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Federal Judge Calls BS On Homeland Security's 2008 STEM 'Emergency'
theodp writes: In 2008, the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security enacted 'emergency' changes to Optional Practical Training (OPT) to extend the amount of time foreign STEM graduates of US colleges could stay in the country and work ("to alleviate the crisis employers are facing due to the current H-1B visa shortage", as Bill Gates explained it in 2007). More than seven years later, U.S. District Court Judge Ellen Huvelle has found that the government erred by not seeking public comment when it extended the program, and issued a ruling that could force tens of thousands of foreign workers on OPT STEM extensions to return to their home countries early next year. Huvelle has given the government six months to submit the OPT extension rule for proper notice and comment lest it be revoked. From the ruling (pdf): "By failing to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking, the record is largely one-sided, with input only from technology companies that stand to benefit from additional F-1 student employees, who are exempted from various wage taxes. Indeed, the 17-month duration of the STEM extension appears to have been adopted directly from the unanimous suggestions by Microsoft and similar industry groups." Microsoft declared a new crisis in 2012, this time designed to link tech's need for H-1B visas to U.S. children's lack of CS savvy.
DHS, FOUNDED BECAUSE FOREIGNERS LEVELED OUR STOCK EXCHANGE, HIRING FOREIGN IT LABOR, BY THE TENS OF THOUSANDS, TO BUILD CRITICAL ANTI-TERRORISM INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURE.....
What you need slaves because the US citizens were like "Screw this guys I am not building my own cage"?
It's all about getting the budget approved and finding ways to get kickbacks on the side. Just like how all these utility companies are now outsourcing. "We need to remain competitive"; your 50 million dollar golden parachute wasn't big enough?
Meanwhile, Real IT Pro's know there's a tremendous shortage of real Talent out there, and it has gotten so bad companies can only stumble upon people who know what they are doing. Everyone else just kinda passes as somewhat knowing what they are doing.
Great recession, almost a depression, crashing economy, loss of million jobs a month.. unemployment spiking over 10%... underemployment way past 16%... and they persisted this farce of 17 month additional OPT for STEM? It is corporatocracy, pure and simple.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Prioritizing family reunification visas is worse. I know of two people that have used family reunification visas to bring in their parents. All four of which went onto Social Security and Medicare shortly after arriving. The US would have been much better off if those four slots had been given to STEM workers.
1. Wages increase
2. They bring in people on green cards for 5-10 years for any employer instead of this H1B nonsense where they bring people in with a leash around their figurative nuts and hand the nut leash to one company.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Bill Gates can kiss my hairy ass.
It's funny how Silicon Valley hipsters love to mock conservatives over illegal immigration ("They took err jerrrbss!") but throw a big fit over H1Bs, which are exactly the same thing. But they're disadvantaged immigrants! Their rights trump yours, Whitey, remember that. Your own politics opened that door.
WOW, a breath of fresh air!
(Sadly, I doubt it will stick.)
I am not sure what you mean by that - sarcasm, literally mean it, or xenophobia.
When I see under/un-employed IT/developers/CS people, recent grads in CS not finding work, and then see some big shot in tech (or worse, some peon here on Slashdot) saying how there is a shortage, I just think the system is broken and rigged. There are plenty of qualified Americans who would love to have the work and no one is going to convince me that someone educated in the Third World is going to have a better background and have the "skills" that somehow Americans don't have.
The H1-b program is ALL about exploiting cheap labor from mostly India and driving pay down by increasing the supply of workers. I see jobs paying 65k that used to pay 80k back in '01. Now, add inflation in. Yeah, pay has been cut in half in real terms. That is NOT a sign of a shortage!
There is no shortage of tech workers. There is only a shortage of people willing to work at rates management wants. And these are not burger flipper jobs that can only sustain paying employees out of the $5 value menu gross proceeds. These are wildly profitable tech giants with billions in revenue.
Wow. I had no idea we had so many affordable houses for the homeless.
I have no problem with H-1B if they companies really want the talent they can't find in the US. What I don't like is H-1Bs filling in routine positions for cheap. Maybe if H-1B had a rule about being paid in top 10 percentile in the industry, the abuses will stop.
Comparing the tech worker unemployment rate with overall unemployment is bogus.
The Construction industry was decimated and so was finance. And sll of the unskilled workers were creamed too.
And then there is the attrition of tech workers. After 35 or so, jobs start getting harder to come by and with the continued offshoring and H1-b hiring, many of us saw the writing on the wall and left. Half of my MBA class were tech workers looking to get out.
When you leave or get forced out of tech, you are no longer counted as a tech worker. When big decides to eliminate a whole division and send it overseas and flood the job market with unemployed workers, the younger ones get hired first and the older ones get left behind.
Please, spare me the fairy tale that "if you have the skills, there's work for yoy," when you are unemployed in tech, you are damaged goods -"if he was any good, he'd have a job." (Kids, always have another job queued up.)
And there were quite a few guys from India, Middle East, Eastern Europe there - and they were all aiming at our markets. See, their foreign based companies were paying their way.
Wait....their nuts are figurative, not the leash?
I didn't realize such a large percentage of H1Bs were women and eunuchs.
Years ago I saw a lecture by a "cheif scientist" . She was bitching how she couldn't find "qualified" people because there are only 25 people in the Wotkd who can do what hey need and they all eork for smaxon, google, facebook, and yahoo.
What did they do? Social networking.
What skills wre they lookong for? JavaScript "engineer". Engineer?
They can't find qualified people because they just want to pach and weren't paying enough.
Silicon Valley employers are idiots.
Large companies are having real problems finding skilled people they can pay minimum wage and treat like chattel.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Sometimes the real issue is hidden as it is inflammatory by nature. What I suppose is going on is that in some other nations education is severe and demanding and fanatical. Students able to get advanced degrees in those nations tend to have superior educations by a wide margin. In other words a Ph.d. from some foreign nations may mean far greater abilities are present than a student trained in the US. economic competition is such that employers not only want these workers as they have to pay them less but also because even though the credentials look the same the US educated students can not compete. If businesses admit this the public will rage over it. But we may be a stronger and safer nation because we do employ these students with foreign credentials.
that right when the entire US economy was imploding in 2008 and my life was going to shit because of it that several thousand more foreign workers were allowed to stay in this country. I was wondering why Bernie Sanders has been doing so well in the polls. As always vote left. Vote for the most left leaning candidate you can get your hands on. You can bet we'll have fewer judges when Jeb is in the Whitehouse...
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If Microsoft is not hiring from the available resource pool, and instead reaching out for cheaper labor through the H1-B system, it could be that its education efforts are merely a front to make it look like it's doing something. It after all has no intention on hiring those students later - they cost too much.
I casually state, "We just contracted a software project to some guys in Kenya, we needed the best and brightest. The project came in on time and on budget. And because of that, I got my bonus. I think next week I'll give them another project."
Works every time.
Wow. I had no idea we had so many affordable houses for the homeless.
Most of the really affordable houses (These $1,000-5,000 specials) are in sad shape. You might not actually be allowed to live in them, they're so torn back. But they got that way because people (or banks) refused to rent or sell them for what the market would bear, so they sat vacant until the vandals and thieves got there...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Once they got use to slave labor they didn't want to give it up again.
This sounds like the administrative law folks decided, hey, you didn't follow proper procedure on this thing you did, go back and check the boxes on your paperwork. It doesn't sound like they are actually saying what they did was wrong or right. If they go back and check the boxes for public comment and still do what they did anyway, nothing changes. H1B1 is a complex subject on one hand, I like the fact that we do end up helping start up economies that were stagnate and had a low standard of living raising some folks from absolutely impoverished to just poor but livable, on the other side there is some truth in the "They took 'er jobs" line of thinking where we did have a lot of job displacement. It's seems much more impactful when the "host" country loses high paying jobs as a form of claimed altruism while really it just saved corporations money than if we'd have just sent over a bailout in the form of trade incentives that came out of our tax dollars. On the other side though India is in a drastically better state than it was 10 years ago and the outsourcing is leveling off and now starting to go elsewhere (China, Vietnam...) and they now have the skilled workforce to run their own modern economy without relying as much on other countries.
Green card holders, including elderly parents who come in on family reunification, only have to wait 5 years before they are eligible for Medicare. http://www.insubuy.com/greencard-holders-medical-insurance/
They have to pay premiums for it, but honestly an elderly person who hasn't spent their life paying taxes into Medicare is going to take far more dollars out of Medicare than they will ever pay in to it.
This is not a myth and it does mean that family unification visas are a direct drain on the Federal budget.
There's nothing wrong with giving foreigners who just graduated from an American college the chance to stay and work. These are people who competed to get into school and won, had the money to pay for it, and then learned more at the school. These are precisely the folks we want to stay here.
This should be extended to graduates with good grades in all disciplines, not dialed back.
The real problem is H1Bs and the difficulty in getting a green card. It's the indentured servitude nature of the immigration-work-model which allows companies to pay less and force down American wages. We should provide enough protection to foreign workers that they can tell an employer to shove it.
People can apply for work visas if they have something to offer, and they can come and help pay for our college system and prove that they can work VERY hard and learn fast via the school-visa program. We should embrace everybody coming in on that path. H1Bs are simply destructive.
Rules just need to be enforced.
At our company, every one of the H1B's make more than their co-workers by 10-20%. All of our H1B developers make $140k+ Some over 200k.
Our H1B Graphic Designers are making $95k.
If we are going to be spending thousands to do the paperwork, plus tens of thousands in training, we need to make sure they stay, all 6 years rather than transfer their H1B to another company.
We went the H1B route, because there is a severe lack of Coders with creative skills. People who have Fine Arts or Liberal Arts degrees tend to be much better developers, finding better solutions, and more innovative new directions. They need a bit more time than the "60hr nose-to-the-desk" US coder, but the overall quality is much higher on average, and they work less (we mandate 30hr work week, 10 hours "exploration" (do what you want) time. And have had much better annual throughput. So, we eventually just replaced most of the US Comp Sci grads with H1Bs who have arts degrees; but have a coding skill-set.
What the US needs, is a better focus on teaching Creative and Liberal arts to students (Or more specifically, the ability to take University courses without going into heavy debt, so that arts classes can be taken to expand their creative and philosophical skills; in addition to the courses required for their desired field of employment.
In some areas, there have been wage increases with programmers. I don't think the IT industry as a whole is in dire need though. There are plenty of system administrators that need jobs, etc.
For example, I work at a large university in the midwest. I recently got an offer from a public company with a 10k raise. The university matched it to keep me. When universities have to pay real wages, you know things are not great out there.
I think the H1B visa should be discontinued, instead, they should give every student, in the entire world, whom owns at least a master's degree or a phD a green card; this would solve a lot of problems in the USA and give us the competitive advantage we need. Also, every F-1 student should be getting a green card instead of OPT; which is nothing but a bridge from F-1 to H1B to green card.
Also noticed some homes auctioned for 3000$ and 5000$ in Detroit had well established rhododendron and azalea bushes 20-25 feet tall, small fruit trees less than 30 feet tall, lots of weeping cherries and japanese maple and dwarf alberta spruce etc. The value of the plants alone would often exceed the auction price. Wish I had the money to buy them, dig out the bushes and sell them to nurseries.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If they cannot find people, let them pay 150% of the Monster rate for that position in their city.
If it is just to lower the wage by diluting the pool - F#$% them.
Off shore development does not work that well, that is why they want them in the US.
Strike One: U.S.A. Citizen.
Strike Two: Make.
Strike Three: Ph.D.
With the Three Strike Rule the Government and Universities are "cleaning house."
But that only places Foreign Intelligence Operatives and Saboteurs within the U.S.A. at critical War Winning junctions.
Ja Ja
Hey do you know what American STEM graduates cost?
Why would they wanna do that if they can pay a third as much and import a foreign "student" while paying them intern wages while getting real work done?
You mean like going to war over intelligence we know is bad for ideological reasons? Or tapping every phone in the country? Or diverting funds from a major US city's levies for the aforementioned war. I could go on you know....
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The companies that seem to scream the loudest about there not being enough tech people, are also the ones with a bad reputation.
Many tech people don't like how Microsoft handles themselves in the Market.
Also they have a bad reputation as an employer; with the cut throat politics.
Same with Facebook, how they collect all this private information. And also has a bad reputation as an employer.
Since the Internet people can actually do research in the companies they want to work for.
It is classic market failure. Our abandoned homes outnumber the homeless by almost 10 to 1 factor. In a proper market, prices would fall until renters move up to homes, homeless move up to renting, fewer people inhabit each house/apartment, etc. But prices aren't dropping, so the supply and demand can't meet, because of the powerful banks who seek to control and extort from society for somebody's basic right to exist.
ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn