Limiting or changing that minimum has had traction on the left before this. Sanders had H1B visa reform, including wage raises, in his platform. It fits with some of Trump’s rhetoric and a quick search shows he supports it. A quick check with an inflation calculator shows the original wage floor if adjusted for inflation would be at a touch over $116k. It’s not that big of a raise over what the program started with in real dollars.
I’d be surprised if this, or a slightly amended version, doesn’t get bipartisan support and end up law.
I would be for this program especially if we had another program that was basically a complete reversal of H-1B, i.e. that allowed and required you to become a citizen and full-time resident. We may or may not have a problem with too many people coming in without productive skills, I really don’t know, and we also may or may not have a problem with people with productive skills coming in and working for rock bottom rates and returning back to their countries with money and experience, but I’d have no problem if we let more skilled immigrants come in an stay in America since it will lead to a more skilled workforce on a permanent basis.
How would conservatives who oppose legally imposed minimum wage/wage floors for workers in general justify legally imposing a wage floor for this particular group of workers?
I can definitely see why that kind of market-distorting artificial-job-requirements practices would need to be reformed. What I don’t see is how trying to reform it with a wage floor would be logically consistent with opposing wage floors for non-elite jobs.
If it was me, I’d just make it so you have to pay half the difference to the government. So sure, you can exploit the H-1B visa by firing an American worker and hiring a foreigner for $70k, but you’ll be paying $30k per year to support your ex-employee’s welfare.
Actually, this will be a great way to expose Trump before his followers. Since he has promised to be the greatest jobs President in the history of everything he should support this measure wholeheartedly. However, the corporate overlords of the Republican Party should fight this tooth and nail, as it would raise wages. So, either it passes, but puts a bigger wedge between Trump and the Republicans, or it fails and Trump is exposed as a the good old boy that we know he is.
Whatever Trump thinks, the Republicans in Congress would be solidly against it. And Trump is easily rolled by the right on stuff like this: take his oft-repeated pledge that he would let Medicare use its purchasing power to negotiate drug prices way down. Trump just met with a bunch of Pharma execs and lobbyists, and now he’s totally changed his tune, saying Medicare shouldn’t be allowed to engage in “price-fixing.”
Think he’ll fight the GOP over H-1B visas, which is something I’m sure he’s thought very little about, compared to Medicare and drug prices? I sure don’t.
I mean - I covered that in my post. H1B is supposed to be about importing workers with a set of skills that can’t be found in the US. Instead, it’s mostly used for cheap labor. Putting the wage floor puts an end to the “cheap labor” uses for it, bringing it in line with its intended purpose.
That’s logically independent of a general minimum wage, since it’s essentially just about fixing a program used in an unintended way, rather than some sort of general stance on minimum wages.
To add to this…near as I can tell…what Trump may be thinking to do is giving priority to the best paid workers seeking an H-1B visa. In such a manner the high paid jobs are filled first and there will be few or no visas left available to cheap labor.
That is what they are supposed to do. At a couple of the companies I have worked for, that meant posting a paper notice about the job on a physical bulletin board in places where it was unlikely to be seen and read. Both of these companies had job postings on their internal web sites, but the H-1B jobs never seemed to appear there.
When the “particular group of workers” are foreigners brought in specifically to take jobs away from Americans, I think Conservatives can easily get on board.
Because it deals with American workers against foreign workers.
Let’s put it this way. In Conservative view, foreign policy/foreign trade/immigration policy is in the purview of the government. Regulating what a business pays its workers isn’t.
I can understand that. But how can they put a dollar figure threshold for this? $130k may still be “cheap labor” if it’s an engineers with >10 years of experience in exactly the kind of work the company is looking for. But it’s an outrageous amount for a scientist straight out of grad school.
H-1B was never meant to be for hiring foreign workers straight out of grad school. We have plenty of those here in the US.
It was meant for hiring people with high skills that could not be easily gotten in the US (i.e. there may be people with those skills in the US but already employed by someone else).
Even when the imported worker fills a difficult to fill hole they may be underpaid. In my case, I got the job over the American candidates thanks to the hiring team threatening the hiring manager with “Japanese strike” (following the rules to the letter) if he didn’t interview me and to actually being way more qualified than any other applicant. I’d already been part of the project as an “end user (whose team has pretty much taken over the rollout)” for half a year by that time the position in the core team opened up; several of the processes being implemented had been designed by me total or partially.
But the way the “salary conversion” was done… the TLDR version is, I should have been at the mid-high range of level 11 salary based on knowledge and performance, I got paid at the bottom of level 7. For the long version, see below.
The salary levels in Spain for that sector are 12. In the US for the mothership company, 16. The job I had in Spain was a level 5 (no level ranges, everybody with that job title, in every single company in the country, is called a level 5); comparable positions in the US were 7-9 and a comparison of specific duties would have put me at a 9; this wasn’t taken into account, I was treated as a level 5 period. The new position was a US level 9-11; since the company had a policy of never jumping someone more than two levels at a step, I was assigned a US level 7. The salary levels in Spain don’t have a salary range, they have a salary point plus bonuses: I was counted as being at the lowest level of the nonexistant range for effects of conversion to US ranges (ehm, you know, while it is literally true that I was at the lowest point, it is also literally true I was at the highest point), but since the bonuses didn’t have a US equivalent with direct-translation names I lost them. For example, I had a “seniority bonus” which increased every year depending on my performance of the previous year, instead of having a “yearly raise” depending on my performance of the previous year; different names for the same thing, but in the conversion I lost it.
Why did I take it? It still was better than going back to the old weekend-shift lab tech job, under a new foreman who hated college-educated people and a new lab-manager hired over me because he “had a better leadership profile” (the selection company involved never proposes a woman for a management position).
It’s a program that has drawn the attention of many of them for reform already. Even Ted “More conservative than everyone…just ask him” Cruz and Jeff Sessions have sponsored legislation raising that wage (to 110k in December 2015). I think it’s safe to assume at least some House Freedom Caucus support for similar moves.
On the Senate side Grassley, as Judiciary Committee chair (which for whatever reason is where these bills go) has tried to reform the program in other ways that would likely increase costs as well. He’s reintroduced/repackaged some of what he’s done as S.180 which still doesn’t have text published on Congress’ legislation tracking sight. From this, probably premature till the text is there, news story in India Times:
I can’t see a clear position on Ryan or McConnell which will affect how people fall into line. (Don’t try to look too hard for Ryan since there’s tons of Tea Party hate for him over expanding the numbers of visas in 2015. :D) They obviously will have big effects. This really isn’t an issue where the GOP is marching in lockstep in opposition to changes that would make that labor more expensive though.
The fashion industry relies on malnourished foreign women to model their new clothing lines … can you imagine the overhead of all those air brush artists if we only had [deleted] American women to pick from?
IT companies are going to pay $60k a year … whether they bring workers into the USA … or ship the work out … either way, they’re going to pay $60k a year …
But that’s exactly what this proposal would do: regulate what a business pays its workers.
Why, on the same grounds, shouldn’t we legislate that, say, US textile manufacturers have to pay a certain minimum wage to their workers, to prevent their offshoring factories to cheaper locales with low-paid foreign workers specifically to take jobs away from Americans?
This is starting to look awfully like “we have to protect the jobs of the high-tech elites but don’t care about the jobs of the working class”.