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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.
I'm sorry, but Zuckerfuck and Ballmer claiming that there would be more American jobs if only they could bring in more foreign workers to replace Americans is complete and utter bullshit.
This is billionaire douchebags saying they could become even bigger billionaire douchebags of only they could get more cheap labor from overseas.
Will someone put these two clowns into the bear enclosure at the zoo and get rid of them for good?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Because without those H1B workers fuelling the local economies, Amaricans can't find work.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
= "none"
The whole thing has been turned into a gigantic cream-skimming operation.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The things you see if you live long enough
You know if they wanted cheap labor perhaps they could offer on the job training to local people and grow their own talent instead of relying on the broken college system. I'll bet they could both afford to create on campus schools. Sure some people wouldn't cut the muster but many would. At least starting they could pay these people less until they prove themselves worth while.
As has been said here many times before. It isn't that companies can't get qualified American workers, it's that they can't get qualified American workers for the low wage they want to pay.
Or as close as they can possibly get, and the H1-B is edging fairly close.
Of course there's plenty of domestic STEM talent, just not for $45K a year with no benefits.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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.
1. We want to drive down wages in the US
Rationale: Wages in the US are high compared to the rest of the world. To sell to consumers and customers in the rest of the world, US wages must come down.
2. We prefer to import H-1B's. Opening offices in other countries is not as efficient as bringing skilled people to the US where employers have the upper hand.
Rationale: The US is the only developed country with 'employment at will' This is preferred over 'just cause' used by most of the rest of the world. By importing H-1B's we get the business-friendly legal framework, and we can deport any troublemakers back to thier home country if they rock the boat. Opening offices in
other countries is costly and requires a management to be present in the offshore country, and the timezone differences hamper productivity.
3. The US federal government is one of the few in the world set up to put the interests of the 'opulant minority' ahead of the common people.
Rationale: We can pay lobbyists to promote laws in our interest knowing that we will get favorable laws passed which are not popular with the US electorate.
I'm in systems engineering/administration, and have been through many, many outsourcing/offshoring exercises. I consider myself extremely lucky, having gotten into the tech field in the early 90s and building up enough experience to stay employed despite this. Younger people just graduating, in my opinion, don't have as many opportunities. In addition, us older experienced types (just turning 40 this year, so much fun...) are increasingly jumping from place to place as IT is offshored. Eventually, no one will have anywhere to jump to, and that's my major concern with the abuse of the H1-B program.
I've mentioned before that H1-B is used for two primary purposes. The first is the intended one -- short term hiring of extremely talented people who really possess a skill that can't be found. I've seen this used in product development and other arenas, and I support that use because it really does work. The second is the "cheap labor" use where foreign workers with masters' degrees and above are brought in to do low level coding or administration work. This just drives wages down for everyone. Also, it's not universal, but in my experience the quality of work is much lower simply because the outsourcer doesn't have any insight into how the stuff they're doing fits into an organization's plans. There are far more H1-B cheap labor users than there are talent importers.
Raising the H1-B cap is simply a way to lower wages and make the profession less attractive to native workers who demand a higher salary. I've worked with tons of people, foreign and native, and the reality is that some are awesome, some are OK, and some shouldn't be working in this field...no matter where they came from. The problem comes when offshoring firms compete with each other to see how cheaply they can offer a service, still get away with the awful level of service the customer gets, and make greater profits.
I don't know the answer, beyond setting up a guild/apprenticeship system, which techies would never go for. If we could make entry level labor cheap enough to compete, weighing the cost of having to redo offshored work vs. having it done here, etc. and have a slower wage progression over a career, that might do something. I'm not trying to be an apologist, but I do see some companies' points when they have to hire a "rockstar Ruby developer" for $200K who turns out to not be a rockstar. Improvements in education might help as well, but companies need to understand that their workforce needs to be trained. Not everyone is a drop-in replacement for the guy who just left.
Amounts to nothing more than that.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
my experience with H1-B hired engineers is that they are making $65K/yr to $75K/yr straight out of school with no experience in the North Eastern USA (Not NYC). don't know if this is representative but seems reasonable.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
They already go through the motions. The government DOES NOT ENFORCE THE CURRENT LAW. The law requires them to look for US workers, but they BS their ways through that requirement.
Look at the Cohen & Grigsby video on youtube! They're so brazen in their violating the law, they even post videos on how to do it out in public.
Imagine someone posting youtube videos on how to do tax evasion on your tax form. They'll have IRS agents arresting them in minutes.
But here we are talking about how to evade the immigration law, and nothing happens to them.
I worked for a consulting firm that wrote a fairly complex mobile app which interfaced to devices over Wifi, Bluetooth, and BLE. Our client decided that they wanted to save money, and rather than just hiring US employees, they decided to hire a bunch of people offshore. Of course, this plan depended on the current team sticking around to "train" these guys who claimed to have years of experience in mobile development. After a few sessions, realizing that they had plagiarized their way through school, and B.S.'ed their way through jobs, we all quit. They were full of bluster, lies, backstabbing and finger-pointing, absolute team killers.
So far, they've done one checkin/bug fix this month, for something the most junior member of my team could have done in 2 days. Yep, you guys saved a lot of money.
Treat the companies that export jobs like the traitors that they are. Don't work for them. Don't help them. You'll be stuck on late night calls with "programmers" basically trying to figure out ways for you to do their job for them, or to point fingers at you if you don't. No amount of money is worth that.
But only after qualified American tech workers and engineers have been hired to fill those positions. Speaking as an unemployed systems engineer, the attitude of MS and Facebook totally piss me off! They'd rather underpay a young, inexperienced, foreign worker than an older, yet fully qualified and capable, American such as myself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
This is what is happening in the US. Companies are disqualifying American workers so that they can justify hiring foreign workers. They claim that they can disqualify based on any reason: over qualified, requested pay too high, etc. They don't even try to negotiate. They come up with ridiculous requirements that are impossible to meet and then turn around and hire a foreign worker with a different set of requirements.
It's not right.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
That may be. I haven't tracked salaries recently, but I know we're offering programming jobs to H1-Bs at 60K. The advantage, from management's perspective is that these guys are like indentured servants. They're unlikely to quit, or complain.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Agreed. This is trickle down economics applied to labor. Using their logic we could solve the lack of science/math teachers by bringing in more science/math teachers which would then make more Americans want to be science/math teachers. This makes perfect sense.
"There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and
I am on an H1-b visa right now and can attest to the fact that that most of it is a scam by corporations to push labor cost down.
The reason for this is if you are born in certain countries (India and China), you face an extraordinarily long delay in getting your Green Card during which time:
1. You cannot quit your job and work somewhere else for higher wages without loosing your spot in the Green Card queue.
2. The company can take advantage of your inability to switch jobs by not giving you raises and other benefits you might otherwise have received. This is bad for the US labor market in general since it pushes down wages for every one. US workers are forced to compete with underpaid "bonded" foreign labor and the foreign labor (like me) doesn't like being underpaid. The only winners are the corporations.
3. If I get fired, I have 10 calendar days to leave the US. I have a house, car, family and friends here. Leaving isn't so easy. I have been in the US since 2000 - always following the law. I have been working the same dead end job since 2007. At the current pace, it will take me another 10 years to get a Green Card. Don't I and people like me deserve better?
They all have the same revelation, "Gosh, we can save money by outsourcing!" but since they don't have to think about the details (and maybe *can't* think about details if some of the one's I've met are any indication), they implement the strategy, move on to a new position in 18 months during the next re-org, and leave the mess for someone else to clean up. The next newly minted moron MBA becomes a hero by undoing the mess (i.e. hiring local), gets his bonus, and then he moves on in 18 months and the cycle starts over again.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
FWD.US is a conspiracy created by Mark Zuckerberg to help drive down IT wages in America.
I have no problem with talented immigrants, but American corporations are LYING about the need for those H1B immigrants due to so-called "shortages" of STEM workers in America, and in the offing they are displacing QUALIFIED American workers with those immigrants (in clear violation of the law). Here are some FACTS to counter Zuckerberg's SPIN around his company's (and others, like MSFT, Cisco, Facebook, Google, etc.) cynical attempt to drive down wages. Just look at the recent policy decision to permit H1B spouses to seek work permits in May, 2015 something; that's 150,000 new workers (most of them professionals - and many with IT skills) into an already challenged IT economy. FWD.US is part of a legal conspiracy to drive down tech wages, under cover of the lie that America does not have sufficient STEM talent. Zuckerberg is shilling for his pals, and working against the American IT worker.
FACTS: One of the most respected technology pundits in Silicon Valley has this to say about the H1-B worker problem http://www.cringely.com/2012/1...
Here's an attorney and his consultants teaching corporations how to manipulate foreign-worker immigration law to replace qualified American workers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
H1-B abuse if accompanied by other worker-visa abuse L-1 Visa (H1-B's are only the tip of the iceberg). There are more than 20 categories of foreign worker visas. http://economyincrisis.org/con...
Professor Norman Matloff's extremely well documented studies on this problem. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/...
Federal offshoring of healthcare.gov website http://www.economicpopulist.or...
How H1-B visa abuse is hurting American tech workers http://www.motherjones.com/pol...
There is no stem worker crisis in America http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-wo...
Marc Zuckerberg and wealthy tech scions continue to perpetuate this trend http://programmersguild.org/do...
Yahoo http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs...
Unemployment is a problem in America, and so are our sticky problems with immigration. Undercover of helping those immigrants who have so long labored in our agricultural sector, the American IT sector has seen fit to use the sentiment to help agricultural workers to create a Landslide of advantage for itself. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
H1Bs in Sacramento http://www.news10.net/story/ne...