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Indian IT Sector Warns Against US Visa Bill (reuters.com)
India's IT lobby warned on Tuesday that a bill before the U.S. Congress aimed at imposing tougher visa rules unfairly targets some of its members and will not solve a U.S. labor shortage in technology and engineering. From a report on Reuters: Industry lobby group Nasscom was responding to a bill introduced by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, that would double the minimum salary required for holders of H-1B visas to $130,000 and determine how many of the visas were allocated, based on factors such as overall wages. India's $150 billion information technology sector, led by Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro, uses the H-1B visas to fly engineers and developers to service clients in the U.S., their biggest market, but opponents say they are using the visas to replace U.S. workers. Concerns about President Donald Trump's immigration policies were heightened by his ban on refugees on Friday. "The Lofgren Bill contains provisions that may prove challenging for the Indian IT sector and will also leave loopholes that will nullify the objective of saving American jobs," Nasscom said.
You speak of the "U.S. labor shortage" yet I look around and see American colleagues who are stuck in dead-end positions with no raises/promotions and struggling to find anything better, and then on the floor above me is at least a couple hundred H1-Bs in positions that could easily be filled by Americans who are looking.
After the dot com bust, I read a study that predicted that the IT industry will have 1M+ job openings by 2030 because baby boomers will have retired by then and foreign workers will stay home to pursue a middle class lifestyle. That prompted me to go back to school to learn computer programming on a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. People thought I was crazy to go into computers when health care became the new money major. Fast forward 16 years later... I'm enjoying my career in IT support, making more money and paying more in taxes. Looking forward to making more money and paying more in taxes as the baby boomers retire and foreign workers stay home in the next 13+ years.
Time and time again we hear how this technical talent simply doesn't exist here in the US and we need to go abroad to find it.
If this is true, why don't these entrepreneurial and brilliant technologists build world-class companies and products in their home countries?
Something tells me these H1B visa holders are neither entrepreneurial nor brilliant.
I'm pro-open-borders (subject to individual background checks) but if you are going to have a system like HB-1 visas that are nominally only supposed to be used when a US citizen or permanent resident can't be found, you need to do it right.
This means making it very difficult to "game" the system so that you can hire a foreigner for $60K to do a job that "looks like" a $60K job on paper but is really a $65K (or $165K) job with a low-ball salary designed to make American candidates look elsewhere.
A partial fix is to do what Trump is suggesting: Have much-higher minimum salaries. If the minimum salary is $130K, you still may have "low ball" job offers of $130K for a job that is really a $200K position, but at least most mid-level and fresh-out-of-college techies won't have to compete with non-Americans for jobs in America.
They will still have to compete with jobs that will go overseas (and SOME will if hiring foreigners gets harder), which is one reason I'm for open borders when it comes to employment.
Personally, I would replace all work visas with a general work visa available to anyone who can pass a background check, but I would charge the employee a significant surtax on all income (probably 10% or so) with the funds directed to career-education and -retraining programs for American unemployed workers with any leftover money directed to K-12 and secondary education programs.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's part of the culture I think. A woman I volunteer with works in an office with a lot of H1-Bs. She's probably about to get laid off and she looks forward to it, as the Indians tend to treat her like garbage. As far as they're concerned women are second class citizens. With the layoff she'll be able to collect a severance and have some time to look for something better hopefully not having to deal with that bullshit.
Refuse to tell us how to reboot our Dells?
When I worked on the Google IT help desk in 2008, I had to walk a newly hired computer science graduate on how to TURN ON his workstation. He actually expected to find someone standing to turn on the workstations like they do at the university computer labs. He was shocked that he had to do manual labor.
I worked for a contract house that imported Indians hand over fist. (I guess they saw my resume online and snapped it up to keep up appearances of hiring Americans first. Works for me.)
Anyway, the brought us into a room one day and explained they paid overtime (which the gigantic customer paid for) but only in excess of the 45th hour. However, they would charge for hours 41-45 anyway.
This did not sit well with the Indian people. I have no idea what their base salaries were.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Both Republicans and Democrats are split on this. The Dems have both their working class constituencies - the ones that haven't already defected like those in MI, PA and WI, as well as their minority constituency - Indians, who still vote more heavily Democrat than Republican
Republicans, OTOH, have the collision b/w their business interests, who want more visas, vs their own grassroots that would like to see even legal immigration curtailed until unemployment is drastically reduced
So in all likelihood, there will be bipartisan support for both sides
We see the same things here in Denmark as well. Some companies refused to have their IT outsourced to India so companies like Tech Mahindra had to bring in some people to work there. (they had outsourced it to a company hosting it within country borders) Their work culture is something from the 60's.
You are doing as told, even if you know it is wrong or won't work because the guy above you said so.
Sometimes they need to bring in skilled local people to do some of the jobs that require some independent thinking. The work climate are so poor that they have a hard time finding any, even freelancers and consultants are hard to find that will accept to work there.
Even though they are said to be paid minimum wage, I keep hearing rumors that in reality they are paying much of it back when the money goes back to India.
They have been doing a bit of sabotage when their bosses are having meetings with local people to fill positions to cover for their incompetence. Oops, this system broke down, now we need all hands on deck and the boss have to cancel the meeting that he just started.
The toilets there are a mess, they have no concept of how to use them, so for the few local Danish workers that were left there, they had to open up new facilities so you had a place to use that wasn't covered en feces everywhere.
Some of them have pages after pages of certifications from Microsoft and others, but no basic concept of how things work in a computer. It looks impressive, it is worthless.
I worked with one visa worker who confided that he was paid only once every 6 months. He got his full amount, but had to budget carefully. I've seen other shady visa practices also.
I don't like Trump and didn't vote for him, but on THIS issue he is right (perhaps accidentally).
Table-ized A.I.