the USA - but being mean to spouses of H1-B workers isn't one of them.
Suckerburg's fwd.us in action again, working hard to bring in their cruising international technocratic elite to move around from country to country sucking it dry with their free google transportation and housing etc. for their do nothing crappy Google "x" or MS research projects that dont do anything to improve society for all but the technocratic few.
Please mod this troll in oblivion and IP ban him from the site. We have already decided that immigration of high tech workers into this country is a bad thing. No more discussion should be allowed. It is just trolling at this point.
The main difference is that if the programmer is here and getting 100k, not only does the wage level stay up there but he may at least find a job somewhere else where that 100k programmer wants to buy something. A programmer abroad wastes your wage level AND creates no new domestic job.
Yes, in both cases he's not the one getting the job. But in one case he has a chance of not only getting another job, he has a chance to get it at a wage that allows him to survive here instead of being more suitable to sustaining him in the slums of Bangalore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It requires that the H1B holder either have an approved I140 petition for immigrant visa or that they have been in the US for more than 6 years (with their H1B extension beyond that approved). This is *not* a blanket permission for EADs for H4 holders.
The reality is that the current rules are unfair to workers from India and China because of the super long wait for permanent residency. H1B holder from other countries will have their green cards approved much sooner and their spouses can work, but not those from India and China that are contributing a lot more to the American economy.
Do you know anything about living in a foreign country? You cannot just "apply for citizenship" in whatever country you want.* To be eligible for citizenship, you you first have to live there on a residency visa for a number of years. And how do you get into a foreign country and live there? One of the most common ways is being invited to work there. Pretty much all countries in the world have the concept of the work visa. One might wish to set higher or lower quotas, but every country is fine with some amount of skilled workers coming in.
* (Yes, there are countries like Malta that give you a passport if you invest a seven-figure amount, but we are talking here about ordinary workers, not oligarchs. And while Ireland gives citizenship on the basis of ancestry, that is not an option for e.g. IT workers in India.)
H1B visas are economic cancer and allowing their spouses to ride on the same application is doubly so.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I do not follow your logic. please elaborate.
When one half makes money and other half spends money works out well for local economy.
The proper solution is to close off the border and bomb India back into the stone age.
That's the only fair method.
No, actually the opposite. The fair thing would be to allow everyone in the world to live and work and travel wherever they want without regard to arbitrary geopgraphical boundaries or ancestry. The fair thing would be for everyone in the world to have equal opportunity to succeed regardless of the circumstances of their birth.
What you want, by restricting immigration, is to maintain your unfair privilege. You got lucky and happened to get a bigger piece of the pie than most people born into this world. And now you don't want to share. Perhaps you even imagine that the purpose of life is to do as much as you can for yourself - as opposed to, for example, doing as much as you can for others. Lots of people in this world are selfish: you're hardly unique in that regard.
But don't pretend that restricting immigration is about fairness - that would make you dishonest (in addition to selfish).
Why not just educate Americans in the United States? Teach them how to read and write in school. Teach them mathematics. Teach them critical thinking. Give them access to universities. Let them work for a living. That would be nice. Instead we have ignorant/obedient workers and predictable voters who increasingly have no option but to join the military, go to prison, or collect wellfare. This isn't right. Regardless of how well it works in the short term it is not sustainable in the long term, and it is an abuse of power and humanity.
I had this argument plenty of times, as I visit USA often.
The fundamental problem is that Americans think they are the best at way they do, because they do something that no one (or at least they believe no one) else does outside America. Americans have a huge pride and pisses them off to no end that someone from the outside can come into the country and do a better job than them. Period. This is the root problem with H-1Bs and everything else is indirectly linked to this.
I always hear the same arguments coming from Americans regarding to H-1B or Outsourcing, like "They just bring those workers because they are cheaper, so it doesn't matter if they are worse!" or "They sent to India but those guys are terrible at doing their job!".
To understand why you already lost, you have to accept the fact that other people is as good as you or better outside America. I'm not talking about bringing Mexicans to do construction work, I'm taking about scientists, engineers, etc. There is PLENTY of birllant people outside, and guess who do they work for? Their local companies and governments? Some might, but they will work for the highest bidder and that includes American companies and American government (through companies). Most of that people is in countries where the standards of living are cheaper or much cheaper, and with an entry level American salary they are rich, have their whole family and they don't care about H-1Bs.
That is the people responsible of less jobs for the Americans, and you have no idea how many are there, probably more than americans themselves. Remember that I mentioned at the beginning of the post that I travel often to the USA? Guess why. America makes it very easy for foreigners to open an American company.
So, complaining that H-1Bs are responsible for the loss of jobs is like blaming a cold for the death of a patient with HIV.
In fact, if you were not short-sighted, you might even see the positive side of having foreigners come and work in american soil. One foreigner will take away at much one job, but one foreigner can also create many jobs, and they don't need to be Elon Musk or Satya Nadella.
But no blaming your problems on those inferior immigrants. Right. I can tell you that there is plenty of jobs and plenty of people willing to invest in endless amount of opportunities in America, Been in many countries and no other country compares to America in this regard, your country is the best.
Also met and have known of more foreigners living outside America taking these opportunities than there are individuals under H-1B.
So, if you are worried about your job or unemployment, it definitely is because you either are not qualified, relevant , or affordable enough. That's the hard truth. America is a free country and promotes free trade with every other country. Vote for the national socialists next time there are elections if you don't like this.
Exactly. In one case he has no job at all and in the other case the H1B worker might hire him to mow his lawn.
Critics say they believe expanding the H-1B visa program will allow lower-paid foreign workers to take American jobs. The plan immediately drew fire from Republicans. Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, accused the administration of acting unilaterally to change immigration law and bring in tens of thousands of potential competitors with Americans for jobs.
I thought Republicans were supposed to support free markets. What could be less free market than limiting the number of immigrants to artificially keep the price of American labor high? Furthermore, I would have assumed some big companies that need H1B visas would have bribed all the politicians by now... What gives?
Sorry to hear all that, but... You were told this would happen. I understand, being from the "Bay Area" you probably thought everyone telling you that was a racists bigot idiot, but you were told. You now have a Federal Government more bent on taking everything it can from the middle class and youth and giving you nothing in return. Obama has had a "laser like focus" on job creation for 6 years now and you see the results. Instead of approving the Keystone pipeline, this week he is instead talking about additional EPA regulations that will kill even more jobs.
Sorry, but you all voted for this. Hope and change is here to stay. At least you have Obamacare. Oops, without income you don't qualify for subsidies but are still required to pay a tax for not having insurance.
This government's treatment of the middle class makes me sick, but it is what you asked for.
I mean, please, let them do what reasonable people should be expected to do to make a life for themselves!
If you see the conditions some of the families of H1-B visa holders live in, through no fault of their own, you would agree to let spouses work if they can and are willing.
This is a question of decency, and dignity.
This is a good decision. The current rules are rather inhumane.
Simple solution: eliminate the H-1B visa. A lot of whining and moaning about unfair or inhumane immigration policies (much of which I sympathize with) are the result of weird horse's ass visas like the H-1B. It's also not reasonable to say unemployed H-1B's have to leave the country. The fix is to return to the traditional approach to American immigration: get a green card. After that, and before becoming a naturalized citizen, about the only thing they can kick you out for is being convicted of a felony.
in an efficient jobs market
You mean in fantasy land? "Efficient" markets rank right up there with frictionless surfaces.
Zuck, is that you?
fuck em, if they do not like it they can go back to india and shit in a trench with their fellow countrymen
The requirement is "prevailing wage" for that category of worker. In Silicon Valley, that translates to $80-$100k for many workers.
H-1b's have been portable since around 2000.
And how do you get into a foreign country and live there? One of the most common ways is being invited to work there.
And for many years the US prohibited work visas precisely because they can be used by employers to drive down wages in a particular area or field.
"Critics say they believe expanding the H-1B visa program will allow lower-paid foreign workers to take American jobs."
Lots of comments here along those lines. As someone that actually hires a lot of H-1B workers, I can tell you that these comments are based on speculation or a populist political point of view that has nothing to do with reality. I'm a hiring manager in the tech sector. I have 60 open positions RIGHT NOW. Pay scales for these positions run from 90k to 200k. Yes, 200k a year, and we can't find enough people fill them. We prefer to hire locally, but we can't find qualified people so we also hire H-1Bs. Making the H1-B program more restrictive just slows the growth of our American based business. It will not result in ANY more Americans being hired, because we already hire every single one we find. Even with H1-B hires, we don't come close to filling our open positions.
The catch is...we only hire people that are qualified and have the right IT skills. We don't care at all about saving a few bucks on a hire. I can put everyone to work that I can find, and at a great salary. There just aren't enough qualified people.
What you want, by restricting immigration, is to maintain your unfair privilege.
Ok, and your point is?
Sadly I think it's offshoring. If you don't let companies bring workers to the United States they are going to set up shop where the workers live. This has much more negative effects - lower tax base, lower economic activity in the US etc. than letting these workers come here.
Yes it depresses US wages and makes the job market tighter for US citizens. But at least the company still has operations and employees in the US that are paying taxes.
Ideally there would be US citizens working in the US taking these jobs. But non-US citizens working in the US on these jobs is better than non-US citizens working in Bangalore some other non-US location doing these jobs.
If you want to cut down on this, it is absolutely necessary to improve the US education system. What we have now truly sucks, as this OECD report describes:
http://www.oecd.org/site/piaac...
set the minimum H1B wage at 120% of the average wage in that area for that type of work and experience
Set it at 200% if you want. Laws are meaningless unless they're enforced. There are already anti-abuse provisions. When is the last time they were enforced?
FWIW I'm from Europe and I recently had to decline a high-paying job offer in the Silicon Valley precisely because this strange visa lottery program that even if I had happened to win, my wife would have 'won' a minimum of a year of being forced to either be separate from me, or to be with me but be forced to stay at home. That's just simply no way to attract professionals from abroad who aren't married to housewives (ditto if the genders are reversed). I have a couple of acquaintances who went through this kind of a process as proletarians (no family or property of their own back home), and that's fine for them, but for me and my family it would honestly have been a meaningless degradation.
The US has never prohibited work visas outright. There have always been visa categories for certain highly-skilled people to come to the US, even if quotas were not as generous as they are for H1Bs now.
The point of H1Bs is to poach top talent from other countries.
The USA currently has a strong technology industry and a higher education system that feeds it new talent. However, that talent pool is not drawn primarily from its population. This should make sense. Exceptional people are rare from a statistical perspective, so it should come as no surprise that the majority of students in top USA graduate programs are not US citizens.
Talented students use an F1 visa to study an advanced degree in an American university, then use an H1B to obtain a good job in product development or industrial research. If we don't treat them like second class citizens, then they may decide to stay and eventually become permanent residents or citizens, and can contribute back as technology leaders or as faculty at top universities to teach the next generation.
The one-sided comments on this story and the apparent lack of ability to separate out immigration that increases the labor pool from immigration that strengthens it is severely depressing.
It wouldn't surprise me if the USA loses its technical and educational dominance in my lifetime and I'm forced to immigrate to another country in search of better work.
There have always been visa categories for certain highly-skilled people
True. No Nobel Prize winner has ever been denied a visa.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
tget vkcxearst uhbvyted tgsu sgut abdm tget shgyiyd titakky be gekd ewaoibauvkw xie ur
The way it currently is, families are forced to choose which spouse gets to keep their career. It's not as much of an issue for those who are in the IT field, since both spouses can probably find an H1-B job, but really bad for when spouse has training in a non high tech area.
Who here would be willing and able to busload thousands of unemployed people? They come to shout down and protest the US District Court Eastern District Virginia. Why? A group of white males were being tried for murder, terrorism and WMD offenses. What did they do? They had truck bombed a Hindu temple presumed to be full of H1B jobstealers a la US Marine barracks in 1983 Lebanon.Why did they do it? They were sick and tired of working for third world wages. It was later found that the driver of the truck had been diagnosed terminally ill and figured he was a goner anyway and did so while still having strength.
This is why everyone is the enemy. This is why everyone must be watched. Edward Snowden made it impossible to prove otherwise.
In the European Union, if one spouse is given permission to live and work, so is their spouse and dependents. This is to prevent situations where one person is the only legitimate earner in a household and so can abuse family members with impunity because if the earner gets deported or made unemployed, everyone suffers. There's a perverse incentive to endure spousal abuse and/or child abuse for fear of losing everything and being deported back to their home country and probably suffer further abuses there because of economic/societal depedency.
The EU implemented this rule because of the sheer number of abuse cases that were coming to light, including hospitalisations and murders.
BTW, you can't blame your colleagues or potential colleagues for your employers' shitty behaviour. It doesn't matter if they come from out of town, out of state, or out of country. It's not them who's making your job insecure and low paid, it's your employers. If you don't like it, start or join a union. You have the democratic right to collectivise and campaign for better treatment, working conditions, and your own dignity.
The prudent action would be to evict Wives and Children of H1B holders to a random foreign country.
That will not happen.
Obama is instead electioneering for November 2014 and 2016.
Obvious
I think that it is a marvelous idea so long as the spouse is a C-Level or above Executive....what's good for the goose?
... due to the law of diminishing returns... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
H1Bs directly reduce wages of technical employees, plus they also displace local contractors who otherwise get much higher hourly rates than employees generally due to the short term nature of the projects and higher skill levels and so on. Even if there is not a lump of labor, there is such a thing as a fixed budget at any point in time.
The US created just about zero net new jobs in the last decade while the population and the GDP grew. So, output is increasing in a 21st century economy while labor stays fixed or declines as a percent of the population.
On top of that, it doesn't matter how much labor is needed if it can be done more cheaply by robots and AIs. And before such replace human workers entirely, they will let a few workers do the work of many, thus increasing unemployment,
There are many possible "solutions" to this situation being tried, which I catalog here:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
The real future of work is to make it play and pleasant. See Bob Black and EF Schumacher:
Black: http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."
Schumacher: http://www.centerforneweconomi...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
The 1950s short story "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon depicts a society powered by mobile computing that has realized both these objectives (especially the first).
http://books.google.com/books?...
https://archive.org/details/pr...
For some comic relief see also the 1950s story "The Midas Plague" where only the very wealthy were allowed to have full-time jobs and work overtime and live in small homes, while everyone else was limited to part-time jobs as best or unemployment and forced consumption of mansions and massive amounts of food and consumer goods at worst..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
If you believe that producing and spending is good for economy, it's better to have two people produce and spend than one.
What needs to be subtracted is what could be called infrastructure costs - they use the roads, police protection, etc. What isn't good for an economy is to have people there, and making use of infrastructure, but not producing. What is good for the economy is to have people who produce (and therefore spend) more than they cost to police, emergency medical care, etc.
Why do the media companies keep making this tired claim? 1 bazillion downloads doesn't equal 1 bazillion lost sales because not everybody would have bought the special edition dvd with holographic cover art. Wait, what were we talking about again?
oh wow bring in someone pay them 100k and they contribute by making more demand for minimum wage jobs to service his needs, including the highly skilled person that cant find a real job and is forced to work at dennys part time to not get kicked out on the street while they search for meaningful work
win
Pull the lota from your mouth, it's not going to wash the cow piss from your breath. You want a one-world government as corrupt as your own. Mercury, Venus, India, Mars...?
I've seen plenty of people on /. decrying the fact that H-1B workers are horribly underpaid. Having met quite a lot of them, I've yet to discover one that's actually paid any less than their American (or green-card-holding) counterparts.
I myself am in the US on an O-1A visa, and my salary is a little under double that of 70% of the people with the same job ('Software Engineer') within the same company.
On the other hand, I have been told a number of times in my past that though I was good enough for the position overall, I wasn't good enough to merit the overhead of their doing immigration. In other words: "If you were American, we'd hire you, but since you're not, we need to hold you to a higher standard to match our higher outlay to take you on— and you don't quite meet that bar, sorry."
This. If you set the minimum H1B wage at 120% of the average wage in that area for that type of work and experience, then we can have confidence that the purpose of H1B is to fill skill shortages. By allowing them to be employed for less than the going rate of a local, employers are just encouraged to find loopholes to enable them to employ lower wage workers. And by not tying them to a specific job, you remove the ability of employers to find other ways to abuse the system (such as paying them 120% of the average wage to work 150% of the average hours) since the employee can always go elsewhere.
This is actually almost how it's supposed to work now— one of the requirements is that the applicant (the employer) submit evidence that shows they are paying a fair market wage for the employee, and are not expecting them to undertake greater working hours than local workers. Hell, in my experience in the tech industry, everyone works equally long hours, local or not.
Additionally, once you've got an H-1B you are exempt from the cap any time you renew or change circumstances— and that includes changing employers. Your new employer still needs to file the paperwork, sure, but you're not going to be stuck because the country won't let any more people in this year.
In fact, I would be quite happy if the government would have a 'cap-exempt' category of H visas requiring more stringent processing and with stricter qualifying rules similar to the O visa, such as being paid significantly above the norm for the role you're taking on. If the company can meet these tougher guidelines, then the cap is lifted.
In that case, it would make sense to drop the cap, thus lowering the number of uses of these visas for bringing in cheap foreign labour.
As for spouses working - if someone is good enough to import for their labour skills, at least have the decency to treat them and their family like you would anyone else. If you think this will have an adverse impact on the local labor market, then you probably shouldn't be letting them in in the first place.
Absolutely in agreement. I've spent ten years in Canada, and during all that time my wife has had an open work visa. It's understood that most couples these days need to bring in two salaries to make ends meet (although in all fairness the US' married-filing-jointly helps there by amortizing the family income over two peoples' tax allowances). I've just moved to California to work for a big tech company. I'm paid a pretty high salary — about 40% higher than I was in Toronto — but with the cost of living here (I'm paying twice the rent for less than half the space here) it's actually a stretch. When my American co-workers get to eat out all the time, I just can't afford that because my salary is all we have to feed my family of four.
In Canada, even thought my wife wasn't bringing in a great deal of money (maybe about $30k/yr) that was enough to pay for food for us all, meaning my salary could go toward things like the replacement of the suspension in our car when that broke (twice, at a cost of about $1200 each time).
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I'm told spouses are currently prohibited from volunteer work as well. I would support an exemption for that.
Nothing wrong with community service work.
Whoever is paying them. Obama & Romney spent more than a billion dollars each during the 2012 elections. Where do you think the money came from?
Having met quite a lot of them, I've yet to discover one that's actually paid any less than their American (or green-card-holding) counterparts.
Where have you met them? Some companies are actually pretty good about that, but it's far from universal.
my salary is a little under double that of 70% of the people with the same job ('Software Engineer') within the same company
How did you get such precise statistics about the salary distribution for your employer?
American jobs should be for Americans. Bringing in "H1-B" neo-slave labor to drive down wages and displace citizens and immigrants who have committed to being citizens is nothing less than a scheme to destroy the middle class and enrichen the plutocrats.
And both the "political parties" support this anti-American treason. Sad.
This is actually almost how it's supposed to work now
"Supposed" being the key word.
I would be quite happy if the government would have a 'cap-exempt' category of H visas requiring more stringent processing and with stricter qualifying rules similar to the O visa
Since we already have the O visa, why would we need that?
Look, as long as we have H1-B visas allowing spouses to work is the right thing to do. Would you suggest that we allow H1-B visa holders to come here but deny them the right to register their kids to school? Of course not. Well, the ability of their spouse to seek gainful employment is no different.
Now if you want to can H1-B visas or at the very least make sure people brought under them are paid above market rates (sign of a true shortage), I have no qualms with that, but don't take it on the spouses.
Is there problem with not enough people being unemployed in the USA? We have that problem in Europe, the working people actually have to be paid salaries they can live on! This is an outrage and must stop!
You need a little socialism. You need to value workers over the owners of capital. You need a social safety-net.
Look up the lump of labor fallacy. In fact, allow me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... Labor isn't a zero sum game. More immigrants creates more jobs in the system.
Does the H1-B system need reform? Yes
Does the immigration system need reform? Yes
Does the L1 system need to be scrapped? Quite probably
Does slashdot circle jerk without getting the idea? Yep
Am I missing nothing? Yep.
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We've already established companies are gaming the system by bringing in low skill workers to fill jobs so they won't have to pay market wages. Wouldn't they just flood the market with more H1-Bs until the Average got to where they want to be?
Let me put it this way, if the Average salary w/o H1-Bs is $120k/year and with it's $45k/year, then even if you make it a 120% increase the companies come out ahead...
See, you're thinking short term, as a member of the working class does. Think long term, like a member of the ruling class, and then it all makes a sick kind of sense....
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This means that I could marry an H1B visa recipient and finally get a job!!
Oh - but then they wouldn't need an H1B visa. . .
and our weak neighbors gives this country a stability few have. There are advantages to having a company in America.
Also, if they want to go overseas let 'em. They get to go home, but don't let them take the ball. Use eminent domain to seize their land and factories if you have to. But I don't see any good reason to let the rich and powerful usher in a new dark age while we fight amongst ourselves. There's plenty of wealth in America, and if you want to leave you don't get to take that wealth with you.
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They need to end the H-1B visa program entirely and force companies to support tech education in the US. All the H-1B program does is allow them to bring over people to learn the job then export the job overseas when the visa runs out. This is why so many engineering jobs have left the US. By allowing spouses to share the visa; it'll double that job drain.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
if the postman throws your mail out instead of delivering it he'll go to jail for 30 years. If the 1% steal 50% of the countries wealth we look the other way.
It's mostly because of our political system. Our constitution was set up to keep wealthy white land owners from having their wealth voted out by the great unwashed masses. That's the real reason why we're a republic, but they sorta gloss over that in school here.
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why is it supply and demand go out the window whenever there's a discussion on labor? There's such a thing as an over saturated market, you know? We have a labor _surplus_. Besides, isn't the whole point that this work has to be done? Why can't the companies train? Are Americans just too dumb to learn?
Moreover, H1-Bs are taking top tier jobs (and depressing the wages). The jobs they create are low pay service sector.
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Employment should be thought of as almost a human right. If a spouse isn't allowed to pursue his calling simply because of where he lives, and he sticks by his working wife for over half a decade on a no-working-allowed H4 visa, that actually sucks pretty hard. It crosses the line from "tough choice" to "ok, now this policy is actually breaking a person's ability to develop". Economics aside, I have a moral objection to placing these kinds of restrictions on a human's development for so long.
Some who disagree with me will say it's the H4's fault for falling in love with a worker going to an H1B job. Others will say that if it's not worth the sacrifice, they should both go home. I say that both of these counterarguments are kind of disheartening: do you really want to force other people into making these tough choices? That doesn't feel like what America is all about.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Having met quite a lot of them, I've yet to discover one that's actually paid any less than their American (or green-card-holding) counterparts.
Where have you met them? Some companies are actually pretty good about that, but it's far from universal.
I've no doubt of that :o) My point was simply that I have an anecdote that is the opposite of yours, and that if anecdotes were all we could offer, then we're neither here nor there.
As for where, I've been in the industry a long time, and I've networked around and worked with a great many people. Generally, when I run into an H-1B worker, they're pretty damned good at what they do, and are quite high on the food chain in their organization. Anecdotal, yes, but still an experience contrary to your assertion.
my salary is a little under double that of 70% of the people with the same job ('Software Engineer') within the same company
How did you get such precise statistics about the salary distribution for your employer?
Glassdoor. One of the stipulations for my O visa was that I be able to show I had been or would be paid a substantially higher salary than others in my field. For my former company there weren't enough people on there to make a good sample, but there were plenty on there for my new employer. My salary fell a little above middle of the overall range, but of 300-odd data points, only three or four were higher than mine. 75% of the salaries reported there were at least $50k lower than mine.
That's what I provided, initially, anyway. I suggested to the lawyers that they take this information to my new employer because they could provide a more accurate number to USCIS in this regard. Since it was a compelling argument which was likely to secure my work visa, they did.
I didn't get to personally see that piece of paper though ;o)
Because the O has other requirements. You basically have to prove that you're in the top 1-2% of your field. Substantially higher salary (on the order of 30% or so) is one of the ways you can prove this, but isn't enough on its own. Additionally, they kind of expect you to have a lot of experience. A raving genius fresh out of college may be able to light the world on fire with their abilities, but they won't have the qualifications needed for an O visa, because they'd lack the experiential requirements.
It's a case of the problem: some companies are abusing H1-B while others — who, let's assume, are playing fair and are NOT trying to suppress wages — are trying to bring in top talent with which to build their companies (say, enough to be the next Google, Microsoft, or Apple) but can't because of all those bad actors flooding the system. If we accept that bringing in great people to become US residents, taxpayers, and eventually immigrants and/or citizens in their own right, is general a good thing for the economy (i.e. a 'brain drain' in favour of the US) then it makes sense to limit the actions of those abusing the system while enabling those who will use it to provide an ultimate economic benefit. In that case, we have a lower cap for those who try to game the system, and we remove some obstacles from the paths of those who are deemed to be doing the right things as intended by those who drafted the laws in the first place
The White House is not allowing spouses of H1Bs to work in the US. Only the spouses for those H1Bs, who have applied for the green card and are in a certain stage of sure approval called the i140, will be allowed to work.
Make em pass a technical test, in person, no internet access, no translators.
If they cannot understand plain english, and do not know their shit enough to pass the test, then they aren't "Highly trained, highly educated" people and shouldn't be extended an H1B-Visa.
Nuff said.
That would keep 98.9% of them from ever getting their Visas.
We have gay marriage now and the software scene is still mostly male, unfortunately.
Most migrant workers in technology know they are going back. They send almost all their earnings back to india. With that, their family can live very well. A 5 year sting in the US is like working 10 years or more there.
This kills the local economy. Minimum feedback is put back. Sure, they buy a nice pair of shoes, and a phone - that is about it. The rest goes to India.
So all these companies that support all the H1Bs, also cause some very bad shit.
Can we blame those fuckers for coming over here? They certainly don't belong here. Once they get a job, they back-stab their way up. But can you blame those low-class bastards - no. If you lived in india, wouldn't you want to get the hell out of there and never go back? How bad would the US have to be for yo to leave your family and friends?
Still, they need to stay there and fix their own shit locally. We have talent here. They just can get work because some brown smelly fucking indian has it for half the wage through a corrupt salve importing company like tata.
Thats fantastic! Its not like we need jobs ourselves due to a recession or anything like that. Not at all. We need to import foreign workers who will do my job for half!!!!
It would bring your H1-B visa in line with the equivilent Australian visa the 457 business long stay visa. On that visa spouses and dependants can work without restriction.
From my perspective it seems crazy not to have it set up like that. I don't know about the H1-B but the 457 visa requires either, the position to be listed by immigration as an in demand skill, or the company to prove they have gone through reasonable steps to locate a domestic employee (and believe me that is actually a tough test). Then the 457 visa person has to go through a skills assessment, background check and education assessment.
So basically these people have skills you can't find in the domestic economy. This means you can't under pay them because another company will take them from you. And as a country they contribute a lot, so it makes no sense to not have their partner contributing as well to their living costs.
I guess another factor though is Australia has a universal health care system and you don't get that on a 457, also you may have to pay for your kids to attend state schools (depends on the state). So these people pay taxes and take very little.
Real engineers would have fixed the car themselves......
I can get shocks for $45-150 a piece brand new and around $150 for springs. The rest is labor.
You rent/buy a spring compressor, jack the car up, compress the spring, then unbolt the shocks while using a belt or grip-wrench to hold the actuator so you can break the top nut free.
I actually bought a really nice set of adjustable shocks for performance or comfort for $500 out the door and installed them over the weekend. Half the price and I got high end performance parts.
You can't be broke and not work on cars..... look at the poor. Auto shops on every corner, dudes fixing cars in the street without even a garage or driveway. The poor realize that you cannot pay $1200 for someone to install two $45 parts. If you put a bit of skin in the game suddenly it's nearly free to do basic repairs.
But what do I know, I'm only a senior software architect who tunes boosted engines for fun in my spare time after realizing that cars are basically LEGO's.... Another way to "program" so to speak.... physically.
They did indeed take it. Bastards.
All countries have some corruption, since all countries have humans and humans are imperfect. However the corruption you see in the US and most or western Europe is nothing the scale you see in some places. They've never had to deal with having to pay out bribes for everyday activities (nevermind the bribed for big things), with having to have contracts cost 5, 10, 20 times as much as they should due to all the money that gets siphoned off, and so on.
None of that means corruption should be tolerated, of course, it is one of those things to be fought in all its forms. However pretending that the US is as bad or worse as some other places shows a laughable amount of ignorance about the world.
Often people think their own problems are the worst when they don't have direct experience with a place that actually has worse problems.
The individualist culture of the United States is being intolerant of other cultures centered on the extended family. We should refuse to tear these households apart in the name of nationalism. Extended families are the norm in the most populous cultures and, indeed, extend to the size that we might think of as an entire country. So let's just invite the entirety of Asia into the US and admit that this land was made for you and me!
Seastead this.
It is my understanding that no visa class currently recognises partners in a committed, defacto relationship. This is a form of discrimination as it means (until very recently at least) that no one in a same sex relationship, and even now those who are straight but don't believe in the antiquated notion of marriage can move to the US with their partner. Even a Christian divorcee who broke off a marriage and starts a new relationship couldn't live in the US unless their new partner got a visa on their own merit.
This requirement only holds the US back and, while my partner and I would be highly valued to the US economy, due to arbitrary age limits my partner doesn't meet the visa requirements. It means as it stands we would never work there.
Any visa that doesn't allow a spouse to work will essentially lead to that visa being primarily given to people coming from 3rd world countries where a wife's job is to cook and take care of kids.
Set it at 200% if you want. Laws are meaningless unless they're enforced. There are already anti-abuse provisions. When is the last time they were enforced?
Oh, I'd say they are being enforced "in force" in the Valley these days. Now is not the time to fuck with employment law in tech companies...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I'm graduating with a Ph.D. in math this spring from one of the top 5 US schools. My whole degree was essentially paid by DARPA, i.e. the American tax payer. My wife has a degree from Oxford. We have decided to look for employment outside the US, because of US immigration policy. I decided not to even do a job search last fall after I realized how damn hard it's for my wife to get a job and since we have agreed not to put prioritize either one's career. For me it's easier to get a job and the visa i would get would typically allow her to work (J-1 for postdocs). However, this would mean that her ability to work depends on my ability to do my job properly. This is a risk for any company hiring her, since it's not just enough that she does her work well, but I must do my work well too or I might get fired and she would be forced to leave in the process. Therefore, she has a disadvantaged position on the job market.
Since both of us are nationals of an EU country, we got jobs in the UK instead, but I got my degree funded by the US tax payer. I thank you for that. This whole immigration issue seems to be a none issue mostly for people coming from Asia and other poorer regions, since whatever they get in the US usually trumps any prospects back home. Current immigration policies is an invitation of the 3rd world to come while no one else bothers.
"aren't doing anything productive"
Excuse me? Managing a household is not of value? Please, go back to the 1970s.
Long ago, the Soviet Union discovered to their dismay that paid child care workers just wouldn't care for children as well as mothers would. There is no substitute for a parent. You can't usefully pay somebody to love your child, and you wouldn't want to anyway because that would be creepy. Parenting is not a part-time job.
Numerous other things need to be done around the home. Proper means ought to be made, not take-out or "just add water" junk food. The place needs cleaning. If people come home tired and grumpy from work, only to face housework, then there isn't as much time for resting and romance and so many other things in life. Each person effectively works 1.5 jobs, or one person has lower standards and thus they end up being unfair about doing the housework.
You are renting, so you are NOT invested and it is NOT your land.
I'll grant that the culture is different in Texas and Florida, but it's not like Pakistan or China.
These H1-b's and the like are not becoming citizens, but (in the majority) returning to their home countries - despite claims to the contrary.
The only way to solve the fraud and anti-citizen nature in these programs is to kill them with fire, then nuke the remains from orbit. Legislatively, that means ripping out everything created from (and including) the 1965 Immigration Act, as well as every single guest worker program that remains. To take care of the other end of the skills continuum, enact a federal version of SB1070, complete with a prohibition on guest workers.
As for the OECD's claim about a skills problem - it doesn't hold up. What the US has is a lack of willingness of employers to train (courtesy of the adversarial nature between employer and employee that has developed over the last 30-40 years) and directly hire people, opting to ask for perfectly trained & disposable people that come through contractors.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I've seen plenty of people on /. decrying the fact that H-1B workers are horribly underpaid. Having met quite a lot of them, I've yet to discover one that's actually paid any less than their American (or green-card-holding) counterparts.
Even when employers pay normal wages to H-1B workers, it can still drive down wages by creating more supply. Forcing employers of H-1B works to pay substantially higher wages than normal would indeed by very useful. This would drive up wages, because if employers have to decide between a H-1B with 50% above normal wage or paying an employee from a different company 30% more to make him switch, most would choose to not hire any H-1B.
Jan
Nobody talks about one really important issue. The H1b is such a strain on a married couple that more than half of the marriages end in divorce during the term of the visa. It is absolute killer. Many of the spouses are university educated and have to abandon their career to sit idly by, get bored. They leave all their friends and family behind back in their country of origin. Sometimes having children solves the problem, but often this takes extreme toll. Same on the visa holder, who gets new job in a new country, doesn't know the conditions, has to support family from a single income in place with no extended family support. And every time you come home, there is your bored spouse ready to jump you and do stuff, while you are tired and want to rest from work. It is a huge strain on couples. Giving EAD to H4 holders while the GC is pending is EXACTLY the change H1b program needs to stop being the marriage killer it is now.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
They have the same negotiating power as other employees, too: leave the company.
bickerdyke
I've seen plenty of people on /. decrying the fact that H-1B workers are horribly underpaid. Having met quite a lot of them, I've yet to discover one that's actually paid any less than their American (or green-card-holding) counterparts.
No. It's not that H-1B workers are underpaid compared to Americans. EVERYONE in a similar position now is underpaid. The H1-B workers prevented the skill shortage that would have put Americans in a position to negotiate for higher saleries.
bickerdyke
Some them hoem and buy American! And toss out any shithead executive who still uses them!
Does every elected representative in Washington have a deep hatred for the middle class, or is it just Obama? Obama is truly the best Republican president in the last century. We haven't had an actual democrat president since Carter.
It is truly a sad day when I find myself agreeing with Jeff [fighting rising gorge] Sessions.
command much larger dowry's from the parents of women who couldn't get the visa for themselves! Maybe parents of men without H1B visas will have to pay a dowry to the woman with an H1B visa to "take him off their hands". With so much money potentially changing hands some savvy internet entrepreneur will set up a match-making site with two tiers of membership- those with H1B visas will be paired with those without H1B visas. They can charge for membershaip and take a commission from the dowry! Maybe they'll even take a percentage of the non-H1B spouse's income for the first few years...
Wow! The possibilities boggle the mind!
This is not true. Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the 1982 Nobel prize in literature for his book, "One Hundred Years of Solitude". He was denied US visas for his "subversive" attitudes, including his friendship with Fidel Castro. President Bill Clinton eventually lifted the restriction and helped him get a valid visa so he could visit the US.
http://mashable.com/2014/04/17...
Grew up in Europe with my father working for an American company there. The company paid 20k per year for his work visa and no one else in the family was allowed to work there. From my understanding this is still the case.
My personal experience as a high tech worker is proof positive you can train American's to fill the jobs here. As a bartender with no benefits, diagnosed with ADHD at age 28 (not diagnosed in Europe), this qualified me for disability training in a 9 month COBOL course, ***got my foot in the door***, now have been an embedded engineer for 15 years. (never wrote a line of COBOL, C in *nix all the way) Every penny I have made has been taxed and spent in this country.
My experience is that there seems to be a high level of ADD'ers in this industry, seems to be a natural fit. Many ADD'ers fell through the cracks of our educational system or didn't have the family resources to be around technology. By allowing H-1B visa's in these astronomical quantity you are in effect 1) reducing corps from having any moral responsibility in partaking in training American's to fill jobs and 2) lowering the salary's of STEM workers, reduces incentives for high school/college students to choose these careers
Imaging we create a visa to allow lawyers/doctors/politicians/bankers or any high wage earning worker in, why only STEM?
Have prison's filled to the gills with ADD'ers, how about training them?
Stage 1) For the people by the people
Stage 2) For the people by the corporation
Stage 3) For the people by the international corporation
The downfall of Communism resulted in a few very wealthy and a population living in fear to speak their thoughts. Seems we're on the same path.
This speaks for itself...
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303665904577452521454725242
Germany's New Export: Jobs Training ...
"We've learned it is better to build our own workforce instead of just relying on the market," said Hans-Herbert Jagla, Volkswagen's human resources chief at its one-year-old Chattanooga plant. The German car maker has launched a three-year apprenticeship program to ensure it has skilled workers to maintain and troubleshoot the car maker's high-tech robotics and assembly line systems. ...
In Germany, nearly two-thirds of the country's workers are trained through partnerships among companies, technical schools and trade guilds. Last year, German companies took on and trained nearly 600,000 paid apprentices. The schools provide theoretical lessons on the side, while trade unions help ensure training is standardized.
They have the same negotiating power as other employees, too: leave the country
Fixed that for you.
Go on, citizen, stamp the vote card. R or D, your choice.
How long does it take to get a US Green Card? Well, it depends. It will take at least 2 years these days. That's two years that a spouse is sitting at home, doing nothing, because she or he are unable to work. That's a stupid waste of resources because that person could contribute to the economy and tax base instead of just "burning time" until the green cards arrive.
In the Bay Area, if you're from India, it can take up to 7 years. My friends and I, from Mexico, got it in an average of 2.5 years (mine took just a smidge less than 18 months, back in 1991-1993).
I worked for a major Internet company last year; a large number of people from France, Israel, India, etc. await their green cards; their average time is about 5 years.
All of us have advanced degrees or are highly specialized in some in-demand technology area (or both); outside of this one-year employment gap (golden handcuffs), I spend about 50% of my time now advising for other companies in Europe and Asia, the other 50% advising US companies. The common denominator I see across all countries where I work is that qualified people who know their stuff are very hard to find and to hire if you're looking for a business and technology advantage. In the last three years I got the equivalent to Russian green card (high technology worker), and have provided services to the Ministry of Economy, Technology, and Industry in Japan, among several other gits. I see the same demand for talent all over the world, not only here in the US.
This isn't a situation unique to the US. I just got back from scouting business in China and (surprise!) I found that start ups and established companies alike are willing to find and hire whoever they can that will give them the tech and business advantage that they need, from whatever country they come from.
Thinking that H1B visas are only filled to keep wages down is naïve. While there are many instances of companies like InfoSys and Wipro abusing the system, most tech companies are trying whatever they can to hire the top talent they can find and will use H1B, E, L, or O visas to make it happen (at least in the Bay Area). There's a real need for people who are qualified in cutting edge science and technology fields. And many of those people have life partners, who could also be productive members of society. Why hinder the spouses ability to contribute, if they are qualified?
Cheers!
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
*shrug*
It's both moving to where the next job will be. So where's the difference between moving back to Idaho (Indiana, Wisconsin, Delaware) or moving back to France? (Canada, Norway, Japan...)
I know it may come as shocking news to some people in the US: but not everywhere outside the US is a 3rd world hell hole.
The only difference is that we could be sure that as he came into the States as a temp worker, he won't have to leave his home country.
bickerdyke
This. If you set the minimum H1B wage at 120% of the average wage in that area for that type of work and experience, then we can have confidence that the purpose of H1B is to fill skill shortages. By allowing them to be employed for less than the going rate of a local, employers are just encouraged to find loopholes to enable them to employ lower wage workers
There are two issues with this idea:
1) That's not a high enough premium--make it 250% of market so that the economics of training Americans (or offering more money to lure away American talent from existing jobs) makes sense.
2) The problem we have now is that the law doesn't allow the use of H1-Bs for less than you'd pay an American. But companies do it anyway, as nobody is enforcing that law. For this to work, there would need to be strict auditing of H1-B employers to make sure they're in compliance with the law, be it the current one or a new one requiring a premium pay rate.
But I do like where your head is, because raising the price of H1-Bs changes the equation for employers, perhaps enough that they might start taking Americans and having reasonable expectations about working conditions (i.e. not 60 hours per week, every week, forever.)
Who did what now?
As was already stated this is just a ploy for tech companies to abuse the already over abused H1B visa market, and drive wages down even further, because the Chinese will work for peanuts. We had a visiting engineer from China at my job the other day, and in casual conversation he unknowingly gave me enough information to figure out how much he makes a year. His salary comes out to basically McDonald's wages if he were living here in the USA. We were having a conversation about his iPad vs my Galaxy tab, and the engineer told me that " My brother keeps bugging me to buy him an iPad because he only makes 25 Yuan an hour which is half of what I make." So, he basically told me he makes 50 Yuan and hour. So, do the Math at the current rate of 6.23 Yuan to 1 dollar the Engineer makes 8.02/hr. Those are just stupidly poor wages for someone with a computer science degree Chinese or not!
Shrug, it's another way to import skilled labor. If they're here long enough to have a child, care of the child (who is a citizen) will allow the parents to apply residency.
You are obviously an H1-B visa worker, and if you want your spouse to work here then he/she needs to get their own work permit, or no job!
Dumb answer. Sure it might expand the economy. But as a tech worker reduces MY wages and MY ability to get a job. Bluntly, the corporation profits but I lose. Maybe society will benefit (on average)*.
The big problem with your answer is that pretends to say 'don't worry, everyone is going to be better off' and completely ignores the reality that some people will lose (e.g., current tech workers). Unlike you, most people are keenly aware that our economy is pretty bad at supporting economic losers (as in... you're on your own) and don't get excited when their job is offered up for substitution.
Finally, its quite clear that for many (though probably not all) of the corporations that are proponents of increasing 'temporary workers' really do see the program as a labour-cost cost-cutting measure. Temporary workers are marginally more expensive (assuming companies actually follow the rules) up front but provide savings in other areas -- reduced benefits, fewer raises, no retirement issues, they are hostage to their visa requirements and (this is key) they provide negotiating leverage against other existing and potential employees. That last one is key, especially for the big corporations.
* the debate on this is somewhat less clear than you posit as well. In a well-functioning and/or growing market this is usually true. How confident are you that our current economy has a well-functioning, healthy job market?
Just what Americans need, more people competing for jobs, many of whom will be willing to work for less.
I am sure that is not going to increase unemployment of Americans, especially low skill, low wage, and part time workers.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Maybe, just maybe, the fact that there are 50 million unemployed Americans has nothing at all to do with foreign workers. There are a maximum of 65,000 H-1B visas issued per year, even if those all went away and every one of those jobs was filled by one of the 50 million unemployed you'd have a 0.13% reduction in the number of unemployed.
MAYBE the issue is more complicated than "the dirty foreigners are taking all the work!". MAYBE the issue is the geographic location of the unemployed being very different from the geographic location of any available jobs. MAYBE the 50 million unemployed don't have the education, skills, or experience needed to perform any of the jobs those H-1B visa holders are performing... or any of the other available jobs.
But reality never gets in the way of a good freakout, does it? It's so much easier to just blame the foreigner, and that's such a popular option in this country. You've got to love deeply ingrained xenophobia.
Do you know how immigration in this country works?
If you're here on an H-1B and lose your job, you have to leave. Your status lapses when the visa does.
If you want to get a green card through work, you have to get labor certifications and go through a very extensive search process to show that there is absolutely no US citizen able and available to do the job that you're trying to use to get a green card.
Your pithy suggestion doesn't "fix" anything or make treatment more "fair or humane". It dicks over immigrants, or potential immigrants, even harder than our already screwed up system does.
You watch a lot of General Hospital?
Pardon MY single tear for your inability to compete for jobs. This is blatant protectionism; you'd rather screw over a foreigner who needs the job even more than you do.
We don't have a wage problem - we have a rent problem. These corporations aren't paying for the natural resources they're consuming, and you aren't getting the restitution you deserve for being denied an equal share of those resources. Blaming foreigners might be a politically palatable solution but it doesn't address the root problem - human labor is being (and should be) marginalized, so each person's primary source of revenue will need to shift from wages to rents.
You just need to de-attach the H1-B visa holder to the sponsoring company. That is, the employee should be able to leave and look for another job within a reasonable timeframe (say, 1 year). That way employees gain negotiating power, and wages go up for everyone.
and who believe this isn't about lowering wages for the sufficiently qualified local citizen workers, then please explain why H1B imports LAWYERS as well.
Do you actually believe we don't have enough of those too, not enough "qualified" citizens?
How about accountants? need more of those too?
http://www.workpermit.com/us/investor_h-1b.htm
Isn't the person holding the H1-B visa already making a good wage that should support both of them? Right? Oh, that's right, I forgot, the tech companies are using H1-B employees to drive down wages. Silly me.
You are the same kind of person that would have passed chinese exclusion laws.
Think about what you said for a second and think what it will do to your family, if you have one. All this talk about wage suppression is BS and you know it. If you dont want to work hard in the tech industry, your job will be automated out and you know it.So, focus on what you want to do for yourself and not talk flippantly about the effects these laws have on people.
The first demand for most H1Bs is "sign back X% of your paychecks to us or go home" where X is closer to 50 than 0. The answer is very different depending on country of origin, ranging from "No way" or "I'll sue" to "yes sir, thank you sir." The first worlders I know kept their jobs and salaries. I doubt the same is true for non-first worlders.
There is definitely a stratification for offshoring with good people able to get better visas and/or salaries comparable to onshore employees. The number of good people is tiny compared with the size of the offshoring industry. Most offshore workers, certainly the ones working for large companies (onshore or offshore, i.e. Infosys and IBM) are salary ballast. They can bill but they can't do productive work.
Good people get good money wherever they are in IT (and some not so good people get good money). It is not like auto-workers with no skills (8 hours training) and no mobility. Companies that are "saving money" offshore or onshore are not hiring good people. Anyone with meaningful skills, even in India (a tiny proportion of those in India working in IT) will get offers at close to western salaries. A lot of people with no meaningful skills "edit a text file? I don't have confidence I can do that" will continue to be paid peanuts to do little positive work and, in many cases, lots of damage. Same as in America in the '90s tech boom where unqualified (and incapable) people were working because of the scarcity of capable people.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
let the market forces go to work. End the H1-B and force every single company to sponsor a green card so the talent is not bound to the company, can leave, can find better pay and working conditions in a COMPETITIVE market. If you love Capitalism, surely you won't mind PAYING for it!!!
Ain't that the truth. Then again, markets are efficient...when competition ends thanks to monopolism. Does anyone deny that Microsoft has turned cheap foreign labor into billions very efficiently?
Fuck the border. Get rid of visas, and just have open immigration for all. Or are you a faux libertarian, who wants to eliminate regulation that hurts you, but supports a protectionist border?
That's true. My wife is a homemaker. Before that, she worked in childcare for 13 years. She's good at what she does.
If you don't have kids, cleaning up your own house is part of not being a burden on others - that, by itself does not mean you're contributing your share to society. Whatever feelings you may have about that, it's simply mathematically true. You can't be a net contributor by just cooking yourself and cleaning up after yourself - the same result would be achieved if weren't here.
I really like where I'm working now, but if I decide to leave the company I'll be able to just find another job. It will be just a change of jobs. It won't involve moving anywhere, because there's lots of stuff I can get paid to do around here. (This is pretty well true of anybody in a fairly populous area who's good at what he or she does, except for H1Bs.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So between immigration, unemployment, on-the-job training, adult re-training, student jobs, low wages, and import duties, you can't seem to put together a system that doesn't screw yourselves?
Do you at least charge, a lot, for an imported worker? Like you would for imported-anything-else?
Perhaps you should try making visa free and clear and instant for anyone coming in to start their own business -- you know, to create new jobs instead.
The term doofus comes to mind. I'm not sure of the plural form.
'Fifty million working-age Americans aren't working,' Sessions said in a statement
Even the simplest calculation shows how absurd that claim is. The U.S. population is a bit over 300 million. Let's say 200 million are "working age". 50 million being out of work would be an unemployment rate of 25%. Ok, some people "aren't working" because they don't want to work. Perhaps they're staying home raising their children, while their spouse supports them. Though I'd argue being a full time homemaker is "working", especially if you're caring for children.
In any case, his number is clearly nonsensical. It has nothing to do with actual unemployment, the sort he's arguing this would make worse.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
It's not like we don't have enough jobs for the people already here or anything...this couldn't possible affect our standard of living any way but positively...
I work in academia. We originally came to the US with a J (research) visa. My wife could work legally on that visa. After five years, I had to switch to an H-1B visa, and my wife suddenly couldn't work. We eventually left the US and moved to Australia where she can work.
You know what? It is your loss. If the US insists on stupid laws like this, other countries will be happy to take talented people.
What is needed is intense directed action and follow up in the form of jury nullification for the resulting cases. We all know why such cases are tried in USDC Eastern Virginia because the jury pool in that area are rubber stamps for the government. Busload thousands of protestors to the USDC Eastern Virgina District and make a whole lot of noise. Monitor the media for reporting. Nothing short of intense directed action will change things. The ballot box does not work by design. The soap box does not work. The jury box is next. We all know what comes after that.
Someone will have to prove that the above language has triggered immanent lawless violence.
It depends on the company. If you work in one of the big and well-known software companies, then you're probably paid a fair wage. If you work for a generic "expert" sweatshop, you're not... but you'd know that already.
Thing is, our environment skews our perspective. I'm an H1B also, and all H1Bs I know get paid a lot. But they are all in like 3 big companies. When I went and looked up the companies who get H1B approvals, and how much those 3 companies got, versus how much all the sweatshops got... it's not even 1 to 10.
So yeah. For some of us, it's a golden ticket, for many others, not so much.
H1B caps are documented and are public record. So are salaries.
True, with a limit of 65,000 H1B, that represents 0.002% of the population, so that certainly is a tiny, tiny fraction of the workforce.
This is all a huge lie, and is based on NO empirical data. Since 1992, when the H-1B was expanded, people have cited this crap. But in that time, 22 years, hundreds of thousands of US workers have lost their jobs and had to train the coding coolie scabs from India and China. ENOUGH of this shit.
We need to end the H-1B, NOW. Also the J-1, L-1, F-1, B-1, and O-1. End them all.
1. Post a job at an hourly rate that no one locally accept & wait 1 year
2. Apply for an exception with immigration, and other 3 letter agencies & wait
3. Advertise the job in 3rd world countries & wait
4. Present documentation of the person that accepts to immigration & other 3 letter agencies & wait.
I am sure there are more steps to this some official & some not official
Note: At one time there was a system much like this. Indentured servants, AKA slaves. But unlike Indentured Servants they are not free to stay or go as they please. They must return to country of origin.
No conflict of interest there. I'm sure most foreigners really want the US to excel. Should be beneficial to our economy too, don't you think?
http://sammyboy.com/showthread...
Casteism
The deal is here to rent a RollsRoyce for the price of a Chevy Spark. Even a Xenaphobic ridge runner or xenophobic hillbilly knows that paying $8 or 10 hr is a no go. Really, the time, education & equipment purchased to achieve those skills is far short of what is needed to recover what was spent to get to the level the employer wants. Its like building house, No contractor wants to hire a Union Master Carpenter, until he runs into a inspector that is not on the take. In this case there is no inspector to deal with. Believe me this is all about that cozy 15,000 sq ft cottage in the Caymans & the Plantation Mansion in Aspen. The obstacle is very few companies are willing to grow their own or pay enough for you to continue and/or achieve, provide in house instruction, education, equipment resource & time for effort needed to keep current with technology development. Before 1974 very few male 18-27 year old immigrants wanted entry into the US
One of my Army buddies with a tourist visa entered the US from Palistine In 1966. He got a job & drivers license. This went on until he got stopped for a traffic violation. The officer asked him for his license, registration & draft card. The judge gave him a deal 24 months in jail and deportation or enlist in the US Army for 4 years. He took the Army option, used the GI bill, got his degree & went to work for the Skunk works. The draft was one the things that had to go. It was keeping wages in the US too high
To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal
Wanting to elevate work to a more enlightened plane is all well and good but has anyone proposed how, exactly, the necessary work of picking strawberries or cleaning toilets can be made meaningful, interesting, and fun?
For some comic relief... In a world of cheap energy, robots are overproducing the commodities enjoyed by mankind. The lower-class "poor" must spend their lives in frantic consumption
Didn't read, because it seems to lack the grain of truth/reality that is necessary for good comedy. I don't care how cheap energy or raw materials become... if proper market feedback mechanisms are in place, this kind of overproduction will not happen. While it may be true that cheap corn syrup is increasing the rate of obesity, those consumption choices are made by free individuals; nobody is forced to consume. The pendulum has actually swung in the other direction (Mayor Bloomberg's attempt to ban cups of soda >16 ounces).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
my father is considered to have been a US citizen since his birth
Interesting... I wasn't aware that a father's ability to confer citizenship on his children is different from a mother's ability.
Still, if your grandfather was able to confer citizenship on your father, why isn't your father in turn able to confer citizenship on you?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
"Here, have some more young, cheap workers. You can discard them later when they are no longer young and cheap rather than retraining them. No need to hire from the existing masses of unemployed!" -Obama
Why does the White House involve themselves in providing special deals for High-Tech Companies? Does Obama think American natives are just too stupid? Idea! Bring in some foreign politicians who can actually govern without screwing its citizens!!!!
Your comments are so stupid it's difficult to tell if you're just trolling, but either way, here is some information that contradicts your central claim: http://www.happyschools.com/h1... So, yes, the majority are escaping 3rd world countries. Your other points are so beyond ridiculous that they don't need responses.
My other UID is three digits.
Oh yes... with canada on #3....
bickerdyke