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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
There is nothing magical about computer code written in the US versus in China or Russia.
I want to agree with this statement (assuming "China or Russia" can be replaced with a generic "overseas"), but my experience tells me otherwise. While anecdotal, I have spent time on many teams where I am one of a few, or possibly the only, non-Indian immigrant on the team (team size varies from 10-50 people). I'm a consultant, and I'm pulled in to help on different projects for my firm's clients.
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. Basically, if what they need to code doesn't match an example from whatever 6-week class they took before getting the visa, they won't have a clue. This means the solutions end up being a glut of cobbled together code until things work. There's entire segments of code that are usually obsolete or do nothing... worse yet, silently fail; users just get tired of reporting bugs and find their own workarounds, so management falsely believes things are being fixed when the bug reports die down.
This isn't their fault mind you. They are being exploited... first by the inadequate training farms in their native country (or possibly online), and then by the "body shops" that bring them to the US and hire them out at outrageous rates while paying as little as possible. While their client is getting subpar coding infused into their software, ultimately increasing costs over time.
I want the H-1B visas overhauled not only to ensure America jobs stay American, but also so these immigrants aren't exploited. They are more than welcome to move to this country, but it should be on better terms, even if that prevents a multitude of them from coming here without more effort than is being expended now.
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.
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."
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Awarding visas for skills does not automatically translate to paying comparable wages to receive those skills
I'm pretty sure the only skill that matters is the "being able to work for slightly above minimum wage" skill.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
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.
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")