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."
Cruz does not excite me, I will not send him money and will not vote for him unless he drops the H-1b visa increase, and he makes me believe him.
$100k plus or minus $5k
I can tell you that I interviewed some Indians and they didn’t do as well as the two non-Indians that I hired, but they did better than the majority of the Americans who applied.
OK, what do you do about quasi complete separation, and do you do the (p,d,or q) first? (no cheating and looking it up)
No, techies in India have been getting close to double-digit raises, on average, for years. Sure, you can still hire 3 to 4 or 5 to 1 there, but the ratio’s not nearly as good for H1-B types here in the US.
Still, it’s a big savings, so hard to fight.
My rant was about the general quality of job applicants for technical positions and the paucity of well qualified Americans to fill them based on my hiring experiences in the last year. I'm not saying that offshore operations are happening more and more. They are, but I had a hard time finding people that could do the job and didn't speak with an accent.
Walker is better anyway and has achieved results as governor.
in reply to
“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 threatening my job and wages.
Americans need jobs.this is ridiculous for any politician to want to bring in more foreign workers. If Cruz is for bringing in more foreign workers then I am against Cruz. I agree with you and the original poster.
Walker is better anyway and has achieved results as governor.
in reply to
“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 threatening my job and wages.
If it was really about a huge demand with a tight supply of talent then the salary for these jobs should have gone through the roof.
I work with many Indian folks. I actually like’em. Their smart, productive, personable, most are very humble.
But I’ve had a scotch or two with a few of’em. They’ll tell ya what the skinny is.
Corporations are getting BS, Masters, PHD’s for less than that of American workers. I don’t blame the Indians for wanting to come and work. Heck, I’d do the same if I were in a country that’s as crowded as a bee hive.
My issue is America/American workers, if qualified should come first. No other country in the world would put foreigners ahead of their own citizens.
I’m not sure about that — that’s math, not IT — but tell me why the non-FIPS-compliant encryption succeeds on Server 2008 and 2003, but not Server 2012, and what can I do about it? Also, my 24/265 application seems to be getting invalid view- and session-states, perhaps you can offer a solution? Also, why is my Lambda expression not hooking into my Linq-2-Sql? Finally, how can I get through-the-firewall direct outside access to SSRS servers with bulletproof security?*
* I actually have all those answers. Just showing off. :)
Hey good buddy you offered to work for me not the other way around.
Well, I am at the tech level where I can hire my employer. I interview companies, not the other way around. :)
Actually I have an answer to the first one without looking it up - upgrade to FIPS compliant encryption on Server 2012 (not sure it’s the RIGHT answer, but it’s an answer)
Let me know how you do that.
Actually, kinda-right, but backwards. Downgrade if you want to run non-FIPS on 2012, 2012 is out-of-box configured for FIPS.
Be top of your profession. Tech-test at the top 0.1% on every tech test you take. When they give you an hour to complete a development problem on a blank solution, complete it in a half-hour and spend the next 30 minutes adding error checking and web-security.
Your company is telling you - quite loudly - what they really think of your profession. They may need some variant of what you do in the short term, but they resent the hell out of actually having to pay anyone to do it.
Already there, but no tech tests for what I do. (make other people do the work :-)
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