I think America needs as many good coders as it can get. Its almost a national security issue. The more coders America has, the more high tech businesses will be American. Where it falls apart is when they are not truly high quality programmers. There are lots of Indian consulting companies who hold H1-B employees hostage. Often they are lab workers or QA (quality testers) who are not nearly as skilled. But they are cheap and because they are consultants, a company can get rid of them easily.
Trump should make the H1-B just for the best programmers and Engineers or highly skilled. And H1-Bs should not be for foreign companies that bring over employees for the purpose of low wage substitutes. H1-B should be for American companies that want to hire full time highly skilled employees at full American wages. Not sweat shop consultants.
Exactly. And maybe our institutions of higher learning should focus on turning out more people capable of needed productive jobs instead of social justice and gender equality degrees.
I think the lack of independent testing for skills is a major problem that really shows in this H1B issue. Employers must rely too much on the reputation of colleges and the transcripts of their graduates to decide on employees with no established work history. They literally CANNOT do that for H1B hires — a list of foreign college degrees is a complete unknown and unreliable qualification.
If even American students were expected to get certifications in individual skills then employers in IT would have a better measure than just a college’s rep. Unfortunately, most of the certification courses I ever saw in my IT career were a joke — just a way to collect money from students without any honest assessment of the skills being acquired. I hired several MCSE people who couldn’t troubleshoot their way out of a paper bag. I hired coders with BS degrees from American colleges that took weeks to code what took me 1/2 day. Honest, tough, TIMED, certification testing would weed out most of these H1B foreigners who are far from “highly skilled” as the H1B requires.
As it stands, the only way to allow H1B is to require the employers put their money where their mouths are. Make the application/sponsorship fee $200K/yr on these visas. If they are that expensive, you can be sure employers will be choosy and not using them to undercut American wages.
At the same time, this H1B visa (and other work visas) does not address outsourcing jobs to foreign workers. The IRS should ascertain what foreign payments by American employers are going to pay foreign workers — and then collect Payroll Tax and Income Taxes on those payments just as though the workers were Americans.