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Fearing Tighter US Visa Regime, Indian IT Firms Rush To Hire (moneycontrol.com)
From a report on Reuters: Anticipating a more protectionist US technology visa programme under a Donald Trump administration, India's $150 billion IT services sector will speed up acquisitions in the United States and recruit more heavily from college campuses there. Indian companies including Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro have long used H1-B skilled worker visas to fly computer engineers to the US, their largest overseas market, temporarily to service clients. Staff from those three companies accounted for around 86,000 new H1-B workers in 2005-14. The US currently issues close to that number of H1-B visas each year. President-elect Trump's campaign rhetoric, and his pick for Attorney General of Senator Jeff Sessions, a long-time critic of the visa programme, have many expecting a tighter regime.
H1-B skilled worker visas
Depends on your definition of "skilled".
There aren't any qualified IT personnel available in the US. Otherwise there wouldn't be any need for all those H1-Bs in the first place.
A "fresher" is someone who is cheap to hire because they don't know sh*t.
Most of the Indians in my US-based grad program self identify as "freshers". The professors all but beg them not to cheat.
An article in the LA Times describes how un-equal our trade deals are in terms of professions. Doctors and lawyers are protected from much offshoring & visa workers due to various laws and trade agreement exceptions, for example.
There's no reason law and medical schools couldn't be set up other countries to train remote and visa workers on US law and medical practices. But our rules arbitrary limit or exclude those schools.
You want cheaper ACA? make outsourcing and/or visa-ing doctors easier. Otherwise somebody who used to make $25/hr at a factory and now making $9 as a Walmart clerk has to pay $200 an hour for a doctor. One is zapped by globalization and one protected from it, creating a huge discrepancy between their service rates. Of course medical care goes up for such people. It's not ACA's direct fault.
If the impact of globalization is spread around more evenly, then perhaps life won't be so difficult for those subject to globalized careers: their wages may go down, but so will their cost of living as others' wages also go down.
Trump may be a babbling blowhard, but he has focused attention on this issue. Let's do it right this time: Spread the "love".
However, something tells me the heavy lobbying money of those professions will buy protection. Blue-collar workers don't have the equivalent counter-bribing force. Lawyers and doctors won't accept a cut without a heavy fight. The rich simply have more weapons.
Table-ized A.I.
It seems trivial to stop the abuse: Stop the lottery and replace it with a list ordered by salary and give the visas to the applicants with the highest salaries. This would make hiring H1Bs expensive and limit their use to hiring rare very talented foreigners.
At the moment H1Bs are broken: The lottery often prevents bringing in highly talented people, while it doesn't matter too much for companies that just want a random cheap semi-skilled person. They just fill a lot of extra applications to get enough H1Bs granted.
Jan
If there really were a shortage of skilled IT workers in the US, then companies including Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro would not be able to hire anyone and would need to import such workers.
Since they now are speeding up the hiring of skilled U.S. IT workers, there must not be a shortage to begin with. There by exposing the Big Lie.
How will Facebook, Apple, Microsoft now react?
An auction system may reduce riff-raff and "shortage" BS.
Have a base cap, such as 30,000 skilled visa positions a year, for example. Maybe have another 30,000 slots, but corporations have to bid against each other for them. If there is truly a shortage, they will pay a high wage for them, and select them for actual skill instead of for cheaper bodies who work long hours because they have no family etc. They wouldn't bid on actual people, just the salaries. And perhaps tax some of that to help pay down the national debt.
Table-ized A.I.
Make the min 100K-120K on W2 and maybe X2 OT at 80 hours a week.
Also cap the number of them at on corp so they can't all be channeled thought some staffing place.
They should have to pay more than the market wage for an H1B. That would kill off the abuse of the program fairly quickly.
I'd mod this up if I had points. This is exactly the issue. My proposal: tariff the H1B so the sponsor pays 120% of US landed resource rate and see how many H1Bs are actually required. This isn't about skill. This is about skill at the rate companies think they should have to pay for it and it artificially skews the pay rate downward. I'm all for H1B in its intended form but right now it's an easy ticket to cheap, indentured labor.
With all this anti-immigrant attitude that is sweeping the country, and with lots of immigrants here in blue state of California (that appears like a foreign country compared to rest of US in this now Trump administration), where will this put many Silicon Valley companies? I heard Ro Khanna got a lot of backing from many SV companies to unseat incumbent congressman Mike Honda because Khanna is a proponent of more H1Bs (disclaimer: I've not extensively researched the details). I can see why many companies are going to push for more visas in these last two months of current Administration (do it while they can). Anyway, as I see Apple being pressured to bring back jobs to US (yeah, lots of luck with that) then there many other companies either friends with Obama and backed Clinton in the election, how will they fit into the Trump regime?
mfwright@batnet.com
So, you are saying that these big banks were unwilling to maintain adequate staff and due to decisions made at the beancounter level, you were left having to staff and destaff continuously. You talk as if these decisions were forces of nature but are in fact perfect examples of why US corporations are fundamentally evil. What they needed to do was staff up adequately and then phase the work in so the necessary crew got to the work when they scheduled it.
Your now small team is made up of work visa holders because (it sounds like) you are choosing to staff through these same kind of H1B types of staffing companies. Hire in a more "standard" manner and you will start to get normal hires.
Only I can judge you.
Every year the top US universities graduate a lot of really great students. They passed exams, know what the US engineering sectors expects.
The students can get security clearances, know the USA well and work hard. They have a deep understanding of systems and networks.
What is missing from the mix of students the US educates every year? Are the top % of every year lacking something that every US university cant/won't teach and every US profession wants?
Have academic entry standards become so lax that very average students are been given top degrees for some reason? Making decades of US grades useless to any US profession?
Has US academic work drifted so far from what the best US brands and firms need? What are US students doing for a few years then?
Loans for a few years of campus in a holiday, party like setting? Scholarship not based on merit? Selected STEM but funding goes to arts and sport?
Why does the USA need to fly in, look after, hire and even grant citizenship later to very average workers from other nations?
What are other nations doing with education that can totally outclass every US student for generations?
Do other nations have some merit based Gymnasium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., Institute of technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... schooling?
Do other nations have merit based public school exams, schooling that only helps the very best students for decades?
What has happened to US exams and merit based advancement that cant offer US brands and firms what they need?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"