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.

Comments

-1 Disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

I modded you down because I disagree with you. It's not racism. H-1B takes jobs away from qualified Americans. I hope I was quick enough that nobody sees your post. Please stop posting crap that's wrong. Otherwise I'll keep modding down all of your garbage that I disagree with. I'm posting anonymously so I don't undo your well deserved downmod.

- chipschap

Re:-1 Disagree

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:-1 Disagree

[guruevi]

All you have to say is: "There is no applicant that fulfills my requirements, I promise" and for good measure you make up a job posting with requirements such as 10 years of experience with Exchange 2016 and a minor in archeology. That's literally the extent of the H1B and the lottery only applies if your company needs more than a certain amount of workers per year, I forgot the exact limits. If you need only a few workers, you're guaranteed to have the applicant you want, it's less than an hour of paperwork and far less issues with HR (it's a modern slave trade).

Where I work we regularly hire through H1B, we pay 35k/y for a PhD from China or Eastern Europe and as an added benefit we/they get a fast track through the green card and permanent resident process later on, in comparison we pay 125k/y and relocation costs for similar degrees from American sources.

500% increase would be 1.25 million H1B's/year on top of the 'regular' .25M work immigrants through other methods such as Visa's.

Re:-1 Disagree

[Shadow99_1]

Well since the late 90s american law firms have taught companies how to disqualify american workers for jobs and get in H1Bs instead. A Pittsburgh firm famously got on Youtube for a seminar were they did that. It hasn't stopped. In my region it's gotten so bad for H1Bs that there are barely any large companies that have american IT workers, at the same time myself and hundreds of others who have applied for some of these jobs were not hired. While I can't tell what rate those workers are then paid, what exactly do you suppose is the reason to discriminate against american IT workers?

Re:-1 Disagree

[AK Marc]

The H1-B visa holders are doing jobs Americans are willing and able to take (illegal) and the H1-B visa holders are being paid below market for the position (also illegal).

What do you see that makes you think they are being done right?

Re:-1 Disagree

[MightyMartian]

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!"

Re:Carly Fiorina is...

[Orgasmatron]

Well, she did get a 7% bump in the stock price.

When news got out that the board sacked her.

Re:Why does Slashdot oppose H-1B?

[khallow]

Anyway, there is no reason to expect Ted's position on this to change because of Carly. VP candidates typically have zero input on policy.

Biden - *IAA. Cheney - Halliburton. The last two VPs had strong connections to certain lobbies and those lobbies did well during the tenure of those VPs.