Again, this proposal has nothing to do with minimum wage. It is about reforming an existing program that has ubiquitous abuse and loopholes that allowed companies to exploit it for their own gain by flooding entire industries with cheap labor under false pretenses.
We don’t have open borders either and neither does any country on earth. All it is saying is that, if you need to import workers because of some claimed special need, you better be prepared to pay dearly for it. American workers can still be paid anything that the market will bear and that will probably be much lower than $130k in most cases.
We do not know what the proposal will do. Unfortunately I forgot where I read it but the guess was the executive order would likely mandate that visas go to the highest paid workers first then work their way down.
Remember there are only something like 65,000 visas available by law.
In this fashion no one is mandating a salary floor BUT companies who try to use it for cheap labor will find that difficult as they are snapped up by better paying jobs.
In other words, it’s not okay to use a visa program to take jobs away from American high-tech workers and give them to cheaper foreign labor. But it is okay to use offshoring to take jobs away from American blue-collar workers and give them to cheaper foreign labor.
I’m not seeing the alleged principled consistency in this.
ISTM that if the point is that H1-B visas aren’t actually necessary in most cases because there’s an adequate pool of American workers, then the solution is to restrict the number of H1-B visas available, rather than putting a high price tag on them. Take the allegedly unnecessary special permissions for foreign labor out of the equation, and let the domestic job market set its own salaries.
That is not what I am saying at all. It is two completely different subjects. IT has a huge outsourcing problem as well that I assume this specific measure won’t address but that is beside the point. The H-1B visa abuse problem is fairly easy to fix and “low hanging fruit”. Any progress on those types of issues is better than the status quo. The H-1B visa issue is important because it will send a signal to companies to stop trying to weasel around existing labor laws. Many of the abuses are very literally criminal and probably prosecutable but they have been allowed to ignore it for so long that they think they can do whatever they want (and rightfully so at least until now).
There are similar issues as well. Another rampant practice is treating long-term employees as contractors to get out of paying benefits. Microsoft got slapped down hard for that a number of years ago but it is still common practice. That is why I don’t trust Microsoft’s opinion on such matters. I am sure the other tech giants do similar things.
No, it wouldn’t. It would regulate which workers the business could bring from abroad (that is, only ones that they can pay $130K+ to). That is immigration policy.
Because American political parties are coalitions, and the people who oppose minimum wage laws are largely not the same ones who oppose mass immigration, they just share a common foe (liberalism).
For that matter, opposition to immigration wasn’t even a partisan issue until around 2006 (i.e. opponents of mass immigration were roughly evenly split between parties).
As a person who has to hire in the tech industry, the hard and cold truth is that while there are lots of applicants for the jobs we have there are very few with the analytical skills.
Due to our anti-intellectual culture and with the religious right’s multi-decade assault on schools it is really really hard to find Americans that are qualified.
Remember in tech that it is more about your ability to adapt, learn and be analytical that are the core skills required. The for profit college model, and the push for certs doesn’t help this out either as it teaches students how to use a product vs why they are doing something.
As high speed internet has broken most of the barriers of remote working and because most newer tech is cloud based (private/hybrid/public) really what this will do is drive jobs offshore.
This may result in pushing high tech areas to grow faster around the world than they already are, add in the fears about protectionist policies and I don’t think this is going to have the intended effect.
As a person who had to work with the foreign hires in the software industry, the hard and cold truth is that for lots of the ones I met (maybe most) both analytical and professional skills were subpar. And maybe it’s cultural, but the lack of initiative (that is, going even a tiny bit beyond what had to be very precisely specified to them) was appalling.
But when you could hire four foreign “programmers” for the price of one US programmer… Somehow projects got done. Not well, but they got done.
It is illegal to not offer the prevaling wage for H1B applicants, and it is a PITA and thus this is purely a protectionist policy.
But I would ask how long ago this was and if you were in enterprise software with legacy languages.
While I am not an agile zealot that fixed a lot of the issues if you set up the process correctly or it is easy to fix.
The problem that I have is finding people who can adjust do distributed systems etc…to the point that I only ask a few questions about what someone knows in an interview and spend most of my time seeing if they know where to find info and how they work through problems.
With an already tight job market, I would hire college fresh workers with no reservations, and I do and they are some of the best producers and innovators we have. That said we do have to resort to H1B occasionally. But more and more we are just building foreign offices because we have to. I hate VTC and I hate timezone drift but with cloud workflows, pull based SCM etc… This industry will offshore with no problem.
In the 90’s things were very different, but countries around the world put lots of investment in education and after the .com crash killed the domestic flow of new talent things changed at least in my experience.
I was going to write a long rebuttal to some prior posts but you hit the nail on the head. I have worked for many mega-corps and my conversion rate for staffing is 3 or 4 foreign workers (especially India) = 1 American IT worker. That isn’t some jingoistic bullshit either. I would be thrilled if I could get anyone to do a good job no matter where they came from but the failure rate for foreign IT workers is abysmal.
It isn’t consistent though. Sometimes you will get lucky and get a couple of really good foreign workers on a project and sometimes you will just crap out with none and have to restaff after everything has failed. The problem is that non-IT managers and executives do not understand this at all. They think it is like getting people to build a dam with sandbags for the lowest price. It doesn’t work that way.
That isn’t that surprising. The U.S. invented the vast majority of the IT industry and has generations of home-grown talent in it. It is absurd to think that third world countries have loads of students that can just take a few classes (that they probably cheated in because rote memorization is the norm) and expect to do better.
It is like suggesting you try to outsource Hollywood to Bollywood just because workers get paid less there. I have nothing against the thousands of Indians (or Russians, Argentinians and many more) that I have worked with over the years but they aren’t superior in any way. They are just cheap and exploitable.
There is no reason to have a special visa program for jobs that can be easily filled by existing Americans and many of them are not that expensive either.
As an Ex-Disney worker, they fired people and hired IBM to do IT for more money, that failed, then they hired people, rinse repeat.
No visibility into Toys ‘R’ Us but Disney just does reorg after reorg, outsource to in-source etc…because they are throwing things at the wall to see what sticks (Read the upper management isn’t that good)
It easily could have been around a misguided attempt to bust up silos and fiefdoms. The money they were looking to save may very well happened by having DroneA go over and talk to DronB to solve a problem vs buying an enterprise solution so they had someone to blame when it broke (at much higher costs)
But typically a lot of those changes often indicate an upper management issue with communication or micromanaging that either encourages waste or gets in the way of getting projects done.
But that is true in general.
But without a direct statement that it was to save money on wages there is no way to know the root cause.
Ya Disney was outsourcing in the story you were refrencing.
They were probably looking to save money by using a more efficient org. But to be clear those people would have lost their jobs with any outsourcing company, the fact that the company they chose had H1B workers is irrelevant in that fact.
I worked at an earlier outsourcing effort but ya, Disney IT was expensive and slow due to bad working methods. I think the company should have fixed those but VPs like to shift blame too.
Same thing with the Cloud, once you get to a medium size you can run self hosted for cheaper in most cases but people move to “the cloud” because they are throwing things at the wall (Re my previous post about people not understanding “why” they do things)
Here is a cite on the earlier failed outsourcing effort.
Note that is in 2005
And the outsourcing effort that was in the media relating to H1Bs was a decade later.
I wasn’t in their CorpIT area but it is a huge problem where even if people are not siloed or have other cultural issues they can still become inefficient due to cargo culting, the sunk cost fallacy or religious product/vendor preferences.
Or management may suck at their job. But with the Out-sourcing firm doubling or tripling wages when passing them through to the customer the only way they can compete on cost is being more efficient.
It is always cheaper and better to do this in house at that scale but there are 1000s of things that may block that happening.
But it is always good to google for this before accepting a job at a company as it will show more about the dysfunctional quotient of org far better than any interview question will.
One exception. Almost every Russian programmer - well, from what used to be USSR - (I mostly worked with them remotely, they were in Russia) was pretty good and some were excellent.
I am told that’s because of decades of working on subpar equipment in 70s/80s/90s but being expected to produce good software. Don’t know if that fully explains it.
This article is so full of misconceptions that I don’t know where to start.
H-1B visas can be, and are, used for any profession that requires a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in a specific field/fields, or the foreign equivalent. A relatively large proportion of H-1B holders are IT workers, but not all by a long shot. I was just trying to calm down a panicking university professor today who knows that his employer can’t in any way afford to pay him that much.
There is no set minimum wage for H-1B visas; the employer is required to pay the prevailing wage for the position, geographic location, and level (roughly by seniority according to the minimum education and experience requirement for the job).
The $60,000 figure refers to the salary level at which the employer is exempt from certain compliance attestation requirements. It has nothing to do with a requirement to pay the worker that much to begin with.
Someone ought to teach a course on immigration to journalists who cover these issues. And to the legislators who try to “improve” it, for that matter.
Any minimum slary requirement will just move the jobs offshore - in which case you not only lose the Indian programmer, you’ve lost the U.S. citizen manager, project manager and business analyst.
Come to think of it, I have found that true as well. The vast majority of the rest of IT people from other countries are terrible but I have never met a bad Russian programmer. My friend Oleg was the only one that could solve some problems that I couldn’t and there have been many more like him. Let’s not give Putin and Trump any ideas though.
There is no current legal requirement to do that for an H-1B visa except in the case of H-1B dependent employers.
IMHO salary is a ridiculous way to determine who is most deserving of an H-1B employee. The H-1B program is used by universities, nonprofits, medical research companies…salary is not the sole determinant of a worker’s intrinsic value.
With all due respect due to your occupation, there is no “deserve” except for extremely hard to fill skills and even those are usually temporary. The H-1B visa is not meant to be a virtue contest anymore than it is meant to be a way for companies to hire workers at substandard rates when plenty of native workers are ready, willing and able to do the same job. The U.S. is already overloaded with many of the best colleges and universities in the world and has people representing virtually every conceivable specialty.
The H-1B process is supposed to be used for very rare skills that cannot be found elsewhere. If colleges, universities, nonprofits and medical research facilities cannot find someone domestically to do a given job then their salary and expectations are unrealistic because there are always plenty of recent college grads willing to take almost anything to get experience. Contrary to some beliefs, young Americans will do almost anything as long as you give enough money to have a bed to sleep in and enough food to eat.
Whatever happened to job training? If you need to bring in someone from Mexico or Malaysia to do a relatively prestigious job for a few years before you send them back, that is a huge problem on its own on many different levels.
