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With Carly Fiorina As Running Mate, Cruz's H-1B Stance Now In Question (computerworld.com)
dcblogs quotes a report from Computerworld: In 2013, Sen. Ted Cruz emerged as one of the Senate's top H-1B visa supporters, and argued for a 500% visa cap increase. But during his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, Cruz had a conversion. Cruz's presidential platform proposed a $110,000 minimum wage for visa workers, among other restrictions, as a way of ending their use as low-cost labor. The move marked a complete turnabout on the H-1B issue. Cruz's decision Wednesday to add former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his running mate if he wins the nomination, may make his newly found H-1B beliefs a hard sell. At HP, Fiorina was a prominent supporter of the offshore outsourcing model, said Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University. "To pump up profits, she was an early adopter of the practice, which given HP's status as a leading Silicon Valley firm, pushed other firms to adopt offshoring," said Hira. As offshoring gained, Fiorina played a leading role in defending globalization. To make her point, in 2004, Fiorina said: "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," reported the San Francisco Chronicle.
a bad business person.
Like many other CEOs, she thought short-term without considering the long-term implications of her actions.
She pushed outsourcing to the detriment of American workers
She eroded the previous HP quality
She bought a horrible company in Compaq
She failed to properly integrate Compaq into HP
She failed to leverage a crown jewel in the DEC Alpha, and contributed to its cancellation after the acquisition
She destroyed the value of the overall business of HP
I don't need to say she is anti-American, though she may be. Definitely a business failure though, despite the golden parachute.
Trump recently pivoted in a debate to say that he now supported the H1B program, in spite of what his web site said. Megyn Kelly followed up just to make sure she heard him correctly. Then the next day, probably after talking to Rudy Guiliani and other trusted advisors, he flipflopped back to his original position.
So you can't trust Trump on H1B either. He'll say whatever it takes to win the election. I bet even he doesn't know what he'll do if he got elected, on that and any number of issues foreign and domestic.
On the bright side, maybe Fiorina would try to offshore Congress?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
How about not at all? The US already has work visas, which worked perfectly until businesses wanted cheap imported labor, and undying loyalty (90 days until deportation is a big motivator.)
I see H-1Bs abused all the time. From recruiters demanding 5-7 years of Apple Swift2 so the employer can say they can't find anyone in the US, so have to go overseas, to "secret requirements" which only can be fulfilled by a H-1B worker. I have been told by bosses that Americans and Europeans are lazy and are going to be replaced, and H-1Bs are where real productivity happens, this speech happening the same day I was cleaning up messes caused by a H-1B squad that didn't understand "DROP TABLE" autocommits in MS SQL server.
The problem here appears to be fraud. In Canada, we had similar abuses going on with the Temporary Foreign Worker program (the equivalent of an H1B). In general, companies were using a number of different tricks, from putting out job listings with very difficult to fulfill requirements, or in some cases putting out job listings but then rejecting any Canadian applying for the job regardless of qualification. The TFW program was so poorly managed, and the Provinces so unwilling to enforce labor codes, that unskilled workers from the Philippines were being brought in to staff fast food restaurants, but the real crime was large companies, like the Royal Bank of Canada attempting to layoff their IT staff to hire people from India. It was all technically against the rules, but as there was virtually no oversight at all, companies were literally committing visa fraud, all facilitated by major international recruitment companies like Actyl.
The low skilled jobs were grating in their own way because what they were doing was allowing fast food joints, particularly in the communities servicing the oil sector in northern Alberta and Saskatchewan to put cheap labor in place, in some cases, once their rents and fees were deducted, these TFWs were making far less than the provincially-mandated minimum wage, and often housed in pretty astonishingly shitty conditions to boot. In the end, the former Conservative government was forced to largely shut down the TFW program to save itself from embarrassment.
The whole time, of course, if applications weren't being rubber stamped and if the provinces had been enforcing labor standards laws for the foreign workers, this would never happened. Of course, the politicians and the bureaucrats put on a good show of being ever so shocked by the abuses, when one has to infer from the number of abuses and the length of time that it had all gone on, that the whole thing had been a wink-and-nod affair for a long time before the whole thing finally leaked to the press. Naturally a few McDonalds outlets were targeted for fines, but the big companies apologized and were never fully investigated.
The solution I agreed with in the end wasn't to kill the TFW program, because there are sectors in which local labor markets can't fill the need, but rather to make it the first step to immigrating and ultimately becoming a citizen. Barring that, at least enforcing existing laws and regulations would have been a start.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"Too expensive" or "overqualified" are not valid reasons for an H1-B, nor is "not a good fit" for that matter. This is a program designed for the case where "we couldn't find anyone with the skills we needed at all" kind of cases. They could easily fix the system, by allowing as many H1-B visas as a company would like, but increasing the cost for every time a new one is created. Give them a 10 year life span and don't require holders to remain at the same company. It immediately provides a market based solution where companies are only going to be willing to get an H1-B worker when they really can't find any talent within the country or need someone who's so insanely skilled that the extra cost is worth it from their perspective.
Absolutely. Bringing in foreign workers distorts a labor market, very much in business's favor. One of the big defenses of using the TFW program to bring in Asian workers to hand out coffee and burgers was "We can't get anybody to work up here in Frozen Butthole, Alberta", to which my response was "Well, no, you can't get anyone to work in Butthole, Alberta serving coffee for $15, when it costs over $1,000 month for the privilege of sleeping in a closet. If you pay $40 an hour, which is what serving coffee in the frozen tundra is really worth, then you'd be surprised."
One of the biggest scams going was a guy in Northern British Columbia whose company was bringing in Chinese foreign workers, and he'd made himself a litle sideline with a big tenement to house them, and then he'd charge them rent! And the real evil was that because these are sponsored workers, if they bitched, he fired them and they got sent back to the country they came from. The TFW program had quite literally turned some foreign workers into little better than indentured slaves. It was a sort of quasi-legal human trafficking operation, with the Government of Canada and the Provincial governments looking the other way, because, you know "BUSINESS!"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
PLEASE look at your organization chart at your tech company I bet you notice quickly that Indian managers and executives have tricked HR and managed to hire only other people from India. At worst I suspect they are racist and believe that blacks, latinos, chinese and caucasian people are inferior. At best they are just hiring their friends, be an interesting study to find out what is going on. However, it is already too late the young people of this country are screwed. If you want your child to have a future refuse to train anyone from India because if they get promoted they will mostly likely never hire you or your kind. There are some good people from India that are decent technically and fair, but they are extremely rare, the bulk of H1B visa's will politically stab you in the back for a dollar, a decent bloke from India told me this.