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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.
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.
You've missed the obbious. Trump doesn't care what the media thinks. He does what's right no matter how much they screech.
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
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.
"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 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.
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'.
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.
What US visa is required for a US company to hire someone in Bangalore to work in their Bangalore office?
Answer: None. US immigration law is utterly irrelevant for that job, with or without this proposed order.
There are dozens of countries vying to become hotbeds of software development, including contract work to the West. It's not just India. As you know, the wage difference relative of what Americans get paid can be staggering, depending on the country. So the big boss in the corner office is thinking, there's a lot of opportunities to reduce our costs in this area, and the alternative of keeping all the work here in the States just got a little worse.
Donald Trump doesn't give a flying shit about the economics of this, whether it actually increases or reduces American employment. It's all a political move to him.
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..
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.
I'm not going to defend a clearly abused program, but I can certainly see in some occupations how that wouldn't be terribly reasonable at all. Universities often recruit professors and researchers from overseas, because it's a helluva lot easier to tempt a Cambridge-trained physicist, say, than to train one from the ground up. Once the fellow is here, the university's capacity to train new physicists actually improves.
I think there are legitimate grounds for attracting foreign talent, but it has to be done in a way that doesn't allow companies to basically use foreign workers as a means of driving wages down. If a skillset is hard to find among the domestic population, due to a lack of training opportunities (in which case, bad on colleges and universities), or simply due to a sector be in a state of extensive growth, thus creating an effective shortage, then sure, why not?
The biggest problem with these programs is that even where you require employers to demonstrate they've sought out domestic workers to fill the positions, they still find ways to cheat. Up here in Canada we had the Temporary Foreign worker program, which was, like the H1B program in the US, all about filling in holes in labor markets due to skill shortages, yada yada yada. Inevitably, you had some guy running a McDonalds claiming he couldn't find any local workers, and bringing in a bunch of foreign workers, often paying below minimum wage, and getting away with it in part because no one in the Federal government was paying any attention, and no one at the provincial level making sure minimum wages were enforced.
My favorite trick, one which I saw first hand in my area, was hotels and resorts putting out job ads and either requiring absurd skills like "can speak Mandarin", or simply just shredding any resume that they received, and then proclaiming "You see, we had the job ad out for months, and there were too few applicants!" And of course because the government oversight in these programs is usually next to nothing, basically a few bureaucrats rubber stamping whatever came their way, with neither the resources nor the inclination to actually investigate, they got away with it for years.
So if you're going to put restrictions on H1Bs, which I think is sensible, you're going to need to have an enforcement system in place that is effective enough to catch and make an example of enough of the cheaters to scare the rest straight, or they'll just simply find new and inventive ways to get past the rules. Foreign recruitment is a huge industry, and one that makes enough money to pay the lawyers to figure out how to game the system.
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That's why I personally think it's a better idea to scrap H1Bs entirely and replace them with a fast-track to actual green cards and citizenship for skilled* workers in the STEM fields. Take away the ability of employers to abuse immigrant workers with visas tied to specific jobs. And give same immigrants the resources and legal legitimacy to put down roots and contribute back to society; rather than making a quick buck and running or sending remittances back overseas. Everybody (except employers who WANT to abuse and underpay their workers... so everybody worth giving a crap about) wins.
(*And I do mean provably-skilled workers though; NOT those clowns who pad their resume out to 10 pages, list so many certifications that the candidate wouldn't have had time to actually do any work, and whose degree comes from "Initech auto body, project management, and computer science academy".)
Imagine all the people...
I actually looked into this a couple of years ago, I'm not American but seeing the whole H-1B debate rage on here for years intrigued me. It turned out there are plenty of places online that seemed to list all H-1B visas issued by year including for which company and at what salary level.
It was clear that some companies such as those mentioned in the summary - Infosys and WiPro did indeed bring people over on H-1Bs to undercut the local market, and it's understandable why that would piss people off no end, I can fully agree with wanting to stop that kind of practice.
But they were only a small part of the story, what was also clear was that the vast majority of tech industry H-1Bs were going to big players like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, et. al. and when going to these companies, these companies were paying well above the national average salary for the roles in question - in many cases at least 2x higher, and certainly higher than the average local salaries (as best as I could find data on them) for those roles.
So I think it's overly simplistic to make the argument that H-1Bs are bringing salaries down - on average they clearly weren't, and in fact most tech companies were using them for their intended purpose - to bring in foreign talent that they'd just have no hope of sourcing in sufficient number locally. There were clearly companies abusing the process like WiPro and Infosys but they were a minority, and their abuse can be dealt with without affecting the competitiveness of the players using the system as intended.
I would caution people against ripping the whole H-1B scheme up altogether given that it does have the affect of raising average salaries in the tech field and is key for major tech players to remain competitive in the global market place. I think some people got this when they checked the data too, but others seemed to be delusional in believing that they too could get a $300k job at Google if it weren't for Johnny Foreigner even though past posts from those same folk show that they clearly couldn't come close to filling such a post. These people also naively believed in American exceptionalism - that there's no way someone from a different country could ever be better for a role than even the lowliest American.
I suspect there will always therefore be some people who hate H-1Bs and similar schemes just because they're entirely ignorant and incapable of evaluating their own level of competence sensibly. But those willing to be more rational should probably be a bit more specific about what change they want to see from the system, because if you're not snapping up the worlds top tier talent, then someone else will, and then those industries wont be sat in your own backyard employing anyone, American or not.
If you want to remain the global tech leader then I would suggest rather than crying foul of the system as a whole and demanding it be ripped up, you demand more sensible changes, such as simply including a clause in the process that states an H-1B hire can't be paid less than the equivalent salary of a local worker for that field. That plus the administration costs of the procedure would ensure that it's only used to bring over talent that actually benefits the US economy and isn't abused because using it any other way at that point would just cost the company more than if they just hired local talent whilst also ensuring it can't be used to bring salaries down.
Make no mistake, it is a competition, and sometimes you have to see past jealousy of people from outside your country raking in massive salaries and accept that accepting others (who have worked very fucking hard to reach the level they have) profiting from the success of your nation is a significant driver in helping you profit too.
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.
And the notion that Trump is doing this simply for political reasons?
Well, he is doing it for political reasons, as he's now a politician. His logic is very simple: listen to what the American people want, tell them you'll do that, then do it. They will then love you, and put you on Mt. Rushmore, which is Trump's endgame. He's got money, women, fame...what he didn't have was immortality. He'll have that now.
And if you happen to think the things Trump is doing are not popular, you need to stop watching CNN and talk to some actual people. Every time he'd do something crazy the TV would say "surely this is the end of Trump!" And then his poll numbers would go up. Even things like the Muslim ban. Shockingly enough, people don't like Islam that much and don't see any value added to America by allowing Muslim immigration. All downside, no upside. Depending on how you ask the question, you'll get 40% ("ban all muslims") to 60% ("ban immigration from specific countries with a history of muslim terror with reasonable exceptions") approval. When you're saying something 60% of people agree with, your numbers aren't going down, even though 0% of people on TV agree with it.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.