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Immigration Attorneys: Industry Pushes Foreign Labor, Claiming 'US Students Can't Hack It In Tech' (breitbart.com)
geek writes: According to Caroline May from Breitbart News, "The tech industry is seeking to bolster its argument for more white-collar foreign tech workers with the insulting claim that the education system is insufficiently preparing Americans for tech fields, according to pro-American worker attorneys with the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI). [In an op-ed published at The Daily Caller, IRLI attorneys John Miano and Ian Smith take the tech industry to task for its strategy to promote the H-1B visa program -- alleging a labor shortage of apt American tech workers while importing thousands of foreign workers on H1-B visas from countries with lower educational results than the U.S.]" John Miano and Ian Smith write via The Daily Caller: "But if the H-1B program really is meant to correct the failings of our education system, as BigTech's new messaging-push implies, why is it importing so many people from India? According to results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a global standardized math and science assessment sponsored by the OECD, India scored almost dead last among the 74 countries tested. The results were apparently so embarrassing, the country pulled out of the program all together. Not surprisingly then, there isn't a single Indian university that appears within the top 250 spots of the World University Rankings Survey. And unlike American bachelor's degrees, obtaining a bachelor's in India takes only three years of study."
and 60-80 hours a week with no OT pay
But you're making the quite flawed assumption that you should only ever compare the cream of the crop. I'll give you a hint: 99% of H-1B workers aren't IIT graduates and wouldn't have made it to the top 50% in the entry test. The argument that just because one well-known outlier in India is good, that this is a "propaganda piece" is laughable.
The truth is far, far simpler: the companies are looking for cheaper workers, and India is happy to provide. Quality is of little concern.
I suspect every slash dotter worth their salt has a few canned responses here they can pull out to stories like this.
The main point of the H1B visa waiver program is to enable US employers to hire skilled foreign workers. Period. The reason for hiring them, at least in Silicon Valley, is not to pay a bargain basement wage, but to enable US companies to hire the best and brightest in the world. It's got nothing to do with a shortage of US workers. Indeed, most hiring managers have no idea if the applicant has a visa, a green card, or is a citizen. They just want the best person for the job. Does that mean that us US folks are at a disadvantage when hiring? You betcha! You are going up against every super-smart wannabe Steve Jobs from India, China, Israel, Russia and the rest of the world. If the hiring manager finds her man, HR will work out how to get the visa. If it isn't an H1B, it'll be an EB-2 or 1099 contracting and business trips until all that stuff is sorted out. Now, if US employers were forced to hire based on immigration status - citizens first, then green card holders, then it would be a distinct advantage to be a citizen. It'd also probably result in US employers not having the smartest people in the world working for them.
With a mark up to 20 bucks an hour to their American customers. Or work for 60,000 as a Software Dev filling a Principle Dev role with commensurate experience.
And put up with the down playing of all their experience, badmouthing them when they leave the job and moving the goalposts on all of their stated job responsibilities after the fact. Don't believe me? I have lived it and I have 3 stem degrees in which I had a high GPA. The system as it stands in the US is broken. I have often thought of moving to Germany, where not only would I make way more money doing the same work, but my money once made is worth about 3 times as much due to the state of the German economy. America has shot themselves in the foot.
Unions raise wages, period (and also working conditions, benefits, etc.)
"Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20% and raise compensation, including both wages and benefits, by about 28%."
If you don't want that, okay, but you're being flat-out irrational.
http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The American war on unions has been one of the most successful propaganda campaigns that most of alive at this time have ever seen.
Sure, if you consider pointing out and fighting against deeply rooted corruption to be "propaganda." You're practicing propaganda right now, by your own vague standards.
We are only now seeing the results of continual decreases in aggregate spending power that is the result of the failure of the workers to organize both for themselves, and for the greater good.
No, we're seeing the rest of the world finally catch up in their ability to provide the same goods and services that - for several post-war decades - used to be the sole province of US-based businesses.
Instead organizing has become a historical footnote as we descend into a vicious circle brought about by lower aggregate spending as a direct result of decreased worker power.
No, you're seeing the direct result of decreased worker value. A given worker isn't nearly as valuable as they used to be, because we no longer need as many file clerks, receptionists, people pushing carts full of parts around a factory, riveters, welders, flour millers, ditch diggers, movable typesetters, bench solderers, fork lift operators, textile workers, and the like. And if you want to make it even more expensive to employ people to fit the jobs along those lines that remain, you're just going to chase that work over the borders even faster. "Worker power," in the way you fantasize about it, is a part of the problem, not a solution. You're trying to wish away a few billion people living in places where the cost of living, regulatory environment, and tax landscape are far more competitive than in the US.
You want more jobs, and more companies fighting over hiring people at higher wages? Get behind fewer regulations and lower taxes. Stop chasing the people you consider your enemies (employers) out of the country.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I employ a lot of IT talent in Canada and the US. Here's what see in the marketplace:
* North American talent is the best, bar none but ... ...
* North American talent is produced in small quantities.
* Indian talent is (among the?) worst, but
* Indian talent is produced by the thousands.
I also work with many business partners, some of whom are Indian outsourcers and some of whom are large US corporations that have outsourced a large part of their IT work to India.
The work that gets done in India is usually shoddy. It takes 3 Indians to attempt the same job that one American will do.
So what's wrong? Are Indians dumb or something?
Turns out, they are exactly as smart (or dumb, take your pick) as anyone else. But they operate in a toxic work culture:
* Their organizations encourage cheating, which begins with those very difficult University entrance exams.
* Corruption permeates the workplace. You do favours for managers, so they will later help you advance your career.
* If you are really smart, you get poached from one outsourcing firm to another every 6-18 months. You never settle into a job long enough to get productive. Indian outsourcers literally have talent scouts on their payroll that have full time jobs at competitor firms.
* If you are not very smart, you stay in the same job for much longer, but you will never be very productive for the same reason that a not very smart American will never be very productive.
As a result, Indian outsourcers tend to have incredibly poor productivity and work quality. Firms that hire them are fools, because they look only at the low (and rising) hourly rates, but not at what an hour of labour will buy you.
I also see Indian workers (H1B or just normal immigrants) working in North America. First, I assume these are among the best and brightest, as they obviously had the motivation to relocate and had to get through whatever filters immigration authorities apply. These people fit in quite well and after a few years are (aside from accent) indistinguishable from their native-born cousins.
So the problems are basically this:
* North American education is good, but should scoop up a bigger segment of the population to compete.
* Indian education mostly sucks, with a few exceptions like IIT.
* Indian workplace culture is dysfunctional, and it's better to hire immigrants from there than to either send work over or give work to temporary workers. Don't outsource to Indian firms - that's a disaster.
* Employers frequently mistake hourly rates for total cost of ownership. They harm themselves and their former local workers through this mistake.
That's the world we live in.
A coworker of mine is from India - green card, permanent resident, married to a US citizen. She told me her credit load per semester was 18 and that "humanities and other general education" were not required. Also that foreign languages were a high school requirement.
She also said her education was fully government paid (and that the admissions requirements are far higher than for US universities).
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Well, it depends on what you are going for.
Did you get straight A's or did your grades take a hit because of your class load? Lower grades exclude you from select jobs and sometimes change the entire path of your career.
Did you intern? Because a lot of companies don't like to hire people without experiece.
Was it a Stem degree? If so, you are pretty sharp because stem degrees are much harder than many other degrees. You may be atypical if so. If it's not a hard degree, your achievement is less impressive.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
So what? Indian universities are, for the most part, diploma mills with no academic standards.
-- Will program for bandwidth
We've hired several people from India. You have to perform a rigorous technical interview because more than half of them didn't know a damn thing. The people we hired are good, though.
-- Will program for bandwidth
They don't, speaking as an Indian in IT in India. The big outsourcing companies, whether the homegrown ones like Infosys/Wipro/TCS or the foreign (to us) ones like Accenture/Capgemini/Cognizant have no such rule about hiring only IITians. MNC product companies on the other hand - Amazon, Adobe, IBM etc - do hire the cream of the crop for their local R&D facilities. The IITians you see in the US probably went there to do their master's and then got a job locally (not sure what visa category that comes under)
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
The other reason is that US students at age 18 are behind their counterparts in other countries. You get to 18 in the USA and your qualifications are as far as I can make out roughly the same as a 16 year old in the UK. This was abundantly clear in the notes for a number of my text books back when I was studying for my physics degree. They would specify the level of study that the text books where suitable for. In fact one of the books we used in the final year of my *undergraduate* degree suggested that it was suitable for masters degrees in the USA. In fact most masters degrees in the USA take two years where in the UK they take just one year.
Put another way you can get an undergraduate degree at either Oxford or Cambridge in three years. Both of which are in the top 10 universities in the world, with a reputation to match. If offering degrees in three years was a bad thing how come these two are managing it?
In fact University College London and Imperial College London are also in the top 10, so that is 40% of the top 10 universities in the world offering degrees in three years.
"Americans are so ridiculous when it comes to work culture. they have no joy, no pride, no self esteem, no passion. It's just work work work for them."
You're getting your Eurotrash lefty narratives mixed up. Aren't Americans supposed to be all fat and lazy?
My friend who works for a big bank, lets call it Nells Cargo, hired an Indian H1B worker. The guy they interviewed was great and was able to answer any question they asked. But on his first day of work, the guy who showed up wasn't the guy they interviewed and they couldn't say anything for fear of being labeled racist and having a HR sh it storm. Needless to say the guy that showed up was clueless and didn't even know the difference between a forward slash and a back slash. So yes these firms do send ringers to interviews.