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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @06:12PM (2 children)
You have my sympathies if you're an American techie who can't outperform H1B code monkeys. Maybe you picked the wrong field.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @06:17PM (1 child)
Outperform? The bosses don't care about performance, they care about having enough "bodies" to charge to the next department down the line.
Seriously, spent a few minutes walking around a cube farm sometime. They don't say "We need a Java developer" or "We need a sysadmin", they say "We need more bodies on this project." They'd use goddamn inflatables if they could get away with it!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:55PM
Correct.
I know good people (Mainframe programmers, CICS guys, as well as Oracle and SQL guys -- never mind how many windows server admins that were replaced when every single H1B had MCSEs and only the employee server admins worried about their email signature had them--it was a swift transition)... that got replaced.
The database guys were the hardest to replace. They build the databases and were responsible for the performance, got blamed for everything, and took the pains to demonstrate that it is fast on the server when there is enough hardware, and fast on the network when it can deliver the results, and fast on the front end when it can render the results as fast as it can receive it, etc...
Some of those guys were the first to go because they were expensive. And replacing them with five H1Bs did not get the work done any faster. It just lead to even more confusion. It started with just 3 guys, and increased to 5 when the 3 couldn't do it.
Then, that place started to use the rule of it is worth it to replace an experienced person with up to 5 H1Bs. If it exceeds that, approach it on a case by case basis and determine if the individual possesses a unique or difficult to replace skill, and then consider how to best knowledge transfer gracefully without risking the resource from figuring things out and abruptly leaving.