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How the H-1B Visa Program Impacts America's Tech Workers (computerworld.com)
Computerworld is running an emotional report by their national correspondent Patrick Thibodeau -- complete with a dramatic video -- arguing that America's H-1B Visa program "has also become a way for companies to outsource jobs." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the article accompanying the video:
The vast majority of people who work in IT did everything right: They invested in their education, studied difficult subjects, kept their skills updated... But no job is safe, no future entirely secure -- something IT workers know more than most. Given their role, they are most often the change agents, the people who deploy technologies and bring in automation that can turn workplaces upside down. To survive, they count on being smart, self-reliant and one step ahead...
Over the years, Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau has interviewed scores of IT workers who trained their visa-holding replacements. Though details each time may differ, they all tell the same basic story. There are many issues around high-skilled immigration, but to grasp the issue fully you need to understand how the H-1B program can affect American workers.
Over the years, Computerworld reporter Patrick Thibodeau has interviewed scores of IT workers who trained their visa-holding replacements. Though details each time may differ, they all tell the same basic story. There are many issues around high-skilled immigration, but to grasp the issue fully you need to understand how the H-1B program can affect American workers.
... how to work long hours for next to nothing.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Fully impossible I say. The usual pro-H1B supporters on here say there's nothing wrong, and it's really good that all these people are being brought in to displace American works and push wages down. Just like how it's happening here in Canada with TFW's and employers are laying off employees because they don't want to pay the wage, then paying the 1/3 the wages that they were going for. And that ranges from welders and pipe fitters to skilled factory labor and IT.
Om, nomnomnom...
in other news....
The only response 'modern' technologies seem to get from Slashdot is how the 'old way is better'' and "it'll never work". "Those kids are going to have to deploy apache servers BY HAND like I used to. None of that Docker Cloud Crap".
For example "graphical programming languages", which by Slashdot standards are terrible, has a lot of job openings. There are plenty of jobs for hardware in the loop (HIL) testers. Same goes for people that know CAN/J1939 and the tools that go with it
For those training their replacements, I don't see what the problem is. I hate doing parts of my job, I've already done it once. I would be able to train a high school graduate to do 90% of it and if they have questions I'll be around for the other 10%. But it means that I get to concentrate on doing something else. If you're doing the same thing for more than a year heads up, someone or something is trying to automate it and replace you. Unless you think companies should still be bootstrapping a new Laptop instal by hand instead of having an imaging server.
I'm sure the older engineers that were replaced by kids straight out of college that knew CAD thought they were 'highly skilled' workers as well. Turns out an engineer that can draft is cheaper than an engineer AND a drafter. But don't let that get in the way of the narrative that your skills are 'up to date'.
There are jobs out there. A lot of them.
IT companies are interested in skills not the beautiful bachelor paper. It's important to hire international talents which education's talent differs from others like russian-romanian and math which is totally different and greater than us math and vice versa
Without the visa program, the jobs would really go to India. This way they stay in the US.
Reclassify the sector under national security interest that requires natural born US citizenship (i.e. having no ancestry that would qualify for alternate citizenship).
Problem solved.
Alinskyite labeling constitutes fighting words under Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire.
It's amazing how much tech folk can sound like auto workers in the 80's bitching about Americans buying foreign cars. The only thing lamentable about the H1-B visa is how it turns foreign-born employees into virtual slaves of whoever their sponsoring employer is. Every other complaint is just a variation on "I shouldn't have to be price competitive because I was born in America".
to work the way that it is sold as working.
(1) Keep the number of H1B workers about the same.
(2) Bring fewer new H1B workers into the country by offering permanent residency to ones already here.
(3) Require participating companies to meet minimum goals for H1Bs converting to permanent residency in order to continue participating.
(4) Since fewer new H1Bs will be coming in, raise the standard so they really do bring in hard-to-find skills.
Good people don't just take jobs. They create jobs. That's why employers like to locate in tech centers -- concentration of talent. So if someone's good, bring them in and keep them. It's beyond folly to have a program which kicks good people out of the country, along with skills and know-how that they've accumulated. It's disloyal to the country.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When you talk about illegal immigration from Mexico, it's all "no man is illegal", "we are all born equal", "tear down the wall", "just let them in". But the moment some brown person comes to "steal" not some low-income redneck job, but your hipster job, suddenly the song changes completely. Guess the equality of men regardless of race applies only to the uneducated. i.e. other people.
Maybe all of that social justice stuff is really just a ruse to get people to think they're not a bunch of greedy monsters who have more in common in their attitude toward paying workers with John Calhoun than Bernie Sanders. One reason I'm voting Trump is Trump is precisely the sort of asshole who might call up the AG, ask if the statute of limitations under the criminal component of the antitrust laws has expired on the anti-poaching settlement and if the answer is "no," might say "bring indictments." Will he? Who knows, but it's a possibility and would be hilarious to watch some of these self-righteous fuckers face the full wrath of the federal government in criminal court.
Bullshit.
This has been happening in industries for decades, there is nothing inherent about IT workers that gives them more knowledge just because it has been happening more recently.
Its most important benefit is that it allows the *best* workers. The U.S. is tiny. Its top-tier of intelligent people is tapped out; because reality is not racist there are tens of millions of foreign nationals who are smarter than 99% of U.S. citizens. Companies would be fools to settle for less.
I was a contractor at Agilent from 2000 to 2003, and during that time Agilent brought in workers from India to replace their US workers in the finance department. The special talent the Indian workers possessed was they'd work for almost nothing. The Agilent US workers were told to train the Indian workers to do the Agilent US workers job or they would be fired and lose their retirement moneys. The H1B program needs to be abolished.
Then you know the company is going H1B because there really is a shortage of workers, and not simply because they're greedy sons of bitches looking to lower their labor costs rather than paying what it takes to get the employee they want.
First they came for the entry level jobs and as those disappeared fewer people got the opportunity many of us here did to "learn on the job". After 20 years in the field working for "too big to fails", around 80% of my team is typically H1B. We can't even get resumes from American's because there is no new crop of folks learning specialties. American IT salaries could be controlled if there were more of us competing for the same jobs. As it stands I make more than twice what my H1B teammates make which seems fair since I'm only here to train them to replace me.
Were those workers being replaced in a government-run program to import foreign workers to labor in Ford and GM plants to lower wages? No. Are those objecting to H1B basing their complaints on having to compete with software companies located in other countries? No.
Does that mean you have the lamest analogy in the story thus far? Yes.
Corporations laugh at the regulations that are never enforced unless there is some sort of massive publicity. Even then... Our congress is bought and paid for.
I'm amazed at all the idiots who think a billionaire who has gone bankrupt (yet somehow still has billions) many times with failed businesses is going to change that.
All they'll do is devalue the dollar so that $200k is peanuts.
I'm wearying of it, but so far I just post the same thing over and over when I read about this topic. You don't see this with comparable white-collar high-knowledge professions like accounting, teaching, law, medicine and engineering. ...because they are all licensed.
This is not about unionism or protectionism. It's not holding onto the job for nationalism's sake or racism. Any race can get a license, indeed foreigners can be licensed - if they can pass the tests. Most of this outsourcing is not about putting in equivalent people; it's about being able to afford more of them and make up for the lower productivity and accuracy.
Information technology should be a licensed profession for multiple reasons; there are a lot of crappy local programmers that shouldn't have such jobs, too. This isn't about handy helpers or kid's games any more: our civilization depends on code that works right and we lose money, privacy and opportunity every day from IT failures. Medicine was not a licensed profession just a few generations back; it was licensed when it was time. For IT, it's now time.
People should stop beating around the bush and call this what it is: a government run program to subsidize labor costs for businesses and shareholders, to the detriment of American workers and taxpayers. "Fair market rates" only apply when they are to shareholder's benefit. When they actually give the worker a leg up for a change - fuck you, we're going to bring in some grads from India to do your job. Grads who can compete without five figures of student loan debt hanging over their heads.
no job is safe, no future entirely secure
When was the last time you heard of an H-1B worker taking a politician's job?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
They told me I had to train everyone in my group how to do my job! For seven years they would not give me any training.
I told them NO I will not train your offshore people or your H1B people how to do my job. Handed them my resignation and walked out of the building.
I have no illusions that it hurt them one bit but if everyone did it they would have to reconsider how they treat workers.
Just say NO to training your replacement.
less in depth analysis. It makes my head hurt.
I know a lot of people here in Silicon Valley who are not naturalization seeking, and working on a visa.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
And I have a lot of friends who eventual became citizens after getting their first job in the US with the H1-B program.
Taking the best and brightest from other countries is in America's best interests. And there needs to be some new regulation to make it harder for companies to use H1-B as a way to train up foreign workers to prepare for a big outsourcing and inevitable local layoff.
I think the easiest thing is add new restrictions. For example, if a company has paid H1-B in the last 18 months, they should face stiff penalties for layoffs. Including some severance requirements for the employees they let go (2 years salary severance seems fair to me). I pick 18 months because it would likely screw up the scheming that corporations do around their quarterly accounting.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Except for a handful of Americans and other nationalities, my grad program is mostly Indian. I would put the percentage at 95%+. Saying that the Indian students are as dumb as stumps would be insulting to stumps since at least the latter has a purpose in the ecosystem. I'm guessing the department's budget depends on that the department and unversity look the other way to keep the international student tuition rolling in.
So long as they have an underclass of ultra cheap labor to support their middle class while they're getting trained they will always be cheaper than Americans. H1-B isn't just about driving tech wages down, it's about eliminating training costs. The Indians get trained in a very, very narrow skill set for pennies. Then they get cycled in and out and you don't worry about investing in them as employees.
We've built our society around a social contract where you work hard, make your employer rich, and get a little bit for yourself. That's the whole "American Dream". If you honestly think the 1% won't break that social contract first chance they get you haven't been paying attention. They did it for thousands of years save for one brief period after WWII when we'd killed enough working males and blew up enough infrastructure that they didn't have a choice but to pay top dollar for workers.
The solution to these problems is Democratic Socialism & Basic Income. The 1% are going to break the social contract. It's a "When" not "If". Restructure society so that when they do it doesn't matter. Either that or enjoy your race to the bottom...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Are programmers working for that here? No, they're working for like 5x that. I bet most H1-B workers are either at or above the US level (55k).
So, what's your complaint again?
You're full of shit.
The H1-b program was started on the lie that was a "shortage" of skilled workers. As we have seen, salaries have been stagnate.
In other words, the whole point of the H1-b program was to manipulate the job market by replacing American workers with under-paid H1-bs. It's market manipulation.
See, back in the 80s, the American auto workers were competing with equals. Here, with H1-bs we're not. We're competing with low wage third World workers who cost less (we're charged) than 45 cents on the dollar - I have SEEN the invoices. The Indian offshorer or whomever takes the bill rate and god knows what chump change they pay their people.
That's the way of the World. As I tell young people with decent brain, go into medical. STEM is for Third World. That's the future: creation will be done here: the grunt shit work of the engineering will be done in third world shithole sweatshops.
And when India is too expensive, there are billions of very poor people with a decent brain to exploit. And those people pop hundreds of million more out every year. Humans are the most renewable resource to exploit there is.
We are laying off our people by the end of the year and sending the work to Bangladesh. I'll get a nice big fat bonus and a promotion. And thank god the software industry has trained customers to take shit and PAY US MORE for the fixes of our own screwups!! Thank you Microsoft, IBM and Oracle!!!!
...love H1B !
Laptops and other computer parts are made from exploited labour and techies do not gripe about that. So it is only fair that techies, too, get exploited. A living wage is for all, not just an anointed few.
Is the United States Government importing Mexicans, as a matter of public policy, to take jobs that require a low skill level?
Some of us (I was working in software dev at the time) saw this shit going down fifteen years ago.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
The workers having to allegedly train their H1-B replacements should be suing their former bosses into bankruptcy.
First off, if they need training, they aren't qualified.
Second off, if they have to train them before being fired, there obviously are already trained and qualified workers to fill the position.
Trumpnuts love to post knee jerk reactions, but lack the guts to post anything but anonymously. /FTR: I dislike both candidates, both will happily increase H1-B Visas for their friends, but Trump will laugh at his Trumpnuts while doing so.
If your job was going to go to India or some other country, it was probably going to go anyway, HB-1 visa program or no HB-1 visa program.
With HB-1 visa-holders coming her to "learn the trade" at least there are a few man-years of work being done here, with those people buying lunch and paying rent and the associated taxes in this country for those man-years.
I know my skills are "portable" and that if I plan on having a halfway-decently-paying job until retirement I need to either:
* be someone who can't be cheaply replaced, anywhere in the world, OR
* do work that can only be done locally (in-person sales, on-premise hardware-installation, etc.)
* do work that can't be outsourced for legal reasons (government contracts, certain national infrastructure work)
* work for a company or industry which can't easily outsource abroad due to financial, regulatory, or other reasons
* change careers
There is another alternative, but one that has a very high emotional cost as well as other costs (learning a new language, etc.): Emigrate to a low-cost-of-living country and live off of my accumulated life savings plus whatever meager earnings I can get there. Not every country would want me but many would be happy to have me.
Yes, I'm being pessimistic, but I'm also being realistic. Most of my technical skill set - programming, troubleshooting, remote-tech-support skills, technical writing, etc. can be found in many other countries where the labor costs for people with similar skills are much lower than they are in countries with "highly developed economies."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Correcting grammar in the post above is left as an exercise to the reader, or, more likely, as an exercise for the offshore person who will be trained by the HB-1 visa-holder that you are training now.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The vast majority of H1Bs are basically used as slave labor. Companies like Accenture, TCS and Infosys import low cost, usually under skilled, employees and force them to work extremely long hours and kick them to the curb as soon as their H1B expires.
"The program was intended to serve employers who could not find the skilled workers they needed in the United States." Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) is responsible for ensuring that foreign workers do not displace or adversely affect wages or working conditions of U.S. workers. For every H-1B petition filed with the USCIS, there must be included a Labor Condition Application (LCA) (not to be confused with the labor certification), certified by the U.S. Department of Labor. The LCA is designed to ensure that the wage offered to the non-immigrant worker meets or exceeds the "prevailing wage" in the area of employment. ("Immigration law has a number of highly technical terms that may not mean the same thing to the average reader." [wikipedia]
Given the above, modify H-1B so that not only must the employer must pay H-1B positions 150% of the average wage rate for the position computed by DOL and pay an additional 50% of the wage rate (total 200% effective wage rate for each H-1B) into a fund for training displaced workers.
If there truly are no Americans who can do the job at 200% of the DOL wage rate, then employers should be happy to pay 200% to import the skilled labor they say they need.
The Medical Industrial Complex is sucking Americans dry, while the Indians send their dollars to India, where they need to spend 1/10th on medical bills.
I am always amazed to see Americans accepting that a simple flu visit to the doc costs in the hundreds of dollars.
If everybody worked a bit harder, used more drugs to handle the stress levels, you and your internationalist friends could build even smarter castles with golden doorknobs.
The 1% are interested in sucking dead their host nation. Then they will board a plane and move their golden a$$e$ somewhere else.
Don't you dare to stop them and vote Trump. 101 bogeymen are deployed in the MSM to show you the dangers of doing that.
Well, you can try to abolish the H-1B Visas, but then, perhaps, American firms will be less competitive. And then, perhaps, the next Google will appear in China. Who knows, after some time of it, perhaps it's the Chinese who will be complaining of all those American cheap programmers that are willing to work for pennies because there is no work in their own country.
You have to recognize that America is now the leader in software services, and I'd guess that the H-1B visa program has helped it getting to that position. Of course the right equilibrium is difficult to get, but you can't have it both ways.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
...and the entire US will become the same treacherous bastards as Microsoft. They kicked out the experience American fathers and replaced it by cheap indians. Including the CEO slot.
Now once great MS products such as Visual Studio are craptastic and cannot do the simplest tasks without crashing in many cases.
But Hillary and her 1% friends think this is a "smart move". These folks are bloodsuckers who will not stop until their own nation is being destroyed.
Your choice. Be a patriot or a slave of the internationalist bastards.
... the poor proles masses pay for the few rich whilst fighting each other rather than revolutionising society. Especially the "American Dream" has gone down the drain. ... All this is nothing new.
However(!!),
there is a new force in the mix, and wether it's HB1 or whatever pushing your sob-story right now, we should prepare for what's coming, because HB1 and the likes will be a joke compared to those overturnings ahead of us.
You have been warned.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
2. To those who think US IT workers are whining about losing what used to be an unfair advantage and they ought to just suck it up: Maybe you think your job is safe or that you're just "special." Maybe every US worker ought to have the same living standard as Indian workers, including doctors, lawyers, accountants, .. everyone. In some sense that would be more fair. But I happen to think that the goal of US trade policy should be to improve the competitiveness of US workers and the life of all Americans. As it is, trade policy benefits only the corporations involved in the trade; not the workers or the consumers.
3. Yes I know that the theory of competitive advantage says that we are better off "on average," but some individuals are inevitably worse off. Unfortunately, US trade policy makes no effort to share the benefits, which go almost entirely to the corps. Also the theory (as I remember from school) assumes full employment. Anyone who thinks we are even close to full employment is drinking the government's koolaid. Workforce participation is at a post WW2 low and salaries have been stagnant for decades. It seems clear that India and China are exporting their unemployment to North America and Europe. Now maybe you think that as a citizen of the world that's how it should be, but I expect our political leaders to look out for *us*.
COE
As long as you Americans fall for the mainstream media sirens deployed by the 1%, expect more of the same to come. On Wired.com they have a piece explaining why Hillary is the right candidate. She will continue and extend these "progressive" policies. That means more and more fathers will become unemployed, trillions of dollars more will be shoved into the pockets of the 1% banksters who own Hillary and of course more Trillions will be spent to destroy nations who cannot defend themselves with nukes.
But Hillary will make sure the supply of drugs will be massively increased so that you all can digest these news.
The White Man is incredibly stupid, face it.
The free flow is a bankster-invented theory and so far it has mainly benefitted China, who take all the goodie rules and otherwise run a highly patriotic economic policy. Oh, I forgot that the banksters of London and New York also benefitted massively.
America and Europe as a whole have taken the pi$$. Hard-won technologies have been shipped to China for a pittance.
With Hillary, you will get even more of this insanity and the CPC leadership will pop champagne. The real one, which they can now easily afford from France. Another country sold out by the NY folks to China.
Trump tells the truth and the 1% crooks hate that.
You will not stop until you have destroyed your host nations, including America.
Unfortutantely, unlike Germany in the 30s, there will be no place to run to, this time. Because the cleanup will be done in America and nobody else will accept you bloodsuckers.
Best of luck !!!
There are plenty of jobs for [this, that, and the other thing]
There are plenty of job ADS.
This is because, in order to hire an H1-B, the employer must first advertise the job to US persons.
But there are whole classes given on how to gimmick the hiring process so that anyone who applies, other than the desired H1-B, can be plausibly turned down as unqualified. The US applicants waste their time, and the H1-Bs get the positions.
Give us a call when there are plenty of HIRES of US citizens for these, or any, positions.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
As both a tech worker and a hiring manager the issue of H1-B workers is both complex and, with the way it is managed, ripe for abuse. From an economic perspective it can only drive wages for IT workers down. No serious economist would argue otherwise. However, on balance, the U.S. economy needs more IT workers (at least software engineers) than it provides on its own. By allowing a limited number of foreign workers, the U.S. economy as a whole produces more at the (unmeasured) expense of American IT worker wages. In addition, these H1-Bs are high-paid workers and while they are employed in the U.S. they pay taxes at a higher rate than most Americans. From a tax perspective, it is a win as well. We get to have a bigger government they we could afford on our own.
One area that is not discussed much is that there is a clear gradient of tech worker in the U.S. I screen tons of developers that have long careers and well-paying jobs whose programming abilities are marginal at best. Adding qualified H1-Bs to the pool makes it much harder for these unqualified American applicants to find jobs. They may not see themselves as unqualified. All they see is that an H1-B was hired instead of them. (To be fair, there seem to be just as many unqualified H1-Bs in the market as Americans.)
Where it is open for abuse (and many of the cases reported in the new of entire teams being displaced are clearly abuse) is that many firms are actively engaged in using H1-Bs to drive IT costs down rather than as a means to find workers who are in short supply. These companies will use methods such as outsourcing their IT work to firms who hire only H1-Bs. Enacting laws which prevent outsourced IT firms from using fewer American workers than already exist in the IT departments they are replacing (with that count spread over some multi-year time period to prevent further gaming) would go far in preventing some of this abuse.
We also need to spend more money investigating and fining companies engaged in outright abuse -- both the outsourcing firms and the firms hiring them. We should make it the responsibility for complying with these laws fall on both parties.
2016: Q. What do you call a Devry graduate? A: Waiter! 2026: Q: What do you call a (Ivy League school or other expensive univerity of choice) graduate? A: Waiter!
People are still discussing immigration, visas & jobs when the very premise of their argument is based on a lack of foresight. The concept of job is going to change with AI, and humans will comply to co-exist in an economy where machines and robots do the job. All these, in another decade and a half, or may be two. And when that time comes, who will these men lay the blame upon? Machines? And will machines give a flying kcuf? You know the answer, don't you?
A lot of people deride unions, but unless we have them, corporations pull this type of shit again and again. The government is either apathetic or complicit, which means the only protection for this type of shit is unions.
I'm voting for Gary Johnson, you self-important ass.
companies will find ways to abuse it. We need to kill it.
I have been working in a support tech company for 6 or 7 years which has brought me into the cubical space of many of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley. One thing I have noticed is the overwhelming majority of foreign names on the cubicles. Hardly ever a Smith or Jones and most I find totally unpronounceable. Rough estimate: 70-80 percent foreign names. No doubt H1-B visas.
in a country where "socialism" is considered an insult? You get cowboy capitalism. As long as the American people keep voting for leaders who are economical extremists in this regard it's their own fault.
Another term for this is Corporate Welfare.
Americans already have opportunities that far exceed the majority of the world. People who want to close the boarder are bigoted and/or biased. Growing up my parents were impacted by changing dynamics as my dad worked in IT as a programmer and was laid off a number of times. That doesn't justify bigotry or restricting peoples right to travel and work freely. Yes- that may have negative implications, but Americans can and have learned to cope with a changing landscape many times in the past. Get over it. We retrain, we go back to school, we start our own businesses. There are lots of options and programs out there. Programs which are *funded* by violence through government mandated taxes. People have no excuses. I'm not an immigrant. I'm unproudly an American citizen by birth, Caucasian male at that. It actually is in our collateral disinterest to make the companies we work for uncompetitive on the world stage. What happens when we do that is they leave the United States for greener pastures elsewhere. Rather what we need to do is make our system more competitive. We need to get rid of copyright (copyright creates monopolies and monopolies are otherwise illegal, it makes no sense that when copyright doesn't do what it was sold to us that we continue to put up with it, it's not for the public good, not when we extended copyright from being a limited monopoly to basically an indefinite one, it also spurs violence due to enforcement, if you don't pay up they steal it from you the state will use violence and kidnap you), get rid of borders (things get more competitive and people can travel freely), get rid of taxes (most taxes are from things like education, social welfare, and military, minimise these and we all can afford to cover our kids education), get rid of public schooling (this doesn't mean people can't contribute to social welfare voluntarily- we did that long before governments got involved), get rid of government instituted monopolies (cable/phone/internet),
Take part in the migration movement to New Hampshire if you want freedom, individual liberties, and a right to self determination, rather than be babied by a nanny state:
www.freestateproject.org
www.freekeene.com
A country without borders is no longer a country.
In an ideal world, the flow of labor, capital and ideas should be free and borderless - but we do not live in an ideal world.
Countries have differing laws, social programs and structures. To protect a country's citizens and its social programs and infrastructure, there needs to be sensible immigration control.
Flooding any nation with immigrants until social structures break benefits no one. Immigration is a noble thing (both of my grandparents were immigrants), but there are practical limitations that need to be enforced.
That's a bit silly, as not all jobs pay the same.
Let's start with the 90th percentile for the job, then double it.
...is that most are Chinese or Indian nationals, meaning they are tied to the company once they get sponsored for a green card. And it takes five or more years for nationals of these two countries to get a green card. This means putting in long hours to meet unrealistic deadlines. And this applies to companies like MS, Google, etc. They are not all amazing developers despite the image these companies try to cultivate. Many tasks are pretty mundane development tasks, which an experienced American developer (e.g. older) could easily do. There is already a visa to bring in the truly exceptional, and that is the O visa.
The majority of H-1Bs I know had children in the US as soon as possible to take advantage of birthright citizenship. And quite a few had wives arranged for them back in their home countries.
"a guy who regularly stiffed laborers of their pay (hundreds of cases on record),"
um, ANYBODY who has employed, directly or indirectly, tens of thousands of people over 30+ years will have hundreds of complaints against him just allowing for disgruntled people.
"who stiffed subcontractors and other businesses on their pay"
Documentation that he never paid, or just gripes that he played hardball with suppliers who themselves may have also been playing hardball?
"and who said he was using u.s. labor when he was found to be using foreign labor."
Most of Trump's workers are indeed domestic and always have been. The famous Polish workers used on prepping the site for Trump Tower were actually NOT working as Trump employees, they were employed by a sub-contractor.
"P.T. Barnum put it best. There's a sucker born every minute."
yup, and many of them get their news from HuufPo and MSNBC and Comedy Central.
"Just for funsy's go to Youtube and search for "trump praise clinton". You'll see only 7 years ago he was saying she was terrific and would make a good president or vice president."
Yup. Lots of Republicans used to say that when they thought SHE was the competenet and responsible Clinton. You Trump-haters used to call this sort of thing "bi-partisanship" and you used to celebrate it. Now you use a Republican participating in it in the past as a weapon against him, and then you wonder why it's getting harder and harder for Republicans to cooperate with Democrats. Do you get just how stupid you are being? Oh, and in the years since Trump and other Republicans praised her and Republicans in the Senate voted to confirm her to the post of Secretary of State, her policies trashed the parts of the middle east that had been previously semi-stable, she failed her people in Libya, she was discovered to have obstructed the congress the courts and people filing FOIA requests with her secret private server and enriching herself with funds pouring into her foundations from many foreign despots and businesses who were entangled in her State Department activities.
"supply and demand" and there ought to be protesters at every Chamber of (Crony) Commerce activity challenging these vile serpents to either admit that these workers push down wages or state that they do not believe in the basic law of supply and demand. Protesters are stupid and would make the Chamber cronies look good. What's needed is calm, rationa, journalist types offerring Chamber idiots the simple option of denying supply-and-demand or admitting that all the H1-Bs have the effect of depressing the wages and benefits of American workers. The data is right there for anybody to use. Wages in the tech fields have been flat since all the insourcing and outsourcing ramped up.
The US Chamber of Commerce used to be an org that championed traditional business. They had members who were big and small, and were rather patriotic. After the cold war, however, they became evil. Multinational corporations got involved. A number of their members suddenly found that with cold war era barriers falling there were opportunities to "outsource" and the chamber started boldly lying to the public, pretending that all the outsourcing and all the imported labor did not affact American workers. The post-1980s Chamber arguments and rhetoric are bold-faced lies that nobody in the press ever challenges. Their arguments that this activity is not bad for American workers is as irrational as flat-Earth arguments.....and their noses need to be rubbed in that on television and the web.
Doctors in the UK are often ... Muslim foreigners who drive cars on fire through the Glasgow Airport terminal. Why? They are cheaper. Nurses in the SoCal area are mostly Filipino nationals, save the ER. Why? They are cheaper. Teachers? Districts are importing them from Mexico. At lower wages than Masters/Phd holders who are American. Accountants and Lawyers are being outsourced ... to low cost Indian labor with half the expertise and a tenth of the cost.
NATIONALISM is the only protection ordinary working people have against corporations and nasty, inbred, crony elite from gutting labor standards to what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider prosperity. Yes, yes I know its "racist" to suggest that ordinary Americans, come first over foreigners. After all, think of how Zuckerberg needs to build another wall around his estates in Hawaii.
Licensing won't keep out H1 Bs, they did not in Britain's NH that has mostly foreigners employed, nor any employer intent on cutting labor costs to the bone to maximize profits.
That's hand waiving. Corporations say they need H1B's because there aren't skilled Americans to do the job. Let them prove it by paying for it.
Let's not. Or did you forget you'd be trusting the same companies that lobby Congress for more H1B's, even while laying off thousands (or even tens of thousands) of American workers? This is all just a game to them, to increase the size of the labor pool and lower their employment costs. Pegging it to 90th percentile is just asking them to drive down wages even further.
Totally posting this one as AC...I'm an immigrant working for a tier-1 employer.
There are two types of "IT" employers that tend to be conflated.
The first category are employers who sell software/services as their primary revenue stream. These include the tier-1 giants ( E.g. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, etc), but also the small vendors as well. The biggest employers in this group want the brightest engineers, and they're willing to pay top dollar. For this group of employers, engineers are a profit center, and paying more to attract better engineers tends to result in higher per-engineer revenue. They can also afford the costs of recruiting internationally.
For every other employer in the world that sell products/services that are not software-related, IT, and the associated engineers, are a cost center. Every bean counter in the world knows the routine: want to increase profits? Examine every cost center & drive down costs. In this case, find a way to make engineers cheaper. This is where outsourcing takes hold, and jobs get outsourced.
These two groups respond to limited H1-b pools in radically different ways:
- Firms (such as banks, etc) that outsource their IT to outside vendors face delays implementing outsourcing plans, or hire/retain americans
- Firms (such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) that encounter issues hiring from overseas *send the jobs overseas*.
Bottom-line: Tier-1 employers want the top 1% of engineers. We prefer to bring foreign 1%ers to the US, but we're increasingly hiring them in place.
Example: count how many non-US engineering centers Google has: https://www.google.com/about/careers/locations/
Once those jobs are gone, they stay gone. They provide another excuse for tier-1 employers to keep their profits off-shore. The taxes on those employee's salaries go to foreign governments, not local/state/federal accounts.
We can prevent employers from bringing immigrants to 'steal' US jobs. We cannot prevent them from sending the jobs away. Every time that a tier-1 employer hits the h1-b cap, and doesn't win the lottery, that's another job that is being sent overseas.
Fun factoid: Amazon opened an engineering center in Vancouver, Canada in the last few years because it couldn't hire fast enough. They join MSFT, Firefox, and others who have been there longer.
Get rid of the program and its enabling acts. Hard, but that's what has to happen. It, along with every single other program of its class, solely exists for fraud and abuse - and that anything else is a convenient side effect. Whether it is the US, Australia, Germany, the UK, or any other country free enough to need a supply of perpetually desperate labor, the purpose remains unchanged.
Naturally, this might be an issue with the pro-hellhole, anti-citizen part of /. that justifies it as "competitiveness". These people are largely outside the US and have no business in doing anything other than learning that it will happen to them.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There are jobs out there. A lot of them.
For the ones that are real and hire citizens, employers are getting way too picky.
Training
The only training done these days is for non-citizen entities. Anyone else is required to satisfy the entitlement mentality of an employer's unrealistic qualifications.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Lots of people are incapable of thinking like the owner of a business
That doesn't mean you imply they're wrong for not having the proper perspective.
As an owner, having fewer admin grunts means more money to reinvest in higher-return activities (which as an employee you can help drive, if you're so inclined) and/or return to shareholders, who, after all, own the damn business and expect something from it.
When your wings melt from flying in rarified air, don't be surprised when people cheer.
But this hard-nosed perspective, for some reason, strikes people as cruel, or you're viewed as the villain or whatever.
The problem is that they're right.
It's just how the world works and you have to adapt accordingly, even if it's annoying and extra work at times.
So you support the fraud and abuse that devalues citizenship of a First World country? You are the problem and deserve anything coming to you that stops it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The law is pretty straightforward, how it's actually implemented is anything but. The oversight attention paid to H-1B visas simply doesn't pair up to the way the law is written. Many US tech giants, and some large employers outside tech, simply violate both the letter and the spirit of the law hoping lobbying and campaign donations will keep them from getting noticed.
Organization? You must be joking..
Geez, can't you just do a quick google check before posting these "refutations"?
Melania Trump, who in 2005 married Republican president nominee Donald Trump, has had a career as a fashion model and later became a citizen. ...
The story pointed to her own comments around her use of a visa. In January, for instance, Harper's Bazaar quoted Trump saying: "Every few months, you need to fly back to Europe and stamp your visa. After a few visas, I applied for a green card and got it in 2001. After the green card, I applied for citizenship. And it was a long process."
The H-1B visa does not require people to get a visa stamped "every few months." The visa is issued for three years and can be renewed for another three. Visa holders who are seeking a green card can stay beyond the maximum six years.
The controversy prompted Trump to respond Thursday in a Tweet that said in part: "I have at all times been in full compliance with immigration laws of this country. Period. Any allegation to the contrary is simply untrue. In July 2006, I proudly became a U.S. citizen."
For "non-exploitation" H1Bs, they already pay high salaries and then have to pay quite a lot of money in relocation, legal fees to get that employee transferred to green card eventually, etc. It's not as much as $200K, but it's certainly at least half of that for most cases.
Remember, it's not that there aren't skilled Americans to do the job, there aren't skilled Americans *available*. If you look at the highly paid IT/engineering jobs that require 10+ years or experience, almost every company out there has a bunch of openings *all the time*. They are very difficult to fill.
If you close the loophole of underpaid and cheap H1Bs, the rest of the system will work just fine. It's already very difficult and expensive to bring in experts on H1Bs.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
I can see the reason for outsourcing, and it's being forced - subject meant to of been displayed - length my limiter.
My son works for a company doing what needs to be done. He is presently working out of town at a prevailing wage of $77 an hour. That folks is obscene.
While a very hard worker, many I'm sure are willing to do the job for quite a bit less.
To quote www.lni.wa.gov/tradeslicensing/prevwage/Basics/default.asp
"Prevailing Wage is defined as the hourly wage, usual benefits and overtime, paid in the largest city in each county, to the majority of workers, laborers, and mechanics. Prevailing wages are established, by the Department of Labor & Industries, for each trade and occupation employed in the performance of public work."
Posted Anonymously for reasons of privacy.
One posting a comment at CW said it doesn't happen that often... well guess what? It happens more often than you realize because some of the businesses have had their ex employees sign nondisclosure agreements.
I have been wanting to write this for some time and here came the opportunity. I am not political and nor I have any special bias towards this topic. I believe H1B visa helps both parties, and I also believe a country is for its citizens first.
To be fair, let me say few words about myself.
- Indian on L1 visa (transferred from HongKong)
- Work in an investment bank
- Salary is 150K+
Say a company needs 1000 IT professionals. Now typically they would need 200 really intelligent and highly capable employees (read 7.5+ rating). This crowd would be a mixed bag with mostly Americans and sprinkle of other nationalities. Please bear in mind that this group are super intelligent and really really good. Hence this group is dominated by Americans. (note that most of what IT is today is because of Americans and British. From hardware to programming languages)
On the bottom side, they would hire ~150 Interns/Fresh Graduates, etc whom they can train and mentor.
Now remains the middle layer. That is 650 employees. Now it is highly unlikely that they can get 650 employees all American. This is much harder because every other 1000+ employee companies have the same requirement. Also they would not need super good developers in this group. They are most likely to be 5+ rating professionals. This is where the H1 helps companies to fill that gap.
I would also like to comment on H1B employees and their state. Not all H1B employees are happy, they are staying away from their home working hard and get blamed for all things wrong. The fault is not theirs. The decision happens more at the top. A CEO promises reduction on cost to his board members. He then gives a mandate to all this CXOs. The biggest impact happens to the CIO/CTO group, this is because of cost of employees + software licenses + hardware + DC costs.
Hence the CIO/CTO has to reduce the cost much more. This pressure results in outsourcing or contracting. Now the outsourcing or consulting firm is budget is limited (remember the company wants to reduce cost). So when a CIO/CTO gives a budget for few million $$, the only option the contractors/outsourcing agency has is to hire foreign workers i.e H1B. So this starts at the top and not at the bottom.
Now look at the perspective of a foreign worker. He/She might just come out of college or is working with few years of experience in an ok company. Suddenly a job offer comes along the way that is in USA where that person can have a better life. Why would that person not take the job offer that has come his/her way? That person does not know the history of the job offer nor knows if that is going to displace an existing employee. For that person, it is an opportunity.
So I humbly request to you all to understand that H1B employees are not at fault. Please do not treat them badly because they have your jobs. They have your jobs because the CEO decided that he will reduce the cost no matter what. If that means finding loopholes in law, firing its own dedicated and long serving and loyal employees, then the CEO will not think twice.
How come employees are training their HB1 replacements? Isn't the point that it is for a skilled position they cannot find elsewhere? If someone is training their replacement this obviously isn't true? Couldn't the company be sued? Would it take a union to be able to afford to?
Would end this atrocity with the urgency of getting out of the way of a speeding big rig.
As one of the people replaced at Disney by H1B I need to straighten out a few facts.
1. The big lie is that these immigrants are highly skilled. They are not. Most are right out of school, from a country with the world's lowest educational standard and world's highest degree fraud, and have zero experience. They are entry level people replacing mostly people over 40 with years of experience. They always need to be trained.
2. Many of the 250-350 people replaced at Disney had salaries below $100k. Because they were older or had been with the company 20+ years, their medical costs we higher or they had high potentional pension payouts.
3. In every outsourcing, partially due to culture differences, partially to significant communication issues, and largely due to incompetence, service downtime and project delivery delays dramatically increase. Existing salary staff workload and overtime to make up for this goes unreported In other words, it looks good on a financial spreadsheet but is horrible to customers and employees.
4. The security risk to the company data, and possibly your data (medical, financial) is astronomical. Indian H-1b companies have already been caught using the code and production data at one company to do their work at another.
5. No one wants a career where the more loyal and successful you are, the more of a liability to the company you become. This is killing STEM careers in this country.
6. Over 80â... of the h1bs are used for skills readily available in this country. Every IT job opening gets hundreds of resume responses, and statistics show that there is actually a glut of these skills now. It also means less than 20â... of these visas are used for what they were intended for - finding rates skills.
7. It is illegal to replace existing employees with contractors, use contractors in long-term work, use contractors to avoid hiring staff, or fire employees because they are older or because they are more expensive that a potential new hire. You are also suppose to search locally for a citizen candidate first before hiring an H-1b. These violations are common because companies are laundering their contracting effort through 3rd parties.
8. This glut of foreign labor desperate for work to prevent being sent back home had made "W2 contract without benefits" a common situation. This is work where you aren't hired as an employee, don't get medical coverage, and don't get paid contractor overtime. In other words; slave labor commonly subject to overtime abuse.
The economics term for this is "labor arbitrage" and it has gutted many high-tech companies with rich-kid executives treating workers as fungible resource pools of interchangeable servants. US hardware engineers and US software developers are replaced by hordes of low-paid overseas technicians, especially in what are perceived as support roles such as data management, specs documentation, and quality assurance testing. I can corroborate the truth of this from personal experience, from my time at both Hewlett-Packard and Qualcomm. Entire US departments disappeared in just a few days. Fortunately I continue to self-train in new technologies as a lifetime hobby, and so have managed to stay just ahead of the worst of it, for now.
In a free market economy there is no such thing as "shortage of workers", there is only a bid-ask spread. In other words, if you offer a sufficiently high salary, you can find any worker.
Si senor I can do IT, carpenter, brickes, pipes and lectricties too. I learnded in Mexico at Ford factory and in Tejas in refinery
I've been watching for decades where technical people, the brains create things. The Sales people take home big bucks. They're the ones that have no skill. Sometimes all they have is a short skirt and look good.
It's high time the people that actually do the work get paid.
To the subject matter, it's a ruse. They come over, they're not that good though they're cheap. Some of them are good bullshit artists. They should discontinue the h1b program.
If a co wants "10 years of experience in X", even a citizen with 4 years of X and a PhD will not "qualify". You cannot manufacture experience. The co's need to be encouraged to break out of the HR paradigm of 10-in-X-or-bust mindset.
Table-ized A.I.
They only really affect a minuscule fraction of VERY qualified and well-paid workers. Otherwise why the hell would they move to the US and pay such high costs of living?
I'm in this exact situation: I do the job some pampered, entitled american wouldn't do for twice my pay, and I live in the 3rd world. Given the option of moving to the US I would refuse, because I'm not gonna go over there where my 48k aren't worth shit.
Most of you idiots on /. aren't even close to the league where H1B visas are an issue.
What you SHOULD worry about is how every other company is going to outsource their ENTIRE IT dept to the third world, because WHY NOT? Their choice between dealing with spoiled, entitled, moderately-skilled crybabies and moderately skilled hard-working-people-who-already-deal-with-life-on-hardmode is a nobrainer, wouldn't you say?
is that it only applies if there is full employment in both countries and zero cost to labor mobility...
http://internationalecon.com/T...
"The higher price received for each country's comparative advantage good would lead each country to specialize in that good. To accomplish this, labor would have to move from the comparative disadvantaged industry into the comparative advantage industry. This means that one industry goes out of business in each country. However, because the model assumes full employment and costless mobility of labor, all of these workers are immediately gainfully employed in the other industry."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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1. Tax Company Revenues, Not Profits;
2. Regulate Market Capitalization of Corporations;
Casteism