IT Workers Training Their Foreign Replacements 'Troubling,' Says White House 305
dcblogs writes: A top White House official told House lawmakers this week that the replacement of U.S. workers by H-1B visa holders is 'troubling' and not supposed to happen. That answer came in response to a question from U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) that referenced Disney workers who had to train their temporary visa holding replacements (the layoffs were later canceled. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said if H-1B workers are being used to replace U.S. workers, then "it's a very serious failing of the H-1B program." But Johnson also told lawmakers that they may not be able to stop it, based on current law. Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University who has testified before Congress multiple times on H-1B visa use, sees that as a "bizarre interpretation" of the law.
He has a talent for understatement (Score:5, Interesting)
"Troubling"... "not supposed to happen".
I'm not entirely sure if he's trying to deliberately understate it, or if it is just that he may be completely clueless as to what it feels like for the people who are put in that kind of situation.
Re:He has a talent for understatement (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably the understatement.
If he starts talking like he's an advocate for the Disney employees he clearly takes a side, which means the people who disagree with any aspect of his case (ie: the guys advocating for more H1B Visas, businessmen prone to see any government interference as evil, Republicans who hate Obama on principle, etc.) will not take him seriously.
If he just says something so obviously true that you can't disagree with it then he might get somewhere.
Re:He has a talent for understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
He CAN'T really side with the Disney employee's, because he already has been paid to vote for increasing the H1B cap.
He knows the law was sold to the public as not permitting this, but was written to permit it, because that's what the people who paid for the law demanded.
"Oops, the law we passed lets companies screw their workers. there's nothing we can do about it. sorry."
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We've reached stage three (Score:2, Insightful)
The four stage strategy of government:
In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.
Re:We've reached stage ... (Score:3)
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This has been going on for over a decade, after Clinton near the end of his term expanded H1B for IT workers, near the tail end of the tech bubble.
At the time there was a bit of a shortage, but schools were filled with tech student waiting to get into these new tech job.
Then the bubble popped.
The market was over saturated and we had the H1B laws in place, and the infrastructure that was built allowed people to work from where ever is cheaper (India, China...)
Now the companies are still crying shortage, but
Re:He has a talent for understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
Romney was a tool of W's neocon backers that needed a new stooge.
As a candidate, he even had his web page for foreign policy titled New American Century and hired people like Dan Senor as the foreign policy brain trust.
We would have had boots on the ground in Tehran a month after his inauguration. Because perpetual war is good for (war) business, dontchaknow.
--
BMO
Re:He has a talent for understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
"Perpetual war" driven by business, is not so much a "load of bull"
I think that you can look to the words of Eisenhower to "beware the military industrial complex", followed by MacNamara's application of capitalist business practices to the waging of war to see the seed that the current conditions of "perpetual war" have sprung from
There was a lot of money to be made as long as there was a USSR 'wolf'' at the gates. We could spend a terrific amount of money on military spending without actually having to go to war. After the dissolution of the USSR we transitioned to relatively bloodless military campaigns where the tools that we developed to fight the USSR were used effectively to crush those same weapons in the hands of countries that had enjoyed Soviet sponsorship
Iraq 2 and Afghanistan demonstrated the failures of going past air wars and quick tank campaigns and getting stuck in the slog where a motivated local with a IED was as effective as million dollar machines and highly trained troops. The miscalculation continued to pour money into the coffers of the military funded corporations, but it stressed the tolerance of the American public
I have every reason to believe that Romney would have gathered the same group of advisers around him that had encouraged W to go too far and pushed their propagandizing of the Red states to new heights in hopes of dragging a few trillion more dollars out of the American public while turning the odometer over from IRAQ to IRAN, as a popular poster in US military sites so proudly proclaimed
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"Perpetual war" driven by business is a load of bull. Eisenhower's words, though wise as a warning, only serve to underline the failure of the "MIC" as an explanation for events. All you have to do is look at military spending as a portion of GDP to see that. The long term trend is decline [dailysignal.com]. If the portion of the economy devoted to military spending is in long term decline (which is even sharper if you go back to 1945) then it is hard to argue that the "MIC" is a powerful agenda driving force.
Do you have
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Convenient when your chart cuts off at 2007 when military spending peaked again in 2010 to similar levels that we saw in the 80's
http://www.usgovernmentspendin... [usgovernmentspending.com]
I suppose that I could fall into the mud with you and trade insults, but I am satisfied that it would provide little entertainment and prove me to be no less correct than I am now
Have a nice evening cold, it is always fun exchanging ideas with you
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Yes indeed, that is a mightly "blip" there.
Defense Spending Since WWII [usgovernmentspending.com]
Not sure why you bothered with those charts.
You think you've been proven correct? I'm pretty sure that hasn't happened, quite the opposite. The issue here isn't you not "falling into the mud" but rather avoiding the nitty gritty.
Thanks gary, good night.
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You twit. The main reason defense spending went down as a % of GDP over time was because of the growth of our economy, not because of a reduction in defense spending.
Using the amount as a % of GDP is just a mask.
All this is is another case of how to lie with statistics.
Start with the relation A/B.
You're claiming the A shrunk because the relation A/B shrunk.
But the reason A/B shrunk isn't because A shrunk, but because B grew, and continues to grow.
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Convenient when your chart cuts off at 2007 when military spending peaked again in 2010 to similar levels that we saw in the 80's
http://www.usgovernmentspendin... [usgovernmentspending.com]
I suppose that I could fall into the mud with you and trade insults, but I am satisfied that it would provide little entertainment and prove me to be no less correct than I am now
Have a nice evening cold, it is always fun exchanging ideas with you
Yeah, this graph is bad, and you should feel bad. Defense spending as a percent of GDP is a useless metric. Switch the graph to display in
$Billion Nominal.
The graph still is bad because it doesn't compensate for inflation.
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GDP. Is meaningless the government doesn't get a dime from the gdp.
That is like your kids saying they can have a car because their parents income will cover it.
While technically true. It is a complete misrepresentation.
The military budget is 30% of our government income. That is far to high. The military spends more on gasoline moving troops around the country than we spend on welfare.
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I have every reason to believe that Romney would have gathered the same group of advisers around him that had encouraged W to go too far and pushed their propagandizing of the Red states to new heights in hopes of dragging a few trillion more dollars out of the American public while turning the odometer over from IRAQ to IRAN, as a popular poster in US military sites so proudly proclaimed
He actually did this. Basically his foreign policy during his campaign was PNAC alumni and FPI members. It wasn't any k
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Great find, it is important to remember our history in order to avoid repeating it
The lies that the neo-cons would eventually use to justify war on Iraq are clearly laid out on the front page:
" Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished. Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq’s chemical and biolog
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Interesting, but nonsense. There is little chance we would have had "boots on the ground" in Tehran
Dan Senor said on Meet The Press that we'd go to war at the behest of Israel if they bothered to ask.
It's one of Bibi's wet dreams. Of course he'd ask.
Did Romney walk it back? No. No he did not. At all. Don't even bother to try to dispute this, it's googleable.
"Perpetual war" driven by business is a load of bull.
Then explain the trillions we pissed away in Iraq and Afghanistan. They went somewhere. Cert
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Dan Senor said on Meet The Press that we'd go to war at the behest of Israel if they bothered to ask.
It's one of Bibi's wet dreams. Of course he'd ask.
Did Romney walk it back? No. No he did not. At all. Don't even bother to try to dispute this, it's googleable.
Yes indeed, it is, sadly for you.
In jam, Romney tries not to make new Iran policy [yahoo.com]
JERUSALEM (AP) — Mitt Romney tried to pull back Sunday from an adviser's suggestion that he favored new American aggression on Iran, distancing himself from comments that the U.S. presidential candidate would "respect" an Israeli decision for unilateral military action to prevent Tehran from gaining nuclear capability.
Hours after the aide previewed Romney's upcoming foreign policy speech in Jerusalem, Romney backpedaled and said, "I'll use my own words and that is I respect the right of Israel to defend itself and we stand with Israel. We're two nations that come together in peace and that want to see Iran being dissuaded from its nuclear folly."
And that is just with Yahoo's coverage from AP. Imagine what even handed reporting would do for the story.
As to the US going to war on Israel's say so, I don't think you quite got that right.
"Perpetual war" driven by business is a load of bull.
Then explain the trillions we pissed away in Iraq and Afghanistan. They went somewhere. Certainly not in the pockets of the Iraquis or you or me. Maj Gen Smedley Butler is laughing at you from beyond the grave.
You have cause and effect backwards. The cause of buying the equipment was needs from the war, the war wasn't created to sell equipment. Afghanistan was a result of the attack on 9/11, remember? Iraq was a result of Saddam's long term
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Romney backpedaled
How on earth does attempt to make a coherent argument on anything Romney said or says? Which time? Which explanation? Which "What I really said"?
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Oh cold, you crack me up
"Romney was right", on an article that demonstrates the dangers of allowing business to pursue profits without government support for the worker
Irony much?
Re:He has a talent for understatement (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize that it is the government that created, enabled, and permits the situation as is, right? Do you think Obama is responsible for any of the policies of his administration yet? Yes, I'm willing to see some irony here. Obama: "I deplore what has been happening as policy under my administration. We must organize to stop it." It is a relief that the Obama administration can finally find something related to immigration that it doesn't like that might actually benefit the US.
Of course what's even "better" is that many of those same businesses give generously to the sorts of causes that are probably near and dear to your heart, and support Obama.
Re:He has a talent for understatement (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize that it is the government that created, enabled, and permits the situation as is, right?
Delicious cold, you almost manage to describe a world where corporate interests stand silently on the sidelines while those wacky government types run roughshod over the public
Hilarious, you should play the straight-man on some comedy duo. We have all followed the hue and cry from the corporation about how they need foreign workers to compete because there just are not enough capable American workers to fill the slots. Disney just managed to go too far, too publicly and as a result shit the bed for the rest of them by demonstrating that the words that helped to push policies may not have been the truth
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I'm pretty sure that the corporations in question don't control the borders. But of course the government never engages in abuse, does it? Both corporations and government can be abusive, but only one of them seems to raise your ire. I'm against abuse from both.
Disney deserved the smackdown, and so do many other corporations pulling that. But the whole immigration policy of this administration is a mess, a criminal mess in some cases. (I see Sec of Homeland Security has been ordered to appear before a
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"I'm pretty sure that the corporations in question don't control the borders."
Yeah, but they sure seem to have a lot of pull with the congresscritters who introduce a bill, every year, to increase the number of H1-B visas.
It's a scam. And everyone with half a brain knows it. There has never been a shortage of good tech people in the US. There may be a shortage of tech people willing to work for low wages.
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Oh cold, you crack me up
"Romney was right", on an article that demonstrates the dangers of allowing business to pursue profits without government support for the worker
Irony much?
Romney - which time, which statement?. The man who would say anything if he thought you would vote for him because he said it.
How do we even begin to have an idea of what he would have done in office?
The argument of how he was "right" is not connected to reality at any point - it assumes that he would have 100 percent applied his policy upon election.
And of course, which one?
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i think he knows he has no power and doesn't want to take a stand on something lest it blows up in his face. so he strokes his chin and intones that something is "troubling". There is a p-word I use in different company.
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When you've got a hammer ...
Making laws is all the ones mentioned in the article who are actually likely to act do. The Homeland guy is just keeping a seat warm and watching the money come in and nobody is going to tell him to actually do something other than grow his utterly useless department that only exists because a previous administration was too spineless to tell the CIA to do the job it was set up for
About Disney... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About Disney... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or reinstate the workers, find decent jobs for the newcomers too, and send the executives packing.
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The recently announced layoffs for the few tech workers in New York and California got cancelled (for now). All 100+ tech workers in Florida got laid off earlier this year. If Disney really wants to do the right thing, they would hired back their laid off workers in Florida and send the Indian workers packing.
Well, what about a legislation change: If you train someone to do your job, and afterwards you are fired, this is taken as absolute evidence that the trainee shouldn't have been there under an H1B scheme, therefore needs to be sent home and the original worker be re-employed, with all wages paid as if he had been employed all the time; complaints can be filed for six years.
Result: If it happens to you, you can do whatever you like as long as your money lasts, then go to court and get your old job back pl
Just closer your eyes and click your heels (Score:2)
Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said if H-1B workers are being used to replace U.S. workers, then "it's a very serious failing of the H-1B program."
If Mr. Johnson closes his eyes all the way, he won't see U.S. workers being replaced by H-1B workers.
Time to Reduce the Cap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps a little collective punishment, reducing the cap from 65,000 visas per year to say 40,000 and reducing it by 5,000 every year in which any company employing these H1-B visa workers misbehaves would send the right signal. Also, the H1-B slots should be sold in public auctions so that those companies that really need talented foreign workers when there are no qualified Americans, which strains credulity, can express that desperate need by either paying up for the Americans they need or forking out expensive foreign workers who are "critical to their ongoing business needs". You need skilled workers? Fine. Show me the money and you shall have them, foreigners or Americans your choice.
Re:Time to Reduce the Cap? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Time to Reduce the Cap? (Score:5, Interesting)
Excellent idea. The minimum wage for any H1B position should be $150k per year, and the employer will pay a 50% payroll tax for each employee hired under that system. It won't hurt the high-end, which the program is supposed to recruit, but sure as hell will end the use of outsourcing firms that skirt the law by mass-hiring H1Bs and then contracting with a firm to replace their IT staffs.
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I suspect very strongly that were this to come to pass, H1-Bs would cease to exist in a matter of months.
It'd sure be fun to hear the corporations and their lackeys try to spin that one. "No, no, it's not because it's no longer profitable. It has more to do with, uh, vertical synergies and leveraging new and expanding markets...."
You had me with you until you said Social Security (Score:2)
You had me with you until you said Social Security.
You are aware that every penny put into the Social Security Trust fund is immediately "borrowed" back into the general fund via bond purchases, right?
Also: H1B workers pay into Social Security already, with no chance of ever seeing that money themselves (not like any of us will ever see it, either).
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Enforcement isn't being done now. You think more rules and legislation fixes anything? Enforce the current law first, and get back to me on how you get that done, k?
Much of what has crippled our nation is simply failure to enforce existing law. The rest is easily solved.
H1B visa reform (Score:5, Insightful)
The H1B system was created for a specific purpose - very short temporary workers who should become permanent green card holders very quickly. The problem is that it has morphed into a decade long temporary work program that dangles the green card to make the worker work for longer hours and less pay than a green card holder, under the threat of losing it all after being fired.
What really needs to happen is that US and India should sit down and figure this out. Over 60% of the H1B visa users are from India. US should have a special visa program similar to H1B for Indians but without the exploitative nature of it.
And, the reason why H1Bs are cheaper is because the US doesn't want them to go into the general labor pool but exist in their own special labor pool, not competing with the general labor pool. But, this creates a secondary job market and when corporations see the labor price differences between the two job pools, there will be incentive to do what Disney did. So, US should loosen these artificial restrictions that so that everyone is competing on the same level field.
H1B really needs to be revised so that is does not place so much emphasis on "sponsorship". The employer can dangle the sponsorship for years denying raises, promotions and starting with low wages and long hours.
Ideally, there should be generic visa that gives blanket work authorization for a certain period of time (like 3 years) and a path to green card without an employer "sponsorship". When a foreign worker comes to the US, they should be in the same market as everyone else, commanding the same salary, benefits etc. There is too much power with employers right now and so there is exploitation.
Re:H1B visa reform (Score:5, Insightful)
Thankfully, they're getting investigated for it because they've gotten blatant enough that Senators from both parties got pissed off enough about.
Re:H1B visa reform (Score:5, Insightful)
I've known a number of H1Bs, have some I've considered good friends, and all of whom will make excellent citizens--almost all are going through the process.
From the H1B perspective, they are effectively indentured servants. They are locked into their employer, and any progress toward citizenship is completely at that company's whim. The employee has no recourse other than to put up and shut up.
From a citizen's perspective, the whole thing has become a sham to replace expensive American workers with far cheaper H1Bs.
Here's how hiring an H1B works (at least part of it):
- Find an H1B candidate
- Make up a fake job listing with EXACTLY that candidate's resume as your 'mandatory requirements'.
- Odds are no citizen will apply that matches those requirements precisely.
- Congrats, the company has now found an "unfillable" position that demands an H1B to fill it!
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They have figured out that the middlemen who make a lot out of the arrangement are significant political donors :(
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H1B Visa reform is easy cancel the program. There is not an issue getting IT talent there is getting cheap IT talent.
worse, IMO, is the treason (Score:4, Interesting)
A California utility has not only replaced citzens/green card holders with offshore labor, but they've handed control of critical infrastructure to foreign nationals. ATM, India is a friendly nation, but that is not guaranteed to last beyond their next election.
Re:worse, IMO, is the treason (Score:4, Insightful)
And that is a very serious problem indeed. It is also happening all over the EU with outsourcing to former eastern-bloc countries. Critical infrastructure always needs to be managed locally, anything else is pure insanity.
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A California utility has not only replaced citzens/green card holders with offshore labor, but they've handed control of critical infrastructure to foreign nationals. ATM, India is a friendly nation, but that is not guaranteed to last beyond their next election.
I agree. Re. the California utility, are you talking about Southern California Edison (SCE) [computerworld.com]? According to these two [computerworld.com] articles [computerworld.com], a US senator and two US representatives are upset about replacing the American SCE workers.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've read that Disney's aborted replacement of US workers was legal. If so, then let's change the law. President Obama, please show us just how "troubled" about the law you are, and work to fix the law.
Doesn't even matter if it's friendly (Score:2)
they've handed control of critical infrastructure to foreign nationals.
The worst part of that being that command and control of systems is now vastly more easy to either take control of, or simply disrupt if your goal is chaos.
What happens when the big earthquake hits and communications have gone to hell?
He might be right on the point of law here... (Score:5, Interesting)
Legally here's what happened:
Some outsourcing company said it could only fill it's consultant ranks by hiring Indians. Since it knew the paperwork really well (and doing paperwork really well is an Indian core competency), it got them.
Then Disney hired the Indian firm to take over some functions at Disney.
Which means that Disney technically did not replace it's employees with H1B Visa holders (which would be ridiculously illegal). It replaced a business unit with a contractor (perfectly legal), and that contractor happened to use H1B Visa holders (also perfectly legal). Courts could rule that the consulting firm were gaming the system, but that's far from a gimme.
Which means you probably should get a new law passed restricting the use of H1B consultants to replace American workers. And you'd damn well better word it very, very carefully or they'll just maneuver around it some interesting way.
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Which turns it from an immigration law issue into a criminal conspiracy.
Europe doesn't tolerate this bullshit (Score:2)
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Simple way to fix it- require that any H1B hired must be paid twice the highest paid domestic worker. That means they'll only be paid if they really are necessary. Any company that's found breaking this rule is not allowed to hire an H1B again- ever. And they're fined 20 times what the salary(s) were supposed to be.
We can't throw companies in jail, so breaking the law should be fucking punishing.
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That's exactly the problem... nobody goes to jail. Start jailing board members and executives and shit will change REAL fast.
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That's fairly easy to solve. The problem is that the H-1B is tied to the position at the company more than the employee. So tie the H-1B to the employee (the company making him the offer doesn't need to sponsor and obtain an H-1B for him, his goes with him and the company that brought him in needs to sponsor and obtain another to bring a replacement in) and give him a 3-month grace period if the company terminates him (and he keeps his H-1B until either he leaves the country himself or his 3 months expires)
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It replaced a business unit with a contractor (perfectly legal), and that contractor happened to use H1B Visa holders (also perfectly legal).
H1B is meant for when you can't find the competency locally. Clearly that is not the case here, since the contractor could hire the old employees.
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Some outsourcing company said it could only fill it's consultant ranks by hiring Indians. Since it knew the paperwork really well (and doing paperwork really well is an Indian core competency), it got them.
I've found there is another problem, fictitious skills/experience on resumes.
I can't tell you how many times I have seen companies list language and tool experience Years longer than the language or tool has been in existence. All the local resumes are rejected because they don't have the skills, and the bogus ones for overseas candidates accepted at face value.
"yes, I've been developing iPhone apps for 27 years..."
Then they come to work and need basic training from the existing staff.
Fortunately, not a big
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a719... [ft.com]
It's long overdue, but better late than never.
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"Should be burden of proof that the current employees were failing at their jobs."
You think 'failure' is the only legitimate reason to engage a contract firm to perform work for a corporation, displacing full timers?
Cost is always a legitimate reason. Get back to me when the law says you can't buy the store brand tomato soup if you wish because it displaces the well-known national brand. Or you can't change your car insurance just to save money.
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If there was a law that you could only use foreign made tomato sauce if you couldn't find domestic tomato sauce AND the store brand 'just happened' to be foreign made, the analogy would hold.
If the contractor would care to hire all American labor and still offer a better deal, THEN it is free to do so.
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In business, doing perfectly, but costing more then a guy who'd half-ass it; is always grounds for being fired. Most private companies I've worked with do niot produce products that are "good enough for government work."
In theory the H-1B Visa-holding company proved it needed to import it's employees. Part of the application process is verifying that a) you have a job to fill, and b) attempts to hire Americans were unsuccessful.
It's just ridiculously easy to game the system. Create a fake job, pay half what
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Or we need to apply the principle of construction. No matter what 'just happened' to be the case, the American workers were constructively replaced by H1-Bs.
That is exactly the sorty of thing the principle of construction is meant to cover.
Oh yes, it's troubling. Troubling... (Score:2)
We're going to have to do something about that... ... Someday.
Oh look, another financial crisis. No a terrorist threat! That's it, a terrorist threat. Yeah, yeah, a terrorist.
Pay no attention to the billionair behind the curtain. Or the H1-B sitting in your chair.
Another .... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The original version of the "temporary worker program" was passed in 1952, and it's been continually revised over the years, in the direction of expanding it mostly. Some history here [numbersusa.com]. The current version of the program dates to 1990, in legislation that was passed by a Democratic congress and signed by a Republican president.
But history aside, is there a meaningful partisan divide on this issue? My impression is that when it comes to actual legislative action, both parties have been mostly in favor of the
Here comes Hillary (Score:2)
It's not the H1B - it's something else... (Score:3, Interesting)
No employer in the world can afford to say no to such a deal, the trainees actually had 16 years of experience in their field behind them, but where also laid off from a bigger company earlier on - and had been on GOV. wellfare for a long time, this is SWEDEN btw. so it's amazing it's even happening here, but since we're a wealthy country (on the paper, not counting the MASSIVE debt each Swede have since they essentially don't own anything but borrow money), this isn't something you'll see in any newspaper - much less reported in American news.
It's a sign of the new times we're heading for. The outsourcing is massive, the GOV. will attempt to get work back to the country, so the salaries of everyone has to be slashed, but you try to tell the happy fat cat that he has to cut his living costs and you'll get the UNION all over you until you have to file for bankruptcy if you do what they want anyway. There's another agenda too - and that is they're trying to open the borders worldwide, so workers can essentially work and live anywhere. You'll notice MASSIVE unemployment rates as everything you once knew will fall apart right in front of you, until you eventually decide to accept lower pay, less perks, longer hours etc.
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Anyways, you guys have a pretty direct democracy, couldn't you vote this down? Or is this a consequence of "too much democracy" and this is what the Swedes, as a whole, want?
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Why not just refuse to train them? Tell your ex-employer that you're too busy looking for another job.
OPINION: America is FUCKING UP BIG TIME (Score:2)
Memo to America: Step it up. You're a first-world country for fuck's sake, act like it.
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It's completely about money. It's not that there's not enough qualified workers in the US to fill those jobs. It's that there's not enough that're willing to work for the wages the companies want to pay. Now, normally when demand exceeds supply companies are all about "Well, naturally you're going to have to pay more, that's just the law of supply and demand.". But then the companies are on the short end of that equation, suddenly it's completely unnatural and they want the right to manipulate the supply to
Simple solution: H1B's supposed to be special rare (Score:2)
They are supposed to be highly skilled and possess talents which can't be located in the local market after a reasonable search.
Now, you can write lots of words but lawyers just sharpen their teeth on that kind of thing.
Simply set a dollar amount equal to the current top 10% income in the country. Right now, that's about $100,000.
So you can't bring an H1B in for less than $100,000. Minimum salary in their pocket- not the contracting house.
Right now almost 40,000 of the 65,000 slots are taken up by large in
This maybe a self correcting problem (Score:3)
I do believe that they are hard workers and that they try, I don't know how successful they will be in the long run. Most of the candidates I have interviewed have generally been hard-put to think through problems. For example, I would ask them how would they generally approach a problem (e.g. your users need to do x, tell me how you would do this). Most were stumped by this. I would even try to lob easy questions such as database normalization (You have a table that repeats the same fields like reference name 1, reference name 2, is this correct and if not why?).
There is also another problem, they aren't really that much cheaper ! The U.S. is an expensive place to live, and you can not really cut corners that much. We are talking about a difference of maybe 10-15k a year (at least in the ones I've spoken to). Most of the time, if you take the additional meetings that need to take place to re-review the requirements due to a little hiccup (see point about not being able to think though problems) and the costs could actually go UP. If you have to have an additional hour of meeting per week (very generous) with a PM, 3xDevelopers, BA (average if you have multiple dev streams). That's 52*5=260 hours. Average of $55/hour across all three roles, that is $14,300 for a single meeting hour long weekly meeting for the year. So the potential savings you got from one of the developers could be a wash. I have also noticed that non H1B programmers tend to work faster (again see point about working more independently).
So my point is that this maybe a situation of self correction. The trend might re-balance itself as more companies realize some of these realities; however, that would assume that the companies take such things into account instead of being penny wise and pound foolish.
US workers have themselves to blame (Score:2)
The Real Solution to the Visa Worker Scam
http://www.techtoil.org/2015/07/what-stem-workers-need-to-do-but.html
About 99% of US politicians want to increase the visa workers. You cannot vote the problem away, and you certainly cannot petition the problem away.
There is only one solution, workers need to organize, raise money, and lobby congress. In DC, money talks and bullshit walks.
Re:even stopping it won't stop it. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are doing software at the low end with regard to quality, you are right. For anything good (and that is where the actual savings by automation are, just requires a bit of a longer-term perspective), software can most decidedly not be written anywhere, as the architects, designers and developers need to be in touch with the users and the business the software is supporting. Cultural and time-gaps are a killer and drive cost through the roof and quality through the floor, often both. Developers having to guess about actual functionality desired are a serious problem. A spec is not enough do decide many aspects of software, unless you invest so much effort in the spec that spec creation actually takes much more effort and costs much more than the implementation. The way around that is that architects, designers and implementers must be able to understand what is desired from other cues and that is only possible if they talk to people.
Re:even stopping it won't stop it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Software (yes, I know, with some exceptions) can mostly be written anywhere.
If that were true, then how come there is a need for H1Bs? Why not just outsource the work?
No, there must be some value loss from outsourcing, otherwise they wouldn't need to bring people into the US and have exiting workers here train them.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, and the various tech companies wouldn't be spending so much effort on beating the drums about "tech worker shortage" either. If they could solve their problems by just moving to Romania or India they'd do so, rather than spending all this time trying to get bigger H1B quotas and more subsidies for STEM education.
Re:even stopping it won't stop it. (Score:5, Interesting)
You say that like it's an unassailable force of nature. It's not. This has been a problem throughout most of human history, and there's a relatively simple solution: tariffs. No, they're not popular in our free-trade embracing modern political climate - but that climate was orchestrated at considerable expense by the wealthiest members of our nation - those who stand to make enormous profits from the arangement while the rest of us suffer. Because one of the truths of free trade is that, as you point out, in a free market all wages must inevitably fall to match those of the lowest-paid workers within the free-trade zone.
Either we must reinstate protectionist measures, or resign ourselves to remaking our country in the image of the worst oligarchies with whom we share free-trade agreements with.
Re: (Score:3)
Hard to do well and can be insanely counterproductive, so not so simple in some cases.
Look at the cane sugar industry - the tariff just meant local sugar priced itself out of it's market and everyone is getting fat twice as quick on corn syrup that costs more than the global cane sugar price but less than the local cane sugar price.
Look at what the tariff on steel did to manufacturing. A lot of it moved to where higher quality steel (since local general purpose stuff got
Re:even stopping it won't stop it. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never seen a successful software project where the entire application was written overseas. It's not easy to gather detailed requirements from US workers and throw it overseas and have foreign workers completely build it. The only way the offshore model works is to have American developers gather the requirements, plan out the work, give detailed tasks to foreign developers and then monitor the progress daily to clear any impediments / misunderstands and make sure the quality is acceptable. Then you have the problem of who is going to maintain the software for the next decade? To maintain software, you either need excellent documentation (which foreign workers suck at) or you need the same offshore developers to stick with the application through it's lifetime (good luck with that). At some point you lose that application knowledge and end up having to pay new people to learn it from scratch.
By the time you factor in the oversight overhead, the language barrier, the time lost in misunderstands, the quality gap, and the cost of having to pay new developers to maintain the application, I personally don't think the offshore model saves any money. But trying to convince the beancounters that is a waste of breath. All they see is that they can pay offshore developers half as much per hour.
Building software isn't like building an iPhone. An iPhone has detailed specs that foreign workers just need to reproduce over and over again. Each software application is a unique product that needs to be designed, built, and maintained from the ground up. That fact makes it much hard to just throw specs over the wall and have offshore workers execute it.
Re:even stopping it won't stop it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Our infosys contractors rotated every 6 to 9 months. It was a *selling* point to management. They actually believed that all knowledge was seamlessly transferring via documents to the new people and that the new people didn't suffer 3 to 9 months of reduced productivity because they had no clue about the big picture.
Combine that with the fact that the quality of Infosys candidates has dropped enormously since 2005 and it's a recipe for disasters.
Re: (Score:3)
Not going to dispute anything you said but many feel that in-house/on-shore projects have the same problems of "throwing it over the wall" where the business side may or may not get what they want, that may or may not be made with duct tape by a developer who also didn't document shit and is about to jump ship for a better position elsewhere. Some of it is just that offshore workers are willing to use any hack today, screw tomorrow as either it won't be their problem or it'll be more billable hours.
Though I
It needs to be a trade (Score:3, Insightful)
What used to happen is that something was academic, then it became a trade, then it became ubiquitous.
With computers being relatively new everyone still thinks you need a 4+ year education to do some of the stuff when it would be better of as a skilled trade. Not everyone is built for college/university. There are a lot of qualified intelligent individuals that, at the age of 13-14 should have gone into an apprenticeship program for the local IT workers 1010010101.
As technology progresses people dive deeper
Re: (Score:2)
It was like that in 1990 :) We had three streams.
Re: (Score:3)
I kind of want to agree with you that stopping it would be difficult due to market forces, but then why hasn't Eastern Europe become the new home of Google, Microsoft, et al?
They have a large and pretty well established educational system with lots of trained people from high quality educational systems that are not terribly unlike the US and have overall technical accomplishments similar to the US in terms of general engineering and science. They're physically close to Western Europe where so many of thes
Re: (Score:2)
Your problem is that you seem to think Obama is working for us, relatively normal Americans. He's not. He has arguably done a few things somewhat on our behalf, mostly symbolic, but by and large he works for the same billionaires that fund the campaigns of virtually all major politicians. And the policies that benefit those handful of ultra-rich rarely benefit the 99%. Things like enabling a flow of cheap, skilled, semi-indentured labor into the country to displace educated Americans with our outrageous
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The USA is an corporatocracy. All candidates are for sale to the highest bidder. It is like that because those that don't play ball that way are filtered out long before reaching that level of power. Bernie may say he's for the little guy and against the current status quo, but Obama had a similar platform and look what happened. Once he was voted in, he just kept on doing what the corporate masters told him to, just like the presidents before him.
They all need to be tossed out of office and the system rewo
Re: (Score:3)
Hmmm... First, citizens united merely over turned a restriction that hadn't actually been in place for very long and was pretty much instantly brought to trial where it immediately lost.
Second, there are serious problem with the idea behind restricting political speech. It really is a violation of the first amendment. You either believe in free speech or you don't.
Third, Bernie isn't winning. He's the Left's Donald Trump. Trump is not winning the white house and any republican that backs him is wasting thei
Re: (Score:2)
If you only vote for people with D's after their name, then here are your POSSIBLE chances at the white house in 2016:
Hillary Clinton
Martin O'Malley
Elizabeth Warren!
Re: (Score:3)
She's not running and is unlikely to run against Hillary.
Note that I'm not endorsing any of these people. I'm just saying some people can win and some people cannot.
The republican field is a complete three ring circus at this point. I think they have something like 20 people officially running. Of those... MAYBE 5 have a chance of getting so much as nominated. The rest are just a giant waste of time. And trump is of course on that list.
He won't be nominated and if he is, he won't be elected.
Bernie is the sa
Re: (Score:2)
I disagree somewhat, it's not a waste of time and money to back people like Trump and Sanders. They won't win the election, but by backing them you can affect the policies of the other candidates.
Re: (Score:2)
Not really.
What is trump's big message? Close the borders, shut down immigration, deal with crime, and I think I heard him say we should boycott mexico... I mean... I can't even take this shit seriously its so stupid.
Is our immigration system messed up? Yep. Do we get too many welfare cases from mexico largely attracted by our messed up labor market that is starved for low level labor but is denied it domestically through a mixture of overly aggressive minimum wages and labor laws? Yep.
But the solution here
Re: (Score:2)
Jim Webb doesn't strike me as particularly interested in the office.
Re: (Score:2)
I really really really want Obama to not be an idiot
HAH! TOO LATE!
Why should he be any different than any other president sitting in office in the last 45 years?
Re: (Score:2)
Our President is not an idiot. He's calculating, deliberate, and intentional.
Do you think for a moment he's not executing his intentions, largely with the support and assistance of Congress, even now?
Don't play the 'idiot' card. You are dead wrong. In fact, the last 5 Presidents can be dismissed as 'idiots' if you pretend, and squint enough. They each had their own agendas, strategies, and goals. Only one had any significant trouble fulfilling their intentions, and he got saddled with a need to go to wa
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The Iran deal is going to boost up his poll numbers when the US can buy Iranian oil, the first time since Carter allowed the Shah to fall [1]. This means lower gas prices, and maybe a return to a non-sucking economy for a period of time.
As for H-1Bs, it is like immigration. People talk about it, shake their fist about it, but follow the money... and find nothing ever gets done, or will get done. Big companies love H-1Bs because they are loyal (and deported if not), dirt cheap [2], and it follows the hist
Re: (Score:2)
From experience in Europe, laws like that have pretty serious negative consequences. The right way to do this is to make sure companies can hire people they cannot get domestically from abroad, _but_ also make sure they do not save any money that way. And let's face it: The US education system is so bad that without some influx of highly qualified workers, the economy is is in serious trouble. There is however zero need for these to be _cheap_ foreign workers, and that is what H1B is all about.
Re: (Score:2)
The reason IT jobs are down is a combination of things:
1)Too many people went into it, because it was seen as hot yet didn't require a degree, just certs (or nothing).
2)Improved knowledge of computers by the general public, and improved software for them to use (its not like the 90s when you had to really know Windows to set up a network). Not many people need to call helpdesk to plug in a mouse anymore.
3)Automation and improved infrastructure. It takes fewer people to manage a fleet of machines because t
Re:Twice your worth (Score:5, Interesting)
If anybody takes a look at the major companies (target, home depot, nemum marcus, etc) that were cracked over the last couple of years, nearly all had windows, and all had outsourced to India. Indian coders are paid around $8K / year. That means that China or Russia can easily bribe somebody for 80K, which is 10 years worth of salary there.
Re: (Score:2)
Um. My wife says I'm worth shite. Do the maths.
That sounds like a load of crap!
What's perceived as best for upper management. (Score:2)
In the end, companies will do what's best for stockholders, which is immediate financial gains, which is bringing in cheap slaves.
No, in the end they'll do what is perceived, by upper management, as being best for upper management.
This includes immediate financial gains, or at least the appearance of them on the bottom line. But it also includes a smooth ramp-up of this bottom line: A sudden opportunity must often be delayed or abandoned, rather than seized, because it would lead to a spike-and-dip on c