Posted on 04/12/2009 2:23:14 AM PDT by Scanian
In between establishing new national policies on healthcare, education, financial regulation and energy, the Obama Administration said last week that it is getting ready to tackle immigration, too. Part of this involves deciding whether to allow up to 85,000 foreign technical workers to enter the country under the H1-B visa program at a time when hundreds of thousands of American engineers and programmers are losing their jobs.
H1-B visas shouldn't be eliminated, as some protectionists suggest, but they also shouldn't be made unlimited, as industry leaders like Microsoft's Bill Gates once requested of Congress. The H1-B program is useful, but only if it can be protected from abuse.
The idea behind H1-B visas is a simple one: companies sometimes need to hire foreign technical experts when there are no qualified US citizens to do a job. In practice, however, the program has been used to lower overall labor costs and as a form of age discrimination.
If a US employer said out loud, "Gosh, we have a lot of 50-something engineers who are going to kill us with their retirement benefits so we'd better get rid of some," they would be violating a long list of labor and civil rights laws. But if they say, "Our cost of doing business is too high, so we'll be importing a few thousand engineers from India," that's just fine -- even though it means exactly the same thing.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
I’ve seen companies advertise a position, receive lots of qualified candidates and then change the job description so that none of the candidates met the requirements. Then they go out for a H1B who doesn’t meet the requirements but the company doesn’t care.
Essentially the dems will do as they have before. They take the Union money and stab them in the back. Whether Nafta or many other situations, once in the bag they go for the other pocket. They will protect the illegals that undercut the union workforce and create committees to study the problem and be staffed by illegals and ex union people. And it’s just a big costly charade as always. Huge expenditure and offices wher forms are filled and one citizen slaps another and it all payed for by more taxes. People essentially spending all day depending on the taxes others pay to do absolutely nothing. I see it as a big scam. The politicians got their hand in the middle and “oh yeh we have this big commitee working on all this and they are doing marvelous work towards ....blah blah. What a load. They cause a problem and put people to work to petend to solve it and walk away.
Back when I worked in Silicon Valley the paper used to always have ads for jobs that the company wanted to fill with a foreign applicant. They had to prove there were no US qualified applicants. These ad were pretty interesting reading. They always went something like:
Wanted: PhD in advanced computer design. Must have 10 years experience in nuclear submarine propulsion systems, knowledge of space flight guidance systems a plus. Starting salary $27K.
“Our cost of doing business is too high, so we’ll be importing a few thousand engineers from India and a few million mexican grunts ,” that’s just fine — even though it means exactly the same thing.
If these workers are so important, the tech companies who are hiring them will gladly pay.
Keep in mind that the only "reason" (if there was one to begin with) that these companies have such problems hiring talent domestically is because they are simply not offering enough money for these jobs. If more money was offered, then more Americans would study computer science, computer engineering, electrical engineering, etc. in college.
H1-B visaholders are the tech world's equivalent of illegal aliens, except that they are legal.
I remember back in the late 1990s reading ads which listed jobs requiring "10 years experience with Java" which of course was impossible because Java hadn't been around that long.
It's more nefarious than that. Watch a seiminar on "How not to hire an American".
It is always funny how so many "Americans" who advocate for offshoring jobs would defecate a brick if they found out that their jobs were to be offshored.
Sounds like a great way of discouraging American kids from going to school to learn those skills. Why bother learning a skill for a job that a foriegn worker will get.
However there is the “bonus” of creating huge numbers of social workers since the govt. always seem to be hiring more of those.
You have hit on something! Gov't likes things they can tax.
Kind of interesting that the original Boston tea party was a result of the Brits lowering taxes for the east India tea company in an attempt to squash competition from colonists buying smuggled tea from colonial smugglers. More importantly it was a means of cutting off the smuggler’s money which was funding a growing resistance.
Money is power and the poorer you can make Americans, the weaker we become. In this case it appears that the H1B visas are the tax that keeps the American worker poor.
Have you heard about the massive INM outsourcing going on now? Not just to India, but now to BRAZIL!
“H1-B visaholders are the tech world’s equivalent of illegal aliens, except that they are legal.”
.
And ... many H-1B’s, L-1’s, and J-1’s morph into illegal aliens. No one tracks them.
“Wanted: PhD in advanced computer design. Must have 10 years experience in nuclear submarine propulsion systems, knowledge of space flight guidance systems a plus. Starting salary $27K.”
.
I’ve seen very similar ads here in NJ, probably with the same outcome - job filled by H-1B with fake resume.
I live in San Antonio. There are over a thousand jobs available for people with moderate to experienced skills in IT, construction, project management and business. I apply for 5-10 jobs a week as a certified PMP. HR departments tell me I am either not experienced nor qualified to be a project manager.
Then they complain that they either cannot find qualified people for positions or qualified people are asking for too much money.
Many of the problems is that HR departments are useless. They rely on software that is not intuitive enough to understand the nuances of a resume. Instead of picking up a resume and reading it, they rely on keywords that the software will understand.
What happens then is department heads get all pissed off because they cannot find people and then they go out to offshore recruiting firms to bring in people that wouldn’t be scrutinized by the software.
I know this because I am both a victim of it as well as one who did it.
They left out one requirement...."Must speak Hindi."
massive IBM outsourcing, I meant, sorry!
Yup. The company I work for is big on outsourcing programming to india. The PHBs tell each other they are saving money, but actually it costs the company much more than it saves, because most of the work that comes in (late- always late) has to be baby-sat, and often re-written, or simply sent back to the originating idiots because the code was so horribly bloated and bad.
Projects are delayed, run over budget, and consume more resources because there apparently are no programmers available that could code themselves out of a paper bag. The quality of code is almost universally that of kids barely out of college. Once you finally break them of most of their bad habits, they leave to work somewhere else, so you are constantly battling with newbies who think they know everything, but in actuality, have no clue how the real code works in a complex environment.
I’d like to see H1-B visas under a cap and trade. Let’s see businesses bid for H1-B workers. That $13K difference between a US and an H1-B worker mentioned in the article would quickly become apparent.
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