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Skilled Foreign Workers Treated as Indentured Servants
theodp writes: A year-long investigation by NBC Bay Area's Investigative Unit and The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) raises questions about the H-1B visa program. In a five-part story that includes a mini-graphic novel called Techsploitation, CIR describes how the system rewards job brokers who steal wages and entrap Indian tech workers in the U.S., including the awarding of half a billion dollars in Federal tech contracts to those with labor violations. "Shackling workers to their jobs," CIR found after interviewing workers and reviewing government agency and court documents, "is such an entrenched business practice that it has even spread to U.S. nationals. This bullying persists at the bottom of a complex system that supplies workers to some of America's richest and most successful companies, such as Cisco Systems Inc., Verizon and Apple Inc."
In a presumably unrelated move, the U.S. changed its H-1B record retention policy last week, declaring that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, "are temporary records and subject to destruction" after five years under the new policy. "There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers," reports Computerworld. "The records under threat are called Labor Condition Applications (LCA), which identify the H-1B employer, worksite, the prevailing wage, and the wage paid to the worker." Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, added: "It undermines our ability to evaluate what the government does and, in today's world, retaining electronic records like the LCA is next to costless [a full year's LCA data is less than 1 GB]." President Obama, by the way, is expected to use his executive authority to expand the H-1B program after the midterm elections.
In a presumably unrelated move, the U.S. changed its H-1B record retention policy last week, declaring that records used for labor certification, whether in paper or electronic, "are temporary records and subject to destruction" after five years under the new policy. "There was no explanation for the change, and it is perplexing to researchers," reports Computerworld. "The records under threat are called Labor Condition Applications (LCA), which identify the H-1B employer, worksite, the prevailing wage, and the wage paid to the worker." Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, added: "It undermines our ability to evaluate what the government does and, in today's world, retaining electronic records like the LCA is next to costless [a full year's LCA data is less than 1 GB]." President Obama, by the way, is expected to use his executive authority to expand the H-1B program after the midterm elections.
Is anyone even remotely surprised by this?
It's time to organize the world's programmers and make it clear to business that we won't tolerate this treatment any longer. It doesn't matter if we form a union or not as long as we band together to protect our common interests as programmers.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Just like Sandy Berger going into to the archives to clean up some incriminating evidence against Hillary, Obama wants to eliminate any information concerning the H1B visa abuses. Look at who his biggest contributors are and it becomes crystal clear why he is doing this. Doesn't want some "Big Data" expert going through the records and coming to the same conclusions as the referenced article does.
These poor 3rd-worlders have unique talents that could never be found locally, don'tcha know!?!?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Across the board to members of government if needed.
But of course this won't happen because the economic incentives are just too perverse, so the question then becomes exactly what is the government protecting us from?
The best thing to do is replace the H-1B visas that are tied to a specific employer and make them a general limited time employment visa.
If the employers say there's a specific need for more workers in a field then the govt can grant a few more of the new visas to those wishing to travel to the US.
This would mean employers would be have to pay the going wage to the newcomers, albeit with the downward pressures on pay that would come from an increased worker pool.
I could be crazy tho.
NOTE: All of the above is the view of a simple rustic Northern Irishman with no desire to move to the US. Well, mebbe somewhere with snowboarding. Seriously, I live farther north than Vancouver for fuck sake, but all winter is just rain and wind. An no. I'm not going to Scotland. Our whiskey is better. If i wanted to drink bog water i'd just drink bog water.
Finally someone else is making this obvious analogy, but in one way H1-B is worse. Two of my great grandparents came to Canada as indentured servants. My great grandparents got married and fled their servitude into what was then the wilds of western Canada where as long as you could work or scratch some dirt for food and kill a little wild for extra you got along. Most of all no one was going to look for you and ship you back because there was no one to DO the work so a body was appreciated in a way, even one that wasn't a slave.
That last word being the key point. They don't want employees, they want slaves. If the free market was driving this to attract the best they would be offering all H1-Bs a premium salary and premium working conditions above local talent which would drive up wages and then supply ... guessing that is not the case.
There are abuses on all sides of this program. Just end it. The tech worker shortage is a lie. This is no longer about cherry picking the best and brightest scientific minds. It has become a system of replacing local workers with lower cost indentured servants.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What kind of stupid researchers are these? Regulatory capture, corporate welfare, and political corruption are plenty sufficient to explain the changes.
Only a knave looking for social justice in every action by a bureaucrat should be surprised, but he should be working at a daycare facility, not as a university researcher.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Companies like Verizon, Cisco, HP, and Walmart contract employment because direct-hire is nearly impossible. These companies insist you work in armpits like Bentonville Arkansas or Decalb Georgia so your salary can be shuffled down the chain to 40 grand a year not under the implication that your services are worthless, but under the assertion that the "cost of living" is so inexpensive you shouldnt need a respectable wage. American workers caught on to this shifty crap pretty quickly and now in the race to pedal labor in general into the earth, contract companies are picking up the slack. Cognizent and Infosys are two companies that actively avoid american labour capable of contesting wage theft and frivolous litigation in court. They avoid it by specifying explicitly the requirement for an H1B in order to incense foreign workers to apply. If you receive a call as an american, its generally from a roaring indian callcenter with poor diction and once your salary comes up, the call ends.
H1B is the new slave-ship, and because corporations control the general direction of american government, it isnt likely the H1B process will get any more reasonable.
Good people go to bed earlier.
still worth it. Making 55k in New Jersey, sharing a place with 3 roommates, we have much better life than at home. Two of us found new sponsored green card jobs in last three years. I hope to be next. Our neighbors don't have work visas, they work to install toilets and things and also would rather be here than home.
Office jobs are not hard and this small price to pay to live in USA.
This is going to happen in all fields going forward, because we live in a global economy now. You aren't competing with just other Americans, you're competing with everyone, everywhere. If someone in the world can do your job and do it for less, they'll take your job. Save your pennies.
"President Obama, by the way, is expected to use his executive authority to expand the H-1B program after the midterm elections."
I don't get it. If it's a good thing, do it now. If it's a bad thing then why do it later or at all ?!?!?
Filing this under hope and change
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
...even in Denmark.
Believe it or not, this isn't much different than some desperate Russian woman seeking a future "husband" in a country with democratic freedom of some sorts, what they don't know - is that everything isn't milk and honey where they come to, they're still going to be second class citizens of the country they "escape" to.
Skilled workers dream of a permanent visa after slaving over minimum wages for 5 years in the U.S. And they pretty much have to accept the conditions, because they know...if they screw up after 3.9 years under slavery, all their efforts would have been wasted, and they have to return home. Don't like the job? No problem...there's 10+ million Asians just waiting to take your job mister so get in line or get lost is pretty much the response they'd get.
You'd believe it would be better in other countries, say...like the richest countries in the world...Scandinavia, but no. I have met a bus-driver that is a surgeon, an hardware engineer from Iraq that has to work at a friends convenience store to avoid being sent home. Several people that collects bottles in our cities, are former health care workers, well educated people, librarians, scientists and many more professional occupations they "escaped" from at home where their beliefs and freedom where suppressed, hoping to find a better life over here.
But all we do, is to complain about them taking our jobs (yeah, the jobs WE DON'T WANT TO DO...), and treat them like dirt.
The whole system has to change. We must modernize this world for the 21 century, we can't keep wasting our resources like that.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
The company I work for has lowered wages for high tech workers. They only hire in St. Louis which is a relatively low wage area and not a big high tech hub. They have cut wages so much that they are offering they can only get h1bs to take the work. The are not sponsoring for greencards. So anyone who takes the job is trapped. They hired one guy who is very good. He makes about 1/3 less than I do. In a free market economy someone really good should command what I can command. However, this is used to lower wages. I have to wonder how long I'll be here. I can't compete with lower wages, willingness to move at my own expense, and if you quit or get fired, you get deported, so imagine how many hours this person will work?
I work for a fortune 100 company.
Its actually racist in 2 directions. First it discriminates against me by excluding american citizens. Its also racist against indians by forcing them to work for lower wages.
He makes about 1/3 less than I do. In a free market economy someone really good should command what I can command.
No, in a free market economy you would both be making *his* wages. What you are advocating for is a protected economy - you want the government to put rules in place (or to maintain/enforce existing ones) to ensure artificially high wages for your particular skill set. You believe the status quo must be kept as is, even in a shifting global economy.
This will sound racist or at the very least xenophobic but..
Some days I don't even notice that I'm one of 5-10 american's in my shop of 120 in a large DC based non-profit.
Other days I get tired of reading through only resumes for H1B visa holders. Many have bachelors degrees in non-technical fields, with a moderately recent technical field masters degree from their home country.
85-90% of the development team of 100 are from out of country. 99% of the QA team. The only teams that are reasonably balanced demographically are the designer and system engineering/admin team (I'm the senior member of the latter).
I've noticed the hours many of the developers and QA staff put in, it's obscene, and not something I would ever consider. I know without a doubt the reason they're willing to do so. It's a highly inefficient system, and results in a mono-culture and group-think in regards to creating solutions to software problems.
As one of the primary decision maker for hiring within my team, I make a conscious effort to fairly employee american citizens, and visa holders.
...is surprised! This is a simple fact of life anymore. They are using the H1-B visa system to get around constitutional rights. If they can't force Americans to work for peanuts due to labor laws they will import slaves that have no constitutional rights! The real problem is that capitalism can't compete with slavery, and slavery is basically legal in the majority of the industrialized world with exception of the USA and a few others. Abraham Lincoln knew that capitalism couldn't compete with slavery, and that is the real reason why he opposed slavery so strongly. So, in order to prolong the decline of our economy companies have chose to abuse the H1-B visa system. This results in the H1-B workers getting treated poorly, but they are still treated better here than in other countries for example: At Foxconn factories, where iPhones are made, there is onsite housing, and workers used to be "encouraged to live on site" by Foxconn taking the Rent money for on site housing out of their paychecks whether they lived on site or not. That isn't the case anymore, but the fact that it used to happen speaks volumes about how much better the H1-B workers are treated here regardless of the shitty pay! The only way this will ever stop is if the H1-B visa system is re-worked, and manufacturing principles change. The reason why the economy used to be good here is even though stuff cost more when it was made in the USA our products were considered quality. It's when companies started cutting corners that people didn't want to pay a premium price for something made in the USA that was the same quality as something made in Taiwan, or China. This in turn caused production of products to be moved overseas where labor is cheaper, and thus quality could be increased. There is a lot more to it but that's basically it.
The shortage of skilled workers in IT is a real problem, this leads to wages being high for those with ample experience in the field.
The fact that companies can't get a hold of them due to elevated cost of the hire, makes them resort to H1B. Foreign workers, in turn, will gladly work for a low payment in exchange of a better standard of living. This is wrong.
Just allow skilled foreigners to immigrate normally, and don't give control over their stay to companies. This way everyone will play on an even field and the whole industry benefits.
retaining electronic records like the LCA is next to costless
There's more to retaining records than retaining records.
There's the cost of remembering where they are, the cost of going through the human process of vetting access requests to make sure they are legit then extracting and possibly redacting data and giving it to the person requesting the data, and the big cost:
The cost of embarrassment when someone finds something in the records that you *as a manager or institution) either know is there and prefer that it never be found or that they find something there that even you didn't know was there but which you definitely wish had never been found.
The Boy Scouts of America learned that the hard way. I'm betting more than a few Scout Executives over the last few years secretly wish that, starting in the 1920s, the Scouts had simply turned over the information on allegedly-abusive Scout leaders to the local police (who, given the desires to not embarrass the Scouts at the time, would've probably handled most cases quietly) and put purged all "ineligible volunteer" files after 20 or 30 years, on the assumption that if, 20 or 30 years later, that person applied to be a volunteer and he had no criminal record then he was no more a danger than someone who had never volunteered with the Scouts before who also had no criminal record.
Fortunately for everyone, the Scouts did retain records, purging them only when the person turned 75, which (back in the 1920s) was a reasonable age as very few 75-year-olds who hadn't been Scouters in recent years would apply to be Scouters.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I am from EU, however this situation around the H-1B visa is why I am not even remotely interested in most of the job offers from the US that I am getting.
I have been in a similar situation in Europe before my country entered the EU and it is a lot of "fun" when you have to go every year to the immigration office, apply for a work permit renewal and pray that some clerk didn't get off the bed with the wrong foot and won't deny your application because of some bizarre reason - forcing you to lose the job and to leave the country, potentially incurring catastrophic financial losses (relocating abroad/overseas is one heck expensive, especially on a short notice!). On top of that, there is the inevitable "second class" treatment of the foreign employees, because the company knows that if the guy decides to leave, his or her permit is cancelled and they would have to leave the country on a short notice. The alternative is to have their new employer re-apply for the visa/permit again, but that must be done while the applicant lives outside of the country (yay, Switzerland ...), waiting another 6+ months for the paperwork to go through, with no guarantee of success ...
Sorry, but this is not how you treat skilled workers that you are ostensibly so interested in.
The US is doing itself a lot of disservice with this, because apart from the horrid H-1B regime, there is little else available for foreign workers (good luck trying to get the "green card" ...). I am sure there are many companies that use the visa responsibly and treat their foreign employees decently, but it is still a pretty big sword hanging over one's head.
I am certainly not expecting any entitlement to have a job in the US as a foreigner, but right now if someone wanted to hire me, they would have to offer a very sweet deal for it to be worth the gamble with the visas for me.
You don't understand open source at all. There is nothing that says you cannot have a business model on top of open source. Most of the open source software I use is written by paid programmers.
Also, not every creative activity needs to be an economic activity. Many of the cherished human accomplishments through history were not driven by economic motives. Only a subset of activities which can be predictably modeled with cost-benefit analyses lend themselves to be cast as economic activities. If you entirely stick to such things, you will have more in common with ants and bees than with being human.
When I do work for an economic motive, I have expectations of fairness, transparency and justice. I do not surrender these expectations by merely engaging in non-economic activity.
"Perplexing to researchers" would not be perplexing to criminal investigators.
In addition, working on an open source project could be a resume-booster both in where you have worked (3 years at Firm X, 4 years at Company Y, and 5 years contributing to Popular Open Source Project Z) and what skills you have (using an up-to-date technology on the open source project while your day job still is stuck on OLDER_TECHNOLOGY).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I am a European citizen living in California after six years on an H1B visa and now several years of permanent residence.
I don't doubt that these abuses occur at some companies, but there *are* companies who are interested in just hiring talent from wherever they can find it and paying above market rate to retain that talent. The US job market is a lot more cutthroat than in the main EU countries, with far fewer legal protections for workers and thus far more variability in working standards, but if you understand that going in and do your research you can do just fine.
I had a pretty easy case of a medium-sized company that got acquired by a slightly larger medium-sized company when I was on year 2 of my H1B visa, leading to a pretty straightforward transfer of visa and the only inconvenience being my green card application got delayed for a year while they repeated the labor certifications.
Other people I know in similar situations have run into other issues like their startup going out of business or laying them off. All of them who wanted to stay were able to find other jobs and transfer their visas. Others have actually left my company and transferred their visas to other companies with no problem whatsoever. I've never known anyone who was trapped or treated badly.
It's not all doom and gloom out here. If you have valuable skills and you choose the right job market (San Francisco Bay Area is the obvious choice) then there is lots of money to be made and career development to be had, even if you're from Europe. I compete with my US citizen peers with my skills and passion, not with lower wages. In fact, half of the manager/tech-leader tier in my organization (of which I am a member, after being promoted twice during my tenure) are foreign nationals from Europe, either currently on H1B visas or formerly on H1B and subsequently granted permanent residence.
Larger companies like Twitter even have employee incentives aimed specifically at immigrant workers. I'm not a Twitter employee so I don't know all the details, but some of my former co-workers (who transferred to Twitter while still on H1B visas) were immediately put on the green card track and tell me that the company offers in-office-hours training on things like understanding the US corporate culture, improving your English accent, and eventually helping you study for citizenship interviews/tests if that is the path you want to take. My company is smaller and not able to provide such perks, but they still put me on the green card track after only a year of tenure (green card application is expensive) and were supportive of my need to occasionally spend days waiting in government offices for various reasons.
in the UK they imported master stonemasons to build a temple and where caught paying them around 30p an hour - I know the guy that was involved I putting a stop to this
The H1 B visa system, and any business that used it.
Or, those same businesses that have abused any non american national using the H1B visa system.
Or, the grinning showoff that thinks, "so what?"
I hate to advise that. It is far from an optimal solutions. But, NumbersUSA is about the only organization with any juice at all, that is opposing the visa worker scam.
Again, I have a lot of problems with NumbersUSA. They are very strongly republican, although repubs are just as bad about immigration as dems. Also, they much more concerned with illegal immigration from Mexico, than they are with issues of visa workers.
Still, as I said, they are probably the best organization out there.
> Hatch, in a speech at the corporate offices of Overstock.com in Salt Lake City, called for raising the cap on H-1B visas. "Our high-skilled worker shortage has become a crisis," said Hatch, who heads the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2838619/sen-hatch-calls-high-skilled-worker-shortage-a-crisis.html
If the demand for domestic tech workers really did outstrip the supply then the wages/salary for these positions would be increasing in response. The H1B program should be reorganized such that expansions in the number of issued visas can only happen when there is real evidence of a shortage through rising income.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
The depressing part is there really isn't anything we can do about it. Voters by and large don't care. IT workers get paid more than Joe the Plumber, and the job is much easier than tearing out sewer pipes.
Handjobs for corporations are unpopular when conglomerates are sitting on mountains of cash while real unemployment remains high. So, expanding the H1-Facscist program will be postponed until after the midterms, so Democrats running for office wont have to answer pesky questions about why we should be importing more workers when so many Americans are out of work.
While I agree that the cost of embarrassment is not a legitimate cost, the cost associated with having someone available to screen records and the cost of tracking where records are kept is just as legitimate as the cost of disk/tape/paper-file storage for keeping them in the first place.
I for one don't want my bank keeping records about me and either saying "sorry, since we don't have anyone to screen access, nobody can access them" or the polar opposite, "sorry, since we don't have anyone to screen access, everyone can access them your privacy be ****'ed."
It is only records which are 100% public that don't need screeners. Even many records on deposit at America's courthouses don't meet this requirement: In some states it used to be routine for military service people to deposit some military records with the courthouse for safe-keeping. These included Social Security Numbers. In the modern age of identity theft, court clerks now routinely redact Social Security Numbers when someone requests a copy of these records.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Unpaid, hobby work can produce Dillo. It cannot produce Firefox or WebKit. A Dillo does not diminish the value of the paid programmers at Mozilla.
Open Source allows money making vendors to collaborate. For instance, the Apache project produces open source code from many profitable vendors. Each project may not be viable when executed by any single vendor. But together, it makes the work lighter and the individual vendors can focus and compete on their core strengths while sharing the common load. Note that everyone is making money in the process.
> even though about 99% make zero money
Where are you drawing these numbers from? Most of the quality open source code is from paid people working on the clock. Are there many small projects done off the clock? Sure. But a very large chunk of critical and widely adopted code is created and maintained by paid people, with occasional exceptions leading to bugs like Heartbleed.
There are projects that are meant to be open source projects (especially common infrastructure bits that we can all agree on) and there are projects that make economic sense only as proprietary projects and there is stuff in between. Open source is adding value, not diminishing it. You are seeing software value as a closed system when it isn't. Many of the traditional ideas of material markets don't exactly translate to software markets. Given the vibrancy and growth of software markets, it is that the other [markets and human enterprises] should take lessons from software markets when valid, not that the software markets should learn from classical markets.
that the random person off the street will be an old white guy, so you'd be right back where you started.
The fact that your friend and corporate overlord was suddenly against universal healthcare should have been a good enough indication that any advances were despite him and not because of him.
Oh, so we're free to buy goods and housing at third world prices? All the CEO's that make more than $500k a year have been fired and replaced with MBA's from India? No and no you say? Then it sounds like the "global economy" is still really a "capitalist crock of shit".
I'm tempted to say that's a first world view. It's a lofty ideal, and might work if the playing field were more level, but when you're incorporating programmers from third world countries, who are looking forward to a subsistence wage in some craphole, it's hard to tell them to go on strike. These people are looking forward to 70 hour weeks (I've seen this, with H-1B workers locally) at lower-middle-class wages, as something that's *still* one hell of a lot better than they came from.
I suspect that attempts to organize will be taken as first worlders trying to save their overly-cushy jobs.
I would support organizing to keep out most Indian programmers, because many of the Indian programmer I have meet are poorly trained coders that produce sub-standard code. But then I don't really care about nationality or race, I just am annoyed by bad coders. Construction unions have differing categories of skill sets that enables you to work on certain types of jobs. Such a system would be good for IT to keep idiots from building database solutions on top of Excell spreadsheets.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
got family in the US to sponsor your green card? WELCOME! you have a right to everything including social security. you can flip burgers or work for nasa..we don't care. and you can get your citizenship in just a few years.
got skills? advanced stem degrees from the US? indentured servitude visa for you...maybe! green card is a dream. you must be employed in this specific thing or else! YOU MUST COMPLY! YOU ARE A FOREIGNER! YOU WILL BE A FOREIGNER FOR A DECADE! GET USED TO IT OR GO BACK HOME!
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
Cherry picking and exaggeration. There are problems with both extremes - so lets get back into the middle. Down with extremism! Which includes both political parties.
Real unemployment is 19% (6% short term, 6% long term, 0.5 * 15% underemployed). Use the U-6 if you want to be at least semi-realistic.
Oh, and 23% wage reduction.
Hurricane Sandy $60b was 99% waste. I was there. Almost all damage was self induced, starting with failure to trim trees from power lines (over 10k outages).
Much better than Romney (Bush 2.0) but mediocre at best. Democrats are incompetent when it comes to economics. But Republicans are evil.
So is the alternative, the defined-contribution model.
You get less overall performance and casino-like odds on returns.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Oh, so we're free to buy goods and housing at third world prices? All the CEO's that make more than $500k a year have been fired and replaced with MBA's from India? No and no you say? Then it sounds like the "global economy" is still really a "capitalist crock of shit".
Other than locally grown food, the price of durable goods is pretty consistent around the world. I've been there, I know. So your strawman "third world pricing" falls apart pretty fast. Do you have any example of this pricing disparity? If you find any, yes, you are free to purchase and import at will.
And yes there are tons of MBA's from India over here. My MBA class (class of '07) was roughly 1/3 China, 1/3 India and 1/3 north america/europe. That mix is typical for most top end MBA programs. Some go back to India/China, some stay here.
Perhaps your problem is you don't really understand what "global" means, or appreciate the benefits you get from it.
I agree. It is all too clear that the H-1B program is simply a way to exploit foreign workers and eviscerate the middle class. In addition, the de-facto elimination of borders between Central America and the United States also depresses wages for even the unskilled workers. All of these things benefit only the elite. An additional revolution, as Jefferson implied, may be required after all.
If this is the plight of H1B in USA, can you imagine the living/working conditions of 800 million Lower caste people in India.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_politics_in_India
Casteism
Why H1B is NOT included in http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_collar_crimes
Casteism
On some planet where every product in Wal-Mart and every piece of electronics isn't already made in China?
Why, how many of those immigrants are being paid $200k a year to replace corporate executives pulling in 8 figures a year? What does Larry Ellison do for $100 - $200 million every 12 months that a team of Ph.d's from Bangladesh wouldn't do for a million, total?