Do We Still Need As Many H-1B Visas?: No

Front Page Magazine ^ | June 17, 2002 | Rep. Tom Tancredo

[College Repub]

If this happens over and over, doesn't that become the new going rate?

[gubamyster]

You're not describing the H1B program.

Well according to the immigration attorney the company frequently uses in such cases, it indeed was a H-1B visa. We had to "beef-up" this employee's resume so we could say he was doing "unique" work that an average Joe could not perform. Basically, we were told by the attorney that we had to justify why we would hire this guy over some US Citizen. In addition to the resume, we had to complete numerous gov’t forms. This was recently – in the 3rd qtr. 2001.

[Marine Inspector]

Yep, and it prices out the US workers.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

Either your attorney is engaged in malpractice or you're misunderstanding your attorney's advice. There's no requirement that an H1B applicant be doing "unique" work. That's one route to a green card, but it's not part of the H1B program. I'd be more inclined to take your concerns about the program seriously if I thought there was half a chance you were straight on the facts.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

If your only reason for thinking that H1B's are "cheap labor" is your analogy with contracting out production with factories in China, then you've reached your opinion in ignorance of the requirements for an H1B. Aside: There's amazing programming talent in India. They have a good educational system and a lot of people going through it. If any firm is not taking the best and brightest from that pool of labor, they're putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage. If anything the Indian government should be complaining about a brain drain. They've paid for the education and American's are getting the benefit of it.

[FormerLurker]

They've paid for the education and American's are getting the benefit of it.

I was hired by a company along with several others to undo the hack job that they received from an Indian consulting firm. I've never seen such pathetic code before in my life. It took a team of 3 engineers along with a software architect 3 months to revamp the software so that it would function properly. There appeared to be a generally good concept in the design, but the implementation was extremely poor, resulting in massive memory leaks and memory corruption. We had to redesign and recode much of the base classes along with every constructor and destructor in virtually every single derived class. Every single memory allocation call had to be checked and most needed to be reimplemented. So don't tell me they provide talent that we can't find here. They're only cheaper than US engineers. As they say, you get what you pay for..

Why don't you take a look at the article I posted. Read it, try some of the links and see what you think.

Are you on a H1B visa and are trying to protect your job maybe? You've either got blinders on or you're one of those who are studying "creative" ways to screw American workers for the sake of "the shareholders". What people like you don't seem to realize is that when you toss Americans out onto the street to make room for cheap labor, you're fueling the demise of our economy. You think people in China, India, or Pakistan are going to buy American? What pray tell is there left to buy from us anyways?...

[StolarStorm]

I've dealt with H10Bs from India on many projects over many years. I have never been impressed with their skills or ability to problem solve. The typical H1-B has less skills than the average non-H1-Bs I've worked with.

It's not about skills, it's about cheap labor and using H1-Bs as a threat.

[StolarStorm]

I feel your pain, man. I'm in Shanghai code hell right now. Were in the process of cleaning up the horrible code provided by our outsourced vendor. It would take less time to trash it all and start from scratch. Sadly, doing that would be an admission by upper-management, that the cheap foreign labor they hired didn't work out. It rarely does. This is what happens whan non-techies manage tech projects.

[Woodman]

What you don't see is that many of these H1-B's are being hired through third parties (consulting firms). They appear to be employeed even when they aren't thus violating their terms for being here in the first place, and secondly they are actually paid far below the rate being paid by the companies they actually do work for.

I have 11 employees working for me, 2 are H1-B's 1 just got a green card after 3 years? None of them were actually employed from Septempber - January, but thay were keep on the books by thier respective consulting firms instead of going home. The pool of consultants I saw that were available about three months ago was at least 90% H1-B's. These people should have gone home a long time ago, and they are driving down chances for other qualified applicants including green card holders. They are truely indentured servants.

[Woodman]

See my response #49. There is a reason why they do not get sent home.

[Rev DMV]

What you don't see is that many of these H1-B's are being hired through third parties (consulting firms). They appear to be employeed even when they aren't thus violating their terms for being here in the first place, and secondly they are actually paid far below the rate being paid by the companies they actually do work for.

This is one of the dirtly little secrets of the H-1B program. A great deal of these folks are not working for companies, but are being farmed out by consulting shops for very below market rates.

[FormerLurker]

When I first encountered such work, I thought that it was an abberation. Obviously it wasn't. My heart goes out to all those who have to deal with such abdominations...

[ConsistentLibertarian]

We've hired H1B's. We also pay substantially above market rate for talent -- we try to use the 20 to 1 rule to our best advantage. My guess is that the problems your client/employer were having went beyond the work they outsourced. Sounds to me like it's a badly managed project. You might be the best thing that every happened to them and they might, quite literally, be lucky to have found you.

[NormsRevenge]

HI Chuck! What line of work are you in?

*** This is NOT a solicitation :-) ***

I been bumping around ol' Silicon Valley for quite a few years.

[ThePythonicCow]

I've got one H1-B in my group. One of my best hiring decisions. It's perhaps like any immigration -- if they are integrated into their new society and workplace, not isolated (hyphenated), then the extra drive that got them this far is one step ahead of the average, and its back to a case-by-case understanding of individual people's talents and motivation. However if work is farmed out to separate isolated groups, then unless it's real straight forward and easily driven by specification and contract, you're begging for trouble.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

Hey, I owe you an email about Python and static typing but I was so swamped at the time I let it drop off the radar. Have you played with Ruby yet? The libraries are not as extensive or mature, but the object model is very elegant and well thought out.

[ThePythonicCow]

I've just spent a few minutes looking at Ruby -- I've been quite happy with Python. I'm not comfortable with Perl like syntax, I'm not an object purist, and for my work, I need languages that are fairly mature and widely distributed (installed by default). See further How Does Ruby Compare With Python?.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

I've never been intersted in Perl. Are you turned off by Ruby's @@ prefix for class variables and such? That's not a feature I particularly like either. When it comes to syntax though I feel spoiled by Objective-C and Smalltalk -- I like the messaging syntax with named parameters, ie [foo doBarWith: blee andNotify: blah]. Python has a lot going for it. There's no Ruby equivalent for Zope, for example.

[ConsistentLibertarian]

Not trying to write english to make it look like Perl. Im on an old Unix system right now and the browser is non-standard and flakey.

[ThePythonicCow]

I never worked with Obj C nor Smalltalk -- so that might
be part of our different reactions to Ruby. My native
tongue is C. My second languages are English (half joking)
and Korn shell. I've done 100,000's of C++ lines, but
still don't feel I've mastered it. Python fits that
background well.