Investigation Reveals Silicon Valley’s Abuse of Immigrant Tech Workers
wired.com
wired.com
1. Body shops overwhelmingly exist to abuse the H1B visa allocation system
2. Contractors cost more than FTEs, but it can be booked as CapEx instead of OpEx so looks better during reporting
3. Body shops generally supply subpar labor. People with cooked resumes that are incapable of performing at the same level as their non-body shop title peers.
4. Body shops overwhelmingly arbitrage the fact it's near impossible to legitimately acquire H1B visa allocations and the broken rules about job changes for immigrants on H1B visas.
5. All of this adds up to body shops treating immigrant workers horribly while at the same time largely defrauding their customers and the government offices responsible for visa allocations
TL;DR: Body shops are evil, everyone knows this, management doesn't care because it looks good to shareholders.
But they are contractors from the point-of-view of the company that is paying the body shops, and that's the point he's making.
If businesses had to report outsourced labor as OpEx instead of CapEx many would see drastic changes to their EBITDA and their stock would drop (for good reason: They're hiding important investment information).
The SEC has supposedly been planning to fix this problem for years but has done nothing.
Another commonly used trick is to send people on L1b or B1 visas. H1Bs are on lottery, these other two aren't.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Sold-Out-Billionaires-Bipartisan-Crap...
http://scroll.in/article/741723/full-text-narayana-murthy-qu...
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Narayana-Murthy-run...
India, if you understand how its education system is setup, is essentially a labour market for producing service workers for the Anglosphere. I'm not the slightest bit surprised that India is dirt poor, while Indians form the richest ethnic group in the US.
There is no social security in India so many times aging parents solely depend on their kids for their livelihood. So its ingrained in culture to push your kids into studying what might be profitable than what is interesting to the kids.
Regarding social security you are right but that is not the reason parents push kids into studying. They believe(foolishly) that giving better education to the kids is their life purpose. It's infused so by the culture and society.
See:
http://koenraadelst.blogspot.in/2015/11/propagating-english-...
Many at this point jut in by saying "English is ours, you Heathen!", but really though it is not. India's English proficiency index was lower than China and Japan in 2011 [2] (before magically jumping up).
I've been extremely disappointed with India. There is very little awareness of political systems, even while many get drawn into pompous nationalism. Everyone is obsessed with how the best of Indians leave for the US, and are greedily optimizing for how to get a share of that sweet sweet dough. This from language teachers,writers to engineers, scientists. When Sanskrit/Kannada teachers start spouting English for class signalling, you realize there is no hope for India (much as with Africa). It's not surprising that the power centers of Indology are in the US.
Also see,
[1] http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Decolonising-Mind-Studies-African-Lit...
[3] http://www.ef.co.th/sitecore/__/~/media/efcom/epi/pdf/EF-EPI...
Power centers in the US? Source? Everyone is trying to leave? From what I've heard India doesn't have enough opportunities for everyone so some people try to leave. Also India has 10+ different languages, all I see you citing are two.
> There is very little awareness of political systems
Uh-huh. Right. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_India. Have you ever heard of a parliamentary, democratic republic? They have a constitution and 3 branches of government too.
I'm just googling shit here and I already appear to know more than you do.
Perhaps Google can teach you reading comprehension too.
propose a fix -> club it with proposals dealing with illegal immigration -> stalemate -> back to step1
I've never heard or witnessed any of these body shops or contractors. Do they just work at places like banks' IT departments so I may not run across them?
There are 2 quick solutions:
1) Allow people to keep their H1-B after quitting their job. Looking for a job while you're on an H1-B sucks, you have to deceive your employer until the transfer goes through. And the transfer itself is a barrier to getting hired because you can't start immediately.
2) Prioritize applications within each occupation class by wage instead of lottery. That way these low wage body shops can't spam the system, they'd actually have to pay a good wage rather than the "prevailing wage" to get a visa approved.
If you are on an H1B and your employer fires you, you immediately lose your right to live in this country, and to seek work, and must leave in the shortest amount of time you can.
So if your employer doesn't like you shopping around they can stop you.
>> you have to deceive your employer until the transfer goes through
It sounded like it is morally bad to do so. @jondubois says that there is nothing wrong in it as you do not belong to your employer.
Agreed they should let you remain in the US for say 6 months after you leave to seek a new job for balance of time remaining though.
So, say a worker on H1b quits and goes back to home country on last day of employment.
Then, after 6 months, they decide they want to come back to the US to work for a different company, is this a simple transfer of H1b?
"Even after the H-1B cap is reached, employers may continue to file H-1B petition on behalf of foreign nationals who are currently outside the U.S., as long as they held H-1B status during the past six years, and have not exhausted the full six years."
Basically you have 6 years after you quit/are fired and return home to transfer that H1B to a new employer, for the balance of time remaining on that visa, without being subject to the cap.
Ask your attorney ^_^
I understand it is tempting for silicon valley employers to lobby for control over workers lives, under the guise of a shortage of software engineers. But citizens are allowed to choose their path in life, and if becoming a developer in the vally isn't appealing to them, thats the market's answer.
Don't try to fix this by creating a large scale tier of noncitizen worker with limited mobility right. Whatever system we have, it must not coerce immigrants into working as a developer as a condition of living in the us.
As long as this deep flaw remains, all "fixes" will just be window dressing.
There is no political will for a broadly available "because I want to be an American" visa program. To the extent that we give work authorization to foreigners en masse, it is to fulfill specific needs for labor that can't be met by domestic workers, or because they are exceptionally skilled.
Workers are locked down to specific fields because otherwise they might start competing with Americans for jobs, and the electorate doesn't want that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/lawsuit-claims-disney-c...
But I am ready to be positively surprised....
So I'd a) watch to see if he doesn't pack his administration with too many GOPe types and/or b) fires them quickly if they revert to type (he's decisive that way, even legendary, you might say), and c) ends up campaigning against a Do Nothing Congress (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/80th_United_States_Congress) in 2018 (and on) so that he'll eventually be able to get promises like his "Intel, not Infosys" one on H-1Bs fixed in the law.
Actually, administratively he can nuke the Infosys type bodyshops from orbit, especially if he takes a page from JFK's playbook and starts putting their executives in Federal prison.
But we'll see...
Note that he doesn't have to be "revolutionary" in one sense, if he's just another FDR Democrat like Reagan labeled himself as (albeit neither being viciously anti-business), that would be a huge improvement.
Trump's stance on H1-B is quite clear from his policy papers, speeches, as well as those policy documents written by his main immigration advisor Sen. Jeff Sessions. This is all out in the open for anyone to read, but I suspect you just wanted to take a gratuitous shot at Trump's supporters, so, good job.