Posted on 02/22/2019 10:27:29 AM PST by rintintin
Americans don't usually think of technical professionals as "guest workers," yet at any one time, there are more than a half-million foreigners holding tech jobs in the U.S. They are here thanks to the H-1B visa program. H-1B, so the official spiel goes, addresses an alleged shortage of "highly skilled" Americans to fill jobs "requiring specialized knowledge."
Growing evidence, however, points to companies' using the program to replace perfectly qualified American workers with cheaper ones from elsewhere. A new report published by the Atlantic Council documents the abuses. The authors are Ron Hira, a political scientist at Howard University, and Bharath Gopalaswamy, director of the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center.
Among their criticisms:
—Virtually any white-collar job can be taken by an H-1B visa holder. About 70 percent of them are held not by what we consider tech workers but by teachers, accountants and salespeople, among others.
(Excerpt) Read more at creators.com ...
No argument there. Our company aggressively hired foreign engineers for reasons that made good sense to them, and the (foreign) people I worked with were genuinely good people. I will never blame the people I worked with for taking the jobs, and once hired a number of them worked their way into upper level positions, simply because they were that good.
But the effect is to flatten wages. That's inescapable. So I don't blame the company for wanting to hire them, I don't blame them for wanting to accept the job. But my antenna go straight up when I hear a politician, even a Repub, wanting to expand H1Bs from 80 thousand to 600 thousand. As some have wanted to do.
Been there...done that. Look at the international scores on math and science literacy and how the US compares to the rest of the world.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-students-internationally-math-science/
I came to the school system from a 22 year world of experience in the military and aerospace engineering. When I was teaching physics in high school we would get students from China and Vietnam that asked if we were kidding them about math expectations in the class. We had seniors that could not do rudimentary algebra. You should have seen the fun when we did logarithms.
You need to read Sold Out, Michelle Malkin’s book on h1b visas:
Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America’s Best & Brightest Workers
We were strictly speaking not a tech business but needed multi-skilled programmers to develop on-line software apps and tools. We could not find them. The H1B folks we ended up hiring were outstanding...
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You’re telling me that out of a country of 330 million people with the best university system in the world you couldn’t find qualified U.S. workers? I call B.S. What you couldn’t find were qualified U.S. workers to work for less than the market rate for those workers which is not the same as a federal “prevailing rate”. If you were paying what the market demanded you’d have found U.S. workers because it’s not even arguable that they’re out there, they most certainly are but they’re not going to work for what 10 Indians will that are crammed into a studio apartment subsisting on bulk rice bought at Costco.
Yet they are educationally qualified, in many cases more than our own kids, for the jobs they have.
The immigration system isn't broken when it comes to tech workers as much as our own educational system is failing us.
No and he’ll no. I work in IT and we continue to be overrun as the Americans are pushed out the door.
you are very unpersuasive, basing your claims on anecdotes about crappy high school kids who clearly didn’t have the skills to go into tech, and surely never did. So they’re irrelevant to the discussion
the issue is about Americans who do have those skills- who receive degrees in IT - being passed over or laid off in favor of cheaper foreign workers. That’s happening on a large scale, and the hard evidence is laid out in Malkin’s book, and elsewhere.
Gary:
I was there,you were not. You are completely wrong as to what we were trying to do - and it is totally presumptuous of you to argue otherwise. Paying below market rate was not a consideration.
I taught for 16 years and have watched the progressive decline. Beyond that I was hiring in aerospace engineering for 12 years and also saw the same trend.
That is a little more that "anecdotal".
Read Malkin’s book and tell me where she’s wrong.
25 years in the software engineering industry and I can’t buy a job here. 99% of the gatekeeper recruiters are Indian and have stated that they have absolutely no interest in submitting my profile to hiring managers after I declare I’m an American citizen. Have people I know at Microsoft in Redmond. Every week 50 or so Indians fresh off the plane start work there. Most with fake, unverifiable degrees and experiene. As an American Citizen, you bet our degrees and experience are practically public record.
Got so bad I had to seek assistance from the VA to try to return my back to my second home overseas. Can’t find any job in the Seattle area except extremely low paying grocery store jobs that leave me nearly homeless. The rudest customers at the store I work are Indians that treat Americans like slaves or worse. All the good retail jobs here are staffed by H4 wives and relatives here (thanks to Obozo)
He told me he had no idea what I was talking about. I then asked him why it was on his resume - and why he didn't have a copy of it in front of him.
Interview was pretty much over at that point.
Most of the interview test cheat sites online are run by Indians, who seem to all go through the same 90 day coding training course.
Was personally interviewed by an Indian orange-carder (contractor) at Microsoft for a position. Couldn’t understand a damned word he said. Gave me a white board problem totally not relevant to the skills involved in the job I was applying for, which was a Azure training specialist.
If you studied chapter 12, page 16, paragraph 12 of a certain textbook only used in Indian schools, you would passed the white board test. I found it later on an Indian interview cheat site.
He personally said at the onset of the interview that I was only being interviewed to pass quota of US Citizen interviewees.
Can’t complain though, looked at the US government TAA (Trade Adjustment Act) site for Americans displaced by foriegners. Microsoft fought and won about 200 cases against it in the Redmond area alone. My team of 4 was replaced by 6 Indians once a new Indian manager took over the area. Being a contractor myself made me ineligible for any other Microsoft position for 6 months, as Microsoft demands 18 month eligibility.
It was ruled that being replaced by an H1B visa holder did not entitle the US citizen for any government grant - which was to be the purpose of the training grant. Kinda hard after doing the same skill area 25 years.
I'm an American software engineer who manages many offshores.
My experience is that they deliver 50% of the product.
My requirement for effective product is:
I get 1), above. I seldom get 2) and 3).
That's only possible if your skills have aged. Mine nearly did, but I jumped back in and got retrained. In the beginning, when I left the CDC with aged skills, it was nigh-to-impossible to score a gig.
Now, with my skills up-to-date, I get 3 phone calls and 20 emails a day.
I ain't far from that, and I have the same experience.
It's not about age. It's about keeping your skills current.
#3. My sides! Bwahahahahaha!
These calls are for COBOL/CICS/VSAM
I got offered work that took 6 hours to complete.
I rewrote it to take 1.
You can go old-school and be gainfully employed too, but I chose the route of .NET, SQL/SSIS, Informatica (which is a lot like BI), etc.
I still have to touch DB2 from time to time.
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