Slashdot Mirror
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!
Only hours after the announcement, corporations all over America started hiring lawyers to find new loopholes in the law.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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 your goal is to outsource to cheaper countries, the existing program works very well... until companies that can decide to move as much of their operations abroad as required to cut costs, until the cost of products domestically rises enough to throw sand in the gears of the economy, etc.
Free trade isn't just for goods, it's for labour and standard of living. We're watching it all even out but the process is uneven due to social and political differences between nations.
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.
If I'm not mistaken, the law as written requires that H-1Bs be paid more than Americans. So what he's saying then is that there's nothing wrong with the law, it's just not being enforced? How about we actually enforce the law rather than change it, if that's the case, because the law can say whatever it wants and it won't matter a damn if you don't bother to enforce it.
Make the H1B minwage $100K + COL
That will fix the issue.
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.
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."
This person is either extremely naive or lying through their teeth. Awarding visas for skills does not automatically translate to paying comparable wages to receive those skills. They would have to monitor wages and ensure that the wages being paid do not fall below the median wages for the job and sharply limit the number of visa recipients to prevent flooding the market and thus driving down the median wage.
Of course the problem is that reforms to the H1B visa program risk being basically a form of protectionism. It's potentially little different than slapping a tariff on imported products and has many of the same consequences. It ensures better wages for a small group of workers, typically at the expense of higher product costs for everyone else. For example if we protect steel workers from cheaper imported steel (presuming no dumping) we make cars more expensive the far larger general population. We hurt consumers to protect jobs that possibly don't need protecting. If the workers want to keep wages high they can unionize or lobby and that's just fine but honestly it's something of a loosing proposition if the labor they are doing can be done elsewhere. Programming and many other tech jobs are labor intensive work (albeit skilled labor) and if the labor can be gotten elsewhere for a lower price, sooner or later it will be. There is nothing magical about computer code written in the US versus in China or Russia.
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!)
I have seen so much lip service from politicians on this, and with Trump being the least reliable of them all, I will rejoice when I actually see something done that makes a difference.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
and they need to have staff job interviewers to put places to the test that they are really doing an interview not just a quick chat with some HR person that wants to not hire a USC.
Also the posted requirements will be reviewed and flagged.
...this means the headlines and summaries of many of the Slashdot articles will be understandable after just one reading again. Sounds great, I can't wait...
He has spent way more money going to his vacation resort every weekend then Obama did by this time in his presidency. Also, Trump refuses to use Camp David which is set up for the president, so the local government needs to foot the bill for the local police service to do crowd control and also the local airport needs to shut down for security. It is running into 30 million plus already.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
To understand how this scam works... H1-B Indian will have BS/MS degrees (from India) and they are willing to work for $35,000. So the body shop takes out tiny ads in local newspapers offering to hire programmers/testers with a BS/MS for $35,000. Of course no qualified US computer person is going to take work at $35,000/yr. These ads generate the "proof" needed that these jobs can't be filled by Americans.
The body shop then brings in 500 H1-B people and pays them $35,000/yr. According to the law this is allowed, there are no US citizen willing to take these jobs at $35,000/yr. But then the owner of this body shop turns right around and places these people as temp workers for $80,000/yr. He undercuts the US temp workers who would get $90,000/yr.
This is a great business $80,000 - $35,000 = $45,000 profit per H1-B visa per year. This is how you make $100M from owning a body shop over the course of a few years.
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
Good news for Canadians and Mexicans!
#DeleteFacebook
The very best immigrant coders...
...get sponsored for citizenship.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
This is the only Trump policy that I actually agree with. So I'm on the horns of a dilemma. Is this actually the only policy of his that is not actively harmful? Or am I on the wrong side of the issue?
The use of H1B visas can only serve to short-circuit one of the foundational principal of capitalism, which is supply and demand. When demand exceeds existing supply, prices must rise in order to stimulate the generation of more supply. When supply exceeds demand, prices must go down to discourage excess production. If this mechanism is undercut, then supply and demand get out of whack and the relevant market becomes distorted. This happens any time that price controls are imposed on a market, or when there is a sudden unanticipated spike in demand for a product, or when supply is artificially inflated. This is true of any market, including the labor market.
The use of H1B visas is actively depressing demand for more American STEM graduates, which is the exact opposite of what President Obama said he wanted. Who wants to go into a field where their jobs can be easily outsourced to cheap imported labor? Into a job market where the government is actively working against its own citizens? Nobody who has any sense, that's who.
So I do feel that Trump is actually correct on this issue. Let's see how long it is before he flip-flops on this one, too.
"The only good windmill is a tilted windmill."
Domestic models don't like their pussies grabbed.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
minorities LOVE to take advantage or minorities.
If it's one thing Trump has shown in his pattern of behaviour in his first 3.5 months in office, is his policies will always have exception clauses for his corporate buddies. in other words, he'll try to make things look like they support principle, but allow loopholes for his corporate colleagues as well as his own private businesses. (which is a conflict of interest). For example, the so-called, Anti-Muslim Immigration act (it does discriminate against Muslim countries but that isn't the bill's name). Apparently Muslim countries that did business with Trump businesses were exempt. Trump talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk. While I agree that corporate abuse of foreign visa to get in cheap labor and lowering the quality of living overall in the USA needs to stop, I don't think Trump is the one to do it. He just talks big. I'm going to have to much fun see how his "wall" plays out.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
First loading printers, then a Computer Vision system admin, finally a unix System Admin
in her 50s. All at AT&T when it was good, 40-odd years back.
Our company makes very sincere effort to recruit Americans and comply with the laws in spirit as well as letter. We pay way above median wage for our areas. We are hard core engineering software company, not IT. I have not seen applicants with degrees from Indian Institutes of Technology in the last 10 years. It has simply dried up. IITians now a days get fantastic jobs in India, or they go do MBA and come to USA to do MBA and get jobs in top Wall Street firms and top 4 consultancy companies.
I do see applicants with degrees from next rung in India, NITs and good engineering colleges with Masters from USA.
The only change they really need to make to the H1B program is to state that degrees from accredited US universities will be given first preference. Degrees from diploma mills from India should not count. That would be enough to make sure these companies like TCS, Cogniscent, Wipro, Infosys and the lesser known body shoppers like R-systems, UBICS, Bharat Desai's companies, Sunil Wadhwani's companies etc stop gaming our laws.
(my background: IIT, IISc, UT, F1, H1B, Green Card, Citizen now.)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
one thing they could do is add the percent over average in unemployment to the taxes paid for having H1-B workers (corrected for sector).
So if your state has 15% unemployment (lets say national unemployment is at 10%) you would pay an extra 5% of payroll taxes on your H1-B workers.
but anyway an easy way to MAGA is to ban retail sales of pre-shredded cheese
and just like Magic America is now Grate Again
Citation/Proof? Not that it matter - He deserves vacation not taking presidential pay and bringing back many times more real jobs than Obama ever did in a far shorter timeframe also. Obama kept getting us in debt and war. Trump stopped WWIII with Korea instead. You SJW's always talk 'freedom of speech' and yet you down moderate anything that doesn't fit YOUR agendas. How transparent. Is that your favorite color? You're the WORST ABUSERS of free speech there is hypocrites. Now, go eat your welfare food us taxpayers pay for and stfu!
APK
P.S.=> Show me Obama brought back Intel, Carrier, Ford, GM, Lockheed (some before he was elected), IBM, Amazon (both adding jobs) & that's not even touching the entire list of GOOD paying jobs w/ DISPOSABLE INCOME (not part time no insurance minimum wage service industry only "jobs" (slavery))... apk
With a lottery, the big shops put in for 500 visas and if they get 400 they are happy and hire a few good ones and hundreds of bodies.
A small shop that needs a specific Phd, loses out.
With an auction, the small shop can get the $200k Phd. The big shops bid on only the highest priced positions.
The thing the government would have to watch out for is collusion amongst the Big shops. (like MS and others did already)
Looks like there's America's problem, right there. Why are we so expensive? Why are foreign programmers so much better than us, that they're able to work cheap while still living in America with all the same expenses?
What we ought to do, is abolish all the special rules and requirements for the visas, and just make it even easier to hire workers. Stop using government to prevent a free market, so that the market can force programmers either accept $35k/yr or else find a job where they're more competitive. Remove all the weird rules and you can squeeze out the need for the body shops' legal expertise; i.e. remove the parasitic middlemen and save $45k/yr. The programmers ought to be applying directly to the employer.
Duh? The US programmer won't take $35,000/yr because they can easily get twice that or more.
The Indian is willing to take $35,000 since they are indentured servants. If they complain in any way they are on the next plane back to India where they are going to earn $15,000. They do this because it pays more than working in India, they get US experience on their resume, and they improve their English. Many of these people live ten to an apartment to reduce expenses.
What we ought to do, is abolish all the special rules and requirements for the visas, and just make it even easier to hire workers.
You do understand that the basic welfare benefits provided by the US exceed the average wage earned by 80% of the world's population? So if there was unrestricted immigration to the US a few billion people would migrate to the US.
Finally a president who cares about the america people! This is exactly why I voted for Trump
The same president who supported a health care bill that would take insurance away from 24M+ Americans over ten years and give the rich a $200K tax break?
So he's Obama. Clearly, that will make him great.
Oh wait, he's a white guy, not black, and he made a bunch of money building things, instead of living in a fancy house off government grants. (yes, that's what a community organizer does). They were both populist democrats (look at trump's history. He was a democrat until he picked a republican flag of convenience). He's shat on the constitution with the exact same tools that Obama demonstrated.
The only difference is that his rabble is rural poor shitheads instead of urban middle class shitheads.
Required Skills/Languages:
C++, C#, Java, PHP, Hindi
====
Problem: Solved.
Do an auction - companies file for applicants, minimum wage is average salary + 10% within given region (and they must work within region), then allow them to bid. Create a race to the top (not bottom) and take 5% cut to support social security. Solved!
Meanwhile: http://thehill.com/homenews/ne... And: http://www.foxnews.com/food-dr... But, I guess that's ok because #hypocrisy
Of course no qualified US computer person is going to take work at $35,000/yr.
Well it depends a lot on how you define "qualified". I'm guessing that not being willing to work for that little is part of your definition. So it's a slam dunk. Considering the fact that college graduates with no work experience are willing to work for free (interns) I would be surprised if there were no highly intelligent graduates willing to work for even less than that. Maybe not forever, but for a while. Of course Indians living in India will work for a hell of a lot less than $35,000/year.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
> The administration official sad
Final proof that Slashdot editors intentionally introduce typos into the summary to spur people to comment more. Sad!
In the society and culture where I live at the moment it's more like 99% sociopaths. I kid you not. That 1% figure of yours may be right for the US though. In other places it seems to vary a great deal even going quite a bit lower as well. There is more intraspecies diversity out there than you probably realize.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The H1B program has been abused for years, and almost any improvement is welcome.
Given the disastrous Executive Orders and ACA reform, however, I am not going to get excited just yet.
I want to see a final draft with commentary by experts---probably labor lawyers---before I take this effort seriously.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
GREAT THEORY. Now...if these (insert country of origin) people can code for much less money and make things that work for that price then the market has decided how much something costs.
If they are unqualified, incapable etc then the product/service will fail because the price point is too low for the skill/resource required.
After all, if all services can be had for less by simply employing non-US staff then companies will move overseas.
It is certainly not some cut and dry scam like you present it.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
No! instead, let's create a protectionist agenda to artificially keep salaries for US workers high because everyone is paying too much for rent in city centers.../facepalm
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Ah, I knew we could get a singular explantion. Why are US tech workers getting screw over? BECAUSE BODY SHOPS.
Thanks.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
It's almost as if the system is designed to collapse isnt it? *checks watch*
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
I want to agree with this statement (assuming "China or Russia" can be replaced with a generic "overseas"), but my experience tells me otherwise.
Only because you aren't comparing things from the right perspective. You are thinking about a few malfunctioning teams. But think of it this way. That smartphone you have in your pocket was built by some very bright and capable Chinese engineers. Russia has a space program that arguably exceeds ours in many ways. To pretend that none of them are any good at coding because you've seen a few who didn't have what it takes is not a logical position to hold.
The immigrants I've worked with, while nice (very much so), and knowledgeable in very specific technology, have no broad critical thinking skills, software design/architecture skills, or outside-the-box thinking.
And some immigrants are guys like Elon Musk. There is a range just like with every population including Americans. Substitute "americans" for immigrants in your sentance and I could say exactly the same thing in many cases. The notion that Americans are better or smarter is just xenophobic nonsense easily refuted. There are and awful lot of very smart guys from China and India and elsewhere. The US is 5% of the global population so the notion that we have some sort of monopoly on smarts is dangerously foolish. There are plenty of people overseas (many educated here) who are every bit as good at engineering and programming as anyone here in the US. We should be trying to bring those smart people here as fast as we possibly can.
I want the H-1B visas overhauled not only to ensure America jobs stay American, but also so these immigrants aren't exploited.
The flaw in your reasoning is in assuming there is such a thing as an "American job". Americans have earned one of the highest standards of living in the world by out competing workers and companies in other countries. But that doesn't mean we get to stop competing. If we want to stay on top we're going to have to work our ass off to stay there.
It's like the idiotic Trump rhetoric about bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US. Those jobs left because US labor was too expensive. The only way we are getting labor intensive manufacturing jobs back in the US is for US wages to fall substantially relative to other countries. Do you really want a bunch of $2/hour jobs or should we focus our energies on trying to do something more economically reasonable?
The question is of course not how whining, sorry for themselves tech workers see it but rather how US employers see it.
If you can lower your labour costs wouldnt you? where is the financial benefit to paying more for a US tech worker? -comapnies do not care where the worker is from, only about the cost of the output that worker has. If the output is acceptable then they'll pay for it as little as they can get away with.
Forcing employers to hire US workers will just mean that only those that absolutely must put up with it, will. The rest will outsource, automate or move etc.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Seems more like 27% psychopaths to me, Trump voters certainly fit the bill.
The source of this is body shops. They're the ones paying $35k and charging $80k pocketing the difference.
Instead of that let them get paid 1% of the take home salary of the visa holders. Maybe 2% if we're feeling generous. When they start making $350 - $700 per person per year then the business isn't sustainable and the problem diminishes significantly.
So what about that $45k difference? Where does that go? Good question. I'd say it goes into job training programs and scholarships.
I know. I'm a dreamer. But the problem lies with how profitable it is for companies to bring in these indentured servants. There needs to be a way to take away the profit so they move on to some other leech business model.
Ok, so if the h1b quota stays the same, and the h1b salaries increase, then that implies that US citizens' salaries will decrease.
Is that the message he's sending?
I have never been to India but I have read about both the education system there being very bad in general and that the India Institute of Technology is pretty damn good. And maybe a few other prestigious schools with extremely low acceptance rates. So the real answer is probably 'it depends'.
However I would guess that at least some of those so called degrees really are not comparable to degrees from US or UK universities. It's hard to know for sure unless you go sit in on some of the classes or at least look at the curriculum to see what they are really studying. Are US corporations who treat US and Indian degrees as equivalent actually checking this sort of thing?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The existing H1-B visa system is a cross between a bad joke, an outright scam and a tragedy. Truly exceptional foreign applicants get tossed into the mix with diploma-mill exhaust and are less likely to make it to the US under the existing system. Likewise, US workers are likely to get replaced with *much* less qualified H-1B visa holders under the current system and enforcement attitude. Glaringly overdue for a reset, the current system only exists because of a few US and Indian tech companies throw lobbying $$ at D.C. Enough already.
It's not that simple. There aren't "two classes" of H-1Bs, they're all the same, there are just honest companies, and dishonest ones. There is no way to kill one of those without harming the other. In fact, the more you try to crack down on the dishonest ones, the more you hurt the honest ones, while the cheaters just find new ways to cheat.
Now stepping up enforcement is probably warranted, but it's not as easy as it sounds, and changing the rules doesn't necessarily accomplish what you think it will.
As for the Canadian equivalent, that would be the TFW program, which has been equally abused, but equally essential to some companies' survival.
Crafting rules that allow companies to fill legitimate vacancies they can't fill otherwise, while not allowing companies to simply undercut the local labour market, is no easy task.
There are a few suggestions I've seen that would help though:
- Mandate a certain % that you must pay over the going market rate for the job (still very hard to enforce as proving the market rate for any exact job is tough)
- Allow the foreign worker control of their visa, if they leave the employ of one employer, they have a grace period to find similar work at another employer before they must leave the country. This would address the issue of companies bringing in people that won't rock the boat for fear of being shipped home, and give those workers similar power to domestic workers to stand up for themselves, removing an incentive to game the system to get them. A similar effect could be achieved by replacing temporary workers with permanent ones. If we really have a skills shortage in a specific area, what's wrong with looking for actual immigrants with those skills? (not temporary ones that can be sent home at a whim)
The solution is to only provide welfare to US born not to immigrants. The immigrants' taxes will pay for the US Born's welfare.
**Life is too short to be serious**
So the body shop takes out tiny ads in local newspapers offering to hire programmers/testers with a BS/MS for $35,000
It's far easier than that.
You troll through job search sites like Monster, Dice, Glassdoor, etc. You get a list of people who are overqualified for the position and do not live in the city where the position is located. You then email them, offering that $35k/year with no relocation. They will turn down your terrible offer, and you now have proof you can't fill the position for less cost than a newspaper ad.
that is why the H1-B minwage needs to go up and / or have no staffing firms and the works must be W2 workers.
A lot of this is because we allow tech firms to drive down costs by importing cheaper labor.
Why not just get real and allow anyone with a PhD from a US top 50 university to get a green card? We already know they have skills, we already know they can speak English.
Just saying.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And how are computer science students supposed to get work experience if no one wants to hire them?
Internships and open source contributions...
Seriously, there is no excuse for lack of experience. There is lots of opportunities to make high impact contributions to reputable open source projects.
I didn't say it wasn't hard work, but the opportunities are there... And internships are widely available in the US, sure there is competition, but many of the good internships are well paid too.
I wonder if putting an Indian name on my job applications would have helped.
Try it, I bet it won't help... You can also try attaching a fake picture why not...
Multiple studies have found that using a foreign name or attaching non-white pictures is a huge disadvantage.
If you don't believe that I see absolutely no harm in trying, hehe, for real though try it if you don't believe the studies.
I wonder if companies like clevertech are included in this? I talked to them about a job once and they were offering to pay FAR less than everyone else. Their ads are all over sites like weworkremotely.com.
They never really had it to begin with, as they were on the dole.
The Medicare expansion was only one-half of ObamaCare. Since this wasn't a single-payer option, not everyone got covered via Medicare.
The welfare system in most of europe is even better, and the UK has about the most generous in europe... It results in large numbers of people trying to get in, often through illegal means.
To someone scraping by in a third world country it sounds like a lot of money and luxury life, but the reality is that the cost of living is also much higher so things balance out somewhat.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
President Trump has made a habit of signing executive orders which say we will do what we are doing.
And that's all the latest executive order does. It literally doesn't change anything. It simply says we will do what we've been doing.
And, really, that's all the president can do except veto things. Mr. Trump shouldn't even be able to order acts of war without prior approval of congress. It's one thing to attack terrorists (for which president's have some approval). It's illegal and unconstitutional to attack the legitimate military forces of sovereign nations without explicit approval by congress.
When are people going to catch on to the fact that Mr. Trump isn't really achieving *anything* with most of his executive orders except publicity? He's dependent on congress to budget money and to change laws.
And since his government is still largely unstaffed after nearly 90 days in office, he lacks the people to implement his policies. There is a serious disconnect between the presidency and the departments right now created by thousands of unfilled upper level positions.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The minimum allowed H1B wage is $56k. JFYI.
While few things that Trump has done so far has inspired any confidence in me, this is one change I'm glad of. H1-B immigrants are the modern version of indentured slaves, and I'll be glad when the process is revamped or replaced.
Now, I would prefer that it was replaced with relaxed immigration controls allowing more new blood to legally join our nation... we are a country if immigrants (barring the sadly marginal population of native indians), and I think it is short-sighted of us to assume that a native-born american is somehow superior to a foreigner who upended their entire life to take a risk in a new land. Immigrants have historically been more successful at creating new businesses than native born, because they have already self-selected to be risk takers.
But baby steps. Removing the downward wage-pressure of a large population of indentured slaves is a good start. If I get few nice things from this idiotic presidency I'll be pleasantly surprised.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I am speaking about the middle class subsidies. Here's a novel idea. Pay your doctor.
I don't qualify for subsidies because I make too much ($50K+ per year). So, yes, I have to pay my doctor in cash.
He's switched sides on tons of other key issues (Syria anyone?). CNBC is saying he's gonna switch ("might" in journalist speak pretty much means "will", they're kinda like scientists in that regard).
So far everything he's done has been to enrich himself and his immediate family. He'll throw in for TPP and use the same tired excuse that failing to do so give China an edge (and maybe say he'll negotiate a better deal to boot). Yeah, TPP is bad for the American worker but it's _great_ for the American Economy. And that's what Trump (and the corporate Dems who pushed it) care about. After all, it'll trickle down, right?
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my ignorance = what is a body shop? I'm thinking car repair. Do you mean it's a business "moving around bodies & personnel"?
A body shop in this case means that the company hires people at a certain qualification, fabricated their resume to be qualified at much higher position, and then sell them to work matched with their fabricated resume. For example, the company hires someone who is a freshly graduated. Then fabricate the person's resume to have 3~5 years experience. Now the person could be hired at that level (e.g. $75k~80k a year), but the company is paying the person for fresh graduate payment ($45k~$50 a year).
To understand how this scam works... H1-B Indian will have BS/MS degrees (from India) and they are willing to work for $35,000. So the body shop takes out tiny ads in local newspapers offering to hire programmers/testers with a BS/MS for $35,000. Of course no qualified US computer person is going to take work at $35,000/yr. These ads generate the "proof" needed that these jobs can't be filled by Americans.
The body shop then brings in 500 H1-B people and pays them $35,000/yr. According to the law this is allowed, there are no US citizen willing to take these jobs at $35,000/yr. But then the owner of this body shop turns right around and places these people as temp workers for $80,000/yr. He undercuts the US temp workers who would get $90,000/yr.
This is a great business $80,000 - $35,000 = $45,000 profit per H1-B visa per year. This is how you make $100M from owning a body shop over the course of a few years.
To go into a bit more detail of your example, there are more work to do on the body shop part. The body shops call themselves as "recruiting" or "consulting" companies.
The reason is that the body shop will apply for H1B with much lower salary (prevailing wage), but at the same time gets paid for higher experience job. Everything (book keeping) is internal. Anyone who can't hold on the job, the body shop will swap the person out with a different one they have got in the pool. Then the body shop may terminate or move the person to somewhere else.
This abuse has been done for over 10 years, but it was very small at the time. However, it became very popular, especially Indian companies, about 10 years ago. Remember when the H1B application went through the roof (140k+ applications) within the first 2 days of opening?
For the record, I am an IT professional with 40 years of IT experience in a wide range of fields and I am living in constant fear of losing my job to somebody overseas.
Supreme Granter of Doctor of Obviology Letters ("A FIRM Command of the Obvious")
It's the most simple problem America has to fix.
Remove the random selection component. Grant the places to the those offering the highest salaries - that is the capitalist way of allocating resources, after all, those willing to pay the most for them get to use them.
There are X places. Companies can ask for as many places as they want, but must specify the minimum salary they will pay to the person who fills the position. The highest X get the places. That the promised salaries are met by the actual salaries is checked at intervals.
Simple. No need for the government to decide which categories of workers are required - the market will sort it out.
Republicans should love it. The government still decides the value of X, so Democrats can be happy too.
And, frankly, he's no more of an embarrassment than Obama was ...
At least we know that he's not a (knowledgeable about the religion) Muslim.
He bowed to a Muslim head of state. There was some flap in the US media about that, but they missed a big point: That was literal blasphemy. Muslims don't bow to heads of state - or anyone else but God.
It was a very good thing he had diplomatic immunity. An ordinary person doing that in a country with a sharia-based legal system could have been in serious trouble.
(By the way: Citizens of a republic also don't bow to heads of state, according to diplomatic protocol. In a republic we're ALL (at least all that are elegible to vote) sovereigns, and thus formally peers with kings and queens. The President is just the guy holding a particular job - which is why he's addressed as "Mr. President".)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's possible to get a good education at IIT. It's also possible to skate by, learn nothing and graduate.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Two issues. First of all, who determines "X"? If it's too low, businesses who need the workers are screwed, and if it's too high, those who exploit the system aren't hindered. Secondly the salary level doesn't necessarily equate to the job scarcity once you take skill level in to account. Imagine a job that normally pays $150,000, the company decides to get an H-1B to fill it and lay off the existing worker, post it at $100,000 to save money, they still get the foreign worker over the company that has a job that normally pays $50,000, but still can't find anyone to hire at $75,000 due to a lack of enough domestic workers with the right qualifications.
Only hours after the announcement, corporations all over America started hiring lawyers to find new loopholes in the law.
See? Trump is already creating more American jobs!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
A degree from India is absolutely meaningless. They have a "university" practically on every street corner ...
Worse than that: The body shops often claim the worker in question has degrees that they don't actually have - but which the employer requires.
= = = =
Back before things got egregious, more than a decade ago, my wife was involved in making a hiring decision, and one of the candidates was an H1-B. My wife asked her about the masters degree on her resume and she was appalled: She had no such degree, (nor a CS bachelors - just some classes in the field.) She risked her immigration status rather than be party to the fraud.
(My wife hired her: She had adequate skills for the position and had demonstrated her honesty.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It sounds like the companies themselves are the ones doing the whining at the moment,but yes I would expect them to do whatever they can to lower their labor costs. The point of this is not to stop companies from hiring labor from abroad. At least I hope it isn't. That would be stupid. Whether or not this actually increases the number of Americans who can get jobs working for US companies remains to be seen, but it's not impossible and the H1B program is just stupid. It should probably be shut down completely.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
I don't like him outside of entertainment, and didn't vote for him.
However, give him credit for occasional good he does. Reward good behavior and dissuade bad behavior.
Table-ized A.I.
Even the high profile Disney case, which was a blatant violation of the law, was simply dismissed by the judge. The argument, made by the judge was a ludicrous mis-interpretation. Oh, your jobs were harmed, but no jobs of the contracting firm were harmed. So no case....WTF.
Disney should of been fined $1 billion dollars for that violation.