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Trump To Overhaul H-1B Visa Program To Encourage Hiring Americans (theguardian.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the best-of-the-best dept.

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."

12 of 619 comments (clear)

  1. Make America Great by 110010001000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We are making America Great Again!

    1. Re:Make America Great by PoopJuggler · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You have a really low standard for "great" apparently. I would define "great" as leading the world in peaceful conflict resolution, technological advancement, social advancement, education, art and overall happiness and equality of a nation's citizenry. Trump is working towards, well, none of those.

    2. Re:Make America Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You have a really low standard for "great" apparently. I would define "great" as leading the world in peaceful conflict resolution, technological advancement, social advancement, education, art and overall happiness and equality of a nation's citizenry. Trump is working towards, well, none of those.

      Let's go through each of these.

      The first one is particularly telling. It was Trump, more than anybody (except perhaps Bernie, certainly more than Hilary) who spoke out against getting America involved in foreign wars. So much so that he was at 'war' (no pun intended) with a good section of his own party - Bush/Graham/McCain - over the Iraq war, which got particularly ugly during the SC primaries. He wanted to get along with Russia, but the Democrats made that impossible by obsessing over 'Russian interference' in the elections. Nonetheless, 2 weeks ago, most of his seniormost officials, like Tillerson and Haley, stated that they'd acquiesce with Assad remaining in power. This was as close to peaceful conflict resolution that one can get, and should have calmed Damascus. Instead, Assad launched a chemical weapons attack on Ibdil, making it impossible for Trump not to respond. One could hardly imagine a stupider Syrian response to what was essentially a peace gesture.

      After that, the North Korean thing can't be peaceful, given that President Un has stated that they are heading towards thermonuclear war. They have, in violation of many treaties, tested both nukes as well as ballistic missiles. Given that they could easily drop a nuke on Seoul, this is not a can that can be kicked down the road.

      Technological advancement - I'm not sure how any government is supposed to do that. The US is more technologically advanced than anyone else, but there are a few things here and there, such as protection of intellectual property, that can be done, but is currently lower priority.

      Social advancement - these days, it seems to center around anybody being able to enter bathrooms of their choice based on what they feel like. While more conservative factions of the party have taken a stance against that, the president has been careful not to.

      Education - well, college tuition costs are at an all time high, but education has not been landing people jobs, given how out of touch with the real world it is. If anything, it's a ball & chain that keeps young people deep in debt. It's hard to achieve overall happiness when things like education and health care are as screwed as they are, courtesy the previous administration.

      As for the nation's citizenry, they are equal. Equality of opportunity, that is. What you are looking for, perhaps, is equality of outcome, which is unattainable, even in pure Communist countries. What equality has come to mean is a code-word for affirmative action - something that's failed despite being around for 50 years.

      Trump's goals - making the US an attractive place to hire people, and making it militarily more powerful and politically more assertive, so that enemies like North Korea or Iran or ISIS don't mess with us, while adversaries like Russia, China, EU stop taking advantage of us - are certainly adequate in MAGA. So as Gatsinko noted above, making the US the richest & most powerful ever is the best path to getting there

    3. Re: Make America Great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Shouldn't the consumer bear some responsibility for this? You and others choose which products are successful when you and others make purchase choices.

      You go to the store to buy $THING. You see two choices. One costs more. Is it built to last, so that the extra cost is worth it? You can't tell without buying both and waiting several years.

      You are making the assumption that people buying things have complete information about the products they buy. That assumption does make the math easy in econ 101, but it is not true in the real world.

  2. It's A Start by StormReaver · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It's A Start by lq_x_pl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're simply not going to retrain people in their 40s+
      And this is the sort of age-ist bullshit that makes it easier for companies to continue abusive hiring practices. Is it reasonable to say that every 40+ worker can be a programmer? No, but to paint a huge swath of the population with the "they're simply untrainable" brush is as intolerant and ignorant as making any broad statement about broad swaths of the population.
      (30+ programmer here)

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      An internal system operation returned the error "The operation completed successfully.".
    2. Re:It's A Start by cjonslashdot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't think that age is relevant. I am 61, and I am completely current in my field (containers, Kubernetes). A few years back I worked at a small company populated with "DevOps" folks - all younger than me - and I ended up leaving because they were not able to mentally shift from VMs to containers. Age is not the issue. Also, while most of "middle America" is not going to turn into programmers, some of the young people in middle America who are just starting out might pick an IT career if they think there is opportunity in it - but they won't if all the jobs are taken by H1B people.

  3. Biased article.. by slashkitty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    -- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
  4. Re:What's wrong with these people?! by jonsmirl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:So actually enforce the law? by jonsmirl · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. The simple way to fix the problems by jonwil · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:It already bears fruit by DigiShaman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Life is not for the lazy.