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Trump is planning on signing an executive order on Tuesday that will cause a review of the H1-B program. It is just a review, and undoubtedly business interests will step up the pressure, but there are some interesting ideas:
"If you change that current system that awards visas randomly, without regard or skill or wage, to a skill-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers, because you're not bringing in workers at beneath the market wage," the official said. "So it's a very elegant way of solving systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa."
Breitbart of course has an article out (though it reads like they need to hire some native speaking editors) -- still, recent college grads face a huge hurdle:
The federal government releases little data on the many different guest-worker programs, but the available evidence says the national population of white-collar contract workers is up to 1.5 million. That population is roughly twice the population of 800,000 Americans who graduate from college with skilled degrees each year.
And finally, lest people forget that progressives also have issues with H1-B visas, here is Bernie Sanders (a decade ago of course) attacking this ploy to make sure money only trickles up by ensuring low wages. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR9QdQIKqMc
[Ed Note: Trump did sign the executive order at a photo op in Wisconsin.]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AndyTheAbsurd on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:45PM (1 child)
H-1B is widely derided and despised. Is there a reason for that?
Yes, there is a reason for it. The reason is that there are a handful of big IT "consultancy" firms that hire a lot of people - mostly but not exclusively Indian people - and bring them to the US on H1-B visas and peddle their services to various corporations, often at rates that undercut the wages of US citizens who could provide those services. And the people that are hired by the consultancy firms are not well vetted, so are frequently barely able to complete the tasks that they get hired to do. Add to that the thick, difficult-to-decipher accents of the recently arrived and the different idioms ("do the needful") of their cultures, making it difficult to communicate with them.
Basically, working with H1-B visa holders is often a swirling vortex of suck, because you have a hard time understanding them, they have a hard time understanding you, everything is taking longer than it should, and everybody is underpaid for the amount of work that's being attempted.
Should we all just shut up and suck it?
No. We should bother our congresscrittters until they're forced into rewriting the rules of the H1-B program to do what it was actually intended to do: only bring in foreign workers when there is no reasonable option for hiring someone already authorized to work in the US and capable of working on the high-tech project.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday April 20 2017, @02:45AM
It's now marked flamebait so the thread may not be perfectly clear depending on how low you browse, but my question was a rhetorical quip to some now properly modded AC.
Anyway, I totally agree with your points.