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With H-1B Cap Hit, Zuckerberg and Ballmer-Led Groups Press For More Tech Visas
theodp writes: With the FY2016 H-1B visa cap reached in the first week of April (only the USCIS knows how many applications were submitted by outsourcing companies and from Bentonville, AR), it's no surprise that groups like Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC and Steve Ballmer's Partnership for a New American Economy Action Fund are pooh-poohing Jesse Jackson's claims that foreign high-tech workers are taking American jobs, and promoting the idea that what's really holding back Americans from jobs is a lack of foreign tech workers with H-1B visas.
Agreed.
Didn't the IEEE conduct a study that there is already a glut of people here already with at least a STEM education, but not working in STEM.... And we're graduating more people with STEM degrees than STEM jobs available every year?
Until we are at the point where anyone who wants to work in STEM can do so, I think we should not let in people. STEM jobs are generally jobs you want people to take...
Right now at the company I'm at there has been surplusing of higher grade workers which typically include grades four and five. Pay has also been essentially flat, even though most of us have security clearances which prevents the job from being handed to an H1B easily. Simply put, I don't buy this BS about needing to bring in more foreign workers to compete. The workers are there, else the company I'm employed with would be forced to try harder at retention.
The college system isn't broken. It's just not "job training," which is what corporate types want.
They want to offload all that "develop the workforce" crap off on the government and other education institutions. They don't care about education. When the job training is obsolete they simply throw away the disposable workers and get the next batch.
The absurd notion that we should all be competing with the lowest wage earners on the planet is absurd.
Globalization is what happens when corporations tell us we should be competing with people in Bangalore for salaries and jobs.
Globalization is basically fucking everyone else over in the name of corporate profits.
Letting massive multinational companies decide that local salaries are more than they want to pay and importing people who will take less money is a surefire way to be on a race to the bottom.
Between the lie of saying cutting taxes for corporations will make the economy better, and the lie that importing cheaper foreign labor will create new domestic jobs ... the fucking corporations are basically robbing us blind, and idiot politicians are bending over backwards to ensure they have the tools to keep doing it.
The US and every other country playing this stupid game is basically gutting its own economy in favor of allowing corporations to maximize profits at the expense of the society which stupidly keeps giving them tax breaks.
And, sadly, the politicians who are bought and paid for to skew the deck in favor of corporate greed are usually direct beneficiaries, so it makes them even more wealthy and corrupt when they cede ever more to corporations.
You should absolutely blame corporations for foreigners stealing jobs, because they're the ones who have demanded the ability to bring in outside labor and change the rules.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Bullshit. Let them relocate overseas. You know what? Some of them do open up shops overseas. You know how well that works? Not well. They want U.S.-style infrastructure and government support, but they don't want to pay for American labor. They want cheap overseas labor without paying the price of shoddy infrastructure, higher taxes, and corruption. [Let me clarify that: corruption that does not directly benefit their interests.] Foreign companies are, not surprisingly, unable to provide a better product or undercut their pricing because those issues I mention prevent them from gaining an advantage.
I have no problem outsourcing labor. It will help developing economies by moving more wealth into those countries. Instead we are staffing our critical infrastructure with foreign nationals. We are wasting hundreds of billions on national defense, yet making the country insanely vulnerable to attack with these foreign labor practices.
Serously, I find it amazing that these companies would pay to move a worker from Calcutta but not from Omaha. "Oh we looked in Silicon Valley's and Seattle's rarified labor markets and couldn't find anyone... so now we must look overseas!" Why don't they hire from Nebraska or Kentucky? Why?....because it never even enters their minds.
Next, H1-Bs don't create jobs because they are not allowed to start a company. The system is designed that way. (OK, legally they can create a corporation on paper, but the condition of their visia is that they are only allowed to be employed by their sponsor and aren't allowed to be employed by or draw salary from their own company, so the practial effect is they can't work for their own start-up). If they are creating companies and they or their famlies are working for the start-up, it's a violation of their visa.
Here's how to quash this BS. Create a national registry of unemployeed STEM workers and make them offer to pay the moving costs to move the employee from whereever to the job site. NATIONAL, not just Seattle and San Jose. Make them hire off that list before they can go overseas. If they can show they offered a job and offered a move to somebody in the US and got turned down six times, then they can do the H1-B thing. Next, if they do hire a H1-B because there is no "qualified" american worker, make them sponsor a scholarship in that field and train somebody until they are qualified. If they hire an engineer on a H1-B, then they must pay the scholorship and internship for an american to make him qualified. That newly minted engineer now goes into the job pool.