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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.
I could careless about the Indian IT job sector. Piss off.
I worked a few months for a company that was stocked mostly with H1-Bs and owned and ran by Indian immigrants. The way that they abused the heck out of their own countrymen like they had imported the caste system to their little office just filled me with disgust.
Yeah plenty of American employers abusing American employees but at least the American employees don't risk deportation if they quit, or get fired because the employer suspected them of trying to find a better job.
This is a myth
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.
Now we know who's abusing the H1B visa program - the ones who complain the loudest.
We offshore our India team, so we won't be affected by the H1B changes. But the body shops here will be decimated, which is probably going to be a good thing.
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.
That's one field. The reason EE is dying is because software engineering is booming. Back 30, even 20 years ago you had a ton of people making custom ASICs for every piece of electronics. Now, processors are so cheap that there's little need for anything but a SOC solution for all but the most complex products. You still need people to build out those SOCs and embed them, but it takes a fraction of the people. All the work that was done on those ASICs is now done in software- which is still adding a ton of people.
You can't just cherry pick one point and call it a dead end. Many of the other fields of engineering on that same website have high 20% growth.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
"unfairly target some of its members" ??? Are they kidding ? What about their sham operations unfairly replacing American workers ? And "it will not solve US Labor shortage" ?? Again which labor shortage ? The one where people refuse to work for poverty range salaries, whereas the 4 Indians crammed into a one bedroom apartment sharing one car, making 40% less than the American worker they are replacing ? That is not called a labor shortage. It is called slave driving. All those infosys, tata, wipro, etc companies can go to hell as far as I am concerned.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
This has nothing to do with Permanent Residents, they aren't here on H-1B visas
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.
Yes, it's legal in the US to not hire people who are not entitled to work in the country.
If Congress passes (and the President signs) a law changing who is entitled to work here, then the employers must also deal with that.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
As someone with an engineering degree who is not currently working as an engineer, I have found that the knowledge I gained obtaining that degree is broadly applicable to all kinds of things, both in the world of employment as well as hobbies and home life. I don't regret it for a second. Most people respect the amount of work and intelligence it takes to get an engineering degree and I've never had a problem getting interesting jobs, even if they aren't necessarily making me rich. I would do it again without hesitation.
The amount of needful that will get done could drop as much as 15%.
There's a shortage of below minimum wage labor within our borders.
Call centers tend to be run as sweat shops to squeeze as much tech work out of as minimally qualified people as possible for a little pay as they can offer to get them to show up to work. India was the solution to pay even less to get equally unqualified work.
The problem with tech isn't the lack of people willing to work tech, there's thousands of reasonably good techs that are jobless in every major city. It's the way companies view tech. Bean counters see tech as a pure expense since I.T. rarely brings money into the company directly. The job of I.T. is to enable everyone else in the company to bring money in. Sadly I.T. is seen as the equivalent to cleaning staff or the electrician that had a job to do but never left by many organizations. This view of I.T. is part of why so many companies that shun tech are often caught without good backups and easily fall prey to ransomware. At least ransomware makers are profiting from the mindset.
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Is that why there are so many Americans working 3 burger flipping jobs just to keep alive and pay the rent?
You can make claims about freedom of religion and all this other nonsense but this issue is about economics, pure and simple. What's being proposed is that incentives to hire people outside of the United States who have no interest in the success of the United States to do the same job for half the wages be greatly lessened. Also, I can tell you from direct experience in the software industry, Indian contractors produce lower quality code, break more builds, have poor communication and many other things that lead to worse quality software. I can't tell you how many times I traced build breaks back to Indian contractors. The only benefit to hiring them is that they cost less.
Before you call me a racist, I have high respect for other cultures and enjoy their cuisine a lot. I love Indian food and I think Indian people in general are pretty cool. What I don't like is when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is throwing all the American citizens under a bus by hiring less skilled workers for a much cheaper price at the expense of American citizens so they can turn even bigger profits when the corporations the Chamber is comprised of are already sitting on vast piles of wealth. It's really a slap in the face. They've taken advantage of the Land of Opportunity so much that it is no longer the Land of Opportunity.
The U.S. Chamber brought this on themselves. They gamed the system too hard and caused a lot of hardship to good, hard-working Americans and that's why this backlash has occurred.
We'll make great pets
If you are hiring someone in the US for $3 an hour you are a monster. I hope you are exaggerating, otherwise please take a second to think of how you are devaluing human life and decency.
It isn't that American's "don't want to do the job" it's that they "don't want to the job for a non-living wage".
12 hours a day for $3 an hour isn't going to pay for any type of decent living condition in America. Acting like a feudal lord and being oh-so-beneficent as to allow the peasants to work for peanuts isn't something we should aspire to. The idea of a job-creator class is a joke. People should be ashamed for treating other humans like this.
We can, and should, do better.
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.
There's this : "imposing tougher visa rules unfairly targets some of its members and will not solve a U.S. labor shortage in technology and engineering"
Then this : "contains provisions that may prove challenging for the Indian IT sector...nullify the objective of saving American jobs"
So in other words, "this looks uncomfortably like it might work, so we're going to come up with a load of bullshit while we figure out a way of getting round it".
If there is a labor shortage, surely American jobs don't need saving? Anyway, as many people here have pointed out in the past, this has nothing to do with closet racism, denying smart people with the vital skills we need the right to come and work in the US or protectionism.
It's about unscrupulous people breaking the rules and exploiting their fellow countrymen while careless (in both senses of the word) suits look the other way.
I am not a Trump supporter but I am definitely anti H1-B visa and offshoring. The Indian firms are wrong as there is plenty of talent in America capable of writing excellent software. Conversely, I have seen very poor software come out of India that was not only unstable but replete with spelling and grammar errors on the user interface. Some stuff was so pooly written, that friends of mine have told me that they ended up re-writing large portions thereby negating any savings. The only reason the Indian IT firms are calling foul is because they're going to lose money and it isn't foul because the Indians engage in protectionism for their economy. They have very high import taxes .... sky high to as much as 25%. So the Indians get no sympathy from me whatsoever.
This actually the cure for H1B problem that h1B holders should never be allowed to become permanent residents. That will take away the sheen from H1B program If the rules are made to only address the real shortage(which does not exist in the first place).
..... best things in life are not so free..........
Considering the tens of thousands of software developers and engineers who are laid off each year by companies such as Microsoft, Google, Cisco and so on, and all the people coming into the market after graduation, I don't think that pool will ever be empty.
What might be empty are people with the exact qualifications a company may want, but all that needs to be done is a little retraining.
If companies insist on wanting someone with the exact, no-other-options, candidate for a position and are unwilling to offer training, they deserve to go under.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
That's actually an improvement. In 1979, I had to teach a Pakistani student how to use a laundromat. Fellow student down the hall, he had asked me what the best way was to the river, to wash his clothes. . .
Actually, yes. Especially if the work is steady there. I worked as an Engineer in West Virginia, a decade ago. No cut in salary from DC, but my salary went a whole lot further. A real house, rather than an apartment or a townhouse. A more relaxed lifestyle.
On the other hand, the dance club scene sucked, had to go an hour up the interstate to Morgantown and WVU, unless I wanted to do a country/western place. And you learned to rely on Amazon for anything not generally found in a Wally World or generic mall. . . (yes, we still went shopping at malls, 10 years ago. . .)
If you pay enough, the workers will come. The problem isn't a labor shortage, it's companies who've been spoiled on cheap labor for so long that they offer workers peanut salaries, refuse to pay relocation costs, offer no training and shit benefits--then run to Congress begging for more H1B's when they can't find American workers.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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
At least your fellow student wanted to find the river to wash his clothes. Some (even US born) students lacked the understanding that clothing needed to be (at least occasionally) washed.
Wish I could say that I have seen it improve in the past 30 years, but I still encounter at least one student a year needing this life lesson.
Good.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Unless I misunderstand how it works in the US, if both Trump and Pence were removed from office this very moment the presidency would fall to the president pro tempore of the senate, who is currently Senator Orrin Hatch (A Republican).
I know nothing of his politics or whether he'd be for or against h1b reform though.
Ice Cream has no bones.
Umm, have you *seen* the code from such locales?
Sure, you will have rockstars there as well (I know quite a few living in Pune - they're trying to move here), but for every rockstar, you have something like 10,000 total incompetents whose code will require a massive overhaul just to get built without fatal errors.
Usually ends up costing more than its worth once you add it all up.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
There is no labor shortage in engineering. It is fake, look at the universities, pushing out 10's of thousands of engineers every year. The problem is people like getting paid in the US and companies don't like paying. So they make this crap up about it, hire someone from outside the US willing to do an engineering job for pennies of what a US engineer would do it for.
Again: there is no shortage, just cheap companies that don't want to pay its employees. e.g. the average starting salary for a mech. eng. in NYC is $35K. The average starting salary for a banker is $100K, something doesn't seem right here.
I'd damn sure rather have Paul Ryan as President. Ryan really knows what he's doing. Trump, Pence, and Clinton have never *read* the federal budget, Paul Ryan has *written* the federal budget, more than once.
There's a reason there was no "campaigning" for Speaker of the House this time around, why Paul Ryan was the consensus pick, even though he refused to follow tradition and do campaign appearances for the reps who voted for him. His peers wanted Ryan, without a campaign, because they know Ryan is the smartest of all of them.
60k for a bay area job? what a joke!!!
I make $50K+ per year and live in a studio apartment by myself in Silicon Valley. If you live a modest lifestyle, you can do well here. But if you want to pursue the American Dream of having it all (i.e., big house, big cars, big wife and big kids), you need to earn big bucks for that.
Also sleeping on the floor?
Some people are willing to sacrifice to achieve their goals. I've known engineers who slept on floors to save up for a down payment on a $1M+ house in Silicon Valley.
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.
There is no such thing... we have plenty of people willing and able to work.
The biggest challenge we face is that we will need to train workers to take their places... this is because India has made skilled workers so cheap in the past couple of decades that US companies has little or no incentive to hire entry level folks here in the states and train them, and individuals saw little to no value in paying for this training themselves let alone spending years in school for a job that was already taken by some goon in another country.
Shows you how bad CS is for basic IT skills
I've been told in a previous comment that there are CS students who are interested in CS only for the money, graduate without ever touching a computer, and then expect to get paid six-figures for knowing CS theory without ever applying it.
Easy. You get to be one of the guys they hire to fix that crap code and process. EVERY project I have ever worked on with overseas code resources has had massive problems with the quality of code that is returned.
The same cycle always holds true: First the overseas resources are given full tasks to complete. Then the returned code is total shit and doesn't do what was asked. So the tasks are broken down into smaller chunks, and those still don't work. Then the resources are asked to provide procedures and subroutines written to a rigid spec, and 70% of those finally work. Then the company realizes that they're paying experienced software engineers over here to spend hours a day breaking things into small enough chunks that the overseas people will *probably* not screw up and the amount of time wasted is enormous, plus those software engineers could just do it themselves in a fraction of the time.
So the company stops offshoring after wasting a couple of years of time and god knows how much money.
Trump had nothing to do with them cutting the price of those fighters. Just because he says it does not make it true. If you actually look into it, he's taking credit for the fact that the next batch they build (90 as opposed to the initial 10), will cost less per fighter (about 6 -7 million less) than the last batch. 90x6.7 million =~ 600 million. The discussions on those costs started before he was elected....so yeah.....liar.
Unless I misunderstand how it works in the US, if both Trump and Pence were removed from office this very moment the presidency would fall to the president pro tempore of the senate, who is currently Senator Orrin Hatch (A Republican).
I know nothing of his politics or whether he'd be for or against h1b reform though.
Actually, it would go to Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. President Pro-Tempre (not sure about spelling) of the Senate is #4.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
There is no labor shortage.
There is a companies willing to pay what it takes to hire someone competent shortage...
+1 Score: 6
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Well, I knew plenty of kids who dropped off laundry with Mummy and Daddy before heading out to party on a Friday night. Heck, one SHIPPED his wash back to Connecticut (College was in Pennsylvania) and he got a box of clean laundry back every week. . .
As I understand the proposed law, you CAN bring them in from Bangalore IF you can show you can't hire them in the US ... AND you pay them a high enough wage.
So what's it worth to you? If you want cheap labor, too bad. On the other hand if you have a critical need and you're willing to pay for it, you're good to go.