I don’t think that’s what bldysabba’s on about. He thinks American workers command higher salaries than they are worth, that there should be open competition for American jobs and that we should let the world marketplace decide the salaries for American workers. That’s why he feels that in the long term it’s the best thing for American workers to be displaced by his H1B crew: the world marketplace for their skill set is a lot lower than the US marketplace is paying, and eventually things will settle out, like it or not.
He feels that “something should be done” for American workers who are so displaced, but I’m not sure what he means by it.
In an ideal world, perhaps. But in this world, I’d happily settle for - You have a system in place. Don’t support policy changes that are thinly disguised protectionism, because not only will that shaft the people from the poor countries who are much lower in the pecking order than yourselves, it’ll be shooting yourself in the foot besides. As history both recent and not so recent amply demonstrates, openness in economies is much better for them in the long run.
It could be any number of things (for e.g income support, training, placement services), and I don’t claim to be an expert on what they would be, but it’s the more productive way to approach the problem, rather than ‘let’s legislate away the efficiency gain from a more open economy’.
All you are doing is attacking the poster(me) and not resounding intelligently to the actual points I am making - I’m not interested in carrying on a discussion along these lines.
Sigh…I feel like I post the same info about the H-1B program every few months or so. To correct some misconceptions:
H-1B visas are not legally restricted to positions for whom no U.S. workers are available. That’s only required for the green card process (or at least for most employment-based green cards, for which labor certification is required. Labor certification is the extremely anal-retentive, expensive, prolonged, PITA process of satisfying the Department of Labor that no qualified U.S. workers are available and qualified for the position, and that the employer is offering at least the prevailing wage, and that the foreign worker for whom labor certification is sought gained the required skills and experience before starting employment with the petitioning employer…it’s a huge PITA and requires multiple forms of public recruitment, including very expensive print ads. Who here has gotten a professional job via a print ad in the past 10 years?
It sure does sound like in the Disney situation, the rules were broken about non-displacement of U.S. workers. That sucks. I’d be VERY happy to see better enforcement of the H-1B rules, trust me - it would make life much less of a PITA for the employers who do follow the rules. I don’t want to see foreign workers taken advantage of any more than I want to see US. workers laid off.
Trust me, there is LOTS of enforcement of H-1B regs. I haven’t worked on H-1Bs for any employer that did a significant volume of them in going on 10 years (and even then, I was in-house for a large financial institution that did hundreds of them, but hundreds, not thousands, and all for its own employees; it wasn’t an IT job shop). I’ve done a handful recently for a small local IT consulting company, and trust me, every time we do an H-1B for a computer consultant for that employer who isn’t working in-house, USCIS requests copies of the client contracts for the projects he/she will be working on. If he’s on a project for the next year, the H-1B will be approved for a year, even if the contract is renewable indefinitely.
The ones I’ve done in recent years are mostly for technical and engineering professionals with U.S. graduate degrees, not people fresh out of college in India or China. The employers typically employ a small minority of people on work visas, a couple dozen at most.
I do think it’s important for Americans to step up their game. H1B visas or not, if we are unable to stay globally competitive it WILL catch up with us. Protectionism can delay it, but in an increasingly globalized world it can’t keep us safe from global competition forever.
We have access to some of the best education facilities in the world. We need to leverage that to keep our global advantage, not rely on protectionism to shield us from competition. India and China are hungry and ambitious. They are building their education systems and working to bridge the gaps that keep them from being fully competitive. If we aren’t doing the same thing, we are setting ourselves up for failure.
Dinner’s not quite ready, so a couple more thoughts:
Employers of H-1B workers are required to maintain public access files of information about the H-1B positions. I kind of wish some enterprising investigative reporter would do a large-scale story in which companies were forced to allow inspection of their public access files. It could be very educational.
It’s very rare that I do an H-1B petition for someone who works for a for-profit organization and makes less than I do, and I’ve got a master’s degree and 15+ years of experience at my job. I am not crying for all the poor, underpaid IT professionals.
I think this is a good point; but I think some of the implications are are worth further exploration especially in regards to income distribution.
A poster upthread tried to make the argument that somehow Indian immigrants come from the poorer classes of India and that immigration allows them to get ahead. This is factually untrue and even an absorb statement to make in light of the facts.
Indian immigrants by and large come from the middle and upper classes. They are the cream of the crop and they make far more than the average American worker when they come here. The potential problem then is not then that this situation causes wage degradation, but that it causes a loss of available positions and increases the competition for those positions to such an extent that they are no longer accessible in the way they once were while doing nothing to create increased overall opportunity for people of all socioeconomic backgrounds.
I did not make this argument(though I couldhave). My argument was that economic growth, which has been spearheaded by IT offshoring, has lifted millions of people out of poverty (and Indian poverty is very, very different from, and in case it wasn’t clear enough, much worse than, American poverty, which is the other point that you failed to appreciate). You also fail to distinguish between Indian immigrants and Indian H1B workers, one set of whom will return to their country and who live and remit accordingly, although both classes remit significant amounts of money that again contributes to economic growth.
H-1B workers are also often (eventually) immigrants. H-1B visas allow for immigrant intent, and the vast majority of people in the employment-based green card process are working legally in the U.S. throughout that process.
Other people are making some subtle points that you aren’t getting yourself. I have had many Indian coworkers including bosses that are brilliant and fully deserving of an H1B visa and eventually full citizenship if they want it. They are the ones the program is intended for and it isn’t meant to flood the U.S. job market with people even less able to perform basic, scripted jobs at a lower level than even an American that went to a trade school. The latter is most commonly what I have seen in the real world over the last 20 years across many thousands of workers in different industries.
You seem to be trying to obliquely advocate an open borders policy like no country has ever implemented and I can’t support that. Again, I don’t care about anything about saving the world’s poor as a whole. It is fine if some of them can benefit the U.S. or another 1st world country through their proven talents but my standard is that it has to be bilateral overall in the immediate and not abstract sense.
Since when is “These furriners are taking our jobs” a subtle point?
You guys want H1B visas restricted because it’s not being used the way it is ‘meant to’. I read that. But the arguments all scream protectionism. I’m presenting a point of view that is arguing from various perspectives - your own competitiveness and humanitarian
I am not a right winger and I am quite business friendly in general. However I do believe in sovereign nations, borders and honesty in stated policies. That is where this one goes wrong. It is a broad policy that is being abused on a large scale and I cannot support that.
Exactly; out of a huge gang of Indian co-workers from one of these Tata-esque consulting outfits that use a bunch of H1B workers, I can think of two who are absolutely stellar- if I was in charge of hiring, etc… I’d grease the wheels for these guys to become full-time, sponsor them, whatever. They’re huge assets to wherever they work.
The rest are about on par with entry-level recent college graduates, IMO. Not because they don’t have technical chops, but rather because their critical thinking/problem solving is weak. They’re at their best when someone gives something very clear to test , or clearly defined functions/changes to write. Having them go off-script and do anything that doesn’t involve almost rote work seems to fluster and stymie them greatly. But for 90% of what they do as grunt-level coders and testers, they’re adequate.
And for the record, I’m aware of the benefits of free trade and globalization. The problem is that when you’re at the top of the mountain, there’s nowhere to go but down. And US workers in just about every industry that can have legitimate foreign competition are vulnerable to this. It’s why our manufacturing sector has declined, for one thing.
The issue at hand here isn’t that we American workers are grousing about things like offshoring things like grunt coding; that ship has sailed, and most people are aware of the pitfalls and advantages of that. What we’re griping about is the fact that our OWN companies are essentially importing lower-paid foreign workers and undercutting us, and that our government is allowing it. It’s the… unnatural nature of it (for lack of a better term) that frustrates us.
Put differently, absent H1B abuse, there’s not too much reason that a guy working in IT (let’s say production support for EDI and core systems) for a middle-sized company in the US should have to worry about competing with lower-paid foreign workers, as there are limited ways that the middle-sized US company can hire or take advantage of cheaper foreign labor. But with the H1B visas, that middle-sized company can hire a consulting/contracting company that hires a bunch of H1B workers from India, and that US guy now has to worry about it, when in the absence of H1B visas, neither company would have the option to hire anyone but US workers.
That’s what’s frustrating a lot of us; not only are US IT workers threatened by lower-cost foreign labor, but US companies and the government are greasing the skids to help it happen.
And… protectionist or not, I don’t think the US (or any other wealthy country really) has any obligation to uplift the developing world at the expense of its own workforce, which is essentially what bldysabba is advocating.
Have worked in IT for around 30 years. More than half for a large financial services company. Back in the mid 2000’s managers were all told that many positions had to be filled ‘overseas’ IE, India. We would interview dozens candidates for positions that required a fairly high degree of technical knowledge - you could hear them typing the questions into Google while they ‘thought’ about it. Then they would give some canned answer that often made no sense. And they couldn’t elaborate when asked to. The quality of work went down, but the company saved money. Yay.
I’ve worked for several other companies since then and the number of Indian IT workers has tripled from what it used to be. I’ve also gone on multiple job interviews where the hiring manager was Indian. I never once got the job, and these days I always ask the hiring manager’s name first. If it’s Indian, I don’t even bother trying.
I work in a fairly specific area of IT so finding a job has never been an issue, but instead of being able to pick where I want to work, it generally takes 3-4 applications due to the amount of competition.
Companies like Microsoft have complained to Congress that they can’t find enough American IT workers to fill open positions. Bullshit. They just can’t find American’s with an MBA willing to work for 80k a year. And Congress has bent over and allowed them to do what they want, as usual.
I live in a smallish town near a big city. Entire neighborhoods around where we live have gradually become all Indian. New developments spring up and every house is sold almost immediately to Indian buyers. Typically parents, kids, grandparents, and extended family pool their money, buy a big house and all live together. The kids go to local schools of course (as do mine), and it is general knowledge that the Indian kids are smart, but they also cheat. A lot.
So the top spots in US colleges are are now going to Indian kids who are taught that they must do everything they can to get the best grades. Don’t believe me? Look at how many ‘tutoring’ centers have sprung up in the past 5-10 years. These places teach kids to do well on standardized tests by rote learning.
I’m not bitter, I realize that things change, but the standard of living in the US has gone down and salaries (especially for IT workers) have been stagnant for the past 10 years and the US Congress is squarely to blame.
And at the other end of the scale from the corps bringing in workers on the cheap via H1-B visas, some HR types are running H1-B fraud schemes. It’s becoming apparent that the H1-B visa program is rife for abuse, and is being abused on a massive scale. The fraudsters in the article cited made $21 million. Nice money if you can get it.
What I am advocating for is a lack of hypocrisy in stated positions. You cannot claim to be driven by compassion if you only feel compassion for your own countrymen (especially when said countrymen are significantly better off than those you are trying to keep off the ladder). You cannot claim to be driven by or driving free trade principles while protecting your own markets. You cannot claim I’m the one supporting open borders like no country has ever done before when you live in a country that is the biggest beneficiary of immigration the world has ever seen.
You can say we’re looking out for ourselves and those worse off than us can suck it, and I’ll leave you alone.
ETA: Except of course, for pointing out that by being protectionist, you’re not actually looking out for yourselves, but that’s all I’ll say. Promise.
What I’m getting from this is that true compassion and support for one’s fellow citizens are not even in mere conflict – they literally cannot exist in the same person.
