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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.
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...
along with their spouses.
This. Then aggressively pursue companies hiring illegals and fine the shit out of them.
US corporations will not hire US labor at fair rates unless they're forced to. Force them.
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).
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.
I don't think that same sex marriage requires that one or both spouses be homosexual. Two heterosexual people of the same gender can choose to get married.
The government does not force married couples to have sex with each other, nor does it require that they have offspring.
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
"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.
[Citation needed] There is a huge difference historically between immigrants to the US, with a strong work ethic and likely to be educated, and the northern European experience where low-skilled refugees have to stay on the dole for at least a generation because they cannot or don't want to work.
There is some social tension in the latter case and the Far Right has often ran campaign that claim the local culture is being swamped by outsiders. In the US, however, immigrants always have and continue to assimilate very quickly, and while you can probably dredge up tabloid scandals to villify the immigrant from overseas demographic of your choice, it means little in the big picture.
I oppose the massive use of H1Bs myself, but if they are coming in anyway, it will only aid assimilation if the wife can go out and work everyday instead of just sitting at home.
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.
Actually, funny as it may be, a lot of high quality IT people I know are gay. I have no idea where that correlation between homosexuality and mad math skills is, though.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The government does not force married couples to have sex with each other
Actually, at least for heterosexual marriages, in a lot of places it kind of does, at least once anyway. I've actually looked into this(long story short a Chinese woman was attempting to pay me $10k to marry her, I ultimately turned her down because you know, fraud) and at least in the state of Washington a marriage technically isn't legal until it has been consummated. Whether or not this statute is enforced or not is beyond me, but it's still on the books.
Monstar L
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.
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.
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.)
I think INS actually comes to the homes for a surprise visit and interview the husband or wife trying to check for fraud. i.e. what position one sleeps, does he/she snores, what the favorite stuff etc etc..
H1B visas are economic cancer and allowing their spouses to ride on the same application is doubly so.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
Well, maybe let's have a civil discussion about it. First of all, return H1Bs to what they were supposed to be: A way to get key personnel with unique skills. And sorry, but when I see how certain corporations carpet bomb the relevant fed offices with applications, I can't really believe that to be the reason for them. You really need dozen and dozen of key personnel with skills you can't find here, every single year? Who do you want to bullshit here?
H1Bs are something that should be the exception. It became the rule, though. And that's what's wrong about it. They should be a way to remove a roadblock, to avoid a shortage of people with unique and hard to find skill sets, or to import very specific people who are for some reason very, very important in a certain field. But for the latter to apply to you, if the field was Linux, you better be Linus Torvalds or else you're just not important enough (just to illustrate what I mean with "important in a specific field").
That's what H1Bs are about and that's what they should be used for.
And I could hardly think of anyone having a problem with this, except for some xenophobic hillbillies who fear the dilution of the true American blood.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I say make the H1B a mandatory fast-track to a green card, then the spouse can work and both are more likely to actually settle here.
As it is now, the majority of H1B visas are used for off-shoring - they bring the person over, train them up for a year or so and then send them back. If these H1B holders really creme-de-la-creme, then we don't want them to go home. We want them to settle here and become full citizens as soon as possible.
Yeah, they call it "Operation Newlywed Game" You gotta give them credit on that one.
Monstar L
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.
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?
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.
a lot of high quality IT people I know are gay
A lot of them don't know what their sexual orientation is, because they're unfamiliar with sex.
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?
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.
Your solution is just a false appeal to pragmatism: "oh well, they're coming, so now what?" like we don't have any choices here. We do. Mexico's mafia/drug drama is destabilizing that country fast, and we'd do well to wall ourselves off from it as best we can.
Citation? The whole south west is one giant 'citation' because we don't have the balls to defend our own borders anymore. You want a solution? How about this: Build that wall talked about a decade ago, except that each state along the border has a school attached to their segment of it. The mexicans (or whoever really) enter one side, and if they pass academic, health, and psychological rigor, they become american citizens who understand our system, can speak english literately, and who, most importantly, want to be american. They'll be more apt to respect our value of liberty, and pay taxes, such that they are willing to compete on equal turf with the rest of us. The others go home. The rate of influx is carefully controlled such that it basically shuts off when labor is plentiful. Anyone who tries to run the border for any reason is shot on sight. No excuses. No exceptions. Watch how quickly the mexican government reprioritizes its own revitalization when the USA isn't there to prop it up anymore.
Of course, this requires leadership that isn't afraid to make tough choices, but the current culture in washington is incapable of that. It only knows how to 'compromise' to the point of gridlock such that nothing of consequence is decided, except of course when it's time to chop out a sizable chunk of civil rights or citizens' income.
The point is that as long as we have americans who are out of work, we shouldn't be importing any labor. Until they are employed I don't want to hear about bringing more foreigners here who then have to be house broken on the taxpayer's back, and then immediately play the professional victim for a hand out to bring their half literate families over. That only bolsters the voting block of a particular group of politicians (I'll let you guess who), and few cents per share on the exchange for the fortune 500s who just want cheap slave labor. If the americans in question are not trained then at least use the taxpayers dollar to train them instead.
If these companies want to make money and host their headquarters in this country, then they gotta be a part of it, or else there will be no first world problems left to sell their first world solutions to (take a wild guess why). The fact that the president and his party care more about the plight of people who don't even live here over that of those who do, is another citation of evidence for just how disconnected washington is from reality and from the duties they're supposed to carry out.
AC above is actually fairly close. People in STEM tend to have been outcasts, and therefore are often (from what I've seen) more accepting of others' oddities. This in turn draws more "odd" folks into STEM, reinforcing the cycle. Theatre sees a similar effect.
It's not perfect, of course. For example, discrimination by gender is still prevalent. There's also a risk that with the current widespread promotion of STEM, that accepting aspect of our culture will be lost.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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?
They're citizens. The US federal government is supposed to put the defense of the borders and safety of the legal population first. That's its job. You cannot ask the USA taxpayer to bail out every poor person on the planet. What are you going to do if/when the USA economy collapses and there is no one else to turn to? This isn't the USA of just post WWII. We're broke. Enough.
H1B visas are usually given to educated IT workers from such countries as India or Eastern Europe. I doubt there is very much overlap between these immigrants and the Mexican narco-immigrants you are concerned about.
The United States gets legal immigrants from virtually every country and every status from rich investors to highly educated worker to unskilled refugee. You are looking only one part of the story, and a part that is off-topic for this Slashdot discussion.
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.
Look, when there are citizens, many of which lead productive lives up to this point, who now have to live on the streets because a bunch of leftists (who call themselves 'liberals') want to play marx on global scales, and/or a bunch of fortune 500s want to bottom out their labor markets, I draw the line. In case you haven't realized, the federal government hasn't had to answer to its citizens in almost 5 decades now at least. I am not responsible for whatever they supposedly did in your country or anywhere else. Perhaps you're right though. Perhaps it is time to pull the plug on the funding that goes overseas. As a tax payer, I am tired of funding these hell holes for the benefit of the relevant fortune 100s you're talking about.
As far as germany goes, you have a very interesting interpretation of history. I'm not sure it's very accurate, but who really knows, right? Each country's citizens can claim the others' media is full of propaganda and it devolves quickly into ad hominem attacks.. While we did poach a number of engineers from the nazis, we sure as hell didn't just attack them to drain them of talent. In fact, we entered the war rather late in the game when we were attacked by the japanese.
I think the whole immigration system needs an overhaul. Like I said, if you come here, that doesn't mean the taxpayer is now responsible to feed, clothe, and educate your family and their extended families (which is what some here are pushing for).
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
Thank you for helping me prove my point with your anecdotal evidence.
I used the mexican border issue as an example but the model applies elsewhere.
Yeah except that those indian immigrants are willing to work for much much lower wages and they haven't incurred the school debts the average american citizen has.. So now we have a glut of american citizens who can do the work, it's just that no one wants to pay them, and we get a bunch of tripe about how "there are jobs but no americans to fill them." It's bullshit. If we're willing to put the taxpayer on the bill for the cost of educating foreigners, then really, americans who need retraining should come first. There's no need to bring foreigners and their wives (and then their extended families) just for the sake of one worker.
I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of immigration comes from the poor and desperate looking for alternatives. Last I checked, we're in the hole 16 trillion. Enough is enough, and I do mean it across the board.
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.
Exactly.. What a bunch of shit that was.
... 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.
Well hey, if america is unwilling to help itself first every now and then, it won't be around long to continue helping others.
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?
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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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?
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.
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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I know what your saying is often true (except I have no idea what your talking about, when you say "taxpayers paying for educating foreigners" If that exists, it is a small edge case) But to say that my viewpoint differs, because I have worked with many H1B workers (most from India), and all of them I have worked with are really good human beings, who truly deserve the opportunity they get here, and US taxpayers paid nothing for their education. Similar to the problems in Mexico, it is a real shame that their home country has so much corruption in their governance that screws up the chance for them to do these Jobs in India. It is also very difficult for the spouses of these employees, they are often educated as well, but cannot apply for Visa's, because they have to give up the spouse visa, leave the country and apply. Even doing things like babysitting... for others is not allowed; really putting the pressure on them. Really degrading for them to not be allowed to do anything but house work. Of course the problem comes with those who would abuse these well intended rules.
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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If the H1-B system wasn't incredibly corrupt, you'd have a point. But only a portion of them end up on the people who they were originally meant for.
The whole immigration point is also kind of a sore spot in the US, because illegal immigrant are bordering on having legal status (they can drive, they can go to school, and in some case go to college and even get grants and scholarships), and there's so many of them, its hard to ignore.
So people end up tossing the baby with the bathwater in these issues. These people are wrong...but its kind of understandable.
Note: I'm an immigrant in the US on a green card.
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
We have gay marriage now and the software scene is still mostly male, unfortunately.
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.
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.
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've had a friend here (the Netherlands) who married an Eastern European girl (before the EU expansion). They actually had to 'prove' that their relation was legit before she got her residence permit, showing things like pictures of holidays together, emails and chats (ICQ! ;-) ) exchanged, etc. It feels wrong that the government gets that close and personal, but I guess sham marriages are too easy otherwise...
"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.
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
Bravo mate! No mod points, sorry.
Yep, HR is such an overworked effort. /sarcasm
Where were you when their fathers established and fought for the country? *crickets* It's not about color Mr. poorly played white guilt.
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...
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!
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*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!
Can we stop this stereotype now? I've been working for IT companies for nearly 20 years and most of my colleagues (regardless of gender or sexual orientation) have had significant others or spouses.
Sure, there's been the occasional guy/girl that I can't ever see being able to handle any sort of romantic relationship but I've no reason to believe its been due to their profession.
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.
Spot on, wish I had some mod points!
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.
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
Wouldn't it be simpler just to shoot people who deliberately employed illegal immigrants? Shoot the CEOs, cut off the jobs, they stop coming. Shooting people just for trying to get to a better place seems inhumane somehow.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Does Bob Eubanks do the questioning?
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."
See my above replies. I graduated almost ten years ago with a degree in computer engineering, I spent over two of those years unemployed and have spent more time working in retail and a hotel and I did in IT. I've never been fired, only laid off, and I am always willing to work overtime. Convince me I just don't want to work hard, go on, try it.
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.
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
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.
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