Slashdot Mirror
New Book Sold Out Offers a Look At the H-1B Debate
theodp writes: The New York Post has published an excerpt from
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires and Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best and Brightest Workers, a new book on the H-1B debate from conservative syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin and programmer-turned-attorney John Miano. "Sold Out," notes a Computerworld review, "clearly has a point a view about the program (crapweasels, for instance), but it backs up its assertions and gives H-1B supporters a high threshold to cross. A serious argument in defense of the visa program requires explaining how America gains when a U.S. worker is replaced by a foreign visa holder hired to do the exact same job. If you are going to justify the H-1B program, then you have to defend firms that force their employees (no severance otherwise) to train their replacements. That may be the point here. This book lays bare the replacement process, the broad use of the H-1B visa by the IT offshore outsourcing industry, and the lobbying effort in Washington to minimalize the visa's use in displacing U.S. workers." With anecdotes like "how Microsoft wined and dined the Bush administration to expand the foreign worker supply through administrative fiat to circumvent public disclosure and congressional debate," the book seeks out a broader audience than just those already familiar with the H-1B issue.
As a former hiring manager for a lager fortune 500 company, whose ass is on the line to finish projects on time, I can assure you, I was not looking for the cheapest hire, but, the most qualified hire. I desperately looked for software engineers with experience in the area of embedded systems and some amount of networking knowledge, but, who are excellent C programmers. For the several positions I recruited for, I could not get a single qualified resume. The good ones don't want to do any C/Linux/Unix programming and are more interested in App or web development for startups. We were paying competitive market rates, with excellent benefits, but, I did not have much luck hiring any good candidates in the Silicon Valley. I completely open to hiring anyone regardless of age, sex, nationality, diability, etc. Being myself an immigrant, I felt bad that I was much more harsh in reviewing the applicants who required H1B and put them at the end of the pile. Believe, me it is much more work for the hiring manager and the company has to spend a lot more to hire a H1B candidate.
What people generally confuse is the abuses perpetuated by the so called body shopping companies, whose primary intent is to get people with some random degree from overseas and try to place them in a position in the US. In contrast, the people who are directly recruited by the large companies as their full time employees, are no different than any other full time employee in that company.
In my opinion, what should happen is, the US congress should close the "body shopping" loophole in the H1B and allow for skill based immigration, instead of H1B.
That title definitely makes this book sound like it takes a balanced and objective viewpoint of the situation, with both sides of the argument covered.
There seems to be a cultural shift in recent decades where you can't make a clear argument any more.
This starts with journalism, where "balanced reporting" initially meant that news organizations couldn't show only one side of a controversial issue (abortion, roughly 50% of Americans on one side or the other), and has progressed to where "balanced" journalism includes giving equal air time to climate change deniers (less than 3% of scientists), ESP and paranormal believers, and other completely fringe views.
To be completely fair, about 40% of Americans believe in Creationism, so it's probably OK that this gets equal billing. The point isn't about the beliefs per-se, it's about journalists unwilling to choose a side. Equal billing tends to prop up failing modes of thought.
I've read numerous books and papers that posit a claim and then cite evidence to support that claim... I *thought* that's how science debate worked. For example, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind does precisely this: establish a point, then bolster it with reams and reams (well, one ream - 512 pages) of evidence.
Why does someone with a position to argue need to lay out both sides of an argument?
That's not how human perception works. We rely on experts to sort through the information we don't have time or expertise to deal with.
What's wrong with making a clear point in a book tagline?
Reduce the cost of labor instead of raising minimum wage.
High labor costs accelerate and, more importantly, compact the removal of jobs, while slowing the reuptake of jobs. Jobs always reduce: we've come from every single individual requiring 15-20 labor-hours per week to acquire food (that means a population of 1,000 people needs 20,000 working-hours per week to feed it) to a society where 2% of workers are ag and we expend 27 labor-hours per year producing food (so a population of 1,000 people needs 520 working-hours per week to feed itself). With the spare time, we've been able to build roads, cars, space ships.
The Industrial Revolution shows us an important model: machines suddenly became cheap, and the 479 labor-hours going into making clothes immediately dropped to 96 labor-hours--80% unemployment even 60 years later. What would today be a $4,000 shirt ($8.75/hr * 479) is now a $15 shirt, as we've improved the manufacture processes to use even less labor-time. Back then, that $4,000 shirt became an $800 shirt; most of the consumer base vanished--not for shirts, but for food and everything else--and much of the economy fell apart.
Contrast that to agriculture or car manufacture. In 1970, India was producing 2 tonnes of rice per hectare and selling for $500 per tonne; by 2001, they were making 6 tonnes per hectare at cost so low the sale price had dropped to below $200/tonne--note that inflation would have raised that $500 to over $3,000 in 2001, and so India was investing less than 6% labor per tonne of rice produced in 2001, compared to 1970. That transition occurred spread over 30 years.
During the spread transition, jobs were lost, and rice became cheaper. A few jobs lost--3% in one year is kind of rough, but that's only 3% of the agricultural sector and much less of the whole market--and a whole shitload of consumers (over 99% of the market) facing cheaper food meant they had almost a whole population with more money to spend. Find a way to make a product with little enough labor and you can sell it to those consumers, pay your workers, and come away with captured profits. Looking at the Industrial Revolution, we can conjecture this works less well when only a fifth of your population still has jobs.
What can we take away from this?
Alternate management--geoshifting jobs (H1-B or outsource to India), automation (outsource to machines), or rearrangement (cellular manufacture uses less labor than assembly lines, which are less labor-intensive than guilds and artisans)--transfers your labor needs to another form. That form often takes less or lower-priced (cost) direct labor, but may require more total labor (e.g. the machines are expensive, or QA to try and make standard measures work in 803BC is ridiculously labor-intensive thanks to undeveloped technological capabilities). If it takes more total labor, then you're paying someone more--the machines are expensive, you just hire real people.
By this, reducing the cost of labor at least delays the transition to geoshifting or automation (less outsourcing, fewer machines, for a while).
With the march of technology on a low-cost labor market, early adopters will get screwed. Your strategic adopters will recognize $10/hr labor vs $8/hr machines, but also notice the machines coming down in price: if they invest $25 million in a 30-year machine that will cost $8/hr to maintain now, they'll find themselves less-advantaged as if they wait up to 5 years for a cost range of $6/hr or lower, and so will decide how much risk they're willing to take and will jump into the automation game at that point. You get traditionalists who wait until their business nearly collapses, too.
By this, spiking labor costs *rapidly* moves labor to cheaper sources (including automation and H1-B): a $15/hr laborer versus a $10/hr machine is more encouraging to the entrepreneur considering a mechanized labor force. Lower labor costs *spread* the loss of jobs.
Lower labor costs translate, eventually, into
Support my political activism on Patreon.
(as if *any* USian is going to pick fruit for less than minimum wage!)
Of course they won't, and it's illegal for anyone else to do so. The correct response would be a massive crackdown on employers who violate the labor laws. Daily raids, random inspections and audits, harsh prison sentences for executives and severe financial penalties for the businesses involved. Failure to do so is class warfare.
I'm a Canadian and I call BS.
First off, Canada doesn't have an H1-B program. We have the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
If you had watched the news, you would have known about RBC bringing in workers to replace Canadian IT workers under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. They only backed down - this time - because of all the negative publicity exposing the illegal practice in this one instance.
Dozens of employees at Canada’s largest bank are losing their jobs to temporary foreign workers, who are in Canada to take over the work of their department.
"They are being brought in from India, and I am wondering how they got work visas," said Dave Moreau, one of the employees affected by the move. "The new people are in our offices and we are training them to do our jobs. That adds insult to injury."
When you write: "WHERE in the hell are all the unemployed, competent, software developers this would create? Their absence is suspicious - they just don't seem to be out there", maybe it's because after decades of BS working for smug, self-satisfied people who don't even know what's going on around them, who can't even tell the difference between Canada and the US, we get completely out of the field. Change career paths. Retire. Whatever. Any way we can to give a big F*CK YOU to the people "managing" the industry, because what goes around eventually comes around, and it's their turn.
This problem has been going on for years in Canada.
And if you're getting people who think that knowing Dreamweaver and Photoshop makes them qualified, then you (or your HR department) obviously have a problem spelling out minimum requirements, or the recruiting companies you deal with are just sh*t monkeys throwing sh*t at the wall and hoping some of it sticks. Either way, the problem is on your end of the line.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.