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After Healthcare Defeat, Can The Trump Administration Fix America's H-1B Visa Program? (bloomberg.com)

Friday the Trump administration suffered a political setback when divisions in the president's party halted a move to repeal healthcare policies passed in 2010. But if Trump hopes to turn his attention to how America's H-1B visa program is affecting technology workers, "time is running out," writes Slashdot reader pteddy. Bloomberg reports: [T]he application deadline for the most controversial visa program is the first week of April, which means new rules have to be in place for that batch of applicants or another year's worth of visas will be handed out under the existing guidelines... There probably isn't enough time to pass legislation on such a contentious issue. But Trump could sign an executive order with some changes. The article points out that under the current system, one outsourcing firm was granted 6.5 times as many U.S. visas as Amazon. There's also an interesting map showing which countries' workers received the most H-1B visas in 2015 -- 69.4% went to workers in India, with another 10.5% going to China -- and a chart showing which positions are most in demand, indicating that two-thirds of the visa applications are for tech workers.

30 of 566 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Uhm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Uhm...he said he did?

  2. Re:Uhm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Uhm... Clearly, that don't mean a damn thing.

  3. Sure, if they had the willpower... by RyanFenton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If I had a team of several million people, I could build a sustainable city on Mars.

    As long as I could be totally devoted tot he task, and the willpower to follow through the billions of setbacks you'd hit on the way, especially including my own ignorance.

    Trump fixing H1b? It's possible, but similarly absurd to expect.

    The Trump coalition isn't the team to fix H1b. They're a wrecking crew, not a construction team. They can foist individuals to make plans, but they're philosophically aligned against, say, the kind of planning that would make a national constitution or something along those lines.

    Even if theoretically Trump actually meant the half-dozen things he said on H1b, and DIDN'T mean the several things he said that contradicted that, he'd still need to coordinate with a team that implements it, and a political base to enable a political climate that will make disobeying the rule a bad idea.

    Trump could GET folks on board to get all that done... but at this point, he'd really need to construct everything needed from whole cloth. I somehow doubt that enforcing and enlarging H1b rules on the nation's CEOs is going to be a high priority compared to everything else he wants done in the world. It's POSSIBLE, just very unlikely, unless somehow Trump is thwarted on literally every other big thing, and yet not impeached.

    H1b is a horrible system. It's virtues are nice - getting qualified folks in to do needed jobs - but that does not justify a system of modern day quasi-indentured-servitude. The way it's used it horrible too, basically used to quash local workers wage increases. Trump speaks against it, but he's exactly the wrong person to choose as a person to crusade against it - he's basically the living avatar of the idea of shortchanging workers using sketchy legal tactics.

    Don't expect too much from Trump on this.

    Ryan Fenton

  4. Re:Uhm... by arth1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    He's obsessed with winning, but losing doesn't affect him. It's always someone else who caused that, so he never really loses. Trying to get Trump to admit defeat (or anything else) is like trying to get water to stick to a duck.

  5. Let's see if I have this right by sjames · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let's see, Obamacare is a plague on the nation that must be killed right now. The GOP could do so much better. So they propose Obamacare-lite and can't manage to pass it even while controlling the House, the Senate, and the Oval Office. Let me guess, somewhere in Arkansas the county dog catcher is a Democrat and that gummed up everything.

    Slow clap.

    1. Re:Let's see if I have this right by Solandri · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Contrary to what the pundits on the left like to believe, the GOP is not one monolithic voting bloc in fact if you explore voting history along party lines, you'll find it's the Democratic party which votes more as a bloc. (Sort by "votes with party" and it's mostly Democrats at the top.)

      Half the GOP wants to replace Obamacare with Obamacare-lite, half wants to completely end government involvement in health care. That was the impasse. Ideally, the moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans would get together and come up with something, giving a middle finger to the hard left Democrats and the hard right Republicans. But the two parties are under the control of the hard left and hard right, and will ostracize any moderates who fail to toe their respective party line.

    2. Re:Let's see if I have this right by skam240 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Democrats are under the control of the "hard left"? Please, what radicalism has the Democratic party proposed on par with completely dismantling the bulk of our government? By international standards our country has no hard left and the hard right looks downright nutty.

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    3. Re:Let's see if I have this right by schnell · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Coming up with something would require planning, negotiation, and "horse trading" skills. Trump is not known for any of these skills.

      Oh, come on. I think the President is a buffoon but even I still recognize that if he has one legitimate claim to competence in any field is it "negotiation and horse trading." I have no doubt that he is genuinely good at it.

      The real problem, as Trump is painfully beginning to discover, is that running a government involves a kind of negotiations that are exponentially more difficult and unsatisfying than business negotiation. Here's why:

      In a business negotiation, one of the most vital factors is the fact that (generally speaking) you can always walk away. You're trying to buy Company X or real estate Z and your negotiating partner wants an unreasonable price or unacceptable conditions that there's no breaking the impasse over? Walk away. No deal gets done, but the world keeps spinning on its axis just fine with no real consequences. (Mostly.)

      But in government? You don't get a debt ceiling increase passed, you don't get to walk away while the government stops paying its bills and torpedoes the world economy. You don't get an acceptable deal with Iran over its nuclear program, you don't get to walk away and just let them build nukes. You don't get a Middle East peace agreement that you want, you don't get to walk away and remove the US from the region while wholesale slaughter starts. There are real stakes in much of what the government does and no option to just walk away.

      So I think that while Trump is undoubtedly good at negotiations, he's having to do them in a completely new environment with a different set of variables and new stakes. And with a 35% or whatever it is approval rating, he doesn't have as much leverage as he's used to. All in all, it's pretty much a perfect recipe for anyone to fail at being a negotiator even if they're otherwise good at it.

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  6. Re: Uhm... by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Do you believe that H1-B workers are the best talent?

    When you send that question through a capitalist's mind, it becomes "Do you believe that H1-B workers are the best talent per dollar spent?" Guess what the answer will be.
    Don't forget who pulls the marionette's strings.

  7. Re:Uhm... by jellomizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Most politicians try to get past what they say. However the complexity of real life sets in. Most American career politicians try to do what they say but they are confronted by other politicians who say they will do the opposite. So they will either get what they want, fail to get what they want, or what is currently political death sentence a compromise where both sides get a little of what they want but not all of it, thus causing the stupid public to think they were lying vs actually trying to get what they felt was good for who they are representing.

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  8. Re:Uhm... by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And unlike the career politicians he's actually followed through on his promises so far. Failure to repeal Obamacare is not a lie. He made the effort.

    WTF?

    Obama "made the effort" to close Gitmo throughout his whole presidency, does he get credit for that?
    Because a lot of people count that as a "broken promise".

    It would be a pretty hypocritical that Trump gets credit for "following through on his promises" by introducing a completely stillborn turd of a bill that his own party wouldn't pass.

    Or would you have called Obama a success if instead of he'd introduced a bill to just shut it down while boasting... "I'm the best negotiator, its the best bill you'll ever see, everyone is going to love it."
    then two weeks later when its obviously garbage and not going to pass even his own party... he withdraws it and says, "I made the effort. now we're just going to keep it open. So there. Oh... and Mitch McConnell now owns it. It's 100% his problem now."

  9. Re: Uhm... by Dracos · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But that capitalist has been conditioned to only consider short term benefits, so in his head the question really is "Do you believe that H1-B workers are the best talent per dollar spent this quarter?"

    With the news about AT&T, Disney, and others forcing their existing domestic tech workers to train the H1B replacements, the true purpose of the program has been revealed: replace expensive domestic workers with cheaper foreign labor. That's why the H1B program won't get fixed: it does what it's meant to do.

  10. Re:Uhm... by stephanruby · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, he said he cared about cleaning up Wall Street.

    But then he picked Steven Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary and Jay Clayton for leading the SEC.

  11. Re:And masterfully so by AmiMoJo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Obamacare isn't imploding though, for the most part it's working much better than anything that can't before it. So many people are now invested in it, reliant on it.

    Trump is losing hard. His two flagship policies are on the rocks. The Muslim ban he promised isn't a Muslim ban any more and even then gets stuck down again and again. And now Trumpcare, because he sucks at making deals and massively underestimated how complex healthcare is.

    Don't forget that he promised to defeat Isis by now too. He's a used car salesman who promises to fix everything, tells you it's going to be the best wagon you every owned...

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  12. Re: Premium processing has been canceled this year by Gorobei · · Score: 5, Funny

    The H1-B program is a mess, but when I look around my office:

    1. There is a small group of H1-Bs who are actually competent and probably help keeping us profitable
    2. There is a bunch of H1-Bs who are useless, underpaid fucks who make the codebase worse
    3. There a small group of citizen programmers who are actually competent and probably help keeping us profitable
    4. There is a bunch of citizen programmers who are useless, overpaid fucks who make the codebase worse

    Revoking for citizenship of group 4 seems the best plan. Then we can work on group 2.

  13. Re:Trump by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Insightful

    and suddenly when they are in a position of actually enacting a repeal and replacement bill into law they came up with nothing.

    It's even worse than that. They've had how many years now to sit down and think about a replacement plan, to go through the details, crunch the numbers, and get their party on board with a plan so that when they eventually could put it into action they could succeed. Instead they did nothing and tried to push out a cobbled together mess that they couldn't even get enough of their party behind to hold an actual vote on it.

    Both of our major political parties are completely dysfunctional at this point. The Democrats spent all of their effort trying to push their anointed party insider candidate who needed significant party help to make it out of a primary against a fringe candidate no one was talking about seriously in the lead up to the election and the republicans had such a weak and unappealing array of candidate that a loud-mouthed bozo that was a complete outsider (he'd only changed to a Republican in 2011, but had bounced back and forth between the parties before) practically take over the party.

  14. Re:Uhm... by jwhyche · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Given his business track record (75% complete failure

    Please site your sources on this. I would be interested in where you got these numbers.

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  15. Re:Uhm... by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's reason enough for me. He seems to be actually trying to pull off his campaign promises. We will see as time goes on.

    I think we've seen enough already.

    None of the crazy pie-in-the-sky shit he promised is ever going to happen. He couldn't even close the deal on his wet dream of wrecking the healthcare system, and that's with a Republican president AND a Republican-controlled House and Senate. He couldn't pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel.

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  16. Re:Uhm... by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Obama "made the effort" to close Gitmo throughout his whole presidency, does he get credit for that?

    Nope, not in my book, and I voted for him twice. That was a promise he broke.

    Now, getting back to President Bath Salts, how many of his promises will he break? How many has he already broken?

    I suspect that he'll be running near 100% failure rate at the end of his term.

    We all know the wall will never be built. We all know coal jobs aren't coming back.
    We all know he's not going to defeat ISIS.
    We all know he's not going to be able to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
    We all know he's not going to be able to bring jobs back from overseas.
    We all know Mexico's not going to pay for the wall.
    We all know he's not going to be able to "get rid" of the EPA.
    He's already broken his promise to "never take a vacation while serving as president."
    We all know he's not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
    He's not going to "Drop that "dirty, rotten traitor" Bowe Bergdahl out of an airplane into desolate Afghanistan without a parachute."
    He's not going to bring back jobs from China. Hell, his own shit is made in China.
    He's not going to "force Nabisco to once again make Oreos in the United States".

    These are just a few of the hundreds of promises he made, all on record.

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  17. Re: Uhm... by orlanz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are you serious?!? Republicans have been bitching and moaning and wasting tax payer money on the topic for SIX years!!!

    In the end, they have control over both houses in congress, full control of the executive branch, and a weakened judicial....

    And the BEST they could come up with was a plan that they weren't even confident enough to bring up to their OWN party after multiple delays and negotiations.

    Their next plan is a "wait and see"?! Just how absolutely incompetent does the US governing bodies have to be before the US public atleast stops coming up with excuses for them?

  18. Re:Uhm... by Sique · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He is not more truthful than any other head of state. As every head of state before him, he tries to get through his agenda. But differently than many an head of state before, he vastly overestimates his own abilities. So far, all of the prominent election promises he tried to implement were wrecked because the way he tried to implement them didn't work. Maybe he will learn. Maybe he recognizes that there is more to being a president than making bold promises. Maybe he finds out that there is a reality which does not care about ideology but just is as it is. And reality does not change just because the President of the United States watches TV and misunderstands what he sees.

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  19. Re:Why Fox? by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Don't you think that living in a country that has the most expensive "treatment industry", and before Obama basically no "health care" as in the sense of "making it possible for everyone to actually consult a medical" is rather ridiculous?
    What is so complicated in simply looking how other countries doe it, e.g. France, Denmark or god forbid China? And copy the good parts?
    How one can be against healthcare and claim to live in a first world country is beyond me.

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  20. Re:Foul, oversimplification by Bite+The+Pillow · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sigh. Where do the prisoners go? Not USA, because of Congress. To another Gitmo? Hardly an answer. Go free? That gets way complicated.

    Congress blocked the obvious path to closing Gitmo. Remember, Congress can override a veto with enough votes, so the President can't just thwart the lawmakers. He only enforces the laws within the legal framework, and your objections are addressed here.

    http://time.com/4178779/obama-...

  21. Re:Uhm... by jwhyche · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He couldn't pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel.

    THIS is the exact reason Trump is sitting in the White house. It will of the reasons he will be sworn in, in 2020 for a second term. You constantly underestimated Trump from the time he threw his hat in the ring all the way up to election night. You where so sure that you had this in the bag you where already celebrating while he was mopping the floor with you.

    More over you are letting your hatred and bitterness, this oppose Trump at all cost, blind you to what is coming down the road. Everyday people are getting tired of it. Even people like me who didn't vote for Trump, and who didn't think he would have made a good President, are starting to change our minds.

    Americans don't like losers, but we detest sour losers. And that is exactly what you are coming off to be. The oppose Trump at all costs, instead of working with him is going to cost you more than the Whitehouse. When the next elections come around Americans are going to remember this, and are going to start removing the obstacles. Meaning Democrats.

    Funny thing is, those of us who don't subscribe to any real political party see this. But democrats don't, Other libertarians in my group, we predicted that Trump would win. We are also predicting he will win in 2020.

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  22. Re:Uhm... by DuckDodgers · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nonsense. Barack Obama, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, George HW Bush, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon all lied plenty but none - not even Nixon - have come out with as much nonsense as Donald Trump.

    Or do you really think there was spy tech in his microwave, he won the most electoral votes since Reagan, his inauguration had the biggest crowd of supporters in the history of inauguration, the murder rate is at a 45 year high (stated in early February, when in fact the US murder rate is half of its 1980 peak), he only lost the national popular vote by over three million votes due to massive organized voter fraud, Kuwait has the same kind of Muslim immigration travel ban as the one he supported, the federal court block of his travel ban means any traveler can enter the US whenever they want with no screening, etc... etc... etc... etc....?

  23. Re:Uhm... by jwhyche · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Documents 6 bankruptcies, and 13 businesses that closed up shop - at the very least suggests he doesn't know what he's doing

    Lets see, in 2005 he paid over 30 million in taxes on a income of over 100 million. He has several properties in down town New York, that is worth several million dollars. You're own link clearly states that bankruptcies are nether a indicator of success or failure. With a income of at least 100M that we know of, and possible billions elsewhere, I believe we can clearly say he knows what he is doing.

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  24. Re: Uhm... by PoopJuggler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Perhaps electing a con man with zero political experience into the single most important political position in the country wasn't such a smart idea...

  25. Re:Why Fox? by Gussington · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why do you think all of the people wealthy enough to fly to the US from all of those great places you mention do so when they needed Medical care?

    The US attracts 60-85k people for medical procedures each year, compared with Thailand that receives 2.8 Million.
    750k American leave the US to seek medical services elsewhere, so the free market is speaking loudly and clearly.

  26. Re:Why Fox? by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Free Market medical system produced the best Medical practices in the world.

    It produced average outcomes similar to those of Cuba for orders of magnitude more money. Simply on the basis of economic efficiency, it must be rated a failure.

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  27. Re:Why Fox? by sjames · · Score: 4, Informative

    Sorry, no. Texas tried tort reform and the problem got worse than ever as a result. The other key word in your post is wealthy. U.S. healthcare works for the wealthy and leaves the majority of the country with none but for a few charity teaching hospitals.

    Americans are going to Mexico for their dentistry and Singapore for major surgery.