Asia IT Giant's CEO Warns Trump's Visa Curbs Will Cost US (bloomberg.com) 157
The chief executive officer of Asia's largest IT services firm warned that a U.S. freeze on thousands of employment visas will only raise costs for American corporations like Wall Street banks, auto manufacturers and drugmakers. From a report: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) CEO Rajesh Gopinathan told Bloomberg News the move has put massive stress on a huge swath of Indian-born engineers that have lived in the U.S. for years and helped support American clients, who will ultimately be the ones hurt most. His remarks were among the strongest public rebukes from India's $181 billion IT industry since U.S. President Donald Trump's June decree to halt approvals for a range of visas until the end of the year -- including those for intra-company transfers.
TCS and peers like Infosys have relied for years on the ability to send talent to work alongside their customers overseas, which include some of the largest electronics manufacturers and global retailers. Investors worry that the inability to do so will hurt their competitiveness in the largest international market. "The ignorance around this ruling should be addressed," Gopinathan said via video conference on Friday. "Playing with the status of people who've moved away from families and committed to spending five-six years in a foreign country without immigrant status to deliver value to customers, is a short-term gimmick," the executive said.
TCS and peers like Infosys have relied for years on the ability to send talent to work alongside their customers overseas, which include some of the largest electronics manufacturers and global retailers. Investors worry that the inability to do so will hurt their competitiveness in the largest international market. "The ignorance around this ruling should be addressed," Gopinathan said via video conference on Friday. "Playing with the status of people who've moved away from families and committed to spending five-six years in a foreign country without immigrant status to deliver value to customers, is a short-term gimmick," the executive said.
Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
It will cost us because companies will have to pay a competitive wage instead of getting cheap H1B workers.
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Re:Yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not eager to work night shifts either.
But I might be persuaded by a larger bag of money.
So back to the original argument then; unwillingness to pay market value.
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Well, it's "market value" either way. This is just changing the rules of the market to favor domestic labor. Normally this would be called socialism, but because it's Trump I guess it's somehow not. Then again, a lot of libertarians have come out in favor of a strong police state recently, so who even knows anymore.
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That is an example of market forces at work in exactly the same way as market forces drive down prices for saleable products i.e. more competition. The more employees out ther
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Re:Yeah (Score:5, Informative)
Not just this but one main reason to use offshore is after working hours coverage. Not just paying more per worker but also more workers. And that also not all workers are eager to work night shifts so there will be an additional premium as incentives not to mention support staff will also need off hours too.
I hate to break this to you, but offshore workers don't need visa because they are offshore and not in the U.S. Your entire post has exactly zero to do with the topic.
Re:Yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
tata says less outsourced work for tata is bad for american corporations
means more work for americans
more work for americans
means more money for america
i conclude tata should stfu
tata is on my shit list for buying mg motors and not building them anymore
i am just saying what are public facts
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Re:Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
Hire American Citizens to handle communication and management, and your problem is solved. Huge numbers of American Citizens are still laid off due to Covid and can easily be poached.
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Are you saying that American workers aren't as competent as these contractors? Sounds like it's the Americans who should be getting their act together and getting better skills.
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Unfortunately you don't "get better skills"- training and education cost money. Those workers were laid off, or passed over when they tried for better jobs, so those workers are working in much lower-level jobs that don't pay for training and the workers don't make enough $ to pay for it by themselves. It's a trap I've been in. Companies want official "certifications" from various "training" organizations and those certs cost thousands. I'm a great self-learner (like probably most here) but that doesn't
Re: Yeah (Score:2)
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I hate to break it to you but offshore doesn't mean everyone from the company is offshore. We have a few workers from the company working here on visa to help with communication and management. If you get rid of them the system doesn't work nearly as well.
OK, but what does that have to do with what you originally said: "Not just this but one main reason to use offshore is after working hours coverage"
You will still be able to get that coverage with offshore workers, since the ones in those time zones don't need visas. Most of the onshored people I've worked with from Indian companies like Tata and Wipro keep the hours for the area they are living.
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Not just this but one main reason to use offshore is after working hours coverage.
That's irrelevant for the subject at hand - offshore workers don't need visas.
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Why not just hire Americans for those roles?
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It would be interesting to be in the world of CEOs and MBAs and their HR minions, but I've overheard enough of those conversations that I'd safely bet it's super-kewl to brag about having H1B and outsourcing. Their (business-types) perspective is all about short-term profit, ROI (Return On Investment), etc. Look how much Boeing management cared about planes crashing.
Re:Yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of the trouble with night work is self-inflicted by the employer. I have a pretty broad experience with that in particular. I've done night shift at 3 different companies. One was at an organization where the majority of work was done overnight (80% of staff worked overnight), another where it was majority day (less than 10% staffing at night) and other one that operated internationally with a more even split.
What I've seen is that the more siloed things are between different shifts, the more dysfunctional the enterprise becomes. By far the worst of these companies had all the "important" guys and decision-makers separated into one shift having zero temporal overlap with the night shift. There was little conception of what actually happened overnight - How much are the employees contributing? What were the company's needs for those hours - qualitatively as well as quantitatively? There wasn't much effort put toward answering these questions. The assumption was usually "nothing important happens overnight" and it was seen as a dumping ground for lesser employees - Yet with zero organizational support after 6 PM, you needed to have a better grasp of what you're doing technically, and I often ended up being the de-facto manager on top of that. Of course, since the titled managers were always gone, that work was never seen. What they saw were useless metrics of busy-work we had to compile by hand... to appease the top guys that we're "at least doing something overnight".
A big part of it was simply bad management, the day shift had their own problems - I moved back and forth between them. But no, the problem with night work is as much about perception as it is the actual schedule. Clearly mark the job posting as "Night shift" and you'll filter out the people who have kids to tuck in bed, or would rather party, and want extra pay to give that up. There's plenty jobless ITT Tech grads they can pay lowball wages to do "lesser" night work, without reaching out to Tata. Have senior employees or supervisors stay a few hours late or early on a rotating basis and you can maybe even shape the night guys up into full employees, assets to the company, to do good work at any hour you're conducting business. But hell, if the management at these companies cared about that, they wouldn't be outsourcing anything more than pest control and building maintenance.
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Offshore doesn't require an H-1b visa.
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This is a benefit yes, but it's a very small benefit and it's not what's driving the offshoring work. The drive is because the workforce is cheaper while also being educated. And not educated in the sense that they speak your local language, but that they've got the necessary job skills. Now, there are hordes of offshore workers who are mediocre of course, but that's ok you can hire more than one of those mediocre to replace your local mediocre worker.
And if you need someone above average, well, they hav
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It will cost us because companies will have to pay a competitive wage instead of getting cheap H1B workers.
Took the words right off of my keyboard.
Re:Took the words right off of my keyboard. (Score:2)
Took the words right off of my keyboard.
It must have been when you were ...
Never mind.
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Yep, that is exactly how I saw this- as a tacit admission that Tata Consulting Services has been *breaking the law requiring H-1B visa holders be paid 10% above standard wages* for many years now.
Re:Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
I have really GREAT coworkers in India. But they're permanent, real hires. The H1B system has brought a few good workers (a couple of great ones) into my sphere, but the vast majority of them have been a drag on the company, not an asset, and all of them were H1B hires as permanent workers.
I agree that paying American workers (or frankly ANY WORKERS) a competitive wage -- which the H1B program claims to do but does not -- is a good thing. But the real benefit of dropping H1B is that it forces companies to hire people again, rather than going through consulting companies (which are full of H1Bs) which skim a good portion of the pay. The india body-machine simply does crap work.
Again, this is not because Indians are not good -- I know from experience that some are amazing and many are great. But the wage-skiming systems built on H1Bs and consulting placements get us bad workers who do not have the company's long-term goals at heart.
And this costs American companies a fortune. They just don't know it because they don't know the difference between a good IT department and a bad one. They save 20% on IT wages, and don't realize their entire staff of data-based workers are ALL working at 50% because the IT department hasn't given them fast, good tools, because frankly, that's not something the IT department gives a crap about. The IT department, after all, does work for the company, doesn't get raises or promotions based on helping the company. Raises and promotions only come by finding more ways to get paid by the client. And that means foot-dragging, paperwork, CYA, lying about abilities, stalling, blaming others, etc.
If the workers hired by the consulting companies had the ability to move easily to real companies (they don't because H1B is a cleverly-disguised indentured-servant pattern) the talent would leave those companies almost immediately.
We should be giving out a lot more work visas. We should make green cards easier to get. But we should dump the H1B program completely, and right away.
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That is the important thing for sure... but being able to hire people (directly) as H1b is important as well. We have a couple H1b employees, and they are paid well, do great work, and are an integrated part of the team.
We briefly hired 2-3 additional H1b candidates t
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The problem is that a lot of non-US educated H1Bs are indentured servants, and they do not have a path to a green card, from India at least. Also, any decent Indian tech professional will work in UAE for 80 euros/hr instead of poverty wages in the US, so all of the good engineers are there, or came here 8 or so years ago before the green cards ran out. Most body-shop H1Bs are not US educated and have credentials from Star Trek.
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No, the jobs will just go overseas anyway. The accounting says that 5 bad engineers for the price of one mediocre engineers is a good bargain. The way you keep your wages up is to stop being the mediocre engineers in the first place. Be good enough that companies want to hire you. And believe me, mediocre is very much the average in the US, people like to claim there's a meritocracy but just take a good look around and you will see otherwise.
Now if there are shady deals going on, such as student visas a
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No, the jobs will just go overseas anyway. The accounting says that 5 bad engineers for the price of one mediocre engineers is a good bargain.
That is on par with the last job I worked at. The over sea workers were paid about 1/4 what the US workers were paid. We were told that they paid top dollar for these offshore workers and they only hired from the best of the best. From the conversations with them and others, they were paid quite well compared to the national average. As for being the best of the best, well, it took three or four rounds of code reviews before things were fixed correctly. Instead of looking for the core of the issue thi
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mediocre adj. of only average quality
I wouldn't have it any other way.
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Both is the plan. We'll have xenophobia AND lower wages for all Americans. Eliminating H-1Bs doesn't mean employers have to pay higher wages, they just have to figure out how to get citizens and permanent residents to work for less.
Slim down benefits, reduced the frequency of salary adjustments. There are lots of ways to stealthy trim the personnel budget without H-1B workers. The more obvious approach is layoffs to quickly get the total cost of staff to the target amount, then push the remaining staff to m
Re: Yeah (Score:3)
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the "talented" foreigners already do that
H1-B has nothing to do with talent, H1-B holders compete on lower cost
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Because of course, your opinion is that Americans are too stupid to do that work, right?
Re:where do you see that? (Score:4, Insightful)
"Limiting the H-1B program without expanding the EB-1 program [green-card.com] is terrible business and a huge setback for our nation. We need to get highly qualified people from all over the world "
Thus implying that there are no highly qualified people *already in the nation* so we have to poach intellectual property from other nations.
Instead of doing what it takes to *create* an above average population. There are a large number of people in the United States who, for instance, actually live lives with less opportunity than exists in those third world nations. The bell curve would suggest that geniuses exist in those populations as well, but we don't take the time for instance to build universities in the 9 poorest counties of East Kentucky and East Tennessee, do we?
Seems to me there is a lot we can do at home with the population we have, before needing to turn to immigration. And by leaving those people in their home nations, it's a win/win because they help develop their home nations which provides more consumers for us to sell things to.
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Then Trump should limit the jobs open for H1Bs to those making more than 100k/year.
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That's not a bad idea. His office probably doesn't have the power to do something so specific with the H-1B program. Congress could easily make the change.
Theoretically jobs are offered to Americans first, before they can be offered through the H-1B program. But in practice there are a lot of loop holes and a lot of Americans never see the jobs. I think there is a lot of room for improving the current program to suit our country's goals.
But if those goals are equivalent to "keep the dirty foreigners out", t
Tata are cheaper, not better (Score:5, Insightful)
Tata and Infosys are used by US companies because they are cheaper, not because they are better. The IT industry has been replacing competent local staff with less competent and cheaper Indian staff for years now, every IT insider has seen this happen. Many of us have seen the disasters these cheaper staff create and are quite happy to see curbs on H1B visas.
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> Tata and Infosys are used by US companies
> because they are cheaper, not because they are
> better.
LOL... yeah... Now, there ARE some outsourcing shops in India that have good people who will legitimately add to your project and company. But Tata and Infosys? No. Just... no. Best to simply round them all up, ship them to the South Pacific, and feed the whole lot of them to the Dread Cthulhu. The industry and world will be better for it.
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if they are such a scary talent
then why does not india hire them
or are you stating that india businesses are stupid
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It's hard to argue with $300/mo (Score:2)
That said, I know plenty of competent offshore and onshore. I think the main problem is that the demand is so high thanks to how cheap they are that the quality drops.
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Yeah, there are some smart ones that catch on pretty quickly and are useful, but unfortunately most of them are also ambitious, and they move upward or onward way too soon. It seems like a treadmill of training new folks, and it is the same whether they are working local or offshore. At least it's a reason to keep some of us locals around, for continuity, I guess.
Bit of history on 1099 - W2 and H-B (Score:2)
What I saw happen (as a simplification): before the early 1990s, when US companies wanted temporary labor for a programming project, they typically hired US programmers as 1099 independent contractors. Such contractors were paid (in today's inflated dollars) on the order of US$150+ an hour or so (depending on the contractor's personal negotiating skills, experience, etc.). Back then a typical rate was like $60-75+ an hour in ~1990 dollars (sometimes much more). Which depending on how much time a person bill
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This is why forcing companies to hire remote workers instead of local visa holders will backfire. As we learn to manage remote workers, it is going to be cheaper to have offices in cheaper locations around the world. In the 1990â(TM)s we saved huge amount of money on technical solutions using a fax machine and having the work don
Uh, what? (Score:5, Interesting)
"the ability to send talent to work alongside their customers overseas"
I have NEVER been able to 'work alongside' my offshore team members. I cannot even, now, 'work alongside' my local team members... We are all at our homes, shut in, Skype and Slack our calling out over the partition, and it has a real, unfortunate impact.
What BS. And as is noted above, the money is the whole point - subsidizing their lovely global business, taking jobs from US citizens, and the program intended not to do that, but to make talent available that WAS NOT AVAILABLE in the local market, required to pay similar if not equal wages, and look, turns out it's cost-saving... For you? For me?
H1B and other programs need to be properly run. Long overdue. I will miss some of my team members, but they will just be 'home', like I am, and that's acceptable. At least so I am told, and to take it without complaint.
Mark my words... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you can't get cheaper labor, you just automate more. And anyone who thinks "we've automated all we can, so I'm safe" just has to wait for the next shoe to drop.
And that increases wages (Score:3)
Who do you think produces more, and can therefore be paid more:
A. A guy picking cotton with a bag and a glove
B. A guy harvesting cotton with a $180,000 harvester
A. My grandma knitting sweaters
B. My friend running knitting machines that produce miles of fabric per hour
A. My grandpa with his slide rule
B. Me with Elastic stack
The more parts of a task are automated, the better our tools get, the more productive we are. The more productive we are, the more money we bring in and the more we are worth paying.
That
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Predicting the past (Score:2)
> Now 10 of the 39 laid off guys get certified in using a harvester... because nobody wants a manual cotton picker anymore. Now there's 11 harvester operators for every harvester the company wants to run
That seems like a reasonable enough prediction. Nothing fundamentally wrong with that thinking.
However, if you check the want ads you'll discover that is not the case. We've had harvesters for a long time. The prediction isn't bad, it's just predicting the past, and it didn't turn out that way.
The reas
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What he's saying is that the guys that didn't get trained in using a harvester moved on to a different career. The guys who runs the harvester can now afford to pay someone to mow their lawns, so several of the manual cotton pickers became landscapers. The harvester guys and the landscapers are now both making more money, and can afford to take their women out for dinner and a movie. Some of the manual cotton pickers opened diners, and one started a drive-in theater. In any case, the cost of cotton drop
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I really appreciate you citing some numbers, and being clear.
> you are talking about the price and supply of goods, I'm talking about the quantity and pay rate of jobs
"Price" and "pay rate" are of course both dollars, a common term on both sides, so we can remove that from both sides to get what matters: how many hours of work buys how much stuff. That's what you did when you quoted real wages.
In nominal wages (the everyday meaning of "dollars"), farm workers currently average $13.78/hour. In 1970 it w
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I've never worked somewhere that has even automated all of the list of tasks in the JIRA (or whatever) backlog.
Once we've run out of shit to automate, I *might* start to worry.
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My job is test automation, so I don't mind.
If you can be replaced by a shell script, you need to update your skills.
Question is what companies will do (Score:5, Insightful)
TCS/Infosys/Wipro and the like aren't using the H-1B visa program the same way a tech company like Microsoft or Intel would. Their end of the market is predicated on IT outsourcing which is just a replacement of middle-skill labor. These aren't world-class scientists and engineers we're talking about -- these are direct swaps of the people doing sysadmin/DBA/basic application coding tasks. It's simply companies saying "I need some onsite work, but don't want to pay $140K, I'd rather pay $60K (or $80K after Wipro takes their cut.)" These companies use their H-1B lottery tickets for two things -- customers who absolutely must have someone on site, or they swap them around to offshoring customers as train-your-replacement people, who then feed back all their information to the offshore teams.
I'm no Trump fan whatsoever but I do think closing the low-end loophole is a good thing. I'm never going to be a genius Ph.D computer scientist working for Google getting people to click on ads more efficiently. I'm in IT, senior-level at this point, and what I'm interested in is teaching the next generation of newbies. If all the entry level positions in IT are either garbage pay, have a career expiration date, or are nonexistent due to offshoring, we're going to have a major issue.
If we had a good, smart government labor policy, this visa restriction would be accompanied with massive tax breaks that would make it less attractive to just offshore every single job to the lowest bidder. The US does not have an education problem -- we keep pumping out students from CS programs and coder bootcamps like crazy. But just like science Ph.Ds, we don't have enough work for them. In this case it's because companies don't want to pay for competent help. The minimum salary for an H-1B is effectively $60K due to a non-inflation adjusted number in the law. Really smart people in expensive markets like NYC or SV are getting 2 or 3 times that. The second-class labor force is what needs to be curtailed -- let tech companies bring in geniuses, don't let companies farm out their DBA work,
Re:Question is what companies will do (Score:5, Insightful)
One relatively easy fix for H1Bs:
Instead of handing them out via a lottery, rank the positions by salary. If the US company really needs that specialized person, they'll pay. If it's not worth paying top dollar, well then you've got to consider things like training one of your own employees. And H1B fraud to just get cheap labor isn't going to work very well anymore.
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H1Bs are for US degree holders only.
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US Degree holders should be given citizenship at their graduation ceremony.
H1B's should not require a sponsor and allowed to compete in the market like everyone else.
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Caltech/MIT Bachelor of science is not equal to Beachelor of Technology from Vijay Institute of Engineering Technology
Which is why the company is going to pay more for the degree from Caltech or MIT.
Now we don't need to come up with some sort of ranking system for schools that can be gamed. Just let supply-and-demand figure out the value.
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Huh, now that's the first logical solution I've heard. Everything else has been unworkably complex, but this one makes sense.
I don't mind the program if it's used for what it should be, and this sounds like a pretty good way to do it.
Sam
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The US does not have an education problem -- we keep pumping out students from CS programs and coder bootcamps like crazy.
Nope. The US colleges crank out athletic majors and psychologists. "People skills" is deemed more important than actual education. Top companies actually compete for students now, by offering generous paid internships.
The minimum salary for an H-1B is effectively $60K due to a non-inflation adjusted number in the law.
The absolute minimum salary for H1b is not specified by law. It's determined using the "prevailing wage" method, from the average salary data published by the DoL. For computer programmers the absolute minimum is $78k for the Bay Area: https://www.flcdatacenter.com/... [flcdatacenter.com]
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Wrong audience (Score:2, Insightful)
Just to be clear: Trump does not care one iota whether or not his move will cost jobs, trade balance, environment, balance sheets, U.S. leadership position or anything else.
He cares about whether he "looks good" in the present news cycle in his own estimation. His measuring stick is three things: 1) the stock market, 2) how well his rallies are attended (not doing too god these days), and 3) how well his sycophants at Fox News and OANN spin things.
Don't try to weave any other logical reasoning into
Re:Wrong audience (Score:4, Insightful)
He cares about whether he "looks good" in the present news cycle
And just how does this differ from any other politician? Do you really think Nancy Pelosi's joke of an impeachment was good statesmanship, or just red meat for her base?
Not really (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead of allowing 50K H1B, we should add 25K green cards of which these are for NEEDED skills by companies. These ppl should not be allowed to work on external projects, nor be contracted out for a minimum of 5 years i.e. they have to work on internal projects that will be used in-house, OR sold externally to multiple customers. Above all, they are not allowed to be paid LESS than somebody in that skill or with that degree for the next 3 years. That is nation-wide.
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If the problem was an inadequate labor pool, then just bring them over and give them green cards. Let them apply for jobs and compete with everyone else.
You don't fix overly complicated code by adding more layers of complication. You fix it by simplifying the code. Don't try to fix silly laws or programs with more laws and programs. Reform the program to fix the problem.
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My company hired computer vision engineer on an H1B visa in 1994. There were no computer vision engineers available then. Now he drives the Mars rovers at NASA.
Lowers Costs and Quality. (Score:2)
I am sorry but you get what you pay for. Cheap Indian IT services are also cheap Quality.
Often when you get the Outsourced "Rockstar" Developer you actually reach someone who is somewhat competent. On par with the Average US It guy in that field.
There seems to be an issue with Outsourced staff especially from India, where they do what they are told, they will do no more and no less than that.
There is a bug in the system that needs to be fixed. They will fix that bug, however will not bother to test to s
Dumb fucks (Score:2)
Reciprocity (Score:2)
I'm not sure how much this will hurt us. (Score:4, Insightful)
Scoundrels like Tata and Wipro present these people as experienced professions and US corporations put them roles where sound experience is required.
This leads to a situation where, as my manager at HP said, "It costs half as much per labor hour but it takes twice as long and twice the leadership."
Placing seasoned professionals, regardless of origin, in these slots will likely boost productivity enough to counterbalance the increase in cost per hour
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This leads to a situation where, as my manager at HP said, "It costs half as much per labor hour but it takes twice as long and twice the leadership."
Five times, easily. And the opportunity cost for doing it the wrong way, in that you missed schedule and now have to undo the problems and do it again the right way. Don't forget the inherent racist environment of the "India protection plan", where the Indian managers continue to hire completely, completely incompetent and unqualified Indian developers.
slavers protesting import ban on slave labor (Score:2)
“ people who've moved away from families and committed to spending five-six years in a foreign country without immigrant status to deliver value to customers”
ROTFL
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Well, because there's no green cards anymore - it's a 30 year waiting list. And spouses cannot work anymore, so they can't say these are people who have put down roots and are part of the community. An these guys could give a rats ass about US educated Indian nationals getting H1Bs.
Increase Costs? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 53. When I was a kid in the 70s, a new color TV was around $3,000 in today's money. My first personal computer in 1980 (a TRS-80), with a printer, was about $7000 in today's money.
Even a simple blender was $150 in today's money.
You can't have all these jobs back home AND a 50-inch TV for $200.
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It's fine for Americans to want to "bring all these jobs home" but they have to understand that (as the article says) costs will increase.
That's ok. We'll be getting decent wages so we can afford the blender. And I'm not sure where you were shopping for blenders in the 70's or 80's, but dude you got ripped off.
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And I'm not sure where you were shopping for blenders in the 70's or 80's, but dude you got ripped off.
In 1975 a blender was around $30.
That's just shy of $150 in today's money.
Today, you can get a good blender for the 1975 equivalent of $15.
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Probably because a) it's a used 1975 blender that's still going strong and b) they don't make 'em like they used to. Win-win!
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To state the merely obvious, that 50-inch TV isn't being manufactured in the US. Neither is the blender. Or the computer.
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There's a whole separate conversation around how desirable it is for us to live in such a disposable economy. The 2020 $15 blender is crappier in performance, not repairable, worse for the environment for a variety of reasons, and likely the people assembling it were not treated particularly well. And instead of one good blender I bet many households have a big one, a small one, one for smoothies, etc.
I appreciate that a certain level of economic expansion has helped lift a couple billion people out of
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I bought a 42" 1080p TV in 2012 and I see no need to get a 4K any time soon. TV looks good and works fine.
Our car just turned 8 years old.
But my point remains: If you're going to cry "Bring jobs home!" you need to also accept that your cost of goods and services will go up as well. You can't have it both ways.
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It's not quite that simple. Engineering wasn't very good back then, so things had to be overbuilt, and even then they might not last. Cheap plastics weren't anywhere good enough to replace metal. Computers were novelties and sold in very small volumes, but today they're mature and mainstream, so they benefit from economies of scale (practically all electronics do). Your TV costs $200 because efficient, plastic LCDs are way, way cheaper to make than lead-lined CRTs packed with high-voltage circuitry.
Labo
Of course it will cost, but... (Score:2)
Is the "cost" reckless spending, or an investment?
This is the problem with just looking at numbers to which you have easy access. Anybody can look at a spreadsheet and compare the salaries of cheap labor vs. expensive labor; but that one item on the balance sheet doesn't show the total impact on the company. It definitely doesn't show the total impact on the nation. If companies have to hire more expensive, scarce local labor then it might be like a tax on the companies which ultimately has a public bene
When can I raise my rates to $1000 / day ? (Score:2)
What's good for M & M Enterprises . . . (Score:2)
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder:
"What's good for M & M Enterprises will be good for the country."
- Catch 22
Oh, cry me a river... (Score:2)
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Why don't you come and look at my mostly immigrant neighbourhood, where we live in (and frequently own) houses worth over $1M?
As someone earning a bit above the median (Score:2)
I'm not saying there aren't immigrants who make good money. I'm saying that money doesn't benefit 80% of the population. And that the increased supply of labor hurts that 80%.
It's simply supply and demand. Increase the supply of labor and cost falls. Falling labor costs show up as lower wages. Cheap Chinese goods made up for some of those lost wages, bu
What benefit do I see from that? (Score:2)
My schools are funded by property taxes from my own neighborhood. My hospitals are funded by private insurance that I pay into. Social Security is on the way to going bankrupt no matter what because it's being actively sabotaged.
Yes, long term there will be problems with an aging population. But that doesn't concern the average Joe American. They're living paycheck to paycheck and about to be kicked out of their shitty apartment because they can't
"The Economy" is nebulous (Score:2)
Again, I support immigration, but only in concert with a broader social policy that makes sure the benefits are felt by all Americans, not just a lucky few at the top. If we do it the neo-liberal way then you're going to get nationalism, racism and all sorts of bad things.
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The legal ones do.
That's entirely a pricing phenomenon. Pay high enough wages and you'll get plenty of American workers.
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