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Microsoft Says H-1B Workers Among Those Losing Jobs
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 27, 2009 08:23 AM
from the define-'fair' dept.
from the define-'fair' dept.
CWmike notes that after a US Senator urged Microsoft to lay off H-1B workers first, Microsoft says it is cutting a 'significant number' of foreign workers as part of the layoff it announced last week. But experts say there is nothing in the law requiring a company to cut the jobs of H-1B workers before US workers. David Kussin, an immigration attorney, said, 'In fact, the law is very well designed to say that you have to treat H-1Bs the same as US citizens in all regards.' Another H-1B critic, UC Davis professor Norman Matloff, said the Senator's letter would help their fight. 'If Microsoft doesn't state that they will lay off the H-1Bs first — and they won't state this — then it would be awfully tough for Bill Gates to come back to the Hill and urge an H-1B increase, wouldn't it?'"
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Your Rights Online: Senator Prods Microsoft On H-1B Visas After Layoff Plans 574 comments
CWmike writes "US Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told Microsoft this week that US citizens should get priority over H-1B visa holders as the software vendor moves forward on its plan to cut 5,000 jobs. 'These work visa programs were never intended to allow a company to retain foreign guest workers rather than similarly qualified American workers, when that company cuts jobs during an economic downturn,' Grassley wrote in a letter sent Thursday to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The letter asked Microsoft to detail the types of jobs that will be eliminated and how those cuts will affect the company's H-1B workers."
Reader theodp adds, "On Friday, Microsoft coincidentally announced it would postpone construction of a planned $500 million data center in Grassley's home state of Iowa, although work on data centers in Chicago and Dublin will continue."
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Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an easy thing to fix - require that H1B visa holders receive the same pay and benefits for their work as the rest of the workforce. If companies really have problems finding citizens to fill jobs, and aren't just trolling for lower paid wage slaves, then it ought not to be a problem, right?
Man, I'd love to see the tech industry try to talk its way out of that.
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Then let it be fair... (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean if you do not see why a company should pay more for my services when someone is willing to do it for less, then I would like to see the following:
Microsoft should outsource management or hire H-1B visa personnel for management positions as well. It will be cheaper for the company too. How about that?
Parent
Re:Then let it be fair... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure some CEOs are worthless turds, but I'm sure there are others that *are* worth their exorbitant salaries. I mean, businesses fail all the time. In a competitive market, it's not like companies have a whole lot of cash to throw around for things that don't return the investment. The argument that CEO salaries are typically so huge that just one could pay for an n-dollar raise for all the other employees actually highlights my point - Unless *every* single company is engaging in some sort of "CEO Salary collusion," the ones who pay big money for turd-CEOs instead of more, or better paid workers, or else a CEO that performs, will fail.
Personal incredulity that, "one person can't possibly make such a big difference to justify those salaries," isn't really a valid argument. I mean, really? *You* could run GE, or Microsoft, or Lockheed-Martin, or whatever just as well as anyone? That's what everyone who's never led, or been close to the top-level leadership of an organization thinks...
Parent
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't understand why a company should "hire locally" first when its not in its best interest to do so.
I didn't used to see why either but somebody who is wiser than I am put it this way: Michael Dell is too cheap to pay for the country that created him
In other words, the United States (for all it's pluses and minuses) got Microsoft/Dell/etc going, why aren't they giving back to the United States? I'm not some hippie liberal douche but I tend to believe that there are more important things than the bottom line. We owe it to future generations not to undercut our own population in the perpetual search for lower wages.
I would also say that this applies to consumers as well as to CEOs. If you aren't willing to buy anything more expensive than the cheap plastic shit sold at Wal-Mart then you are part of the problem.
(And before I get modded troll the 'hippie liberal douche' remark is a South Park reference)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Here I was thinking that our society is supposed to be built on competition. If you can create a scompany that can compete and be successful then that's good.
Why should it be different for a country? If they can't compete by providing the skilled labour necessary why should a company be forced into 'purchasing' the less skilled labor?
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should it be different for a country? If they can't compete by providing the skilled labour necessary why should a company be forced into 'purchasing' the less skilled labor?
Because it's not fair when companies can shop all around the world for the cheapest prices on necessities (e.g. labor), while the common US citizen cannot shop all around the world for the cheapest prices on necessities, such as food, housing, education and health care. In other words, the competition is between US employers and US labor, and the employers have an unfair advantage.
Parent
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Interesting)
People look at me like I'm a friggen lepper when I say I don't shop at WalMart sans crisis.
Buying import crap (literal meaning) is almost unavoidable in some cases. In other cases you can find import crap (figurative) that is better made. I do try to buy American/Canadian especially for food products (often cheaper, always seasonal), and my art supplies tend to be from the UK or Germany. Where I do willingly stoop to Chinese knock-off quality is glassware for the kids chemistry set, and even then I buy the higher end. My personal glassware is all "proper" German and American glass. I try to buy at least American owned company computer components.
But to quit rambling:
Country of origin is not always a choice, but is one often enough that the consumer *should* pay attention. In addition to steering money to American companies, often the build quality is so much better that you will not be needing to replace that POS a year or so down the road. (My German(?) built toaster is serviceable for contact wear, is your Chinese one?
-nB
Parent
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Informative)
Shopping around the world for labor and materials ultimately lowers the price of goods.
No it doesn't; it increases the profit margin of the people providing the goods. Why on Earth would they lower prices when they're making good money? Demand is not perfectly elastic in the real world (especially for necessities like food, housing, health care, etc.), so lowering the price won't necessarily make a seller more money by increasing the amount demanded. Therefore, it's in their best interests to just pocket the money, and that's exactly what they do.
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Re:B*cough*s*it (Score:5, Informative)
No, actually they can't. Take a look into the rules those countries have in place to protect their workers from immigrants.
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Re:B*cough*s*it (Score:5, Insightful)
There are no work visas to apply for if you want to move to India.
None, zero, zip.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Interesting)
Here I was thinking that our society is supposed to be built on competition
Ah, the dog eat dog extreme of the far right. Eventually people will wake up and realize that it's no better than the "from each according to his ability to each according to his need" extreme of the far left.
I wasn't advocating for a socialist solution. I was bemoaning the fact that the Michael Dell's of the world grew up with all of the advantages that the United States offers and can't even bother to employ American workers to answer their goddamn tech support numbers. They've taken all of the advantages that American society offered while contributing as little as possible in return. You may respect that but I don't -- and it's this extreme that business has shifted to in the last few decades that has emboldened the far-left into seeking further expansions of the nanny state that will eventually erode our competitiveness on the global stage.
Read up about welfare capitalism sometime. Read up about the CEOs of yesteryear that sought a square deal for their workers and in so doing helped to create a market for their products. Everybody won to a certain extent. Now we've traded that all away for the cheapest labor or the cheapest stamped plastic POS product that breaks every 12 months.
why should a company be forced into 'purchasing' the less skilled labor?
At no point in my post did I advocate for forcing anybody into doing anything. I was bemoaning what we've become -- not advocating for any specific solution. So nice way to distract from my underlying point.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:4, Insightful)
Too late; we've been sold out to China. Globalization tends toward global equality. There simply isn't enough available energy (because we haven't invested in efficiency and improved harvesting and energy management) for us all to live at current American standards. The American lifestyle depends on cheap energy of all flavors; we have not been paying the real cost of energy -- the cash equivalent of the energy deficit we have accumulated makes the budgets of the world's governments look feeble. Once we get a few places in America down to *average* Chinese or Indian village standards this will be clear.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
The people laid off should be the ones with the lowest skill-set, regardless of their location. Or does equality only apply domestically?
If companies lay off their best employees (foreign or domestic) because they're the most expensive to keep on board, those companies will suffer in the long-term, which is good for exactly zero people. I'd argue that companies have been forced to do this in order to help the short-term bottom line for idiotic shareholders who refuse to see R&D as a good thing because it doesn't bring in revenue next week, but it's that kind of stupidity that brought us this situation in the first place.
I'd like to think that most companies aren't so short-sighted to think that getting rid of their highest-paid employees is a good idea in the long term, but they've been forced into a position where they have to do so because it makes the shareholders happy. It's the asshole day-traders trying to ride the stock market to immediate infinite riches that are killing your precious American jobs.
Yes, I'm saying that Americans are causing their own replacement by H-1B foreign workers. Blame Wall St., blame the guys with the annoying accents doing your tech support, blame whoever the hell you want. I'm blaming all of the people happy to get rich at anyone else's expense, probably including whoever manages your 401k.
Parent
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
I blame the inequality of the current system. Give H1B's more rights and this becomes a level playing field. As it is, companies have h1b's by the balls.
Parent
Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:5, Informative)
So medical doctors would be the richest people in the world. I can choose to go without a car. I can choose not to use roads. I can choose to raise my own food and make my own clothes. However, when I get very sick, I can either find a doctor and pay them whatever they want, or die. Sure, if I want to hold strongly to my beliefs, I can tell the doctor to go screw themselves. However, death is kind of a big deal. You don't get to change your mind.
Plus, this was the attitude that allowed Crassus to become one of the richest people in history. His fire brigade would show up at your house fire and refuse to work unless you sold him everything for pennies on the dollar. Again, I could hold to my beliefs and watch it burn, or I could sell it and salvage something from the fire.
Parent
Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:5, Interesting)
You seem to think that medical doctors would be able to set arbitrarily high prices and people would have no choice but to pay them. That would not happen because people have a choice about which doctor to go to.
If doctors were making insane amounts of money then more people would become doctors, which means more competition and lower prices. So, medical doctors would not necessarily be the richest people in the world by any stretch of the imagination.
However, in a pure market system there would be people that could not get care (as there are now) because they are unable to pay the market price. Free markets maximize overall wealth (barring externalities), not the number of products sold or people served.
If this is unacceptable, which it may very well be in this case, then that is your argument for why health care should not be subject to the free market, NOT because doctors might get rich.
You'd better be damn careful that what you replace it with actually is better. Doctors must be paid enough to get the best people. I sure as hell don't want to be under the knife of some second rate surgeon kept on by some government bureaucracy.
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Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, if one espouses and believes a philosophy that says that "Whatever I can do to make myself more money at the expense of the group is both moral and reasonable", well, you wind up with the current GOP ideology of selfishness and greed and you can see where that has gotten us.
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Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:4, Insightful)
Could you be any more petty and childish? Surely you can't believe that the Republican ideology is 'DO WHATEVER YOU CAN TO MAKE MONEY AT THE EXPENSE OF THE GROUP!'. No one has ever stated that, and it's as ridiculous and stereotypical as believing that every Democrat is a tree hugging homosexual. I'm sure some of you don't hug trees.
Republicans, and even libertarians believe that nobody should be able to make money by fraud. Your hypothetical 'Expense of the Group' example is retarded, and what brought this house of cards crashing down was low interest rates by the government, and forced home loans to people who didn't deserve it. While the propaganda to blame free markets has been plentiful, repeating a lie doesn't make it true.
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Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:5, Insightful)
Republicans, and even libertarians believe that nobody should be able to make money by fraud.
Look at the legacy of the Bush administration. The reality does not reflect your arguments. Roll back regulation, roll back enforcement, protect the guilty, victory at any cost. If the president does it, it is legal. To the victor goes the spoils. Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. Who is John Galt? I am, motherfucker.
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Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, if one espouses and believes a philosophy that says that "Whatever I can do to make myself more money at the expense of the group is both moral and reasonable", well, you wind up with the current GOP ideology of selfishness and greed and you can see where that has gotten us.
Thank you, you hit it right on the head. The part of Ayn's ideas that makes sense at first blush is "Hey, don't take from me what I created, let me choose to do what I want with it." That goes right back to the American Revolution with "Taxation without representation is tyranny." Yes, taxes are the price we pay for a civil society but a civil society would also let us say what should be done with it.
The part that Ayn completely misses is capturing the true costs and debts represented by a society. Her heroes are idealized men who never quite existed in the real world, only in the adventure pulps. Her heroes are like Doc Sampson, Johnny Quest's dad, Rusty Venture's dad, etc. You could sit them down on a desert island with nothing but coconuts and surly natives and five years later he'd have a modern society and space travel. This just doesn't happen in the real world.
In the real world, the Edison's and Gates' and other robber-barons are building their empires upon the groundwork laid by society. Public money paid for the national defense so they aren't growing up as slave labor for a foreign power. Public education provided for them, likely not for their own schooling but the schooling of their employees. Imagine if they were to set up shop in Haiti and had to start educating their workforce in the ABC's before they could ever get to producing things of value!
A healthy economy is like an ecosystem. The plants grow, get eaten by something that gets eaten by something eventually eaten by the apex predator. The apex predator dies, decays, and the biomass enters the ecology once more.
The problem with the Randites is they simply don't want to play fair. They'll gussy up their arguments with all sorts of sophistry but the fact of the matter is they're greedy and don't want to pay their fair share.
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Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:5, Insightful)
You miss the whole point of those tax breaks. The states didn't sacrifice anything to attract his business there. If they hadn't offered tax breaks, they wouldn't receive ANY tax revenue from Dell because the company wouldn't have set up shop there. It was a calculated decision by the state that resulted in a large net gain in tax revenue, and a net gain in employment, regardless of the makeup of that employment, and it was an agreement entered into willingly by both parties. Dell has no obligation to the state beyond that.
I sincerely hope that people with such attitudes never buy imported products. It's always easy to criticize others' decisions to use their own resources in the most efficient manner, but when the tables are turned they claw for rationalizations to make themselves exceptions to their rule.
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Re:WHO IS JOHN GALT? (Score:4, Insightful)
And how successful would the US be without these businesses?
The US was successful before it was an economic superpower. We had relative peace (our soil hasn't been invaded since the War of 1812), freedom and liberty.
It's a symbiotic relationship.
It should be. Lately it feels more like a parasitic one. What's symbiotic about locating your headquarters offshore so you don't have to pay income taxes? You get all of the aforementioned benefits of the United States without having to pay for them. Seems like the definition of parasitism to me.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:4, Insightful)
it is not allowed to hire any dirty foreign brown people. I thought we'd got past that xenophobic attitude.
And I thought we'd got past playing the race card as a way to distract people from the point that someone else was trying to make.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
If someone can do your job as adequately as you can, and will do it for less, then they should get the job.
I've worked with outsourced workers who were located in India, and trust me, there's no functional equivalency there yet. Not even close. but when that person is making $5,000 USD a year or less, their salary covers a multitude of shortcomings.
If your company doesn't do it, your competitors will, which will render your margin much higher than theirs. And if they outlaw it here in the US, foreign competitors will still do it, and thus, you'll still lose.
This is why tampering with market forces is in most cases ill-advised.
Parent
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right, they shouldn't be required to hire locally. The government, conversely shouldn't be giving them tax breaks, special immigration exemptions, bailouts, and all the other bits of corporate welfare that are regularly given to large corporations like this.
If you want to argue for the "free market" and the laissez-faire approach to letting businesses do whatever the hell they want to, then you had damn well better remember that it cuts BOTH ways. "Free market" also means no handouts.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That said I think it would help America Greatly to setup a special low-pay VISA program that has strict guidelines for what types of job can be performed under it IE Cheap labor for working land/child care/house maids/packing plant jobs no one els
Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a shortage, of American tech workers. Many of the out of work onces complaining about this still haven't adjusted to the fact that there tech bubble back in the 90's was indeed a bubble, and are still trying to find Web Designer jobs that pay excess 100k a year to use Front Page.
Unfortunately the truth about tech jobs, is that it is support role position, It is a professional careerer but you are not going to be rich from it, it pays about the same as a teacher, which isn't bad, and allows us to live at middle class levels.
Even when there is a shortage qualified people will still get left out for various reasons.
Poor Resume/Self Promotion skills
Unable to relocate to an area which has more jobs.
Personalities don't match corporate culture
Out of date, or different focus on skills
Just aren't trying.
Just poke around your college especially in the masters levels, for Computer Science and Engineering. Look at those classes listen to the accents of the people talking. Even in MBA classes Americans are just not trying to get smarter and be competitive anymore.
Parent
Offer citizenship to H1B holders (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. And let them stay as long as they want, rather than kicking them out to bring new H1Bs in to replace them. That's pretty much a formula for accelerating the movement of tech jobs overseas, taking inexperienced engineers, showing them the ropes, and sending them back to offshoring outfits in places with low wages.
I don't want to frame this as a kind of nationalistic struggle, but India and China don't need a US funded technology and tech jobs transfer program, which is what H1B really is. They are quite capable of developing their own, robust indigenous industries.
If a talented and educated person wants to move here for a while, and can support himself, I don't think it hurts us very much if at all. If after a few years he decides he'd like to stay here, that's good. Productive people create wealth, and wealth creates jobs. The very best create companies, even industries.
What's really bad for the country, not just American engineers looking for a job, is a revolving door program which drains the country of experience gained by work being done here. The knowledge gained by work is a capital resource, and kicking H1Bs out who want to stay here is like sending boxes of cash out of the country.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:4, Informative)
You don't get it.
It's not immigration of people with engineering degrees that drives down wages. It's continually bringing in entry level people and expelling experienced people that does that.
Everyone here seem to grasp that the fact that music files are so readily and perfectly copyable changes the economics of sharing copies. What some people miss is how the same kinds of things make the economics of knowledge different than, say the economics of automobiles. Even having and automobile industry creates lots of related jobs, in suppliers, distribution, sales, advertising and the like. But if you brought in a bunch of low wage braseros to run your automobile plant, you'd definitely have that many fewer jobs for American auto workers.
But has Linus Torvalds living in the US decreased the net employment of American software engineers by one?
Software is different in that making software tends to generate more jobs making software.
Think about it. Some team comes up with this great software framework that makes doing something that was hard before, easy. Does this mean people who were doing that stuff lose their jobs? No. What happens is that there is a new demand for people who can use that framework to do things that weren't possible before.
Let's say we're talking about Geographic Information Systems. You can do the kind of things GIS does by programming in Fortran with nothing but bare metal and a library with a handful of trig functions. But back when this was the the only way to do GIS, almost nobody did, except maybe in the oil industry or defense. But when GIS becomes so simple minded that non-technical managers can do simple analyses of store siting decisions, none of those few people are going to lose their jobs. In fact, there's a whole new industry of people employed doing jobs that didn't exist before.
Employers make their hiring decisions based on marginal calculations. In the Fortran-and-bare-metal days, many things were theoretically valuable, but not worth the expense and uncertainty to try. When what was hard before becomes easy, this opens up a new universe of things to do, which equals new employment opportunities.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Informative)
It's an easy thing to fix - require that H1B visa holders receive the same pay and benefits for their work as the rest of the workforce.
It's already required. [wikipedia.org]
You're ignoring two things:
1. Companies have ways of working around this rule. This typically involves saying that the visa holder has skills not available in the U.S. workforce.
2. By importing workers, the company effectively shifts the supply curve [wikipedia.org] and lowers wages across the board.
I will also add, laying off foreign workers first is a form of protectionism. [wikipedia.org] Protectionism is never a good economic policy.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, done (several decades ago, actually), still the same "problem" though ('cos, well, nothing's changed, that's the point, it always was a requirement of an H1B and pretty much all the employment visas that the holder get the same pay and benefits as a citizen for the same job.)
H1Bs are popular amongst employers not because they're easy to abuse (the amount of bureaucracy involved takes care of any "benefits" you might have in having someone for which a firing has worse consequences than an ordinary citizen) but because they make it relatively easy to get very, very, skilled people from overseas.
Being able to hire good people means being able to do things you otherwise wouldn't be able to, which means being able to survive as a business and employ more people, citizens included. What would be good though would be to replace H1Bs with an expanded green card program, so fear of losing one's job does not factor into the equation, and so people who want to work in America because they want to be a part of this country aren't discriminated against over those who just want to take the money and run.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:4, Insightful)
The Slashdot editors seem to still be enjoying laying all of Microsoft's faults at Bill Gates' feet, despite the fact that (as you say) he left a while ago.
They seem to be living in a parallel universe.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Funny)
Could someone explain to me, why Bill Gates would be arguing for H1-B Visas before congress now? I thought he left Microsoft?
Because he's still chairman of the board.
He's also their lovable nerdy Horatio Alger philanthropist mascot, over which which the senators will swoon. They would not react so favorably if forced to listen to a sweaty chair thrower.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Interesting)
There should not be workers here on visas. Especially for high-tech jobs.
Give them full legal residency and give them the option to stay instead of sending them home after 6 years and perpetuating the "shortage".
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Informative)
Actually that's not true. H1B's often accept a dramatically reduced standard of living, with the intent to make as much money as they can for the duration of their visa, then take it home with them. Sometimes this is still much better than the conditions they left at home.
H1B's make on average 23% less than their citizen counterparts [ddj.com].
The citizen counterparts tend to want things like kids, gadgets, a nice car, good clothes, a house, etc. The H1B tends to have 1 week's worth of clothes, takes public transportation or has an inexpensive used car, lives here alone (maybe with family back home), lives in a one-room studio apartment, and maintains a minimum of optional expenses.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:4, Insightful)
H1B's make on average 23% less than their citizen counterparts [ddj.com].
And I'll bet that that's an age bias. H1Bs are mostly young guys. Some go home, others get green cards and stay (and so aren't H1Bs any more). So the H1B dataset will be dominated by entry- and low-level salaries. The citizen dataset includes those people, but also includes much better paid engineers with 30 years of experience, senior managers and the like.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Informative)
One place I worked at, it was no secret why were hiring H1-B workers. It was much cheaper.
Whenever we hired Americans my boss would interview them, I'd interview them, another peer would interview them. Indian workers just kinda showed up.
One guy was fresh out of training and needed a lot of hand holding to do basic things. Any random CS grad would have been the same.
The best people we had were American. That sounds ethnocentric but the people I'm talking about included Russian-American, Indian American, etc. either first generation or immigrants.
I remember another time when someone contacted me about developing a small site for them. They explained how they hired an indian firm for $2,500 and after months of not getting the project done hired another for $3,500 and the didn't complete it either. He decided to share this information with me after I quoted him $10k for his project. He ultimately decided to try and find another outsourcing firm. Months later I checked and he didn't have the site done. He wound up spending almost the same in and got nothing in return.
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Re:Require pay and benefits parity (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me fix that for you:
"B happens to be a single man holding an H1-B. He knows that if he doesn't find a job in 60 days his visa will be canceled and is willing to work for significantly less than prevailing market wages to avoid being forced to leave the US and have to start the visa process all over again from scratch."
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Let Microsoft import as many people as they like (Score:5, Insightful)
The United States wants to be the leader in technology, but it won't encourage kids to go into science and engineering, and won't let many talented and better educated foreigners come and work at their companies.
And then they bitch and complain when companies like Microsoft move jobs to other countries that either do have the people they want, or will let those people come and work there.
Re:Let Microsoft import as many people as they lik (Score:4, Interesting)
That is so true. The university i am working in (somewhere in new england) has a bunch of foreign grad students. I would say that about 80% of them are foreigners. I am myself a postdoc and a foreigner, all but 2 postdocs are foreigners. Americans should see the things straight: without foreigners research in the US would take a big hit. I do not understand those xenophobic republicans bitching about us. There is nobody to replace us. The foreign postdocs got hired because there was no american up to our job. Not surprising as few get a PhD anyway. Of course getting a green card is awfully hard and guess what, people do not really like being treated like disposable toilet paper.
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Re H1B should go first (Score:4, Insightful)
Know what disgusts me ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh, H-1B workers don't vote. Now of course, if the senator had asked them to fire gay people first...
The gut reaction of many slashdotters to migrant workers is simply disgusting. It combines basic misguided tribalism ("Yeah we're in the same group of 300M people") with a rent seeking behavior ("I want a higher wage at the expense of the consumers")
I won't even get started on the total immorality of the concept that the govt grants you or not a "right" to work for a willing employer, grants you or not a "right" to rent a house from a willing landlord, etc.
Re:Know what disgusts me ? (Score:5, Insightful)
What disgusts me is the double standards. America was and is the land of the immigrants and dreams. The country was born out of immigration. America is proud of the American Dream, IMHO H1-B visa holders carry the torch of that dream more than born citizen. They come to this country in that hope. Unfortunately the dream is being hijacked by a few rick business men on the top for cheap labor that is willing to throw in 120 hr weeks.
If you really want to fix this, then transform the H1-B program and give the H1-B visa holders right equivivalent to that of greencard holders. The problem will mitigate itself. All of a sudden the employers will realize that immigrants are not slaves and if u lower wages and expect 120 hr weeks, they will find a better opportunity. Also remove the concept of "sponsor" for H1-B. Sure a employer can sponsor, however an immigrant steps into US, he is free to work anywhere.
This will level the playing field for Americans, as employer will really find a local before he attempts H1-B.
Parent
Re:Know what disgusts me ? (Score:5, Insightful)
I couldn't agree more. The H1-B program seems not that much different from indentured servitude. We got you over here - either you work for us, at the wages we dictate, or you leave.
The problem is that the people here don't want the dream. They want prosperity, and they feel entitled to prosperity. Immigrants present competition, which threatens that entitlement. The American dream, America itself, was never about entitlement. It was never about deserving something. It was about being free to use what you had to achieve what you could without being oppressed. We've lost that.
Parent
'Significant Number' (Score:5, Insightful)
I was an H-1B worker at Microsoft (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked at Microsoft in Redmond with H1B work status for four years. In 2007, I left MS because I found a job opportunity that was better for my family. (This new job happened to be back in my country.)
I can't comment about the overall H1B program in the US, or the overall US labour market, or even on any new changes at MS over the past year, but I do definitely know about the experiences of H1B employees in the developer and testing roles at MS.
I (and all other non-US-citizen employees) were treated exactly the same as every other employee. We had the same job descriptions and responsibilities as other employees and the same opportunities for promotion. We were integrated in teams that included US citizens, other H1B-status workers, and people with other immigration statuses. We were certainly paid the same as any other employee with a similar job and similar experience.
I also know that Microsoft has very high hiring standards for developer and tester roles. I was not in a management/lead position, but I occasionally reviewed resumes and took part in interviewing applicants. Interviews were tough all-day affairs, including questions that required the use of logic, math, programming, and testing methodologies. The point wasn't to see if the applicant could regurgitate the knowledge, but to view his or her thinking process, creativity, and problem solving abilities as they tried to come up with a solution, and handle complications or restrictions that the interviewer throws at the candidate after they come up with an initial solution.
During the time I was there, my group and most others were always trying to hire more people. The major bottleneck was waiting to get any resumes for candidates that seemed worth interviewing. Most interviews ended with frustration that the candidate wasn't up to standards. Just because you applied to MS and didn't get a job or even an interview is not proof that Microsoft didn't need to look outside the US to find candidates up to their standards.
So, you might have valid criticisms about the quality of Microsoft software, but MS really does have very high standards for their employees, and employees with H1B status are treated the same as any other full-time employee there.