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Fearing Tighter US Visa Regime, Indian IT Firms Rush To Hire (moneycontrol.com)

Posted by msmash on from the meanwhile-in-India dept.

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.

20 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. "H1-B skilled worker visas" by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    H1-B skilled worker visas

    Depends on your definition of "skilled".

    1. Re:"H1-B skilled worker visas" by geekmux · · Score: 3, Insightful

      H1-B skilled worker visas

      Depends on your definition of "skilled".

      At 1/3 of the cost, it's rather irrelevant to those who do nothing but stare at the bottom line all damn day long.

      With those kinds of demonstrated cost savings measures, even system outages perpetuated by a lack of skills are somehow justified.

    2. Re:"H1-B skilled worker visas" by Tangential · · Score: 5, Informative

      At 1/3 of the cost, it's rather irrelevant to those who do nothing but stare at the bottom line all damn day long.

      With those kinds of demonstrated cost savings measures, even system outages perpetuated by a lack of skills are somehow justified.

      This is the BS part of the H1B Fraud that is going on. If you look up the rules around H1-B one of them is:

      You must be paid at least the actual or prevailing wage for your occupation, whichever is higher.

      If this was being done legally, there would be no advantage to displacing the US workers; it would only be used for skills in short supply as it was intended. This law is being totally subverted by Infosys, Tata, WiPro and everyone of their customers that uses such replacements. I think that they would qualify for prosecution under RICO statutes.

      --
      Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
    3. Re:"H1-B skilled worker visas" by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Doesn't even need any changes. They just need to vigorously enforce that rule and the one about the skills not being available locally.

      That's "available" without any qualifier or modifier, not "available at the wage they're prepared to pay".

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    4. Re:"H1-B skilled worker visas" by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This, exactly.

      These companies, and the companies that hire them, are performing an end run around the restrictions of the law that completely subverts the intent. Specifically, they do this by acting as a middleman, so that a company like Disney (http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/technology/disney-h1b-workers/) or SoCal Edison (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-edison-layoffs-20150211-story.html) doesn't actually 'replace' a US worker with an H-1B. Instead, they simply subcontract out the positions (or the entire department) to a company like one of these, who just happens to employ H-1B visa holders working at a cheaper rate.

      This is the loophole that needs to be closed. These companies constitute the lion's share of H-1Bs, and make a mockery of the ones who are actually higher-paid expert workers in critical demand.

    5. Re:"H1-B skilled worker visas" by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sure but even that gives wiggle room because they can take the average wage nationally instead of locally

      Do you even read?

      From the link above:

      "The prevailing wage is determined based on the position in which you will be employed and the geographic location where you will be working (among other factors)."

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    6. Re: "H1-B skilled worker visas" by shaitand · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I'd be careful, those Americans invented most of the technology the rest of the world needs to modernize and those H1B visa workers are coming here to work on.

    7. Re:"H1-B skilled worker visas" by Dan+East · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Doesn't even need any changes. They just need to vigorously enforce that rule

      Sounds like you're talking about immigration law in general, that everyone is freaking out about on the left with our president-elect. The laws already exist, but what has been happening is "legislation" by the executive branch, by not enforcing law. Another example is the legalization of marijuana at the state level, when it's illegal at the federal level. I'm not attempting to open a debate on whether or not it is right or wrong that the federal government regulates it in the way it does (I am pretty adamant across the board that the Federal government has gotten way too strong and usurped too much power from the states), but what I'm saying is the inaction and lack of enforcement by the executive branch of laws passed by the legislative branch is a misuse of power and an imbalance in the three branches. This has been a problem with previous presidents, but Obama has taken lack of enforcement of law to another level. The judicial branch only gets to rule on cases brought before it, thus if the executive branch does not prosecute in the first place, the judicial branch is also totally removed from the picture.

      So in other words, the left has been flipping out over the mere enforcement of existing laws, and the H1-B enforcement is just another example.

      --
      Better known as 318230.
    8. Re:"H1-B skilled worker visas" by saloomy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'll be modded down for this... but there is also I believe a problem with the perception of "skilled" IT labor, and the expectation of lifestyle being in IT brings. You have good people that are even certified in one profession or another (Oracle DBA's, storage admins, etc..) who expect to earn $200k a year when that isn't really feasible most of the time. The education requirements to become decent DBA will be a few years in a robust environment, plus a few months of courses, and voila!

      It's not the same regimen as 8 years of medical school, 4 years of residency, $300,000 in student loans and years of practicing before you earn that much. I know IT pros who legitimately make more than the salaries of senators, and still bitch about how much everything costs and how they deserve to earn more. The market is sorting itself out. There are others out there who can come in and offer a better value, so a better value will end up winning. To have the delusion that it's always because some asshole manager is trying to earn a bonus or pocket from a deal is just not a reasonable view of reality.

  2. Rushing to hire? by tomhath · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:Rushing to hire? by geekmux · · Score: 4, Informative

      The people pushing for this shit is HP, Google, and Facebook. They don't think YOU should make $120k a year. They would rather pay an H1-B $40k/yr.

      Lacking identifiable sarcasm in the parent's post, this fact is not lost upon a single American IT worker today.

      Meanwhile they make 7 and 8 figure salaries. Make THEM take an 60% paycut if you're going to fucking cut someone's pay.

      Uh, you DO realize the reason they can pay themselves 7 and 8 figure salaries is due to the fact they've demonstrated considerable "cost savings" by outsourcing the shit out of the IT department, right?

      In other words, fat fucking chance of them stopping the very activities that feed and justify their obscene salaries and bonuses.

    2. Re:Rushing to hire? by DirkDaring · · Score: 3, Informative

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm

    3. Re: Rushing to hire? by shaitand · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Salaries being determined by the free market is a race to the bottom. There is localized salary variation for a reason, there is a higher standard of living in some locations. The lowest bidder lives in third world conditions, if you want to open an IT shop somewhere with those conditions and sell services to the people who live in those conditions then by all means hire at their local rates.

      But as long as you want the superior conditions found in the US to exist, if for no other reason so that you can benefit from the economic power of selling to the fat US market, you'll need to pay US level salaries to the workers in your US level market. You believe in the free market? The free market is ethic and moral free leverage, squeeze, blackmail do whatever it takes to gain no matter who you burn. Well, the US is an organization with massive economic power and it is just as free to leverage it to the benefit of local workers as companies are to leverage their size and ability to absorb the impact of any one worker being fired to take advantage of staff in employment term negotiations.

  3. Uneven by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
    1. Re:Uneven by swb · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Doctors and lawyers are protected from much offshoring & visa workers due to various laws and trade agreement exceptions, for example.

      Mostly it's because the regulatory bodies for those professions are made up of...wait for it...people in those professions, and they are often statutorily empowered to make rules and often adjudicate problems. So the medical board is run by doctors who, surprise, surprise, rig the rules in their favor and limit qualification for their trade which has the effect of limiting the labor pool.

      In some ways it makes total rational sense, because why wouldn't you want doctors, who best understand the practice of medicine, setting the rules and standards for who can practice medicine?

      On the other hand, the fox is in charge of the henhouse. I had a friend get horrible dental care. In so much pain, he pretty much randomly selected the closest dentist he could get into on short notice and dentist 2 was horrified at the work. Dentist 2 documented everything wrong and what he did to fix it, solving my friend's problems. He submitted a claim to the dental board against Dentist 1 -- only to have the claim rejected as unsubstantiated. And why not? If a bunch of dentists gets to decide what complaints are legitimate, why wouldn't they reject a claim against a fellow dentist, even if another dentist provides documented clinical proof?

    2. Re:Uneven by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It could be that way first because most polls projected H would win. You want to influence the likely winner. Donations are not necessarily intended to finance campaigns, but to buy influence, and to do that you want to pay the likely winner.

      Trump also baffled the political managers of such organizations who would make those decisions, being T is such a different (non) politician. He was a wild-card that many didn't know what to make of. He won mostly the angry/revenge vote, and those in management of such orgs are doing relatively well because they are managers after all.

      Someone doing well won't want to rock the boat. It's the angry "losers" (for lack of a better term) that typically want to rock the boat. Therefore, those managers didn't feel/understand the revenge/anger angle of Trumpism.

      You have to throw the normal political analysis out with Trump. The books have to be rewritten.

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  4. Trivial to stop the abuse by tempmpi · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Trivial to stop the abuse by Guybrush_T · · Score: 4, Interesting

      This is indeed a good solution, though it may have to be weighted depending on the area, otherwise Silicon Valley will get all the H1-Bs.

      But yes, those three Indian IT companies are the one abusing the system, and it is their fault if H1-Bs are so hard to get. They prevent other companies from legitimately bringing foreign talents by flooding the system.

      So of course they're fearing it won't work long, and I hope it will be the case. I don't really trust Trump to do this smartly, but if at least they can fix the H1-B system, that would be an interesting achievement.

  5. The Big Lie Exposed by byteherder · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  6. Auction system by Tablizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.