Absolutely nothing. It's central planning for something that doesn't require it: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
Ability to switch jobs at will, can bring up the paid salary and it puts the onus on employer to ensure employee is treat equal to other other employees in US. If employee is not treated/paid well enough, employee can move to another company in US.
If I get a job, and my company NEEDS me, and I'm GOOD at what I'm doing, I should get IN; period. There should be no crap involved. How the hell is it good for a company to be told that it can't grow because it happened to petition the 65,001st person out of 65,000 that year? How the hell is it good for the prospective employee to have to try again later? And in extremely-fast-moving industries such as tech, even the arbitrary time frame of "one year" is an insanely long time.
The only limit that kind of makes sense is a thorough investigation of the type of person you're bringing in (e.g. university degrees or other background, some indication of what they're bringing to the country as a whole). It may make sense to force companies to prove that no U.S. citizen can do the job but this system has been gamed for years, as companies produce vague job descriptions just like they post vague patent descriptions.
My first experience with H1-B workers was working with contractors at a state agency (in Virginia). They were nice, but not highly skilled overall, and terrified of losing the job as they didn't have any guarantee of getting another U.S. job. This, in turn, made work life worse for everyone, as they'd never complain about anything on the job, even when it was egregious and not just software devs being whiny.
My second experience with H1-B workers was when I moved to Seattle. My colleagues were often H1-B, and were vastly skilled (still nice). Good workers (generalizing, of course), but perfectly willing to complain if the workplace or work was subpar, because they knew they could land another job in the U.S. more easily than our employer could replace any of us.
That said, the paperwork process was amazingly bad, and many of them got stuck in jobs (even avoiding promotions) because they had started the citizenship process, and for at least one phase changing your job starts the process over. Ugh.
The difference between the two, and the impacts it had on the workplaces were stark. My leaving the first job was in the middle of most of their non-H1-B talent leaving (you could call that a self-correction, but that just left those that stayed worse off). My second experience left me rethinking everything I thought I learned from the first experience.
Something that'll genuinely solve all the problems (qualified americans losing jobs, outsourcing companies abusing loopholes, salaries racing to the bottom), would be to have a concept of temporary green card.
Instead of a 3 year H1b, have a 3 year green card (lets call this the Super H1b). Once an immigrant is here in the US on a Super H1b visa, he/she will be free to take up any employment if need be, even with multiple employers.
This will ensure that an employer sponsoring the Super H1b visa will be paying at or above market rate salary, because the employer truly needs this employee.
Are there chances of this visa being abused? sure. But its way low, much more beneficial (to americans, to the immigrant and also to the genuine Super H1b sponsors).
@ergothus : Do you think having such a visa would have helped (considering your experiences in Virginia and Seattle?)
1) 10x poverty guidelines in US for 2015.
That's not enough for some places. I know mid level engineers at some of the big companies make more than that, for example.
$117,700 in San Francisco is not the same as $117,700 in Austin.
Again, any minimum salary requirement, becomes very easy to game (employee can be expected to pay back in cash, for the difference). This will put genuine companies (that cannot do such shady deals) at a great disadvantage
When I was on an H1B visa I changed jobs multiple times, very easily. Part of the problem is that people (including potential employers) aren't aware how easy it is.
3 years, immigrant can work anywhere, any number of employers.
Guess how many illicit h1b employers will be interested in bringing an immigrant, if they are not guaranteed that the immigrant will stay with them?
Once you apply for a green card, you have to maintain legal immigration status continuously. Furthermore, nationals of India and China have to wait longer, due to country quotas and relative demand. There is something called a priority date, which is somewhat akin to taking a number instead of waiting on queue, except it's really more like a number for the secondary queue to get a number for the real queue.
There is an I-140 form that is part of the process, which is filed by the employer. If this form is withdrawn, perhaps in response to changing jobs, it can reset priority dates or cause extensions to be denied.
Until this happens, Americans are going to be at the receiving end.
Even limiting number (drawn out of thin air) of visas, or increasing the cost of the visa, doesn't solve any issues. If anything, it'll make it worse for the legit h1b sponsoring company to bear the costs and handle the immigration process.
Who wouldn't want to hire a bunch of people that are beholden to you to stay in the country? Remove that from the equation and wages will move back up to market.
This isn't a cold trail of off shore shell accounts and obfuscating financials dealings. The trail is pretty clear.
This is about high tech companies lobbying congress for a special temporary guest worker visa (that allows for a dual intent to remain in the US), held and controlled by a corporation, where the guest worker resides in the US at the pleasure of the corporate "sponsor", on the grounds that there is such a shortage of critical tech employees that we need to empower corporations to bestow the right to live and work in the US on non-citizen who possess these skills. Some of these corporations have then turned around and fired US Citizens, some of whom are in fact immigrants, in order to replace them with workers brought in on this program.
While there is plenty of debate here on HN on the extent to which the new workers are "captive" in their jobs, I think we can all agree that the H1B workers absolutely are not free and full citizens, free to choose their own path in life, decide where they will live, what they will work on, what career they will pursue, and so forth. Even if they can change jobs, they need to find a new corporate sponsor who bestows the right to live in the US on them.
This kind of corporate power over individuals, on a massive scale, really bothers me. You can object deeply this while celebrating immigration that preserves the freedom and autonomy of the individual, and supporting general immigration (or even a more general version of skilled immigration).
Here's the article that was posted here a little over half a year ago. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-...
It's nice to see some closure.
Hadean justice would alter the H1B visa category such that the guest worker could perform no function for the company other than to train American nationals to perform adequately in the labor category that required the imported foreign worker.
Clearly, if it is advantageous to import a skill, it would be more advantageous to replicate it during the limited time that it is available.
This is not true.
Let's say you need someone with expertise in a very specific category, like embedding javascript into Postgres. You find the one person in the world who does that and hire them using an H1B. Your whole company uses Macs and she is used to Windows.
Is training that new employee to provision an OS X machine fraud?
No.
I thought the main reason for H1-B visas was because there aren't enough American workers?
So why would they get rid of American workers they already had ,that have been doing the job?
Surely it couldn't be because they lower pay of the H1-B workers?
Recall that crime rates in the US among immigrants are lower than in the general population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime#United_S...
That being said, the H1-B system is broken and needs urgent reform, I suggest looking at the point-system used in Canada.
That hasn't been the case for many many years, but the memory lingers and some employees feel beholden to companies. Many large public corporations these days look for maximizing "share holder value", which translates into "what can we do right now to maximize revenue". That being said, those short term actions will have long term effects. Cringely has done well to document the case of IBM. My graduate advisor was old school IBM and was still getting money from a time when (i don't know the exact specifics) where if an employee made a significant impact that saved the company money, they company would provide some renumeration in kind. His patents, etc. still brought him money from his time at IBM.
This is going to be a gross over simplification, but it is based on personal experience at two companies -- both startups. There are certain nationalities, maybe it is due to national ties, sometimes it seems due to prior business relationships and potential kickbacks, where an individual in power puts significant pressure on the company to hire a particular out sourcing firm or sponsor an H1-B for a particular individual.
Just like the numerous debates around "women in tech", there are factors at play and decisions made where hiring isn't always about "what's right for the company", but more about a "cultural" or "ethnic" fit.
Skill and merit should be at the forefront (a pipe dream, but we like to think it is there). Any work place where there is a significant dominance of one culture over another (unless, say a whole team was brought in as a whole) speaks to a diversity and cultural problem. Unfortunately, a lot of these can also be coupled to Visas like the H1-B.
This is a give away to the outsourcing firms. Helping them having a bit more control over their employee.
If so, why not create the same restrictions on, say, a company in California from hiring someone from New York?
Or is this a guise for xenophobia?
People all over the world also get the short end of the stick when expats are favoured over locals. The third world is full of high-paying positions held by white westerners doing jobs that locals can do.
Also, unless you cap it in a per industry basis (which makes the whole thing very inflexible to changes in the economy) you just created an insurmountable problem for those firms that want to hire, say, a Catalan interpreter. Required skill uncommon in the U.S.? Check. Easy to get a foreign worker with that skill? Check. But now you need to pay them a software engineer salary or higher.
As a matter of fact, given how small the cap is, you could conceive that the only software engineering jobs that would be hiring internationally would be in high frequency trading and other such areas of the industry that pay higher salaries. Or, software engineering, but just in the bay area (other places pay less because of adjusting for the cost of living). No matter the rest of the considerations associated with why someone chooses a particular job.
Other than that, you're absolutely right. This would mostly benefit software companies in the Bay or NYC, and the ones that pay way above average at that. I'd argue it'd be better than current situation though. Indian employees are effectively tied to their employer due to the Green Card backlog. It's significantly less true for the H-1B holders hired by Facebook, Google, Amazon and the like.
And there are other skills-specific visa categories. For example, a professional hockey player on a North American roster from wherever is never denied a visa because of any other visa quota (H-1 variants, L variants, etc.)
American electorate is somehow more placated by having a random number generator yield winners in a green card lottery.
That said, it certainly sounds like an improvement over the status quo: slightly better quality of life for the Seattle-like folks, and real options to reduce employers taking advantage of desperate employees.
Either the company is being deceptive by making the job requirements much narrower than is reasonable, or in claiming that no local could meet them.
Realistically, there are probably at least 18000 people worldwide (top 0.1% of software pros) who could hear that you want javascript embedded in Postgres, and--without any training from you whatsoever--be able to do that two weeks later, and at least 3500 of them are currently authorized to work in the US for any employer. But the people you can get without a visa will want at least $150k a year to do that for you, because they know they are elite software professionals in the US, whereas the person you import may only expect $90k.
Please note that the requirements you mentioned as an example are experience based requirements, not aptitude based requirement. Many of us on HN, given a sufficient lead time, can meet any aptitude based requirement that a company might care to advertise. But none of us can have 5 years of experience with a specific technology tool in less than 5 years.
The sort of requirements that might non-fraudulently require an H1B worker would include fluency in a natural language other than English, or knowledge of certain areas of computing, such as artificial vision, natural language processing, distributed network architecture, custom hardware interfaces, cryptography, and the like. When you need a cryptographer, you ask for someone with a proven aptitude in cryptography, not someone with 5 years of experience in AES, X.509, and "Bitcoin hacking". Structuring requirements that way is a means to intentionally disqualify everyone but the pre-selected applicant. And it is not limited to gaming the immigration system, either, but as a means to discriminate against protected classes. Someone with 30 years of C experience is undoubtedly an experienced software professional, but requiring five years of experience in Node.js is a great way to weed out that applicant for being too old, rather than being unable to do the job.
They aren't citizens right away. Getting even a green card takes about 5 years. Citizenship another 5-10 years.
Adding 65,000 day laborers is very different from adding 65,000 engineers.
That implies a lot more power over the latter.
The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers
who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and
abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the
temporary employment of qualified individuals who are
not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
You'll not that list is pretty heavy on the "body shop" side.
Note that, according to the article, the laid off people seem to be (relatively speaking) older, with multiple years in the company. It is likely that their salaries are higher than what management would like them to be. My theory makes the prediction that the H1 holders are young. If so, they'll take lower salaries, specially if they aren't aware of living costs. Until they actually move, whatever offer they got must have seemed like a crapton of cash.
Yes, it is the main purpose: http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm
If the companies are not using it for that purpose and telling the government something different then they are committing fraud.
Disney had a project cost of $X, the outsourcing company moved in offering to accomplish similar goals for $Y, where $Y is significantly less than $X. How the outsourcing company plans to accomplish this - through lower-paid workers, or some secret process management kungfu, or having 100x workers accomplish much, much more in a short amount of time, is a mystery for outsourcer to resolve.
Like citizenship? Do you consider citizenship an artificial barrier?
As someone who has worked at tech companies and various law firms in the Silicon Valley, I've seen this story played out several times. Hire Cognizant, TCS, Infosys, Symphony, or some other outsourcing firm and then bring in H-1Bs for an entire department. All it does is drive down wages for everyone and hurt everyone except for the 1% at the top.
How do you feel about companies and law firms gaming job postings to disqualify qualified workers in the US so they can hire someone on a visa for much less? Employers are posting jobs that don’t really exist, seeking candidates they don’t want, and paying for bogus non-ads to show there’s an IT labor shortage in America. 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 Do you consider this abuse or fraudulent?
>Or is this a guise for xenophobia?
Implying that the only people against immigration are racists is just a lazy, offensive, and dismissive argument. Try something else.
Actual barrier to a job: knowing how to deliver that type of service.
Artificial barrier: Something arbitrary synthesized by a party not involved in an A<->B transaction. Such as, having your papers in order so someone doesn't throw you in jail.
>All it does is drive down wages for everyone and hurt everyone except for the 1% at the top. Specious argument. What about the person from New York/India moving to California?
Does allowing a company from California hire someone from New York 'drive down wages hurt everyone except the top 1%"? If not why does it suddenly 'drive down wages hurt everyone except the top 1%" when you change New York to India? This is my motivation of suspicion that H1 visas are a guise of xenophobia.
To me, H1 visas appear to be a sophomoric tantrum of the US transitioning to a global economy.
Addendum for your reflection: Doesn't buying foreign manufactured goods 'drive down wages'? Do you not buy foreign mfg goods? Why not force all companies selling goods in the US to have those products exclusively made in the USA?
Can you elaborate a bit more on this? Doesn't the initial LCA application with the Dept. of Labor requires you to submit wage details that conclusively prove that the offered wages are as per market norms.
how about if your company employ cheap labor, all the 99%ers quit? that'd change how company are run pretty quickly
but somehow the 99% like doing nothing about it, or so it seems.
What about the guys on H1B's who are now earning 4x more than they were back in India? Are they not people too?
It's funny how much this parallels file sharing and the music industry (and even open source) over the past 15 years: the sharing of free music, open source, and even the app store (how can you possibly make a living when you charge 99 cents for an app?) drove down the cost of both software and music to peanuts.
It's pretty clear artificial government controls haven't worked here (IE: copyright laws) and all industries involved have had to learn how to work around it to survive.
Globalization is here to stay and the thing we all love, technology, has made it easier and easier to replace us with overseas workers.
You can try to restrict the companies through law, but they will just end up moving out of the country (and more jobs will go along with them) to compete at a global level. There are plenty of countries that would love the tax dollars in exchange for lax hiring practices.
"How do you feel about companies and law firms gaming job postings to disqualify qualified workers in the US so they can hire someone on a visa for much less?"
it's not really 'gaming' anything. It's using technology to find the best applicant (be it experience, cost, or both). Business owner have learned that just getting cheap labor barely works, but it seems like companies like Facebook are getting not only cheaper labor, but employees that are educated and can compete with their American counterpart.
"Do you consider this abuse or fraudulent?"
Is adblock technology considered 'fraudulent' or 'abuse'? People using it are actively choosing to deprive a website of money, which will result in job loss.
Site owners have to learn how to still make money despite this new technology and so will you if you want to continue working and compete with overseas workers.
The logic is really very simple: those artificial barriers are also the borders between economies, social benefit systems, etc. etc. Every person within those borders that 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.
Obviously that is a vast, vast oversimplification, but there is a logic. Xenophobia is an "intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries" - putting your own economic interests ahead of others isn't necessarily the product of dislike or fear. And some would say it's entirely rational.
You're right - that's a vast oversimplification. Here's one of my own: at the same time Linus Torvalds moved to the US, there were a number of unemployed people. I still think it was a net win to let him in, though.
Be very wary of the lump of labor fallacy, it's what's behind the "they took rrrr jawbs" mentality.
Can anyone elucidate why having artificial barriers to employing certain types of people is beneficial?
If so, why not create the same restrictions on, say, a company in California from hiring someone from New York?
As far as the Xenophobia bit? Yes and no. It's very easy to argue that discrimination based on place of birth is fundamentally wrong, and that open borders are an ideal worth striving for. Not sure if anyone has figured out the pragmatic policymaking around that -- i.e. designing social structures that are resilient to open borders.
To prevent a race to the bottom on 1st world wages and worker welfare and to arrest 3rd world brain drain.
Can you explain why India should be forced by dint of its poverty to invest in free education for its smartest citizens and let the benefits accrue to US elites rather than to the Indian people?
>If so, why not create the same restrictions on, say, a company in California from hiring someone from New York?
Because they are both US citizens and their welfare is the responsibility of the US government.
If the United States and India were to join at the hip and elect a single government collectively (do you want that?) then I see no reason why we shouldn't have free and open immigration between the two countries.
>Or is this a guise for xenophobia?
Or is race baiting just a cynical ploy to funnel yet more money into the pockets of the 0.01% hyper-elite?
That's a pretty bold claim! That would imply widespread fraud. I don't think all companies do that, not even most of them. I think the bodyshops heavily skew the perception, though.
Why are free rider effects acceptable when someone moves from New York to California but not when it's India to California?
There are two, distinct forces at play here. Free-rider effects and cost subsidization.
The non-local worker would start paying taxes into that system? If a corporation is taxed on it's profits, wouldn't they start paying more into that social community.
Personally, I would like to see the H1-B system go away/become unavailable to large body shops and consulting firms. All they are doing is the scenario outlined above.
Some companies are good, some, like IBM which are attempting to cater to the daily whims of Wall Street, not so much.
Also citizens vote, foreigners don't.
TIL not actively undermining your countries economic foundation is xenophobia.
And it's not "certain types" of people. It's all non-Americans.
I bet a lot of opposition would disappear overnight if foreign workers could only be hired at a very high high salary level. Of course, go too high and you'll get complaints from US citizens that are not yet at that level. But I guess that would be a minority.
Level the playing field (at least in wages), and there's much less of an excuse to restrict immigration. After all, if an immigrant with no networking, who doesn't have English as his native language and a different culture, and has to jump through a lot of hoops just to be able to legally move and work in the country (a process that can take months), if he can just walk in and steal your job, then there was something wrong about your job security in the first place.
The problem is how to define what a [high|fair] wage would be at a given location and industry.
Would you be in favor of increasing the general US immigration cap by 65000 and abolishing H1B completely? Because I would. If you are not in favor of that then perhaps there is a motive to your concern other than racial harmony.
Source: my Italian wife and I went through that process when we moved here from Italy.
We've compromised as a society and said sure slave labor will exist but not in the US, if a company wants to benefit from the infrastructure and educated workforce and culture and benefits that American society has developed they have to be decent corporate citizens and treat workers with a modicum of respect. You're suggesting bringing slave labor here, I'd suggest rather we sprint in the opposite direction and ban it everywhere through e.g. making the import of goods made through slave labor a criminal offense.
Why should Disney expect to keep that monopoly privilege and control if the public could still get the same benefit from someone else?
Why should the laws of a mostly free and mostly democratic society matter?
If you're playing a game, with rules, why can't you just help yourself to extra tokens and change the die rolls, and look at other people's cards?
Because the other players will frickin' kill you, that's why, you lowlife cheater. The rules are there so that everyone has a reasonable chance at winning, even in the enhanced-difficulty challenge modes.
For a variety of reasons, some supportable and others abhorrent, the rules-makers decided that unrestricted immigration would someday turn the country into an exploitative, stratified, third-world hellhole. So far, none of their grandkids have had the balls to throw open the gates and fill up their ancestors' neighborhoods with scary brown people with their thick accents and weird foods. Deep down, we're still tribal animals, and the law reflects that.
So the reason is that we follow the law, even if it is stupid, racist, and xenophobic. That's why the citizen gets priority over the foreigner. If you don't like it, you change the law for everyone instead of cheating it just for you.
We know that Disney knows how to lobby for changes in the law. And we know they can get stuff passed that would make ordinary people want to vomit. So why wouldn't they want a new law allowing a specific business category--one so narrow that it could only reasonably refer to Disney and a few other big companies--to import unlimited numbers of foreign workers at below-market wages?
The laws should be good for the people in the country.
Or have we entered an era where hereditary property rights are so much more valued than a citizens rights that we can no longer even see the analogy here.
As for why it's imperative to Americanize immigrants. Look at how much trouble the U.S. has had cultivating democracy in places like Iraq. Most people acknowledge that the Iraqi people aren't ready for Democracy. Do you think they would be any more ready for democracy if you moved them en masse to Minnesota?
This is a really contentious statement that you just drop in both as fact and as the basis of your entire argument.
No, I would not say that 'the Iraqi people aren't ready for Democracy' is a true statement. I also wouldn't say that what 'most people [in the US]' think about the Iraqi people's readiness for democracy [in Iraq] is really relevant to the question of whether they are ready for democracy [in Iraq]. I also wouldn't say that the question of whether they (as a group) are 'ready' for democracy in Iraq is relevant to answering the question of whether individual Iraqi people are 'ready' for democracy in Minnesota (whatever that means).
> Look at how much trouble the U.S. has had cultivating democracy in places like Iraq.
It also doesn't help that we have a long history of doing the exact opposite of 'cultivating democracy' in the Middle East (ie, going in and deposing democratically-elected leaders so that we can install dictators that are friendly to the US).
The US has had trouble cultivating democratically elected regimes that are friendly towards us in countries like Iraq. In the US, we tend to conflate 'democratic government' with 'government that shares our objectives and goals'.
And we're not talking about whether individual Iraqis in Minnesota are ready for democracy. We are talking about the link posted earlier in the thread, which suggested that the optimal number of immigrants in the U.S. would be two billion. That's not encouraging immigration of selected individuals, it's endorsing wholesale migration of huge populations.
Well that's an easily defined metric, isn't it...
There's nothing that says you must let immigrants become citizens right away, or give them all the same privileges citizens are entitled to. For instance, it wouldn't be at all unfair to kick people out for certain classes of crime.
There's nothing that says you must let immigrants come.
Fixed that for you.
You already have a process of green card + a bunch of time leading to eligibility. Isn't that good enough?
> For instance, it wouldn't be at all unfair to kick people out for certain classes of crime.
you mean prior to them getting citizenship right?
It is good for a laborer when there is more available work than there is labor - they can command better rates and generally have a better quality of life (see: almost everyone in the tech industry right now). It is good for someone with lots of capital to have as much excess labor as possible (assuming there's still people that can afford to buy that person's products). When a person with capital can make cheaper products because the labor is cheap, it doesn't necessarily mean that all products become cheaper. You end up with the walmart economy where you have the people who own and manage in their mansions and everyone else unable to generate any meaningful wealth.
Once you remove the "indentured" part from H1-B's, we'll never hit the cap again.
If you quit at day 2, the employer is still on the hook for all the fees.
It can be gamed, but if you make the fees something like 30-40K, genuine employers will simply shrug as they'll amortize that over 3-4 years. Sweatshops, however, will lose bad.
The reason is that the choke point benefits these companies. If you cleared the backlog so that a green card was a 12 month process, the companies would quit asking for H1-B's unless they really wanted them.
If US gives X green cards to nationals of Y countries (X>>Y) in a year, each country is allocated X/Y number of green cards.
This puts Indians, Chinese and other high population countries at a disadvantage.
An Indian applying for green card in EB-3 category (minimum qualifications being undergrad degree + 3 yrs experience i think) has to wait for ~12 years from the date his gc process was started. EB-2 (advanced degree and/or 5+ yrs experience) is ~10 years (these are my ballpark numbers)
Its not the turnaround time, but the concept of diversity based green cards that slows down the process.
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.
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.
First, are you willing to pay $500 more for every product, and $10 more for every meal? Companies have to compete, and they are responding to what is necessary to survive. If a company employs 5,000 U.S. citizens and can't compete, it may stumble and lay off 1,000 U.S. citizens, or fail entirely and shed 5,000 U.S. jobs, all because it wasn't allowed to bring in a few immigrants to grow a little.
Entire companies (and successful companies, like Google) have been started by immigrants, creating potentially thousands of jobs for U.S. citizens. There is no reason to automatically fear immigrants; many of them are brilliant people.
A lack of a paid job does not make you a "drain" on society, either! What about children? What about volunteer work in communities? For that matter, I have met some astoundingly lax and irresponsible people over the years that have paying jobs, to the point where I almost thought of them as a net negative to the company.
You're playing fast and loose with the facts. $500 for every product and $10 for every meal? That doesn't seem like an intellectually honest scenario. Where is that based in reality? Skilled immigration and non-skilled immigration are totally different. No one here is begrudging the immigrants picking fruits and doing farm labor. The issue 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.
Not to mention most of those 'products' are manufactured in China already so there isn't going to be much price increasing there. Second, what a ridiculous scenario where a company has to choose between hiring 'a few' immigrants to save 'thousands' of US workers. Again, where are you drawing these examples from? Clearly not reality.
You didn't acknowledge what I said and again shifted the goal posts to another issue entirely. This is a pointless conversation if you can't even listen to the other side.
Ask an Indian entrepreneur how easy it is to hire an US national with origins in Pakistan.
I assure you and anyone reading this, your skills are not unique nor is you talent unmatched. And even if they were, there is no way it could be discovered in our broken hiring processes. The chief attraction in these 65000 cases, so long as some vaguely plausible skill exist, is price I'm afraid.
I mean, in the absence of open borders, we have a limited number of spots available. Why should someone who wants to open a sandwich shop have lower priority than a programmer? Why should we skew things to accomodate Disney's desire to fire middle aged programmers? I think it's pretty clear we aren't talking about best and brightest here.
While I don't love the idea, I would concede that focusing on skilled immigration does make a certain amount of sense. But even then, I see no reason to give corporations the power to micromanage who gets in and who doesn't. They are, of course, free to hire any of the immigrants who come here - in fact, it would be very illegal, and rightly so, to discriminate against immigrants.
> Again, any minimum salary requirement, becomes very easy to game (employee can be expected to pay back in cash, for the difference). This will put genuine companies (that cannot do such shady deals) at a great disadvantage
Paybacks are illegal now and should stay that way. A couple of criminal prosecutions would do wonders for fraud.
But, just because it is illegal, doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Just as hiring someone to kill for you does not absolve you of the legal responsibility for murder, hiring someone to lie for you does not absolve you of the legal responsibility for fraud.
1) Disney decided to outsource a project (a program? entire department?) to Cognizant.
2) Cognizant brought their own staffers onto the project, those staffers were brought into the US on an H1 program.
3) Disney included mandatory training of Cognizant employees into severance package of their departing employees.
Neither (1), (2) or (3) are illegal by themselves.
The outcome of 1+2+3 suggests there might have been fraud happening at stage 2, where Cognizant had to prove to US Department of Labor that they could not find an appropriate US resident to take the job and that they were paying the prevailing rate.
Considering Cognizant received an approval on H1 visas, they must've indeed advertised for the job paying prevailing wage and found no one. The loophole seemed to allow them to advertise for an opening in the city they're incorporated (Teaneck, NJ) for prevailing wage in Teaneck, NJ, which might (or might not) be the prevailing wage in Burbank, CA or Anaheim, CA.
What do you expect the court to do in this scenario? Forbid Disney (and related companies) from outsourcing anything in the future? Forbid New Jersey contractors from winning contracts in California and bringing their consultants on-site? Forbid Disney (and companies in similar situation) from including mandatory training into severance packages? Mandate H1 employees are bound not only to the employer in question but specific geographic location they were hired for, so a New Jersey employee is forbidden from working on a project in a different state?
Each one of those decisions has some unintended consequences when you look at the larger picture than Disney+Cognizant.
But that doesn't need to be done by the government. It seems like the sort of situation that a good collective bargaining agreement could handle. Such an oddity might guarantee a minimum severance package that is not contingent upon the employees symbolically cutting their own throats.
I believe that immigration law already requires an LCA to be filed for each non-temporary work location. If Cognizant intended to employ workers in California longer than 10 days, it would have to pay the prevailing California wage, not the prevailing New Jersey wage.
H1B workers already are "bound" to the area of the LCA. If the company wants to move them permanently, it has to file another LCA for them.
None of those requirements prevented this from happening.
Disney had a duty, which could not reasonably be delegated, to ensure that its contractor would be obeying the laws that Disney is expected to obey. If such a duty did not exist, there would be a huge, obvious loophole in the law that would allow anyone to break any law at will, just by creating a throwaway corporation to do it, and paying the skeleton crew a scapegoat bonus.
They are quite often simply bodies being pushed by the outsourcing firms to get fees. Many of these workers brought to Disney had to be trained for months.
At least that's the story I'm endlessly told.
Fundamental difference: I, as a U.S. citizen, have the legal right to move to California (or New York, or any of the other 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, and so on) and work there. I do not have that legal right in relation to India. Until we have achieved "free trade" for the movement of people participating in an economy--like the European Union does internally--I do not have any objection to my country of citizenship trying to see that I am employed over non-citizens.
> To me, H1 visas appear to be a sophomoric tantrum of the US transitioning to a global economy.
Absolutely; I won't dispute that. On the other hand, why doesn't India have a program for U.S. nationals to easily move to India and take up employment? Or China? Or Brazil? It's easier to go to the United Kingdom for work than so-called "developing markets."
> Doesn't buying foreign manufactured goods 'drive down wages'?
It can and sometimes does.
> Do you not buy foreign mfg goods?
Where possible, I do not. Most of my clothes are made in the United States as is my television and my computer. My mobile phone was made in the U.S. (Motorola-manufactured in Fort Worth, Texas) but now that's not an option because Motorola shuttered that plant.
> Why not force all companies selling goods in the US to have those products exclusively made in the USA?
I realize this is a rhetorical question but I'll answer it straight anyway: I wouldn't object but that does rather bring about more centralized planning of the economy which is something to which a lot of people would object.
Yes, other than:
* Being responsible for the welfare of A and B.
* Being responsible for mediating any disputes between A and B regarding their transaction.
* Being responsible for cracking down on potential fraudulent activity between A and B.
* Providing the medium whereby A and B can discharge their debts.
The government has nothing to do with the transactions. Absolutely nothing.
>Does allowing a company from California hire someone from New York 'drive down wages hurt everyone except the top 1%"? If not why does it suddenly 'drive down wages hurt everyone except the top 1%" when you change New York to India?
Because they're capitalizing on India's relative poverty.
There's nothing preventing you from applying for a lower LCA level. For example, say you have someone with 15 years of experience in system architecture and they have a Master's degree, and are bilingual, etc. Instead, you apply for a generic software engineer LCA, with a bachelor's degree with 3-5 years of experience. Now isntead of the LCA being approved for $150,000 it's down to $80,000. The immigrant doesn't complain because they're still getting a raise and have a chance to get a Green card. Meanwhile the company is getting to severely underpay (profit!) the worker.
There are all kinds of ways to game the LCA system. Apply for a location in Indiana, then bring the workers to Chicago. Apply for Arizona then bring them to LA. All the tech companies are abusing the system to their own advantage. USCIS is poorly funded and hardly checks on this, if ever.
If you've ever applied for an H-1B then you know that's not how it works. The 'process to evaluate the skill' 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.
It's like protecting Exchange administrators the day after Gmail for companies was released - good idea in theory.
Perhaps the best answer for everyone is to worry about growing the pie, rather than keeping people out.
If I'm doing a job and I get paid X, then I get laid off, but before I can find a new job I have to train an immigrant from another country to work for 40% less, I think it's quite right to view this from an nationalist point of view.
In practice, this depends on a number of factors being aligned correctly and an organization being tuned to the idea of remote work. Especially if the deliverable of the IT job in question is part of the core function of the organization.
It isn't about the law being the law, but everyone being equal before it.
Besides that, a bad law can be changed to be better (in theory). We can do that via the sanctioned legislative process, or through mass civil disobedience.
These companies that are cheating various provisions of immigration law aren't doing it as a protest, but as a means to make a quick buck from a bunch of people who can't effectively seek redress.
http://www.post-gazette.com/business/businessnews/2007/06/21...
"Our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker, and, you know, that in a sense that sounds funny, but it's what we're trying to do here. We are complying with the law, fully, but our objective is to get this person a greencard.... Certainly we are not going to try to find a place where [American] applicants would be most numerous.... if necessary schedule an interview, go through the whole process to find a legal basis to disqualify [the American applicant] for this particular position."
"Our goal is clearly not to find a qualified
and interested U.S. worker..."
Note the strategy laid out starting around 3:30:
"(have US applicants go through the motions) to find a legal basis to DISQUALIFY them... in most cases, this doesn't seem to be a problem."
The kind of fraud that's profitable, happens regularly and nobody gets called for.
For which they'll settle or pay some insignificant fine, and continue about their same business.
Yes. Not all of them, but some definitely are.
It suggested no such thing. Please reread it:
"What is the optimal number of imported tomatoes? Soviet central planners tried to figure things out this way. Americans shouldn’t. We should decide on the optimal terms on which tomatoes can be imported, and then let the market decide the number."
Also known as unemployment benefits?
And while his numbers are invented, the concept is spot on: producing some things is expensive in the US, perhaps too much so to be competitive.
Do you realize how much of the tech world was built be people from all over? HTTP, Linux, Google, Java, C++ and so on.
Israel has had a strict immigration policy, far more restrictive than the post-1965 US policy. They don't seem perturbed by your claimed economic requirement of not "exclud[ing] everyone who wasn't smart enough to be born there" (while you've already shown you really mean open borders).
The US prospered with very restricted immigration for decades.
> Keep them out, and they'll concentrate in other places.
Let them concentrate, especially those from the Third World, so their countries have a chance to benefit from their talent and develop. I don't understand why you are against their home countries prospering.
Xenophobia-at-a-distance has no place in modern civilization.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that codifying exactly what those are and if someone is going to be able to accept them in X months/years is not going to be an easy task.
[1] I'm cognizant of the fact that it can be dangerous in some Americam communities too. Alas, we're stuck with that. But there is no need to make the task of progress and civilization harder than it already is.
Perhaps the problem is that he is the son of an immigrant?
Historically, "people not like us" has been used for far more bad than it has for good.
Israel's "lot of immigration" has been those very people that their government wants to make up the demographics: Jews. Your "lot of immigration" bears no resemblance to what you advocate for the US.
http://www.oecd.org/migration/internationalmigrationoutlook2...
Permanent migration to Israel - almost all "ethnic" by Jews and their families - was particularly high in the early 1990s.
Israel has seen a lot of deportation and arrests. Deportation, not amnesty, is normal practice there.
Why do you deny that the US citizens have as much right and duty to protect their country for themselves as Israel does? Perhaps the US immigration authorities should look at open borders advocates' motives towards the US and their fitness for residence, in the manner that Israeli authorities do.
Israel, in one month, deports what would be the equivalent of 277,000 US illegal immigrants:
Report: Migrants leaving Israel being sent to Rwanda, Uganda
http://www.jpost.com/International/Report-Migrants-leaving-I...
The state’s policy, including placing new illegal migrants in closed detention for up to one year, but also allows placing up to 4,000 (so far) already in Israel in open detention for an indefinite period, was initiated in mid-December 2013 under pressure from a mid-September 2013 High Court ruling striking down the old policy as unconstitutional.
Since the new policy’s initiation, 3,988 migrants have left the country, including 1,510 in March alone.
Crackdown Begins: 400 Illegal Entrants Arrested
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/132548
The special police unit “Oz” has begun a large-scale operation aimed at cracking down on illegal entry to Israel. Over the past three weeks, members of the unit have checked the documents of more than 4,000 workers.
Of those 4,000, 600 were detained for questioning. Four hundred were arrested after police discovered that they had entered the country illegally.
Israel’s Chilly Reception for African Asylum Seekers
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/31/opinion/sunday...
In May, I attended a graduation party in Tel Aviv for Taj Jemy, a 28-year-old asylum seeker from Sudan… The celebration was interrupted by the Israeli police, who burst into the room, scattering the crowd. The partygoers recalling their skills of hiding, ducking and fleeing, spilled onto the street to find it barricaded and surrounded by horses. Seven people were arrested that night for not having their visas with them.
Israel’s policy toward African asylum seekers is to pressure them to self-deport or, as the former interior minister Eli Yishai put it, to “make their lives miserable” until they give up and let the government deport them.
As of Friday, Infiltrators Can't Export Money
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/275652
Interior Minister Gid`on Saar signed regulations, Monday, that make it illegal for someone who illegally infiltrated the country to send money out of the country. The goal of the measures are to make the infiltrators leave with what they accumulated instead of regularly sending it out to their countries of origin.
Milestone: No illegal African migrants enter Israel in August
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=11...
Population and Immigration Authority says August is the first month in which no illegal infiltrators entered Israel through Egyptian border
168 migrants from Sudan and Eritrea leave Israel voluntarily
Interior minister: We are progressing day by day.
As an immigrant myself I'm really thankful for our melting pot policies. Life will be better for my daughter growing up surrounded by American attitudes. Had our family immigranted en masse with a million other Bangladeshi families, she might very well have been deprived of that.
I'm pretty much ok with anyone who accepts the rules and laws even if they don't think like me. I'd like them to integrate to some extent prior to gaining citizenship, but that's different than a work visa.