Posted on 03/24/2015 5:24:29 AM PDT by Kaslin
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, believes passionately that the United States needs more skilled foreign workers. He has long advocated increasing the number of so-called H-1B visas, which allow those workers to come to the U.S. for several years and, in many cases, work for lower wages than current employees. Schmidt is frustrated that Congress hasn't done as he and other tech moguls want.
"In the long list of stupid policies of the U.S. government, I think our attitude toward immigration has got to be near the top," Schmidt said during a recent appearance at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "Everyone actually agrees that there should be more H-1B visas in order to create more tech, more science, more analytical jobs. Everyone agrees, in both parties."
The Eric Schmidt pleading for more foreign workers is the same Eric Schmidt who boasts of turning away thousands upon thousands of job seekers who apply for a few prized positions at Google. For example, at an appearance in Cleveland last October to promote his book, "How Google Works," Schmidt explained that his company receives at least 1,000 applications for every job opening. "The good news is that we have computers to do the initial vetting," Schmidt explained, according to an account in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.
Other tech leaders join Schmidt in calling for more foreign workers. Some companies are actually lobbying for more H-1Bs and laying off American staff at the same time. For example, last year Microsoft announced the layoff of 18,000 people at the very moment it was pushing Congress for more guest worker visas.
Given all that, there's not quite the unanimous agreement on the need for more foreign workers that Schmidt claims. At a recent hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a number of experts testified that the H-1B program, so sought-after by CEOs, is being abused to harm American workers.
Ron Hira, a Howard University professor and author of the book "Outsourcing America," told the story of Southern California Edison, which recently got rid of 500 IT employees and replaced them with a smaller force of lower-paid workers brought in from overseas through the H-1B program. The original employees were making an average of about $110,000 a year, Hira testified; the replacements were brought to Southern California Edison by outsourcing firms that pay an average of between $65,000 and $75,000.
"To add insult to injury," Hira said, "SCE forced its American workers to train their H-1B replacements as a condition of receiving their severance packages."
Hira testified that such situations are not unusual. And on the larger issue of whether there is, as many tech executives claim, a critical shortage of labor in what are called the STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering and math -- another professor, Hal Salzman of Rutgers, testified that the shortage simply does not exist.
"The U.S. supply of top-performing graduates is large and far exceeds the hiring needs of the STEM industries, with only one of every two STEM graduates finding a STEM job," Salzman testified. "The guest worker supply is very large (and) it is highly concentrated in the IT industry, leading to both stagnant wages and job insecurity."
The hearing also featured Jay Palmer, a former Infosys project manager who blew the whistle on a case in which the big outsourcing firm paid $34 million in fines for worker visa violations. "I watched this on a daily basis," Palmer told the Judiciary Committee. "I sat in the offices in meetings with companies that displaced American workers only because the Americans who had been there 15 or 20 years were being paid too much money."
So not everyone agrees with Schmidt on the need for more H-1B workers. Certainly not the laid-off IT employees at Southern California Edison. And not the workers reportedly displaced by similar practices at Disney, Harley Davidson, Cargill, Pfizer and other companies. Who knows? Maybe some of those workers have been among the 1,000-plus who apply for every Google opening.
To hear the witnesses before the Senate Judiciary Committee tell it, Congress needs to act -- not to increase the number of H-1Bs but to close the loopholes that allow them to be so badly abused at such a cost to American workers. "Congress and multiple administrations have inadvertently created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans," Hira told the committee. "Simply put, the H-1B program has become a cheap labor program."
“Everyone agrees, in both parties because we paid you guys off equally.”
EXACTLY!!
Maybe more Americans should be getting degrees in engineering, hard sciences, and mathematics instead of English, ethnic studies, philosophy, soft “sciences,” etc.?
Goofle’s new motto: “Be As Evil As Possible.”
You could have hired me at 1/100000000th the cost.
I have six open C# .NET development and/or architect positions open in Charlotte, NC. We’re trying to fill them, but IT unemployment is less than 1% in our market. So, yeah, we get our fair share of Indian developers. If I can’t fill with domestic candidates and the job needs to get done...
Any Freeper interested in these positions can Freepmail me and we can discuss further. There is no guarantee you’ll pass our interview process, but I’ll gladly entertain candidates.
I can echo georgia’s experience x6. It has not been easy finding homegrown talent.
Another poster, MNDude, posted the same above.
There are three Freepers on the same thread indicating it is a problem.
There are plenty of qualified people out there who could deliver or support quality products for Google. The fact is, Google is a bastion of Nitzian caste bigotry. They use people on H1B visas because they can control them. Come in on an H1B and you effectively waive your 13th amendment rights. You work for the company that brought you in or you get sent back. Google likes these terms.
indians are some of the worst IT people i’ve worked with.
they’re also some of the most racist.
its a known fact that an indian manager will hire an indian for a position whenever possible. he’ll also encourage existing members to leave, so he can fill it with another indian.
this has been going on since 2001. it’s not a newsflash to anyone in the industry
“They work hard, but are taking all the IT jobs.”
No they don’t. They walk the halls in groups speaking Hindi. They need to be deported immediately.
The article compared apples to apples; they did NOT compare "women's studies" grads to IT jobs. It was IT to IT.
The sole reason they're doing this is the money. About 15 years ago, CBS News followed the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor around as he tried to implement a mandate of his board to cut labor costs. This was a board directive; previously he had tried to follow it using American workers but the board redirected him to offshore some of his operations. The board was very "not shy" about telling him what they wanted, and that was an Asian operation.
CBS documented this guy's going to Filipino government salesmen (essentially that's what they were) flacking for a new industrial zone being greenfielded in the general Manila Bay-Subic Bay area. The Flip government offered the CEO a young woman pink-collar employee who knew Microsoft Office (she went through the routine, for his benefit, of creating a new doc and saving it, opening and using Access, etc.), and they said she would get, on local prevailing wages, about $4.85/DAY; and they also quoted $8500/yr for software engineers. On top of that, they offered Cypress a tax-incentive package to move some or all of their operation to this Luzon "special tax zone".
So Cypress's board was playing pitch, and the Filipinos were playing catch.
The sole purpose of the whole exercise was to eliminate American wages previously negotiated or merited. It was a giant welsh, ordered by the board for the money's sake.
So it was not a question of Americans' being "on their dead asses", contrary you n/w/s.
When corporations want to hire in from the slums of Campbellpore and Kowloon and sell on Rodeo Drive, American workers don't stand much chance of keeping their jobs.
Furthermore:
Indians in upper management have made statements to the effect that "IIT [Indian Institute of Technology] graduates are much better hires than MIT men; I'd rather have an IIT guy who can hit the ground running; they're much more job-oriented and better-grounded than MIT guys."
I am assured on no weak authority that this is a b.s. line used solely to justify Indian managers' continuing to hire fellow-Indian immigrants, either directly or on wage-slavery contracts from Tata International, over qualified American help which is usually better suited in terms of relevant experience, schooling, and quals.
Lastly, those Americans required to teach Indians probably didn't do so. The one case a friend of mine knew about involved some code writers who had both to compete with and train Indian H-1B hires who would supplant them. No way did the Americans show the Indians all the shortcuts the Americans used to make code run faster; no way did they unbundle the hard-won experience of a lifetime for these mooks. The result was that the Indians' code ran, all right, but it was infuriatingly slow, clunky, and buggy. Top management got what top management wanted to pay for.
So there it is. Weep, weep, occupied ga, for the philistines who once were savaged by Dickens, who merely showed us what those men were like in his novels, and who are now among us again by the operation of Wall Street sophistries about "delivering to the bottom line" and "unlocking the value".
As a FYI Ted Cruz is in favor of increasing by a factor of five the number of HB1 visas a year. I will not be supporting Ted Cruz when he is threatneing my job and wages.
It was a PHP programming job. Not in my department, so I don’t much more about it.
Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner!
Yeah, the monthlies and quarterly reports look great, right until the guy has to close the division.
I personally ascribe a lot of this development to high-concept Wall Street wand-wavers, who bring in Prof. Ubermensch to board-level breakfasts to explain the latest riff on "buy low sell high". I think that's where the whole "hire in Calcutta, sell in Beverly Hills" thing came from.
The SPP "superhighway" idea is likewise based on it. It's a wage-avoidance scheme, in that Chinese goods travel untouched by American labor from a dock in China to Mexico and then overland without labor or regulatory barriers to a Wal-Mart loading dock, there to be handled by illegal aliens on the dock and in the stockroom, overseen by an H-1B green-card manager, never touching American hands until a customer picks it up and pays First World prices for it.
I hope not that is just an issue waiting to happen and woe be on to the dumb@$$ that does that.
Fair enough, that is something we will have to keep an eye on and bring up to the candidate.
It's not a good idea to be "falling in love" with any candidate just yet .... although I still have my 2008 crush on Sarah that makes mah Hort go pitty-pat </off George Jones>.
Yup you are right on the money, there are very smart Indian’s, however most of the time from what I heard they are hired because because of cheap labor, and worse I have heard from others that when they get in positions of power they hire other Indians, push out the others and create some caste like culture, half the reason I have turned down jobs from Indian owned companies.
Also, the article claimed that only half of graduates end up working in the STEM field.
In general Chinese programmers are ok, not great but ok. Indian programers, in general suck. US programmers are in general very good. I will say the US electrical engineers that can’t make it in their field and turn to programming are about as good as Indian programmers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.