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Microsoft's H-1B Workers Cited In Motion That Successfully Blocked Trump's Travel Ban (geekwire.com)
"President Trump's travel ban is on hold," reports WGN. "A federal judge in Seattle blocked the executive order banning travelers from seven predominately Muslim countries." But Slashdot reader theodp noticed that the judge's temporary restraining order might've been responding to something specific: the motion argued Trump's executive order had been harmful because it impacted major tech companies in the state of Washington, including Microsoft. From the motion:
Washington's technology industry relies heavily on the H-1B visa program. Nationwide, Washington ranks ninth in the number of applications for high-tech visas. Microsoft, which is headquartered in Washington, employs nearly 5,000 people through the program. Other Washington companies, including Amazon, Expedia, and Starbucks, employ thousands of H-1B visa holders. Loss of highly skilled workers puts Washington companies at a competitive disadvantage with global competitors.
It was in response to the motion from Washington that the judge ultimately ruled that "the States have met their burden of demonstrating that they face immediate and irreparable injury as a result of signing and implementation of the Executive Order," citing its harm on the state's public universities -- and on its tax base. And Attorney General Bob Ferguson told GeekWire that he gave some credit for the judge's ruling to the declarations of support filed by Amazon and Expedia which specifically say that "Microsoft's U.S. workforce is heavily dependent on immigrants and guest workers. At least 76 employees at Microsoft are citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, or Yemen and hold U.S. temporary work visas."
It was in response to the motion from Washington that the judge ultimately ruled that "the States have met their burden of demonstrating that they face immediate and irreparable injury as a result of signing and implementation of the Executive Order," citing its harm on the state's public universities -- and on its tax base. And Attorney General Bob Ferguson told GeekWire that he gave some credit for the judge's ruling to the declarations of support filed by Amazon and Expedia which specifically say that "Microsoft's U.S. workforce is heavily dependent on immigrants and guest workers. At least 76 employees at Microsoft are citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Libya, or Yemen and hold U.S. temporary work visas."
Skype.
Work remotely... they have Internet overseas.
For US citizens to be denyed entry into all civilised countries for - guess it - terrorism.
After all the US is the only country bombing the shit out of half the world. So the world needs extreme vetting of
american citizens.
At the time of writing, WE THE PEOPLE meant white male landowners.
Today, WE THE PEOPLE means the corporations.
Please, try to keep up.
I think the H-1B program should be expanded to other occupations. If medical insurance companies could import masses of low-paid foreign doctors and dentists, just think of how much that could cut the costs of insurance premiums!?!
Also, these judges seem and lawyers seem to be scarce and overpaid . . . let's replace them with cheap foreign imports!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Not one word about translators and guides for the US army in Iraq who have served faithfully and got a visa after intense vetting as a reward. Not one word about the reliability of the vetting procedures already in place, the probability of inadvertently admitting terrorists on visa already issued or about substituting security theatre for security. Not one word about the justification (or lack thereof) of a measure that hits people who have lived here for 10+ years without problems and can't travel abroad because they'll be stopped at the border.
No. The only thing that counted was: Washington state filed a complaint that companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks (not people !) have suffered immediate and irreparable (financial) loss. That was decisive.
Ugh. I'm getting a drink.
Hey! Corporations are people too! Anyway, the Muslim ban is just another of the burdensome regulations that are strangling small businesses. Aren't we supposed to be against regulations?
Trump has done one thing others have not been able to, and that's cut through the baloney. So quickly too. Microsoft participated in this lawsuit now, but yet they said or did nothing when DHS put travel restrictions from these very same countries last year.
Let's be honest. This is not about stopping a handful of employees traveling from these countries. It's about taking on Trump in order to protect the importing of cheap labor from abroad. You know the old saying "even the pope is replaceable." If your company is so reliant and dependent on employees from failed terrorists states like Somalia, then there is something really wrong with your company.
Posting as anon to prevent the doxing.
Section 1182(f) of the US Code reads: "Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate." In other words, the president has pretty much arbitrary power to decide who is and isn't allowed into the country. This is why it was lawful when President Obama banned all Iraqi refugees for six months in 2011. Also, the judge implies that aliens in foreign countries have Constitutional rights, which is complete lunacy.
I suggest you start drinking Brawndo. :(
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Taxes are not collected immediately and the injury to the State of Washington is barely noticable from that perspective over the course of a few days or weeks or months.
This temporary restraining order should be thrown out on that alone.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I didn't know tech workers came from those countries in any large numbers unless all they are is slave production workers.
Some good news re. H-1Bs: N.R. Narayana Murthy, the president of Infosys, said
Indian software companies must truly become multicultural. They must recruit American citizen [and] American residents in the U.S., they must recruit Canadians in Canada, British people in Britain, etc. . . . we should stop using H-1B visas and sending a large number of Indians to those countries to deliver services.
I don't know if he means it, or if he's just talking. But the fact that he's at least admitting the possibility of hiring Americans is a step in the right direction. We'll see what he follows up his words with deeds.
The article also says,
U.S. officials say the H-1B program suffers from fraud and extensive corruption, especially in India where inflated resumes and faked documentation are used to get poorly trained and poorly paid Indian workers into American job sites.
Just like their shoddy programming, you will die.
There have been a few cases of dodgy ones in australia who caused dozens of mistakes and deaths and used false resumes of experience like your typical indian IT worker with fake details/quals.
Trust them to cut you open,mmmmm, no thanks.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
That may be how the law works out in practice, but it's probably not the intent. I suspect that the law, like in most other countries, chiefly concerns itself with the rights of citizens and to a lesser degree with residents of the country. If a travel ban causes harm to aliens, law says "meh". However if it causes harm to citizens (and by extension: to corporations), then apparently the law states that the pros and cons have to be weighed against each other. Maybe there are laws that govern how visa and green card holders are to be treated, but those are different laws and that would be a different case.
I agree with the sentiment, though. Even if these people aren't US citizens, you'd think that the government would treat valid visas and green cards as a sort of contract, and that they would have an obligation at least to continue to honour it once issued. Unless there are immediate and substantial reasons not to. To be honest, I don't see any of the stated reasons for the ban either as valid or of sufficient consequence to warrant immediate action.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
See: http://dailycaller.com/2016/06...
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
Cheap/low end doesn't have to mean sucky and dangerous.
Look at what happened in IT. When I started, many IT guys were strong generalists, capable at a wide variety of tasks. It was not uncommon to see a single team handle design and architecture, development, testing, requirements gathering, deployment,and support. However those guys were fairly expensive and managers figured that it would be better to compartmentalize the work and hand it either to specialists for improved quality (or at least repeatable mediocrity), or to lower paid workers to handle the simpler tasks like 1st line support.
The same has already happened to some degree in health care. In the old days, dentists took care of all parts of a procedure, even cleaning off scale. Nowadays when I go to the dentist, the guy takes a look to see if there are any issues, then lets an oral hygienist take care of the simple stuff while he pops into another fully kitted treatment room where the next patient has already been prepped. He hands off work to "cheap & low end" technicians to save costs and treat more patients in the same time. Same in hospitals, where there are a few things, formerly considered the domain of MDs, being handled by medical techs.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
So let me get this straight: a judge rules that since Microsoft in WA state relies on H-1B Visa slave labor—and Microsoft constitutes a large chunk of the WA state tax base—therefore the federal H-1B slave labor program cannot be suspended in the U.S. in any way because that would adversely impact some states' economies.
Didn't we already fight one civil war over this sort of issue? And this ruling was issued during Black History Month?
Consider my mind officially boggled by the blatant irony of this decision.
P.S. Lest you imagine I am just trolling, this was ironically the same appeals judge who proclaimed that “Black Lives Matter” in a hearing involving Seattle police reform.
...... Just sayin'. This judge has a tendency to preach from the bench.
Ref: http://www.washingtontimes.com...
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
"Microsoft, which is headquartered in Washington, employs nearly 5,000 people through the program."
Yes, and those are ~4,999 jobs that could be filled by American workers instead of low-cost imported labor.
Sorry, but the H-1B program has become so abused that it's just a fucking joke. Apparently no one in America knows how to program in Java, Go, C#, or C++, and no one knows how to administer a database or a file system. We're all just too stupid to work on stuff we invented so we need to import "skilled" people from places where toilets are still a novelty.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Except apparently a corporation can be treated as a person when they see fit.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Do they have broadband in these countries - Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, et al? They'd need that to run Skype. I support the ban - our safety comes ahead of their convenience, but they could have relocated them to Turkey or Dubai and continued from there
"Starbucks" and "highly skilled workers" in the same sentence?
Isn't the H1B system just a massive piss take to import cheap foreign labour?
What is it about low cost staff from other nations that big US brands really want in the USA?
Why not just go with what the big US brands really want.
Say a project needs 3 months of computer work done.
Fly in staff from a really low wage nation on a new very short term US visa.
Pay the staff the same wages they get back in their own nation while working in the USA due to the very short term nature of the winning bid.
When the work is done, the low cost staff return home.
All the costs of 3rd world wages with the branding of been made in the USA.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
No irony. Kuwait is a Kingdom.
The USA isn't one yet even though Trump is going on about how it's terrible that a country cannot block immigrants as if he is the country personified and the legal system that gives him legitimacy as President in the first place is worthless.
Also add Halliburton to the list. They have a LOT of people working in Pakistan including a major geophysical software division.
It's an artificial emergency so that a weak President can appear to be strong.
Yes, but the example given was at least low end, although a very long way from cheap. An incompetent Indian doctor (with his licence to practice in New York and Oregon removed due to incidents there) was appointed head of surgery in an Australian hospital and he decided to attempt a lot of risky operations that would gain the greatest amount of profit from insurance or the state. The hospital administrator loved him due to the money rolling in but the death toll mounted. Eventually, after being linked to 87 deaths, some action was taken against him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayant_Patel
That's a pretty extreme case but it's an example of what can currently get through the system in New York, Oregon and Australia.
Not all employers see things that way.... really.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Agreed. STEM sucks. No respect from clientele, unstable job market, outsourcing,
Maybe you don't have relevant job skills. From where I'm looking on Indeed and Monster there are jobs all across the country. Most say "We will not consider any applicants that need visas".
Cheap/low end doesn't have to mean sucky and dangerous. Look at what happened in IT. When I started, many IT guys were strong generalists, capable at a wide variety of tasks. It was not uncommon to see a single team handle design and architecture, development, testing, requirements gathering, deployment,and support. However those guys were fairly expensive and managers figured that it would be better to compartmentalize the work and hand it either to specialists for improved quality (or at least repeatable mediocrity), or to lower paid workers to handle the simpler tasks like 1st line support.
Over time the different components of a datacenter became so complex that you had to specialize. In large companies, Networking and SAN storage management require their own specialists and departments.
But, you still need high end people in those departments. Just because they are specialists, that doesn't mean they can be mediocre. The problems I have seen over time is that when one component has a problem(Storage, Networking, Server, Application), there is a lot of finger pointing. I have seen storage performance issues where the storage team claimed there was no problem with the disks and meanwhile the FA ports were running at over 90% utilization, which is bad if you were expecting good response times. I have seen countless networking problems and the networking group would claim there was no problem with the network, meanwhile it turns out that they made firewall changes that were blocking required ports. DBAs often lthink there is a disk performance issue when the real problem is a bad query and now it's doing a full table scan on a 4TB database, that never ran in 5 seconds!
All of these problems should have been noticed within minutes, but mediocrity makes it possible for these problems to last for months because someone doesn't see the obvious problem and the other teams have no visibility into that mediocre team's environment. To compensate, there need to be high end players with visibility to all of the environments so that they can point out what someone is missing. Paying for people like that seems expensive, but it's not nearly as expensive as multiple teams spending months on a database performance problem that only one team can solve, but they keep overlooking the obvious problem and nobody can call them on it.
It is a 90 day stop not forever.
It is also not just Muslim but anyone coming from these countries.
even for Doctors. Hell, _especially_ for Doctors. And not because of nationalism, but because it encourages us to cut education funding here at home. Who's gonna wanna pay the taxes to support an unprivileged kid for 8 years while they get an MD when they can just bring folks already trained overseas. Trained for cheap since cost of living is so much lower thanks to overall lower quality of life. Remember, school isn't just about tuition. There's food, shelter, transportation, medical care. Not to mention having a life outside of studying while you're in school too. Last I check Americans don't have to pay for any of that unless they have to.
Take away the H1-Bs and the rich would have to either pay to train the people that make their lives great or move the the second and third world hell holes we're getting these Doctors from due to sheer weight of numbers. If I was a one of those rich guys I'd want the latter, but as a member of America's working class I want the former.
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being expended to fight this Muslim ban. It's not even a ban, since it doesn't touch a single country linked to Muslim backed terrorism. But here's the left, throwing everything it has at fighting it. Trump is doing a _lot_ of awful things. This is piddly stuff compared to the rest of it. We might win here, but it'll be a pyrrhic victory...
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The odd thing that no one examines is whether very many people/businesses have business dealings with those companies. Kind of like how people claim that confidence in our elections is justified, but no real investigation of the elections is done to enforce this. There are so many things that need to be done to be certain that people are on the up-and-up that simply aren't done and people have or lack belief in a given situation without the necessary work being done to grant certainty. We are living in a world of deliberate vagueness that people act as if they can be certain about.
The odd thing that no one examines is whether very many people/businesses have business dealings with those companies. Kind of like how people claim that confidence in our elections is justified, but no real investigation of the elections is done to enforce this. There are so many things that need to be done to be certain that people are on the up-and-up that simply aren't done and people have or lack belief in a given situation without the necessary work being done to grant certainty. We are living in a world of deliberate vagueness that people act as if they can be certain about.
There was no "deliberate vagueness" in my post. Trump does in fact have business dealings with those countries. I just didn't bother with the details. If you're interested, then look here.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Foreign doctors are imported. The tech industry should study what is different about that field different that makes it so they can keep it more secret.
the government would treat valid visas and green cards as a sort of contract, and that they would have an obligation at least to continue to honour it once issued.
Contracts depend on the negotiated terms, if someone applied for a visa that could be revoked at any time then that's what can happen, even if they cry
I wonder how much this judge is costing Microsoft?
I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
Visas only grant you the right to present yourself to an immigration officer. It doesn't give you the right to enter the country. Technically, border control may just keep on blocking any immigrant coming from the banned countries.
We have cheap, low-end doctors. We call them nurse practitioners. Except that they aren't so low-end. I've seen many of them and been very happy. I really don't need a high-end doctor since I'm in good health. Save those for the sick people.
I do a lot of the interviews in my company and I can say that there is a dearth of qualified candidates. Requisitions stay open for months or years at a time. And we pay above market. Some of the candidates just don't have the technical skills (don't know a buffer overflow from an IRQ) or lack the ability to think through problems. We try hard to make sure that everybody gets to present themselves in the best possible light. We will actually try teaching people something new during the interviews to see if they can pick it up and explain it back to us. But most fail. We aren't looking at H1Bs. We do without. But if there are qualified people out there, I'd love to hear from them.
Except apparently a corporation can be treated as a person when they see fit.
If corporations are people, then they're psychopaths.
Wait, hear me out. I know that most corporations are run by decent people, and that they do many great things that make our lives better. But by their very design, they operate purely in their own interest, and face limited consequences if they break the law or violate public trust. They do not feel emotions like love, compassion or regret, even if the people who run them do.
Corporate personhood has been a sometimes convenient but always controversial concept. IMHO it's long-past time for review.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I'm not looking at the question of whether or not Trump has business dealings in countries outside the ban. The question is whether or not Trump is particularly an odd man out for not having business dealings inside the countries the ban effects. If nobody or very few has/have dealings with these countries then it is a harder case to make that Trump's business dealings there played a particularly large part in involving those countries in the ban.
Nothing is simply binary. If it was, we wouldn't have courts at all. We'd just have a machine that you entered parameters into and out popped the decision. The constitution also involves things like civil liberties, equal protection before the law, and other aspects meant to insure that the government can be held to a certain standard. Now maybe the decisions being made won't stand up to the appeals, and that's how the courts themselves are checked, with SCOTUS being the final arbiter of whether a law, executive order or regulation fits within constitutional constraints. But the whole point of the American system of government is that no branch has some sort of unreviewable and absolute power.
In this particular case, the judge is making a ruling based on the law itself, and contains references to case law. So before you declare it invalid, perhaps you should actually read it.he signing and implementation of this Executive Order. It can be found here, so since you clearly view yourself as a constitutional and legal expert, explain precisely where the TRO goes off the rails? After all, it is a Temporary Restraining Order, and the government will have another opportunity to defend itself against the States.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Don't you have a backwoods fortress to build for the end times?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Lots of people probably have business dealings with those countries because they aren't shit holes or one of our key enemies.
Turkey is even a long time member of NATO.
The Clintons have business dealings with Saudi as well as other Muslim nations on on Obama's list.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So you've read both but have nothing to say beyond "Liberals"?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
There was one case in Australia. Over the 50 years of my life in Oz, I have been treated by a few Indian doctors, all of whom were very competant.
I trust them as much as any other Doctor, however im not a bigot pushing an agenda.
Oh, and Robarts is a Federal judge for the District Court for the Western District of Washington. He's a George W. Bush appointee, so what the "liberal" slur even means is beyond me, but more to the point if you don't even know what court he's in, you don't exactly strike me as someone with the ability to assess the veracity of his ruling. Since when were Federal Court judges not allowed to make rulings on Federal law?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The judge is way out of bounds and will quickly be overturned http://lawnewz.com/high-profil...
Yes you also said it was a state court, when it is in fact the Western Washington District "FEDERAL* court, so in fact it is empowered to deal with Federal laws, and your claim of jurisdictional overreach is pure rubbish.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Microsoft harmed by loosing 76 employees? It is disturbing such a point was taken seriously.
Calling it a Muslim ban...
Those are Donald's words, not mine:
Agreed. My wife just had a situation where she had pneumonia that went undetected by a doc at Care Now in the Dallas area. She used the Care Now clinic since it had more convenient hours vs her regular doctor. When they finally realized she had pneumonia they prescribed meds that were not effective against pneumonia. Luckily when she realized she was not getting better she got in to her regular doc. Long story short, it could have killed her. Don't trust those doc in a box shops. Question everything.
... than by an immigrant terrorist http://www.vox.com/2016/9/13/1...
"Virtually all the deaths from immigrant attacks (98.6 percent) came from one event: 9/11. Other than that, fatal immigrant-linked terrorist attacks in the US were vanishingly rare -- and ones linked to refugees specifically rarer still. The average likelihood of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in which any kind of immigrant participated in any given year is one in 3.6 million -- even including the 9/11 deaths. That is a very, very, very low number. To put that in perspective, I've produced the following chart, which compares the average annual likelihood of American pedestrians being hit by a railway vehicle, dying due to their own clothes melting or lighting on fire, and being killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by an immigrant. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Those countries that were not excluded but have history of terrorism against the USA have business dealings with Trump. Coincidence?
He didn't want his grand gesture and artificial emergency to hurt things he cared about. It was never about a real threat.
and I live in one of the worst economic regions in the US.
Then move. People have been migrating for jobs and food for millennia.
I have too many skills. Bosses hate independent thinkers
Oh... one of those guys. Yeah. 'Way too many skills'
Cute, did your liberal professor teach you everything you "know". I can't stand how liberals judge everything by today's standards rather than the standards of the time. They seem incapable of seeing things in a proper historical context, especially when the USA is involved. This needs to be fixed.
Imagine if the teachers would mention that the USA was a late adopter of slavery, but one of the first nations to rid themselves of this blight. 10s of thousands of Americans died on both sides to accomplish this, but liberals just want to piss on their graves to further this false narrative of original white guilt. I didn't get a chance to choose what color I would be born as. It is racist to judge me for what color I am, regardless of what hideous education the liberals have bestowed upon you.
The artificial emergency is poor Amazon and M$ claiming they will endure great financial injury by not being able to displace more American jobs. H-1Bs need to be stopped. I am sick of the shill "HR guys" that get on here and try to confirm that they can't find qualified workers. Pay a decent wage and stop treating us like overhead/slaves and you'll find plenty of talent. H-1Bs and other off-shoring methods have been depressing our wages and exporting our industrial secrets for decades. It also doesn't help to have the money sent out of our economy, either.
... Trust them to cut you open,mmmmm, no thanks.
Yet people trust them to "cut open" their computers!
i.e, Microsoft. 8-{
You're a delightful human being. Yes, displace more people so Microsoft and other $hitty corporations can squeeze out a little more profit at the expense of American workers and the greater economy. I hope you get to experience the joys of off-shoring - oh, you're probably one of those H-1B trolls that seem to permeate Slashdot in greater numbers each year. Never mind.
No, I'm someone that has moved across the country for jobs. Just like great-grandpa had to do during the Depression.
You think you can buy a house in suburbia, own 2 cars and have 2.5 kids and just sit around and work for the rest of your life doing the same thing for ever?
It's never worked like that, ever.
Fake news. See the following Independent or many other serious sites: http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
"Kuwait has denied imposing a travel ban on nationals from several Muslim-majority countries, a move that was praised by US President Donald Trump. The story was propagated by news web sites popular with Mr Trump’s supporters including Breitbart, Infowars and Sputnik."
al Bawaba - the site that this story was taken from - is a website that's Arab centric, and in terms of opinion, tends to be Arab supremacist. Just go to their cover page and you'll see that. If they got it wrong, it's certainly not out of any desire to vindicate Trump, as might have been the case had Breitbart or any other site come up w/ it
It is incorrect. The official Kuwait statement: http://www.kuna.net.kw/Article...
Why not import 3rd world Politicians?
Casteism
Fine! Then al Bawaba got it wrong, not Breitbart, Infowars nor Sputnik
Are you are aware that many middle-eastern and other companies ban the use of Skype because the local telephone company owned by the Minister-of-this or Prince-of-that can't compete with it? We sell them networking gear that can block that traffic at the border.
I have a board member who does a lot of stuff in China. When in China I can't Skype him or use any of the other usually communication protocols.
Further, the use of encrypted VPNs is illegal for the obvious reason that it would allow getting around these subscriptions. You will get fined and thrown in jail if caught.
Lesson: Powers-That-Be that make their fortunes from selling or taxing phone service really really hate free communication over the Internet. And their displeasure will be known to you. As a result I if you want to work foreign you will have to travel.
Does it matter though? The countries you mentioned already implemented the background check system that the 7 did not implement. Do you expect that it has any bearing either? There are many muslim countries he has no business dealing with that were not in the ban, it is a conspiracy!
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Don't forget all the camels in the ban too, we have to protest for the camel's right to cross borders as they see fit.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?