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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...
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).
"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.
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...
... 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.
We have gay marriage now and the software scene is still mostly male, unfortunately.
Nobody is forcing them to pack up their family and move here. What you're describing is the same for anyone who needs to relocate for a job, though I admit it's more difficult when relocating to another country. All of the potential consequences need to be factored in if they're going to move, the same as for anyone else who relocates for a job or any other reason. If they're living a good life, one of the two is well employed, and they don't want to pack up and leave, they're not being forced to. As it is, unemployment and underemployment are still serious issues in the US for everyone, and that's killing marriages for citizens as well! While I can see people making the argument it isn't fair to tell the H1B workers' spouses they can't work, the H1B worker has already been granted a special privilege to be able to work here and it's also unfair to grant that same privilege to the spouse just for being married to them.
There are a lot of problems with our immigration system, and I would never suggest we stop allowing people to come to this country and work toward improving their lives, but the fact is there already isn't enough work to go around and it isn't fair to those of us already here to keep willingly increasing the rate at which we add workers to the pool, not until jobs are added at the same rate. It sounds like you'd have to be a dick to say, "You can't work in the country you live in," but that only looks at half the story. It's still pretty damn generous to say, "If you want, you can take your family and move to this country so you can be employed here, but your spouse won't be able to work while they're here." If that doesn't sound like a sweet deal, simple solution, don't take it. It's up to them to decide what's best for them, it's not up to us to sweeten the deal until it is what's best for them.