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IEEE: New H-1B Bill Will "Help Destroy" US Tech Workforce
dcblogs writes New legislation being pushed by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to hike the H-1B visa cap is drawing criticism and warnings that it will lead to an increase in offshoring of tech jobs. IEEE-USA said the legislation, introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Tuesday, will "help destroy" the U.S. tech workforce with guest workers. Other critics, including Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University and a leading researcher on the issue, said the bill gives the tech industry "a huge increase in the supply of lower-cost foreign guest workers so they can undercut and replace American workers." Hira said this bill "will result in an exponential rise of American jobs being shipped overseas." Technically, the bill is a reintroduction of the earlier "I-Square" bill, but it includes enough revisions to be considered new. It increases the H-1B visa cap to 195,000 (instead of an earlier 300,000 cap), and eliminates the cap on people who earn an advanced degree in a STEM (science, technology, education and math) field. Hatch, who is the No. 2 ranking senator in the GOP-controlled chamber, was joined by co-sponsors Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Chris Coons (D-Del.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in backing the legislation."
See? They do work together! They are a team! The majority wants this. Don't even try to argue with them.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They're like workers in the US (and everywhere):
Precious, precious few talented and useful ones, hordes of shitty ones
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
That does seem to be what 'bipartisan' means.
So when a "disruptive" technology forces down prices for Taxis (Uber, etc), Hotels (airBnB etc), Music (Spotify, etc) Software (Linux etc) Banking (Bitcoin) I see that the old guard are like "Buggy Whip" makers and they have no automatic right to be profitable or in business.
So here is a shock, if that applies to the businesses it must also apply to the workers.
Capitalism applies to wages just as it does to anything else, if you can buy it cheaper elsewhere, do it.
Considering the way China and India are growing, many of the brightest graduates that are turned out from state-subsidized universities are better employed at home.
There was a time in the last 2-3 decades where a highly qualified engineer from these countries had no choice but to emigrate to the states to have a career. This is increasingly no longer necessary. Making it harder for people to move to the US will have the beneficial effect of halting the brain drain in these countries and keeping the brightest minds home.
Anyone else notice this: STEM (science, technology, *education* and math)
Pretty sure that should be Engineering...
Explain to me how allowing more foreign workers to come to the US under H1B visas will increase offshoring? Surely not allowing people to work here is going to cause work to be sent overseas, not the other way around.
Every H1B worker I've met (including myself) wants to get a green card so they can live and work in the US permanently. At which point they are just as much part of the US tech workforce as a citizen who was born and raised here.
I really don't understand why they want this. Is it just plain out right corporate greed? Do the legislators really believe that, in doing this, US tech workers won't be negatively effected, as if there are all these tech jobs out there that US workers can't or won't fill? It has to be more than that, right?
I'm honestly thankful that, where I work in IT (healthcare), they really can't hire H1B's because it's doubtful any H1B candidate would have enough experience to pass muster. That, and they can barely find anyone in the local market to fill the position anyways. Except me!
for senators? They may be cheap enough for ordinary people to bribe.
Isn't STEM Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics? I know the original article also has it as "education", but I would imagine that's wrong.
You're new here, aren't you.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It's using the phrase "offshoring" to mean Americans losing jobs to cheaper foreign workers in general. Probably because by now everyone understands that "offshoring" == "bad".
It doesn't change the fact that the basic point (the death of American IT) is correct. If you can bring anyone in with an "Advanced STEM" degree then India will just open more schools to rubber stamp 'em. Race to the bottom.
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I am sorry to say you can't blame this just on the most recent iteration of cookie-cutter presidents. This shit all reached critical mass when we stopped listening to Ross Perot.
It increases the H-1B visa cap to 195,000 (instead of an earlier 300,000 cap),
Now I aren't no math genius, but ... increases?
Being anti-H1B isn't protectionism.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The entire system is corrupt.
All politicians lie in order to get elected and then do what they feel like doing afterward.
The above applies to Bush, Obama, and all the rest of the scum. There is no substantive
difference between one politician and the next. They will all pretend to be your buddy
and then screw you whenever it suits their agenda.
Your vote is meaningless. The show goes on regardless of who holds office, because
the real power in the US is not elected.
Welcome to the real world.
Enjoy your stay.
US Jobs Policy:
Step 1: Export tech jobs overseas to increase corporate profit
Step 2: Throw all low-skill immigrants back across the border
Step 3: Now US tech workers can get jobs doing lawn work, picking crops, and nannying.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This has nothing to do with protectionism. Nobody is saying not let foreign software into the country.
As for foreign labor, I have no objection to bringing foreign labor in. My objection is kicking that labor out after it has gained experience. If there really was a tech worker shortage, these are the very workers we'd want to stay.
What this does is create a pool of offshore labor that's familiar with the work being done *here*. The obvious purpose is to use the immigration system to assist companies that want to relocate work overseas. And there's nothing special about American tech people; anything we can do can be done in India or Ukraine. That's fine, but I don't think the US government should be in the business of making it attractive for companies to move jobs overseas.
It's something so irrational (if we were to assume for the moment that the US government works for the welfare of the American people) there isn't even a word for it. It's the mirror image of protectionism. It's self-predation.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes. Just like here. Except less expensive. So actually not just like here. See how that works?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yeah more people get fucked to make billionaires richer.
Yes. Just like here. Except less expensive. So actually not just like here. See how that works?
Soon the American worker WILL cost less, if he or she wants a fucking job.
Isn't unrestrained capitalism great ?
It sure is, if you're at the top of the pyramid.
/
1. Bring H1-B over to be trained and work.
2. Send back.
3. Open up foreign branch.
4. Reduce costs -> increased profit.
Model 2:
1. American company gets H1-Bs.
2. Sells services as "American" company (really important to government and politicians.)
3. Charge "American" fees.
3. Reduction in costs -> Increased profit.
I'd also like to point out that Hatch was the one who forced to FDA to reduce regulations on the supplement industry so that instead of having to prove their products work, the FDA has to prove they don't. And with state laws of Utah, there is a reason why the supplement industry is based in Utah. (see Bigger Stronger Faster
Meaning, I'm not saying he's corrupt, unethical, or anything like that. Or that he is a disgrace to the Senate and epitomizes everything wrong with our Congress and legislative system in the US and how they are all in the pockets of big business.
Nope. Not me.
Immigration systems are always unbelievably complex. The intention is apparently to allow immigrants to fill labour shortages. Labour shortages can be seen when people are getting paid well over the median wage. So create a visa that allows working in any job paying over three times the median wage, or whatever.
Keep people in fear of losing their job at any time so they are forced to act grateful for any low wage and position an employer deigns to give them. Fuck the people responsible for this legislation.
Have members of legislatures in China, Russia, India, Eastern Europe, Africa, et al represent us instead of Congressmen, and outsource the president's job to Vladimir Putin.
Great. It's bad enough that the Indian body shops have set up diploma mills in the US handing out master's degrees for a little C# work and writing some database queries so that they can brag "x% of our programmers earned master's degrees in the US". Now that bullshit will get them around the H1-B cap as well.
The anti-white platform of the Democrats push most of the white majority away and into the arms of the GOP. The whites have nowhere else to go, so the GOP can betray us in this manner. We must drive all foreigners from our lands and hang the elite who aid and abet this invasion.
Politicians do the bidding of those who pay bribes
That's only true if the people watching (i.e. the voters) aren't paying attention. If we got together and voted out anyone who accepted bribes, then politicians would learn quickly.
If voters actively looked for the campaign platform of the person they voted for and ignored ads, then politicians wouldn't need contributions.
But we live in a world where people don't take democracy seriously, but vote anyway. Welcome to democracy, we (collectively) get what we deserve.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Self inflected wounds cannot be blamed on the weapon. The American people did it to themselves by electing these assholes. If the people who don't like this wanted to avoid it, they would have either voted or voted for someone else. You can't say both parties would do it, because an active electorate would have ensured someone who met the needs was on the ballot. If you are Democrat, make sure a Democrat who don't do this gets nominated. Likewise, Republican. Or find an independent.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
The ones responsible for watching the politicians are the press, and they've shown that they're not objective and can't be trusted. It's obvious even to a casual observer whose side they've been on for the past few decades.
Your theory would work if the cost of living in all of these countries was the same but it isn't.
Yes, it is. That's literally what it is.
When management started to look at IT people as strictly a cost center. No more training. No more enough people to do the work. No more. It's long overdue. We really need to consider unionizing. Otherwise it's just going to get worse.
The ones responsible for watching the politicians are the press, and they've shown that they're not objective and can't be trusted.
Oh please, the press reports on it, people just don't care. It's YOUR responsibility as a citizen to know what's going on. The bribing is almost all in the open. It's not like politicians are hiding it. Blaming the press is just a lame excuse, it doesn't absolve your from living in a crappy government made by you and your fellow-citizens.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
( Being anti-H1B isn't protectionism.) Especially when other countries aren't just throwing their gates open to Americans. Last time I showed up to do a project in Canada I had to lie about the scope and they were clearly less than thrilled about my arrival. All developed countries that I'm aware of are at least moderately, if not highly cautious of allowing foreign workers. A playing field that isn't totally level, in this case is better than the alternative. We're busy telling our young people to go to college and get STEM degrees. We owe it to them to protect the jobs we are telling them are there and for which they are needed. I'm all for a robust global economy were all workers can earn a living in dignity, but not at the cost of losing the American middle class.
Yeah, it always entertains me when I find people who think it's racist to keep Mexicans out, but the Indians?! They're stealing our jobs!!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Yeah, majority of campaign contribution dollars...
Table-ized A.I.
The anti-white platform of the Democrats push most of the white majority away and into the arms of the GOP.
Has life gotten better for NON-WHITES when they were under total Democrat rule? Nope.
The Democrats aren't anti-white, they are pro-elitists. They are pro GIANT companies, of which the government is one example.
The GOP can "get away" with raising an HIB cap because the way in which it is raised will not hurt the middle class much at all. I can't see it hurting any technical people I know much, since the H1B guys often get stuck doing jobs or working at companies that many people would rather not do otherwise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nope, What if I'm anti H1-B, but for easier green card rules, resulting in a larger net migration? Is that still protectionism? Or is anything that would sustain the standard of living protectionism?
Learn to love Alaska
Importing cheap labor is not "technology". Plus, many countries that send visa workers have protectionist rules at home for our product and services. They want the benefits but not the downsides. It's one of the reasons why we have a fat trade deficit and why the rich get richer but the middle gets screwed.
Table-ized A.I.
There's more than one way for us to create situations that are "not what this country is about." The question at hand here is, is the value of the ideal of the free market for everyone, everywhere, regardless of consequences, more important than the idea that we here in the USA should be able to afford homes, transport, healthcare, safe neighborhoods and so forth. Your assertion of inflated wages is also questionable: how appropriate wages are has to be measured against cost of living, maintainance of a healthy lifestyle, home ownership, and so forth. The costs and social limits here are demonstrably different than in, for instance, China.
Protectionism has its place, and isolating the economies of strong countries from those of weak countries is one of them.
At this point, having seen the actual long term effects of our free trade policy, I am entirely for putting protectionism in place hard. If you want access to the US market, you live here, you mine it here, build it here, bank here, design it here -- period. We are resource rich in every way: we have raw materials, we have manpower, we have land, we have a potentially useful educational system and we have an ethos that matches job ethic with reward. Most importantly, with high trade barriers, we have the required market.
If we did this, we'd have our own semiconductor industries, our own electronics manufacturing industries, and so forth, for every category you can think of.
"Free trade" was put in place last century with good intentions and yes, a very American outlook, trying to extend the way we thought outside our own and operated borders. But that's not what happened. Only some of the economic mechanisms made it out. So now we have countries mostly unlike us in the sense that they have an ethos that matches job ethic only with the most basic day to day survival -- and they use that to severely undercut us. It's cheaper to buy prescription eyeglasses from China, ship them across the ocean by air and then across our own country, than it is to buy them here. Same for batteries, radios, displays, computers, iPods and tablets, jewelry, tech jobs, pretty much you name it.
It's not just price as a per-hour thing; I don't require a high per-hour wage, and I know some others of comparable skill who don't either. None of us are employable, though, based on various combinations of basically economic factors like age, health, family size and the like. None of this makes a significant difference when the hire doesn't have to be insured; that's another economic advantage which going outside the country for labor provides.
Look at Bethlehem, PA. At Detroit, MI. At Butte, Montana. Once you really see the wreckage caused by free trade, its very hard to have any confidence it's actually the right thing to do. Nice idea, yes -- but like many ideals, when put into practice, human nature alters the deal, Darth Vader style.
I say put the walls up, give it 20-30 years, or whatever it takes for our economy to recover from the miss-step, then slowly begin to let other countries in with a carefully crafted tariff system that normalizes their prices with the prices here. That way, competition is based upon quality. Not the wages of Chinese or Indian peasants living in hovels.
To indulge in a little metaphor, we offered our hand, and they burned it instead of shaking it. Time to pull it back. That's just the sane response. Right now, all we're doing is standing there, arm out, fingers burned off, waiting until the figurative fire burns our arms off to the shoulders. It doesn't help one bit to stand around saying "but our intentions were good!" Sure they were. But the intentions of corporations are not. The only way they are actually like people is that they act like sociopaths and
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This article lists some H-1B employer fees. Let's increase that by $50,000 per year per "guest" employee. That should cut down on the number of employees who are brought here in order to save on wages.
However, some non-American hiring managers will want to hire only people from their own countries, because of feelings of patriotism for their countries. So we should have a law that states that "guest" hiring managers must hire at least 50% Americans, and that each year, the lowest starting salary of Americans that he/she hires must be higher than the highest starting salary of the non-Americans that he/she hires.
More importantly, isn:t capitalism great when you have non-monetary incentives to hold over people? The ability to deport workers works much better then benifits packages, and all those pesky US workers who can do things like change jobs and thus have competition are just too expensive.
Agreed, I have not voted for Dem/Rep in 30 years. I agree w/Carlin. You can ask most Americans basic civic questions and they have no clue. Agree with previous poster that corruption/bribes is now out in open. http://youtu.be/07w9K2XR3f0
"There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and
The real question is why haven't we, the IT workforce of America, banded together and formed one or more unions so we can actually have some influence on laws that effect us?
Companies discourage it because they know it's the worst thing that could happen to them.
We discourage it ourselves, out of greed and competitiveness and a misunderstanding of politics.
If we don't wake up and realize this is the only way we're going to keep a balance between the needs of business and self-preservation, we're going to find ourselves working in what's left of the walmart/mcdonalds sector.
Well, if they are allowed to compete with us in the same labor market, then we are less expensive too.
Speaking as an H1-B working, I'm far from screwed.
I'm paid a very high wage (even for silicon valley) as the company that employs me is legally required to. I enjoy all the same conditions as they do re health insurance etc. I have a team of lawyers trying to keep my in the country by getting me a green card. Honestly, couldn't be much better.
And before you yell that I'm "stealin er jerbs!", we're still hiring for more people in the same role. There aren't enough people in the world who could do this job, let alone in America.
Why don't you link one or two of these diploma mills? I might as well go get my masters degree so I can compete on equal footing with the H1bs.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Opposition to the creation of an underclass is not "protectionism". If we really need them then fine, bring them over. Just bring them over as full EQUALS.
Given them green cards the moment they land or forget about it.
They won't do that of course because it doesn't get them what they want. They want indentured quasi-slave labor. They don't want real professionals.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No it isn't. HIB is a slave status. Being against a slave status is not protectionism. It's classic American patriotism (Common Sense).
You are trying to conflate immigration in general with the HIB underclass status and they simply aren't the same thing.
If they're worth importing, they're worth treating right.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
That's funny because I have personally managed to out earn an H1B with a PhD (if not several) simply because of my status as a full citizen. I am free to bargain with an employer. I don't have to worry about deportation if I am too demanding.
Now that's the "good side" of H1Bs (abused talent).
The bad side is mediocre no talent sleazebags that are just used to lower labor costs. I've seen that variation on the H1B system as well.
Your "situation" could be much better. You could have an actual green card.
Also, cut out this "team of lawyers" crap. This makes you sound like such an obvious shill. I'm familiar with that end of things too. You're so full of it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
We are finally to a point where economics are forcing companies to put serious efforts into college hire programs and workforce development of college hires. I consult with many large companies as a programmer. Up until recently I went nearly a decade without seeing a programming department have college hires.
If you were to remove all caps on H1B companies would go back to facing a decision between hiring a college grads that need professional development or H1B workers. The college hire could choose to take a different jobs years later. The H1B worker is far less likely to change jobs because they risk deportation if they fail to secure a sponsor (a fact that does not go unnoticed by employers).
IEEE-USA's position is STEM workers should be afforded Green Cards accommodations (most likely capped) thus not be beholden to employer sponsorship. I personally think any change to H1B or Greencard programs should be dependent on the majority of college hires finding jobs post graduation.
Shouldn't there be a financial reward to living in a place with lower cost of living, especially given the fact that in our modern economy, a lot of what is produced is just information?
As an american, you can move to china or india and work for an american company, and benefit from a lower cost of living as well. One of my friends is in china doing that right now.
How does allowing people in to a country to work encourage jobs to move out of the country?
That just makes zero sense to me.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"I have a team of lawyers trying to keep my in the country by getting me a green card." And there you have it.
There aren't enough people in the world who could do this job, let alone in America.
If there aren't enough people in the world who could do the job, how would letting in more H1-Bs help
They ALL take bribes. They just euphamistically call them "campaign contributions" to avoid jail time.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
by definition having them in the country reduces the prevailing wage...
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"I imagine this looks to people from the 3rd world as ..."
I see a premise there, that 3rd world people would be looking to us for something. Why would they? We're not the boss of them. (I bet they don't like being called 3rd world either. They're just people form other places. And no, not everyone is as rich as people in the US.)
And then, your imagined response just reeks of white guilt. Or Karl Marx maybe. I understand that you didn't earn your 'privileged class' position. Your great-grandparents did that.
All you can do with that, is to have it, or throw it away.
they're the ruling class. America has one. We just don't like to talk about/acknowledge our social betters.
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>. I am leaving this fucking country finally
Thank you. I do think you'll find France, Greece, or Canada better suited to your political tastes. Really. I hope you enjoy it, wherever you go.
If by chance you find that France or Greece sucks , you cant get a job there and stuff is generally screwed up, and you decide to come back here, please understand what that means. It would mean that you've seen the actual results of the policies you espoused and decided that you DON'T like the results. If that happens, if you don't like the results of welfare state liberalism, leave your old ideas behind when you come back. Here in Texas we have a booming economy with lots of jobs. You're welcome to come here, but understand our economy is doing well because of the way we do things here. If you don't like how we do things in Texas, you're free to not move here.
What this does is create a pool of offshore labor that's familiar with the work being done *here*. The obvious purpose is to use the immigration system to assist companies that want to relocate work overseas.
That doesn't makes sense. Sure you could imagine companies wanting to make off-shoring easier, but what possible motivation does a group of senators have for shipping US jobs overseas?
I stole this Sig
Yes, you can do that. A year or two ago the court ruled in a case where someone was doing that with textbooks. Doctrine of first sale, your fine legally.
Chinese DVDs might require a Chinese DVD player. That's a technical issue, not a legal restriction.
And then, your imagined response just reeks of white guilt. Or Karl Marx maybe. I understand that you didn't earn your 'privileged class' position. Your great-grandparents did that.
Except I'm not white nor a communist. I am actually a free market capitalist. Did you read my whole post?
(if we were to assume for the moment that the US government works for the welfare of the American people)
That's a pretty big assumption. The people don't pay the large campaign costs. The people don't supply the well paying jobs doing nothing for the politicians after their public service is done. At that the idea of helping people is a left-wing idea and anti-American.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
You forgot the fact that the cost of goods and services will never drop in half to match the salary drops. That equals profit. Why would they drop the profit?
Does apple drop the cost of the goods because they use cheap slave labor instead of making the products in the expensive US?
So enjoy your 10$ loaf of bread. It now only takes you 3 weeks to make that.
love the taste, hate the texture
to rubber stamp 'em. U of Phoenix got it's start when a guy bought a secretary school so he could use the accreditation.
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For what it's worth, the legislation is called the "Immigration Innovation Act of 2015 (I-Squared Act of 2015)". Here's another article along with the senate press release and the bill itself.
It's hard to understand how disconnected they are from us and our daily concerns. They're representing their interests and the interests of everyone they know and meet. Senators, and the people who hang out with senators, don't have to worry about being outsourced. "Outsourcing" is something that makes people's business more successful and their bank accounts bigger. Why would you oppose it?
Or, if you're feeling cynical:
They're connected now, if they weren't already before. When the US turns into a third world shithole because of their actions, they'll be the feudal lords or safely relocate to a less distasteful locale. (Or at least they hope that's the case. Or they know they'll be dead before any sort of collapse and don't care what their lifestyle costs the chattel.) If they aren't so pampered and surrounded by sycophants to see the outcomes of their actions, they're just-world believers and think the displaced workers probably deserved being laid off.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Why don't you link one or two of these diploma mills? I might as well go get my masters degree so I can compete on equal footing with the H1bs.
I don't remember the names. I advertised paid internship positions on MonsterTrak (now MonsterCollege), and kept getting these resumes, from second-year master's candidates, with experience that would be more appropriate for a bright high-school student, and names that made the ethnicity obvious. Then later I read about the diploma mills, and recognized what had happened.
Team of lawyers?
This team?
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
Silicon Valley has never been duplicated, although many have tried.
40% of the largest US companies were founded by immigrants. Surely a net win. The article needs to stop treating it as a zero-sum game
First, no medium or smaller company is going to want to own IT hardware, and employ IT Staff. they want to buy applications from Cloud. Or thats what they think they need - damn the torpedos and the internet availability issues and loss of control. Even large companies dont think their dedicated, hard working folks offer any competitive advantage. They are just overhead in MGT eyes. Levels of bureaucracy ensure that workers get no credit for their succes. Second, letting H1B workers in displaces US workers, and drops the labor rates in the US for all other US workers. We train the foreign workforce,then chase them away so they go home with a clue on how to run businesses. Is it better to keep them here or not let em in, or restrict H1B count? Either way, business wants to pay less for what it perceives as commodity skillsets. (again, not recognizing the skills of the domestic worker). Then the jobs can go offshore and then the contracts that are written and the cross training provided results in a loss of control of the IP, as well as the financial performance. The guy in the next cube works for your competition, and gets the sales reports for both before you and before your competition, and goes on day trading escapades accordingly. The question never asked: Is the US worker more productive, more creative and more effective at doing IT work? I've heard hte rate is about >> 2:1 for headcount, favoring the US worker, but this is not acknowledged. EU has a protectionist view. Wonder how history will see that?
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
It's the corporate leaders that benefit from off-shoring who decide on the big political contributions, not the workers who don't. The workers are divvied up with ads paid for by the contributions anyway.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
How does letting more workers enter the country lead to jobs moving overseas? Isn't it the exact opposite?
If somone has a job and a place to live why shouldn't they be able to move about and work anywhere in the world? Just because a person is born on one side of a fence why should they be denied an equal opportunity? If labor is fluid the world will be a better place for it. I was born in the UK. I've lived and worked all over the world. Most people I know (here now in the US) would like the opportunity to travel and experience life abroad but silly imaginary lines prohibit them from doing so. Imagine if people in California were prohibited from working in Oregon. The whole idea of national borders is dumb. It's about time humanity started moving on to bigger things and living up to its true potential.
It seems pretty simple. Vote the GOP out.
More wealth gathering for he wealthy :)
Actually that is what you dumb asses signed up for when you voted republican to spite Obama. Stew in it assholes! I am leaving this fucking country finally! Enjoy your fucking bullshit you brought about to try to bring about the second coming of jeep bus.
How about instead of arguing with me about who is trustworthy and who is destructive to this country, you figure it out for yourselves? I am ashamed to be an American since 2001, the Republicans have done nothing but undermine this country and I am washing my hands of it.
Well, voting for Obama solidly makes you part of the problem http://www.ibtimes.com/obama-m...
That article expresses one theory. Of course it doesn't mention the fact that the economy in Texas has been besting the national average since long before the shale boom. Since right about time we started electing Republican governors, of turns out. Before shale, it was tech - tons of tech companies leaving California and coming to Texas.
We'll see what the future holds. I do indeed check my intuition against the facts, and I came across a really nest way of doing so. I wanted to know which is better FOR THE ECONOMY - Democrats or Republicans. There are a like lot of ways to measure that and you can devise statistics to match any conclusion you want. I decided to choose the best, most objective statistic I could of, WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT THE RESULT WOULD BE before I chose the measurement. I decided a reasonable, objective measurement would be economic growth. The president has about as much power as all of the house reps put together, and presidents stick around long enough for their efforts to have some effect, while the house and senate can switch every two years. So decided I'd compare Republican presidents vs democrat presidents. I was a bit nervous to chart the results - it might prove me wrong, very wrong.
I made one other decision before plotting the data. A new president's first budget is for the year AFTER they take office, and generally it takes that year for new policies to be formulated and go into effect, etc., so I decided to assign blame or creditcredit for that first year to the outgoing President. For example, Obama took office in 2009, but his first budget wasn't until 2010, so the 2009 economy wss under the Bush budget and Bush policies. (I actually did this in 2007, so 2009 wasn't on the chart, but 1989 was blamed on / credited to Reagan, etc.
I charted the data and like looked anxiously to see which party had better economic growth. It turned out that both parties had years of high growth and low, all over the place. The chart made one thing very obvious, though. Economic growth had ALWAYS improved under every Republican administration, and always got worse under every Democrat administration's budgets. No exceptions.
Of course after that we had the mortgage crash in 2008, making Bush Jr the only Republican president to have slowing economic growth.
It turns out the data confirmed what I had suspected - Bush was indeed the worst Republican President ever, in terms of the economy, and Republican presidents consistently improve the economy.
You can argue about which party is better for fairness or whatever, I don't know how to measure that objectively.
In a similar fashion, I reversed my position on abortion when I realized the editorials I used to write were wrong. I love learning new things and gaining a fuller understanding.
The problem is not necessarily foreign workers, but foreign workers that we don't actually need. Corporations are lying through their teeth when they say they can't find local workers to do the same work here. These are not all foreign workers showing up to do advanced R&D, most of them are doing very basic grunt work much of the time only they do it a lot cheaper. These are basic mainstream jobs, but the rationale being used to push this is that these are highly specialized jobs that are so arcane and rare that we need to import an additional 195,000 of them or else the economy will collapse.
If it really is so very difficult to find American workers then one would logically expect the corporations to pay MORE than the prevailing wage in an attempt to find these amazing workers. Everything would be fine I think if the person next to you who's entering data into ActiveDirectory is paid double your salary because there was no one anywhere in the country who is skilled enough to do that job. But that's not at all what happens. Congress is not raising the numbers because there are so many above average workers who are so good that we're willing to pay a premium in salary to recruit, they're raising the numbers because on average they'll be cheaper than local workers.
Of course there are exceptions. But foreign workers should be the cream of the crop, above average, for jobs requiring actual skills that are proven to be in short supply, and paid at *least* the average prevailing wage and benefits. There should be severe penalties for any company which falsely states that they can not find workers already within the country who are able to do these jobs.
What is happening is that we are also artificially lowering the labor cost by importing workers from developing countries to do the jobs for which we already have qualified workers.
Work and charity can be kept separate. I'm not going to voluntarily relinquish my job just so that some worker from a poorer country can have it. Similarly I don't think people are going to stop feeding their own childrenso that they can invite poor children to the dinner table instead. Everyone looks after their own first and foremost, that's very natural.
The big problem here is that companies are LYING when they fill out paperwork to say that there are no resident workers able to do these jobs. We all know the numbers are being raised to get cheap labor, it's an open secret with a lot of nudging and winking going on. It's the sheer hypocrisy of it all that's so infuriating, the insulting of American workers by claiming they don't have the necessary skills when in reality they're just trying to cut wages.
What it looks like from the 3rd world, from the labor broker perspective, is that America is being governed by amazing idiots so let's try to exploit it.
But that is the sort of thinking you get from the free market true believer.
Spend some time in these countries and it's not long before you see a wage disparity far greater than in the US, the haves are literally stepping over the have nots. They absolutely need to fix things up over there rather than for us to voluntarily give up our jobs as charity (or have congress give away our jobs in our behalf).
If there really is a labor shortage than we should pay a premium in salary to recruit and retain these workers. Instead what is happening is that we're paying less salary for these workers on average. Sure there are some great people that are recruited from overseas. But these numbers are not being raised in order to recruit more of the best but to just get more.
Well, considering that I don't have a job, 65,000 seems like 65,000 too many.
Are you "competing" for a tech job. Do you have an MSc in CS from an internationally recognized institution?
I put "competing" in quotation marks, because my inbox has emails from a lot of recruiters who just wants to talk (they aren't all job offers).
Actually, if you happen know your way around open source projects and has some experience with js, linux, python, node, aws and release engineering, + a non-empty resume; feel free to drop me a line...
Either of 11.5M unemployed Americans I suspect most people don't compete for the tech jobs.. Oh, and btw, I know that my employer will hire anywhere in the world, and have people working remotely. In fact I'm an H1B, and paying taxes in the US; but if I weren't H1B I would just be working remotely from Denmark. To be honest, the uncertainty of being on an H1B, does often make me consider if I should continue to work out of the US (especially when 4 people are gunned down 20 blocks from my crappy over-priced San Francisco apartment - which is in the nice part of town).
To sum up, yes some companies are trying to get cheap workers; but the bay area wouldn't be a tech hub if it weren't for immigrants (they would just go somewhere else - say London or Toronto); and most of the unemployed Americans aren't looking/qualified for tech jobs...
Since the current unemployment rate is about 6%
Being unemployed, you probably don't want to here this, but the unemployment rate can also be too low.
Keep in mind that the unemployment rate counts people in-between jobs, and that an extremely low unemployment rate means that it's hard to hire, and, hence, hard to grow the economy. This is likely no the case in the US, as many people are under-employed (and/or under-paid); partly due to the very low minimum wage.
If there really is a labor shortage than we should pay a premium in salary to recruit and retain these workers. Instead what is happening is that we're paying less salary for these workers on average.
This is false. Here are average tarting salaries for H1-B workers for some companies:
Amazon: $109,440
Apple: $130,690
Google: $126,565
Microsoft: $113,408
Qualcomm: $105,169
Intel: $102,883
Oracle: $113,065
JP Morgan Chase: $105,751
NTT Data: $100,889
CVS RX Services: $120,435
Goldman Sachs: $107,429
BofA: $105,173
Citibank: $109,327
EMC: $103,245
Capgemini: $114,785
EBay: $119,224
Randstad: $103,303
Facebook: $123,142
Walmart: $113,238
Tell me again how they are underpaid?
From what I've heard from people who went to San Jose state, it is trivial to get a masters in software engineering.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
What did you say when shiny gadget manufacturer #1 announced that workers had better learn to "run against the robots"? And when shiny gadget manufacturer #2 exploited underage workers in dangerous sweatshops in China? I haven't read any comments about "unions turning the IT sector into another Detroit" on this page, but instead I now learn that government regulation is in "the true spirit of America, because it's againt slavery". If selling stuff in Spain but paying taxes to the British Virgin Islands is not only moraly acceptable, but even a duty, because it's in the interest of the investors, then why would hiring IT developers from abroad be any different?
Capitalism is about making money, and that's it. It's not a philosophy, it won't make your lives better by itself. And rightly so. It is a government's job to ensure that the interests of those making money proceed in harmony with the interests of a nation as a whole; to which extent is matter of debate. When the government turns out as an expression of those with the most money (bi-partisan agreements...) rather than the choice of informed voters, we'd better learn to love the "invisible hand" and wait for its positive effects on the economy to trickle down on us.
Well, voting for Obama solidly makes you part of the problem
BOTH PARTIES contribute to the problem. This is not a party-line issue. This story body and TFA point that out: bipartisan bill.
Given the political parties in power there is no good way an American can vote to fix the problem. Both parties listen to the money from businesses who like the cheap slave labor H1-B provides. Who wouldn't want to hire workers for 1/4 the money that cannot leave for another company that pays better?
As a resident of one of the states mentioned in the story I've written my senator in the past about not raising the limits, and just seconds ago wrote again, including my own sad story of a layoff after training my own H1-B replacement in 2012 and learning that he was being paid about 1/4 of my salary, below the poverty line. Not that writing to the senator will do much good as I've written in several times before and only get a form letter "Thank you for mentioned your concerns. They are important. I will now ignore them. Signed, Senator Moneywhore."
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I'm not the AC you're replying to. But that AC's experience is similar to mine.
I'm a green card holder, had H-1B before, and worked for a few Silicon Valley companies. My anecdote and my knowledge of other similar H-1B holders' experience is so vastly different from what you describe, such that until you can show me data to prove otherwise, it's difficult for me to take you (or any of anti H-1B people) seriously, and not jump to the conclusion that it's just protectionism and whining of losers.
My 2014 salary+bonus was around $500k. Looking back, I've driven a lot more hard salary bargains when I was H-1B. I worked as a manager for some time and also served in company hiring committee in multiple companies - in my experience, I haven't seen any things remotely like you mentioned.
You may dismiss my case as "an exception". But I don't think so - I know many (hundreds) of current and former H-1B holders, and none of them had any experience like what you mentioned. A biased but not trivial sample clearly showed me H-1B program works just fine, both for the company and the hired employee. Yes, it sucks for unskilled losers and whiners, but that's ultimately better for the world.
What is happening is that we are also artificially lowering the labor cost by importing workers from developing countries to do the jobs for which we already have qualified workers.
I would call it allowing the price of labor to reach it's true market value. Excluding a huge chunk of labor force that's willing to work for less money is artificially raising the cost of labor in the US.
It's like if congress passed a law that said you are only allowed to take your car to the dealership to have it repaired. This would increase the price of car repair for those who follow the law by excluding those willing to do the job for less money.
Work and charity can be kept separate. I'm not going to voluntarily relinquish my job just so that some worker from a poorer country can have it. Similarly I don't think people are going to stop feeding their own childrenso that they can invite poor children to the dinner table instead. Everyone looks after their own first and foremost, that's very natural.
It has nothing to do with charity. As a consumer of goods and services, I benefit when the cost of those goods and services can be lowered (e.g. by hiring workers at a lower labor price).
If congress passed the law requiring all car maintenance to be done at dealerships, one might say "We can't repeal the law, because it will cause a lower quality of life for those currently benefiting from their privileged position." My point is that it is not anyone's duty to maintain the privileged position of others.
Buying cheap Chinese stuff rather than expensive American stuff *is* looking out for yourself (i.e. finding the best bargain). Buying expensive American stuff even thought he cheap Chinese stuff is just as good (or even better), is the act of charity (i.e. spending more money than necessary to help out your neighbor.
The big problem here is that companies are LYING when they fill out paperwork to say that there are no resident workers able to do these jobs. We all know the numbers are being raised to get cheap labor, it's an open secret with a lot of nudging and winking going on. It's the sheer hypocrisy of it all that's so infuriating, the insulting of American workers by claiming they don't have the necessary skills when in reality they're just trying to cut wages.
They shouldn't even have to lie. The fact that there are lots of workers willing to do the same jobs for less money is a fact. Yes they are trying to cut costs by cutting wages. They are corporations and they are trying to make a profit. That doesn't mean we don't benefit from it. We benefit from being able to buy goods more cheaply.
We don't benefit when our cushy jobs are shipped overseas, but it's a two way street. We can;t have both cheap prices and guaranteed jobs for Americans with inflated salaries. My point is that there is no benefit to having guaranteed jobs for Americans with inflated salaries if the price of the goods is inflated due to the high cost of paying high salaries.
You need to read the post I replied to for context. Telling me it's both parties is pointless I already knew that. The people who think that Obama was the messiah, and that Reid and Pelosi were on their side need the message.
Consistently vote for representatives that act againt their best interests. I spoke to enough voters who genuinely believe in upholding policies that harm, including themselves directly. I wonder why this is.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Sources, which you could have found yourself by picking 3 of the numbers and "H1B" and putting them into Google:
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Repo...
The 25,000 that Microsoft laid off were largely *not* Americans, they were (mostly) Nokia people who had been involved in building the Nokia phones that were not selling, and were very low margin, and mostly desired only in the third world, as Nokia tanked enough that Microsoft could buy them (very cheaply, in fact).
Those numbers are from the U.S. Department of Labor, which obtained them from the IRS. And they are comparable, or higher than what an American worker would get for the same job.
I personally interviewed some of the Apple and Google H1-B's.
PS: The other benefit to the 6 month break is that contractors don't get reclassified as employees by the IRS.
Isn't it about time for that gnarly old fart to retire?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
It's cheaper to employ them overseas, you don't have to pay them as much or pay benefits.
An H1-B visa is for a foreign worker to come to the US to work, not for a company to move a job overseas.
This is nothing new.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The entire sector is in for a shock in the next dozen years.
Very advanced software will be generating applications ingesting the requirements via speech recognition. Most programmers will loose their jobs. Thanks to Edward Snowden, NSA is finally getting off their asses and plugging the super user security hole they have suffered under for decades - developing tech to automate and eliminate the vast majority of sys admins. That tech will be filtering out in about 10 (?) years or so.
Good luck indeed.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Just wondering...
The humidity in this part of Texas is really annoying. Of course, it's a BIG state - there are many climates to choose from.
Don't forget to properly credit the sainted Ronald Reagan with mandating that emergency rooms treat anybody, regardless of anyone's ability to pay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
People who claim ownership of the natural resources (including land underneath buildings) or of financial assets used to capitalize businesses may never have done any more work than cozy up to some King hundreds of years ago to get a "grant" of land, or, alternatively, (legally?) bribe some politician to get special monopoly or tax preferences, or something similar. Those "rents" can form a substantial part of many costs, and have little to do with "labor". Just think "feudalism" and "serfs" for an analogy, where feudal lords (who often provide nothing but protection against the feudal lord himself) taking much of the harvest from "their" lands for themselves despite however much work the "serfs" put in.
Also, even when up-front costs to consumers may be lower with cheaper labor (domestic or foreign), there are also social costs (like violence, failed families, welfare costs, etc.) such as shown by so many people who work at Walmart getting food stamps etc.. So, there can be a lot of indirect costs to "cheap labor" that are paid in indirect ways like higher taxes or greater fears of violence and so on.
Another example of externalities as indirect costs is low price for gasoline at the pump may ignore the huge taxes and debt obligations incurred to support a huge USA war machine which (in theory) defends long oil supply lines, and it also may ignore costs like polluted ground water from MTBE, or the health and crime crises caused by lead in gasoline in previous decades. It is possible the the cost of leaded gas may be (in my estimate) many trillions and trillions of dollars, which people never paid at the pump but paid in their personal lives and in taxes to pay for prisons and police:
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
"New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing. "
Rent-seeking and externalities are reasons why markets need to be regulated by governments. There are other issues too, like ignored or under-appreciated systemic risks. On that, see Alan Greenspan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10...
"âoeThose of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholdersâ(TM) equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,â he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Perhaps someone here could come up with an automate methodology to put these folks on the ropes? How about multiple answers, approach it from many directions. Crowd fund, kickstart, background checking, fact checking, and other things? There is this strange aversion to unions after decades of paid for ad campaigns against them, but you all act like helpless children vs. the technology geniuses you are!@! Find a solution, implement the solution, solve the problem. These half baked "can't hold a job doing anything else" politicians are on the offensive, how about you all get offensive instead of whining like you are still in elementary school.
No it's not. I'm pro-immigration, we can use all the smart hard working people we can get. I'm anti-H1B, it's a way to get lower cost labor that has less negotiating power than a US citizen.
From 2011-2014, gas dropped from $4 / gallon to to $3.40 / gallon.
At the same time, Texas unemployment dropped from 8% to 4.9%. So the Texas economy has been getting better while oil prices have been falling.
Since 2007, gas prices have been up and down, sometimes as low as $1.59, sometimes as high as $4.10. Texas has had lower unemployment than the rest of the country the whole time. From 2009-2011 the price of gas doubled - Texas had low employment as the price doubled. From 2007-2008/2009 the price of gas was cut in half. Texas did better than the rest of the country over that period too.
> It is a shame we have only your word that you didn't just, you know, make this all up. You cite no specific figures for any administration, or overall figures
Oh sorry, you don't know how to look up the economic growth rate? You could google "economic growth table" and find the numbers reported everywhere, but the canonical source is the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Here's a link.
http://www.bea.gov/iTable/iTab...
For your convenience, here are the official BEA numbers labeled the name of which president did the budget for that year:
http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...
I checked your first link, and found a page with several tables I could look at, none of them labeled "economic growth". Clicking around a bit got nothing useful, and I lack the patience to explore further.
Could you be more specific about what you're observing at the BEA site?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I don't know if BEA will let me deep link, so here's another presentation of the data. The data all comes from the same source.
http://www.tradingeconomics.co...
Please note this tells us something important about the effects of each party's policies on the ECONOMY, only. We need to look at other data to comment on party policy effects on social issues such as crime rate or anything else. So it doesn't mean Republicans are better; it doesn't mean you should vote Republican. Unless of course jobs and the economy are your primary concern
If you like the hopeful Democrat ideals, maybe you decide this means you should push your Democrat representatives to set the agenda, but allow Republican bean-counters to calculate the details of how to do it effectively and efficiently. This bit of fact doesn't address any of that, of course. It only shows that Republican policies improve the economy.
Well, it's an interesting assertion, but you've not actually demonstrated this. Consequently I can't see taking it any more seriously than any other baseless remark. More to the point, I don't condemn free trade, I actually think it's a lovely idea, but as it turns out, when implemented without regard for human nature, it doesn't actually work. There are many ideas like this. For instance, it would be absolutely lovely if we could open our homes to anyone who needs shelter from a storm. Unfortunately, this tends to lead to us being raped and murdered in our beds. And so on.
So in light of free trade's actual failure to function as hoped for, my position is that we need to examine it to see why it failed, and then fix the problems so identified. In my opinion, this is not rocket science: Free trade fails because there is no level playing field, specifically because our offerings of economic parity are incorporated, while our offerings of social parity are not. This establishes massively unequal costs we cannot control, and so the playing field tilts in direct response and proportion.
To say that free trade is a fundamental requirement of human equality and/or decency is just hand-waving. Yes, all other things being equal, free trade could be a foundational element of a uniformly consistent world economic structure. But that's not the world we actually live in. Here, in reality, if we wish to develop a system system as good as it can be, then we must do it in a significant degree of isolation from systems that are fundamentally incompatible with the mechanisms that drive such a system. This is the only way it can be done. You may, if you're a raging optimist, imagine that were we to achieve such a thing, or even go a long way towards it, that it might serve as a model for other societies to emulate, but I think we already know where that leads: no one in power wants to abandon, or even significantly alter, the conditions that got them there and are keeping them there. That's just as evident inside our borders as out -- it is why it is so difficult to even begin to address the corruption that pervades our legislatures and our judiciary.
Possibly pure capitalism is. However, since we've not been operating as anything even remotely close to pure capitalism in the last 60 years or so (that's the limit of my observations, not a pointer to any functional boundary I know of), what is relevant is what we are, rather than a pure ism. And what we are is very close to being compatible with human decency. We're getting along towards a universal medical system, we have social safety nets and so forth. Further, at the social level, we reward those who do charity with status. It all needs considerable work, but it certainly is many steps above the cold calculations of profit and loss already.
The vast majority of religious morality is canned nonsense produced by the disingenuous in order to facilitate control over the deluded. The sooner it is excised from our economic and legal systems and is replaced by economic- and legal-sanity, the better off our country will be. I cannot, and do not, speak about other countries here, but I know very well the extensive damage the poison of religion has done to ours.
What you fail to recognize is that gross inequalities exist from the very start. They are the irreducible axioms of the human condition. Most of the implications of the statement "all men are created equal" are not just wrong, but nonsensical. The only sane rest
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In order to have a comparison you have to have two sets of data. You've provided only one set.
I provided the hard to get set.
Look up the non H1-B yourself here:
http://www.glassdoor.com/
Should we all be forced to pay the costs of a destroyed economy because you want cheaper widgets and don't give a hoot about the working and living conditions of those who perform the labor of creating these widgets for you? What you're arguing for here is great advantage for you, while the producers of the very things that give you your advantage have no access to the very benefits you so obviously covet.
The point of making twice as much, regardless of what things cost, is that you can purchase twice as much as you could otherwise.
However, as others have pointed out, for manufactured goods, labor costs are not the only factor that sets prices, nor is the amount of labor required to create widget A necessarily equal to the labor required to create widget B, nor, in fact, are these costs certain to be constants inherently not amenable to reduction. The premise you're implying here -- inherent double costs -- isn't supportable at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The Native Americans tried that, they just let the ice bridge from Asia melt away after the last ice age. And it worked well for tens of thousands of years, until immigrants came over from Europe. How did that work out for them eh?
There's nothing wrong with pulling up a drawbridge - it's a what cells do when they build their cell membrane to maintain homeostasis by separating their innards from the outside world.
...
They can. They just can't hire them within our borders. But since "within our borders" is not an actual constraint... they can.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I'm not convinced that Americans making less money would significantly better the lives of people in other countries. It is ridiculous I'm not convinced that Americans making less money would significantly better the lives of people in other countries. Much of the world economy depends on the US middle class spending every dollar of those inflated salaries on goods and services sourced from all over the world. I realize saying I want more for workers throughout the economy while acting to protect my own privileges seems like a self-congratulatory contradiction. If I'm an asshole for not being willing to take less on the off chance others can have more, so be it. Americans cannot end economic suffering by accepting more suffering themselves. I believe it's more practical to support economic activity in other countries and support rising wages globally. Restricting competition for local jobs, even if imperfect seems to me to be less ethically flawed than most of our trade practices where business often seeks win-lose deals rather than the win-win deals were both trade partners reap substantial benefit.
I'm not convinced that Americans making less money would significantly better the lives of people in other countries.
It's not that the fact of Americans making less money *causes* the lives of people in other countries to be better. It's that having a free market causes both of those things to happen.
If Americans can find a way to make more money without restricting markets, it would not necessarily have any negative impact on anyone else, in fact it would probably be a positive impact by creating more total wealth in the world economy.
Opening up jobs to the whole world that would otherwise be limited to only Americans, gives foreign workers more opportunities. It increases the demand for labor worldwide. If the supply of labor remains constant, this shifts the supply-demand equation into creating upward pressure on wages worldwide.
Think about it in terms of cheating on taxes. Let's say some billionaire is cheating on his taxes, and he makes billions of dollars doing it. Let's say we catch him and repossess all his assets and throw him in jail. Does the general population benefit from this? A little bit. Maybe each person gets to pay $10 less in taxes on average. But when you multiply these $10 over the whole population, it adds up to the full $2 billion that the tax cheat lost.
So the tax cheat might think, I may as well just keep this money, look at how much it benefits me. If I give it back, everyone else will only get $10 which is not that much at all. This completely ignores the fact that it's a *lot* of people getting a small benefit which adds up to a large benefit overall that is being stolen.
"...and eliminates the cap on people who earn an advanced degree in a STEM (science, technology, education and math) field."
-Does anyone actually verify the credentials of a foreign applicant? -Maybe in the top 1% of jobs.. but the rest?
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
If you are afraid that due to outsourcing and H1B you won't be able to find a job or you won't be able to find a job paying a fair wage, you either aren't very good at your job or you work in a commodity position where the value of "barely adequate" performance is not substantially different than the value of "really good" performance. Consider a career change, or consider trying to skill up.
This isn't to shit on people or anything - just a reality check. If you can be easily replaced AND don't have anything that would make you in-demand, the burden is on you to become more competitive (or find your own path), not economic protectionism.
Frankly, I'd be pretty disappointed in myself if I were in a position where despite all the advantages I've had in my live and all the opportunities that have been afforded me simply based on where I was born, didn't manage to perform well enough to be considered of more overall value to various employers than someone from a far less privileged background. It would mean I, personally, failed somewhere.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
I don't view it as "giving up" our jobs. I view it as a mutual benefit to both societies.
I am a software engineer. Until about 6 months ago, I washed my own dishes. Then my wife hired cleaners to clean the house every 2 weeks. They started doing the dishes. They took a job away from me, and I let them. It probably only costs me like $5 or something (part of a $100 total cleaning bill). They are willing to do this job for cheaper than I am. I now purposely don't do the dishes if I know the cleaners are coming soon, because I'd rather they do it at the cost they are willing to do it for. It helps them and it helps me.
If you see yourself as a dishwasher, then someone willing to wash dishes cheaper than you is a threat. I think this is the wrong attitude in a global economy, especially if you live in a place with so much opportunity. All the cheap shit you can get at walmart means that it is cheaper to live at a certain quality of life while you are getting a college degree or learning a new skill.
We shouldn't be competing with foreign labor by trying to exclude them from the market with laws. We should be competing with foreign labor by trying to acquire skills that are easier for us to acquire than it is for them. My housekeepers don't speak english. My wife has to communicate with them via google translate. They are more than happy to be doing dishes. I probably would be to if I were in their position.
It's not that we should charitably give up our jobs to them. It benefits both of us if we let them do those jobs that they want to do more cheaply than we do. It gives us more freedom to do other things and it helps them as well.
There are cases that people have seen where two foreign engineers are hired to replace one engineer, most often as outsourced labor. Those two engineers are not individually better than the one replaced engineer, very often the two of them together are not even better. So the engineer who is doing the best is being replaced by substandard people.
So your advice is stop being our best. Don't bother being good engineers because they'll always be able to hire inexpensive labor to do the simplistic stuff like engineering. Instead we should aim for jobs that even the poor undeveloped countries don't want to do. What's left? Can't do science, can't do engineering, can't do manual labor, can't do housekeeping, can't do construction, all those jobs are able to be done more cheaply elsewhere. Could be lawyers, all those executives need people to help them avoid the law, but not everyone has the capability of being a lawyer and we already have far to many of them in the country already. Could be artists, but they're already starving today.
Do we tell our children today to stop becoming scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, because it will be impossible to compete by being good at the job and instead they must compete by being the cheapest? STEM is going to be this century's equivalent of the interchangeable factory floor worker, only without the unions fighting on their side? (mostly because the same people worshipping at the free market altar are the same ones who are dismantling the unions)
Don't blame me. I voted for Kodos.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Those two engineers are not individually better than the one replaced engineer, very often the two of them together are not even better. So the engineer who is doing the best is being replaced by substandard people.
Wow so it seems like a company could stand to make a lot of money hiring all these super qualified people who are now out of a job (i.e. instead of foreign workers). They should theoretically get more work done that's of higher quality and for less cost. This seems like a golden opportunity that any smart entrepreneur seeking a profit would jump on.
So your advice is stop being our best.
I'm really not sure how you came to that conclusions from anything I've said, even if we assume your other claims are true.
If you feel like you can't compete with people less skilled than you, then I don't know what to say, other than "Don't be a motivational speaker".
Do we tell our children today to stop becoming scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, because it will be impossible to compete by being good at the job and instead they must compete by being the cheapest?
If people are willing to hire less skilled people than you to do the same job, I can only guess that maybe you aren't as skilled as you think you are. STEM is really not a field where doing a shitty job leads to usable products.
I would tell my children that a STEM career is definitely a good career choice. But I would be sure try to discourage them from thinking they are better than other workers simply because they are not foreign.
If hell really does freeze over and bad engineers are more valuable to employers than good engineers, I would suggest becoming a business man, hire all the unemployed good engineers (at a discount), and destroy your competition.
But being the negative person you are, I'm sure you'll find some reason why this won't work, and you are destined to fail competing against mediocrity.
I'm not following. Please explain how buying only American goods is good for the foreign consumer.
This isn't correct. Keeping the money within the country accelerates the economy without leaking funds externally, and so funds American salaries, resource recovery, care and so forth. In a closed economy, especially one as large as ours, there is a lot of room for competition, and so costs should settle out to reasonable values in most cases without having to depend upon the workers living in despicable conditions, as is the case now.
Further, since within our own economy we can regulate activity at all levels (as we cannot in foreign economies), we can avoid monopolistic behavior, price gouging, unacceptably low wages, unacceptably long hours and so forth if we simply choose to do so.
Finally, for American tech workers who now have jobs, where those jobs were previously offshored, their roles as consumers are hugely improved, as well as their contribution to our economy (as compared to money going offshore and then into a foreign economy/)
The presumption here is invalid. The Chinese workers that make iPads live in dormitories, eat poorly, and earn very little income. They don't consume on an equal level with a US worker/consumer; they cannot do so. Likewise, the children that manufacture some of our clothing, etc. The equality you posit simply doesn't exist. And that, of course, is the basis for the lower cost of an offshored job.
The degree to which wages affect the continuing cost of manufacture of any one thing varies enormously. Some services are 100% wage based, such as programming of one-shot, one-customer solutions. Some are nearly 100% resource based, such as anything coming off of a fully automated production sequence. And there are cases everywhere in between. In addition, for the workers who now have jobs that were previously lost to shallower economies, their earning power (and power to support the economy) goes from near-zero to very significant. In any case where precursors (parts, for instance) were already being created here or the materials mined here, no cost increase is implied. Finally, as competition arises, manufacturing efficiency is a commonly adjusted factor. It's not just about costs or wages; that's far too simplistic a take on the issue.
The most important factor out of [6,4,5,5,5, 5,5,5,5,5, 5,5,5,5,5, 5,5,5,5,5] is the 6. However, doubling the 6 to 12 changes the total from 100 to 106, or a 6% increase. What this tells us is that your words do not describe a general situation that backs up your assertion.
Furthermore, if we assume wages double, the only case where the cost doubles with it is the case where the job is entirely wage-based. You would first have to demonstrate that wages would double, though, and you have not done that.
(a) No one is proposing doubling everyone's wages, the only wages that would need to change are the ones that were off shored, and (b) your assertion of doubled costs in response to doubled wages is fundamentally incorr
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
While I, like many other tech workers, have a natural affinity for libertarian thinking and a concomitant disdain for the political system, the reality of this throat cutting behavior by our selfish and short-sighted politicians needs to be countered within the defective framework of the political system if we are to have a fighting chance of protecting ourselves and other STEM workers from these greedy bottom-line, pin-striped pinheads that are calling for the gutting of our field.
As disgusting as it might be, we need our own Political Action Committee. Unless we can engage these baboons in Washington in an organized manner, they won't listen to us. They need to see PAC representatives from the STEM sector every day, demanding the lowering of the H1B cap and protection of the domestic tech workers.
If you meet anybody from India ask him "What Is Your Caste?"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Casteism
Democracy is the Government of the Corporations, by the Corporations, for the Corporations.
Casteism
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
Casteism
H1Bs are as far as I understand for people with at least a BSc (with higher quote for people with MSc). I dare say that one does become a scientist by being trained in the industry. Granted one doesn't need to understand automatons, grammars, push-down automatons, Turing machines and how these are used to prove membership of computability and complexity classes... But you will never learn these things, or how to read/write scientific papers, or how to formally prove theorems by working in the industry.
You can certainly replace some MSc positions with less qualified developers. But developing with inexperienced developers can be very expensive (even if the developers are cheap). Learning to code in the industry doesn't compare to an MSc; it different - not useless.
...
Ron Hira has addressed this years ago, but here's how I see it:
You've got an office in Outerstan, and set up a sales office in Cincinnati (or Buffalo, or Southfield, or Jacksonville), using $10M-$25M in "incentives" given to you by the suc, er, fine local and state government economic development/crony socialists, widely poclaiming that you expect to employ 1K people (from where you refuse to say). You send 100 people from Outerstan to Cincinnati, or recruit 100 or 500 Outerstani's from USA universities within 400 miles of Cincinnati (or, more likely a combination, with most being fresh college grad Outerstanis in the USA already, with a very light sprinkling of new-US-grad Easten Europeans, South Americans, Africans...).
They're on a combination of F with OPT and L-1 and H-1B visas, and, as others have claimed, many of them want, and expect, to be able to stay in the USA for an extended time and perhaps become citizens. Many of them have gotten a great deal of help with their class-work and simply living in the USA, transportation, bail... from generous Americans. (Yes, I've helped several, and friends and relatives have helped many more a lot more than I did or could. In the end some of them were quite deserving of it, while others were not.)
On this first gig they know nothing about the application areas of your customers, and only academic knowledge about programming, not what real commercial/production programming involves. But your bid was so low that you dare not invest in any training of substance for anyone. So, you have the soon-to-be-former US citizen employees of the client firm train your guest-workers (and if they don't co-operate in training the guest-workers, or try to sabotage it in any way, they don't get any severance pay and they don't get positive recommendations for use when trying to get a new job -- they have communication problems, aren't team players, are borderline insubordinate, are not people people, or simply say you're reluctant to recommend them... nothing anyone could prove or disprove that you're stabbing them in the back, but it still sounds bad enough to stab them in the back to the extent of hampering their careers).
You have your guest-workers get a little experience doing the rote work, then a little work that requires understanding and creative figuring out how to do it. And then start sending them back to Outerstan in shifts of a few at a time. These rotated guest-workers and green card holders teach your crews in Outerstan HQ (your off-shoring services center), and they keep up a communications conduit between your bases of operations.
You (typically) sponsor 0.5%-2% of your guest-workers for green cards and send the rest back to the old country, or scrambling for new jobs in the USA when their gig is up, or simply illegally over-staying their visas. You have an iron grip on the compensation and working conditions of the ones you're sponsoring for green cards through the several yars of the application process, because it would be more difficult and expensive for them to jump ship (though the law explicitly allows them to do so). You also use a tiny number of US citizens for PR and to work with some of the guest-workers to drum up business (clients and contracts/gigs) for your bodyshop/off-shoring operation (yes, I've had bodyshoppers from Outerstan ask me to help them drum up business).
After a while, you've build up a collection of frameworks and templates, and the bodies shopped and green card holders and then the guys back at Outerstan Base are about to die from boredom doing essentially the same work with only minor variations repatedly, for different clients. But your bids are less wildly off the mark, and the guest-workers and off-shore operations people can't be too terribly dissatisfied because, as low as the pay is, and as crowded as they are in that shared house or apartment, it's better tha
I was in the same boat as Anonymous Coward GP. My company paid me the same as regular workers, the lawyers were working hard to get me a Green Card (and I did get one too) etc. The H1B scare on /. always surprises me. A couple of questions:
I left the US a handful of years back, but when I was there, that was not the case. I worked for a start-up growing from four to forty employees when I was there, hiring engineers was always an issue, we simply could not get enough qualified applicants from the US and was regularly forced (by our needs) to get H1Bs.
Again, when I lived in the US, paying for a house, a cleaner, a nanny and a decent car on my salary was not an issue. My wife got a work permit and worked in a non-stem field, her salary was less than half of mine, but her job also required at least a bachelor.
I'd love to see numbers indicating this. I hear from "Silicon Valley" about over-paid people driving people with "normal" pay out of the city and way out of the region due to property price increases. Are these stories untrue? The number of CEOs in these companies are not enough to make property prices sky-rocket, that phenomenon must be caused by lots and lots of "regular Joe's" in the tech companies having significantly higher salaries than the average in the area.
...then when the bill comes, simply do not pay it.
Medicaid will foot the bill:
http://kaiserhealthnews.org/ne...
Sure, it's the worst way to get healthcare - but it is free - at least for some.