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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.
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.
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.
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.
...too early in the morning.
What Silicon Valley hipsters are likely to object to are "indentured servant" visas. This is one problem with the low skill illegals actually. The situation helps create an underclass that can be easily abused.
That's what H1Bs are for, they are a tool to abuse labor.
I've always said that if a guy's talents are worth importing, then it's worth importing that guy as an EQUAL.
None of this stupid indentured servant crap.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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
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.
I am not surprised at all this tired old lie would show up as an anonymous first post in a thread like this.
Pay more, more will come. Very simple. Why would anybody bother to learn / earn experience for your shit-pay job? Your problem is YOU.
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.
we rarely even get through the interview and to the point where you make an offer.
Are you out looking for candidates yourself or are you going through HR? The reason I ask is that if you're going through HR, you're almost certainly getting idiot candidates who know how to push all of HR's buttons and tick every requirement from the ridiculous job description (also prepared by HR) on their doctored resume. The really good recruits, who refuse to engage in HR shenanigans or game playing are getting dropped as "not qualified". Finally, really good IT people tend to be introverts and not exactly the most outgoing or socially minded people. It's easy for these kind of people to be missed by an HR department staffed with non-tech extroverts who majored in liberal arts. Sometimes, in order to find good tech people, you have to do more to meet them where they're at instead of waiting for them to beat a path through the HR jungle.