I’m not blaming them; I’m blaming our government for letting our companies employ them in favor of US workers.
The dodge that’s going on is a little more subtle than “Companies are hiring H1-B people to undercut US workers”. In the IT realm, it’s more like “Companies are outsourcing IT functions to consulting companies… who are competitive because they hire swarms of H1-B workers at depressed rates.”
And using Eva Luna’s pay scale, I’m guessing the H1-B people are saying the going rate is that level 1 rate of 47k/yr, even though the average is around the Level 3 rate, which implies that there are a LOT of Level 4 and higher paid people, or nearly everyone is at that Level 3 rate.
It’s nice that you’re now broadening your expressed attitude on the issue beyond “economists agree free trade good protectionism bad so u r dumb & wrong”, but it took some probing and cites of more nuanced and complex discussions to get us there.
Once again, though, “at some point” we’re all dead. If the higher-paid workers who benefit from an inefficiency vis-a-vis lower-paid workers in a less developed country can manage to stave off "elimination of the inefficiency’’ for their own working lifetimes, it makes sound practical economic sense for them to do so, from their point of view.
It is kind of an eyeroller how nobody ever seems to expect wealthy CEOs to forego free-market-distorting inefficiencies that are financially beneficial to them personally for the sake of the greater public economic good. Whereas workers, on the other hand, are constantly being scolded for selfishness and shortsightedness when they oppose economic measures that will hurt them personally in the short run.
One place where there is wiggle room is underclassifying a job and/or hiring someone overqualified for the job. For example, hiring a fresh master’s grad at the Level 1 rate, but stating that the job is actually entry-level. But H-1B workers, in my 15+ years of experience preparing H-1B petitions, tend to be people at the beginning of their careers, so they will naturally be lower on the pay scale. Oversimplifying a bit, there’s a 6-year cumulative maximum in H-1B status, so if you haven’t reached a certain point in the green card process by then, you either need to find some other kind of immigration status or leave the U.S. So you won’t find, for example, people 20 years into their careers in H-1B status for the most part.
Can you read? Did you read your own cites? You know what, never mind. Thanks for letting me know what kind of poster you are. Please proceed with your non sequiturs and straw men to your heart’s delight.
Those numbers are at least 5-15K low. We can’t hire people at those salaries here in Tallahassee - which has a lower COL than Orlando.
One of the tricks Disney and other companies use is that they don’t hire H1-B workers. They “outsource” to a company that hires H1-B. I believe this is specifically to get around the “you have to pay H1-Bs the same as the people they replace” requirement.
ETA: No, Disney has not reversed their decision in Orlando. They cancelled a planned additional round of layoffs in New York.
Other countries aen’t going to leave you the specialized technical niches or the management position for long, anyway.
And as it’s extremely often pointed out, not everybody can work in specialized niches or management. By definition, there can be only a minority of people in such positions. And besides, half of the people are less intelligent than the average, half of the people are less able to manage a career track than the average, etc…
So, some people, on an individual basis, can make themselves more valuable. The wide majority won’t be able to. I can’t see how the citizens of western countries, as a whole, could not see their standard of living go down when the standards of living in other countries goes up.
Some are going to say that it’s not a zero sum game, that the pie is growing larger, etc…but it’s not growing remotely quickly enough to ensure that we could keep those standards of living. And besides, there’s a blatantly obvious trend all over the world, in China as in the USA as in Sweden, in countries with a robust growth as well as in stagnating countries : income and wealth inequalities are increasing quickly. Even when it becomes larger, a minority gets larger and larger shares of the pie, and a majority gets smaller and smaller shares of it.
Well, talk to the DOL about that. Those figures are based on info that is published annually in July, and gathered before that. Of course numbers fluctuate over time, especially in a volatile economy. For some jobs (yes, including IT jobs) here in Chicago, last July’s numbers were significantly down from the year before. Others weren’t. And the figures are based on salary surveys, not cost of living.
I agree that this is a totally sucky tactic. And depending on what proportion of the consulting company’s employees are H-1B workers, they are also supposed to attest that the consultants are not displacing U.S. workers. I have absolutely no problem with better enforcement of that kind of thing.
And believe me, petitions for IT consultants are scrutinized quite closely these days, even for those who are not working for large job shops of the sort that tends to displace U.S. workers. I’ve done H-1Bs recently for a small local IT consulting company that has a lot of bona fide, competitively bid contracts with local government orgs that simply don’t have - and do not wish to acquire - staff with this person’s specific expertise (the employer has less than 50 employees). We just did a 2nd H-1B extension for an employee, and for the 3rd time, USCIS has requested documentation of exactly what projects he will be assigned to, who his supervisor will be and whether that person is also an employee of the petitioning employer, his role on each project, and its end date. I feel like it’s Groundhog Day.
[It’s already capped.](It’s already capped.) 65,000 annually (with some very limited exceptions for higher education employers), plus an additional 20,000 for people with master’s and higher-level degrees awarded by U.S. institutions.
I think this story is news only because it happened at Disney. Corporations I’ve worked for have been abusing the H1-B process for at least 20 years: always petitioning congress to raise the limits, because of a “shortage” of qualified workers…and using it to replace well-paid Americans with underpaid Indians.
I suspect that one reason Disney is retreating, besides the bad press, is that the Silicon Valley companies pushing for a raise in the cap were pissed at this action. It is hard to say they need a raise because of the shortage of workers when a bunch of the visas are used to replace workers.
There are definitely cases when H1Bs are used to fill jobs for which there are shortages, and using them to employ people we’ve trained in grad school makes a lot of sense. But the majority of the H1B pool is gobbled up by Indian contracting companies. They’re not the ones testifying before congress on shortages, of course.