H1b visas. Anyone else work in technology and see the issues with this program and outsourcing?
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Anonymous
You’re my neighbor, I can tell. It’s exactly this. Farmland sells - developer - new homes - within weeks i see the bus stop kids are 100% Indian mostly middle or high schoolers. I drive by 12 of these developments every morning, and they were only built in the last two years. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
As an educator, the problem is this. Sometime in maybe the 90s, government funding of state universities plummeted and the "customer" moved from being the state to the student. Students demand easy courses and lots of As. But what can the universities do? they need to compete to survive, and so they need to deliver what the students want. The resulting problem is that students graduate with worthless degrees and no skills. This is not true in most other countries. In most countries, the "customer" is the state, and universities can uphold high standards. It is just much much safer to hire from abroad. When you hire from the US, you have no way of knowing if the student has skills or even aptitude. Maybe there should be some test for US students, like lawyers need to take, for IT people to certify that they are indeed skilled, since grades and a degree no longer do this. |
Anonymous
Pp you are overstating things perhaps in an effort to muddy the issues. It is probably true that policy can’t completely eliminate off shoring but they can make a significant dent in it by these sorts of changes I suggested. I work in this area and see exactly the types of structures that are used, and it is not as opaque as you are claiming. Also you are just wrong that there aren’t American options. There is simply no effort. Co go straight to their contractors and when there is a need for a new specialized skill set - my current example above- they find a new vendor to hire through. Take away. There are ways to cause more friction for offshoring and to incentivize local hiring. It is doable. |
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| When I was a federal contractor, I worked for a niche SDVOSB, I was a SME on tons of capture teams, working proposals, and so on, along with various tiger teams and other things. We worked with all of the major primes in the DMV. But as a small business setaside we also worked with tons of 8(a)s, most of which were Indian dominated. The Indian 8(a) folks were constantly looking for jobs and opportunities for family members. But what made it worse was that communication and competency was a problem. For example one of our primes asked for a proof of concept involving ontology management for taxonomies and knowledge graphs. The Indian guys completely misunderstood the request, and in fact the entire conversation, and came back with some hokey thing for cancer patient records (they thought it was oncology, not ontology) and worse zet even if it was for oncology their solution would never have even cone close to meeting standards for SPII or HIPAA. They had no clue. I mean, there were some decent Indian DBA's but a lot of their coders were clueless. |
Anonymous
| India has like 1.5 billion people shouldn't h1bs even out the number in the us |
Anonymous
Have you asked yourselves who is making $$ off these Indians moving into the suburbs? Or is it just the workers fault? |
Anonymous
Anonymous
one easy step is to get rid of Optional Practical Training (OPT) visas. They have NEVER been voted on. Created by executive branch without any input from Congress. The troubling fact is that the OPT program was created entirely through regulation with no authorization from Congress whatsoever. It has been going on for so long, that many people assume that Congress authorized OPT when in fact, Congress has explicitly changed the law to prohibit it. Here is a history of how OPT came about. In reading this history, keep in mind that the regulations described here employ the euphemism "practical training" to refer to work. In 2007, Microsoft concocted a scheme to use OPT as a means to circumvent the H-1B quotas. Microsoft's plan was to extend the duration of OPT from a year to 29-months, so that the duration would be sufficient to serve as a guestworker program, rather than just an internship-type program. Microsoft proposed this scheme to the Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff at a dinner party at the home of the owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team. (See pp. 229-230 in the book Sold Out.) From there, DHS worked in absolute secrecy with industry lobbyists to craft regulations implementing Microsoft's plan. In a classic example of Washington cronyism, the first notice that DHS was even considering such regulations came when they were promulgated as a fait accompli, without notice and comment, on April 8, 2008 (73 Fed. Reg. 18,944). These regulations made three major expansions to OPT. First, they allowed aliens to remain in student visa status while they were unemployed so they could look for work. Second, they allowed aliens working under OPT to remain in student visa status from the time an H-1B petition was filed on their behalf until a final decision was made on the petition or the start date. This adds a maximum of 6 months to the OPT duration. Finally, they authorized a 17-month work period for aliens with degrees in fields DHS designates at Science/Technology/Engineering/Mathematics (STEM). This gave a maximum OPT duration of 35 months. The OPT program has been the subject of continuous litigation since then where, after nearly a decade, the federal courts have been unable to come to a decision on whether it is lawful. However in 2015, the D.C. District Court held that the 2008 OPT regulations had been promulgated unlawfully without notice and comment. In response to this opinion, DHS promulgated new regulations that did the same as the old regulations except that they expanded the STEM work period from 17 months to 24 months, giving a maximum OPT work period of 42 months (24+12+6). OPT is an example of the administrative state run amok. Instead of law coming from Congress, we have law coming from bureaucrats working hand-in-hand with lobbyists. OPT also illustrates the slippery-slope problem of regulation. Work on student visas started innocently as an integral part of a course of study to give foreign students an experience not available in their home country, but eventually was transformed into a full-blown guestworker program whose stated purpose is to provide labor to American business. https://cis.org/Report/History-Optional-Practical-Training-Guestworker-Program |
Anonymous
and what is the main tragedy is that DEMOCRATS, the party of labor, have constantly expanded the OPT visa program by adding more and more job classifications and extending the time period from 1 year to 3 years. Thank you Obama. The Program Puts Recent U.S. Graduates at a Disadvantage. OPT can disadvantage recent U.S. graduates by creating an uneven labor market in which foreign students can be hired more cheaply than their American graduate peers. Because F-1 visa holders on OPT are classified by the IRS as “students” (even after graduation), their employers are exempt from paying federal payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare — saving roughly 7.65 percent in labor costs per worker — while American graduates generate these costs for employers. This tax subsidy makes OPT workers financially more attractive to companies, especially for entry-level positions in competitive industries. |
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Seriously. I don't fault people for using legal means to get jobs in the US that these US companies are offering to them. |