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Trump's Next Immigration Move To Affect H-1B Visas; Require Tech Companies To Try To Hire Americans First: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
AdamnSelene writes: A report in Bloomberg describes a draft executive order that will hit the tech industry hard and potentially change the way those companies recruit workers from abroad. The H-1B, L-1, E-2, and B1 work visa programs would be targeted by requiring companies to prioritize higher-paid immigrant workers over lower-paid workers. In addition, the order will impose statistical reporting requirements on tech companies who sponsor workers under these programs. The order is expected to impact STEM workers from India the most.
Penguinisto adds: If (perhaps when) the president follows through, his next move could limit or at least seriously alter the way H-1B visas are distributed, putting U.S. citizens at a higher priority, and possibly restricting H1-B visas tighter. From the article: "If implemented, the reforms could shift the way American companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple recruit talent and force wholesale changes at Indian companies such as Infosys and Wipro. Businesses would have to try to hire Americans first and if they recruit foreign workers, priority would be given to the most highly paid. "Our country's immigration policies should be designed and implemented to serve, first and foremost, the U.S. national interest," the draft proposal reads, according to a copy reviewed by Bloomberg. "Visa programs for foreign workers should be administered in a manner that protects the civil rights of American workers and current lawful residents, and that prioritizes the protection of American workers -- our forgotten working people -- and the jobs they hold."
fucking TIME!
So, what's the "group think" on this one? Because I don't want to be called a racist or a xenophobe...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What does this mean, "and if they recruit foreign workers, priority would be given to the most highly paid."? Billionaires/millionaires first?
clancey
isnt that the point, if you looked everywhere in the country and could not find qualified personal, then you get into the H1 program??
He's building a smoke screen with all this racist crap while robbing the country blind .He will put a kkk figure in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, with his name on the back. It will be right behind Snoopy.
It means that if when this happens:
ABC Inc wants to bring over someone who is actually special, who has skills not available locally. Since they have special skills, ABC Inc is willing to pay them $190,000
XYZ Inc wants to import some entry-level coders, for $40K each ($20K cheaper than entry-level US workers)
ABC Inc wins. They are getting someone with special skills not available locally, as *evidenced* by fact that they are willing to pay for those special skills.
It's not perfect, but it's an improvement. No system is perfect.
If you make sure an H1B holder is paid over $100k a year the abuses will stop.
Or require them to be paid the average prevailing wage of the position in the CEO's MSA.
Either one will kill large chunks of the body-shop industry.
Lastly, put in a bounty program for body shops that use B1 visa holders for body shopping. Reporters get 40% of the imposed fine, which is a multiple of the salary delta between the body shoppers and the equivalent FTE.
You've missed the obbious. Trump doesn't care what the media thinks. He does what's right no matter how much they screech.
This action will have bipartisan support. Even Democrats won't decry this even though it's good policy.
I've said this before and it still stands: there needs to be a secret shopper program of sorts where test applicants (who have really good backgrounds that match the skills needed) apply and if they are rejected, a hearing is held. public embarassment would result from any company who was cheating.
it would be a bit of work to set it up and manage it, but the alternative is not working at all (ie, trust system).
I've often thought about this. I have been out of work for months and months at a time and yet I'm pretty well qual'd for many jobs. I applied for quite a few, several that were 'below' me since I needed to eat and would take any job I could get that would keep food on the table. even those, I could not get. I knew something was 'up' but no one really cares (who has power to change things).
I'm now employed, but during my 'out' months, it was a real struggle to find a company who would hire an older american and who needs a local salary grade to afford US style expenses.
I'd have volunteered to be a secret shopper. I'd enjoy it, in fact, since I would know that bad co's would be brought to justice.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Stop the fraud. These companies are firing Americans and replacing them with H1B individuals. And saying we can't find Americans with the skills! If the Americans they are firing don't have the skills, how could they be asked to train their replacements.
;) I was just dropped in the fire.
And if their replacements had the skills, why would they need training!
I have never been trained by an individual I was replacing
Lots of ways to disqualify local applicants with job requirements. The system is being abused in order to cut wages. The H1B program needs an overhaul. Until this proposal is in public, final draft state, hard to tell if it's the best fix, but there should be no question a fix of some sort is needed.
Thank you President Trump for doing the needful.
I can't wait to be trained by the H1B I'll be replacing. According to my last job it only takes around 2 weeks to train your replacement, so thinking it should be about the same this way.
Gonna shoot high now, aiming to work for Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter or Microsoft.
Now that they won't discriminate against me, should be easier to get a job.
Wait, Americans FIRST? At the expense of ALL OTHER nations? How can this be possible in the current year? I can't believe this is even happening in USA
But easy on the hyperbole - we can't defeat the lying and maniacal fury of our White Nationalist POTUS by using their own techniques, any more than we can defend freedom by surrendering our freedom. I would recommend looking to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior as an example of how we can win this fight. Let President Trump (nee: Drumpf) rely upon the Big Lie, screaming alternative facts at the top of his lungs. We must calmly and quietly assert Truth in response.
Yes, heaven forbid a U.S. President stand up for the U.S. for once. He's supposed to be out apologizing for being American (and an evil white male one at that!), and representing everyone BUT the middle-class Americans who get up and go to work every day to pay his fucking salary.
Europe could learn a lesson here too. Believe it or not, you don't HAVE to apologize for being a westerner. Hell, it's even possible to be PROUD to be a part of a modern western democracy. I know you've forgotten that, but it is actually possible.
Part of what you were experiencing applying for jobs 'below' you was exactly that. You were over qualified. When hiring, if I'm looking for junior people, I'm looking for junior people. Teams work best when there is a balance of senior and junior. Junior people are often hungry and willing to do more menial tasks that the senior people will not. You need chiefs and you need worker bees. There's also concern that an over qualified hire will leave at first chance to get a job more befitting of their experience. When I hire, I'm looking for long term employees, not ones that will leave as soon as something better comes along. I look for fit of the position to their career and aspirations.
Tell that to the Disney IT workers.
I'm sorry but maybe the real problem is in how people "need to identify" that creates serious problems in the first place:
For example: I was literally a victim of extortion from my previous employers and the state and I was not even allowed to leave the country or state on the grounds that they needed to go through extraordinary lengths to prove they could make me into less than an animal.
Litigation is impossible for people like me because these scenes are so graphic and horrendous that people choose to protect their own interests and lives to hide from the government who do discern people who try and speak out for human rights violations such as this.
I was even visited by the CIA on the grounds to investigate matters where people were clearly involved in blatantly assaulting and physically extorting me and surprisingly the police would not even acknowledge that this was even a crime on the grounds that I am less than a human being.
All the government really tells people like me is that "we need to get with the program" and understand that things like this happen to me for a reason proven by "God" and there is literally nothing I can do. Laws are only used against us (yes U.S. Citizens who are trying to run from the country because they cannot obtain protection from the US government) and they are always tried with the ideas of "other perceived religion and racial biases" and they always argue "the time is not appropriate" for any form of litigation. Whether in writing or not.
Even contacting the CIA, FBI, government regarding people who did this to me does absolutely nothing other than "please call 1-800-SUICIDE if you are going to kill yourself".
You still wouldn't even believe it even if you saw it. You can't even do anything about it. It was only 20 years though.. how the hell am I supposed to live with that?
Try contacting the ACLU? Too late, they are suing Trump! What a public load of BS.
So very happy with Trump, and this will be the icing on the cake of all his latest decisions. It's about freaking time the American IT worker had more (or some) protection in our own country. I say the companies that have been abusing the H1-B program (and there are MANY), are getting what they deserve: good and hard.
Also: I wanted to add "cannot get protection from the government" is VOLUNTARY.
In case you missed the "extortion" part.
"What's right?"
I think you meant to say "He does what he thinks is right".
That isn't to say that it is or isn't right - but Trump isn't automatically right on all things. Keep that in mind.
I'm sorry but people who are perceived as being from other countries can be victims of their own employers. I was extorted at my previous job and this idea of "hire Americans first" is just to gain public approval.
Thing is, this is already how H1-Bs are supposed to work.
But they don't.
So unless he's proposing some sort of actual, y'know, enforcement process, this proposal is precisely BAU, no more and no less.
set the same persons up in an overseas establishment. Send those who they replace to the establishment to train their "replacements". Depending on the foreign establishment, the new employees will get $10 k to $20 k per year, much more if they're in a European country, but not what they'd get in Silicon Valley. Seems like a lot of that's going on now.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
The problem isn't with the foreign workers. The problem is the American manager who hire them.
So if you are worried about racism, I bet 110% of those managers are white-ish.
Well, you've posted all this anonymously so far now. Care to share with us any actionable details about your story and what you're being extorted for?
The H1B was originally intended to be a path to citizenship- promoting "Brain Drain" immigration from other countries.
Instead it became a way to hire cheap indentured servants of large tech firms and outsourcing companies.
The former we should be supporting, the latter we should not.
IMHO 3 simple things would solve this:
1) Make the fees high enough on H1Bs to make sure that they are not simply being used to find cheap labor
2) Impose punitive level penalties on companies that do not convert their sponsored H1Bs to green cards in a timely manner.
3) Make the H1B visa transfer if the employee changes companies.
Don't think you should enforce a salary- but I think that the fees for the H1B sponsorship should be high enough to remove any possibility that the sponsor is using the H1B process to save money instead of finding domestically unobtainable talent
About gorram fuqking time!
at least for H1-B. Last I heard they were legally required to attest they could not find a qualified American (fat lot of good that does).
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That's the lesson that Hollywood doesn't understand. The more you criticize him, the stronger he gets. Every smug liberal fart-sniffing speech at this year's Oscars is going to turn the few remaining blue states between the west coast and New England just a little more pink. At this rate, Trump is going to be adding Illinois to his win column by 2020, no problem.
I think we should abandon H1-B completely. If someone wants to work in the US, and has a job lined up here, then we should allow them to become a citizen within a year assuming they jump through the necessary hoops (take a night class, pass the citizenship exam, etc). This idiocy of requiring people to wait years, sometimes over a decade, to become a citizen while they work in the US at a well paying job is stupid.
We are a nation of immigrants. It's in most of our blood. Immigrants start businesses far more than native born Americans because they are risk takers... if they are willing to uproot themselves and move to a foreign land, they are likely willing to take other risks as well. That kind of risk taking is what built our nation, and shutting it out only harms us in the long run.
The H1-B program creates trapped workers who have to toe the line and rock no boats, lest they be fired and deported. This allows companies to abuse them in ways citizens would not put up with. An immigrant with citizenship is less of a threat to the livelihood of tech workers than an H1-B visitor, as companies would not be in a position to deport them if they asked for a raise; they could look for other jobs with impunity, and thus would compete on equal footing... and similarly, would not have to put up with artificially depressed wages.
So open up immigration, and fuck the stupid fake 'work' visas.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
There are way too many loopholes and nobody is really trying to enforce the rules. It is actually quite reasonable and legal to require hiring citizens and permanent residents first since the H1-B isn't even allowed to be here without a special visa that nobody is obligated to grant.
last I heard companies were already required to give the jobs to a qualified American first. There's been talk of raising minimum salaries, but it's only to $100k. If you factor in training costs and the extra hours the guys on Visas work it's still a bargain. Given how much it's been abused don't talk to me until the program has been completely dismantled. What I've seen so far is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
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So this is SUPPOSED to be the way H1-B visa's work. I know because as a Canadian coming to the US for a job 11 years ago that's EXACTLY how it went for me. I had to demonstrate that I had 'special skills' that were NOT otherwise easily available 'in the US market'...it didn't have to be that I had skills (education & experience) that absolutely no one in the US had, but that I was competing on the same level as US workers & that my skill set was 'best suited for the job' (as well as having a special education...specifically for me it was an M.SC in Physics).
Long story short the company that hired me paid ALOT of money for me AND for the lawyer who had to do the paperwork. I did not get hired 'on the cheap' so to speak.
when you factor in training. And that's before we talk benefits, since most of these guys work for contractors. Also their young, but being here on work Visas nobody complains about age discrimination when their contracts don't get renewed past 40.
You're massively underestimating how profitable the abuse here is because the scale of it is hard to grasp. It's completely pervasive. Anything less than $300k (adjusted yearly for inflation) isn't enough. Remember: these Visas are suppose to be for geniuses. The best and brightest. It's 2017. A code monkey makes $100k, especially on the West Coast.
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So all those people on here saying "YEAH good for him!" are going to get out and demonstrate FOR Trump and talk about how THEY were harmed by abusive of H1-B visas etc.? Otherwise all we'll hear about is how this is just another swipe at 'immigrants'.
ban Personality tests / Unicru test.
They can be set up to be not pass any one with real skills and pass people who can past tests like that.
Currently there is a lottery every year to see which companies get the H1-Bs, they are not prioritized. (Other than having a couple types of H1-B).
> Thing is, this is already how H1-Bs are supposed to work.
It's already WHY, not HOW. Currently, companies (mostly a few staffing companies) put in applications in which they simply *state* that talent isn't available locally. They provide no *evidence* that Americans aren't available to do the job. There is then a lottery, and H1-Bs applications are randomly approved. The staffing firms, who submit hundreds of thousands of applications, then essentially resell the H1-Bs at a profit.
Trump's order is to give preference to applications which provide *evidence* that there is no local talent available because the employer is willing to pay the H1-B a high salary. A company wouldn't pay an imported worker $200,000 if an American will do the same job for $150,000. Therefore the high salary proves that the H1-B is being used as intended.
As I mentioned before, this plan is of course not perfect, but it's clearly an imprpvement. Perhaps Congress or the4 administration will make further improvements next week, next month, or next year - he's only been in office ten days.
He's going to be president for 8 years when all this regressive shit actually does the thing that the liberals have been bitching about for year--- income equality.
Government recruits qualified employed US tech workers as secret shoppers and pays them $$$ to apply and interview for positions. Failure by a company to offer such a secret shopper a job along with documented intent to hire a less qualified H-1B is prima facie evidence of fraud and the employer (a) pays a big fine (b) can't hire H-1Bs for 6 years (c) immediately loses all current H-1Bs who must leave the country within 48 hours. The employer can admit it and take a plea bargain -or- fight it, prove the secret shopper is less qualified than the H-1B they went with, and have the charge dropped.
As for TCS/Wipro/etc. - H-1B workers cannot work as contractors/consultants. Period. Simple. Fin. No exceptions. That means TCS H-1Bs don't have desks, equipment, direct intranet access, badges, etc. Regular audits are conducted with a fine of $1M per H-1B per day in violation. Presence of an H-1B on company property who is not an employee of that company is prima facie evidence of violation. Employees can blow the whistle to receive cash incentives paid from assessed fines.
I worked for Microsoft north of 15 years. My division hired something like 70 new H1Bs this year alone (all straight out college). I was one of the ones who trained three new hires. My job was gone in the next round of layoffs. Any company has massive layoffs should be mandated to first atleast consider the laid off staff before getting H1Bs. BTW, as an older and experienced person I command more than the younger H1Bs. It is baloney that the companies cant find talent locally. It is just the companies do not want to pay for it. BTW, I am of Indian ancestory.
If you make sure an H1B holder is paid over $100k a year the abuses will stop.
It already costs a bunch to get the H1-B visa in the first place. After that, it costs the company tens of thousands to get the employee's green card. If the employee is getting paid $80k/yr, it could be close to $90k after adding all those legal fees.
In 1991 I was working on a factory floor. A position opened up in the data processing department. I interviewed and got the position. They trained me to do the job. This opportunity lead to a lifetime of employment in the IT field. If that position were to open up today, the company would have hired an H1B visa and I would have been left on the factory floor. I worked hard and studied my ass of. I make six figures writing software today and I am the best.
FUCK the H1b visa program. Companies in the USA need to dance with the people who brought them to the party. They need to hire, and if necessary train, USA citizens for hi-tech jobs. The H1B party should have been over for them a long time ago.
They're already supposed to "try". Invariably we just get told that "there were no qualified offers which matched our requirements" or "We offered so much but no americans wanted to take the job no matter how hard we tried" all sorts of other bull.
Start talking to US brands and businesses of all sizes. Find out why a visa system for "experts" was even needed.
US colleges have had the ability, funding and staff to graduate the best in the world every year and generation for decades.
Vast amounts of funding went into science education over the decades. Few other nations had that level of US funding for science education over decades.
What can any other nation's educational system do that a well funded US university cant?
Students pass exams and should be selected on merit so the ability to learn and study should be no issue.
Is some skill set lacking in top US universities that make its graduates unable to compete?
After a few years of working and considering a new job what makes a visa holder in any way better than a graduate from a top US university?
If its just a wage difference, that can be fixed. Getting an expert worker into the USA will be as expensive as any US expert.
Is anything missing from the US education system?
Further education? Have US colleges let academic standards drop for any reason?
Are good grades been given to very average US students for some reason who would have been better learning a trade or considering learning some other skill?
If US colleges are still passing students on merit and a lot of students are going to university a lot of very skilled people should have been entering the US work force over many years.
When they change jobs after a few years or over the decades, do they keep learning?
Is anything missing in the US education system that other nations do well? Any diploma mill issues? Or graduation not based on academic merit?
Is the US gov or mil attracting all the top graduates away from the private sector? If so what is the US gov and mil doing better than the US private sector to attract the best staff?
If not what are all the best US gradates who passed their exams over the years and decades doing? Did they all move away from math, science and computing to arts over the years?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The country where I live (not America) only lets you issue visas if you can't find a national with the required skills. They also peg minimum wage for workers you issue visas to at just a little below average for that industry. I wasn't even aware America didn't have even this basic kind of requirement!
I mean wasn't the existing American workers would be given priority and in the case that no one has been found in a certain time like 3 weeks or so, then the position would be open to H1B wrkers. At least this is what I remember from my H1B days back about 20 years ago. But I know these indian a-hole companies, one of which was my visa sponsor and their recruitment ad was a page of incomprehensible goobledy-gook about my position , posted on an obscure bulletin board where I worked. At the time, the high school grad, so called sysadmins were turning their nose down to salaries I have been given and there was no word about recession. So, I did not think too much ab out it. Once I was on my way to my green card, thru marriage (and not a sham one if you have to ask) when I lost my job at the 2001 dot com bust, I realized what a peon I had been first time around. Nowadays, H1B is another way of saying cheap labor. At least at the time I was hired, I was being paid a market average salary. Now, I know Indian workers in So Cal, making 2/3 of what I was making in the same position and I was barely making the ends meet. T hey obviously were living in below standard levels. I do not have anything against these people as long as they are getting paid a salary as good as an american worker gets but companies undercutting the American workers by offering headcount 10-20-30% less than an their American equivalents is a sham, from which ever point you look at. Hence F*** Zuckerberg,, F*** Nadella, F*** Pichai and all their cohorts. Do not use these visas for things they are not introduced for. Taxpayers are not supposed to pay fr your way to the top. You are running a business. Bear the expenses like any smaller company does..
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I agree. And it makes you wonder why Obama didn't manage to do this in eight years in office. This really seems like a no brainer.
The old way was "make a law telling companies they must ____." You pointed out how well that worked.
Trump's draft order has taken a hint from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's approach - if people are motivated by money, you set it up so that they make the most money by doing what you want.
The draft order says that instead of approving H1-B applications at random, via a lottery, as it's done now, they are to use a different approach. If a company truly can't find American workers with the required skills, if the imported labor actually has special skills, the company will be willing to *pay* for those skills. Companies wanting to import cheaper entry-level prpgrammers won't pay them $180,000 / year. That's why Trump's order is to prioritize H1-Bs by salary. You want to import someone and pay them $40K? Go to the back of the line. You're willing to pay $200K salary because there truly aren't any Americans available with those skills? You're at the front of the line.
It totally removes the motivation to use H1-Bs as cheaper replacements for American workers, because it makes H1-Bs cost more than American workers. The company who wants to minimize costs will hire Americans, whenever possible.
Though it's not perfect, there is a certain genius to using their desire to minimize costs to get them to avoid H1-Bs. The founding fathers wrote about doing something similar. They deliberately set up a power struggle. It's designed so that a president could increase their power mainly by taking power away from Congress. On the other hand, Congress is a bunch of people who like having power and won't give it up easily. So to fight the President's desire for power, they used the Congresscritters' desire for power.
Some 10 years ago I worked for a large company with offices all over the world. I had to work with the hardware group, who wrote tests but had no clue about software. Not only did they not use any kind of version control, their common software (libraries and utilities) were on a mapped drive, usually s:. There was no documentation on what was mapped to s:. There was no write control on their software. They all worked on the same code, at the same time. A couple times a week I'd get group-wide mail along the lines of "whoever broke the build with foo.c, please fix ASAP". It doesn't help that more than once I was the one who broke the build but never admitted to it. Yep, I would have their file and my file open side by side (I had to copy their hardware register settings), would change the wrong file (why could I open their files r/w? Cuz they were dumasses). I begged their manager for over a year to use some kind of VCS, only to get a blank look.
I should mention, 2/3 of this team was in India, rest of the team including management was across the street.
So, new chip. Big announcement, they were going to use VCS this time. Happy me. Till I started to notice the files tended to stay new. Got concerned when changes went away. Came back. Went away again. After about a month I dug into it. I'll give you a paragraph break to think of WTF was happening.
Turned out, they still had the same shared directories everywhere. At the end of every day in India they would delete the entire repository from VCS. Then they would add every file in their common directories as new files. First thing in the morning somebody resync'd to the common directories. I kid you not. I walked across the street, asked the manager "um, whiskey tango foxtrot?". His answer? "It matches our workflow, it's working, go away".
sigh
The old way was a lottery, with H1-B applications approved randomly. Oh and companies would say there were no American workers available, pinky swear.
Trump's draft order has taken a hint from Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's approach - if people are motivated by money, you set it up so that they make the most money by doing what you want.
The draft order says that instead of approving H1-B applications at random, via a lottery, as it's done now, they are to use a different approach. Preference is given to applications paying the highest salary. If a company truly can't find American workers with the required skills, if the imported labor actually has special skills, the company will be willing to *pay* for those skills. Companies wanting to import cheaper entry-level prpgrammers won't pay them $180,000 / year. That's why Trump's order is to prioritize H1-Bs by salary. You want to import someone and pay them $40K? Go to the back of the line. You're willing to pay $200K salary because there truly aren't any Americans available with those skills? You're at the front of the line.
It totally removes the motivation to use H1-Bs as cheaper replacements for American workers, because it makes H1-Bs cost more than American workers. The company who wants to minimize costs will hire Americans, whenever possible.
Though it's not perfect, there is a certain genius to using their desire to minimize costs to get them to avoid H1-Bs. The founding fathers wrote about doing something similar. They deliberately set up a power struggle. It's designed so that a president could increase their power mainly by taking power away from Congress. On the other hand, Congress is a bunch of people who like having power and won't give it up easily. So to fight the President's desire for power, they used the Congresscritters' desire for power.
Those jobs will never come back.
Hate, hate, hate, hate to break the bubble, but all this will do is force everyone to open an office in what ever locale that will allow for the cheapest labor.
Guess what. Technology workers like you and me aren't immune to the same damn laws of capitalism. Businesses will find a way to reduce costs and punch up their profits, no matter what populist measures are passed by the politicians.
I guess you missed it. The big bitch session about H1B's is that it isn't capitalism, it's cronyism. It's using government to interfere with the market by letting business use effectively indentured servants. They bring people in that don't have the knowledge about how much the job is actually worth, suppressing wages. Then when they find out they're getting screwed just like US citizens they have no recourse since if they raise a stink they lose their status and have to go back while the company gets yet another sucker. If this was capitalism then the foreign candidates would just work for somebody else that actually paid them what they're worth but with the H1B program they're prevented from taking any action. But hey, it's not as though this is the only time a company thought that using cronyism is a hell of a lot better deal than actual capitalism.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
America First. About Time.
Sometimes people just don't like you and don't want to work with you. I don't mean to be mean... but there are many reasons why people/companies choose to (or not to) hire someone, and doing crap like that just makes companies gun-shy on hiring anybody.
That only helps high paying tech-states like Washington, California & New York where $100k yr is a drop in the bucket....there are some companies that legitimately needs H1Bs to survive and are in lower income areas where $100k yr is too much to pay. They need to just make a minimum wage based on average company pay, impose limits on the number of hours and partially do away with the lottery system.
Right to work precludes prevailing wage.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
You may recall the University of California was in the news for having their US IT workers train their Indian replacements.
You may also recall the same UC gave Obama four million dollars. Microsoft is another big Obama donor, at $1.7 million, and Obama needed the money - he's never earned significant money himself. Shockingly, Obama never stopped the people paying his way from doing what they wanted, abusing H1-Bs.
Trump (who is a blowhard, btw) put up $54 million of his own money to campaign. Some PACs who had supported Cruz switched to supporting Trump, so he benefited from donations, but he's not *dependent* on big donors.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day..
All you have to do is insist that any person hired on H1B receive a salary 25% higher than the highest paid equivalent level US person in the company. If they are willing to pay the premium then it's pretty clear it's not bullsh*t to say they are more qualified for the job. I've seen proposals to simply fix the salary at say $150K . but a fixed salary can't span the distance from academia to industry or across various types of work.
As someone who handles a lot of resumes I plainly see that many foreign applicants are infact more qualified in some cases. So I don't think they should end the H1B program. They just need to end the abuse of it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I've said this before and it still stands: there needs to be a secret shopper program of sorts where test applicants (who have really good backgrounds that match the skills needed) apply and if they are rejected, a hearing is held. public embarassment would result from any company who was cheating.
Wouldn't help.
- US company would hire an outsourcing firm to actually supply the workers.
- Outsourcing company gets caught by your proposed system.
- US company says "We had no idea! We're ending our contracts with ABC inc!". This garners support for the US company.
- BCD Inc is incorporated the next day. Miraculously it has the same executives as ABC, and wins the former ABC contract.
- Repeat as many times as necessary.
On the campaign trail, or yesterday?
I'm surprised by the lack of empathy for Indian tech workers on this forum. Sounds like none of you have ever had an Indian friend. I'm sure you will all be pleased when Trump orders all Indian visa holders be shipped home with no notice. It will free up all the $50K monkey coding jobs and you can finally get an entry level position after being rejected a dozen times and not being able to find work 2+ years after graduating from Devry.
XYZ Inc wants to import some entry-level coders, for $40K each ($20K cheaper than entry-level US workers)
I'm Canadian, and we don't really have this problem in the tech industry (other industries are a different matter...), thus I don't have a personal stake in what's happening in the US (other than the fact that I do routinely get calls from HR rep from large, well-known Internet companies that want to hire me and bring me down to the US, but I have solid reasons for not uprooting my family for such a move).
Personally, from what I've read on /., the situation you describe above sucks. We had a similar situation in my city a year or so ago when it was found that several McDonalds restaurants had been turning away student applications, and was using the Temporary Foreign Worker program to bring in foreign workers while claiming no local Canadian were interested in working for them. This is low skilled work, and it turned out there were lots of Canadians who wanted the jobs -- the local McDonalds franchisee just decided that he could bully foreigners into working long hours more easily. When this hit the news, the Government took action and rescinded their ability to bring in foreign workers, and (as I understand things) McDonalds rescinded their franchises. So I agree -- it's wrong, and it needs to stop.
But do you know what else sucks? By forcing XYZ Corp., to pay those entry-level coders more, they're likely to do the math and realize that it will be cheaper to just open up a foreign branch of XYZ Corp. in the country/countries most of these workers are originally from, and then pay them the local equivalent of $20k/year. Now not only have the jobs been lost for American workers, but all the money those workers would have spent in the US for housing, food, clothing, etc. is also gone. You can't offshore fast food, but you can offshore IT workers.
So I suppose the downside is that if XYZ Corp. does the math and realizes it's going to be cheaper to just offshore, it may not do a whole lot to help American IT workers. And it will doubly hurt when the wages they're paying don't get spent in the US either. I'm not saying H1-B's are the solution (I don't have a solution) -- but getting rid of them may not work out as some rosily hope.
Yaz
I'm deeply conflicted by Trump. On one hand I believe he is a racist and a pathological liar, who is in it to enrich his coffer and advance the alt-right agenda. On the other hand, I know H1-B is a lie and always seems to take a back seat to illegal immigration, and was unlikely going to get better under Clinton because she is a globalist. So it was hard for me to vote so I didn't vote. My vote wouldn't have mattered anyway in the state that I live in.
There are a lot of things that bother me about the H1B program, but at the end of the day, why are the hiring managers (mid-tier) going along with it? Why are they happy to see their white colleagues get replaced by foreign workers? I worked at a large fortune 500 company once and there were so many H1B programmers. When the economy crashed in 08/09, American workers and/or green card holders were laid off first. I never once saw a H1-B being laid off. It's hypocritical to be a citizen in a country where your job security is worse than a foreigner's.
The foreign workers eventually get promoted (they have to because they can't be discriminated against once they are in the company), and hire more H1-Bs. Meanwhile, we pour money and tell our kids to go into STEM programs only to have kids graduate having a hard time even getting a foot in the door because they are competing with cheap foreign labor, often with much more education. The only one who wins is the employer, who can hire a Ph.D for the price of a college student. Whether having that Ph.D. is really necessary to do the work is never really addressed.
It's a sad situation that most countries that we source these H1-B visas from are poor countries, but executives are selling each and every one as an Einstein. I have met some really bright and hardworking folks, but they feel like they don't have a soul. There was nothing I could do with them outside of work. There was no banter or chit-chat, just the usual greetings and comments about weather. I had an Indian friend study for his engineering masters tell me his parents mortgaged their home to have the money to send him to college in the US. He literally cannot fail and go home because his parents won't be able to pay off the debt. They are putting everything on him to succeed. Having a job in the US is a source of pride and a path to a good life. Unfortunately it often means that someone already here is going to have a worse life as a result.
Also, you do not need a college degree to be an excellent programmer and I'm sure slashdotter realize this. Some of the best, most creative and motivated programmers are Americans without college degrees and I know a couple, but somehow they are passed up because there is someone with a masters or Ph.D willing to take that job for the same pay, because there really isn't an alternative to not getting that job. I mentored a white, bright, young kids at work and helped him transition from a tester to a programmer. It took only a few hours to get the basics concepts that he has missed in college and he is doing fine and has been promoted a number of times already. Programming is really not that hard and there is really no shortage if you are willing to invest a minimal amount of time to on the job training as American companies ought to.
The Indian friend also asked why shouldn't jobs in America go to those most qualified rather to an American. A serious question. They believe that Americans are not entitled to American jobs. It's with attitudes like that that makes me less sympathetic to them. After all, they already have better job security than me. But going back to the white middle manager for a second, one of the white managers was talking to me one-on-one and was giddy over the fact that he could hire a Ph.D. in China for $40,000. I couldn't hold a smile any longer and he saw my expression and changed topics. Shortly after he assigned me to menial work. I think people like him like H1Bs because it makes for certainty that they will stay around and there is so much leverage you can have over the
Lost my last job to H1-B holders. I suppose I'll lose this one when the company responds to this by moving all development offshore. Jobs go where labor is cheap. Stockholders, owners, and consumers make sure of that.
This is already the case. Though the company churn has its benefits - during one of the reorganizations one of our H1Bs became overtime eligible. Until then he never marked his extra hours on the timesheet figuring if he wasn't getting any money for them neither should the sham of a company.
That's more than we can say about most politicians. While "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" someone who at least desires to "make america great" is a refreshing change. Obama started with a similar message (change!) but fizzled out quickly.
I happen to visit a forum of US immigrants of certain Eastern-European origin. Most are in IT jobs, and came here by way of H1B visa (though significant portion have been sponsored for a permanent residency by now). They are largely vehemently pro-Trump, islamophobic (and generally harbor great dislike and disdain for all "brown people", be that middle-easterners, hispanics or asians). I find the current situation not a little ironic - in a way wouldn't it be poetic justice if they were hit by the very policies they so feverishly support?
Not that I specifically wish this upon anyone or their family, but if the choice must be made - these people surely deserve it more than refugees from war-torn countries.
Trump doesn't care what the media thinks
Except when they report about the size of his inauguration crowds, or his tax returns, or his court cases, or his comments about women, or his many contradictory earlier statements, or when he calls them the "opposition", or "biased", "false", "failing", "dishonest", or..
Your title does say it all.
America is saturated with unskilled labor. Those people need to live somehow. Until we have some kind of guaranteed base income or some such system, they need a job.
Aside refugees from extreme conditions, it's difficult to me, morally, to "help" massive amounts of semi-skilled foreigners when our neighbors might be wondering where their next meal will come. They should come first. The whole "you can't help others if you can't help yourself".
We can't save the world. We just can't.
Now that doesn't mean these work visas should not exist. There is totally a need and large benefits for having visa programs for high skill immigrants where there's real needs. And stuff like H1B should be exclusively used for that.
Time to pack and move to another continent I guess.
Automation is already happening, and has been for 30 or so years. Ask an automotive factory worker about that one if you have doubts. While we could have a debate about the merits of minimum wage, the fact that you jumped to hyperbole makes me doubt your capacity to do so.
Minimum wage is absolutely a challenge to discuss and map out. When the only jobs available are clerks, cooks, and counter service it's difficult to argue against a living wage for those jobs. It's that, or Government assistance programs (sorry, you are not entitled to my money so I refuse to call them "entitlements"). I don't believe that it's necessary to have those jobs as the only jobs, but it requires a change to the economy to re-establish a strong middle class. Only so much can be automated with countless jobs, like construction, and those markets are down since the 2008 collapse.
You are right that Tech workers are not immune to automation. If you are as smart as you think you are, your value to a company will continue to rise instead of stagnating. You probably won't be doing the same thing in a few years that you are today, and if you expect and plan for that you are going to remain valuable. My market value has increased drastically over my 30 year IT career, and I never moved to management.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Do you think XYZ Corp hasn't already done the math on whether its cheaper to offshore? They have. Repeatedly. All of them. Many did offshore. XYZ Corp isn't importing cheap H1Bs because it's cheaper than offshoring, its because it needs a domestic American presence - particularly for customer requirements.
Even a broken clock gets the time right twice per day!
Too bad the 2nd right thing won't be dismantling most the CIA (doesn't anybody wonder what they told him? or showed him? ) At least he could have died trying to do something important. H1B hacks need fixing badly but are not really important ... just to some of us they are.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I have tons of empathy for Indian workers, Mexican illegals, etc. I don't fault them one bit for coming here. They have families to feed, and I understand completely why they do it and don't hold it against them (I would do the same thing in their shoes).
But I'm also an American. And so I stand by my fellow Americans first and foremost. And we have kids to feed too, of course.
And I would expect the same treatment from any other country. If I were applying for a job in another country, I would do it with the understanding that a citizen of that country is of course going to get preference over me. That's the whole point of having countries in the first place.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
about to be losing perhaps half of my staff due to it, I'd be laughing at our companies full steam ahead push for offshoring.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
They are already required to try to hire Americans first.
Of course, this is the guy who already takes credit for automotive plant hirings which were agreed upon between the UAW and the auto makers in 2015. So why would it be surprised to hear of another do-nothing announcement?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Encryptions next
I've worked with many fine Indian immigrants(green card, work visa) over the years and even they have half-jokingly talked about how they could be replaced by H1-Bs.
love is just extroverted narcissism
All you have to do..? Bullshit.
> They just need to end the abuse of it.
Of course. And this is action hopefully toward that end.
> in SV ... $200K+ that it would cost a live around here
Okay, California is ridiculously expensive. Here in Dallas I just bought a 3,500 square foot house, five bedrooms with a pool, for $245,000. That's AFTER housing values have gone up 8-10% per year for the last few years.
I'm at the border between horse pastures and freeways, 20-30 minute commute to many office jobs. You're welcome to come on out if and when you get tired of paying so much for California. Our unemployment rate is lower here too, you'll have an easier time finding good jobs.
Just one thing - IF you decide you're tired of what California policies have created and you decide you'd rather come here, please remember why you came. Obviously you wouldn't want to bring California policies here - those policies caused the situation you're trying to get away from!
There should be criminal charges made against all of the corporate leaders who abused this program, forcing existing US workers to train their low-salary replacements. Clearly, US worked were already available in all of those cases.
The H1B visa program is so abused by a bunch of outsourcing companies that is outrageous. I am not an american (in estern europe working for the local branch of a US IT company) but I am horrified at the abuse. This TCS , Infosys and Wipro giants are importing slave labour to US. I had to deal with indians "imported" to US by this companies and let me tell you the comclusion:
- a lot of fake credentials. Skills they were supposed to be experts in lack completly.
- low levels of trust as they are paid at the level of a Wallmart cashier. I do not trust them having access to the company git server. We had instances of code teft in the past.
- I cannot believe that they are paid less then me and they leave in a city whwrw life costs like 4 times more than my est-european city.
- I would not want a H1B visa in those conditions. The irony is that my company or a competitor cannot relocate me in US because they pay me more than a H1B indian they already have there.
- it is imposible for a company to relocate a highly skilled profesional (one of the core architects) from Europe because the whole H1B system is flooded by applications from the Indian outsourcers. I know of a TCS comapus in India with some 4000 employees where virtually everyone has a H1B application, the TCS does not care which one gets the random VISA approval, if one gets it it is imediatly shipped to US. Actually the promise of an application for the H1B is part of the hire pitch at that office !!!
It seem pretty clear that billionaire tech "leaders" do not give a flying f**k about the plight of the American tech worker, especially the older ones. While they buy Hawaiian estates and sponsor the America's cup, they have absolutely abused H1-B visas to enrich themselves. I have seen it since at least 1996, using the lie that there is a lack of American talent for most tech jobs. They use this to depress our American wages and make us work horribly long hours like we were child labor in the early 1900's. They conspire to prevent a free job market by making secret deals with their competitors to not compete for talent. Maybe worst of all, they blackmail H1-B visa workers to get far less pay and to create a sort of slavery for these immigrants that makes it impossible for them to demand equal wages and decent treatment lest they are fired and they are forced to go back to their country of origin. Meanwhile they tear up and down I-280 in their supercars, fly in their private jets, and sail the oceans in their massive yachts. They claim concern for the environment or whatever social cause is popular on the Davos circuit. They live in bubbles like French kings from the 18th century. There was once exploding opportunities for the independent tech guy, but the tech King vampires have made us into blood donors to support their empires. H1-B visa should be used for only the most exceptional foreign talent to enrich the technical talent in this country. They should not be used for lowering wages for jobs where there is plenty of American technical talent, but the greedy Kings of tech just want more. And they should not use these visas to essentially enslave foreign workers.
When India joined the WTO and opened its economy to US companies like Caterpillar, Boeing and Coca Cola it pushed very hard for WTO to cover not just trade in goods but also in Services. The US succeeded in getting free trade in services pushed to the next round of negotiations but as a compromise created the H1B as a backdoor way so that Indian Software companies could sell services in US and get some dollars flowing back to India (India could not afford to pay dollars to Caterpillar if it could not earn dollars somehow. And given that India had a very well educated population but very poor infrastructure India's competitive advantage was in selling services rather than goods). At this point if the US tries to push back on Indian companies selling services expect pushback on US companies selling goods in India. This would mean jobs lost at Caterpillar and Boeing. It would also mean higher levels of offshoring as there is nothing preventing a TCS or a Wipro from hiring a few Americans too be the onsite team and having the rest of the team in India. Currently the cream of the crop in India moves to US on H1B to be onsite team and then transition to GC, go start their own companies. With that pipeline closed the quality of offshore work will just keep going up till there is very little reason to have onsite teams. The fact of the matter is entry level IT work is now a skill for a developing country just like sewing jeans or making shoes. Market forces are forcing these jobs overseas. The H1B program has temporarily kept some of the jobs in the US but with the H1B being crppled the flow of jobs going overseas will just speed up
**Life is too short to be serious**
This is why I'm liking him more all the time. However, I will point out how humorous I find that all the liberal slashdotters love Trump on the H1B issue all the sudden. Even though I'm liking Trump in most ways, I think telling employers who they can and can't hire is bullshit. If they don't want to hire blacks, white, Chinese, H1B, whatever. That is their business. Personally, I like the outcome of keeping America first, but I still think private business should runs things the way they see fit. Government institutions and other public funded institutions (universities) is a different story. They should represent all Americans only. I can see keeping H1B out of the university and other state government by law.
H1B is easy since you get person locally in US but if it is not possible then companies can simply stop hiring in US and start hiring in foreign countries. I've seen 100% US company transformed to almost completely foreign-based with only CEO and few people staying in US. Getting H1B visas was too much hassle so company just "migrated" out of country.
The current system is broken. It is so broken that application for a H1B visa is part of the hire pitch or hire benefits when someone gets employed at TCS !!! Are you kidding me ? They expoit the random VISA system by flooding it with applications.
Well I'll bite. I think David Frum said it most accurately. "When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals wonÃ(TM)t do"
Harris said something similar in 2003ish I believe:
"The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization."
I mention this that not to imply any sort of plagiarism, but rather the opposite. This is a multifaceted phenomenon that has been around for a long time, at least since 9/11, a problem that many people are discovering and re-discovering, but still very few liberals or leftists seem to understand or accept that this is what is going on. They think that the solution to rightwing extremism is leftwing extremism[1], instead of taking advantage of the golden opportunity to simply portray themselves as The Sane Position/Party[tm].
A related phenomenon is the backfiring of what I call "Operation: Conflation". It's widely observed that words like 'misogyny' and 'racism' are losing their punch due to their overuse, due to their being shoehorned into more and more inappropriate situations. And that's quite true, but it's only half of the story.
What is less commonly observed on is that the attempt to marginalize people and ideas by branding them racist or misogynistic or fascist is beginning to flow in the opposite direction as intended. Instead of making it less acceptable to support Trump, they're making racism (actual racism) more socially acceptable. "If being worried about Mexican immigration is racist, well shit... I guess I'm racist then." And the next time an actual racist opens his or her mouth, they listen a bit longer than they normally would. And they don't feel as ashamed to even nod their heads now and then. Wash, rinse, repeat for fascism and misogyny.
The Overton Window is not being moved by the extremists alone; at this point in history, the heavy lifting isn't being done by the KKK or even the self-identified alt-right. It's being done by self-described liberals and leftists and progressives overplaying their hands and insisting that we talk about extremist right views all day long, and by tossing a cornucopia of reasonable sounding ideas (and even a few actually-reasonable ideas) into that giant bin marked "evil extreme-right bullshit", they're making it a lot easier for people talk themselves into simply diving into that bin head first.
And they're still doing it. With glee. Hands rubbing together, expecting Trump to crumble to dust at a
Well I'll bite. I think David Frum said it most accurately. "When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals wonÃ(TM)t do"
Harris said something similar in 2003ish I believe:
"The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization."
I mention this that not to imply any sort of plagiarism, but rather the opposite. This is a multifaceted phenomenon that has been around for a long time, at least since 9/11, a problem that many people are discovering and re-discovering, but still very few l
Well I'll bite. I think David Frum said it most accurately. "When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals wonÃ(TM)t do"
Sam Harris said something similar in 2003ish I believe:
"The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization."
I mention this that not to imply any sort of plagiarism, but rather the opposite. This is a multifaceted phenomenon that has been around for a long time, at least since 9/11, a problem that many people are discovering and re-discovering, but still very few liberals or leftists seem to understand or accept that this is what is going on. They think that the solution to rightwing extremism is leftwing extremism[1], instead of taking advantage of the golden opportunity to simply portray themselves as The Sane Position/Party[tm].
A related phenomenon is the backfiring of what I call "Operation: Conflation". It's widely observed that words like 'misogyny' and 'racism' are losing their punch due to their overuse, due to their being shoehorned into more and more inappropriate situations. And that's quite true, but it's only half of the story.
What is less commonly observed on is that the attempt to marginalize people and ideas by branding them racist or misogynistic or fascist is beginning to flow in the opposite direction as intended. Instead of making it less acceptable to support Trump, they're making racism (actual racism) more socially acceptable. "If being worried about Mexican immigration is racist, well shit... I guess I'm racist then." And the next time an actual racist opens his or her mouth, they listen a bit longer than they normally would. And they don't feel as ashamed to even nod their heads now and then. Wash, rinse, repeat for fascism and misogyny.
The Overton Window is not being moved by the extremists alone; at this point in history, the heavy lifting isn't being done by the KKK or even the self-identified alt-right. It's being done by self-described liberals and leftists and progressives overplaying their hands and insisting that we talk about extremist right views all day long, and by tossing a cornucopia of reasonable sounding ideas (and even a few actually-reasonable ideas) into that giant bin marked "evil extreme-right bullshit", they're making it a lot easier for people talk themselves into simply diving into that bin head first.
And they're still doing it. With glee. Hands rubbing together, expecting Trump to crumble to dust at any moment under the weight of their sweeping "any form of immigration restriction is bad and racist" positions. I was going to say "go look at the Guardian if you don't believe me", but you don't need to go that far. Bruce Perens, a man of some small notability around here, is of the opinion that we should not / cannot ask not just prospective refugees, but even prospective American citizens what they think of the constitution. That people who openly despise freedom of speech and religion (not quibble over the details of interpretation, but outright reject them) should be invited in and be granted citizenship, because to do otherwise smacks of... well, something unsavory. And Mr. Perens isn't alone. I've had a dozen other similar conversations.
I certainly don't agree with all or even most of Trump's recent activities, but when otherwise reasonable-sounding leftists start insisting that the only way to serve the ideals of liberty is to allow people who openly hate those fr
"Trump cracking down on H1B abuse? WTF - I love Wipro and the H1B program now."
-- The internet
Tech companies have already been caught creating job descriptions that cannot reasonably be filled by anyone, then hiring H1s. This will do nothing.
Hey /. - I always wanted to know what would happen when this came to pass:
The way I think of it ( absolutely concede that this is a subjective PoV), by blocking immigration you are effectively (among other things) blocking free trade of services. The fact that goods/services will be replaced by more "value-for-money" substitutes seemed to be the logical outcome of globalisation and free trade, so this could be the beginning of protectionism kicking in, unless it can be spun somehow that goods and services are different.
Anyway, my curiosity lies more with the fact that IT services are much more easily delivered offshore than other services, and enabling technology has advanced significantly for this -> from a for-profit incentive, I'm thinking:
- Outsourcing with full offshoring - i.e. - Outsourcing companies will design and prices services with much more offshore parts. Of course they already try to do this, but when the cost of onshore resource increases, the equation changes.
- Insourcing, but with remote development centres: Companies like Google, FB, to much more smaller companies, start setting up development centres in cheaper locations, more immigration friendly locations
- Growth of Value added services in cheaper locations, where the final service can be bought by companies. E.g. going up the chain of BPO, instead of outsourcing IT, outsource HR, Accounting etc ( I think this happens already as well - my question is more of - do you think these changes will drive the incentive to do so higher or lower)
Thoughts?)
Just wait until the loosely affiliated companies in question form a consortium due to their shared interest and just get all those tech jobs done remote.
What they need is more reliable infrastructure for remote work. You think they will pay MORE money because some president said they have to?
Capitalism works. Why pay an American $150k when you can pay an Indian $50k? - you say because this law fights greed with greed...sorry the companies in question will spend ANOTHER $50k a year to facilitate that $50k employee from India because that saves $50k a year.
Ironically it's the greed of Americans and their American companies that are not using American employees...why? because it makes no financial sense to pay more just because someone is from America. It's the sense of entitlement that so many have (typical of the native population of any country, not just America) that somehow they should be the first port of call. Morally? maybe but financially what's the point?? -companies want profits.
Go ask all these American companies why having a million dollars or profit a year is not enough. Ask them why ten million is not enough. Ask why one hundred million is not enough. Ask them why one billion PROFIT is not enough and they simply cannot higher more Americans at extra cost? -they can afford it so figure out why.
Couple years ago I was one of the H-1B workers. Not IT though but in physics. I got an fellowship in one of the national laboratories. US citizens can apply for it equally well, the only thing important is the science quality and added-on value the fellow can bring to the lab. Everybody was pretty surprised when, after 3 years, I decided go back to my home county, particularly concerning the money which were really good. I did not wanted to be a second-grade citizen and but I could stay longer on H-1B. But, I could see it coming what happened now. And I'm more than happy now doing good science for maybe 25% of the money but 100% appreciation of my work.
Trump's Next Immigration Move To Affect H-1B Visas; Require Tech Companies To Try To Hire Americans First
The more they complain about Trump's measure, the more it should be applied.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Stop sucking that corporate cock and internalizing its self-serving "diversity" propaganda. The companies only value Oompa Loompa workers because they can pay them in cacao beans.
As was touched on here, H1B does is not solely encountered in the Bay Area.
In the Oil and Gas industry, in Houston, H1B is used a lot. Which is odd considering the history of the industry.
I've seen a lot more 'quality' issues from them. Like damaging equipment and endangering personnel as a result. When confronted with the poor quality of their work you tend to get a "I'm sorry. I don't know anything about it!"
As far as I'm concerned, Trump is spot on with this one. The U.S. should not be burdened to employ people from China and India when we have a glut of un/under employed Engineers.
An average engineer can be taught to be an expert. This does not require a PHD or even a Masters, just time and diligence and working with the right people.
Is the US tax system really so archaic that they can't just produce stats on this sort of thing automatically?
In the UK the majority of employees get paid through a system called PAYE where tax information is automatically passed to the tax man. There are of course people outside of this system, but not enough to be statistically significant enough to alter the stats.
This means it's trivial for our statistics body the ONS to produce stats on things like average salaries by field which are then used to inform government policy on the rare occasion we have ministers willing to engage in evidence based policy rather than doing what they want regardless of what the data says.
Cut off H1B visa for equal right! Anyone who can't speak English but living in America is just BS. You could hire me instead. But you decided not to hire me.
So I like Trump. Kick them out from the USA! Let them taste how I feel. I wanted to live in the US but I can't because of stupid visa.
Wait I thought republicans where against big government? What happened to capitalism? What happened to the free market?
I worked with the India office of a major mobile company. I could have moved to US on L1, but realized that the salary paid there would have been less for 8 years of experience. Atleast this rule will ensure that people who are hired in US are paid fairly. There is simply a shortage of the number of people required to run successful business in US.
Do you think XYZ Corp hasn't already done the math on whether its cheaper to offshore? They have. Repeatedly. All of them. Many did offshore. XYZ Corp isn't importing cheap H1Bs because it's cheaper than offshoring, its because it needs a domestic American presence - particularly for customer requirements.
Yes, however by forcing companies that ire H1-B holders to pay them quite a bit more than they are, the math is going to change. You may need a domestic American presence, but that presence can certainly be made smaller. You only need a team of project managers remaining in the US to handle requirements gathering; development can be done pretty much anywhere these days.
What tips the scales is real estate. It may be cheaper for XYZ Corp to bring H1-B holders into their existing American facilities that it would be to try to navigate the legalities of, and pay for the opening of a new facility overseas. Forcing them to increase salaries for H1-B holders may change the math on this. Take for example a team of 50 H1-B holders. If XYZ Corp is suddenly required to pay each of those people $20 000 more per year, that's a difference of $1 million. It may now make more sense to instead pay $500 000 to open an office in Mumbai and pay those same people their current salary -- they'd come out $500k ahead.
In effect, you may be taking those marginal cases where companies looked at the situation and decided offshoring wasn't going to save them enough money in relation to the problems it would cause, and push them over the edge. And once those jobs go, they probably aren't coming back.
I'm not arguing that there shouldn't be a solution to this -- I'm just note sure that forcing salary increases is the solution all on its own. You simply can't properly fix the problem while leaving the possibility of offshoring those same jobs on the table.
Yaz
Oh so wonderful we have Trump, NOBODY ELSE ever had that idea!
Sadly it's still impossible to find a $obscure_language specialist with 20 years experience (probably because the language was only invented 10 years ago) for less than 2k bucks, so I guess we'll have to hire that guy from Bangalore who is that specialist. Really. We promise. After all we're hiring and why would we hire him if he wasn't exactly what we're looking for?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I walk into my local Walmart and it's not kids I see. It's ALL older folks who most definitely aren't trying to use the job as training wheels. They're trying to be able to afford to live here (SI Valley) in the house they bought 40 years ago and now the taxes cost enough for 2 months worth of food. You're seriously out of touch about Walmart, Starbucks, and even Apple Associates. They can't afford the stuff they sell.
Surely India needs programmers more than the U.S. does? Aren't we strip mining their best, most talented people by inviting them to live in the U.S., instead of helping their own country, where they are obviously needed?
Looking at the numbers for H1-B visas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_demographics_and_tables) I would argue that the impact on the US employment market (146,305,000 labor force with a total of 315,857 H1-Bs issued in 2014; see also https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2014/cpsaat11b.htm) as a whole will be rather negligable. I find it difficult to argue that this is anything but another populist stunt.
I feel so sig.
He cares very much what the media thinks. Why do you think he threw a temper tantrum when it was shown that he didn't have the biggest inauguration crowd? He's always checking the media because he's so insecure and so narcissistic.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
In the UK, all "public" education used to be free. This included university tuition fees. Since the system changed, regular increases in fees began to price out students from low-income families. As a consequence, most universities started actively "recruiting" abroad. This has led to a large pool of UK educated foreign students competing for UK jobs. With problems with STEM education producing enough local and qualified candidates, IT & science jobs have seen an increase in foreign born workers. However recent changes to visa regulations either planned or implemented have made it more difficult for foreign students. If the percentage of foreign goes down, the universities income is disproportionately effected. Foreign students pay higher fees. So the bottom line is that if your national education system can't provide enough local candidates, employers have to look abroad. If local students can't afford tuition fees, then the educational establishments make less money, and that will probably lead to loss of staff and researchers and a lowering of standards. The unintended consequence of a rash and ill thought out plan form an incompetent who is only interested in his TV ratings is that your tech sector is F**KED! On the bright side, I suspect that the backlash is going to destroy the GOP and all the Trumpinistas they have been supporting. Someone will point at The Donald and say "YOUR FIRED!".
Best wishes,
Sid
I've been against everything trump has done so far. But, I think this is something that's long overdue, IMO. The H1B abuse has hurt me in the past and continues to hurt others. If they think this out (laugh) and create something without loopholes or dangerous unintended consequences, this is something I can get behind. Is it just me being selfish or is this an injustice that needs fixing? I'm not sure anymore, -Snowflake
While I think the H-1B program has been exploited to hell and back and would like to see it stopped.... the wording is odd.
"Give priority to higher paid workers?" Very odd, and unenforceable.
How about, "Limit the number of H-1B visa and raise the minimum salary for an H-1B visa holder to $100,000 per year?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
It has been too long coming. This is a thing of beauty and I can't wait for it to hit.
I don't know any American citizen working in engineering here or at my previous fortune 40 company that isn't waiting with baited breath for this. Trump is working on his re-election campaign right now in doing this. If he makes this work then I should have voted for him, and I can vote for him next time around.
I hope that Disney, Google, Intel, Facebook, and the rest are forced to show what they have actually been doing for years. STEM shortage my ass. Slave shortage is what they want - free labor. It isn't free. Tell that to American student load debt. All that debt, and the jobs go overseas so it can't get paid.
This has been a long, long time in coming. I hope Trump writes it hard, and makes them show their true soul in a very very public manner.
-a very senior mechanical engineer at a fortune 100 company
That makes sense. Do ability-testing based hiring, not based on the lowest salary an applicant would accept. Companies willing to pay more for tested top-performers would win. Imagine staffing of a symphonic orchestra on the criterion of a lowest wage foreign hire instead of testing candidate's performance.
I think it can be boiled down for the most part to the left shifting its focus from socialist economics to a fuzzy range of social issues, focused mostly on multiculturalism.
The political left has always been left vulnerable when they lose the support of workers and shift their priorities to non-labor social issues, especially when those issues are not salient to the majority population's labor sector. This provides a window for parties to offer policies of interest to the labor sector and capture them.
The problem the left has is that they end up prioritizing policies whose constituencies are only numerical minorities. It may work electorally if they can form a broad enough coalition, and at times they can pull in enough middle class voters to tip the balance. But the risk is that they have to have a broad coalition, and such a broad coalition is tough to sustain -- either you water down your social issues enough to not alienate the middle class voters, risking another candidate stealing your social issues faction or you alienate the middle class.
The question is why the left chose to abandon a lot of their socialist economics for social issues and multiculturalism. It's probably a combination of factors -- the failure of Communist states economically and their political oppression. The rise of civil rights as an alternative to Marxism as an animating drive of the political left. I also think that the decline of organized labor and its hostility to left-wing social issues tempted the left into trading them as a voting bloc for the broader voting bloc represented by multiculturalism and social issues.
I think the latter was a miscalculation, as they failed to see the overlap between middle class votes and economic issues, and they didn't trade for an equal scale voting bloc.
If the left abandons mainstream labor interests it almost always leads to fascism, the synthesis of labor-friendly economics with nationalism. If the left maintains itself principally as a party of labor interests, though, it seems to squelch nationalism and authoritarianism by forcing those elements into alliances with the economic establishment where establishment economic values end up superseding nationalist interests.
Personally I think what Trump is doing should be a positive. His immigration stance makes sense giving all that is going on. It's less of an impact than we would have if a major attack were to happen. It hardly will affect visa applications from most countries who provide high education job skills. Not many from Syria are highly skilled in technology. We have plenty of people in the US who need skilled jobs and are sitting it out or working less skilled low paying jobs. The only people really complaining are corporations who will have to pay more for skilled US workers than provided visa workers. If we really look at immigration we should really look at how many we are providing access for. This ideal that we have a unlimited amount of capacity for immigration is a utopia that doesn't exist.
Never seen this many pissed off American engineers since the announcement that systemd was going to be mandatory in Debian
There will be no court with defined rules as to what qualifies a person for a job, there never can be. So companies abusing the H1-B program will list some impossible requirements like " 10 years experience with windows 2012" or "52 years experience with COBOL". They'll claim no US candidate matches and then hire a junior from a cheap labor market, pay him shit and the US gov can't do a thing about it. Set a minimum wage of 25% above the USA equivalent job....again this is subjective. Sorry, we couldn't find a Phrenological Engineering Specialist, that position doesn't exist in here so we had to create it and we are setting the wage to be 20k a year. Source: CGI does this in Canada Want to really mess with the program, make the owner of the visa the employee being hired and don't shackle them to the sponsor....then require mandatory union membership. *POOOOOOF* problem dissapears.
How likely is it that Intel, and Microsoft, Google and Apple will just say "oh well - let's hire expensive Americans" - instead of saying "Can't get a H1B ? OK we'll create that job in your location".
The big corporations already have major offices in EMEA, Asia - it's not exactly difficult to expand your office in Bangalore or Shenzen - particularly in 2017 when remote working is no big issue.
Trump is applying a 1920s trade solution to a 2020 issue.
This may be the only suggested Trump policy that I actually support. Having worked in IT/software development for 20 years I have seen the proliferation of H1B visa holders brought in at cheap wages that most definitely took jobs away or reduced salaries for qualified American applicants. It is industry marketing-ploy to suggest there aren't enough qualified American high-tech workers to fill these positions.
That's the whole point of having countries in the first place
When modern nation states first appeared, capitalism and globalism didn't yet exist, so there was no need for protection from them. I think that states in general originally appeared as a way to insutitionalize rule of law, while modern nation states appeared because of the new notion that different nations need some form of "nation individuality".
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Just *saying* stuff about what you need is the old system.
Trump's draft order says "put your money where your mouth is." If they don't actually need someone with all of those skills, they won't want to *pay* top dollar for someone with all of those skills. The draft (which will hopefully be revised) says whoever is willing to pay top dollar for their H1-B candidates goes to the front of the line. You don't pay top dollar for someone with unique skills unless you *actually* need those unique skills.
* Ps Trump is a jackass and I voted against him - twice.
If you make sure an H1B holder is paid over $100k a year the abuses will stop.
Trump has proposed a bill that sets minimum H1B wage at $130k (up from $60k).
http://wap.business-standard.c...
Probably could not find one willing :)
Having been through waves of offshore outsourcing in major corporations my conclusion is this:
If you can be replaced with a half priced, little experience, poor communication skilled replacement...you have to look in the mirror and see where you went wrong.
I'm a tech worker from Bangalore, this might hassle us in the short run but I think we will see entire divisions outsourced in the long run. We no longer will have to come onsite to do the work.. Already major US companies like IBM, Accenture etc no longer outsource work to our local companies but they themselves run large operations in Bangalore.. If I'm right, IBM has the largest global workforce in Bangalore..
I'm all for regulating the H1B visa program but I see many of you are ready to pat Trump on the butt and give him an 'attaboy' before you even see what he's planning.
The dude is great at telling people what they want to hear. The only RIGHT solution is to limit the H1B quota. Anything else is a band-aid
1. Split all business in three slabs based upon number of H1Bs employed.
2. For every company calculate how much is the ratio of H1B vs Non H1B compensation, called wage-fairness-factor.
3. For the bottom quarter of the list in each of three slabs , if the wage-fairness-factor is less than 1.5, bar them from applying/hiring H1Bs for next 5 years.
No need to change the rule ever. Will keep up with inflation etc.
The calculation is a multiplier of the "average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment." For some occupations that can be found here:
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/
Age discrimination is illegal in the US, a company can't admit that age affects wages.
By current law, H1-B employers are supposed to pay at least the average wage. Proposals by Trump by a Congresswoman from California leverage the idea that those employees for which someone is willing to pay 200% or 300% of the average wage for a similar position must indeed be highly needed.
That's certainly an important issue. Of the last three places I worked, one had a very strong training program for employees, one moderately strong, and one paid for Lynda.com.
To have more of that, we probably need to work on the much larger issue of loyalty between both the employer and the employee. Employees routinely only stay 1-3 years, so investing in a lot of training can be foolish for the employer. On the other hand, employees see little reason to stick around when another company makes them a higher offer. The places I worked that had long employee retention times and good training also had career advancement planned in advance "Chuck is due to retire in a year and half. Bob is training to replace him. Stacy will take over Bob's position." Employees knew there was a plan for them to advance. Still, management had trouble getting employees to complete the training the employees themselves had chosen. That goes to the next issue:
The other day my boss lamented that most employees don't seem to have any interest in advancing. He writes out a plan with them on what they need to do to get a promotion and they just aren't really interested, they don't do the stuff they need to do to get promoted. That's hard for me to understand. I've *always* been working on my next promotion, from the very first day I had a job. Then again, I'm also an entrepreneur - I go so far as to *create* new companies for me to be the president of. Most people don't think that way, they show up for a paycheck, then go home and do whatever they like to do.
You just gave me an idea...
Why not require a company who states they cannot find any *qualified* US based labor (when the plead for foreign labor) to:
1. Submit the job requirements, resumes and interview data of the applicants that they said were not qualified? That data would be forwarded to a US accounting office (like the GAO, for instance) to analyze after an H1B had filled the position they wanted.
2. As part of a yearly accountability review completed by a 3rd party (don't know that another fed gov agency would be needed), the data (job posting, resumes, interviews) would be analyzed along with an interview with the H1B whom got the job to determine what skills were actually "required". If a discrepancy is found, the company would be fined a generous sum of money.
I was raised in Colorado. If you like Colorado, Denver has tech jobs, legal weed, pretty mountains nearby, and smog.
Texas has a lot less weed smoking (except in Austin, which is actually a part of California which got stuck in Texas when it's VW bus broke down), no smog, and no mountains.
It'll be interesting to see - I suspect we'll find that the places with legal (or quasi-legal) weed end up losing jobs to places where people get off the couch and go to work. We'll find out. That's one of the cool things about having 50 states - they can each try things their own way, then see how each approach worked.
Having looked into traveling to and working in other countries , it seems like what the president is proposing is 'the norm' in almost all countries except the united states? Am I mistaken? Any idea what percentage of countries don't have a 'hire local first' policy ?
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
MAGA
Which law says that H1-Bs have to be randomly assigned by lottery? Maybe there is one, but not that I know of.
Congress is *supposed* to make the laws, not the executive. Since about the 1970s (and to a lesser extent since 1929), Congress has passed more and more vague laws giving the executive the power to fill in the rest via "regulations". I don't like that, but it's reality. As far as I know, the executive was given significant discretion as to how to allot H1-Bs.
One Congresswoman from California has proposed a bill which make statutory law of the preference for higher salaries (relative to the average for the position). If it's well written, with unintended affects considered, I would support such a bill.
Strangely, president Trump has signed an executive order reducing the amount of "law" (regulations) made by the executive, sending that back to the Congress. His order is that for every new regulation made by the executive, they must remove two old regulations that are no longer needed (with exceptions signed off by cabinet level department heads). If we get to the point where we've gotten rid of most of the stupid regulations and we still need that stuff to be law, Congress can do their job and pass it as law, rather than having the executive promulgate more and more law as regulations. I'm sure there will be some unintended consequences, but I like the general concept of that. The executive has grown much more powerful vis-a-vis the Congress than the framers intended. This graph is informative as to the change in the cost of executive regulation:
https://regulatorystudies.colu...
... , which is by far the most retarded program. Green cards raffled in a lottery for people with as little as a high-school degree. It sounds like a hoax but it is true.
That's basically what we've done, though of course constrained by budget. I think a new approach is needed.
In general, when you pass a law saying "you must _____", then try to enforce that, you can catch maybe 0.1% of the cheaters. To catch anything like even 15% of the cheaters requires a cop on every street corner, and in every office.
More effective is when you can set up the system to reward the behavior you want, without needing cops to investigate and prosecutors to try to prove each violation. As an obvious example, we want people to get off the couch and do something useful. The system is set up so that you get money by getting off the couch and doing something that other people find useful. Therefore, most people go to work. No need for cops to look for people on couches - the system is set up to reward working, not napping.
Before I delve into the issue,
About: I do have Master's degree from an U.S. institution with 7 years of relevant experience. I am on H-1B, and my previous job was replaced by 2 outsourcing firms. I have resided here for 10 years. I have directly worked for American companies (not outsourcing or IT work). In my current company 99% are all Americans and I did not steal or replace anyone's job.
The Limitation: H-1B is firstly capped by 85,000 visas every year out of which only 20,000 visas are given to people with a Master's degree. If the number of applicants is greater than 85,000, then a lottery takes place. For example, last year there were 240,000 applicants, which means only 1 in every 3 applications is approved. Imagine your fate being decided by a lottery.
The Abuse: The thing that sucks is that Outsourcing/IT companies abuse the system. There are atleast 10k to 20k applicants from these "outsourcing" companies each year. Whomever wins the lottery gets to work on-site, in USA. The outsourcing firm usually charges it's American client of say $100k+, out of which 60% goes to the employee and 40% goes to the outsourcing company. That's how they make revenue. The big prize for American companies is that along with the on-site techies, you get a dozen offshore support. So from an American company perspective, imagine getting 13 employees for $200k.
Green Card can be applied in EB-1, EB-2, EB-3 categories. EB-1 is the fastest which takes 6 months and reserved for exceptional candidates (like PhDs + cited publications etc.) or managers with lots of experience. EB-2 is for people like me, with a Master's degree, and takes 6 years (if you are an Indian citizen). EB-3 is for people who only have a bachelor's degree.
Workers from outsourcing company who come on-site, portray themselves as "Managers" and apply in the EB-1 category. They get the green card in 6 months. A person like me who has gone through the U.S. system of education and experience are made to wait longest. I have seen this abuse first-hand.
Limitation while on visa: H-1B is strictly controlled. It has to be renewed every 3 years. If you change your title, job duties, company, you will need to apply for a new visa. If you are laid-off, the you go on an illegal status immediately. The advantage outsourced worker, you ask? They work for the same parent outsourcing company. In other words, if their contract ends, they can find a new American client.
For renewing after 6 years of H-1B, you need to have your green card petition filed by your employer. I will no go into the details, but the process much worser than H-1B.
Qualifications: Outsourcing companies blatantly lie on their resume. I have seen and worked with people, where they say they have experience in engineering while all they know is IT.
Pay: $130k+ is absurd. While it maybe feasible in California or other big cities, I don't see payscale rise for people working in smaller cities. Infact it will affect brightest talent since Outsourced workers are already paid $130k+.
I have been on both sides of the sword. I can empathize what Americans are going through and also as a legal immigrant, how my hands are tied. After jumping through so many loops, I am still on the queue for a green card. As a legal immigrant, bright talent, gone through the US system of education, contributing to the economy and my society, I am made to wait the longest, with so many possibilities of losing your spot along the way.
I agree with Trump that the system has been abused. I also agree on having a curfew for people abusing the system. I just hope he retains the brightest talent.
Yeah, but I tend to think- the more the left and the crony corporatist media (sorry for the redundancy) screech, the more right he is.
Obama's policies took my pay from $150K/yr to $0/yr.
Then I was hit with 300% more costs for health insurance over the last 3 yrs thanks to ACA.
I didn't vote FOR President Trump.
I voted AGAINST the continuation of whatever crap the democrats were pushing.
My family simply cannot take it anymore.
Not everything President Obama did was terrible, but a President who can't get the economy roaring with 0% fed interests rates for 8 years is clearly an idiot. Secretary Clinton was going to keep doing the same stuff, which wouldn't help my family.
I don't like many things that President Trump is doing, but he is doing what he said he would do. Some of it will likely be found illegal/unconstitutional, but he will be able to to say "I did what I said and only Congress and the Constitution got in the way."
What do they say? To make an cake, you have to break a few eggs. The wall and immigration bans are sorta stupid as rolled out. The wall is just stupid outside borders near cities. In the vast NM and TX borderlands, something else is necessary. Closing the borders isn't the answer either.
In 4 yrs when President Trump gets re-elected based on his record of doing what he said (good and bad), perhaps the lifetime politicians will pull their heads out and start working for the people.
Seems to me this is just likely to concentrate H1B visas in high cost areas like San Francisco and New York where they do get higher base pay than elsewhere (although still well below the market rate).
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
100K for an H1B visa holder would be a steal in my employment market, and in San Francisco it would be super freaking cheap. Its hard to peg a good number when wages (and cost of living) vary so much across the country.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
H1-B was supposed to be used to AUGMENT American technical powers by bringing in highly skilled SPECIALIZED talent
Instead it's been abused to the extent that companies are replacing entire departments with UNQUALIFIED H1-B Workers that require training be provided by the staff they are replacing
Fuck zuckerberg, fuck gates and fuck all those exploitationslist assholes who are displacing US Workers by abusing the system and breaking the law
Trump needs to include CRIMINAL SANTIONS and imprison those who violate H1-B provisions
The calculation is a multiplier of the "average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment." For some occupations and locations that can be found here:
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/
So a proposed H1-B in Dallas who would be paid twice the Dallas average for a similar position is on equal footing with an application for a job in San Jose who would be paid twice the San Jose average.
Please note I'm not advocating for or against this proposal, just explaining it.
They need to reclassify H1B as temp visa so that people working on H1B are not eligible for green card. That is the biggest hole which no one is talking about.
..... best things in life are not so free..........
If they're going to do something about visas in America, they need to do something about education. When I when to university, tuition was less than $200 when I started, and less than $500 when I graduated. I could put myself through school working part time, without going deep into debt. Today's young people don't have that benefit. People coming in on visas have the advantage of a cheap foreign education (let me know if I'm mistaken). Education should be affordable, if not free.
This is NOT capitalism. This is crony capitalism.
H1B program = crony enrichment act that is government interference in a free job market.
TFA seems to be stressing the impact on the India-based body shop firms, who are indeed the primary target of this action. They are the ones who have gamed the system for years, and set up a wink-nod artifice to replace American IT staff with Indian H1B workers by claiming that it is simple outsourcing. It sure looks like a criminal conspiracy to me.
Nah. He's just getting them riled up on useless stuff to sap their energy on the big items. You have too much to protest at once while he blitzes you. He planned this for decades. You think he's an idiot, tell everyone that, then lose to him and whine. But it just makes you look silly.
Wah! I lost to a cheeto! No fair! Wah!
People are mocking that. Do you even know how popular meltdown videos are?
He threw a temper tantrum about the inauguration crowd to distract all the news agencies from what should have been the lead story: Trump filed paperwork for re-election before his inauguration.
1) The work needs to get done; but it actually doesn't matter where it gets done...
2) jobs will just move out of the US, where the workers they don't pay US taxes, and don't buy US consumer goods.
3) There has always been competition, offshoring has always been an option, or you can just move the company out of the US too...
Hey, we'll destroy public education and block skilled foreigners from entering the USA.
Wait a minute... why are all those high-tech companies moving their development facilities offshore?
You can relocate R&D to Canada and 99% of your customers won't know you don't have a domestic American presence... a North American 1-800 number, customer-facing people who sound American... but no silly restrictions based on your workers' country of origin.
'tis a good time to be in the Canadian hi-tech sector. We all just need to learn to say "zee" instead of "zed" over the phone, eh?
I understand that there's a lot of anger here and in so many posts over the past years that was tagged as H1b. And being an international student from India working on my PhD (who eventually would need a H1b to work here), some of the really racists comments made me mad/sad as well but I let it pass. I would like to start a thread with what people over here think would happen. There are lot of smart people here, so I'd like your objective (preferably without prejudice which is hard) opinion on how this would play out. I'd like your opinion on what would happen: (1) to US nationals who are seeking/laid off employment in IT sectors. For example, will they immediately get jobs at the the salary they are willing to work for? (2) to US companies that are currently using the contractors to displace US workers. Will they immediately employ US nationals for they pay they requested? Or do something else? (3) the contract companies themselves, who seem to abuse the system. Do they stop taking clients from US companies? Or do everything offshore? in the next 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, if, there are heavy restrictions placed on the H1b system so that its really not viable for US companies to use or if the H1b visa system is completely scrapped. I understand this is a hypothetical scenario and just want your realistic opinions on how this would move forward.
If you make sure an H1B holder is paid over $100k a year the abuses will stop.
Or require them to be paid the average prevailing wage of the position in the CEO's MSA.
Either one will kill large chunks of the body-shop industry.
Lastly, put in a bounty program for body shops that use B1 visa holders for body shopping. Reporters get 40% of the imposed fine, which is a multiple of the salary delta between the body shoppers and the equivalent FTE.
I could cheat either system easily:
If you set a minimum pay, no matter what the level, have the foreign contract company who "owns" that employee to pay a fee for the privilege of keeping their job. They still make a good wage, from their perspective, if perhaps not as much as the USA intended. The foreign asset (or outsourcing company like Tata) kicks back a portion of that money to the corporation who holds the visa (or charges a lower contract fee), and everybody wins. This sort of thing is probably illegal with current USA labor laws, but either cut the jobs of regulators who are supposed to be watching for this sort of corruption, or we get rid of that pesky labor law... in the name of cutting useless regulation and bureaucracy.
If you base wages off CEO's home district, then clearly we need to place a subcontracting CEO in a low-pay district. Maybe we can set up a bunch of straw CEOs in Appalachia (jobs for coal miners!) and create a market where all the H-1B visa earners are well above the district's market value.
As long as the system appears to have been fixed (no regulators to check it, and no one trusts the media when they report it is broken), the people will be happy. Maybe throw in a periodic ritual sacrifice of an H-1B shell company to show you're working hard to stamp out corruption.
Ok, does anyone happen to know what the 'norm' is? I mean don't 'most' countries require you to hire within 'if at all possible', because that's what I remember when I looked into working in other countries.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
But I'm also an American. And so I stand by my fellow Americans first and foremost. And we have kids to feed too, of course.
I assume that you are a white male. NTTAWT. . .some of my best friends, yadda yadda. However for some of us our "fellow Americans" are offended at the very notion that we are their fellows, and in fact are the greatest obstacles to our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. We can't afford your blanket appeals to patriotism, because to do so would be suicide (albeit, very rarely in the literal sense).
You say you would "expect the same treatment from any other country". But I can't expect the same treatment from people in my own country. When these people elect demagogues who promise to help them by hurting us, do you blame us for vowing to take every opportunity to defeat them?
That's the whole point of having countries in the first place.
There hasn't been a point in having countries in a very long time, and even when there was, it was merely to agree on where battle lines should be drawn.
The media is who speaks directly to the people in this country. When they have been shown to actively oppose everything you do, to the point of publishing things that don't have any tangible proof, I'm not really surprised he has a complex about it. They didn't even do that to Bush. Of course, they were willing to polish and shine everything Obama did. Should he be taking the bait? No. Is he the greatest president so far? No, at least in my opinion. Is he being given a fair chance to do his job? No. He just affirmed LGBTQ worker and marriage rights. Will that change any LGTBQ protestor minds? Of course not. They appear to enjoy making a big stink about everything.
I have a friend that was told to seek another job inside his company, but when he applied, the job req was filled by a lesser qualified individual with a lower wage coming from an H1-B. He sued and eventually won (but it was painful). Bigger companies especially, where innovation is lacking, do this all the time since they believe they can train a monkey to perform "a high tech job".
IMHO, one should avoid those companies, unless you're allergic to "good work", but still... stuff like this is happening all the time.
For $1000, the answer is: Cheap Foreign Labor
"What is our standard hiring practice?"
Correct, choose again...
Currently, they open the application process for three days, get far more applicants than the quota, then later randomly select some of the applicants. Since Infosys files the most applications, they get the most H1-Bs. The fact that they are using H1-Bs to undercut US workers doesn't currently count against them. So we get 190,000 cheap H1-Bs approved, and 200,000 positions that actually need special skills get denied, or can't be submitted since the application limit was hit six months before.
Suppose you change it to 2X average for the minimum H1-B salary and the highest salaries get precedence. Infosys no longer submits half a million applications for bog-standard developers, they want to pay *less* than average wage, not double the average wage. Even if they were willing to pay double, they'd probably be beat by someone willing to pay triple for their guy, because he's Jonas Ã-berg.
So you don't have a bunch of cheap labor displacing US programmers, instead you have them working with guys like Ã-berg.
Lastly, put in a bounty program for body shops that use B1 visa holders for body shopping. Reporters get 40% of the imposed fine, which is a multiple of the salary delta between the body shoppers and the equivalent FTE.
This is a great idea that can work in many different areas also. Most of the illegal immigration/guest worker abuses and issues depend on the actions of unscrupulous employers. The only other people who know the reality of the situation are the deportable or indentured employees who have a strong incentive to not report the employee. We should instead create an incentive to turn in the employer (well... and then actually prosecute them instead of just looking the other way).
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
that they are the best on Earth in their fields.... and then insist that the only people on Earth who can properly prepeare workers for Google, Microsoft, etc are Highschool and college teachers in India.
These mega-cronies:
(1) want other people to bear the costs of training their emplyees
(2) want other people to bear the costs for the health and retirement benefits of their employees
(3) burrow into "progressive" administrations to have influence in the rule-making of massive government, and fight non-"progressive" admins to prevent the roll-back of their crony-preferred rules
(4) always talk-up socialism and social justice for good PR among the stupid and ill-informed who get their news from comedians and Facebook
(5) hide all their revenue off-shore so THEY do not pay taxes
(6) do not want to hire American workers/taxpayers but want those taxpayers to bear the societal burdens they've advocated for with wages they've suppressed by the importation of cheap labor
There's nothing that distinguishes these corporate monsters from the worst evil behemoths in the worst and most corrupt tyrannical countries on Earth; they're no better than Volkswagen in 1938 or any giant business in Italy in the same year
Just look at the lengths they go to to curry favor with and get access into countries like China - they have NO principles at all while they primp and posture and pose and use phrases like "don't be evil" - they DEFINE evil.
It feels good.
Obama tried not deporting people to pander to Hispanics - he not only allowed them in but even used axpayer dollars to fly illegal alien kids from the border to wherever in the US they had relatives - in effect making DHS into part of the smuggling rings
Obama simultaneously tried to keep the non-Hispanic population from becoming upset by re-defining what counted as a "deportation" and pushing his new phoney numbers in the mainstream press. He re-defined "deported" to include anybody stopped at the border and turned-back... so in a place where border guards kept 1K people from ever entering, he reported that as 1K deportations.
Obama's big problem was that he could not keep those conflicting messages in the two separate spheres; when his own supporters were defending his border lawlessness to the non-Hispanic community they would tout the high deportation numbers and that would leak into the Hispanic community where they saw him not supporting them, and when the non-Hispanics got word of the manipulations, they stopped listening to the phoney deportation numbers.
As a professional community organizer (his career before being elected to public office), Obama was very good at targeting propaganda at specific agitated groups and working them up into a lather, but he was never very good at a productive follow-through and not very good at hiding the activities from people aware of the tactics and opposed to the goals.
This is a war between the ultra-wealthy and the middle class. The ultra-wealthy are doing all they can to destroy Trump, having their media outlets hype anything they can against him, even boldly lying about his actions all in the effort to block him from things like limiting their access to slave labor.
Same thing as in 1860 when new Republican president Abe Lincoln was elected and a bunch of very wealthy slave owners managed to convince half the population that they needed to rise-up in a civil war against the Republican president. Most poor souther soldiers thought they were fighting for various principles their wealthy community leaders propagandized them into believeing - but really it was all abou the very rich trying to keep using cheap imported labor to pad thier own bank accounts.
Consider this past weekend:
[a] There are 57 Muslim nations.
[b] Trump banned entry from 7 of them for 90 days to give his new administration time to figure out how to screen people from them. The 7 nations were selected by the Obama admin as countries lacking the infrastructure and records to support proper screening of travellers.
[c] The big media companies owned by American billionaires who use H1-B visas (Washington Bost, owned by Bezos etc, ABC owned by H1-B visa abuser Disney, etc) all ran endless stories about some "Muslim ban" and the braking-up of families and the evil nasty bigoted Mr Trump.
This is war, and truth is the first casualty as always particularly for the super-rich H1-B abusing folks who stand to lose billions of dollars
I'm surprised by the lack of empathy for Indian tech workers on this forum. Sounds like none of you have ever had an Indian friend.
If you were African American, you wouldn't be surprised at all.
It's about time. It kills me that tech companies outsource the lower paid jobs like support and other call center work while at the same time trying to lower wages for the people with more in-depth skills.
Now if Canada would follow suit I'd start to feel better about my job security.
So why not sell their house, move to another state and live lie millionaires... Because that's c what they will be after seeking their house.
how the software industry continues to survive in the US with such great pay disparity with other countries. China has taken over manufacturing mostly because labour is factory labor is cheaper there ... and after a while the scale makes it convenient as well. ... but actually speed up the transfer of all jobs elsewhere. Same thing here with software.
Why wouldn't the same thing happen with India for software?
I'd imagine factory labor unions fighting the good fight
... there go a lot of junior staff scientist posts.
Most professional scientists don't earn anything close to US$130k, and the institutions that hire them won't be able to afford to pay anything close to that. Such a move won't be good for US-based scientific innovation.
As someone in tech that has to hire people... hiring someone under H1B isn't exactly easy. There are already some decent hoops to jump through. We only have one person on H1B at our company right now and we hired him because we could not find anyone local that was actually properly qualified to do the work and "hirable" (meaning someone you would actually want working at your company beyond their skillset).
Personally I feel the problem is the US education system. If it continues to crank out graduates that are not-qualified to do the job, then of course people will resort to the more painful H1B process.
Honestly, hiring an electrical engineer that graduated 5 years ago from a (well respected) U.S. University and having to teach him how to solder is unacceptable.
Sometimes my bad typing and autocorrect completely jumbles my posts.
Yet, it is still funny when someone writes two sentences about their "skills" and makes five grammar errors in those two sentences. Skills indeed.
Yes, I know there is no shortage. But think about how hard it is to find an entry level job because fresh grads are competing against H1B's on salary. How many leave the field or don't even enter it because they get discouraged. When asked, I tell potential future software engineers that they will have a very hard time entering the market. I know that "rock stars" have no such problems but most people are not such "rock stars". Anyway many of those rock starts will never actually deliver a working maintainable system to production. You need all levels of developers to deliver a good product and not a bunch of egos.
Considering an average skill and ability distribution don't you think that an average local developer will be a better value at a market salary than a similar skilled and experienced foreign H1B developer when you take into account culture, communication skills, attitude, etc ...?
Except in zero real life cases has any of what you said happened. This is why economics is NOT a science. It completely ignores the asshole factor which is simply that if a person can make a profit or get a great feeling of personal satisfaction from being an asshole, then they will. Minimum wage was established because even though those 10 made 20 units, the employer did not increase wages to $40. In many cases they cut those too or an equivalent benefit. Look at the status of wait staff- $2.30/hr + tips. You are absolutely brainwashed about how people with power treat others.
I am Spanish and I work for a big company in the West Coast. All employees have the same salary level (I started with 150.000$), regardless of their origin. The company is growing and we are having a HARD TIME finding skilled engineers. That's why my company looks around the globe. Stop with the bullshit: the US education system is fucking broken. It is extremely expensive and students need to quit early to start paying their loans. During my PhD I collaborated with many university departments in the US and most of the students are foreigners! So, stop crying and make sure that more of your students get to grad school so that companies don't have to go to other countries where education is actually affordable.
Considering how many economists have correctly predicted anything in the last 20 years, how many times they absolutely got it wrong, how little the generalized economic theory seems to explain anything in actual empirical terms, it might as well be called Magic. I liken it to what just happened with the election and Trump. Sure there were a few people that seemed to say some correct things in hindsight, however just about everyone that was supposed to be an expert got it wrong (to big effect). Again, lots of things going on that were not really accounted for in their analysis, and assumptions made that turned out to be incorrect.
Though I think you last assertion is probably the most correct, in that it is horribly complicated now, and that many little things can have a very large influence on how everything behaves, so trying to apply grand economic theory on anything falls flat because none if it can take all the complexities into account.
Not only that abuse, but I recall the news getting a hold of a few stories (I believe one was in Alberta), where they were like indentured servants. They would be brought over, and immediately put into debt, even so far as to have housing where the employer was also their landlord (making sure they never get out of debt), with threats of eviction, deportation, etc... should anyone complain. Deplorable.
Can we all please just take a chill pill? Pretty much everyone in the US thinks H1B reform is a good thing, Trump just re-signed the executive order protecting LGBT in the work place. He torpedoed the TPP. Who here disagrees with those actions? He stopped all immigration from terrorist hotbeds for 90 days to make sure we can effectively screen out ISIS operatives and other terrorists (Obama did this for 6 months from the exact same countries back in 2011 to review and better vet existing and incoming immigrants from those countries after we found out that we let in two terrorist bomb makers...)
Trumps supreme court nominee is a constructionist, meaning that every article of the constitution and all the amendments mean exactly what they say they mean in plain English and the constitution is the highest law in the land. Under Gorsuch, your constitutional rights will be protected, including freedom of speech, religion and the right to bear arms (all of which were under threat in the last 8 years). Trumps actions do not bear out all the panic on the left. He won the election and he is president and people having panic attacks over it or rioting will not change that and only serve to make the left look crazy to everyone else. The Democrat politicians are playing politics and trying to keep you in panic mode, but so far Trumps actions have been good for all Americans. They have been bad for foreign governments who have abused the American worker, big companies who have abused H1B visas, big companies who wanted TPP, bad for terrorists who want to infiltrate the US, bad for progressives who want to legislate from the bench and twist the constitution and try to take away rights like the second amendment while finding special rights where none exist in the plain language of the constitution, instead of creating popular support and passing legislation. Which camp are you in?
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
I am in HR. I have been troubled about the H1B situation for decades. There was a report by the CRS (Congressional Research Service) in the '90s that concluded that the USA was producing more than enough STEM graduates of good quality to fill all the tech needs. The various self-interested entities who keep saying that they need to import programmers, engineers etc. are LYING. These are the same dopes who hollowed out corporations by letting all the middle layers of these same capable folks to cut their labor costs and put that in the pockets of the C-suiters. Then, they discovered that they couldn't just replace these older employees with young cheap people, because there were far fewer of them...so they started "importing" engineers and programmers to keep the pressure on wages. It is a damn shell game intended to keep C-suiters over-compensated and everybody else wage-starved. I do not agree with Trump on a lot of things, but on this topic, he is correct. Tariffs will force production back onshore and limiting H1Bs will get more US people hired of all ages. We have good programmers and engineers of all ages who can do the jobs.
But do you know what else sucks? By forcing XYZ Corp., to pay those entry-level coders more, they're likely to do the math and realize that it will be cheaper to just open up a foreign branch of XYZ Corp. in the country/countries most of these workers are originally from, and then pay them the local equivalent of $20k/year.
The corporations can kiss our collective American asses. I say let them try to offshore everything. The reason they haven't is because it's very difficult to get things working. It would be a laugh riot see all of corporate American suffer technology seizures caused by poorly-written software and ransomware/malware caused by stupid workers and incompetent systems/network administrators.
I've worked with enough foreign workers to know that well over 95% of them are utterly incompetent and will never become competent.
You make it sound as if all of the Indian visa workers are skilled. Here's a hint: most of them are not, especially if they graduate from an Indian university. I've even met IIT graduates whom I felt were not very capable. Of course, maybe the person lied about graduating from that program.
The U.S. is under no obligation to hire the citizens of other countries and provide them with a middle class lifestyle. If India is incapable of providing a good standard of living for its own people, then that's too bad. Perhaps the skilled Indians will go into politics and rout out the crooks currently running the system and put in place a system that better enables Indians to better keep the fruits of their labor.
So, in short, fuck 'em. And, yes, I have Indian friends but what is going on in the U.S. is a matter of national security. If we impoverish too many Americans, we'll eventually get a real guns-and-steel revolution. It's astonishing how the "elite" don't seem to understand this despite the purportedly elite educations they receive.
As a British citizen this means my ability to access the US market is now restricted just as the same time Brexit makes it harder to access the start up market in European countries such as Berlin and Stockholm etc.
Not really sure what the benefit of this new wave of protectionism to those of us in tech is unless you want to be caged in your country and every country to start producing its own knock off Red Star OSs.
The first thing that most 1st world countries need to do is actually produce STEM graduates. I don't mean the shit that gets produced by university at the moment. Look at any Russian or Eastern European and ask them about their education and background. You'll pretty quickly see why they dominate most hackerank boards.
no, it just means you screwed the high wage / high cost states, where 100K isn't exactly a huge salary.
------- Oh damn.... the Sigfile escaped... -Great OM
I wonder how long it's going to take the millions of protesters against Trump to figure out that they can cause real damage by making reservations at his hotels and then canceling them a day later :-)
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Does not help a favored demographic. Derp.
It' not perfect, for sure.
The old law is that they must be paid at least 100% of the average. So the company (Infosys, let's name names) plays games to reduce the "average" by 20%, so they can actually pay 20% less than the *true* average.
Now we switch to "whoever pays the highest multiple of the average". As before, Infosys plays games and deflates the average by 20%. My company wants to hire the Linux firewall maintainer, Arturo Borrero Gonzalez. Gonzalez isn't some random programmer, he's the world's foremost expert on Linux firewalls, so my company offers him five times the average programmer salary. What's Infosys going to do?
The argument that "we need H-1B Visas for the best talent" is an outright lie. Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many other industries have been building their tech products on the back of what amounts to sweat shop labor and American corporate elite get richer. They are getting "top tier talent" from India at $60,000 and undercutting an American job that has a average market value of $100,000. But it gets worse. Out of fear of loosing their job the H-1B workers will work ridiculous work weeks 50-60 hours and will keep it off the books. It's a horrible system that's helped Bill Gates become the first Trillion dollar man. The tech companies are going to maximize the laws to their financial gains, they will do this to stay competitive. The Government has to pass these laws to keep them from undermining the US work force. India and China's brightest H-1B have nothing to fear, they will finally be paid what they are worth in the US market... As for US companies moving overseas. Let them! They won't do it. Microsoft relocating it's HQ to India, China, etc.. will face a long list of infrastructure problems, tariffs, etc.. It's a bullshit lie that they will just move. If the law changes they will just be good children and stop stealing from the US workforce cookie jar.
1. LIMIT H1B TO 10K PER ANNUM. ANOTHER 10K TO IVY LEAGUE SCHOOLS. No one wants a PhD from doboku community college - sorry
2. MINIMUM WAGE 150K + BENEFITS + GURANTEED JOB FOR 2 YEARS. NO BAIT AND SWITCH CRAP BY INDIAN CHIMPS CEOs
3. TRAINING AMERICANS CAN BE SUBSIDIZED FOR LOST TIME.
4. $ OUTFLOWS TO INDIAN OUTSOURCES WILL BE TAXED AT 40%
That's certainly true, Congress has ceded power by writing vague, broad laws and allowing executive agencies to write huge amounts of laws, which they call regulations.
For their part, Presidents have been more than happy to accept more power. One recent President even publicly said that *because* Congress chose not to give him the changes he wanted in immigration law, that justified ignoring the law and writing orders effectively crossing out the parts of the law he didn't like and replacing them with whatever he wanted. Basically implying that Congress is supposed to be under the direction of the President, and when Congress doesn't do what the president wants he can just override them at will. The shift in power has become so accepted that few people took much notice of his strange "justification".
Surprisingly, perhaps, the new Oompa Loompa in Chief is giving up some of that power. For example, you pointed out how much law is made by executive agencies as regulations. Trump's order that any new regulations be offset by getting rid of two old regulations (unless an exception is granted by the cabinet member) means less regulation (law) from the executive, thereby handing the ball back to Congress to make these laws. Personally I think Trump is a jackass, but that EO is good, to the extent that it puts lawmaking authority back on Congress and the states, where it belongs.
But, when your job description includes 20 years or coding experience, that isn't a junior position.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?