Because, yes, people see that doing X grants Y, and Y is desirable, so they do Y.
That is often true. But it is not an example of operant behaviors and reinforcements, it's an example of cognitive processes and rational behavior. You keep confusing the two, which shows that you know very little about psychology.
but I can't find anyone who actually agrees with any of your reasoning
I myself don't agree with "my reasoning"; I was just pointing out how a behaviorist analysis of joblessness would look like.
Because coupling it to government supervision doesn't provide a benefit.
Well, experience from Europe suggests otherwise.
Because there aren't an endless amount of jobs.
False.
A certain proportion of the population will be unemployed;
True. But your problem is that you erroneously believe that it is due to a "limited number of jobs" or lack of "incentives". Since you don't understand why people are jobless, you come up with incorrect solutions.
I don't know what the actual detailed causes of long-term joblessness are; nobody does. What I do know is that a bunch of models are not good explanations, among them behaviorism and rational economic behavior.
It doesn't work in the US. The Feds can't just issue IDs to everybody in the country and have the states use them, since it's not one of the Constitutional powers, and it's not close enough to hope the Supreme Court stretches the Constitution to cover it.
That's a ridiculous argument, given how much has been shoved into the interstate commerce clause. FFS, we have a federal requirement to purchase health insurance now and SCOTUS had no problem with that. Those bright, progressive lawyers could easily find a loophole; for example, they could require it for everybody who ever engages in interstate commerce, or they could require a nationwide supplemental federal drivers licenses, they could require standardization of state drivers licenses, or they could simply issue an ID that is required for all interaction with any federal agency, including the IRS, Medicare, and any federal welfare program. Even if people want separate cards for all of those, they could simply unify the namespace for each of these agencies, so that your IRS-99999999999, SOCSEC-999999999999, and MC-999999999999 all use the same format, and possibly even the same unique suffix. That way, you could use any of those identifiers to identify yourself.
Some time ago, the Feds started a RealID program, an attempt to require state-issued IDs to conform to certain standards to be valid for boarding an aircraft. It faced a lot of opposition..
All states are trying to comply with RealID, some states are just so badly run that they can't get their act together.
Obtaining employment under my system: 100% of benefit from employment is conveyed. No punishment. Job good. Operant response: reward, repeat. [...] thus job doesn't provide a benefit, thus no reward, thus no reason to get job.
But the jobless don't have employment, and it's a lot of work to get one, so it's not a behavior you can reinforce.
Your problem is that you confuse behaviorist models (operant behavior and reinforcement) with cognitive models (getting a reward is a reason for getting a job); that is, you don't know the first thing about psychology.
A bigger problem is that even as a cognitive model, your reasoning fails. People in poverty simply don't make your kind of cost/benefit calculations; that is, you reason as if the entire world was composed of educated, rational, privileged white Westerners with a protestant-inspired education, and it isn't.
the reward value of gainful employment is thus reduced by 30% (i.e. $10/hr? No, it's only $7/hr).
So now you have retreated from "taking a job causes them to lose money" to "taking a job doesn't give them 100% of their earnings". Well, welcome to the club, that's how it works for most taxpayers.
In any case, my proposal wasn't to keep the current mess of programs, it was to adopt the European model: a single cash-based benefit (means-tested and with a gradual phase-out so that there is always some incentive to earn more money, and to combine that with government supervision and requirements for recipients.
A means-tested benefit with a gradual phase-out is financially similar to your proposal, but it makes it easier for government to tune the reward for every extra dollar earned than your proposal. And you have provided no argument why this shouldn't be coupled to government supervision and requirements for recipients other than that you don't like it.
A reinforcement has to be a reward tied to a behavior.
You said that the basis of your analysis was "operant behavior". I'm simply pointing out that that analysis is incorrect: reinforcements only apply to actual behaviors, and someone who is jobless, by definition, doesn't engage in the actual behavior of "holding a job" so that behavior never gets reinforced.
In reality, your analysis is a simple economic analysis in terms of rational actors. Unfortunately, that analysis falls flat on its face in multiple ways, for example...
In the system I describe, getting a job results in an immediate benefit. When you get a job, you do not lose your welfare income.
That is a property that pretty much all welfare systems already have. And it is unrelated to the question of whether people should also be subjected to European-style government intervention while receiving welfare.
Apparently they do, as they have current non H1-B employees doing those jobs and I assume that UCSF is also providing a program in this area training new people to do them as well.
Well, no. If you RTFA, you see that these jobs are being offshored. The H-1B workers are here to gather requirements and understand current workflows, not to become employees of the University and take the existing positions of American workers. The people actually replacing the IT staff will be working in India; they don't need US visas for that.
But, H1-Bs meet all the other requirements
Look, they are called "temporary work visas". In case you didn't get it, that groups as "(temporary (work visas))". That's because they are work visas that are time limited. Whether you like that terminology is irrelevant.
The only difference between H1-Bs and a "permanent employee" that I have seen is that [...] they're usually paid significantly less. Regarding retirement, they are obviously not able to partake of government involved plans like 401Ks nor IRAs.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Personally I do not feel we need an H1-B program at all. If a skill set is needed, I'm sure we can get it either domestically or promote that skill set for people actually wanting to immigrate. But that would revert the current immigration policy back to that in the 70s and that's a whole different can of worms.
Skill-based immigration works pretty much the same in most countries: a temporary work permit followed after 5-10 years by permanent residence and the option of becoming a citizen. In the US, that works through H-1Bs followed by green cards. The reason for this two-stage system around the world is the massive expansion of the welfare state.
My statement about 60K was in relation to computer / network support people who we are discussing in this thread.
The page you link to doesn't seem to be region specific; labor certification must take into account regional differences.
Here's the thing - when someone gets hysterical about a total non-issue your mental alarm bells should ring and you should check to see if they are using it as a distraction to get their hands on your wallet.
My mental alarm bells did go off: Ron Wyden, being a Democrat voting against Voter ID laws, is likely trying to make it easier for people to vote who don't have a right to vote. Hence my suggestion of coupling such vote-by-mail efforts with better identification requirements.
Of course you already knew that, you can not be anywhere near as stupid as you keep pretending.
Sadly, I can't say the same thing about you. In fact, with you, the reverse effect seems to be operating.
The fever swamps believe national ID cards are the first step in rounding up "true patriots" and sending them to the camps.
All the national ID card proposals that have been floating around in the US (mostly from Democrats) so far have come along with national citizen databases, and that is a problem.
It's because we know things like single-payer are far easier to pass in the US than national ID cards.
Yes, and passing European-style welfare laws without European-style government is utter foolishness.
There are many places in the US where a non-drivers-license ID office is at least a two hour drive away.
So? It takes hours to get this kind of crap done in Europe as well.
The fever swamps
I see massive "fever swamps" on both the left and the right. You have to be the same kind of illiterate idiot to support Clinton or Sanders as you have to be to support Cruz or Trump.
That's certainly one type of bias. Another could be selection bias
We aren't talking about what "could be" a bias, we're talking about loan applicants and loan outcomes. There is no reason to believe that racial bias is "baked into that data".
What makes you think I pulled it out of my ass. I got it from the American Economic Review. It's a prestigious publication, peer reviewed.
How nice. Nevertheless, the car insurance example you gave is not an example of "bias baked into the data", it's an example of a real statistical regularity that is property picked up by statistical analyses.
I'm not sure I offered that solution,
You didn't offer any solution. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that your Philadelphia example was supposed to serve some point other than supporting my argument. Obviously, it wasn't.
Obama, Clinton, Sanders and all these guys keep talking about how we should do what other "advanced democracies" do. Well, other advanced democracies issue every citizen a clear form of government ID, uniform across the country, and require it for voting and all other government services. That not only prevents voter fraud, it also prevents non-citizens from taking advantage of government services they are not entitled to. It doesn't "cause other problems", it fixes other problems, as experience shows.
Seriously? Do you have any examples that this has happened any time in the past 50 years? Anecdotes and urban legends don't count.
How would anybody be able to prove voter fraud under the current system? A significant percentage of votes could be fraudulent and nobody could tell. I'm not talking (just) about non-citizens voting, but fraud by staff, voting machine manufacturers, and others.
The real question is why the US shouldn't do what other Western nations do: require clear identification and establishment of citizenship in order to vote, combined with simple, consistent, auditable paper-based voting instead of the current mess of machines and local regulations.
No, it turns out there are lots of people who can vote who do not have a government ID.
Well, not in Europe, because possessing (though not necessarily carrying) a government-issued ID is legally required. It's something the US should also consider because it is quite sensible.
And that's ignoring some of the byzantine "problems" that appear. For example, it took me 9 tries to get my CO drivers license changed to an NY drivers license when I moved.
The solution to that is obviously to fix the byzantine problems with bloated and inefficient administrations, not to design ever more laws around the assumption that the bureaucracy doesn't function properly.
And it turns out being able to take off time in the middle of the day to go to an office many hours away when you don't have a car is a tad problematic.
Well, what can I say, Europeans deal with it. In fact, the hours for government offices are often shorter and wait times longer than in the US.
It's quite bizarre how Democrats and progressives in the US keep pointing to everything they like in Europe, but ignore the parts of European government that make progressive policies actually function in Europe (to the degree that they do).
Well, and in this case, the job is to gather requirements and perform training in order to facilitate outsourcing to India. Obviously, the current UCSF IT staff are not well versed in that, are they.
You just stated that they either have a whole school of them, or, rightly so, they should be shut down.
No, I didn't.
H1-Bs are not temporary by the definition of temporary workers.
If a foreign state were to eliminate registration records for a particular group of Americans immediately before an election, they could very likely disenfranchise those Americans and swing the results of an election. Recent efforts by some states to make it more difficult to vote only serves to increase the danger of such attacks. This is why I have proposed taking Oregon's unique vote-by-mail system nationwide to protect our democratic process against foreign and domestic attacks
Of course, we could just do what European nations do, which is citizen-verifiable voting, government voter and residency address registration based on valid identification, and a requirement that people carry a government-issue photo id and show it on demand. Of course, according to Democrats, Americans are too stupid for that.
Morally, they're bound to work for improvement, ethically they are required to do so by law and expectations.
If UCSF is training people to do IT jobs that cheap overseas labor in third world countries can do, they are failing in their mission and should be shut down entirely.
First, all workers are temporary. H1-Bs with potential 7 year ability to work are more permanent than many IT workers.
The term "temporary worker" has a specific meaning; look it up.
Federal Law, as stated elsewhere, only requires a minimum salary of 60K.
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires that the hiring of a foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers comparably employed. To comply with the statute, the Department's regulations require that the wages offered to a foreign worker must be the prevailing wage rate for the occupational classification in the area of employment.
the large number of TAs that cannot speak English? [...] H1-B parking ticket writer
Those aren't examples of "outsourcing", they are examples of jobs going to people you don't like.
I encourage you to read about human operant behavior, then explain to me how reducing rewards and increasing punishments will more-effectively lead people to repeat desirable behavior than would maximizing rewards for desirable behaviors while minimizing the risk of punishment for pursuing those rewards.
I encourage you to read about it because you don't seem to understand what that means. Operant behavior is an actual, voluntary behavior that is followed by reinforcement. For people who already don't have jobs (either because they lost them or because they are just leaving home), the operant behavior is "not working" and, under your proposal, the reinforcement is "gets money from the government". The operant behavior "working a job" doesn't get reinforced because it doesn't occur. For a while, people may still reason that going through the trouble of getting a job might result in future benefits and might overcome your reinforcement of "not working", but the longer you reinforce, the less likely that is to happen. So, your analysis in terms of "operant behavior" fails miserably and actually implies the opposite of what you wanted to show.
Because I as a tax-payer I am funding it, does not matter how much
So what? I'm a tax payer too. More importantly, California needs to cut back on public employment: it can't pay for them in the long term.
but utilizing tax-payer money to actually CAUSE unemployment is fundamentally WRONG
California's IT unemployment rate is 3.5%; it's even lower for people with experience. If these people can't quickly find another job, then there is something wrong with their qualifications and skills and they shouldn't be on the government payroll.
It sounds to be you are trying to make me a hypocrite. Weeelllll, nice try, but you failed!
No, I wasn't trying to make you anything. I was simply explaining to you that you already live in a globally connected world. You may try to delude yourself that everything you buy and do is "local", but that's just your ignorance. Furthermore, whatever your job may be likely depends crucially on international trade, and trade is a two-way street.
BTW, you have the smack of a Globalism troll at worst or just a current/recent MBA graduate.
I grew up in Europe. I have seen the damage that the kind of nationalist crap you spew does to society and economies.
Umm, if this is a federally subsidized academic institution,
Its graduate students and research grants are federally supported. What good would cutting off their funding do?
Why the heck should I pay to have jobs exported to a foreign country?
For the same reasons you buy Chinese phones, German cars, French wine, Canadian wood and paper, and New Zealand Kiwis. I mean, if your reasoning applies to IT services, why not to all other products?
Seriously, you think like the mercantilists and fascists of past centuries.
That would only mean that UCSF will operate less efficiently: difficulties of students signing up for classes, security breaches, etc. How is that going to help anyone?
California has a huge problem with public sector pension liabilities; the current spending patterns are not sustainable, and something has to give. Raising taxes further won't work. Outsourcing various services is one way to start addressing that problem. What do you suggest California should do instead?
What UCSF is doing is not only morally and ethically wrong
In what way?
it is directly against the H1-B hiring clauses, i.e., illegal.
I don't see how. These are temporary workers and presumably paid more than their US equivalents while in the US. The fact that they (or others) may eventually replace US workers doesn't make their work illegal.
Not sure how the state of CA feels about its tax money leaving the country this way either.
The state of CA has to cut its public sector workforce because it is too large and too expensive. It can't cut teachers or police. It can cut jobs that it can outsource.
What you should ask about is how California residents feel about paying some of the highest taxes in the country for such a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy. And the answer is that they are voting with their feet and leaving the state and hence stop paying taxes to California.
I'd wager you're getting a nauseating gut-feeling from the thought of free money landing in people's hands
No, I simply understand both economics and the history of welfare a bit better than you do. The fact is that liberal welfare benefits have been tried in Europe, and several European countries have moved away from them again because they simply don't work very well.
You fit the pattern of a large number of individuals who are extremely uncomfortable with people not doing something--anything--to justify a societal benefit.
It is merely your ignorance of economics and human behavior that leads you to misinterpreting other people's motives that way.
the system I describe can't be more than slightly-worse than our current system
But we already know how to do a lot better than the current system: (1) replace welfare programs with a simple cash benefit, and (2) couple that cash benefit with supervision and a requirement to actively look for work and accept jobs.
We agree on (1). As for (2), you have presented no argument to demonstrate that it is in any way problematic or disadvantageous. In fact, experience in Europe suggests that such requirements do, in fact, work pretty well.
I keep pushing for a Universal Social Security [wordpress.com]. No tax increase required. Remediates the welfare system completely.
Simply shoving money into people's hands doesn't seem to work very well. The US could adopt the European welfare model, which is generally a simple, limited cash payment combined with strict government supervision of the job search.
Alternatively, the US could adopt a model in which local and state governments act as an employer-of-last-resort; that is, if you can't find any other employment, you can always work for the government, but you basically have to do whatever job they give you. Payment would have to be below other entry-level jobs, and some payment might be in-kind (housing, food, basic healthcare, education/training).
Because as much as you can push the company, the company can also push back and withhold all kinds of goodies from you like a severance that a lot of US workers would need to get through a few months of unemployment.
Which company would that be? This is about the University of California.
Where is the "abuse"? These jobs are going overseas no matter what because Indians are cheaper at providing the jobs.
The only place H-1B workers come in is in the training. Now, would you like a more chaotic transition period, or would you like UCSF IT services to work reasonably well during the transition?
Slashdot Mirror
That is often true. But it is not an example of operant behaviors and reinforcements, it's an example of cognitive processes and rational behavior. You keep confusing the two, which shows that you know very little about psychology.
I myself don't agree with "my reasoning"; I was just pointing out how a behaviorist analysis of joblessness would look like.
Well, experience from Europe suggests otherwise.
False.
True. But your problem is that you erroneously believe that it is due to a "limited number of jobs" or lack of "incentives". Since you don't understand why people are jobless, you come up with incorrect solutions.
I don't know what the actual detailed causes of long-term joblessness are; nobody does. What I do know is that a bunch of models are not good explanations, among them behaviorism and rational economic behavior.
Your problem seems to be more Dunning-Kruger.
That's a ridiculous argument, given how much has been shoved into the interstate commerce clause. FFS, we have a federal requirement to purchase health insurance now and SCOTUS had no problem with that. Those bright, progressive lawyers could easily find a loophole; for example, they could require it for everybody who ever engages in interstate commerce, or they could require a nationwide supplemental federal drivers licenses, they could require standardization of state drivers licenses, or they could simply issue an ID that is required for all interaction with any federal agency, including the IRS, Medicare, and any federal welfare program. Even if people want separate cards for all of those, they could simply unify the namespace for each of these agencies, so that your IRS-99999999999, SOCSEC-999999999999, and MC-999999999999 all use the same format, and possibly even the same unique suffix. That way, you could use any of those identifiers to identify yourself.
All states are trying to comply with RealID, some states are just so badly run that they can't get their act together.
But the jobless don't have employment, and it's a lot of work to get one, so it's not a behavior you can reinforce.
Your problem is that you confuse behaviorist models (operant behavior and reinforcement) with cognitive models (getting a reward is a reason for getting a job); that is, you don't know the first thing about psychology.
A bigger problem is that even as a cognitive model, your reasoning fails. People in poverty simply don't make your kind of cost/benefit calculations; that is, you reason as if the entire world was composed of educated, rational, privileged white Westerners with a protestant-inspired education, and it isn't.
So now you have retreated from "taking a job causes them to lose money" to "taking a job doesn't give them 100% of their earnings". Well, welcome to the club, that's how it works for most taxpayers.
In any case, my proposal wasn't to keep the current mess of programs, it was to adopt the European model: a single cash-based benefit (means-tested and with a gradual phase-out so that there is always some incentive to earn more money, and to combine that with government supervision and requirements for recipients.
A means-tested benefit with a gradual phase-out is financially similar to your proposal, but it makes it easier for government to tune the reward for every extra dollar earned than your proposal. And you have provided no argument why this shouldn't be coupled to government supervision and requirements for recipients other than that you don't like it.
You said that the basis of your analysis was "operant behavior". I'm simply pointing out that that analysis is incorrect: reinforcements only apply to actual behaviors, and someone who is jobless, by definition, doesn't engage in the actual behavior of "holding a job" so that behavior never gets reinforced.
In reality, your analysis is a simple economic analysis in terms of rational actors. Unfortunately, that analysis falls flat on its face in multiple ways, for example...
That is a property that pretty much all welfare systems already have. And it is unrelated to the question of whether people should also be subjected to European-style government intervention while receiving welfare.
Well, no. If you RTFA, you see that these jobs are being offshored. The H-1B workers are here to gather requirements and understand current workflows, not to become employees of the University and take the existing positions of American workers. The people actually replacing the IT staff will be working in India; they don't need US visas for that.
Look, they are called "temporary work visas". In case you didn't get it, that groups as "(temporary (work visas))". That's because they are work visas that are time limited. Whether you like that terminology is irrelevant.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Skill-based immigration works pretty much the same in most countries: a temporary work permit followed after 5-10 years by permanent residence and the option of becoming a citizen. In the US, that works through H-1Bs followed by green cards. The reason for this two-stage system around the world is the massive expansion of the welfare state.
The page you link to doesn't seem to be region specific; labor certification must take into account regional differences.
My mental alarm bells did go off: Ron Wyden, being a Democrat voting against Voter ID laws, is likely trying to make it easier for people to vote who don't have a right to vote. Hence my suggestion of coupling such vote-by-mail efforts with better identification requirements.
Sadly, I can't say the same thing about you. In fact, with you, the reverse effect seems to be operating.
Honey, dearest, "this Senator" is Ron Wyden, who opposes voter ID requirements.
Do you even bother the article summary, or do you just jump right into the comment section to abuse people and push your agenda?
Yes, and lack of identification requirements is intended to keep up that appearance. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
All the national ID card proposals that have been floating around in the US (mostly from Democrats) so far have come along with national citizen databases, and that is a problem.
Yes, and passing European-style welfare laws without European-style government is utter foolishness.
So? It takes hours to get this kind of crap done in Europe as well.
I see massive "fever swamps" on both the left and the right. You have to be the same kind of illiterate idiot to support Clinton or Sanders as you have to be to support Cruz or Trump.
We aren't talking about what "could be" a bias, we're talking about loan applicants and loan outcomes. There is no reason to believe that racial bias is "baked into that data".
How nice. Nevertheless, the car insurance example you gave is not an example of "bias baked into the data", it's an example of a real statistical regularity that is property picked up by statistical analyses.
You didn't offer any solution. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that your Philadelphia example was supposed to serve some point other than supporting my argument. Obviously, it wasn't.
Obama, Clinton, Sanders and all these guys keep talking about how we should do what other "advanced democracies" do. Well, other advanced democracies issue every citizen a clear form of government ID, uniform across the country, and require it for voting and all other government services. That not only prevents voter fraud, it also prevents non-citizens from taking advantage of government services they are not entitled to. It doesn't "cause other problems", it fixes other problems, as experience shows.
How would anybody be able to prove voter fraud under the current system? A significant percentage of votes could be fraudulent and nobody could tell. I'm not talking (just) about non-citizens voting, but fraud by staff, voting machine manufacturers, and others.
The real question is why the US shouldn't do what other Western nations do: require clear identification and establishment of citizenship in order to vote, combined with simple, consistent, auditable paper-based voting instead of the current mess of machines and local regulations.
Well, not in Europe, because possessing (though not necessarily carrying) a government-issued ID is legally required. It's something the US should also consider because it is quite sensible.
The solution to that is obviously to fix the byzantine problems with bloated and inefficient administrations, not to design ever more laws around the assumption that the bureaucracy doesn't function properly.
Well, what can I say, Europeans deal with it. In fact, the hours for government offices are often shorter and wait times longer than in the US.
It's quite bizarre how Democrats and progressives in the US keep pointing to everything they like in Europe, but ignore the parts of European government that make progressive policies actually function in Europe (to the degree that they do).
Well, and in this case, the job is to gather requirements and perform training in order to facilitate outsourcing to India. Obviously, the current UCSF IT staff are not well versed in that, are they.
No, I didn't.
The H-1B visa defines temporary workers. So, wrong again.
That may be, although since the labor certifications are issued by the federal government, Obama must be complicit in that.
However, your statement that it "only requires a minimum salary of 60K" is incorrect.
Any more "dog poop" you want to produce?
The far bigger danger to the integrity of elections is of the vote early, vote often variety. Well, that, and dead people voting.
Of course, we could just do what European nations do, which is citizen-verifiable voting, government voter and residency address registration based on valid identification, and a requirement that people carry a government-issue photo id and show it on demand. Of course, according to Democrats, Americans are too stupid for that.
If UCSF is training people to do IT jobs that cheap overseas labor in third world countries can do, they are failing in their mission and should be shut down entirely.
The term "temporary worker" has a specific meaning; look it up.
Incorrect:
Those aren't examples of "outsourcing", they are examples of jobs going to people you don't like.
I encourage you to read about it because you don't seem to understand what that means. Operant behavior is an actual, voluntary behavior that is followed by reinforcement. For people who already don't have jobs (either because they lost them or because they are just leaving home), the operant behavior is "not working" and, under your proposal, the reinforcement is "gets money from the government". The operant behavior "working a job" doesn't get reinforced because it doesn't occur. For a while, people may still reason that going through the trouble of getting a job might result in future benefits and might overcome your reinforcement of "not working", but the longer you reinforce, the less likely that is to happen. So, your analysis in terms of "operant behavior" fails miserably and actually implies the opposite of what you wanted to show.
So what? I'm a tax payer too. More importantly, California needs to cut back on public employment: it can't pay for them in the long term.
California's IT unemployment rate is 3.5%; it's even lower for people with experience. If these people can't quickly find another job, then there is something wrong with their qualifications and skills and they shouldn't be on the government payroll.
No, I wasn't trying to make you anything. I was simply explaining to you that you already live in a globally connected world. You may try to delude yourself that everything you buy and do is "local", but that's just your ignorance. Furthermore, whatever your job may be likely depends crucially on international trade, and trade is a two-way street.
I grew up in Europe. I have seen the damage that the kind of nationalist crap you spew does to society and economies.
Its graduate students and research grants are federally supported. What good would cutting off their funding do?
For the same reasons you buy Chinese phones, German cars, French wine, Canadian wood and paper, and New Zealand Kiwis. I mean, if your reasoning applies to IT services, why not to all other products?
Seriously, you think like the mercantilists and fascists of past centuries.
That would only mean that UCSF will operate less efficiently: difficulties of students signing up for classes, security breaches, etc. How is that going to help anyone?
California has a huge problem with public sector pension liabilities; the current spending patterns are not sustainable, and something has to give. Raising taxes further won't work. Outsourcing various services is one way to start addressing that problem. What do you suggest California should do instead?
In what way?
I don't see how. These are temporary workers and presumably paid more than their US equivalents while in the US. The fact that they (or others) may eventually replace US workers doesn't make their work illegal.
The state of CA has to cut its public sector workforce because it is too large and too expensive. It can't cut teachers or police. It can cut jobs that it can outsource.
What you should ask about is how California residents feel about paying some of the highest taxes in the country for such a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy. And the answer is that they are voting with their feet and leaving the state and hence stop paying taxes to California.
No, I simply understand both economics and the history of welfare a bit better than you do. The fact is that liberal welfare benefits have been tried in Europe, and several European countries have moved away from them again because they simply don't work very well.
It is merely your ignorance of economics and human behavior that leads you to misinterpreting other people's motives that way.
But we already know how to do a lot better than the current system: (1) replace welfare programs with a simple cash benefit, and (2) couple that cash benefit with supervision and a requirement to actively look for work and accept jobs.
We agree on (1). As for (2), you have presented no argument to demonstrate that it is in any way problematic or disadvantageous. In fact, experience in Europe suggests that such requirements do, in fact, work pretty well.
Simply shoving money into people's hands doesn't seem to work very well. The US could adopt the European welfare model, which is generally a simple, limited cash payment combined with strict government supervision of the job search.
Alternatively, the US could adopt a model in which local and state governments act as an employer-of-last-resort; that is, if you can't find any other employment, you can always work for the government, but you basically have to do whatever job they give you. Payment would have to be below other entry-level jobs, and some payment might be in-kind (housing, food, basic healthcare, education/training).
Which company would that be? This is about the University of California.
Unfortunately, they are: they sell themselves out to the highest bidder.
IT workers, of course, could become the highest bidder. In that case, they'd get some protectionist measure passed and someone else would get screwed.
But someone always gets screwed when "senators and secretaries of state" work for the "benefit" of some group.
Where is the "abuse"? These jobs are going overseas no matter what because Indians are cheaper at providing the jobs.
The only place H-1B workers come in is in the training. Now, would you like a more chaotic transition period, or would you like UCSF IT services to work reasonably well during the transition?