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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."
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.
i am so very tired....
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.
That's very interesting, but only a fraction of those H1-B holders have degrees from IIT. In fact, I would doubt that any of the H1-B holders working for the big Indian outsourcing companies got their degree at an IIT university.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Simply, about age 35 I was "too old" and was pretty well done in the tech industry. I wasn't even able to get back into the interviews. This was right after Y2K (see, I am old) and there really was a glut of IT workers looking for jobs.
I saw the writing on the wall when I looked around for old men and didn't see many. I went back to school and now I teach at a middle school. If I really believed the jobs were there, I honestly believe that I could go back to school and be up to speed an a semester or two. However, I know that the jobs are not there. I know plenty of 50 year old ex-IT workers.
The reality is that the lack of willingness to hire is the problem. The workers have been pushed out; but can quickly "retool" of the demand existed. However, stop and think, if we weren't so fixated on pushing people out of the tech industry, about how much expertise we would have grown. That is potential, and, frankly, education investment that this country has wasted.
Those of you thinking, "I am so awesome that it can't happen to me," consider the number of older IT guys that are driving cabs and delivering pizzas.
I would be interested how you would determine that. At the undergraduate level there are lots of Asians at UCB, but most were born in the USA -- their parents are 1st generation immigrants.
Another UC site, UCLA has an alternative meaning for the initials (You See Lots of ...).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The American war on unions has been one of the most successful propaganda campaigns that most of alive at this time have ever seen. It amazes me that people have been convinced to act against both their own, and the nation's, best interest in order to increase profits for so few.
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. 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.
has been one of the most successful propaganda campaigns
The unions do most of the advertising all by themselves. At some point in history, they went from being the victims to the bullies, and they lost popular support. Even without the violence, anyone who has had to work with a union finds the process maddening. When you read about the sickening attitude of both management and labor in the 80s within the auto industry, it makes you wonder how we stayed on top as long as we did. Unions have become just another bureaucracy that people have to deal with. We really need to reduce the influence of both corporations and unions on government (a la Citizen's United).
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
I have to laugh myself silly when people object to unions.
Have you ever been in an effective union? Most haven't been in a union at all, but spout nonsense "everybody knows". Or they pick outstanding bad actors and paint all unions the same.
Some very few have been in bad unions. Those do stink.
No, the gripe people have with unions is propaganda generally spewed by those that would least benefit from good unions; bad employers that don't want to pay a fair wage. Before you fire off that hot reply full of indignation, ask yourself if you'd like it if you couldn't be fired because a H1B visa worker costs less, or because your boss is a clueless skylark, or because your employer can cut costs and increase profits by working you like a dog by cutting your team by 1/3 and doubling your workload.
Is fifty buck a month is starting to sound like a better deal now?
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
You had hot gravel? Some people just don't know when they've got it good.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Please stop shilling for billionaires.
The United States has a higher GDP per-capita than it did during the time the boomers came up. There is *plenty* of wealth to go around. What has changed is the distribution of that wealth.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
You are right in that I have no idea what percentage of unions are rotten. I can only tell you that all of my experiences have been pretty poor. My wife's hospital had a strike. These are nurses, not iron workers. Tires were slashed, threats of violence were made, etc. The scabs were better nurses, by most accounts. The nurses were already the highest paid in the metro area. The hospital was (and is) bleeding money due to its role in a poor area. The only reason the strike was "resolved" is because the bought politicians leaned on the hospital.
My friend runs a small iron working shop - just him and a few long-time employees with benefits. He's had rocks through his window and his equipment is regularly vandalized.
Locally, the iron workers union burned down a church that was under construction by non-union labor.
Attempts to reform public schools are repeatedly thwarted by public teachers unions. Attempts to get rid of morally objectionable public pensions fail across the board at the hand of public unions.
In NYC, the grossly-overpaid TWU went on strike illegally in a city that is 95% dependent on transit.
Have you ever been written up for a bullshit "grievance" by dozens of cliquey union members because you said something unpleasant to one of the other members? That's fun to be on the receiving end of.
I'm sorry, I do recognize the historical importance of unions, and I do think workers need to be organized. I just don't think the current thing we call a "union" is terribly beneficial to society. Its mostly a semi-governmental bureaucracy at this stage. I'm glad it served you well, but I have not had nice interactions.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
They want you to believe illogical bullshit. So the claim is that education in the US can not prepare students to become employees in tech industries, that already exist and we built using students trained in that US education system, that was (the one disparaged and being torn apart to create for profit charter schools). Can no one see the illogical bullshit, if the claim was in any way or shape or form true, the would be no fucking tech industries looking to employee those improperly educated students but as those industries exist and are pretty much fully staffed with educated students, then the claim must logically be bullshit.
Basically they are loosing the lie, what they are saying is they do not want to pay one cent to train people, the want the government to do if for them for free (absolutely for free as they keep their money in offshore tax havens and do not want to pay one cent for taxes to pay for that education) and even when the government pays for all that training those corporations want to pay those trained people less, much less.
Before the psychopaths took over, corporations trained people, tried to employ them for life and continued to train them, corporations were loyal to their staff and staff were loyal to their corporations. Now the psychopaths have turned it all on it's head, loyalty to no one or nothing, lying, cheating and stealing is acceptable as you get away with it or when you get caught the penalty is lessor than the benefit and the investors, well, their assets are there to be strip mined, at the first opportunity, taking into account the rules about net getting caught or the penalty being much less than the crime.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen