re: Tech Workers Rejoice: Trump Admin Tightens H-1B Guidelines

Meh, nvm.

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You can't have free trade and freedom without the ability to moves goods and services around the globe without impediments.

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Yeah that's fine and well but why import a bunch of foreign workers just to displace American workers so they can save a few bucks? It may help the bottom line but its not good for the country. If they want to out source that shite, let the workers stay there.

Hilarious people trying to use international economic theories like no outside governments or factors exist and we're one world run by the NWO.

Plain and simple, International Econ 101, economies are looked at on a country by country or, at the least, region by region, for a plethora of factors so numerous and many so simple yet even the most basic underlying principle exceeds the understanding and scope of this thread.

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These positions should not exist in the US if they are cheaper to perform in India, they hold the competitive advantage and the market would naturally gravitate to the cheaper product.

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They are still cheaper to perform in India. If they could be performed in India, they would be.

The H-1Bs are being abused in multiple ways. Companies hold their foreign workers hostage because they underpay them, knowing that they don't have the leverage to ask for market wages. Companies like Microsoft and Google pay them the competitive wage, but Indian companies like Infosys, TCS, and Wipro get these visas by the thousands and staff all of their projects with almost 100% imported talent.

The employees have to be sponsored in order to stay in the US, so Infosys, TCS, and Wipro can bring these people over here, and it is very difficult for them to find another sponsor, so they have to accept the lower wages. They can't quit, because they will be sent home. Some can find another sponsor, but most don't.

In addition, these companies don't help their imported talent get their green cards, because a green card means that they have the freedom to seek a job that pays more. So they bring them over, use up their H-1B visa, and then send them back.

These companies also make it difficult for employees who are US citizens to work for them - adding to the illusion that they can't find talent in the US citizen pool. For example: they will ask the US based employees to work with the India base employees on IST. Meaning that the US based employees will have to work very late at night on a consistent basis. In addition, they are consulting companies, and rather than pay for travel expenses for an employee to travel to the customer site, they pay for partial relocation expenses. This means that if you have a 4 month contract with a client, you are expected to relocate to the city where that client is located, and then relocate again in four months for the next assignment. US employees won't do that. H-1B employees will.

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I don't have a problem with bringing in H-1B workers, but give them the freedom to compete in the market when they get here. Let them get hired on their own merit, not because they are cheap. If a US citizen and a foreign worker cost the same amount, then companies will go with the US citizen first (no expenses for flying them from India, visa sponsorship, etc). If that is the case, companies will hire foreign workers only when they can't find American workers.

And yes, there should be restrictions on the number of people who can come here on the visa. Companies who abuse the visa system by snatching up 10,000 visas at one time should be punished, as well. I suspect that the reason a lot of companies don't use them is because they are hard to get, once Infosys, TCS, and Wipro get what they want.

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There have definitely been abuses, and those need to be addressed.

LINK

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U.S. employers are deflecting attention from their own abuse of H-1B by promoting the notion that they use the visa responsibly, while the (conveniently non-Western) Infosyses are cheating. Where I come from, we call this scapegoating.

Those critics point out that the Infosyses tend to pay below-average wages. But so do U.S. firms. The wage rules for H-1B and green card sponsorship are broken down into Levels I, I, III and IV, with Level III being the median. For software developers, the most common type of foreign tech worker, the green card data show the following percentages of foreign workers at Levels I or II making below-median wages: Amazon 91%; Facebook 91%; and Google 96%. These firms, putatively in the vanguard of advanced technology and certainly in the vanguard in Capitol Hill lobbying regarding H-1B, are paying almost all of the foreign workers wages below the median for the given region.

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Not just Infosys. American firms do it too.

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A few years ago, our company decided to phase out our internal IT department (staffed by citizens I might add) and replace them with contractors from Tata. It's an outright nightmare to deal with now and anything new or innovative that we'd like to do is pushed out so far as to be pointless due to "available hours" and "IT's capability." Projects take 3-4 times as long to complete, rarely without hiccups. There's constant arguments about hours and whether something is "out-of-scope" of the project with meetings about meetings to try to overcome the language barrier and ensure they understand what they're supposed to be doing. Hey, we saved a few bucks though and kept salaries competitive...

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This is why you will never see 100% of the work go offshore. You need people with technical skills who can speak with the business folks and understand the business needs.

One of the things that exacerbates the scenario above, is that companies are pushing for their IT department to become more and more process driven. On paper, it looks good, because you can have nameless faceless people offshore that can be plugged into a position and all they have to do is follow the process. This is a model many companies are adopting.

The problem is that the nameless, faceless developer doesn't know the company business, doesn't understand exactly what the users are asking for, and doesn't understand the impact of the work he is doing. He ends up bogging the process down. He develops a program that doesn't work, and you spend a ton of time trying to fix it - both because of the gap in understanding what needs to be done, and the fact that you can only interact with your programmer for a 1/2 hour each day.