Guest Post by Joe Guzzardi
With April 3 the Opening Day, so to speak, for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to accept fiscal year 2018 H-1B visa petitions, how this affects displaced and unemployed American tech workers is a timely subject.
Congress established a 65,000 H-1B visa cap per fiscal year; an advanced degree cap exemption will go to an additional 20,000 beneficiaries who have earned a U.S. master’s degree or higher. The harsh reality: 85,000 jobs, including tech positions, will go to foreign nationals while Americans will either lose the job they hold or will be denied an opportunity to be seriously considered for employment.
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When it comes to reforming, i.e., restricting or eliminating the H-1B visa and its illegitimate cousin the H-4, the White House has, at various times, offered encouraging bluster. But from the big buildup, nothing positive for American tech and other skilled workers has evolved.
Here’s the sorry broken promise history. On the stump, candidate Trump promised to end “rampant, widespread H-1B abuse” that he said led to lost American jobs. Right out of the gate, the new administration suspended premium processing – no more pay to play to move an applicant’s paperwork to the head of the line – but then rescinded that order just a few months later.
In April 2017, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued updated guidelines that allegedly tightened the standards under which H-1B applications might be approved. The USCIS memo also suggested that employers evaluate the wage standards of its prospective overseas workers to ensure that they qualify, and the agency warned of targeted site visits to determine if fraud or other abuses were evident.
The USCIS advisory coincided with President Trump’s “Buy American, Hire American” executive order which led H-1B visa critics to anticipate that, at a minimum, extra scrutiny would be directed toward the lowest paid applicants, the so-called Level 1 category which is the Labor Department’s minimum permissible salary for foreign-born workers in certain professions. Pursuant to the more rigorous standards, immigration officials may send “requests for evidence,” meaning that they need confirmation of the information that the foreign national presented on his H-1B application. But as long as 85,000 visas are granted year after year, tougher standards don’t help Americans.
As for the H-4, the visa President Obama created through an executive order which allows H-1B holders’ spouses and children under age 21 to obtain employment authorization documents, President Trump initially talked tough on it, too. The fall 2017 edition of the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions included an indication that the Department of Homeland Security was considering “stopping granting employment authorization to certain holders of H-4 visas, granted to spouses of H-1B recipients.”
But as with the hoped-for, pro-American changes to the H-1B visa, the smoke surrounding terminating the H-4 quickly vanished as federal courts intervened. On multiple occasions, DHS has been successful in convincing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to delay the case originally brought by Save Jobs USA.
Since H-4 holders can work in any employment category and are not bound to their tech-visa sponsors, their presence in the labor market, while smaller in number than the aggregate H-1B total, adversely affects a broader swath of job-seeking Americans. A conservative estimate puts 100,000 H-4 visa holders in the workforce.
Readers don’t have to be immigration wonks to understand what’s going on: a purposeful, hurtful and sustained undercutting of American workers. Employment-based visas like the H-1B and H-4 mean that, no matter how Silicon Valley elites deviously portray it, Americans lose out on jobs.
It (outsourcing) started with heavy industry and manufacturing, now it’s headed into the soft skills markets like IT. Wait till it starts hitting the ‘other’ soft skills markets like management, lawyers etc. I bet changes will come about when those people start getting screwed.
It frosts me when publishers keep repeating 65K or 85K “cap”, because the exemptions to these caps far exceed 65K or 85K:
– medical, government, research, education H1B hires
– 2nd 3 year renewal
– annual renewals of H1Bs awaiting employer sponsored green cards
All cap, cap exempt and renewals are a claim a company couldn’t find a citizen for the job.
They’re just coming here to do the jobs Americans won’t do.
BS, you anon Piece of Shit
No response other than personal insult, and apparently too low inn intelligence to recognize what is obviously sarcasm of the leftist arguments about immigration.
Don’t insult shit!
I am a US citizen born and raised here. I have a BS in chemistry and a MES in computer science both from US universities. I worked in the US for US companies my entire life. My last job was with a mid-size company as a software engineer. I was with them for more than five years. During that time I received regular pay increases and good reviews. I was told I was doing a good job right up to the day I was replaced by a woman from China with an H-1B visa. She was a nice person and a very good programmer. she was also willing to work for about half the salary I was earning. I was 61 years old. I didn’t want to retire, but I was forced into it. I guess this was a good deal for my employer, it sure didn’t feel that way to me. I don’t think this program is fair to the US citizens who have invested their time and money developing these skills.
Once the primary application is no longer to replace those of us already doing those jobs, come back and open up that argument. Until then, it’s a non-starter.
These H1-B’s are low paid ‘Butt Monkeys’. Many of them have inferior educations, and poor English skills. Employer’s are more interested in having a warm body, than a quality employee.
But why would an employer hire inferior employees? That sounds like the path to lower profits and ultimately bankruptcy. There must be another agenda at play here.
How it’s done in the software industry: Employers are concerned about loosing ‘key’ people. So they have teams of lesser people, making everyone dispensable. Software development has turned into a shit show. Things change continually, the specs are incomplete, meetings upon meetings, nano-management by worthless bosses – this results in very little productivity. Thus it matters little of the abilities of the programmers.
Then I would expect the competition to weed out inefficient, bloated and unproductive companies with incompetent imported programmers…in very short order. How do they stay in business?
Too big to fail.
Exactly. Now we know where those trillions of dollars created out of thin air by the Fed end up. The companies use the free dollars to buy back their stock and create giant bonuses for the top tier of management and owners. Ordinary Americans pay for this with a debased currency (8-10% inflation), suppressed interest rates and displacement by foreign workers. Let’s call it what it is: high treason.
Because they do not think long term. They think only as far as the next three months. My cousin who is an engineer just related how outsourcing software development was forced on her department by the CEO who was brought in by a venture firm that bought the company. She views the Indian consultants they outsourced to as incompetent and they spend a lot of times fixing their mistakes and trying to get things right. But the C-suite sees only the bottom line.
But there is another often unseen but often present factor in these deals; money is changing hands. In one case Infosys offered $250,000 as a “finders fees” to the department manager who brought them in and “more” to the CIO when contract was signed. This is money in the pocket of individuals who either retire or change jobs before the $hit the fan.
Why do people buy cheaper products?
Two reasons,
-For low value products, it’s disposible.
-Because monopoly gives them no other choice.
In the realm of employment/tech, when was the last time you saw anything innovative from Microsoft? 1995/Windows.
Reorg the UI and sell as “new and improved”, same trash with a new skin over it.
Every politician and corporate prick that pushed for and voted for the H-1b program should be Guillotined. I will pull the drop-cord and won’t wear a mask.
Oil up those guillotines that have been inactive for far too long. It is high time for the heads of traitors in government, Wall Street, Federal Reserve, MSM and corporations to roll.
“5,000 jobs, including tech positions, will go to foreign nationals ”
Let me fix that sentence.
5,000 jobs, including tech positions, will go to dot-heads.
There, that’s better.
Curry.
http://www.newsweek.com/trump-gets-visas-70-foreign-workers-mar-lago-despite-hire-american-pledge-702295
That’s the H2B program. Yet another visa that frankly should be dumped completely or at least scaled down considerably. Most of the H2Bs for summer season jobs are landscapers coming from Mexico or they’re hotel cooks/maids coming from Jamaica.
Purposeful, Hurtful and Sustained undercutting.
Webster definition #3 of Insidious.
Back in the 92 election, someone said NAFTA is not about bringing the 3rd worlds wages up to our levels but rather to bring our wages down to their level.
Very prophectic I think when you figure in the currency debasement that took place even as we were experiencing wage deflation due to factories being shuttered and an endless supply of Central American and Mexican workers coming up here.
If this were being done in a spirit of true Free markets I doubt that I would object. However “WE” don’t have Free Markets. We have CRAPITALISM.
A word coined by Gene Epstein of Barons Weekly. (Crony Capitalism).
MAGA. More Hopium and Wishium from trump and his Zioist Bankster buddies and children.
Just be patient and keep voting for Faux-Con Republicrats just once more this fall and then we will finally, maybe, sort of, possibly have the courage to fix things.
Our Friends in congress are about as useful to us as Gilt Semen on a hog farm.
Right on! “If this were being done in a spirit of true Free markets I doubt that I would object. However “WE” don’t have Free Markets. We have CRAPITALISM . . .”
This isn’t capitalism. It’s corruption.
Con-gress, now House of Lords.
Solely looking at their votes, Princeton says we’ve been living in an oligarchy for a few decades.
NAFTA conversation, from the 60K ft view,
https://ralphnaderradiohour.com/trump-and-trade-whats-going-on/
“Back in the 92 “, forewarned, but ignored,
The H1B program should be totally scrapped or at least cut down significantly. The vast majority of those petitions are for India computer programmers and there’s absolutely nothing special about any of them. They all graduate with a standard computer engineering degree from a crappy Indian college and have no skills that set them apart from anyone else in the world. But Congress and the dept of commerce are so bought off that they’ll never get rid of this visa or any other business visa category. And allowing the spouse of an H1B to come in and work is totally ridiculous. It’s basically like the business equivalent of chain migration.
There must be an incentive to hire “..graduate(s) with a standard computer engineering degree from a crappy Indian college and have no skills that set them apart from anyone else in the world.” Are Indian programmers payed a lot less than an American with comparable qualifications? Or are these companies just doing their part as well compensated traitors to import the third-world and destroy what remains of Western Civilization in America?
Wdg – the payment averages are easy to find. H1Bs are often well paid. Especially by the major companies. Here is a list of companies by H1Bs they employ, and by average salary paid.
https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx
The major accounting firms hire quite a few. Tata is number three, which is understandable given it is an Indian company.
Looking at the numbers, it seems clear to me, at least, that the major IT companies – google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. -are not hiring H1Bs as a cost saving exercise. They are paying those folks very well indeed. I am aware of some of their recruiting, and they are seeking the best engineers wherever they can be found.
Some of the other companies may be getting engineers/programmers a bit on the cheap. But the least paid seems to be around $70k. Still not peanuts.
Review the actual data and make up your own mind.
It strikes me that there is a great need for a well funded national association of engineers and computer scientists to represent the interests of Americans in the computer software industry. I realize that there are professional associations but they are largely ineffective from my experience. A model would be the AMA which is a very well funded and highly effective lobby group that speaks with one voice on behalf of doctors.
They are both paid a lot less, and immobile (visa indentured). According to Senator Issa, 80% are paid $60K… or less.
“these companies just doing their part as well compensated traitors to ” squeeze record profits via peonage for green cards.
Congress about to reshuffle and up the employment based green cards to India.
It is not unusual to get a pink slip after getting a green card. Peak age for an engineer in Silicon Valley, 30.
WE NEED TO BE LOOKING AT H-1B VISAS
AND SPECIALLY H-4 VISAS
IT’S A JOKE AT MICROSOFT AT THE NUMBER OF H-1B VS AMERICAN WORKERS THERE
Roberto – don’t be such a dumbass. Microsoft employs 5,029 on H1B visas, TOTAL. They are paid an average of $129,000, so they are not exactly paying peanuts.
Microsoft has over 50,000 software engineers. Plus many tens of thousands more in other areas.
Against H1Bs? Fine. But using false narrative is bullshit.
It’s clear where you’re not employed. Tech companies are awash with workers on temporary work visas. But yeah, they’re not stupid; they play the game. This includes flooding employment statistics with jobs they will never fill (from the American work force) and hiring a few foreign workers directly while the bulk come through foreign outsourcers who evade US immigration laws by both hook and crook.
Meanwhile 50% of US STEM graduates cannot find any technical work and 75% of all STEM educated citizens have left these professions. But what is not to love? India has minted seven billionaires at the expense of our citizens.
You need to check more than the wages of foreign temp workers directly sponsored by all at companies — that is the only the top of the ice berg. You need to also include the many foreign workers they hire through 3rd parties. And then look at what these temp workers are actually paid, not payments to their slavers.
Your numbers are wrong.
Federal databases are online, and your salaries and number of H1Bs are wrong.
I’ll leave it as an exercise for you to download the databases and take a look at Microsoft’s numbers.
Big Injun Chief strikes again !!!
I looked up the company I work for and out of 8000 employees we employ around 100. Not as bad as I had expected. I was surprised.
The new trick, hire an H1B body shop contracting agency to replace staff so it doesn’t show up, trigger the dreaded “H1B dependent” status.
All? No. But enough to a) do damage to citizen hires and b) hide foreign labor dependence: Disney, Verizon, etc. etc.