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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."
Call me whatever the F you want. I wish this was around 7 years ago when I got outsourced after 9 1/2 years with my previous company!
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'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."
Doesn't look like he's lying to me. I'm as shocked as anyone, but it looks like he actually intends to keep his campaign promises. I can't even remember the last time that happened.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Actually, most presidents do in fact keep most of their campaign promises...
"Political scientists have been studying the question of campaign promises for almost 50 years, and the results are remarkably consistent. Most of the literature suggests that presidents make at least a “good faith” effort to keep an average of about two-thirds of their campaign promises..."
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...
The H-1B visa was a mistake. Even in Canada, employers have to go through a lengthy Labour Market Impact Assessment process before they can hire a temporary foreign worker, and some companies have had their privileges to do so revoked because they misrepresented their case and made it look like Canadians weren't available to do the job. We also have tighter salary laws. Extreme sub-market wages hurt everyone in the end—including the company, which ends up with damaged morale, weakened culture, and subpar work caused by inadequate training.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
At this point, anyone not expecting exactly this either wasn't paying attention during the election, or is just plain delusional.
Remember what else he promised.
He's anti net neutrality - and he's appointing that idjit, former verizon lawyer, Ajit Pai to chair the FCC in order to kill it.
He's anti encryption - so just wait to see how he bones us there
He's anti LGBQT - said "states rights" which means "let the states fuck'em while I keep my hands clean" although there are rumors he's got an EO coming up that is "religious freedom (to refuse to do business with gay people)" so maybe he will own it. FWIW, the last time "religious freedom" was a big deal back in the 70s when it was all about refusing black people (see bob jones university)
I'm sure there is more, that's just off the top of my head.
I bet he he doesn't keep his promise about stopping the ATT/Time-Warner merger though...
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 easiest solution is not to set any particular price, but have companies bid for available visas which will naturally drive up the price. Eventually it gets to a point where it's only worth it to hire an H1-B visa candidate if you really can't find any local talent and are more than willing to pay top dollar.
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.
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
Is anything missing from the US education system?
No, we graduate 1.55 people with STEM degrees for every entry-level STEM job opening. And then we staff those openings with H1B workers because they didn't have to take out student loans to pay for their STEM degree.
The people claiming we need H1B visas are lying. They want to pay workers less money, and competition from H1B workers drives salaries down. So they lie about not being able to find US workers.
Well then, if that's the logic, then let's halve the minimum wage... no wait, let's make it a penny, and then wow, will we all be in great shape!
This is one of those things where once you have it, you can't really take it away. The best thing that could happen to areas like these is that people move away, reducing the local demand for housing and other high ticket goods, or alternatively, build more high density housing while allowing economies of scale to reduce the real cost of high ticket goods. And yes, minimum wages could go down. On the up side, families that live there will actually be able to have their kids find jobs when they become of age.
I don't know about you, but if I owned a subway, I'm not going to pay some 16 year old $15 an hour if he doesn't even know how to sweep a floor. I might pay him $8 an hour if I often have to show him how to do that and clean toilets, provided he learns and does it without me having to ask, and I'd pay only $7 an hour if I had to micromanage him. And that might sound like a crap job with a non-living wage, but that's kind of the point. If you don't understand the basics of having a worth ethic, nobody is going to ever hire you for a real job. In my opinion, this is even more important than a college education. My company just fired an IT guy because he slacked off and lied about doing actual work, even though the work he was asked to do really was not hard. Who cares what he learned in college if he doesn't even work?
This is why people shouldn't give wal-mart or mcdonalds shit for giving crap wages. Walmart and Mcdonalds are "training wheels" for the job market, and if you're trying to have a career here then either move to corporate or else quit. Even if they did pay a good wage, would you really want to spend your golden years talking about how great your career as a greeter or burger flipper was? Maybe we can engrave a mop on your tombstone? The reality is that these jobs suck even if they pay well.
The TFW program is being abused badly and more so since Trudeau loosened the rules that Harper had put into place. More people are losing their jobs to imported workers, and not just the very bottom rung. But skilled tradesman like welders, pipefitters, machinists and so on. The process isn't stringent enough here in Canada, and companies have already figured out how to abuse it.
Om, nomnomnom...
Except that more than just 16 year olds work at places like this, and Walmart in particular, through its part time employment practices, essentially uses the taxpayer as its benefits system. If Walmart is to be allowed to pay a very minimum wage, then it should at least be forced to provide a large amount of full time employment.
In actuality Walmart seems to be slowly realizing that its employment practices lead to high turnover, and the cost of training new employees is actually costing it money. There's something to be said for a decent wage and benefits if you're talking about retention. If you could pay one 17 year who you trained to clean the bathrooms and sweep the floor, and he stayed at the job for more than a few months, wouldn't that ultimately be cheaper than having to train a new person with some frequency, even if the training isn't overly complex?
What you're talking about here is a rather one-dimensional of the worth of a job, even a so-called "low skilled job". There are damned few jobs that literally require no training whatsoever, and not that many where the training takes a few hours. A place like McDonalds or Walmart can actually have a good deal of training in safety, processes, systems and the like that can extend longer than one shift, and thus every time you have to replace an employee who you've pissed on because you're paying them shit wages, you're costs actually go up. And that's not even talking about productivity and quality issues that come from paying piss poor wages.
Want to solve the housing problem, don't starve people out. Build more houses. If the market can support the jobs, then the market can support the housing, unless of course you're talking about a real estate bubble, and in the hottest markets that has fuck all to do with minimum wages, and everything to do with speculators, and in some areas, like Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto and London, it has to do with wealthy foreign buyers planting their cash into what they view as safe real estate market. That somebody working at McDonalds slinging burgers for $15 an hour is utterly irrelevant in these kinds of markets, and cutting their wage in half wouldn't bring the housing prices down at all, because there is little if any relation between the overheated market and the hourly wage of burger slingers and door greeters.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
But these countries you speak of are very likely in the wrong geo to be useful contracting partners. Software engineering can take place anywhere but the current hub of innovation exists in the western world. GMT -7 -- GMT +1.
US companies generally don't want to set up shop in some foreign country. They want the comfort, safety, infrastructure, and lifestyle that comes from living in the US. They just want to import cheap code-monkeys to work locally, rather than pay full price for local code-monkeys.
If they decide to relocate to another country, that's fine. Let them move to China or India. They can let us know how easy it is for an American company to set up shop and take local jobs away from local tech companies. I'm going to guess that'll be a bit harder than they thought. Or if they can outsource all their coding/IT away and get the results they like, fine with me as well. That's legitimate global competition, but you have to take the bad with the good. In other words, they'd just better not cry to me when all their code or data mysteriously turns up in competing products and services, or on the black market, similar to what hardware makers face these days in China.
And the notion that Trump is doing this simply for political reasons? You guys don't get him. I don't think Trump is a deep or complicated person. He often speaks off the cuff, and said what he was going to do, and now he's doing it. It's pretty simple, but some people can't wrap their brains around it because they see the back-room double-dealings of Clinton as normal and expected behavior for a politician, and so, naturally, expected the same from him. He still has nearly four years to disappoint everyone, so we'll see.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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.
...So what if I want to hire an Indian tech writer who understands all dialects of Hindi, so he can write manuals for my product being exported overseas? Is that application going to be competing with every American tech writer? Will it compete with every H-1B application? Will it compete with every Indian?
Right now, there is an easily-understood process. Employers submit applications, and a limited number of H-1B visas are granted, regardless of industry, skillset, or salary. Basically, beyond initial review, there is nothing anyone can do to game the system. If Trump introduces more "competition", however, that also means that the selection process becomes either industry favoritism or a game of picking buckets.
If all applicants are in the same pool, and judgement is purely on salary, then the H-1B system becomes reduced to a tool for Silicon Valley at the expense of the rest of the country. Industries and locations with high expenses (and therefore already-inflated salaries) get preferential acceptance, while low-paying visa applications are rejected. In short, that accomplishes the exact opposite of what is promised: Americans get the lower-paid jobs, while high-salary tech jobs get more of the H-1B allocation, and even more American salary money goes overseas.
Alternatively, with more criteria for judgement, the system becomes more open to abuse. To use my hypothetical tech writer, I could claim on his visa application that he also has an in-depth understanding of Elbonian custom that Americans simply do not have, so he should be considered his own special case, separate from other tech writers. Without a thorough investigation, the fraud (or misrepresentation, or careful planning, however you want to call it) would be unnoticeable, and my candidate would be the highest salary in his field.
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.
More often, the company will just pay less for someone without those special skills, then expect their existing staff to train the newbie to have the skills. That inevitably fails, so the company has to hire more inadequate staff to get the job done, raising costs further, but at least it creates jobs.
Of course, that only works until management starts seeing the higher costs and lower productivity, and realizes they can move the whole operation overseas. Why pay for an American office full of H-1B staff when you can just pay for a foreign office with a few key American personnel? Unlike the days of James Madison, communication between offices is no longer a significant issue. For the cost of gambling on a handful of H-1B hires, a large company can set up shop in a whole new labor pool, often getting a nice tax break to boot. The only downside is that they lose some of the comforts of an American office, but those amenities can be rebuilt overseas cheaply enough. It's just the cost of doing business in Trump's America!
This is yet another populist measure being run with no understanding of the underlying system. Trump is giving the people exactly what they asked for, but he isn't paying attention to the people who understand the systems already in place. He thinks his ideas are the best ideas, regardless of their actual effects.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The group I work in is truely international. I work with Indians, Russians, an Israeli and a guy from Venezuela, oh, and a few white Americans as well. Few of them are H1B. We have a hard time finding good engineers and jump at the chance to hire them, regardless of where they come from.
That's fine. But know that if you're going to base your company in the U.S. and benefit from our infrastructure, our high living standard, our universities, our clean air, our non-corrupt cops, and our less-corrupt-than-most political system--then you're going to have to pay for it. And part of paying for it means either hiring American workers or paying a significant financial penalty for importing foreign workers.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Meh, he just looks out for his own business interests and his friends, rather than whoever paid him. It's not better or worse, just a different kind of bad. Any good he does on the H1B front will be offset by something awful he does to enrich himself or his buddies.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Our politicians scream for 21-st Century SKILLS, STEM and Skills, HI-Tech workers, yet these are the SAME PEOPLE WHO VOTE TO APPROVED ANEMIC EDUCATIONAL STANDARDS that do no include ANY 21st Century STEM, or HI-TECH. If something is a priority, MAKE IT A PRIORITY. Don't just talk about it and say, "Oh golly gee, wish we had more kids with 21st Century skills."
But we still need simple jobs for simple people. Half of people have an IQ below 100. School doesn't make you any smarter (go in with 90 IQ, come out with 90 IQ). We're not going to be turning these people into electrical engineers no matter how much money you throw at STEM education.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.