Posted on 05/06/2019 2:57:50 PM PDT by zeestephen
Overall, Trump is a supporter of the H1B program. He throws us a bone once in a while, but he buys the lie that we "need" these people.
Then you also have the problem of once an Indian gets in a position to hire, you'll never see another American come into the department.
Hotel desk clerks have gone through the same transition.
The average wage for a desk clerk has not kept up with inflation over the last 20 years.
I think most foreign born employees in banking and in white collar hotel jobs are probably legal immigrants who have a Green Card or citizenship since they handle a lot of money and credit card information.
Re: brilliant students have to go home after graduation
A total scam.
Almost all of the brilliant foreign students who attend elite USA universities come from Japan, northern Europe, wealthy Persian Gulf nations, or English speaking countries.
They return home immediately because the standard of living in their home country is as high or higher than the USA.
The ones who stay in the USA are completely average scientists and engineers from China, India, Russia, and Iran.
Between H-1B and OPT, they can get nine years of USA residency, and if an employer sponsors them for a Green Card, they can stay until the Green Card is approved, which can take many years for some countries, like India.
Did you even read the article? Would seem that you did not nor do you know much about this rather complex issue.
I know a little about the subject...I worked in recruiting STEM workers, and I have 4 family members who are “STEM;” 2 of them have PhDs, 1 has MS, and one has BS and working on MS...
I really resent you and others here stereotyping all US technical students and professionals as being uneducated or unskilled and therefore unable to compete with Indians or Chinese indentured workers. I would stack up my family members’ skills against anyone here plus any H-1B recipients.
Tho my family members are very talented and doing fine, at various times over the past decade, they they have been impacted by H-1B visa workers thru missed opportunities, layoffs or reduced salaries. Endless supply of workers primarily from India but also China cheapen the work of all US tech professionals...They are not better skilled—in fact many US professionals have had to train their cheaper replacements...Many articles outlining this have been posted here in the past.
Tech titans like Ellison (being sued by Justice Dept for preferential hiring of foreign students) and Zuckerberg want H-1Bs because they are cheap and can be indentured...And Dem pols want them because if H-1B’s obtain citizenship (their primary objective), they will likely vote Dem...
Why would you want to take a position of tech titans who hate Trump and conservatives and Dems who want to create a future DEM political monopoly?
Thank you so much for posting this—The victims’ stories are
very sad, moving, and yet all too common.
And, thank you for your encouraging comments.
in silicon valley the operative metric now seems to be cost per line of code, regardless of other considerations. concerns about quality and experience seem to fall by the wayside. software management is still in its infancy. how many lines can you code by tomorrow? by friday evening? saturday midnight? sunday midnight? next sunday midnight?
all the while, be aware that h1-b new hires are arriving in your area by unending droves, day in and day out, year in and year out. why should a company keep you when they can easily and legally lay you off and hire an h1-b for half the cost? one third of the cost? someone who barely speaks engrish, can’t quit because their entire family lives in a mud hut in their home country, much less sue you for discrimination?
this is not your textbook software engineering environment with everyone bushy-tailed and rosy-cheeked and pinball machines in the dining cafeterias chanting lofty mantras about doing no harm or saving the rain forest while delivering the promised post-industrial nirvana. in practice, it is more like a fire ant hill and only those prepared to fight for decades at a very visceral level can keep their job until they retire. one wrong step and they are out of a job, in which case they are instantly in competition with h1-bs who can be offered the same job at 1/3 of the cost or less. h1-bs can be patient. they know the score. one of them, or one of their colleagues, is likely to get your job. in the current environment, all they need do is to be patient for a while...
in the silicon valley suburbs, entire neighborhoods of caucasian people have been replaced by indians and chinese. the caucasians go back to iowa, or sell their home equity and move to grass valley or phoenix or someplace like minden. the retail stores and clubs are full of the same. the silicon valley of 40 years ago is totally gone (although likewise that replaced an earlier local farming culture which is now not even remembered by anyone now).
removing h1-b would force companies to hire americans. there is a hidden reserve of unemployed americans who can do these jobs. what is lacking is the corporate morality to employ american. this has been subverted by the almighty quarterly report and polician subceptibility to corruption by silicon valley corporations.
imho.
H-1B and OPT may just be the transition point into universal CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering).
It’s only a question of time before computers start writing better software than most humans do.
that’s been talked about for decades. im not sure it has any grounding outside academia. it could therefore be just a fad (imho). i like version control system and maybe iso 9000. but new devices appear all the time which require new software. you can’t just throw a robot at a complex problem and expect anything like a good solution. no more in software than in any other sphere of endeavor.
The financial sector is filling with foreigners (primarily Asians) - replacing skilled/trained American workers; when Occupy Wall Street was protesting in front of their former employers in the financial district (when the movement started, due to mass layoffs), you could see on the TV their foreign replacements filing into the buildings behind them - to fill the positions the Americans had held weeks before.
It IS the “Great Replacement”, make no mistake about it.
I didn't say that, DJT did. Sigh......
I was agreeing with you.
Sorry if my excerpt confused the issue.
No problem. I am old and confused most of the tie anyway.
LOL!
No problem on my side of the discussion, either.
I see you fly an Illinois flag. Most of my IT consulting since 1983 has been in IL (Motorola, Sears, Allstate, Kraft, Discover, United Ins, CNA Ins, State Farm, etc.) but also Minneapolis, Kansas, Missouri, and not 6 years in GA.
Repeatedly I have seen IT shops with full funding for 3 or more big projects which were unable to staff up. That was true is the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and now 2017+ (2012-2016) seemed like a drought in the midwest). Shops with multiple projects that cannot staff up have 3 choices:
1) kill 1 or 2 of the projects.
2) Offshore to India.
3) hire immigrants (mostly India but Australia, Mexico, Korea, China, Ireland, UK, and especially Canada. Many
people don’t realize how many Canadians work in the US).
When they hire immigrants all 3 projects stay in the US.
With the first 2 options I do not have a job.
Yes, I have trained Indian Jr College level techs to take my US jobs in insurance back to India (an insurance company not named above).
Currently in GA IBM has had a $100 million fixed bid contract for an Oracle Data Warehouse, Informatica, Cognos, SAS, etc. They are offering the same rate (or better) as you would find in Chicago, Dallas, Huston, Austin or Atlanta, 6 figure for most. They started staffing up last May and have been very slow to find qualified people. Over 2/3 of the people they took a chance on were let go because they were incompetent. (If the words Normalize, DeNormalize, Fact and Dimension are not in your vocabulary, what are you doing on a Data project?)
They have ended up with a mostly immigrant workforce, but not by intent. I was at the IBM headquarters for a different project (not the one I know intimately). I saw about 200 people come to apply for 100 jobs of various skill levels. About 180 of the 200 appeared to be Natural Born Americans, not immigrants. Apparently many of them had a BA/BS in IT/MIS. But they apparently did not know what I knew on my first day at Motorola in 1983.
PS I am worth my low 6 figure rate. But I don’t claim to be a genius worth double what I make.
>These days, with skill set demands changing daily, keeping up is the >equivalent of a dog chasing it’s tail.
It’s not daily. A few years ago at the age of 55, I decided to stop consulting and re-enter full time employment. The world of tech had changed, but targeted a few companies based upon their needs, and my existing skillset. I applied to 7 companies. Got interviews. Got 5 offers. And have been working with people much younger than me for the past 6 years.
We’ve become complacent. You have to really want it and go for it.
I will get back to you Freepmail when I have more time.
ONe point though was made by another poster I thought was a good one...there is a large number of older tech professionals who are still unemployed and underemployed who could fill a number of the tech vacancies.
I believe those individuals should be tapped before newly graduated programmers from Indian diploma mills...
However, it all boils down to money, and at least in Silicon Valley (as well as many other places if posters here are to be believed), cheap indentured H-1B Visa holders are preferred—they are not a last resort.
The linked article does not mention the specific details of the OPT “work visa.”
(1) OPT is a thinly camouflaged expansion of the H-1B program.
(2) OPT is actually a part of the standard student visa for foreign students. It allows foreign STEM graduates from USA colleges to stay and work in the USA for 36 months after graduation.
(3) OPT is subsidized by USA taxpayers. OPT workers, and their employers, do not pay Social Security or Medicare taxes, even though OPT workers are competing directly against home grown American STEM graduates for the same jobs.
(4) When Trump came into office, the number of OPT workers was below 250,000. Trump has increased OPT workers to more than 300,000.
Again, it is about the money...Univ. of Illinois, a tax-payer funded public Land Grant University, actually travels to China to recruit Chinese students for STEM seats which reduces the number of seats available for Illinois residents. Why? Because Chinese pay more—at least initially....
And there are NO CAPS ON F-1 FOREIGN STUDENT VISAS...
At 55, you’re very fortunate to have found something.
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