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US Suspends 'Expedited' H-1B Visas (sfgate.com)
"Starting April 3, 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services will temporarily suspend premium processing for all H-1B petitions," read Friday's announcement, which says the suspension "may last up to 6 months." Slashdot reader elrous0 sees it as part of the "ongoing efforts to curb abuses in the controversial H-1B program." The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
While it could be difficult to divorce the move Friday from the Trump administration's broader immigration crackdown, some experts believed the agency's decision to be apolitical. "It has everything to do with an understaffed, overworked, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services," said Jason Finkelman, an Austin, Texas, immigration attorney, adding that the wait time for an H-1B visa in California is currently about eight months. However, Vivek Wadhwa, an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Silicon Valley campus in NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, said the suspension seems like a message from the government that you "can't buy your way into America."
Whatever the motivation, Engadget believes this will impact large tech companies. "Financial Times quotes a lawyer saying that 'close to 100 percent' of applications from companies like Microsoft utilize the option."
Whatever the motivation, Engadget believes this will impact large tech companies. "Financial Times quotes a lawyer saying that 'close to 100 percent' of applications from companies like Microsoft utilize the option."
We're talking about H1B's here. Imported labour. If their jobs could be offshored, they already would've been: the offshoring job-market favours capital even more than that for indentured brown people.
Some leftie you are, failing even at basic Marxist economics.
Hopefully, the Trump administration will build upon this first step by properly increasing the minimum wages of an H1B worker to something more commensurate with that of a world class expert in science, technology, engineering or math. The wage should reflect the fact that the necessary worker is so rare and valuable that no US citizen living anywhere in the United States can satisfy the requirements. In my opinion, a person of such outstanding capability cannot be worth less than $250,000 per year in salary to the employer. If Google or Facebook or Apple need these people so desperately, it should be no problem for such wealthy corporations to pay what amounts to a pittance for skills and expertise which cannot, or so they claim, be found in any American citizens.
While it could be difficult to divorce the move Friday from the Trump administration's broader immigration crackdown
It is actually not difficult at all. The default position since Trump got elected has been to blame him. This despite the fact that it makes people who are otherwise legitimate, respectable public figures seem like raving lunatics. They seem like lunatics because this is their mindless reaction to anything they think they can associate with Trump, including things (like the Yemen raid) which were planned and prepared during the Obama administration.
For example. I just saw an article how SXSW is now facing a public backlash over an immigration-related clause in this contracts for performers. People are just skewering them, calling for boycotts, etc. They are lamenting how SXSW is part of the immigration problem and awful their support for Trump's immigration policies is. The clause has been there for four years.
Here is some more from the Wikipedia article on Deportation and removal from the United States:
In the 105 years between 1892 and 1997, the United States deported 2.1 million people.[2]
Between 1997 and 2001, during the Presidency of Bill Clinton, about 870,000 people were deported from the United States.[3]
Between 2001 and 2008, during the Presidency of George W. Bush, about 2 million people were deported from the United States.
Between 2009 and 2016, during the Presidency of Barack Obama, about 3.2 million people were deported from the United States.[4]
As you read that, remember that during one of his State of the Union Addresses Clinton specifically called for greater enforcement of immigration laws, and got a bipartisan standing ovation at that comment.
Also, just a couple of years ago immigrant rights groups were calling Obama "deporter-in-chief". I wonder why that was. I seem to recall Bush being branded a racist immigrant hater and immigrants came out in droves to vote for Obama. Twice. The single biggest deception in modern politics was Obama pulling a fast one on the entire immigrant population of the US. Twice.
Absolutely none of that matters now. Since Trump got elected, we can just project everything on to him, even if it makes the people doing so look like raving lunatics.
Seriously, he has been in office a whopping 6 weeks. Keep this up and in a few months nobody will be listening (c.f., The Boy Who Cried Wolf). Think about that: nobody will be listening.
Most of the jobs that can be easily offshored have already been done by these companies. There's a reason they want the H1Bs instead and that's because they understand the limitations of offshoring and the communication and control gaps. Offshoring looks good on paper but in practice for non-trivial tasks there's a friction to the process that shows up after actually doing it. Of the various companies I've worked at that have done offshoring they all ended up moving some or all of the jobs back because the quality of the work was inferior, getting the problems corrected took time due to the time zone lag and there was also a lack of control due to that same time zone lag. In the end most of the projects ended up costing almost as much and took 3-4x longer to do which ended up with large opportunity costs for the companies.
They also delayed processing in 2015, with the same reason given: so they could catch up on their backlog.
My dream is that Slashdot become a place where people do a little research before commenting irrationally.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I work for a rather large (and here nameless) entertainment company. They tried off-shoring our technical support to Romania. Our various sub-companies make a very good profit, year after year - as much of the entertainment industry, we generally weather bad economies better than most because people fall back to less expensive forms of entertainment like TV and movies rather than concerts or vacations. Why did the bean counters feel like it wasn't enough? I don't know.... but looking at numbers on paper is far different than what happens in reality.
Yes, our tech support was expensive - but responsive, fast, taking care of issues correctly the first time and right away, largely because someone could actually come to our desk and fix things. The Romania deal was a disaster. It's not that Romanians are stupid - far from it; it's that it's a lot more difficult to troubleshoot an issue from 5000 miles away than it is when you're sitting in front of the computer having problems. Then this bean counter probably got accolades and a big bonus, all the while actually COSTING the company more money in lost productivity. We have since switched back. Unfortunately, the company has already taken a number of other cost cutting measures that look good on paper, but have already started to backfire. They will not learn, they are only interested in the short term gain. Companies need more forward thinking leaders, but when CEO's get golden parachutes while driving companies into bankruptcy, it doesn't happen.
So... long story short, it is indeed valuable actually having people here. And no H1B visas needed - none of the fired tech support people were H1B, and they didn't need to be.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
3. No limits on the maximum duration of the workweek. The EU's working time directive is a good start.
Luckily we do not live in the EUSSR. If I want to work 80 hours a week, that's my problem. If I don't, I can work somewhere else (H1-Bs can do that too).
OK. I'm in the EU (for the moment), so I'll respond to this. You as an individual can opt of the 48 hour week. That is your choice. However you can't be forced to opt out (expect in those occupations where it would be dangerous to do so).
https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours/weekly-maximum-working-hours-and-opting-out
So what's with the "EUSSR" label?
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake