In my experience this has less to do with money and more to do with the psychology of managers (especially the A+ personality, entrepreneurial types.)
Many of them are very careful about who they allow into their sanctum and see other people (especially other Americans) as competitors and threats. A highly educated and innovative all-American Cornell grad is the LAST thing they want to have in their circle, it would just make them insecure and paranoid. In contrast, foreign workers on visas (even if they’re sloppy workers) will treat them as being the king of the sandbox in a way that another American never truly will. It’s kinda sad but it’s true.
In most instances, they are doing it because the foreign workers are not qualified, they’re doing it because the foreign workers are cheaper. There are SOME foreign workers who can do work that American workers are not qualified for, but these are relatively rare instances. Education is not the solution. Laws that prevent companies from exporting jobs are.
The notion that the U.S. education system is terrible failure also seems to be a myth.
Steve Sailer has shown that once you adjust for ethnicity, U.S. students are actually doing just fine. Asian-Americans perform as well as other Asian-majority countries, U.S. Caucasian students perform at or above the European average, and Hispanic-American students actually perform better than students in Latin America:
Well I’m glad that it’s helped poor people, but I am not glad that it has cost American workers their jobs, and have no problem with legislation to protect American workers from cheap foreign competition. The idea is to raise all nations to US standards, not to reduce America to a third world country.
Probably the same way most reality-competition shows get away with their “If you say anything about how the show works - for example, you say that, on American Idol, you never got to sing in front of the judges, but the producers made you sing in front of a backdrop that turned out to be identical to the one in the judges’ auditions room, and they cut reaction shots of the judges (listening to someone else sing) into it to make it look like everybody gets to sing in front of the judges - then we can sue you for up to $5 million, even if you do so years after your performance” clauses. (The original intent was so that Survivor contestants wouldn’t reveal the winner in advance.)
You are mistaken on several counts here. First is the process by which other nations rise or develop economically. The nations most successful in developing fast and approaching rich country standards in the past twenty to thirty years - China, South Korea, before them Japan, have all done so precisely because people in rich countries have not acted on the sort of unfeeling knee jerk protectionism that you’re displaying here. American manufacturing jobs have moved to these countries because they had a comparative advantage. They benefited and the American people as a whole benefited, even if some American factory workers lost out. There was a net gain involved from trade for both America and the developing world.
And guess what? In this massive shift of low end manufacturing out of the U.S.A, it has not been reduced to a third world country. It is still the richest and most powerful nation on earth. If some workers/software engineers lose out in the process and you feel terrible about it, vote for policies that allow some of the benefits of the net gain to flow to them. Don’t vote for policies that stop the net gain from happening at all. That’s heartless and borderline evil, especially when you consider(as I hope you realise you should) that the beneficiaries of this gain in the developing world are significantly worse off than almost any American is likely to be.
Again, even if the courts would probably throw out these provisions as unenforcable, do you want to be the person who tests it by getting sued for $5 million?
It’s called “libel chill,” and it’s a very real & powerful phenomenon.
That’s pretty much what my company’s done with testers and coders as well, although we were desperately short-handed to begin with, so AFAIK, there wasn’t too much in the way of job losses.
Still, it makes me wonder why the contracting outfits are so much more attractive than just hiring local full-timers; the only explanation I can come up with is that they’re cheaper. There’s certainly no less turnover, and communication issues and cultural friction are certainly larger issues than with local hires.
Put another way, a STEM graduate from a US school will probably expect to make 45-50k out of school as a starting salary, plus all the usual benefits that come with being a salaried professional (health, vision, dental, 2 weeks paid vacation, etc…)
Why should a company want to pay that, if they can legally hire H1B visa holders who live in the proverbial “6 to an apartment and send their money back home” for 20% less, and with less benefits? Or worse, just hire a contracting company to do a job for a fixed rate, and let them screw that H1B guy worse?
That’s what some of us are getting at; in theory the H1B plan is an excellent way to allow highly skilled foreign workers to come and work for US companies. In practice, the companies have figured out how to game it and work public perception in such a way that a perceived STEM worker shortage allows them to hire H1B visa holders at below market wages in the US.
And honestly, when it comes to the livelihoods of myself and my US peers in IT, I really don’t give a fuck if hiring some H1B guy gives some Indian guy the ability to buy a toilet or whatever, if he’s undercutting our livelihoods. He should take it up with his own government if it’s a problem; it’s not OUR problem in the US to lift India or any other developing country up at the expense of our own workforce.
Well a STEM graduate is typically in no way qualified to fill a STEM vacancy. They need to be trained and gain experience until they are useful. Especially when you’re talking about Corporate IT where they are using things like Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle. A CompSci graduate is useless in any of these fields until they get experience.
The problem is that the market is so hot these IT salaries are crazy. You can hire a (useless) CompSci major for 70k and train him in SAP. If he’s any good he will be worth 85k in a year, 100k in two, and 120k in three. No major corporation is set up to give that sort of raises. So what happens is that almost as soon as they train someone to be useful they get a 30% raise to go somewhere else.
Pretty quickly companies figure out that the poachers are winning in this scenario, so they stop training people. That shrinks the number of targets for the poachers leading to them offering hire salaries. Which makes it more likely for trainees to leave. Which makes it less likely for companies to train people. A vicious circle.
Ah the sweet sound of a special interest demanding its due. Americans on the whole are also better off if there is less protectionism. American software engineers too probably will be with time, as they adjust their skillsets to those not easily taken over by low paid code monkeys from India. This may not be reassuring to those who are losing their jobs to them right now, but the solution should not be to try and arrest the inevitable drive towards greater efficiency and remove the gains for everybody but the squeaky wheels. The solution is to let it happen, and help those losing jobs adjust and move on.
It always warms my heart to learn how many people on this board profess to be concerned about the poor, the jobless and the less fortunate, but their concern ends at their national borders. Bravo humanity.
The situation being described is one in which the workforce is being diminished to a lower level; not lifted up. It would stand to reason that being opposed to this degradation of quality of life is consistent which concern about the poor, jobless and less fortunate. Merely changing the specific people who are poor, jobless and less fortunate is not a net improvement.
There are at least two major but very different discussions going on in this thread. One is about outsourcing which involves foreign work forces bidding on things ranging from call centers, manufacturing or routine coding and IT administration. I am not fully against that philosophically although I usually am in a practical sense because it doesn’t work that well most of the time. My personal rule of thumb is that it takes about 3 outsourced Indian workers to equal one average American IT professional. It isn’t necessarily the fault of the individual outsourced workers but there are a number of problems associated with the basic idea including additional management overhead, cultural differences, end customer dissatisfaction, extreme time zone differences and very high turnover. If a company can deal with all the huge drawbacks and still make it cost effective, I say go it.
However, that is not what this thread is about according to the title. It is about actively importing foreign workers under the supposedly very strict H1B visa program under false pretenses that are detrimental on many sides. There is a huge difference between allowing businesses to outsource jobs and both passively and actively allowing them to import foreign workers to compete with Americans en masse for their own gain. The program was intended to be used to fill jobs that could not be filled by Americans in any reasonable way but its most frequent use is anything but that. The vast majority of people on H1B visas are not especially skilled. Most of them do routine and heavily scripted jobs. Sure, it is better for the workers to be on one than live in India but that is a big reason why it is an unfair practice. I am sure Wal-Mart would love it if cashiers, truck drivers and stockers were on the list of H1B eligible jobs too because then they could just bring in a bunch of people from Mexico and build some nice housing behind the stores for them. That is what you call a win all around and it is basically the same thing that has happened in the tech industries.
That is what people like me are objecting to.
BTW, I have never claimed that I was especially concerned about the world’s poor in any forum because that wouldn’t be true. I also almost always put American interests above those of other countries. You can now legitimately say that someone told you that directly.
I’ll take it from this response that you’re one of those Americans I refer to earlier in the thread - who cannot imagine what it is like to be poor, jobless and less fortunate in India, and the difference that economic growth, led in large part by IT offshoring has made to lives here.
Having worked in IT myself, I assure you I’m well aware of the distinction between the two, and also that it is much more blurred than what you’re trying to represent. For instance, many of the large offshoring projects you speak of are often structured in such a way as to involve phased offshoring, with more people with H1B visas as the project starts, and more offshore workers in later years. For IT offshoring companies to grow in size and be competitive, they require more H1B visas, not less.
Wanting to restrict H1B visas is protectionism, plain and simple, and it’s a strategy that does no one any good, particularly not an advanced economy like USA.
Also, yes I’m sure it would be good for Walmart to import mexican workers. You know what else it would be good for? The American economy at large. There is no shortage of evidence that shows immigration, particularly of work force, special interest complaints not withstanding, is a net positive.
Let’s say I’m someone who’s a highly skilled STEM person. I am willing to work the same wage as your typical HIB Visa worker. I’m willing to share living space with six other people in a slum apartment. I’m willing to eat ramen for the rest of my life.
The only thing is I’m American.
What are my options, bldysabba? How do I convey on my resume that I will code for food and nothing else?
I’d just want to say that I am a highly skilled STEM person, who was on an H1B for many years, and your description of the experience is nothing like mine or that of anyone I know in the same situation. During that time I lived a quite conventional twenty-something bachelor existence, with a good apartment, no roommates (save for the occasional girlfriend), savings going into the bank, and putting on weight from all of the not-ramen food I was eating. My salary was quite good for my experience level and area, and most people I know in a similar situation had a similar experience, as did most Americans I knew in the same phase of their lives.
Living six to a slum is nothing like my experience of the process, and I doubt it is “typical”.