A phony STEM shortage and the scandal of engineering visas
latimes.com
latimes.com
If you've ever applied for an H-1B then you know how easy it is to abuse the prevailing wages. The process to evaluate the skills of the applicant is simply filling out a form online for their experience level, job title, and location. Give it a test here: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx It's very easy to game their job title and location to lower the salary.
Here is the law firm Cohen & Grigsby advising other employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1B workers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU This seems like clear fraud. The issue I have with H-1Bs is when companies lie/cheat/commit fraud to outsource jobs that Americans do want and are qualified/willing to do, all for the sake of driving down wages.
they can jump ship to a big company like google after your small startup went through the hassle of lawyers/visa fees/ govt fees ect.
The right solution is that if google or whoever hires an H1B 1 year into a 3 year visa, they need to pay for 2/3 of the cost of the visa.
Why would you want to use trade barriers to increase inequality?
Once the domestic pool of potential employers has dried up, then employers will bring in the slightly more expensive foreign labor.
Again, why is creating more inequality, harming the poor, and harming consumers via rent seeking a good thing?
More importantly though: how is not letting Indians into the US harming them? Are Indians incapable of creating a US-like environment in their own country? If so, that's an argument to keep them out. If not, why wouldn't they do just that instead of moving half-way around the world?
Black Americans in Flint seem incapable of creating a NYC-like environment in their own city. Is that an argument to prevent them from moving to NY?
And none of this explains why American consumers should pay extra. Apparently Indian humans count for less than 3/5, but don't American consumers count as full humans? Why should labor sellers be privileged over consumers?
Second, New Yorkers routinely enact regulations to stop unapproved immigrants from moving in through housing cooperatives for example. And Americans all around the country do with gated communities.
I lost track of what you're arguing. Are you arguing against freedom of association? For some sort of forced integration where everyone should be allowed to move wherever they please regardless of the opinion of people already living there?
I lost track of what you're arguing. Are you arguing against freedom of association? For some sort of forced integration where everyone should be allowed to move wherever they please regardless of the opinion of people already living there?
I'm arguing that it's wrong for person A to use violence to prevent person B from hiring person C, even if that undercuts the wages of person A. I believe this to be true even if person C was born into an unfavorable group.
None of the arguments you've made explain treating Indians different from Flintians.
Maybe you are arguing that some arbitrary lines on the map (e.g. countRy boundaries) deserve moral weight, but not others (e.g. county boundaries)? Is that your claim?
It's not really an argument to keep them out. We should let them in when real demand is there. Right now, its a race to the bottom in this country due to job market manipulation by business.
Also I'm all for letting Indian entrepreneurs into the country because they will create jobs.
It's not necessarily about pay, it's about wanting to work for a big name like Google.
I think the best solution, as others have suggested, is that the new employer has to buy out the visa costs. This is the deal I made when my employer paid to relocate me to the Bay Area -- if I left in the first two years, I would have had to repay my moving costs.
And of course the objections to your idea highlight the point that hb1s have generally not been about finding people with unique skills but rather about getting cheap labor on a tight leash.
Wouldn't that punish small startups by favoring big co's like google/ms?
My opinion is, no, most are not doing this.
It is such a high burden on an early strat-up to hire a H1-B and only post Series A, H1-B makes some sense.
In the grand scheme of things, I like the market oriented auction, that will at least eliminate the rent-seekers who are clogging the pipeline.
The current system encourages my boss to buy extra lottery tickets at the lowest price so he can be surprised later when productivity, morale of local employees, and quality ratio to labor cost is at rock bottom.
Now about being unfair to startups... If the auction somehow doesn't account for offering ownership/equity (which seems like an obscure rare situation anyways), that's clearly a better problem to have than a market flooded with cheap labor that still needs regular training, in addition to language training and cultural training.
Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company - something along the lines of "If an employee spends N months at a company on H-1B, not get into trouble with the law, pay taxes and be a productive member of the community, then that person can work at any similar job without being tied to the employer".
Facebook, Google or Microsoft are not doing H-1Bs so they can trap those employees into working at low wages - Cognizant and Infosys are. Removing the power these firms have over the employee is the only true way to reform H-1B.
President Obama's executive action plans did state intent along those lines [1], but those seem to be torpedoed by vested interests. There is currently a draft rule from USCIS titled "Retention of EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 Immigrant Workers and Program Improvements Affecting High-Skilled Nonimmigrant Workers" [2] open for comments until Feb 29, 2016.
If you are interested in acting towards a solution to this problem you identify, please consider reading and commenting on it this weekend. You can do it online by going to www.regulations.gov and searching for the eDocket number USCIS-2015-0008 [3].
[1]: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120...
[2] USCIS Seeks Comments on Proposed Rule Affecting Certain Employment-Based Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Visa Programs - https://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-seeks-comments-proposed-rul...
[3] http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=USCIS-2015-0008
While I agree that people on an H-1B visa shouldn't be tied to one particular employer, I don't think this will solve the problem at all. The lottery model will always unfairly advantage these outsourcing companies precisely because all they care about is billable hours, and the people working there are interchangeable. That's why they can afford to be relatively indiscriminate by throwing thousands of visa applications at the wall and hiring whoever sticks. Product companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft who have to actually care which individuals they hire are always going to be at a disadvantage in a lottery - their hiring bar reduces the pool of visa applicants and gives them fewer tickets. That doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers at these companies, but as a whole the system perversely incentivizes quantity over quality.
These companies apply for visas on behalf of the competent employees they have in their offshore offices. Once the employee gets an H-1B visa if the regulations are such that s/he is free to switch employers without harming their immigrant status, they will bargain for better wages. This breaks the business model of applying for lots of visas paying large fees on each of them and getting a few approved.
Right now the visa fees (> 7K for just the initial application! [1]) are considered an investment by these firms, because they know that the few that sticks can be trapped into a long employment period and underpaid for years to recoup many multiples of the initial investment.
Breaking this business model is what will prevent these firms from applying in large numbers (which is a DoS attack on USCIS, forcing the approval process into a lottery). Hence my original comment.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/forms/h-and-l-filing-fees-form-i-129-p...
Do you really want to import foreigners for high paying jobs? Do you really want to starve low margin industries that are unable to pay high wages but need specialized locally unavailable skills? The skill shortage doesn't necessarily equates with high wages, for example shortage of skills needed for short term. One example, a COBOL programmer needed for a cobol to xyz conversion project.
Using any one criteria as qualification is recipe for disaster and gaming the system. An appropriate process should look at multiple items both from hiring org perspective and the fit of a foreigner for hiring org as well as industry and the country. A point based system that evaluates suitability of employer and non-immigrant candidate might be better approach, a system somewhat like what Canada uses for permanent residency.
In the end, either you import foreigners or you export jobs. If there is an arbitrage opportunity, it will be exploited by someone somewhere.
I know about many USA tech companies increasing size of their European offices, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Palantir. It is bad situation for everyone. USA general public: Role of USA as the tech capital of the world is diminished, as there is more intellectual capital elsewhere. My taxes go to UK rather than to USA. Tech companies: They need to open offshore offices. Foreign tech workers: There is less choice of companies in Europe (especially startups). Some people may want to live in USA for various reasons.
The only potential beneficiaries are American tech workers. I believe that the benefit is only in the short term. If tech companies could get all engineers they want into USA, they wouldn't need to open offshore offices. As soon as offshore office is opened, the company have access to more engineers than they could import to USA, as not all people are open to relocating to USA, regardless of Visa situation. Therefore, "value" of an American engineer drops more.
Edit:typo.
Palantir is opening up a EU based branch? Where? I think people who work there should be put on lists and never be allowed to work in a normal company again. If by now a person still thinks it's ok to work for Palantir they really should be closely watched.
They're in their early 20's and got swept up by the recruiting machine. It's like brandishing all Goldman Sachs analysts who joined the firm pre-2008 as having evil intent rather than just having been ill informed.
It is that black and white unfortunately. But only because current US legislation with their war on everything made it so. It is up to Americans to change it and as a non American I'd judge anyone who doesn't rise up and distance themselves. You should be on the streets protesting and not behind laptops and cowardly half-arsed remarks hiding yourself. Downvote me all you want I really don't care.
[1] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/
edit forgot to add the link
>Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Second, you should defined what is a normal company. They are pretty much the same as any big tech company, and they are definitively hiring the same profiles as Google, Facebook or Criteo, in a very similar process.
Last, what makes working for Palantir worst than, let's say, working in adtech, fintech, or anything resembling a buzzfeed-like mobile social network?
Palantir is helping California police develop controversial license plate database: http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/29/4478748/california-license...
Congressman continues drumbeat on controversial intel system: http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/24/congressman-continu...
CIA-funded upstart: THE TRUTH about Prism and NSA's web snooping: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/10/palantir_denies_powe...
Helping Build The Surveillance State Is Good Business: Palantir Gets $196 Million More In Funding: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130927/17175624683/helpi...
In practice, it's impossible because Congress isn't going to do anything.
But that's IF you're the kind of worker the H1-B was designed to allow into the USA – someone highly skilled and in demand, with the cultural competence to navigate US society. The hordes of TATA people, I don't know.
The real issue with the H-1B (in my opinion) is that you need to jump to a new employer very quickly if you quit. You can't quit a bad situation and then spend a couple of months trying to get a better one.
I came to the US for my MBA (from a good school), graduated in the top 2% of my class with a 3.94 GPA. I got a job with a Fortune 150 company. My starting salary was 94K, and now I make more than 150K. All this happened in the last 4 years.
I am not "cheap labor" and I don't work in IT. I am highly skilled (I'm a lawyer with an MBA - it's not all that common). I have an approved green card application.
But - I'm from India, and there's a LONG line of people ahead of me waiting for green cards. It will take 5-7 years to get a green card. In the meanwhile, I have received job offers where I would get paid more - nearly 200K in one instance. But I'm unwilling to take those offers because it would mean restarting the green card process. There are ways to keep your spot in line, but they aren't foolproof, and for me, it's easier to stay with this company and hold onto my spot rather than take a higher paying job.
So yes, even for people highly skilled and in demand, it's not easy to switch jobs. There are many factors that you have to look at, and it's stressful knowing that if you lose your job, you have days to find a new job - or else give up your life in the US and leave. I have been here for years, I have a house, cars, friends.. you can't easily just leave everything behind.
The US needs to work on this issue. I agree that people shouldn't be losing their jobs to cheaper labor, but at the same time, what about highly skilled immigrants who want to contribute to the US economy and build a life here? The sword of Damocles hangs over our heads - lose your job and you have 10 days to find a new one, or get out. Doesn't matter if you've been here 10 years and have done everything you possibly could to be a good citizen.
I've known people at my company with approved applications, that left to work elsewhere.
However, if USCIS decides to deny the new PERM, or ask for additional evidence, or who knows what else - you could lose your spot AND lose your ability to work and have to leave immediately. There are many things that could go wrong - the lawyers could screw up, Congress might change the rules, your new company might decide to withdraw the I-140.
It's a risk, and the question is your willingness to take that risk. If I get offered a job where I'm getting paid more that $220K, I might take that risk. Below that, it's simply not worth it for me. And I'm not alone in this.
The OP was talking about how restrictive and capricious the skilled immigration laws were on him. A person elected by nativist populist voters will likely try to take away the OP's freedom (and ability to stay here), and make his life worse.
One organization working for the OP's benefit, and the benefit of all skilled immigrants, as well the as the many undocumented is Fwd.us: http://www.fwd.us/ They're funded by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. Just as a note, many of these people have signed the Giving Pledge, so they're not the evil billionaires people like to make them out to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge
Other pro-immigration organizations, like the Chamber of Commerce, are also funded by big businesses. The Koch brothers are pro-immigrant, and have said they support legalizing the 11-12 million undocumented here. There is a lot of broad support in the business sector for making our laws more immigrant-friendly.
The OP's life would have been a lot better had the 2013 "Gang of 8" Senate immigration bill (S.744, 133th Congress) passed: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/s744
It would have made our immigration system a couple of order of magnitudes better, and made life for skilled immigrant especially better.
It didn't pass, not because of business opposition to it, but because of right-wing tea-partyer grassroots nativist sentiment, and congressmen who were beholden to them.
I don't want to start a big off-topic thread about philanthropy, just point out some nuance that was missed by your note.
O visas are easy to get if you're an author, celebrity, renowned professor, and so on.
I'm not in that category. I have publications in international journals and corporate awards - but an O visa would be a stretch.
It's easier for me to leave the US for a year, and come back and reapply under the EB1 classification, and this is something that I am seriously considering. It depends on what new rules the USCIS makes this year - and also on the outcome of the upcoming Presidential election.
No, you don't even have 10 days -- it's zero days. You are immediately out-of-status (or in more common parlance, an "illegal immigrant") as soon as your H-1B employer terminates you.
USCIS has an official FAQ / Q&A on this: https://www.uscis.gov/tools/ombudsman-liaison/practical-immi...
I'll quote them here: "If the employment ends, this condition is no longer satisfied and the individual is no longer in a lawful nonimmigrant status and may be subject to removal proceedings." and "There is no automatic 10-day or other grace period for terminated employees holding H-1B status".
The employer is required, by law, to notify USCIS as soon as your employment ends. So USCIS does know immediately, that you are out-of-status.
My job is fairly secure, but who knows, right? I have a range of worst-case-scenario strategies, including how to quickly sell everything I have and move to Canada (which is far more welcoming of highly skilled people - I qualify).
I wish I didn't have to think of all this though. I shouldn't have to. I do everything according to the letter of the law, work hard, pay my taxes. None of that matters. Lose my job - and bye-bye life in the US.
I know people who don't make as much as I do and aren't getting job offers. They are even worse off and often complain of feeling like slaves to their employers. My company doesn't treat me any different to a US citizen - but smaller companies routinely abuse their H1 workers, because they know they have them over a barrel.
True, whether USCIS chooses to act on a sudden unexpected layoff you might have, and begin "removal proceedings" against you -- or in other words, send ICE agents to your home, arrest you, throw you in a detention center ("jail") for an indefinite amount of time, until you are put on a plane back to India (forcibly), is up in the air.
The likelihood is that, as someone who came to this country on a skilled visa, you are probably not on the top of their priority list. There is also, prosecutorial discretion. If you get laid of suddenly, and if you find another willing sponsor super-fast (in let's say, 10 days), they can basically ask USCIS for forgiveness for the fact that you were out-of-status. They'd have to write a letter explaining that the circumstances were outside your control. However, prosecutorial discretion, is completely at the discretion of the officer reviewing your case.
However, another thing to be much more wary about is, if you were let's say driving in Alabama, where police officers can stop you[1] on suspicion that you are illegal (for which the sole, if not primary criteria is race/appearance), they can and do contacted the federal government to check if you are in the country legally, and you could be dragged and chucked into an ICE detention facility by the local police.
Alabama law requires local police to do this. But I've heard of stories of police in upstate New York doing this unilaterally (not because state law directs them to). NY driver licenses show the expiration date of your visa. This person had overstayed their F-1 student visa, and the upstate NY officer after seeing the visa expiration date on the driver license, dragged him over to ICE and handed him over. What's interesting is that NY doesn't have any state law[2] that requires the police to do this. With Indian people being frequently confused for Hispanic people, you are at high risk in any rural part of this country, or really any part of the U.S. with low immigrant populations.
[1] Alabama has a statute that allows them to do that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_SB_1070 It was much harsher, as originally you would have been made guilty of criminal felony (under state law) for not having legal status, but the Supreme Court overturned most of it, except for the ability of local police to randomly stop you because of "reasonable suspicion" that you lack legal status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_v._United_States
[2] But the local laws of New York City expressly prohibits this. The local laws of the "sanctuary cities" in the U.S. all expressly prohibit the police from inquiring about your immigrant status. Even if they can know from just looking at your driver license that you are illegal, the sanctuary cities prohibit the police from taking any action based on this. More on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city
We could petition the President and ask him to create such a rule, but we'd need a lot of people, and a lot of support. If you are interested in working on this, feel free to get in touch with me at the email address listed on my GitHub profile (which is linked to on my HN profile).
I have heard contradictory things from various lawyers about whether I could continue a green card process if I changed employment. Even if there is a correct interpretation of the law, you can't rely on them applying it to you because as a non-US citizen you're at the mercy of the bureaucracy. Big companies can get what they want, not individuals.
I wasn't happy with where I was working, and though they were willing to sponsor me for a green card, all the advice I got was that I would have to wait ten years or more. I didn't want to wait a decade to be more entrepreneurial, so I left instead. Also I was just sick of all the hoops I had to keep jumping through, scary experiences at the border, trivial screw-ups from lawyers meaning unexpected stays out of the country.... but most of all, how it made me a much more compliant person in my day-to-day work. I survived some difficult situations (and did jump employers once) but it was never easy.
Other people in my situation, who are tired of being some company's indentured servant, sometimes do different visas. The O-1 is surprisingly popular, even though it's written like you have to be Stephen Hawking to qualify. But I guess I didn't have the werewithal to do that.
In the original article, the congressperson commented about how the visa program doesn't attract entrepreneurial people. That was crazy. Lots of us are entrepreneurial! The H-1B visa is designed to stop us from doing that.
Just give them a green card after 12 months, background and security check expensed to the company that wanted them (50K minimum charge).
The pipeline would simply shut down for cheap workers. Technical specialists wouldn't even blip.
Honestly, I'd like it if the Kentucky logistics company were forced to pay SF wages. It might help drive up wages for skilled workers in Kentucky.
You don't have to; the market will take care of it. They severely underpay their workers, so they'll never be able to compete.
People move to SF and NYC because those places are good when you need to find your NEXT job because you got laid off.
Do you "deserve" whatever wealth you have when it could be liquidated and save one live for every $3,500 [1]?
It's easy to be generous with other people's resources. Being as virtuous as you imagine you are is expensive.
The interesting bit is that there are few who make this argument at the low end. The idea of open borders for unskilled folks is way less popular.
The net effect of this, it seems to me, is that while there's lots of support for me facing more competition, there's no support for more competition in the labor I buy.
Now, one could say that is reasonable, just because I make a lot more money than I need to live, which can't be said for less skilled workers, but it's an interesting dynamic.
"The gains from eliminating migration barriers dwarf---by an order of a magnitude or two---the gains from eliminating other types of barriers. For the elimination of trade policy barriers and capital flow barriers, the estimated gains amount to less than a few percent of world GDP. For labor mobility barriers, the estimated gains are often in the range of 50–150 percent of world GDP." [1]
A typical example:
"Take a male construction worker in the capital of Ghana. There isn’t much you could do to greatly raise his economic productivity in Ghana; access to better tools or training might make him modestly more productive. But if you let the exact same person emigrate to work at a construction site in any big U.S. city, his economic productivity would rise roughly 700% to 1,000%." [2]
[1] Clemens, Michael A. 2011. "Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25(3): 83-106. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.25.3.83
[2] http://www.cgdev.org/blog/trillion-dollar-bills-sidewalk-why...
Frankly the only place where H1B seems to be "misused" is in the outsourcing industry. And that too it is "misused" if you look it from a protectionist perspective.
I've never seen any high skilled jobs going to H1Bs just because it is cheaper. In fact I've seen the opposite: small and mid-size companies hesitating to hire H1Bs because of the uncertainties involved.
Also, PhD glut in bio has nothing to do with H1B! The author misleadingly brings it up because it has the "woah" factor to buttress his argument.
Also can somehow explain to me how it is not protectionism to forge Disney to do something in house while it can be done cheaper by engaging a foreign company like Infosys?
Are you familiar with the Walt Disney Company.
It's not. Most large companies already have offices over there and could hire those people tomorrow if they wanted to. They bring people into the US with their families to have power over them. A manager without power over skilled people is useless in accomplishing business goals that require those skills. They also are always trying to accomplish personal goals like getting their friends promoted, getting more power generally at the cost of technical people. These types of goals tend to make technical people walk away despite any salary level, hence the need for H1B. Except for body shops, H1B is about power not money or available workforce.
Did you read the article?
> The mismatch is especially stark in the biomedical field. There, according to a 2014 paper by experts from UC San Francisco, Harvard and Princeton, "the training pipeline produces more scientists than relevant positions in academia, government, and the private sector are capable of absorbing."
If you demand someone with a phd from a top 10 (stanford/cmu, berkeley, michigan, toronto, ny, columbia, UW, etc) then yes, I agree -- but there's probably fewer than 200 of those minted per year. If you realize a cmu ML phd holder isn't going to your startup for $125k + lottery tickets and is instead going to a public company for $200k + $100k in RSUs and are realistic about what you can hire, there are plenty of us with track records of delivering products and making our employers money.
That's from my perspective both as hiring manager and an employee. I've been willing to hire both non-phds and outside of the aforementioned schools and really not had much trouble.
p.s. BTW we are more open to Masters/Bachelor's (less researchy) than Phds.
I'm not aware of a huge pool of "Machine Vision + Deep learning" people who are trapped in India because of Wipro using up all the H1Bs on J2EE programmers.
> But to say "there is no skills shortage" is at best laughable.
What is stopping you from filling that shortage by training people to have the skills you need? You're trying to hire students forchristsake.
No, I didn't. I just think your hiring expectations are unreasonable and not at all indicative of any kind of real "skills shortage."
Instead of sharing your infinite wisdom of who I should hire, how I should train them, and what have you...why not start your own company? Hire all this talent pool you claim exists, and show us how it can be done. Be the change you want. But that would involve moving your fat a$$ and might be too much exertion for your royal laziness
Unless you have started up a business, and done something worthwhile, you can go shove your advice up your you-know-what.
> Agree with you. There is definitely no shortage....of entitled, arrogant, lazy, whiny, whingey armchair generals like you.
> Instead of sharing your infinite wisdom of who I should hire, how I should train them, and what have you...why not start your own company? Hire all this talent pool you claim exists, and show us how it can be done. Be the change you want. But that would involve moving your fat a$$ and might be too much exertion for your royal laziness
> Unless you have started up a business, and done something worthwhile, you can go shove your advice up your you-know-what.
Hmm. I wonder if your attitude has any connection to your hiring problem. I certainly wouldn't want to work for someone who acts as immaturely as you are acting now.
BTW, I do hire people and I do train them/give them time and guidance to pick up the skills I need them to have, especially if they're less experienced students. I think it's unreasonable to expect that the perfect candidate will just fall out of a university fully formed and into my lap, so I deal with it and do something about it. Apparently you do not, and instead jump to conclusions and hurl put-downs.
That's true, but only to a degree. There is a kernel of inherent talent/ability behind many skills, but pretty much everything else besides that can be learned.
So, assuming you're correct, you identify the "CS and EE" students that can be trained in AI/ML and you train them, rather than complaining about a "skills shortage" (usually meaning something like the US is not providing fully trained bodies at cheap prices with the cutting-edge, special-snowflake skillset the complainer desires).
"Training" could mean paying for/subsidizing an advanced degree, which good employers have been known to do.
> If everyone can be trained for everything, what is the point of specialization?
I'm not saying something like everyone can learn any job with a 4-week training course. The point of specialization is that no one has the time to learn every skill, so people focus.
What's the snark about here?
There are lots of Indian grad students in CS and EE departments across the US. Modulo OPT, they're at the mercy of H1B lotteries. I know of PhDs from EU universities who, without the luxury of OPT, haven't been able to convert successful interviews and skill-matches into actual employment because of H1B's arbitrariness. Many of my friends have had to resort to O1 with varying success after excellent PhD dissertations because the failed to make the cut in H1B. Some had to return to India simply because they failed at both H1B and at meeting the onerous requirements of O1.
If you want a new Lexus, but can only afford a used Corolla, that does not mean there's a "Lexus shortage" ... nor is there a "car shortage". If only a Lexus will do, then the market just doesn't happen.
You know, you could always just hire someone with potential and put him through a training program to teach him the "specific skills" needed, or just let him learn them on-the-job.
But of course, employers are no longer willing to invest in their employees* , so we have a "skills shortage."
* They used to. It's my understanding that the first few generations of business applications programmers were taught programming from scratch by their employers.
From the flip side, I see the company concern - kind of. If I bring in raw talent and train it, I've sunk $X into the talent and if they leave shortly thereafter, I'm out $X with no benefit. The counterpoint to that argument, I think are signing bonuses and defined time contracts. In exchange for us training you to do this job and completing the program, you get a signing bonus of $X at the start, $Y at the end, and sign a 2 year agreement to work here. If you leave beforehand you agree to payback the $X+Y signing bonus (unless laid off by the company).
There are ways to address the "skills shortage". The problem is, no one wants to take the time and the cost to do it.
This will mostly damage employers abusing the system -- I doubt this hog processor really vitally needs all of these "Manager Trainees" earning 30k.
http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=MANAGER+TRAINEE&city=&...
The whole prevailing wage and government allocation business is just too ripe for abuse. If they're genius visas you can afford large salaries.
"outsourcing firms that use them to import workers"
And throughout it interchanges offshoring and outsourcing, all the way through its conclusion:
"Overwhelmingly, the H-1B program is working to speed up the offshoring," Hira said, "rather than keeping [jobs] here in the U.S."
What h1b does is keep the jobs in the U.S. staffed by work permit holders, it is the opposite of offshoring.
The biggest H1B companies specialize in outsourcing and offshoring.
Does anyone know if anything ever came of this investigation? http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/us/politics/outsourcing-co...
Q. "B-b-but there's a shortage of skilled workers!"
A. Good, let supply-demand make you pay what you should be paying for it. Let our colleges give meaningful education to people they're putting in debt for jobs they can actually get later on.
Our economy is bleeding to death while corporations rack in record profits because of outsourcing.
Few simple rules that would help a lot.
* Want an H1B? Pay them in the top 10th percentile of similar domestic professionals' wages. * Want an H1B? Great, but once you sponsor it, they're free to work for anyone in the U.S. * Want an H1B? Great, but you'll be limited to no more than 5% of your total employees. * That 5% limit includes overseas offices and "international" owned ventures.
If a company is domestic, they should stay domestic. If it's international, they have no need for H1Bs.
I'm writing this as a disgruntled software engineer turned into a business owner.
People getting away with crap like this is infuriating.
I'd also advocate that we allow companies to convert their existing H1Bs to green-card holders after 3 years, in exchange for getting a new H1B. This would effectively raise the cap while increasing mobility among immigrants working under the program.
I realise that this is probably going to get stupidly downvoted, but I am a die hard libertarian.
Why is it, in 2016, still OK to pick on the foreigners? Replace the word "foreigner" with Black/Woman/Jew/Gay/White/Whatever, and it would be totally unacceptable.
Way I see things, in a hundred years or so, picking on foreigners will be seen in the same light as picking on some minority group today.
I just worry that I won't get to live to see that day.
You're being ridiculous. It's not picking on them at all. They are trying to protect US citizens from losing their jobs (or getting wages cut) due to a sudden availability of cheap labor. A government is rightfully concerned with making sure its own citizens are gainfully employed. Citizens vote, foreigners don't. Every person within those borders who does not have a job puts a drain on the rest of the country. Someone without a job outside of those borders does not. So bringing someone across those borders while an unemployed person is within them is a net economic negative. Look at the biggest H-1B recipients: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx It's all low quality outsourcing shops like Infosys and Cognizant.
>why USians should have a god given right to jobs in the US?
These laws/protections are intended to prevent a race to the bottom. If the public subsidizes the operation of a company through security, education, and infrastructure, the community that makes that investment is entitled to ensure that the fruits of that investment go to other members of the community.
Mmmm. I hear you. Sort of. Your argument though, is not very different from the "women are taking jobs that rightfully belong to men" spiel that was all the rage after WWII.
I suspect that my argument is fundamentally based on wishful thinking. That said, you can't have your cake and eat it. The 'race to the bottom' you alude to is already happening with offshoring though.
But my central argument remains ... foreigners (based on borders determined by middle aged white men a couple of centuries ago), remain the last 'minority' group that you can still discriminate against, vocally, in polite society.
The fact that you think it's discrimination shows you completely misunderstand the issue and are coming at it from an emotionally biased perspective. You aren't entitled to anything. The government is rightfully concerned with protecting its own citizens and making sure they are gainfully employed. Citizens vote, foreigners don't. Every person within those borders who does not have a job puts a drain on the rest of the country. Someone without a job outside of those borders does not.
Also, the last I checked Americans aren't allowed to work nearly as freely in most of the countries where we accept immigrants from. We are already an exceptionally generous country and our visa program is already abused and rife with fraud. To expect even more from the US is just hypocritical and self-entitled thinking.
There is a school of though that it shouldn't. Many countries confer citizenship jus sanguinis (by descent). Is that system easier for you to understand?
Citizenship conferred jus soli (by place of birth) arose at a time when people were less mobile and less likely to acquire citizenship by "accident of birthplace" and when there were few practical benefits to citizenship in any case. It seems entirely outdated.
Modern nations belong to their citizens who are free to vote for representatives that write laws to benefit citizens and their children.
I doubt you'll have any luck convincing the people of the United States to give away their kingdom or taking it by force.
If you have the capacity to house them, feed them, train them, then that's great. Do that. But me? I need my children to be able to sleep at night. I need to feed my children. I need my children not raped. I need my children to have room and freedom to study. Will I be looked down upon as a lesser person for this through tumblr-tinted glasses in 50 years? I doubt it.
Why do I think my children have a god(s) given right to my house? I don't. Instead, I am merely thankful.
I have a much better idea. Instead of bringing the homeless world into my house, let's make a better world for the homeless?
last one here from 11 days ago : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11105798
And who continues to vote incumbents into office? It's as if we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Okay, but if they aren't skilled and no shortage exists then why aren't companies able to find cheaper US based graduates?
> Employers are legally required to pay visa holders the "local prevailing wage" for their jobs, but enforcement is porous. "It is extraordinarily easy to pay an H-1B worker much less than an American worker," Hira observed; the trick lies in how the job is defined
So fix this.
> Evidence is ample that the very claim of a STEM shortage in the U.S. is phony. Salzman noted that "overall, our colleges and universities graduate twice the number of STEM graduates as find a job each year." The mismatch is especially stark in the biomedical field. There, according to a 2014 paper by experts from UC San Francisco, Harvard and Princeton, "the training pipeline produces more scientists than relevant positions in academia, government, and the private sector are capable of absorbing."
Wow. That's compelling evidence since everyone known STEM degrees are entirely interchangeable.
How many H1-Bs are given out to biomedical graduates?