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Mark Zuckerberg Throws Pal Joe Green Under the Tech Immigration Bus
theodp (442580) writes "A month after he argued that Executive Action by President Obama on tech immigration was needed lest his billionaire bosses at Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC have to hire 'just sort of OK' U.S. workers, Re/code reports that Joe Green — Zuckerberg's close friend and college roommate — has been pushed out of his role as President of FWD.us for failing to Git-R-Done on an issue critical to the tech community. "Today, we wanted to share an important change with you," begins 'Leadership Change', the announcement from the FWD.us Board that Todd Schulte is the new Green. So what sold FWD.us on Schulte? "His [Schulte's] prior experience as Chief-of-Staff at Priorities USA, the Super PAC supporting President Obama's re-election," assured Zuckerberg in a letter to FWD.us contributors, "will ensure FWD.us continues its momentum for reform." Facebook, reported the Washington Post in 2013, became legally "dependent" on H-1B visas and subject to stricter regulations shortly before Zuckerberg launched FWD.us with Green at the helm."
There couldn't be a wrose personality to be in power than Zuckerberg.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I hereby award you Most Unreadable News Snippet Award. Bravo.
But, how is this possible? I thought Obama banned his team from becoming lobbyists after they left him???
I guess that rule doesn't apply to everyone. Good thing we have the most transparent administration ever and these lobbying efforts won't influence anyone...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
What this boils down to is we've got a company propped up on nothing more than hot air and advertising that has to lowball the market in order to keep their ill-gotten goods. Keep in mind Zuckerbergs billions came from people investing in his company, it didn't come from actual sales of a product. Of course the man is a scam artist.
1: To have Americans work on critical projects and not spill the beans to your competition, you need a NDA and non-compete agreement, both if which you pay American workers a premium for. With H1B's, you don't.
2: When you hire a college grad with a school loan, you're paying their them to be educated irregardless if you like it or not.
3: This is about wage arbitrage; whenever you sell products made in a slave wage state to a free state, you are in effect consuming the margin the labor pool in that free state would otherwise make to, and here's the key guys, put the cash in your pocket, you aren't doing a god damn thing for the world. There aren't more engineers, or better educated engineers, or better products, or better designed products, or better manufacturing and construction methodology. Do that enough and you destabilize the government like in Russia, and that one led to millions of deaths from the Russian Mob selling of arms, including nukes, to foreign countries.
4: What are you doing, Zuckerberg, to motivate Americans to work hard? Because at the end of the day, if you aren't sharing the profits and are just exploiting you, Americans will destroy your business. Mexicans do the same thing nowadays, and the Indians, well, they aren't much better.
Sort of OK? Fuck you Mark, you degenerate piece of shit!
Its tragic that Mark et al are being forced to put up with just sort of OK US workers.
You know one step that Mark et al could take that would grease the skids on their immigration reforms?
Pay the geniuses they want to import what they're worth. See The Bottom of the Pay Scale: Wages for H-1B Computer Programmers.
In fact, Mark et al should either pay back salaries to all of the H-1b workers they've ever employed or Mark et al should be thrown in prison for fraudulent abuse of the H-1B guest worker provision.
Seastead this.
Or a collection of fullstops, dashes and capitalised consonants?
There are some problems you ignored. First is that the industry claims there is a "shortage" to justify high quantities of H1B's. There is no evidence of a general shortage, only spot shortages, which are necessary for those with glut skills to be accepted into new-trend skills.
Second, is that during IT recessions they don't shut off the H1B spigot: visa workers keep coming. IT has been booming and busting since at least the 80's and I see no reason this pattern will change.
And I have seen H1B workers being abused. Your example is only a spot sample.
In general, the industry wants "instant employees" rather than spend time and money on training. This means that if a US techie loses their job in a glut area, they cannot get retraining for the new area because the company will hire an H1B worker that already has experience. The citizen can read books etc., but companies prefer existing paid experience.
Companies just want what they want when they want it and don't want to pay anything inconvenient for these goals.
Regardless of whether there are some H1B abuse myths floating around, the whole premise is based on a lie.
Table-ized A.I.
If you mean that there is no shortage of people with STEM credentials, you are absolutely right. But most of those people are the product of a dysfunctional US educational system. They have fancy degrees but not the skills the US needs. US industry doesn't want them. The fact that there is a worldwide shortage of qualified STEM graduates is easy to see, since many other nations basically just rubber stamp work visas for skilled workers.
And the idea that you can force American companies to hire American workers that don't meet their needs is ludicrous. What those companies are going to do is hire the workers they actually want overseas. And eventually, they are just going to leave the US altogether, by moving their headquarters abroad, by "inversions", or eventually by just getting acquired by overseas competitors.
Let them. That's the real problem. These companies do not want to move overseas, probably couldn't sustain the model they have if they did so, but want to exploit the system by paying overseas wages with the advantages they get from being a US company. Let them go elsewhere, there are plenty who would take their place. Instead, they are taking ad money from companies selling in the US, or selling products to US citizens banking on the expendable income that is common here while hoping to lower their employees wages to that of nations where this expendable income isn't present. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Let them go, or let them pay what is expected in the nation they are selling to. I wish we would do the same with manufacturing.
In the specific case of Facebook, it is not about driving wages down. Facebook pays decent wages, even for Silicon Valley standards. It is about not increasing wages.
If it's not (in any way) about wages, then there would be no problem for Congress to repeal the 1965 Immigration Act in its entirety, cancel all the programs enabled by it, and (via the market) actively/aggressively solicit long-term unemployed US citizens in their place - as regular workers. There are more than enough of them to go around to be not only qualified, but very well qualified. Unfortunately, citizenship in the US makes people expensive, even for hard-working, by-the-book immigrants that want to come to the US.
Truth of the matter is, in the SF Bay Area, it is hard to be unemployed if you're a properly skilled tech worker, citizen, green-card holder or otherwise.
Truth of the matter is that "properly skilled" can be redefined to exclude otherwise-suitable US citizens too easily. In the eyes of an H1-b/L1/etc. supporter, "properly skilled" is equivalent to saying "has proper fear of an employer". If you were to go to the extreme end of business-friendliness (which spawned the H1-b preference), the ultimately qualified worker is a slave. They cost nothing and are the easiest to dispose.
That doesn't mean I condone the way that the H1-B program often is being abused today. I've seen abuse, and we'll always see that.
Then get rid of what enables the abuse - every single guest worker program. After that, strict enforcement of immigration laws already on the books - SB1070 and similar laws show that it works.
But this is only made possible due to the ridiculous limits on permanent resident visas vs the amount of H1-B visas, as I pointed out in this comment
The only proper limit for all guest worker programs is 0. If you want someone enough, they'll take up naturalization where they can't be corralled between sponsor employers. It might make them incur business-unfriendly "costs of freedom" (by being able to choose their employer), but the market also functions to raise prices.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.