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Evidence That H-1B Holders Don't Replace US Workers
Okian Warrior writes: In response to Donald Trump's allegations that H1B visas drive Americans out of jobs, The Huffington Post points to this study which refutes that claim. From the study: "But the data show that over the last decade, as businesses have requested more H-1Bs, they also expanded jobs for Americans." This seems to fly in the face of reason, consensus opinion, and numerous anecdotal reports. Is this report accurate? Have we been concerned over nothing these past few years? Remember, this is about aggregates, rather than whether some specific job has been replaced.
This just means there's more demand for skilled workers than h1b's and native talent pool combined.
I have a bunch of H-1B workers (All Indian) at my place of employment, so yeah, they DO replace American workers.
BFD.
That doesn't preclude H1Bs having replaced US workers. Maybe the companies would have hired MORE US workers if they hadn't gotten H1Bs.
The Puffington Host - land of Thalidomide-brained morons.
How about this explanation instead: an expanding business hires people, but can't replace them all with H1-B's.
Always consider the source. This "study" is totally biased and funded by the libertarian--regulation hating Koch Brothers and their CATO institute. This is false and not true.
What the H1B provides is a means for an employee to *NOT* participate in relocation. By offering H1B positions, companies do not actively recruit people from other areas, assist in relocation, the alternative is to open more branch offices in other locations near the groups of people. Instead, they offer the H1B because (1) the cost of that worker is less, and (2) they do not need to provide relocation. Lastly, most H1B workers want a green card. The problem is once the worker starts the green card process they are sort of an indentured servant to the sponsoring company. They cannot quit, they cannot threaten to leave otherwise they loose the green card. This process lasts from 3 to 6 years. If the H1B worker had job mobility as a normal american does, the H1B worker would recognize the low pay, demand higher pay, or move on to another job in the USA leaving the low paying company with a hole. This job mobility (or non-mobility) by the H1B worker solves or causes the problem. I know this, I have been involved with these types of decisions, or watched these types of decisions occur right before me over the last 30+ years writing software.
Also, remember that part of the fight is about _expanding_ the pool of H1-Bs. From the pov of the employers, if current levels of H1Bs mean they aren't getting cheaper labor, then clearly they don't have enough H1-Bs. The study doesn't project what would happen if the number were increased substantially.
This is BS. The author of TFA is using the third type of lie, statistics, to suggest that H-1Bs aren't having a negative affect, by setting up a strawman argument. Sure, H-1Bs may not increase unemployment, IN AGGREGATE. But that's as easy as saying, "Well, Initech replaced 50 American coders with H-1Bs, but there's a new McDonalds open down the road that hired 60 people at minimum wage, so unemployment is down!"
There was no mention of salaries, benefits, much less anything specific to particular fields, not even "IT." At most he made an argument that "STEM grads are less likely to be unemployed" but that means nothing, because that can still be true even if they're not being given the opportunities they should.
This is just a rewording of the old saw that illegal immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won't do -- at salaries that are too low. If the flow of H1-Bs dried up, then wages would rise as the American tech workers would become more valuable. As wages rose, then becoming a tech worker would be viewed more favorably.
With the same evidence, Huff Po could have argued that H1-Bs are depressing wages for American tech workers.
Economics 101.
Supply and Demand: If Demand stays constant and supply goes up, cost for services go down.
So during the late 1990's we had a High Demand for Tech, and at the current supply, tech workers were getting exceptional pay and benefits. Then during the Clinton Administration they opened the H1B1 for tech workers, because they saw this as a permanent increase in demand, and wouldn't meet supply in the near future.
However after Y2k settled down and a new infrastructure was setup demand settled (The tech bubble pop), however there is now a glut of tech workers, and H1B1 and the new infrastructures allowed for outsourced IT services. Thus so many tech workers, caused the salaries of tech workers to plummet.
Now technology demand is going up as the Y2k infrastructure is approaching 20 years old. So IT worker salaries are on the rise.... H1B1 increases will cause a drop in salaries, so many tech workers will leave work, as the lower salaries will not be acceptable.
However if a company is trying to stay competitive, and they find if they layoff their local workforce, and hire H1B1 for half the price, then they can make up for the cost of high turnover.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The issue is not whether both populations are increasing, the issue is whether the number of regular workers would be more or less or the same without the H-1B abuses.
Check this action out: 13 million jobs added, yet from the same article:
So, the actual unemployment rate (the labor force participation rate) was unchanged in spite of thirteen million new jobs, and the number of people who need full-time work to support themselves but are only working part-time is also unchanged, meaning that the number of Americans with unmet needs was unchanged.
How can there be 13M new jobs yet Americans' status hasn't improved?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They are not comparing wages for ALL H1B workers, only the "Highly Skilled" ones. So they exclude all the low wage H1B workers meaning they are comparing the Elites against a country in recession and come to the conclusion things are fine. A more accurate comparison is how wages/benefits have dropped steadily at the same time the Corporations are claiming a massive skills shortage (supply and demand doesn't work that way).
Not necessarily. If the two jobs would not have been created if H1B workers were not available, then one American job would have been created. Not saying this is the case, just pointing out the flaw in your logic. This is a complex issue. There is also something even larger: The US economy. If it does worse without H1Bs, that can mean both a better or worse situation for American workers, it could even mean a better situation for American workers, but a worse situation for Americans overall, depends all on the details, the numbers and the long-term trends.
This is a complicated issue, there are no simple answers that are true.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Any report, with a carefully selected pool (read as pre-screened) of people to take your poll will achieve the outcome you desire.
Just another fake report based off of fake analysis paid for by your donations to both the Democratic and Republican political parties.
From the website of the entity who did the "study":
This is a partisan entity who makes reports for the assholes telling us H1Bs are necessary to support their point.
This isn't objective. This is made my people who think giving industry the power to fuck us all over is good for the economy.
Which means you should view this for exactly what it is ... paid shills writing papers to support the conclusions of the people paying for it.
Next they'll tell us trick down economics really works, and all those tax breaks for the wealthy and the corporations have led to prosperity and job growth, when that is provably false.
Now tell us about the fucking Easter Bunny.
Libertarian think tanks don't have facts. They have ideology.
It means there's more demand for CHEAPER skilled workers than the native talent pool has.
There is ALWAYS demand for less expensive labor. Sometimes it isn't available. Sometimes companies engage in measures to reduce labor costs. Importing cheaper labor is fundamentally no different than offshoring the work. The basic goal is the same - to reduce labor costs. I run a manufacturing company and we do all our work domestically and pay as much as we can but our competition does a lot of their work in Central America or China so we really cannot compete on jobs with a high labor content unless there are special requirements like engineering help or just in time delivery. We simply cannot pay much more than we do and remain competitive.
Some companies are obviously engaged in some shady tactics to keep labor costs down. The tactics may be reprehensible but the fact that they are trying to contain labor costs should surprise no one. In a competitive market companies HAVE to try to do that. It's particularly galling though when the company has huge profit margins like Microsoft or Facebook does. A low margin manufacturing company might go out of business if they don't keep a tight lid on labor costs. A hugely profitable tech company has no such excuse.
I've heard stories from a technical director at a major American firm where they'd reject PHDs simply because they were worried they'd leave for higher paying jobs elsewhere.
It's not just PHDs. I have a pair of masters degrees and I've been told point-blank during interviews that they were afraid I would get bored and leave or seek higher paying work. It's incredibly short sighted but it happens pretty routinely.
It is a very simple thing -- even though H-1Bs were meant to be hired on as true experts, the program is being used the same way businesses in the early 1900s hired scabs when unions were striking, or hired Chinese labor in large quantities to build railroads... only thing that stopped that was Americans threatening to burn down factories.
We saw the same shit back in the 1990s. Japan was good, US workers were lazy.
Now, it is the same thing with so many games used for companies to say they "need" a H-1B:
1: They have a position for a Linux person with RedHat certs, then demand a CCIE. Usually nobody has both, so they get their $18,000/year junior admin who is an indentured servent.
2: They demand shit like 5+ years of Swift mandatory or 2 years of Windows Server 2016. Of course, nobody is going to have that, so the business gets their bottom of the barrel H-1B dev which gets replaced every 90 days.
3: There is the scream of PHBs, "Lets call Tata/Infosys... they fix everything". What results is not pretty.
I've seen this in IT since the 2000s, when the PHBs tried to offshore entire IT management to Bangalore, then realized that they needed big-ass network pipes for that, so decided to import the cheap labor.
As for quality, I've know managers who are used to flipping people every 90 days, and are used to nothing getting done, and just assuming the low code quality is the norm.
But the data show that over the last decade, as businesses have requested more H-1Bs, they also expanded jobs for Americans.
So if this is the "refutation" that H-1B holders replace American workers, I would say this is insufficient proof. It could be that in businesses that are expanding, you see more of both H-1Bs and jobs for Americans, simply because there are more jobs in total.
Like if I'm running a business and I need to hire 2 new programmers for an American office, and I can hire one H-1B worker at a much cheaper price, maybe I hire the H-1B worker and 1 American workers rather than 2 new American workers. In that case, it's true that the H-1B worker is taking a job that would have gone to an American, and also true that as I'm requesting more H-1B, I'm hiring more Americans. Of course, this is a simplified example.
Now I'm not opposed to immigration. I do think there's value in welcoming the best and brightest, even understanding that on a small scale, they'll displace some workers. I'm just not sure what this thing actually proves.
A lot of people here in the forum fear those people with H1B visas, as they are used to lower wages and increase unemployment. Instead of whining about this obvious bad situation in the US, you could yourself look at relocating yourself to another country. For example you can get paid between 35-55 k€ a year in Germany as a coder or software engineer after leaving university. In US equivalent you have to add another 7% for healthcare and 5% for retirement plan which would be today $43.77k to $68.79k per year.
You mean...Disney didn't replace their US tech employees with H-1B Visa holders? So their US employees did not train their H-1B Visa replacements?
You mean...Microsoft didn't lay off 18,000 people and then lobby Congress to increase the number of H-1B Visas?
You mean...there isn't economic research that refutes that article's premise: "As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages." http://www.epi.org/publication...
Sounds like a page out of the Philip Morris playbook: "cigarettes don't cause cancer" - "H-1B Visa holders don't displace American workers"
Really? Large numbers of H1B visas are no problem, is a neo liberal/neo conservative statement. Commies would try to protect the workforce from foreign competition.
Not necessarily. If the two jobs would not have been created if H1B workers were not available,
Wait. What?
Actually the Niskanen Center is Libertarian.
They state as their intent to shrink the size of government. This is them wanting to get rid of INS. They are pretty radical, even as Libertarians go, since most Libertarians are OK with UBI (for example), as a means of paying poor people to not steal their stuff. These guys are far ... not right or left ... up?
Very little controversy on the issue until the front running Republican candidate comes out on the side of the /. consensus.
Pointing out that the research was funded by a special interest group that has a self-interest in the out come, is pointing out a flaw. Move along Potsy.
Donald Trump is making more sense than almost anyone, and the HuffPo is quoting with the Koch Brothers in a non-ironic way?!
Yep, the apocalypse is neigh.
Why engage in a serious discussion when you can just blame someone else for the misery. For example, last time they could vote, they voted most likely Republican or Democrat (not that it matters that much) and they most likely did so before. And every time they do not like the outcome. But instead of changing their choice the next time in an election, they whine about the situation and elect the same jerks over and over again. They could vote for the Green party or even organize something new.
Neither Trump nor any other candidate will really stop H1B visas. It might be that they deport Mexicans to simulate action, but the truth is that this will be far too little to fight the influx of Mexicans. As long as you do not start shooting at them at the border 24/7 they will come. And if you do, they will find other ways to flee their dysfunctional country. Why do I talk about Mexicans? Because it is part of the same problem. People move around the globe in search for a better life. Some come by H1B visa, some are illegal. They are driven by the limited prospects in their own country, by wars, by hunger, by violence. and they will all come to Western states. Look at the influx of Syrians to the EU.
So if all these /. would really want to discuss the issue of H1B they must discuss migration and wealth distribution, but this is communist stuff. Real Americans don't use these words.
I think OP means that _IF_, due to a less expensive H1B hire, the company is able to post 2 jobs rather than their normal one, then the "one job lost" calculation is thrown off.
Perhaps a bit clunky explanation but I understood the post to indicate "there are a lot of variables that may factor in to this equation, for which a simple math calculation may not give an accurate picture."
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
... I've got a bridge you might want to buy.
1. Over ten years? The whole H1B visa thing has been an accelerating situation. I'd like to see a study that focused on the last couple years.
2. If you read the report they refer a lot to what politicians are saying which is a bad sign in a study. It sounds like a political argument.
3. The correlation versus causation in this "study" is ridiculous... they say "company X hires more stem people than company Y and company X also hires more people period"... and they conflation US hires with foreign hires... it literally says in here "every 1 H1B visa hire correlates with 2 native hires"... as if they wouldn't hire the two native guys if they didn't get the H1B?
4. Then they talk about patients and really really highly skilled H1B visa holders which no one is complaining about. No one has a problem with companies importing geniuses. Its when they pull any yahoo into the country into entry level positions of which there are f'ing zillions of americans to fill that same position.
The study... looks like garbage. I've also never heard of this organization before. They say they're libertarians and are a splinter of the CATO institute... we'll see what happens.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
At my place of employ, H-1B absolutely replace US tech employees. HR here is required to, on some regularity, advertise the H-1B jobs as "open" and entertain applications for the role. The reality of that is that HR advertises for tech skills that we don't even use ... for instance, about a year after starting for the company I noticed a job opening for a developer position that needed "VAX/VMS, Oracle, and Cobol experience" ... funny enough, I happened to know a guy who had over a decade of experience with all of those and thought he might like an opportunity. I asked HR what part of the company needed all of those skills, and HR became immediately evasive saying "we just advertise the positions we are told to." Cop out. Tech staff here is roughly 80% H-1B.
Why are graduate schools (i.e. PhD) filled with international students? A University pays the same stipend to international students as it does American citizens. Internationals do get counted towards diversity, which helps ranking, but American citizens can apply for more fellowships/scholarships hence potentially becoming 'free' employees. There's a lot of people here posting on empirical data, and while I feel bad for you if you went through a tough situation.
There is a fundamental difference.
There are differences but they are not fundamental ones. The goal is to keep labor costs low. The mechanics of how this happens is secondary. Sending production to another country does add some logistical overhead but they wouldn't bother if it didn't result in a net gain on labor costs. Importing H1Bs or other cheap labor has different logistical hassles but they wouldn't bother if it didn't result in a net gain on labor costs. You're getting bogged down in worrying about the logistics but missing the big picture in the process.
Sure, the regulations claim that a H1B worker can have another company sponsor it if the first revokes prematurely. How many companies would consider doing so? Company2 sees that Company1 revoked,so the holder was not acting in favor of Company1. Whether it was reporting them to INS or only working 40hour work weeks does not matter. They would not spend the money to investigate the majority of the time.
Ding ding ding, you got it in one.
This is also why every time some poor idiot pulls out the "($Unskilled_Profession) wants $15 an hour? I'm ($Skilled_Profession) and I don't even make that!" argument a Walmart heir's nipples tingle. Because the minimum wage being so low doesn't just hurt the working class, it artificially forces all wages down -- in short, your wage is supposed to be much higher too, but it isn't because they're getting away with paying Burger Flippers slave wages.
Depending on if you're checking increased productivity, inflation, or both, the Minimum wage in the US should be either $11 or $15 an hour, if not higher. Since it's still $7.25 that means that money went somewhere other than the workers of America who earned it.
Thus the question isn't "Does a burger flipper deserve as much as me," it's "Does a Walmart Heir deserve the $7 an hour extra they're not paying each of their workers?" (Spoiler alert: No.)
This is obviously counter to the prevailing thought flow here, and I'm more than willing to admin that companies can exploit both H1B Visas AND the employees hired under it, but I've never seen /.ers discuss much about how it would affect overall competitiveness of American companies if they could not hire cheap labour from developing countries and bring them in. Some points I see, qualitatively are:
1) Companies in developing world will have a huge cost advantage in IT, and the more significant IT costs are to an industry/company the more significant this advantage/disadvantage will become.
2) Knowledge is generally free of country barriers, and I think most people here would want it that way, which means it is foreseeable that IT products & companies can develop in developing countries at a much lower cost and export it cheaper compared to the same product made say in developed countries. H1B to some extend mitigates this risk in developed countries, and also pulls out the better talent from the developing countries inhibiting , also to some extend, actual product/mature IT product companies growth in these companies. I'm talking about something like having an MS or GGL in US with H1B talent being more competitive to a potential Indian MS or GGL - you dont really hear about (yet) an Indian company with a fully developed OS or IT Product as much as its industry size suggests.
I'm sure there are counter points that would likely mitigate against these risks, but I think these points could have a real , if not absolute impact to the industry as well, and in that sense, H1B might be doing good for the developed countries ( since we're talking about H1B, I suppose I should just come out and say the US..)
"...Remember, this is about aggregates, rather than whether some specific job has been replaced...." ...which means it's about lying.
The submitter/editor is specifically trying to contradict what you know otherwise to be true, and so had to remind you that the story's data need to be specifically interpreted to be true.
-Styopa
This is 100% the fault of unions. If we outlaw unions, ALL our pay will go up, we'll get MORE benefits and the greedy fatcat union bosses will be the only ones looking for a new job.
It may also well be that none of the two jobs would have been created without the availability of an H1B for one of them, giving a net gain in American jobs from H1B. A possible scenario is that both jobs would have been off-shored without the one H1B worker.
You are spot on that simple math (that ignores most of the factors by its nature) is not enough. Sure, I think that companies wanting more H1Bs are mostly into getting cheap workers, but what the actual effect on the job market is, is far from clear.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If you falsely believe that economics is a zero-sum game.
If by "consensus opinion" you mean the opinion of progressive activists, then it probably does. However, their "consensus" is worthless.
Introducing a new pool of cheap workers into the economy causes lots of people to "lose their jobs", quickly to be replaced with better jobs for most of them. Those are the "anecdotal reports". It's basically the same fallacy that the Luddites were a victim of.
They seem to be talking about a scenario in which the existence of H1B visas creates both jobs, which seems ridiculous. At best, it is a wash.
With all the rhetoric and back and forth about H1Bs the truth is a little consequence. Anyone who is unable to find employment in any portion of the tech industry can readily point to a story or belief, founded or not, regarding H1Bs and blame foreign workers.
Some in industry claim that the root cause of the need for even more H1Bs is a lack of skilled/trained workers. Yet there seems to be little activity that would result in upping those numbers.
Usually I would consider HuffPo to not buy into government policies which seem to only benefit corporations.
Immigration is one of those strange issues where liberals support it for reasons involving being pro-multicultural and businesses supports it for its supply of cheap, wage-suppressing labor.
I can't decide if this article was posted for the usual left-wing pro multiculturalism reasons or just as more liberal sniping at Donald Trump. The latter alone is a phenomenon I don't understand as it seems like a waste of energy when there are more likely Republicans to actually win the nomination.
+1 exactly
I've been through this on both sides, working for the outsourcer and the outsourcee (as a US citizen for US companies.) What I've seen happen in most instances of worker replacement is this -- CIO signs a huge outsourcing deal with Tata, Infosys, CSC, IBM, HP, Xerox, HCL or one of the other huge consulting companies. This company gets a fixed price per year to deliver the same services the customer's IT department delivered, and this price is usually significantly less than they previously paid for IT employees. (We'll ignore time and materials, change orders, rework, etc. etc. that push the price back up eventually.) Because the outsourcing company has to make a profit on the deal, their task is to provide the minimum service required to avoid contract cancellation, and drive the cheapest cost possible to make it happen. Usually, about 10% of the IT department remains with the company, mostly the business analysts, project managers and other touchy-feely roles that can't be easily done remotely. Some percentage is laid off immediately, and the balance transfers over to the outsourcer. Over time, these workers begin being replaced by H-1Bs or offshore labor because of cost pressures. H-1B labor is brought in to fill roles that absolutely can't be done from some call center environment, and the remaining ones (day to day administration, help desk, etc.) get sent offshore or into a sort of sweatshop "sysadmin farm." This is directly due to cost pressure, and service suffers because of it.
Companies might "create jobs" but they're generally not IT jobs in environments like this. I'm very lucky and now have a system architect level job that I've earned through years of experience in the trenches. What I worry about is that these low level jobs that new grads learn the ropes on are getting harder to find. As it is, I'm often in the position of just telling an offshore team what to do. I don't think arrangements like this are sustainable because you're not building up the next generation of techies to take the high level jobs later on.
I don't know what's taught in MBA school, but I guarantee a good portion of it is telling them that numbers on a spreadsheet are the only data that deserves any weight. I've seen IT outsourcing fail to produce the desired results far more often than it has succeeded. If your company does anything with IT beyond keeping the lights on, you'll be disappointed with an outsourcing arrangement -- but the numbers don't lie, at least in the short term.
Here's what I'd like to see happen: IT and dev workers should create a professional organization similar to the AMA, Screen Actors' Guild. It would have to be anything but a "union" because techies have this individualist streak that prevents them from wanting to associate with others in that way. This organization would do what the AMA does -- limit the number of new entrants, lobby for laws to be passed that favor its members, and ensure professional standards. Low level tech work would be on an apprenticeship basis, which would allow people to learn from experienced folks rather than the hodgepodge of self-teaching, vendor certification, etc. High level engineers/architects would be professionals, with responsibilities similar to actual, real PEs. I know most people think they're super-special and would never dare to compare themselves to their peers, let alone associate with them. But this is the best long-term solution -- it keeps tech a well-paying career, ensures that we can bribe Congressmen the same way businesses do, etc.
Like I've said before. If you are going to make an argument for H1B visas then it should be based on jobs where real apparent scarcity of talent has been shown to have driven up salaries. In other words, Doctors, Lawyers, CEOs.... professions with layer upon layer of protectionism. Once those salaries are down closer to a median income, then we can talk about needing to import a bunch of indentured servants who are clearly in-fact lowering the prevailing wages of middle income American families. And if you just want more people overall, then increase immigration quotas. We need immigration of people that want to come here, not hundreds of thousands of indentured servants like we are Saudi Arabia.
Irrespective of the fact the H1-B's are used to displace American workers with cheap foreign labor, which is blindingly obvious...
The beauty of Trump's proposal, in the abstract, is that it is beneficial regardless of how damaging the current H1-B program is to domestic workers. By preferring American workers for any jobs, and ensuring that H1-B workers are paid at least as much as any US worker filling the same job, you ensure that H1-B's are being used only for their nominal purpose: to fill high-skilled positions for which no Americans are capable and available.
If the H1-B program isn't being abused, then Trump's proposal does no effective harm to the businesses utilizing it. If it is being abused (as everyone knows, really, aside from partisan politics), then Trump's proposal could help limit the abuse. Moreover, implementing it would make clear if it was being abused or not (vis-à-vis the continued usage and/or calls for expansion). It would be a win-win-win... and by inference, you can assume that anyone arguing against it (in the abstract) has an ulterior motive.
They still talk about absolute employee counts and salaries. Well, why H1B visas, then? Why not give them green cards instead? If they are legal resident aliens, don't make them indentured servants. They prefer indentured servants because indentured servants are more likely to cope with poor management (which is also the cause of more highering... poor management means longer working hours and less efficient organization in general).
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
This is the same group that proposes :
. Focus on policies that tackle absolute poverty, rather than inequality.
. Reject taxes on capital, including on dividends or capital gains, and reduce those taxes if given the opportunity.
. Refuse to increase, and preferably abolish, the federal minimum wage.
Ok, sure, it's anecdotal, but if we do want to talk about some measurement as silly as salary levels, I've gotten calls from recruiters trying to hire for Infosys in the US and the salaries they offered were at least %30-%40 lower than the market wages in the US. You can call it anecdotal, but Infosys is the largest outsourcing company in India. And now they are trying to prove that they local American workers are not available by pretending to try to hire locals at much lower wages.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I was asked to TRAIN my H1B replacement then let go. This is complete bunk and propagandized drivel.
what I do know is after 20 years in IT, I've only seen the number of Indian co-workers increase. I've seen (numerous times) scores of American workers let go, only to see a restaffing from places like Tata and Infosys only weeks later. I'm no Einstein, but that sure seem like replacement to me. Still, these aggregate numbers are deceptive. If some programmer making $100k finds a new job flipping burgers, then technically there's been no loss in the number of American workers. Sounds like MBA math actually.
Besides the rural population you already mentioned, there are another 350M middle class there, and yet another 350M there that are quite well off, have access to excellent schools thus becoming as "highly skilled" as a westerner.
Why people want to claim such easy to disprove bullshit is quite befuddling. No country has a good balance between rich, poor, and middle class. The 1/3rd of the population you claim exists and is "quite well off" simply does not! India is very similar to the US where the top .01% own most of the country and the top 10% own 90% of the wealth just like the US. There are more people in extreme poverty in India which makes them worse than the US.
Getting a degree does not make a good and productive worker in a foreign country. If it did, every company would have more Chinese workers than Indian workers because that is who the numbers have favored for decades. There is quite a bit to that discussion, more than I care to get into in this thread. Anyone that has dealt with development and support out of a foreign country knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Your personal anecdote with hiring does not change the fact that H1B workers are easily pressured into working far more than anyone should. Recent criminal actions against several companies for human rights violations in the SF Bay area should make that abundantly clear, and we only know about the few that were abused to a point where they turned in their sponsors. Of course a H1B worker is "hard working"! That is the point of people calling it a legal indentured servitude. For every one company that uses the system correctly there are at least as many that don't.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
We don't need H1B visas. They *do* result in really f'd up situations. A H1B visa holder shouldn't be an indentured servant. That's wrong. They should be able to compete with natives on a semi-even playing field (ie none of us are really playing fairly- I got a "good" education which can't be said for those I'm competing with). We *do* have to compete with other countries on pay already so closing the boarder and acting like we can't let the foreigners in because they'll lower our standards of living is a bit of a folly.
We need more freedom. I'm willing to sacrifice the southern United States to republicans and conservative agendas if your willing to sacrifice another part of the country to communism and another part of the country (say New Hampshire) to libertarians. And heck- lets even though in some hippie system in Vermont and anarchist non-system in Main. We should then just accept that we can all move freely between said systems by virtue of a right of a right to exist. If one is arrested for a crime in one state then one should be able to choose prison- or be forced out. Problem solved.
> Labour is, typically, a zero sum game. Pay less and the quality of work goes down in one (or more) of many fashions.
IOW it's not a zero-sum game.
I see two obvious errors in logic in this analysis.
1. Rising total employment of Americans does not mean that other Americans were not replaced by H1B holders. If there were no H1Bs, employment of Americans would have been even higher. What sloppy logic!
2. From the article: "If H-1Bs were primarily cheaper substitutes for American labor, the pace of H-1B requests...should rise when unemployment rises, as employers look to cut labor costs by laying off workers." In what universe does this logic make sense? If unemployment is higher, cheaper labor can be obtained by hiring more Americans since they are having a harder time finding a job. The actual results are completely consistent with H1Bs being a cheaper replacement for American workers.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
If finding these people is soooo hard, pay them 150% of the market rate when they are brought over.
If they are worth it, no problem. At least they would not be depressing the wages.
Manufacturing is a bit different especially unskilled.
It is not different at all. Any given job requires a certain set of skills and within the locations where those skills are available it will tend to migrate towards the location with the lowest labor costs. If an area with lower labor costs develops a workforce with needed skills then the work will tend to move there like osmosis. Obviously it is easier to relocate work where less skill is required for the job but that is true in any industry and isn't unique to manufacturing.
Our general economic strategy as a nation is to shift those less skilled jobs out and replace them with higher level and more skilled positions.
Well since the alternative is to lower wages to compete, I don't really see that as a bad thing. Bear in mind that the same thing will happen to low wage countries in time. China has low wages now but they are rising steadily. Eventually China will have to do exactly the same thing as the US if they continue to grow their economy. We're already seeing some manufactured goods that previously were offshored to China coming back because the labor costs have risen so much that the savings has evaporated.
Tech is the fastest growing and one of the highest paid job sectors and requires substantial investment in terms of time and education on the part of the workers. These are the jobs those losing jobs in manufacturing are supposed to be able to learn skills for and take on as a career. There is nowhere to go from here.
I've been in manufacturing most of my working life. Manufacturing jobs require substantial investment in time and education just like tech jobs. What is happening in manufacturing in places like the US is very similar to what happened in the farm industry 100+ years ago. The number of jobs in that industry is shrinking as a percent of the workforce but those that remain are far more skilled and productive in general. Very much like farming there is this perception by people outside the industry that the skill and education levels required are low when in fact exactly the opposite is true for much of what we do. I routinely do multi-variate statistical analysis, work with PLCs, conduct spectroscopy, generate complicated process management tools, develop databases, do operations research, and more. Manufacturing is absolutely loaded with technology and to compete in the industry you need to be well educated and smart.
I've seen two sorts of H1-Bs. When I worked in big companies, they tended to be much less skilled and much more like the "el cheapo" sorts of workers that many people fear are replacing "good American workers".
On the other hand, the remaining "good American workers" in those jobs were often captive to the massive specialization and gross bureaucratization of big companies as well.
Other places I have seen the H1-B postings, and I always read the H1-B postings when I see them, those postings are looking for people who are going to be paid $90K, 100K, 120K. These are very decent salaries for developers. Not the best, but pretty in line with average mid-career sorts. So, unless there is some huge bias in *favor* of bringing in Indians just because they are Indians (and perhaps there is in some places), the H1-Bs aren't replacing American jobs with lower paid offshore. They're making as much as I would expect to make in a similar situation as an American citizen.
So, in the end, I am fairly certain that the big corporations are probably abusing the H1-B system in some way, but as a hiring manager in an area with lots of developers/technical people I can tell you that I struggle to find qualified people and I am quite willing to pay them a rate commensurate with what they might expect to make with their skills and experience. We simply don't get large numbers of candidates.
I've never personally hired an H1-B. Although some companies I have worked for do hire them, it is almost always considered to be something you do when you are extremely desperate. For that reason, despite my almost certain belief that a Microsoft abuses the system, I don't think that they're completely full of shit.
Of course, I would prefer a system where we could get these people naturalized and have them move here instead of sending all their money home and then leaving eventually with their skills in tow.
Let's see...
FY2009, 214,271 visas were approved. I was out of work from mid 2008 till 2010. I've since been gainfully employed in a large government/corporate work environment in which it is not uncommon for 85% of the staff to be or have been H1B visa holders.
Since being employed, I have survived two project cuts and received multiple promotions and a 50% increase in salary. Obviously, I was capable and competent.
I actually like the H1B visa program as a cultural exchange. But the whole, we need this because there are not any skilled, capable American workers is utter BS. It's like the "trucker shortage". There is no shortage of skilled truck drivers in America. There is a shortage of truck drivers who will work for peanuts, barely making above what they have to expend in gas. Truck drivers work because they were able to make half decent money to support their families. Now they can't.
We all know the Disney import of H1B visa holders to be trained by the employees they are to replace is not uncommon. The H1B visa program is repeatedly used by corporations to depress wages.
So no, this article is utter BS.
I actually have an idea to improve the H1B program. A tax...for every $100K increment there would be a $10K tax on the visa. An IT worker earning an $85K salary = $10K tax, a doctor earning $165K salary = $20K tax. These revenues would go directly to funding 2 year community colleges allowing any American to attend a community college for free. That's a minimum of $2.5 billion and likely a lot more....
H-2 visa holders are the ones who are replacing US workers because they need no qualifications.
H-1B holders are workers who are filling in because there isn't enough qualified workers already in the US.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
IF but that if is false.... It doesn't create more jobs.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
Which point to this article http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sc... which cites this article http://sciencecareers.sciencem... , which cites this researcher Matlof in this paper: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/...
The long and the short of it: "It boils down to cheap, compliant labor." -- Norman Matloff.
Said by an anonymous coward
This just in from the DNC's inner sanctum email traffic on what they really mean by "a path to citizenship":
"We've just approved a new plank in Hillary's platform: Pile illegals up in a stadium, drop a nuke on them and pray for them to reincarnate as children of US citizens!"
Seastead this.
They bring skills that couldn't be acquired by hiring an American into the company and cause that company to be more productive
Would skills include a culturally-developed high tolerance for indentured servitude? That's about the only thing they bring to the table, since US citizens cannot and will not acquire such willingness.
Never mind that the replacement and promotion rate is effectively nil, since US citizens are considered a problem in business.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It doesn't work that way. To address and preempt your lines of argument:
Skilled immigrating workers may bring capabilities that are not available in the native workforce
Realistically, they're not. Unless culturally-developed attitudes of non-objecting servitude is a capability, they're only bringing in warm bodies with a lack of citizenship status. Why else would a need exist to train them on non-trivial concepts, a la California Edison & Disney?
...immigration of young employable people tends to expand the economy by more than the number of jobs they take, creating net employment for the pre-existing workforce.
This needs a large [citation needed], since the only "extra" jobs relate to
Legal services that only exist to defend the status quo, which is to replace citizens with non-citizens
Jobs given to individuals closely related to said H1-b individuals.
Statistically-generated "gains" that exist largely on paper.
Remove those and you will see a net loss on citizens and a net gain on non-citizen (guest worker) labor. The "net gain" jobs you (and other non-citizen labor force) suggest just simply doesn't exist.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Not knowing particular tools can also happen, but people with higher education usually catch on in short order. That's what they're trained for.
As to not hiring Masters or PhD's for programming on the other hand: that depends on the kind of programming you do. If your company's work has a lot of stupidly simple jobs like adding columns to a database table, then apparently your company it shouldn't be looking for programmers (as in software engineers) at all. It should be looking for code-monkeys.
Not hiring anyone with a bit of education makes actually sense in that case.
Ease up on that pot, mate.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
The author of the study bases his conclusions on the fact that H1B visa requests go opposite to the direction of unemployment. When unemployment goes up, H1B visa requests go down, and conversely. He then states that employers are therefore using H1B visa workers to grow, rather than to replace existing workers. My belief is that this is true, but that employers are using H1B workers to grow without paying higher salaries and benefits to attract more domestic workers. My belief is that this is one reason why IT salaries have stagnated over the past ten years.
I would need to know who paid for the study in question. I'm guessing it was a group of companies with massive H-1B worker staffs. What were the criteria of the study? Walmart would actually have to pay H-1B workers more than citizens due to the low rates of pay historically found in their company. Fast food chain workers need not fear H-1B workers for the same reason. If you look in the IT sector, we have more than enough workers and pay rates have stayed static while the cost of living has gone up for the last ten years. Yet corporations look to H-1B to fill holes in their staff because it's cheaper and they will work unpaid extra hours out of fear that they will be fired if they don't.
The study referenced in the article starts with the assumption:
If H-1Bs were primarily cheaper substitutes for American labor, the pace of H-1B requestsâ"measured by the length of time before the cap on visas is reachedâ"should rise when unemployment rises, as employers look to cut labor costs by laying off workers.
But that's wrong. Rising unemployment means an economy already in the early stages of recession. Instead of replacing highly skilled workers with cheaper ones, companies shut down entire projects. They want to get rid of employees, not add them.
The study goes on to say:
But since 2003, we see the opposite: H-1B requests rise as unemployment falls.
Falling unemployment means an economy coming out of recession. Companies start hiring again, but because of the recent recession they are always nervous about adding permanent workers, especially more expensive domestic ones. So of course we see more H-1B requests.
It's a CV - you don't have to list every degree you've earned. Is an employer going to fire you for having a 'secret' masters degree?
Also, it is a reasonable thing to address the elephant in the room, why an over-qualified candidate wants the job. For example, shorter commute, new technology, new challenges, etc.
I once had to apply for a job THREE times, my first two resumes were tossed as over-qualified. Only when I walked into the HR office to drop off my third resume in-person which included a cover letter that specifically stated I understood the pay was modest and the position was part-time did I get an interview. I had a very productive and happy five year run at that job until I choose to move out of state.
Ken
And we're surprised it's BS? Just another crazy leftist paper.
Indians have infected America with Caste system, a type of Cancer;
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Kshatriya will manipulate you/system and hire a Kshatriya;
Brahmin will manipulate you/system and hire a Brahmin;
Bania will manipulate you/system and hire a Bania;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Please sign/RT;
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
Casteism
Indian H1B covertly hires/promotes/colludes with another Indian H1B;
They've mastered the art of manipulating/using people for past 2000 years;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
Casteism