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Trump To Overhaul H-1B Visa Program To Encourage Hiring Americans (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In a bid to court working class voters, Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday to revamp a temporary visa program used to bring foreign workers to fill jobs in the U.S. The president will use a visit to a manufacturing company in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a crucial state he snatched from Hillary Clinton in the election, to promote his latest "Buy America Hire America" offensive. Trump's executive order will call on government departments to introduce reforms to ensure that H-1B visas are awarded to the "most skilled or highest paid applicants," a senior administration official said. The executive order will also call for the "strict enforcement" of laws governing entry to the U.S. of labor from overseas, with a view to creating higher wages and employment rates for U.S. workers. The order will also call on government departments to "take prompt action to crack down on fraud and abuse" in the immigration system, a senior administration official said. The administration official sad: "Right now H-1B visas are awarded by random lottery and many of you will be surprised to know that about 80% of H-1B workers are paid less than the median wage in their fields. Only 5% to 6%, depending on the year, of H-1B workers command the highest wage tier recognized by the Department of Labor. [...] If you change that current system that awards visas randomly, without regard for skill or wage, to a skills-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers [...] It's a very elegant way of solving very systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa."
We are making America Great Again!
At least it's moving in the right direction. However, there is no shortage of skilled American workers. Just the opposite is true. We have a glut of skilled American workers, but there is a dramatic shortage of decent, livable-wage jobs in America.
While tightening the rules around H1B is a good start, the system needs to be entirely gutted.
Raise the minimum salary to $100,000 per year, have it automatically increase by 1.5% per year. Done.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I can tell the article and website are biased by the first phrase. "In a bid to court working class voters..." No, it's not a bid for voters. It's fulfilling a campaign promise. It's helping the American worker. As a programmer, (and mighty successful at that) I've been denied jobs at many companies who hire H1Bs over citizens like me. It must change.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Abuse of the H1-B program is not primarily done by large corporations. Instead there are specialized "body shops" doing it. These body shops pretty much only employ H1-B Indian software/testing people and then rent them out to business in the US as temporary staff. These body shop companies make huge profits for the owners since they bring in the H1-B people at very low wages and then rent them out at 90% of a normal salary. The savings to the large corporation is not much since most of the profits accrue to the body shops. One of these shop owners lives near me in a $20M house and has made over $100M profit from renting out H1-Bs. These body shops are where the bulk of the abuse occurs and they need to be outlawed.
Haven't you noticed hundreds of tiny ads in the classified sections of local newspapers asking for programmers or testers and they include salary information? But when you contact them you never hear anything back? Those ads are generating the "proof" needed for the government that the position can't be filled by American workers.
That US-Americans haven't learned to use that metric. Nor any decent metric. They are still stuck using Imperial.
(hmmm, quite fitting for Mr. Trump!)
Just set a minimum wage for H-1B visas so anyone imported in via a H-1B visa costs more than hiring an American to do the job would have cost and most of the abuse of the system goes away.
Combine this with some sort of labor market testing so they cant bring in a foreign worker if there is an American capable of doing the job and 99% of the problems with H-1B visas go away. (if you do this right you can structure it to also avoid the situation where companies import foreign workers to train them up and send them back to their home country as cheap outsourced labor)
Doing this ensures that H-1B visas only get used when there is no American capable of doing the job (and the company can demonstrate they tried to find an American for the job first) or when they need a specific individual for some reason (and can prove there is no American with the necessary skills/experience/knowledge to do the job)
Will this solve every issue with H-1B visas? No. Will companies try to find loopholes? Yes. Would this be significantly better than doing nothing? Most definitely.
Given the "swamp draining" skills Trump's shown so far, I'm expecting that he's going to outsource the implementation and enforcement of the H1B program to an Indian corporation...
Instead, just start the countdown clock until he reports that "No one realized that visas would be so hard." or until he has a 10 minute conversation with a foreign leader who explains to him why he's wrong.
Or until they find him in the corner of the rose garden smearing himself in his own shit as the dementia kicks into top gear.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If the program really was there to fill a labour pool deficit, it never would have allowed for visas for positions where the wage was below the current median wage (for those employed, not for empty positions waiting to be filled). You'd still get downward pressure on wages as labour supply increased, but it'd be slower. If the program was there to fill a labour pool deficit, it would never be allowed to be used in an instance where employees have to train their H1B replacements before being let go.
I suspect we will see an increase in "students" looking for work via J-visa:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The administration better be ready for body shops to work around the new restrictions - there is too much money here to simply walk away.
No, a judge in California or Washington will shoot it down on the grounds of being discriminatory to Indians (dot, not feather). Also, and most importantly, it puts a "burden" on the tech sector for not having access to cheap global labor. I SHIT YOU NOT, that's how it will go down in flames. I'm 100% correct on this, just wait.
Life is not for the lazy.
A good example of H-1B abuse is when Disney make their employees train their foreign replacements. It's blatantly obvious that the outsourcing company committed fraud on the H-1B application. There's no way to claim that US-based workers cannot be found for a job that those workers are currently performing. The Disney workers sued and lost.
Google, Microsoft, et al don't have standing to sue the outsourcing companies for visa abuse.
It's not just low-level IT - as the links above show, it's entire departments. Even it was targeting low-level IT only, that makes it harder for new college graduates to find jobs - everybody has to start somewhere.
High-skill jobs were what was supposed to replace the lost manufacturing jobs. The idea was to retrain some manufacturing workers, and younger people would get degrees that lead into high-skill jobs.
H1Bs greatly harm that paradigm.
they need to bring manufacturing back as its the only place where you need large numbers of workers
Not anymore. Automation means you only need a larger number of workers if they are incredibly cheap workers. As soon as you go above third-world wages, automation is cheaper.
This is starting to happen to China. Their manufacturing workers are getting expensive enough that companies are looking at "re-shoring" with highly automated factories and virtually no workers, or moving their plant to another country where workers are still incredibly poor.
So what he's saying then is that there's nothing wrong with the law, it's just not being enforced?
It's not just that. This EO is saying that someone has 220 days to create a report, for Trump to review about how the law is not being enforced. That's all. The reason for all of this bluster is to make his trust-and-don't-verify support base think that he's actually doing something.
Apparently you don't know what the fuck you're talking about since that's not remotely close to being true.
Please educate yourself. You're embarrassing all the other asshats on Slashdot.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/muslim-majority-countries-donald-trump-travel-ban-immigration-entry-visa-three-main-countries-exempt-a7552526.html
Uh, yeah. You're the embarrassment who needs to educate yourself. The executive order is based on a law passed in 2015 and signed by Obama - and the seven countries are listed there. Even the loons at Politifact know this:
http://www.politifact.com/wisc...
Do you have ESP?