H1b visas. Anyone else work in technology and see the issues with this program and outsourcing?
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Anonymous
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This again?
I feel like we see something like this every week or so. |
Anonymous
I hire in biomedical research and what you’re saying is true for us too. Not enough Americans are graduating with Ph.Ds and doing postdocs for the price that republicans are willing to pay via NIH funding. And yet, the work still needs to be done. If not, we will continue to fall further behind the rest of the world. |
Anonymous
There are tons of excellent American STEM grads, engineers, computer scientists etc. And many of them are strugging to find jobs because people like you are undercutting them. Meanwhile those Indian and Chinese guys you hire are the top tier of their entire country yet while they are good, they are still not all that great compared to our own home grown talent. |
Anonymous
Americans created the microchip, integrated circuits, the internet,, and the personal computer. |
Anonymous
You're paying people with Ph.D. in the 17th percentile. Trump is going to mandate that raised to the 33rd percentile. If that is what people are willing to pay for the research, then maybe we don't deserve it. |
Anonymous
| My kid recently graduated from a T10 school with a biomedical engineering degree. He had no interest in pursuing a PhD bc the pay was so lousy and didn't see a return on the investment. Instead he jumped right into the job market. |
Anonymous
Using foreign talent. It has been our secret sauce. Always. |
Anonymous
And will end up in tech sales or similar. He will not be inventing the technology behind the next generation of products because he is not yet qualified. And that is ok. He will do great and have a wonderful income, figure out how to market the next breakthrough, and rise in the ranks. But this is exactly what the pp was saying. The technology innovation is going to come from an immigrant who is willing to slog through the miserable pay of the PhD followed by the undervaluing of that degree that will follow in the corporate world (in terms of compensation). |
Anonymous
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H1B has NOTHING to do with filling skilled labor.
2 questions I challenge folks to answer ... 1. how could we have a skills shortage for over 36 years? H1B was created by Bush Immigration act 1990 to address a mythical skills shortage, but that was the propaganda, it really was created to reduce salaries for US workers with Masters and PHds. see -> https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhowandwhygovernment.pdf 2. why are H1B visas allocated randomly, why not allocate visas based on salary, since the higher salary would be for the most desired skills? this was recommended and almost implemented in 2021 but the industry roared about this, and it was ignored by Biden/Harris. The law needs to require that aliens be paid 150% of the normal wage for any of these jobs. |
Anonymous
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Americans don't want H2B type jobs. Why should they? It pays more to stay unemployed. |
Anonymous
use your common sense - Long term labor shortages do not happen naturally in market economies. https://users.nber.org/~sewp/references/archive/weinsteinhowandwhygovernment.pdf "Upcoming labor market shortages will devastate Science and Engineering." This was a mantra heard through much of the 1980s. And yet, the predicted “seller’s market” for talent never materialized as unemployment rates actually spiked for newly minted PhDs in technical fields. In fact, most US economists seemed to think that the very idea of labor market shortages hardly made sense in a market economy since wages could simply rise to attract more entrants. Yet we have had workers visas for over 34 years to alleviate mythical worker shortages. In the late nineties, in the course of research into immigration, I became convinced that our US high skilled immigration policy simply did not add up intellectually. As I studied the situation, it became increasingly clear that the groups purporting to speak for US scientists in Washington DC (e.g. NSF, NAS, AAU, GUIRR) actually viewed themselves as advocates for employers in a labor dispute with working scientists and were focused on undermining scientists’ economic bargaining power through labor market intervention and manipulation. Increasingly the research seemed to show that interventions by government, universities and industry in the US labor market for scientists, especially after the University system stopped growing organically in the early 1970s were exceedingly problematic. By 1998, it was becoming obvious that the real problems of high skilled immigration were actually rather well understood by an entire class of policy actors who were not forthcoming about the levers of policy they were using to influence policy. The NSF/NAS/GUIRR complex appeared to be feigning incompetence by issuing labor market studies that blatantly ignored wages and market dynamics and instead focused on demographics alone. During the late 1990s I became convinced that in order to orchestrate lower wages for scientists, there would have to have been a competent economic study done to guide the curious policy choices that had resulted in the flooded market for STEM PhDs. For this theory to be correct, the private economic study would have had to have been done studying both supply and demand so that the demand piece could later be removed, resulting in the bizarre ‘supply only’ demographic studies released to the public. Through a bit of economic detective work, I began a painstaking search of the literature and discovered just such a study immediately preceded the release of the foolish demography studies that provided the public justification for the Immigration Act of 1990. This needle was located in the haystack of documents the NSF was forced to turn over when the House investigated the NSF for faking alarms about a shortfall. The title of this study was “The Pipeline For Scientific and Technical Personnel: Past Lessons Applied to Future Changes of Interest to Policy-Makers and Human Resource Specialists.” The study was undated and carried no author’s name. Eventually I gathered my courage to call up the National Science Foundation and demand to speak to the study’s author. After some hemming and hawing, I was put through to a voice belonging to a man I had never heard of named Myles Boylan. In our conversation, it became clear that it was produced in 1986, as predicted, immediately before the infamous and now disgraced demographic shortfall studies. The author turned out, again as predicted, not to be a demographer, but a highly competent Ph.D. in economics who was fully aware of the functioning of the wage mechanism. But, as the study makes clear, the problem being solved was not a problem of talent but one of price: scientific employers had become alarmed that they would have to pay competitive market wages to US Ph.D.s with other options. The study’s aim was not to locate talent but to weaken its ability to bargain with employers by using foreign labor to undermine the ability to negotiate for new Ph.D.s That study was a key link in a chain of evidence leading to an entirely different view of the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification. In this alternative account, American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market. The correlate of these objectives were shifts in orientation toward building bridges to Asia and especially China, so that senior scientists, technologists, and educators could capitalize on technological, employment, and business opportunities from Asian (and particularly Chinese) expansion. This, in turn, would give US scientific employers and researchers access to the products of Asian educational systems which stress drill, rote learning, obedience, and test driven competition while giving them relief from US models which comparatively stress greater creativity, questioning, independence, and irreverence for authority. I wrote this up in a study that the National Bureau of Economic Research published. Until a few weeks ago, it was available on their website. With other studies now appearing that are consonant with my conclusions and the Trump administration studying a possible revision of legislation on visas, I am grateful for INET’s encouragement and willingness to republish my study. |
Anonymous
Who wants to spend 10-12 years doing a PhD and postdoc for minimum wage and the reward of uncertain job prospects while their peers are out establishing themselves in well-paying careers? The current science model in this country is a joke. |
Anonymous
I don't believe it is a coincidence that the postdoc training programs just so happen to be on exactly the H-1B/Perm time frames. For most Americans these programs just don't make any sense, going into physics or biomedicine then doing postdoc after postdoc every three years until you get tenure and "Academic freedom". Oh, that's the H-1B renewal period and about the time every three years until you're no longer eligible then you get on a tenure track is when you get a green card. |
Anonymous
Wrong. All of those were created by people born in America, who went through the American education system. |
Anonymous
Repeating my post: 1. I've worked in the tech sector in SV for 20 years. In the 90s, there was absolutely a shortage of IT workers. I was able to get a job in IT even without formal training (but I picked it up reallly quickly) because companies were so desperate to find IT workers back then. My salary doubled in 2 years from $45K to 95K (again, back in the 90s). That's how desperate companies were to keep IT talent. 2. Today, the landscape is totally different. We are more global; remote work is a lot easier; these foreign countries like India, Poland, Philippines now have a more educated workforce even as their col is still pretty low. The US now has more IT workers, probably a glut of them. so, yea, we don't need H1 workers as much today but they are cheaper, and companies seek profit and lower expenses. They don't care about American workers. Trump raising feels will reduce some visa workers but it will just hasten offshoring, not to mention that he will approve the thousands of visas for his tech financiers like Bezos and Ellison. |