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Tech Looks To Obama To Save Them From 'Just Sort of OK' US Workers
theodp writes Following up on news that the White House met with big biz on immigration earlier this month, Bloomberg sat down with Joe Green, the head of Mark Zuckerberg's Fwd.US PAC, to discuss possible executive actions President Obama might take on high tech immigration (video) in September. "Hey, Joe," asked interviewer Alix Steel. "All we keep hearing about this earnings season though from big tech is how they're actually cutting jobs. If you look at Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, why do the tech companies then need more tech visas?" Green explained why tech may not want to settle for laid-off U.S. talent when the world is its oyster. "The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge," Green said. "Culture in tech is a very meritocratic culture," he added. "The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
They aren't interested in building up or maintaining US employees; they want to have foreign countries foot the bill for the training of their workers so they can sit around and reap the benefits of advanced training without laying out money to make it happen--and further, they want these employees dependent upon their employment with the company to remain in the country, rather than being able to move about at will.
Indentured workforce, in other words.
This isn't a tech report, it's political propaganda. There's plenty of awesome U.S. techs to do the jobs that are out of them, just as good as the imports, they just want U.S. wages.
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"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
I've worked in tech (SE) for 15+ years now, and I don't know of a single colleague that would agree with the sentiment expressed in that quote.
Business lobbying for what what will be best for them. News at 11.... Hopefully, voters make this an issue.
"The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge"
Especially when you want to keep that person tied to the company for the duration of their visa and pay them less than someone with a non-visa.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
We're too cheap to hire a less experienced person and train them to do their job properly.
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Of course they want to hire the "very best", where "bestness" is measured by how little money they are willing to work for.
I don't disagree that there are some really smart people around the world who want to work for Google, but really valuable people don't need special programs to come over to work. The existing system is already set up to admit them. This is a smoke screen to hide the true purpose of the program: finding more people who don't know the value of their skills, preferably ones without many existing relationships that are easier to overwork.
I read the internet for the articles.
Let's be honest here: no it isn't.
Tech skills are hard to objectively verify. Technical results are hard to objectively verify. We collectively proxy that by having lots of tests, competitions, selection, and other heuristics. But that's not a symptom of us respecting skill more than other jobs(maybe more than other specific office jobs, but not more than lawyers, doctors, manufacturing technicians, similar things), it's a symptom of it being really hard to tell.
These companies are looking to take shortcuts. And some are looking for excuses to cut salaries. That's it.
Is this article a troll? If it is then I give it 10/10, gr8 b8 m8, and all that shit, because it makes me want to punch someone. In the face. Repeatedly. I've never heard such total bullshit in my entire life. So, what, I'm supposed to sit back and accept an attitude of 'fuck U.S. workers, they all suck, we'll hire from overseas because they're better'? Bull-fucking-shit. Know what I think? I think they like getting anyone they can that will work cheaper, that's what. I work with engineers, I live in the same house as an engineer, and they all tell me how it really is: They'd rather hire younger workers from overseas, regardless of their lack of experience and education, because they can get them dirt cheap, and to hell with quality.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
> Proof that US slashdotters techies are just sort of OK at best since they don't want high skills immigration. Low skills immigration is fine since it doesn't compete directly with their jobs though.
What immigration?
H1Bs are an indentured servitude program.
It was a stark realization the first time found out that the imported PhDs in my shop were making less than I was. I was in a much better position to negotiate for better salary despite having less education and a more generic specialty.
I had the legal standing to tell my employer to "take this job and shove it".
I happily took advantage of the situation but never forgot the injustice of it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
"The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries because they want to work with the very best."
Show me ONE.
Just fucking ONE.
He or she must have a pulse,
be conscience,
have an IQ over 30,
full citizenship,
NOT A POLITICIAN,
NOT A CEO,
NOW SHOW ME ONE.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
So this tool just shit on U.S. workers and claims that people who are essentially nothing but ITT Tech graduates from a third world country are superior.
They are cheaper, more subservient, less likely to push for raises, and are perfectly happy work 60-80 our weeks.
I'm sure he has illegals mowing his lawn too. I wonder if Google Car can be programed to run someone down.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
as long as there is a high min wage + OT pay for them.
As some places use them as cheap workers chained to the job.
also if they want to use them as the best then they should be locked to that job with just about no time to find an other (h1bs have to get out as soon as there job is over) if they get fired or layed off.
Here is a study that was done a long time ago (1985). Skip down to section 5. It states that the most productive engineers were given 78 sqft of dedicated floor space, thought of there environment as quiet, private, and could silence or divert calls, were not interrupted, and thought they were appreciated. Skill had nothing to do with whether the engineer could finish the project they were assigned. http://teaching.davearnold.ca/...
Maybe tech companies need to develop culture that encourages good engineers rather than hiring foreign workers.
So that means that tech workers from abroad are better than tech workers here? Well, that must then mean that schools abroad are better than schools in the US because, hey, where would they get their knowledge from. And that of course must mean that we'd also find much better managers in India and Pakistan than we can find here, for obviously the same reason.
I fail to see a lot of H1B visa applications for CEOs, though? I really, really wonder what could possibly be the reason. I'd really want to work for a great CEO for a change, I can tell ya. I mean, when we all want to work with superior colleges, I can only assume that we would all just outright LOVE to work for a superior CEO!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then your company is breaking the law and you should report them. Companies are required to pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region. We paid both of our H1B workers well above average for our staff and when they worked out sponsored their green cards (and boy is that process a cluster!), we're the kind of employer that the program was actually designed for, we were looking for extremely rare talent sets and had advertised the positions for months before looking abroad. I have to say that I have much bigger problems with the screwups in the green card program than I do with the H1B system, permanently bringing smart people from abroad raises the GDP of the US and brings diversity to the country.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Mod this one up! The idea that we need to import tech workers because US tech workers aren't good enough isn't just wrong. It's blatantly un-American. "Oh yes, we're laying off all these high skilled workers, but what we REALLY need is more skilled workers from other countries. Our American college graduates just can't compete anymore with Bangladeshis (at least they can't compete on price, o ho ho)!"
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
They are cheaper, more subservient, less likely to push for raises, and are perfectly happy work 60-80 hour weeks [while getting paid for 35 - AC].
That's what he meant by "truly great."
To the employer that is a huge form of merit that can easily outweigh others!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
As a tech worker myself, I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse. I mean I've seen some people, very much home grown, who seem to have such a poor grasp of how things work that I wonder how on earth they even have a job.
Companies are required to pay above the prevailing wage for the position and region.
First of all, the "prevailing wage" is already artificially lowered because of the presence of H1B's. But, even so, it doesn't matter because there are a million ways around this law anyway. Want to get around having to pay your Indian software engineer the prevailing wage for a software engineer? No problem! Just hire him as a "Junior Programmer."
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I guarantee you that "the vast, vast majority of tech engineers" would not assume that "other countries" automatically meant "the very best". The general consensus in my neck of the woods is that engineers of foreign origin are about on par with our native engineers. The consensus I've seen in pop culture is that the foreign engineers are generally much worse. I can only imagine the question that would lead to the response above:
Q: If faced with a choice between a top foreign engineer or a mediocre American one, which would you hire?
A: The foreign one. I'd want to work with the very best.
I sometimes ask revealing, often ignorant-seeming questions. Maybe they're harder to answer than you think.
As others here have already posted, I call BULLSHIT of this quote by Joe Green. This is nothing more than political propaganda. I worked in the computer industry over 35 years for DEC, EDS, HP, Loral Aerospace, and others. My roles ranged from component repair at customer location (soldering iron & oscilloscope), customer service manager, system engineering project manager, database admin, sales support, system admin, and virtualization work. As also stated by an early poster, I don't know of a single colleague that would agree with the sentiment expressed in the Joe Green quote. I worked with many software people holding visas. Many are very competent and motivated. Others not so much. If Mr Green thinks the 'best' are outside the United States, then perhaps Facebook, Zuckerberg, and Mr Green should relocate to become permanent expatriates.
Not superior, just cheaper. The guy is right when he states that, in tech, "The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge". It stands to reason that you'd pay a hell of a lot more to the truly great compared to the good, and that the good still earn quite a bit more than the sort of ok. Funny how that never seemed to happen, though, except in a few companies I've seen (where you also had management reeling in horror at the fact that some techies made more than them). I bet there's plenty of talent to go around in the US, but top performers command top pay or they'll up and leave. Foreign workers are a cheaper and less mobile work force.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
And the program is only supposed to be for filling jobs that CANNOT OTHERWISE BE FILLED. It's supposed to bring in geniuses and highly skilled technical workers, not fill the cubicle mazes with bodies.
What the H1B program really needs are some quantifiable metrics, i.e.
= You can only bring in H1B people for jobs where the qualified US applicant pool is smaller than X. (Only allow for highly specialized jobs)
= A person on an H1B visa must be paid at least the average regional salary for their job position (remove the lower wage incentive)
= The job which the H1B person is being hired for must require a 4 year college degree and the candidate must have received said degree from a recognized
institution.
I also support a tax on these workers, to be paid by the employer in addition to normal wages and taxes, that would directly fund educating/retraining American workers to fill tech jobs that are open. Note, this is a fair tax because only companies that want to use H1B visas would be burdened--it's totally their choice.
"As a tech worker myself, I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse."
They are not, *inherently* worse. Not by a long shot. Some of them are very, very good.
The problem is that they are being selected, not on the basis of technical skills, but on the basis of lower costs and more subservience. Companies prefer, not just foreign workers, but H1B workers specifically - because they are powerless and easier to abuse.
Just a look at the 'products' these so-called tech companies are churning out should be enough to give lie to the idea that they have any interest at all in technical excellence. They do not. They want cheap code-monkeys that will crank out utter crap as directed with no back talk, no wage pressures, and no looking for a better job to worry about.
"I mean I've seen some people, very much home grown, who seem to have such a poor grasp of how things work that I wonder how on earth they even have a job."
Sure. But we dont have any kind of monopoly on those people. Outsource to save money and you are likely to get the south asian equivalent - all the same problems, plus communication and cultural difficulties on top of it.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Most of our foreign (European) contractors are better developers (and all round co-workers) than the home grown US developers, unpopular thing to say but there it is. Add to that they are better educated in general than the US devs and US developers have the highest sense of self-entitlement and things start to look clear. I am a senior sysadmin and I prefer to deal with the foreign devs and select them for projects as they are not obsessed with position and work place politics, they just get it done.
That's easy to believe. I feel the same way.
Yet sometimes I hear people bitching about immigrants in other contexts. If they're agricultural workers instead of tech workers, somehow they're undesirable. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. It makes so little sense to me, that I think it's just plain stupid.
But that's just, like, my opinion, man. We don't open the borders. Every election we nearly unanimously scream that we want highly restricted immigration consisting of very few people, and the thought of making any moves toward meritocracy makes us so incredibly angry and resentful, that we go out of our minds with blind rage.
So, tech workers and tech industry customers (i.e. most of America), if this is how you really feel, then you need to live with the consequences. You can't say justice, fairness, and efficiency are important, yet also things you totally don't care about. Make up your fucking mind. If you speak about programmers from India in a fundamentally different way than farmers from Chihuahua, maybe you are the problem, psycho.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Green is a big fat liar. "The Best" account for less than 10k a year - across all disciplines. Cut all other visas then give these people green cards then citizenship.
75% of STEM workers leave the field due to substandard conditions. There isn't a recruiting problem, there is a retention problem.
" I don't see why foreign workers would be inherently worse."
AS one that has had to work with some great guys I can tell you that communicating took 3-5X longer. Sorry but some accents are so thick that we had to waste so much time it was not funny, we finally gave up on meetings and went to text based communication.
Hamir is a fantastic guy, but I can not understand him, and he had trouble understanding me.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Lots of geniuses FAIL. They fail spectacularly.
To be truly successful, you need to be a genius and be lucky.
I don't care how smart you are, you need the luck - if for no other reason than being born in the right country, not having a debilitating disease, and not having family that desperately needs your help. Because sometimes good luck is simply not having bad luck.
But that's beside the point. Lots of genius just had the wrong timing. There was this guy - a real genius. he came up with a great idea to help kids tie their shoes. But someone else came out with Velcro shoes that year. If he had his idea one year earlier, he would have made a couple of million and the Velcro guy would end up selling the idea to the Kid's Shoe King, instead of becoming the Kid's Shoe King.
Genius is not that rare, and the difference between the best and the second best guy is for all purposes irrelevant. Other things matter more than creativity and intelligence.
Timing, luck, and hard work matter just as much as genius.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I would prefer we did this with CEO's and executives. A company can have HUGE savings by outsourcing the useless upper management to a management center in China.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This isn't a tech report, it's political propaganda. There's plenty of awesome U.S. techs to do the jobs that are out of them, just as good as the imports, they just want U.S. wages.
That last bit is the flaw in your argument. You mistakenly think there is such a thing as "US wages". The talent pool is global and what matters is your productivity versus your price. If you demand more in wages you had better be significantly more productive and able to prove it. Your economic value to any company is based solely on productivity per dollar spent. If an overseas worker can do the work needed and is willing to do it for less money then you had better find a way to increase your value either by improving productivity or decreasing your price.
Pretending that your citizenship is any kind of meaningful protection against economic reality is just foolish. I understand that the reality of H1B visas and the rest is a harsh reality but its a reality that isn't going to change. Even if you did away with H1B visas altogether they are merely the symptom of the bigger problem which is wage disparity for a given talent level. US workers are highly paid relative to their talent compared with IT workers elsewhere and the economic consequence of that is that companies will seek lower labor costs wherever possible. This is true for ALL labor intensive industries. Get rid of H1B visas and I guarantee you will see some other equally odious tactic to reduce labor costs take its place. The only thing that will preserve high US IT wages is to develop structural economic advantages to hiring US IT workers. On a price/performance basis you need to make US IT workers the best in the world. Any solution that does not address that fact is doomed to fail.
He's right, I have said that. Of course, I always follow it with "but only if they have unrestricted visas that give them the same freedom I have to shop the market and work for whomever they want", and I suspect everyone he's talked to (presuming he isn't making it up) have said something similar.
Because when the best of the best make $200k a year, it kicks the wind of out the whiners who complain about the the average programmer salary. But when they work for $80k and they can't switch jobs, that depresses my salary, and that is precisely why lying fuckwits like Joe Green and Mark Zuckerberg want to bring them here.
I worked for a small company where the two guys writing the communications protocols were ESL, one was Hispanic, the other was Russian. They basically couldn't understand each other in English. Amusing that it was comm protocols in particular.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Exactly - truly great for this quarter's share price. Maybe the next couple of quarters. Beyond that I don't care as I'll be vested and can cash out.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
While not direct, this is already effectively the case. When an employer needs to bring in an H1B worker they end up shelling out huge amounts for lawyers fees, moving expenses etc. It is not a cheap option to hire H1B workers. Quite the opposite in fact.
Nope, the company uses one of the big Indian firms who bring in H1B in mass. They contract the H1B and pay 50% to 75% of the standard contract wage, the contracting company then kicks back 50% of it to the company hiring the contractor and pays the contractor $10 an hr. They also use various methods to keep the contract price down like classifying the contractor as a "Systems Admin" but then working them as a programmer. This is done because (in my area) the prevailing wage of a system admin is $57,000 a year compared to the prevailing wage of a programmer which is $100,000 a year.
I have also noticed that the Indian contractors will put in 80 to 90+ hours a week while only reporting 40 as the contracting firm promises to make it up to them once they get home. I actually had an Indian counterpart tell me this once.
Here's an example of how one company apparently applies that "no American available" policy:
What to Do When My US Company Won't Hire Americans?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Even if the accent isn't a problem, sometimes cultural biases can make communication rough. I once spent a two hour long meeting going in circles with someone who'd lived in the US for a decade now and spoke nearly flawless English, but who entirely failed to grasp the concept of what we were supposed to be discussing. We needed X, he assumed we needed Y, and it was only at the end that we finally convinced him to give us the X we'd asked for in the beginning.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
'The vast, vast majority of tech engineers that I talked to who are from the United States are very supportive of bringing in people from other countries...'
Name them.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
We have a visa for 'top' 'extraordinary' workers. It is the O visa. Funny there are no caps for it...
H1B is being abused and they know it. It was meant for 1-2 month gigs and they leave. Instead its turned into 6 year stints. Nearly 500k people are h1b at this time. A 6 year job is a job not a short term contract work. You can produce front to end a decent software product in 2 years. If it takes longer you are probably doing something very wrong.
There are give or take about 140 million jobs in the US. Of those 1.5-3 million depending on how you count it are IT jobs. Or about 1 out of 5 IT jobs are filled by an H1B worker.
Wages in a sellers market should go up. However, they are flat to no growth. Because companies are using the h1b to depress wages by reducing mobility.
I make it a point to show h1b workers that they are truly getting fucked over. I am currently on 15 who have up and quit and moved on to get better pay.
Many do not realize they are getting fucked over. As the standard they are coming from is so much lower. I show them how they could have *even* more and their greed kicks in every time. I also make sure they push hard on HR to get that green card. They then realize HR does not work for them either. I make it expensive to keep an H1B. Funny thing is I accidentally lucked into this at my first job as I saw a friend being screwed over being passed up for 3 raises.
What? You don't have 42 years as a J2EE programmer working prototype-driven structures?
As a manager at a company that does to hire the best and the brightest, I can say that people calling for more H1-B visas are full of s#!t.
The biggest users of H-1Bs are consulting companies, or as Ron Hira calls them, "offshore-outsourcing firms."
"The top 10 recipients in [the] last fiscal year were all offshore-outsourcers. And they got 40,000 of the 85,000 visas — which is astonishing," he says.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/allte...
Here is the break-down of my reports.
15 - born in the USA.
3- naturalized citizens when I hired them.
2- from Egypt on L1 visas (we have an office in Cairo)
2- from Korea that had green cards when I hired them
1- from China that was a grad student that we supported. F1 students visa changed to H1B by obtaining a sponsorship position with an H1B sponsor company.
1- from India that was a grad student we supported. F1 students visa changed to H1B by obtaining a sponsorship position with an H1B sponsor company.
It is fairly easy to convert F1 visa for a student that has completed graduate school in the USA to an H1B, and as far as I can tell there is no limit.
(I am not an immigration lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.)
If tried to hire highly qualified individuals from outside the US and was told that I would not be able to get them H1B visas because they were all taken (by the body shoppers). These people had PhDs from prestigious Universities and years of relevant experience. They made the unfortunate mistake of not attending a US
graduate school.
So the solution is quite simple. Stop giving H1B visas to "consulting companies".
more cowbell
H1B is being abused and they know it. It was meant for 1-2 month gigs and they leave. Instead its turned into 6 year stints
Almost true. While you are correct that the H1-B visa in itself is limited to a 6 year maximum stay, the visa can be renewed indefinitely if the holder is the beneficiary of an approved I-140 petition in the 5th year. This means that any H1-B holder can stay on that H1-B for a long time as long as they find someone willing to sponsor their greencard, and they have about 4 years -in the US- to find them.
Reason for this is that there is disconnect between the amount of H1-B visas (which are not limited per country) and amount of greencards (which are limited per country). We all know which country I'm talking about: the folks from India, however you may feel about their presence, are hitting this the most: For each EB category (EB1, EB2, EB3 in general), there are 265 greencards available per month. That's a little over 9500 per year. On the other side is the number of H1-B (and L-1) visa that get allocated to workers chargeable to India. Just for H1-B, that number comes close to 170,000 just for FY2012 (source). Then there are the L1 visa holders, which are uncapped.
So, you end up having ~10k greencards, vs ~200k influx, just for India alone. This means that there is a huge waiting list for people with approved I-140s, but not eligible to file for AOS. What are you going to do with them? Sent them back? Politics chose to let them stay by renewing their H1-B every 1 to 3 years, even after the 6th year.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
The only economic reason they'd hire an American over an H1B is if the American is willing to let his kids starve and be downright abused for $10 an hour after spending his whole life studying his craft.
You outsourcing shills are downright retarded. It should be criminal. US IT workers shouldn't have to live like utter slaves, work 80 hour weeks and need food stamps just because some barely qualified H1B will do it for $10/hr. We are not disposable blue collar idiots. We are white collar professionals and we just want the same damn respect accountants, other dept managers, other educated employees and even secretaries get within the same organization. We are often abused just about everywhere companies get away with it. We're also treated with copious amounts of paranoia and mistrust.
How would you feel if hospitals outsourced all their surgical labor to Mexican H1B's getting paid $19,000/yr and still gave you the same $2,000 bill for giving your kid antibiotic eardrops after a 5 minute visit?
Americans can't compete on price. Point blank. It costs too much to BE an American and LIVE in America. We can't tolerate spending our entire lives (and a lot of personal money) dedicated to being the skilled folks we are only to be forced to compete at a hair above minimum wage. Get a grip.
And you think unionization killed US manufacturing? No. Outsourcing did. And as good as we are at pissing off the rest of the world, being a society of unemployed skilled workers, management, minimum wage employees and lawyers will kill us if the world cuts us off.
Because different countries have different economic, social, and legal systems in place. We have no say in how other economies work, so we have to have barriers that prevent damaging leakage. It is the same reason that you don't share your bank account with everyone.
The only economic reason they'd hire an American over an H1B is if the American is willing to let his kids starve and be downright abused for $10 an hour after spending his whole life studying his craft.
If you spend your life studying something that allows you to be replaced for $10/hour then you are frankly retarded. Nobody owes you a comfortable living. You need to earn it and part of that is having the foresight to see what might be valuable to employers.
US IT workers shouldn't have to live like utter slaves, work 80 hour weeks and need food stamps just because some barely qualified H1B will do it for $10/hr. We are not disposable blue collar idiots.
Who is suggesting that you do? If you provide enough value for the wages you command then you should be able to live very nicely. But if your job can be done by someone willing to work for $10 per hour then you better reconsider just how valuable what you do actually is. Furthermore, just because someone does a "blue collar" job doesn't mean they are an idiot. Stop looking down your nose at people who don't work in an air conditioned office typing on a computer. You think you are too good to get your hands dirty? Are you really that arrogant?
Americans can't compete on price. Point blank.
Americans ARE competing on price at all times and the movement of certain types of jobs proves that fact. You could not be more wrong. Anyone who thinks price doesn't factor in is delusional. That includes competing for wages. You can ask for whatever you want but that doesn't guarantee the market will bear your asking price.
Furthermore the per-capita US income is in the top 5 in the world. How sustainable do you think that is? I suggest you learn about regression toward the mean. There are 5 people in China for every 1 in the US. Do you think Americans are smarter or harder working or more deserving? Do you think Americans are somehow special so they don't have to compete with the other 95% of the world? Grow up. The US has had a good run since WWII but that doesn't guarantee it will stay on top without a lot of hard work and sometimes some belt tightening too. Some jobs are going to move to where they make more economic sense. If you want to keep high paying jobs in the US then there is a lot of hard work to do. Better get busy because the rest of the world isn't going to wait for your lazy ass.
And you think unionization killed US manufacturing?
Nothing has killed US manufacturing. I work in manufacturing in the US and have for most of the last 20 years. I run a manufacturing company. The US manufactures over $3 Trillion in goods each year. The US manufacturing sector alone would be among the 10 largest economies in the world by GDP. Manufacturing in the US is alive and well and anyone who says otherwise has no idea what they are talking about. The number of jobs in US manufacturing has fallen just like it did in agriculture a hundred years ago but that is not by itself a bad thing. Would you prefer that 50%+ of the nation's workers be employed on farms like they were 150 years ago? What has changed is that the US predominately manufactures capital intensive rather than labor intensive goods.
Yes.
I totally understand your sentiment. However, do remember that these folks already have an approved greencard petition and the only reason that they haven't received it yet is because they are waiting for their priority date to become current.
In theory, the employer has provided evidence to the Department of Labor and USCIS that they have done a reasonable effort to hire a local (citizen or permanent resident) for the job that the alien is performing. DOL and USCIS both approved a petition to grant the alien permanent residency (DOL does PERM, USCIS does I-140). They only thing that they're waiting for is the I-485. Does it still sound reasonable to deport them?
I say "in theory" because we all know that this process is being abused heavily by a subset of greencard-factories (the same ones that take 80% of H1-Bs...)
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.