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IT Workers Training Their Foreign Replacements 'Troubling,' Says White House

Posted by Soulskill on from the understating-the-matter dept.

dcblogs writes: A top White House official told House lawmakers this week that the replacement of U.S. workers by H-1B visa holders is 'troubling' and not supposed to happen. That answer came in response to a question from U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) that referenced Disney workers who had to train their temporary visa holding replacements (the layoffs were later canceled. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said if H-1B workers are being used to replace U.S. workers, then "it's a very serious failing of the H-1B program." But Johnson also told lawmakers that they may not be able to stop it, based on current law. Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University who has testified before Congress multiple times on H-1B visa use, sees that as a "bizarre interpretation" of the law.

9 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. He has a talent for understatement by mark-t · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Troubling"... "not supposed to happen".

    I'm not entirely sure if he's trying to deliberately understate it, or if it is just that he may be completely clueless as to what it feels like for the people who are put in that kind of situation.

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
    1. Re:He has a talent for understatement by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Perpetual war" driven by business, is not so much a "load of bull"

      I think that you can look to the words of Eisenhower to "beware the military industrial complex", followed by MacNamara's application of capitalist business practices to the waging of war to see the seed that the current conditions of "perpetual war" have sprung from

      There was a lot of money to be made as long as there was a USSR 'wolf'' at the gates. We could spend a terrific amount of money on military spending without actually having to go to war. After the dissolution of the USSR we transitioned to relatively bloodless military campaigns where the tools that we developed to fight the USSR were used effectively to crush those same weapons in the hands of countries that had enjoyed Soviet sponsorship

      Iraq 2 and Afghanistan demonstrated the failures of going past air wars and quick tank campaigns and getting stuck in the slog where a motivated local with a IED was as effective as million dollar machines and highly trained troops. The miscalculation continued to pour money into the coffers of the military funded corporations, but it stressed the tolerance of the American public

      I have every reason to believe that Romney would have gathered the same group of advisers around him that had encouraged W to go too far and pushed their propagandizing of the Red states to new heights in hopes of dragging a few trillion more dollars out of the American public while turning the odometer over from IRAQ to IRAN, as a popular poster in US military sites so proudly proclaimed

      --
      Wherever You Go, There You Are
    2. Re:He has a talent for understatement by davester666 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      He CAN'T really side with the Disney employee's, because he already has been paid to vote for increasing the H1B cap.

      He knows the law was sold to the public as not permitting this, but was written to permit it, because that's what the people who paid for the law demanded.

      "Oops, the law we passed lets companies screw their workers. there's nothing we can do about it. sorry."

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  2. Re:even stopping it won't stop it. by mysidia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Software (yes, I know, with some exceptions) can mostly be written anywhere.

    If that were true, then how come there is a need for H1Bs? Why not just outsource the work?

    No, there must be some value loss from outsourcing, otherwise they wouldn't need to bring people into the US and have exiting workers here train them.

  3. Time to Reduce the Cap? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Perhaps a little collective punishment, reducing the cap from 65,000 visas per year to say 40,000 and reducing it by 5,000 every year in which any company employing these H1-B visa workers misbehaves would send the right signal. Also, the H1-B slots should be sold in public auctions so that those companies that really need talented foreign workers when there are no qualified Americans, which strains credulity, can express that desperate need by either paying up for the Americans they need or forking out expensive foreign workers who are "critical to their ongoing business needs". You need skilled workers? Fine. Show me the money and you shall have them, foreigners or Americans your choice.

    1. Re:Time to Reduce the Cap? by molarmass192 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I like the idea of an H1B tax. Say 50% of the wage paid to the H1B holder has to be paid by the employer into social security. If H1Bs are paid the "prevailing" wage + the employer has to pay 50% of gross wages into social security, then only true H1B candidates should get hired, since there should be no cost saving involved, in the end it should always be more expensive to hire an H1B. For enforcement, any employer found guilty in court of underpaying an H1B could be subjected to 100% social security back tax for all H1Bs employed by the company for a 5 year period. This helps fund social security, prevents the exploitation of H1Bs from below market wages, and protects American applicants / job holders from unfair wage competition. Companies would get greater access to H1Bs as a result of reduced misuse to acquire the talent they really can't get here. If everyone plays by the rules, it's win-win.

      --

      Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
  4. Re:About Disney... by seven+of+five · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If Disney really wants to do the right thing, they would hired back their laid off workers in Florida and send the Indian workers packing.

    Or reinstate the workers, find decent jobs for the newcomers too, and send the executives packing.

  5. Re:even stopping it won't stop it. by srichard25 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've never seen a successful software project where the entire application was written overseas. It's not easy to gather detailed requirements from US workers and throw it overseas and have foreign workers completely build it. The only way the offshore model works is to have American developers gather the requirements, plan out the work, give detailed tasks to foreign developers and then monitor the progress daily to clear any impediments / misunderstands and make sure the quality is acceptable. Then you have the problem of who is going to maintain the software for the next decade? To maintain software, you either need excellent documentation (which foreign workers suck at) or you need the same offshore developers to stick with the application through it's lifetime (good luck with that). At some point you lose that application knowledge and end up having to pay new people to learn it from scratch.

    By the time you factor in the oversight overhead, the language barrier, the time lost in misunderstands, the quality gap, and the cost of having to pay new developers to maintain the application, I personally don't think the offshore model saves any money. But trying to convince the beancounters that is a waste of breath. All they see is that they can pay offshore developers half as much per hour.

    Building software isn't like building an iPhone. An iPhone has detailed specs that foreign workers just need to reproduce over and over again. Each software application is a unique product that needs to be designed, built, and maintained from the ground up. That fact makes it much hard to just throw specs over the wall and have offshore workers execute it.

  6. Re:H1B visa reform by Vrallis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've known a number of H1Bs, have some I've considered good friends, and all of whom will make excellent citizens--almost all are going through the process.

    From the H1B perspective, they are effectively indentured servants. They are locked into their employer, and any progress toward citizenship is completely at that company's whim. The employee has no recourse other than to put up and shut up.

    From a citizen's perspective, the whole thing has become a sham to replace expensive American workers with far cheaper H1Bs.

    Here's how hiring an H1B works (at least part of it):
    - Find an H1B candidate
    - Make up a fake job listing with EXACTLY that candidate's resume as your 'mandatory requirements'.
    - Odds are no citizen will apply that matches those requirements precisely.
    - Congrats, the company has now found an "unfillable" position that demands an H1B to fill it!