Why not treat this any differently than Whites preferring to hire their own?
I've worked at Silicon Valley startups that were that way. I remember thinking this is really odd how high the concentration was (probably about 70% Indian). Didn't really bother me because it was a great team and honestly one of the best companies I worked at.
It didn't really seem like they discriminated in hiring and I never felt discriminated against at work. It was just that coworkers referred people they already knew.
Question to the Americans: if in the US you don't need a reason to fire someone, how can you prove the company was discriminating you when they fired you if they didn't give a reason.
I don't have strong feelings about what they should do, it just seems like what they're doing isn't really in anyone's interest. What am I missing?
So if you're keen to move up the US, H1B sounds amazing but then you are in quite a vulnerable position.
I left because the management team clearly valued control over competence. Every person in management either was a (white) connected executive salesperson or a member of the CEO's family.
And outsourcing does not work for these companies as their business is putting bodies into chairs on their customer's site.
Where I work about half of our contractors come in through TCS.
Probably an Industry lobbyist came up with that rule so that employees have to depend on the company.
Honestly I am surprised that they didn’t just hire directly in India.
Globalization is coming to an end. An unparalleled period of worldwide navigational stability and political stability enabled indirect access to labor markets of a vastly larger size. Why is that? Because the USA is increasingly not seeing value as the world's police, because increasing totalitarian aggression from China/Russia, from inevitable stress due to climate change.
There was also demographic bulges from the boomers in this period, compounded with both-parents/partners work that also increased the labor supply.
Re-onshoring manufacturing, combined with the demographic bombs in China, Korea, Germany, Russia and the lesser demographic shrinks virtually everywhere else will mean that labor supply will decrease, and companies better get used to paying the worker bees more and the financial wizard CEOs less.
You know, unless AI and Robotics waves their magic wand, but even then ... things are going to change.
That completely ignored the fact that they went out of their way to fire the American employees. If what you're saying was a reasonable answer they wouldn't have hired Americans in the first place.
TSMC wants more Taiwanese working on its semi plants in US for similar reasons, but at least their executive team is a bit more diplomatic in how they say these things.
> In their complaints, the former employees cite comments that TCS’s global human resources head Milind Lakkad made in an interview with Indian media last year. He said TCS is trying to reduce the number of Americans it employs in the U.S. and would like to provide more opportunities to Indians there, according to the report.
> One former worker said in a complaint that TCS human-resources staff told employees in an all-hands meeting that the company planned to use money saved by closing down a unit that employed many of the American workers to provide jobs to more Indian nationals in the U.S.
That's not quite what "at will employment" in the US actually means. What it means is that an employer can fire you at any time for any reason that isn't an unlawful reason. It doesn't mean the employer doesn't have to give a reason at all, or that the employer can simply refuse to give a reason if questioned, particularly if there is an allegation that the firing was for an unlawful reason.
And even when you need intent, these people are like people who do insider trading. They tend to leave a trail. They think they're smart. Then they talk in detail about the crimes they are doing in logged chat rooms. It's hilarious.
Or what do you do when the reason is something somewhat objective like "performance" because you didn't meet your deadlines or something. Can you claim discrimination then?
Otherwise what's stopping everyone from claiming discrimination every time they get laid off?
- Wages wind up going backwards.
- Wages fail to keep up with inflation meaning lower discretionary expenditure flowing into the economy.
- You wind increasing involuntary unemployment.
- With rises in involuntary unemployment you wind up increasing crime, from petty theft through to more major crime.
- With lower returns to economy on an individual basis you economically have less to invest in things like health, education, infrastructure, creation of export businesses on a per individual basis, despite growing GDP. You've created a hole but made it look like growth.
You don't need to go full domestic industry protectionism to avert the above, but you absolutely should not be firing an existing skilled domestic workforce with the explicit intent to replace them with skilled immigration if you want to perform better as an economy.
Because individual businesses can and will try to exploit the issue, this is why it should be regulated. To fail to do so hurts the economy at large when you are not filling a genuine skills shortage.
From my experience, the best H1-Bs go to the FAANGs (or whatever we're calling them these days). The middle of the pack go to consulting companies like Accenture or Wipro. And the subpar ones are C2C consultants for dodgy sweatshops, the kind who fill our inboxes with their 'hotlists' (if you know then you know). While most of them got a STEM Master's here in the US, if you look at the resumes of the weaker ones it's generally from some college you've literally never heard of- Northern North Dakota State or something. I would imagine that they're basically running a borderline diploma mill that's profiting off of foreign families who hope their child will get a Green Card
So no, your assertion that there is an implicit "there is no American we can hire to fill this" is false. We can't even consider that.
The problem is, Indians can’t create an America. What they create is an India, and they will, inevitably, in America also. And that’s a shame.
> If anything, we should change the law to encourage much more high-skill immigration.
I don't think any reasonable person would argue argue against importing highly skilled laborers to increase GDP per capita, that is, to fill a genuine labor shortage that domestic supply cannot fill within a reasonable span of time.
Yet they keep getting contracts and the IT outsourcing company keep on making record profits.
I think China can replace its demographic losses in the cities by pulling from the rural areas.
But... with the end of oil as a paramount geopolitical concern due to our domestic production and EVs/alt energy ... why would we keep 13 carrier groups around? WHy are we doing all this "free defense"? Why are we essentially allowing China to own our production and give them a massive technology transfer?
And China is definitely turning totalitarian and incompetent and there are real signs of distress coming out of the country.
Zeihan used to be mocked, but then we signed the chips-in-the-USA and batteries-in-the-USA and more "moving production to Mexico" stories in the news. So there is definitely some re-onshoring happening.
Zeihan also poo-poos alt energy and EVs, he doesn't seem to understand the economics of alt energy in LCOE terms or the recent developments in battery chemistry that free us from nickel/cobalt constraints.
Do you listen to anyone else interesting?
WHy are we doing all this "free defense"? Why are we essentially allowing China to own our production
However, politically China owns your physical factories, and switching production if there's a war over Taiwan is not a two week sprint / 5 point ticket.
You can claim discrimination, but then you'll need somebody (usually an attorney you hire) to file a lawsuit against the company. I'm not a lawyer, but I believe you'll also need to cite a specific type of discrimination for your case to have standing.
If there is no reason, why were you fired?
You can easily google/ask chatgpt the answer to your questions - the answer is that some companies are nowadays very risk averse in laying people off precisely because they are afraid of discrimination lawsuits, which is why they generally have very solid documentation of performance problems (hence the reason for the modern Performance Improvement Plan as a papertrail)
Behause they can? To cover their ass? I duuno.
I'm asking since I live in an EU country where you can get laid off for no reason and employers usually provide no exact reason in writing precisely to potentially avoid getting sued.
They just terminate your contract and let you know they terminate your contract by giving you your notice and that's that, you're gone in 30-90 days, no need to provide an explanation as to why they decided to terminate you since they're not required by law.
So I'm asking to know how it's like in the US if it's like here. If employers aren't required by law to provide termination reason, why would they?
What EU country is that?
Usually if that's the reason the company will go to great pains to document it and fire you properly, for cause. This is where PIPs (performance improvement plans) come in—they document the specific areas where performance is lacking, set specific targets for improvement, show that those targets were not met in the time allotted, and then fire you.
If a company doesn't do that then yeah, they're leaving themselves open to a discrimination suit. It doesn't usually happen because lawsuits are expensive and unemployed people tend to not have the resources to fight back, but larger companies will usually take pains to be sure they're covered.
That's why companies still go through an enormous amount of procedural and documentation hoops before they fire someone, including PIPs.
It doesn’t have to be valid. You can fire someone because you don’t like them, or for no reason at all.
You just can’t fire them for a prohibited reason, such as race, age over 40, sex, disability etc.
Needing a reason is more of a practical problem - every person is a member of at least two protected classes (everyone has a race and sex). If you have no reason for firing a person, it’s often pretty easy for them to argue it was really based on a protected characteristic.
No smart company will ever put down "don't like them" or something more PC like, "culture misalignment." That's an invitation for legal issues. They're going to tie it back to performance as much as they can, and that takes time and effort.
In the US, it is no more OK, legally, to discriminate in hiring on the basis of nationality for any nationality compared to any other.
But even then, it is not, as suggested upthread, more OK for Iranians to hire Iranians than for Americans to hire Americans, whether talking about nationality, national origin, or ethnicity. (Fir nationality, there are narrow cases where the latter is mandatory and the former is prohibited no matter who is hiring, sure, but that's the opposite of what was suggested.)
I would wager that conditioning on US citizenship is less restrictive than conditioning on any other citizenship when seeking diverse historical nationality.
> The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) makes it illegal for an employer to discriminate with respect to hiring, firing, or recruitment or referral for a fee, based upon an individual's citizenship or immigration status. The law prohibits employers from hiring only U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents unless required to do so by law, regulation or government contract
H1-Bs would legally require a visa transfer to switch employers, and the company can simply choose to not sponsor or transfer that visa. Thus, the worker is not eligible to work for them. Here are 3 immigration attorneys explaining this in another way https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/can-a-company-refuse-to-c...
Reference: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/fact-sheet-immigrants-emp...
Also, what hiring manager is letting HR decide in what order their candidate pool is meritorious? HR can barely judge a local talent contest let alone someone's ability to undertake skilled work. If I say to my HR that a candidate needs to know Python with environmental experience I'm just as likely to have a candidate put forward who was a wildlife carer 20 years ago since they handled pythons as I am to find someone who can script and understands climate data. They will probably also give me someone who is good with Java, since it's all just computer programming.
Now, was I misinformec by an HR person during my time as a hiring manager? Maybe. But guess what, I didn't control their pipeline, and I had work to make sure got done. I'll definitely be adding HR people to my list of groups to talk to when interviewing companies interested in hiring for a hiring manager position though, because the sheer amount of hell that experience came with was beyond unreasonable.
Austria.
But I didn't really discuss this topic with the coworkers I visited so clearly I was wrong :(
There are exactly two jobs where that is required, and only one is kind-of in the military, in that it is legally the apex of all military chains of command.
(There are other security-related, especially in the military, jobs where actual or potential dual citizens, the latter more commonly being an issue when people have foreign born parents, may be required to renounce any other citizenship than American.)
It is absolutely discrimination, but legal (and legally-mandatory) discrimination. That it may be “common sense” does not change that it is, absolutely, discrimination.
Like here in Spain if I'd get fired I would get a redundancy package for sure. And of course France has even better protections (we're all jealous of their 2 months holidays of course :P ).
I'm not sure if we're unionised though.
Thanks for letting me know. I was not really considering it as a place to live but I won't now - especially as I'm getting older.