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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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
If there really is a shortage, paying a premium to fill those gaps at the top will not be a problem.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.