Posted on 04/27/2010 5:02:19 AM PDT by reaganrevolutionin2010
I have a problem with H1-B, because it depletes the American workforce and suppresses wages.
But it’s a long swim from India to the USA.
I’m not entirely kidding. A lot of people overstay visas, but an alien from India likely at least entered the country legally.
I’ve worked beside many Indians in IT, some with papers “in progress” which means they have diddly now, some with H1b, some with green card, some naturalized citizens, some ??.
I’ve never seen them to depress my wages or the wages of citizens around me. Everywhere I’ve worked (Chicagoland and midwest) there is a shortage of IT workers. Based on the many recruiters emailing me for IT jobs in an L from Washington DC to FL to AZ there is a shortage of IT workers there also. (Curious even in boom times I never get recruiters from the NE or left coast.)
Due to this shortage of IT workers, the IT managers have 3 choices:
- Offshore the project to India
- Kill the project.
- Bring in immigrants of whatever immigration status
All 3 happen. A shop will have budget for 3 projects and is unable to staff them up. So it offshores 1 project, kills 1 project and then consolidates the few people it could find for the 3 projects into the third project to staff it locally. I only have a job in option #3 as I don’t plan on going to India.
There is an extremely high variance in IT wages. Some of it is based on technical skills. Much more is based on communication skills and that is where Indians make less. I sit in meetings with them and don’t have a clue what they are saying. It isn’t only me, Indians from different parts of India don’t understand each other. In the meeting I tell them “email us what you just said”. Then we’ll understand it.
But the biggest reason for a wide variance in wages is negotiating ability. With both Indians and the rest of us, some have the ability to negotiate a high wage; others of us don’t. That has nothing to do with one’s immigration status except that lack of communication skill sometimes impacts one’s negotiating skills.
Illegal immigrants should be aware that they are breaking our laws when they enter the USA illegally! Christians know they are supposed to love the sinner but hate the sin. IMHO, ICE should have rounded up all the protesters and sent them packing to their country of origin, in this case south of the border.
Great cartoon.
Wow, huge crowd!! /s
What I am tired of is this liberal talking point echoed by some supposed conservatives in the media that “illegal immigration exists because Republicans want cheap labor and Democrats want votes”.
I know of several millionaire and billionaire Democrat businessmen who use illegal and legal low wage Mexican labor in their businesses (restaurants and clothing manufacture and as nannies and in construction).
And the GOP has long looked as the Hispanic vote as the single largest demographic of voter to sway (although not all Hispanic voters are interested in the same issues, SOME are anti-Castro, SOME are anti-abortion, etc but others are proudly Socialist Liberal).
Democrats have looked to them for ILLEGAL votes which is why they drag their heels over ANY attempts to ID voters and verify they are legal citizens.
So if her church has female priests, are there also male nuns?
NAKED COMMUNIST
My job (of 5 years) is going to India Friday. I came in extra early to crosstrain my replacement since that is when his schedule ends. I had to take a 1/3 pay cut last year and it still isn’t enough to save my job.
Champion this all you want. My college degree is being devalued because of global market competition.
Now if the software we design, test, and subsequently license was taxed an import duty like any other good, it would be valued into the millions but because it comes via a wire, there is no importation tax.
Bill Gates is a billion dollar marxist but was among those leading the call for such work visas. The money doesn’t help out the bottom line of corportations, it gets pilfered off at levels of upper management.
>> I’ve never seen them to depress my wages or the wages of citizens around me. <<
That’s really funny.
>> Everywhere I’ve worked (Chicagoland and midwest) there is a shortage of IT workers <<
Really, because I work in IT, too. I happen to be smack dab right in the middle of where that trillion dollars of “stimulus” is heading, and am very safe in my job, but I have dabbled in looking elsewhere, and I just don’t see listings. But we’re in a bad economy right now, so that’s not too reliable. It just means I don’t trust your anecdotes either way.
There was a day when meat packing was a job which would bring in about $50/hr (today’s money), plenty to retire on when the inevitable damage to the human body over-ran the ability to work. Then they brought in immigrants, and meatpackers make about $6 an hour.
When my brother worked in construction, he could pull down $100/ hr. Then they brought in immigrants; his old job (he switched careers) would pay about $6 an hour.
I studied IS instead of CS at the graduate level. Why? Because CS salaries were already declining. (It’s harder to offshore IS; CS can do everything via email.)
There are other options, such as attract more domestic innovation by paying better, develop domestic workforces (all the grad assistantships go to people who struggle to communicate). Besides, what’s so terrible about offshoring the project? The same jobs which are low-pay here are comparably high-pay there, so BOTH countries see an increase in per-capita income; we continue a domestic resource development, and they have seed capital to develop their own markets, which we can then also trade with.
>> But the biggest reason for a wide variance in wages is negotiating ability. <<
A-ha... you just said a mouthful. Now, consider the impact of your employer being able to force you to leave your new country at will.
If I have developed a few prejudices, one of the biggest is in favor of Indian people. My wife has a horror story or two, but I’ve never met one I didn’t like. If there’s a flaw in my relationship with Indians, it’s that I rather presumptively figure we’re going to get along great. Another huge source of H1-Bs is Philippino nurses. You want to talk a people who are devoted to Christ, and who are beautifully charitable! If I were to name the people I would expect would be the first in Heaven among my acquaintances, the top of the list would be jammed with Philippinos. Then there’s African priests, who are giving the American Catholic Church a much-needed re-evangelization.
But be that as it may, there’s still a tremendous amount of abuse in the H1-B program, resulting in greatly artificially large demand. I’m not saying scrap the program altogther, but huge reform is desperately needed.
Great post. One of the reasons why I love FR.
As I said, my yahoo inbox is filled every week with emails from recruiters begging me to take some IT job that they are having a hard time filling. Because I've always worked in the Midwest (MO, KS, MN a few, Chicagoland many) it's natural that I get a lot from this area.
Michigan had many up thru 2007. In 2008-08 it disappeared. But in late 2009 and now in 2010 it is coming back. Recruiters say they can't find anyone who wants to work in Michigan. (That includes me, of course.)
In addition there seem to be many IT openings DC to FL up through TN, AK, TX on the way to AZ.
I've never understood why, regardless of the economy, I never see jobs from Baltimore to PA,NY,MA nor CA,OR,WA.
The job market is like musical chairs. Over 10% of a typical IT shop hop for a better job every year. (Seemed like more than 10% in my shop last year.) That leaves jobs open for others. When they hop their old jobs become open.
Here in IL one IT shop announced that it was laying off 123 IT workers. Immediately two other IT shops said they would hire every single one of them that was willing to come over.
Job hopping for a better spot seems to account for many more empty chairs in the game than the addition or subtraction of chairs by boom and bust.
I'm not sure how much technology trends have to do with it. COBOL/DB2/SQL are my skill and always in high demand. Java, networking and column based databases seem to be in high demand. VB/.net/MS skills have low demand and by the law of supply and demand, probably don't pay as well.
You'd think people in IT would think logically. But in fact IT is very much driven by fads that defy logic. It seems that every month there is a new trend du jour, only to be replaced the next month by the newest hype from the marketing departments.
I think we can all expect that there will be a massive need for IT workers in the shops that need to keep up with the massive number of changes that we can expect will come out of the hundreds of new government regulatory agencies, commissions, committees, boards, etc. As my daughter said, she thinks Obamacare is bad for the US. But it is great for her short term employment prospects.
Ping!
A while back there were some news stories about the Chinese “snakeheads”, organized smugglers who brought illegal Chinese into the country as indentured servants. I just happened to remember this so I looked up the term “snakeheads”. It is interesting to see how all of these organized crime syndicates operate. They use many of the same tactics regardles of the countries they come from.
An illegal factory in NYC was operating with some of these smuggled indentured servants who were forced to live on the premises. One of the networks once brought a hidden camera to expose this factory. Don’t you think it odd that such an illegal operation could take place in the middle of New York City? Weren’t they even afraid that the city’s code inspectors might unexpectedly drop in to check the premises? Or were they paying off the inspectors and politicians?
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/snakeheads/index?tab=articles
Actually, the exploitation is done by those who tacitly permit illegal immigration.
You see, I’m against slave wages. Apparently, these people are not.
Wrong. There is never a shortage of workers in a particular sector. All that this means is that IT workers are not being paid enough. Pay more, you get more IT workers.
Ain't no "shortage" of lawyers. But I bet if you give student visas exclusively for law school, you'll find that the hourly rates go down.
That is so true. I'm just amazed at people who can't see simple Supply and Demand when it comes to immigration. It doesn't make the immigrants bad, in fact it shows greater character that they're willing to uproot.
I should have said “shortage of IT workers WILLING AND ABLE to do the work.”
There are some products of our mis-educaton system who have been taught how to FEEL about computers... Computers are their friend. They have been taught how to click a mouse. But they have not been taught how to THINK. They are flat out not worth the money. The best they can do is to be hired as coordinators to coordinate the facilitators who facilitate the coordinators. But they can’t analyze, design and code.
Then there are those not WILLING. A conservative former co-worker was complaining online that he was unemployed. I suggested he apply at my current shop where his six figure income would be more than his previous six figure income. (That’s pretty good for those of us with no degree.) His response was that he had taken a couple classes in C++ and now would only accept a high paying position in a skill in which he was entry level.
Another former co-worker said that when her unemployment comp ran out she’d go back to work and her husband would collect unemployment comp while she built back up her unemployment comp credits.
Indian immigrants are now earning those six figure incomes in my shop.
My current shop is in the middle of the corn fields. Many applicants turn up their nose at jobs that aren’t in silicon valley or some other prestigous location. They turn up their nose at high paying technologies that aren’t the technology fad du jour.
I do have to admit COBOL is always in high demand. And that accounts for about 1 in 10,000 IT people. CS departments presumed years ago — before Y2K — that COBOL would go extinct, and quit training anyone for it. It’s kinda like saying that there’s a shortage of animal husbandry workers because you can’t find a good, experienced condor breeder.
Yeah, it was kinda dumb to presume it’d go extinct. But it’s meaninglessly insignificant in the issue of labor shortages.
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