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posted by on Wednesday January 11 2017, @12:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-upset-the-real-bosses dept.

The Washington Post reports:

For the new political order taking shape in Washington, how­ever, H-1Bs aren't quite welcome. Amid promises of sweeping changes to immigration policy, President-elect Donald Trump and his choice for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), have tabbed the program for a major overhaul, and might even scrap it altogether. In the House, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) is on the same wavelength.

Trump has described H-1Bs as a "cheap labor program" subject to "widespread, rampant" abuse. Sessions co-sponsored legislation last year with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to effectively gut the program; Issa, a congressman with Trump's ear, released a statement Wednesday saying he was reintroducing similar legislation called the Protect and Grow American Jobs Act.

Sessions and Issa's legislation primarily targets large outsourcing companies, such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services, that receive the vast majority of H-1B visas and use them to deploy workers to American companies seeking to cut costs. In 2015, the top 10 recipients of H-1B visas were outsourcing firms. As recently as 2013, the Justice Department, which Sessions stands to take over, settled with Infosys for $34 million in a visa fraud case.

If they were smart they'd change the program to maximize brain-drain from other countries by making H-1B a fast-track to citizenship instead of the 6+ year wait for a green-card that it now is. Bring in the best of them rather than the cheapest of them and let them compete on equal footing rather than the indentured servitude of the current H-1B program.


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 11 2017, @01:01AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday January 11 2017, @01:01AM (#452311)

    Bring in the best of them rather than the cheapest of them and let them compete on equal footing rather than the indentured servitude of the current H1B program.

    Bringing in the "best" is never the point of bringing in a group of immigrant laborers, whether you're talking about the bracero program back in 1942 or the various waves of European immigrants back around 1900 or the influx of H1B's from India. The game is always this: The more people there are looking for a particular kind of job, the less you have to pay those who do that job. This is simple supply-demand analysis of the labor market, not the economics version of rocket surgery. And it's also usually easier to threaten those immigrant laborers than it is people who have the ability to, say, vote for politicians that might actually change the rules to prevent employers from abusing their employees.

    Some of those newly arrived immigrants are going to be smart enough to get promoted to more senior-level positions. If the system allows for it, that will spread the salary-lowering effects to the senior-level positions as well as the junior-level positions. Management likes paying less for senior-level people too. You must remember that what you see as reduction in salaries, management calls "efficiency".

    The professions that are able to resist this sort of thing are those with professional associations and licensing requirements. For example, immigrant doctors who want to work in the US have to go through a US residency program first, which takes a while to get into and is 3-4 years before they can make full doctor money. That barrier helps keep the salaries of doctors high even in relatively low-paying specialties like pediatrics.

    And none of that is a knock on those enterprising foreigners that take advantage of the opportunities presented by these programs. My understanding is that in India, the role of the H1B program is that it's becoming a rite of passage for many young Indian men: They work their butt off in their early 20's to become the most attractive candidates from India, leave their home and families behind for their mid-20's to go to America to make their fortune, and then return in their late 20's or early 30's with the money to buy a home and arrange a good marriage and be comfortably middle-class the rest of their lives. I can't hate them for doing that.

    It's not like there aren't alternatives to correcting the alleged shortage of qualified programmers, like, say, setting up training programs, where you make it possible for people who work for the company in other capacities to learn to become programmers.

    --
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday January 11 2017, @01:23AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 11 2017, @01:23AM (#452321) Journal

    +5000 insightful

    We, the common people, are brainwashed to believe that immigration is good for this reason or that. But, the decision makers across the country lobby for things like H-1B for one reason only. Immigration and work programs drive wages down. Always, it's all about the money.

    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @05:30AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @05:30AM (#452374)

      People often forget that there are other types of visas for stealing the best and brightest. Want to bring someone in as an executive or management? L-1 or EB-1. Want someone really high in your company, run an entertainment or sports venue? O-1 or EB-1. Religious worker? R. From a NAFTA country? TN. Are a doctor or lawyer or the like. EB-2. And that is just for starters. However, my personal favorite is the ability to literally buy your way into the US with an EB-5, 'cause fuck the rules when you have money.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @04:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @04:46PM (#452553)

      but i never believed in that lie

      the problem is that i never have found a republican I could vote for that didn't perpetuate the lie. And I never found a democrat to vote for that spoke the truth about h1bs that had a chance of gaining office.

      Everyone on the ballot was about making outsourcing even better (it's already pretty great) and getting more cheap people available. There is so much lobbying on the topic that unemployed IT people like me can't afford the bribes that HCL and tata and infosys and disney and google and microsoft and... well. $5 to bernie sanders was a loss I guess.

      Hopefully The Donald will properly do something, but I still expect to see exploitation of IT workers at an even faster pace. MS's own outsourcer pretty much singlehandedly ushered in the era of no longer needing a local IT staff. Just cloud it. yeah amazon and google had their services, but when people didnt have to pay some guy to check the server LEDs now and then (and that can be a good thing to eliminate this cost), an entire industry caved in overnight.

      the h1b thing continues to kick those that had the servers pulled out from under them.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @02:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 11 2017, @02:25PM (#452500)

    For a H1B, it appears Congress managed to craft a dumb immigration policy.

    "My understanding is that in India, the role of the H1B program is that it's becoming a rite of passage for many young Indian men: They work their butt off in their early 20's ...and then return ... and be comfortably middle-class the rest of their lives."

    Aside from a little short term indentured servitude,
    That is a really good deal for the person and India and a really bad deal for the company and the US.
    The US is both bootstrapping a major competitor and killing their internal labor force.

    Immigration could/should be way better if the talented, trained folks end up in the US.

    So how did we get here?
    This started with an MBA theory that it's ok to export non-core competencies.
    But Apple appears to have exported their manufacturing supply chain?

    Sad story for the US, but the world is probably a better place.
    Kind of a situation of unintended altruism.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:22PM

      by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday January 11 2017, @06:22PM (#452602)

      > This started with an MBA theory that it's ok to export non-core competencies.
      > But Apple appears to have exported their manufacturing supply chain?

      Apple could export the dirty capital-intensive supply and manufacturing, because their core competency is "user interface" and programming.
      But Linux and Android brought "easy familiar user interface" to their competitors, so Apple's main assets are now customer inertia (brand value) and massive piles of cash.
      Not great of a business plan going forward.

      Kind of a standard US tech issue for the last couple decades: profit now before they catch up, even if pursuing marginally higher profit helps them catch up, because we'll be on the the magical "next thing" by then.
      What's the "next thing" now?