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If Immigration Reform Is Dead, So Is Raising the H-1B Cap
dcblogs writes: In a speech Wednesday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) declared immigration reform dead. He chastised and baited Republicans in Congress for blocking reform, and declared that winning the White House without the support of a growing Hispanic population will become mathematically impossible. "The Republican Presidential nominee, whoever he or she may be, will enter the race with an electoral college deficit they cannot make up," said Gutierrez. If he's right, and comprehensive immigration reform is indeed dead, then so too is the tech industry's effort to raise the cap on H-1B visas. Immigration reform advocates have successfully blocked any effort to take up the immigration issue in piecemeal fashion, lest business support for comprehensive reform peel away. Next year may create an entirely new set of problems for tech. If the Republicans take control of the Senate, the tech industry will face this obstacle: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee could become its next chairman. He has been a consistent critic of the H-1B program through the years. "The H-1B program is so popular that it's now replacing the U.S. labor force," said Grassley, at one point.
Next year may create an entirely new set of problems for tech.
Problems like how to treat their employees like human beings rather than disposable trash?
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Now maybe the IT jobs will pay a little better and people over 40 can get a IT job.
Just say no to a cheaper, but less productive H-B1 visa holder
Exactly - there are plenty of workers here in America that can fill that void - employers are just reluctant to pay the proper price for it.
H1B is merging with the us labor force, not replacing. The overwhelming H1B workers I know have either become citizens or are eager to do so.
No, immigrants are replacing native workers. The Center For Immigration Studies just released a report showing that all employment growth since 2000 has gone to immigrants, legal and illegal. There is no general labor shortage.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
My personal problem with all this talk of immigration reform has been the consistent desire by both parties to making the expansion of E-Verify a requirement of any bill. To sum it up, E-Verify is a way for the executive branch to block the employment of anyone that the database flags. Or more colloquially, you have to get permission from the president in order to feed and house your family.
One of the biggest problems with e-verify is the false negative rate. Even if you assume absolutely no malice, you can easily end up on the "no work list" by accident. Note, that's not a false positive - giving people permission to work when they aren't permitted, it is stopping people who have done nothing wrong in the slightest.
Requiring government permission to work is absolutely unacceptable policy in a free society. E-verify is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.
Employers: There is a shortage of good tech qorkers. Give us more H1 visas so we can get the work done.
Employees: These darn foreigners are taking our jobs! They work for much less than us people born in Amerika! (studys show about $13,000 less http://www.workpermit.com/news... )
The simplest solution is of course to offer unlimited H1 Visas - at the cost of $15,000, paid by the corporation, before the employee is hired.. (with inflation adjustments so this doesn't become abused).
This solves all real claims of not enough tech workers, it reduces the US budget, and gets rid of the financial incentive to refuse to hire perfectly good American tech workers.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Nonsense. I support eliminating the H1-B program entirely. Poof, gone. I also support streamlining the legal immigration program. Supporters of H1-B don't mind letting "them" do the dirty work, but god forbid "that kind" should move in!
So who is the racist, the guy that welcomes actual immigrants or the guy who wants to churn 'em and burn 'em?
>It's a federal civil infraction, legally less serious than minor copyright infringement.
No, it's a crime. Just like copyright infringement.
If the MAFIAA can continue to say that copyright infringement is a crime, then we need to do the same for all civil infractions.
> In order to be H-1B eligible a position has to pay at least the prevailing wage for the job title in the region that the job is located. .
That's not really enforced.
The big problem with H1Bs is that they're basically indentured servants (as you note), and it's very difficult for them to change jobs. So the companies can pressure them for more work, via unpaid overtime.
They need to change the system so that H1Bs can switch jobs at any time, with no penalty. If companies are really THAT desperate for workers, they'll pay the filing costs and legal fees anyway, even if there's a chance the employee will leave. If they don't want to, then they're really not that desperate for workers are they?
Those of you who believe that an H-1B worker is paid less than a domestic worker don't know anything about the requirements of the program. In order to be H-1B eligible a position has to pay at least the prevailing wage for the job title in the region that the job is located.
Not if the "prevailing wage" has already been artificially lowered by the presence of so many H1-B workers. An a regular American work can also do things like quit if the job sucks and ask for raises.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
being an illegal immigrant is not a crime. It's a federal civil infraction, legally less serious than minor copyright infringement.
Whoa slow down there, I don't think it's fair to compare immigration to something as heinous as minor copyright infringement. At worst it's a lesser crime like first degree murder or human trafficking.
Why does the US need a population infusion? All the new manufacturing in the US is heavily automated; in fact, the big fear now is that increasing automation is going to render many lower and middle-class jobs obsolete. We aren't going to need taxi drivers pretty soon, for instance, because of driver-less cars. The economy's in the shitter (except for the 1%), and good-paying jobs are drying up. So why again do we need a population infusion?
Are you advocating that we start treating workers the way they do in China, where they live in company barracks as virtual slaves and there's no minimum wage? This seems to be what the open-borders advocates are advocating these days: bringing in a giant number of easily-exploited laborers so that corporate profits can be increased.
I thought the Republicans were supposed to be the ones in the pockets of Big Business, but these days it seems that the Democrats are the ones more guilty of that.
There may be legal requirements but that does not mean it is being followed in practice or that the spirit of the law is being blatantly broken.
So just hire a senior H-1B worker for an entry level job title. Job titles are meaningless and not standardized.
The real fiction is when companies lie and say that they can not find local qualified workers in order to justify hiring H-1B workers.
I am for increasing immigration and immigration reform but this remark is off base.
Most illegal immigrants are drawn to America for its economic opportunities and are not seeking asylum due to prosecution from back home (political, religious, etc.).
What it's done is placed a carrot out there to bring on H1-B programmers instead of college hires.
With an H1-B the employer has a lot of power over the employee. They can't move jobs with out sponsorship. It's very easy to knock them out of the country. You can easily classify them in a lower pay band because they have very little recourse. These employees usually get little to know employee development (i.e. money).
With a college hire the employee can change jobs at will. You as the employer are expected to put money into employee development. And in the end they are likely to leave after a couple years to seek greener pastures.
So yes, the H1-B program has done tremendous harm to our country. I consult with many large companies and I haven't seen a intern in a programming department in half a decade. College hires are few and far between. It's a radical change from how things were when I started in the 90s. Simply put business have put their money into short term H1-B and Offshore workers. They stopped putting money into college hires. Now they whine they can't find qualifies workers because they stopped investing in Junior programmers a decade ago.
Where I work now, we have two H-1Bs in our dev group of 12. Both are outstanding workers, and "legitimate" in that the company made a good-faith effort to fill the positions with Americans, but wasn't able to find people with the needed skills. Both are also paid at what I would consider to be an appropriate wage comparable to ours, and HR takes good care of them and makes a real effort to abide by both the letter and spirit of the law. This is how it's supposed to work.
Having said that, I've also worked at places that brought in H-1Bs in preference to American workers, even when the domestic workers were more qualified for the position. The reason? Money. At one place I worked (dev group of 14 with 4 domestic workers), the highest paid of that group was at about my experience and competence level, yet was paid less than 2/3 of my salary, and the company made it very clear to all of them that if they didn't toe the line, they were welcome to go right back to the five different nations they came from. Of course, personal experience doesn't mean it happens everywhere, but I've seen it enough to believe that there are a non-trivial number of employers that are in fact abusing the program.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Familiar with the Dreyfus model of skills acquisition?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Sure you are. It goes like this: Want to be an expert? First you need to to be proficient. Want to be proficient? First you need to have been competent. Want to be competent? First you need to have been an advanced beginner? Want to be an advanced beginner? First you'll need to be a novice. Want to be a novice? Great! Just get started learning by following the rules and doing what people around you do. Experience will let you unwind the stack.
Every profession maps to this. It's a type of career ladder. And what do H1-B's do? They seriously knock out the chances of getting a position on the lower rungs of the ladder. H1-B aren't taking me and other Gen-Xers jobs, they're taking the millennial's jobs. And the Baby Boomers who pissed & shit in the punch bowl that used to hold the American dream don't care enough to do anything about it. They started setting the tone for all this bullshit over 10 years ago and just like everything else, now we're left holding the bag.
Fuck class warfare. I think there's some serious generational knuckle dusting that needs to be applied to those in power in BOTH political parties regarding what's happened on their watch to whole notion of careers they've been selling to the rest of us.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
Fuck you with a soldering iron, seriously.
You took a serious concern about importing indentured servants and turned it into a stereotype of a racial stereotyper?
I have no problem with immigration, and I have no problem with corporate sponsored visas to that end. The problem I, and many have, is that an H1-B visa allows you to pull someone in with highly theoretical rights. Given legislation that already makes it so programmers in general are commonly subjected to a de-facto requirement of uncompensated 20-30 hours past 40, you cannot tell me there is a shortage of actual labor. Only a shortage of cheap labor. And in an industry that has cash spewing out of its pores, that's a pile of bullshit. At least right now though, I can use my extra hours to justify a wage significantly above "prevailing". Every person they pull in from a culture that is more used to their people being corporate slaves increases the economic pressure for me to behave like one.
The H1-B needs fixing. If they want to import labor due to an actual labor shortage, import them without caveat. That labor shortage doesn't really exist though.