H-1Bs Reduced Computer Programmer Employment By Up To 11%, Study Finds (marketwatch.com) 271
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MarketWatch: There would have been up to 11% more computer science jobs at wages up to 5% higher were it not for the immigration program that brings in foreign high-skilled employees, a new study finds. The paper -- by John Bound and Nicolas Morales of the University of Michigan and Gaurav Khanna of the University of California, San Diego -- was conducted by studying the economy between 1994 and 2001, during the internet boom. It was also a period where the recruitment of so-called H-1B labor was at or close to the cap and largely before the onset of the vibrant IT sector in India. In 2001, the number of U.S. computer scientists was between 6.1%-10.8% lower and wages were between 2.6% and 5.1% lower. Of course, there also were beneficiaries -- namely consumers and employers. Immigration lowered prices by between 1.9% and 2.4%, and profits increased as did the total number of IT firms.
Open borders! Open borders! Open borders! (Score:5, Interesting)
If H1Bs are bad, why are illegal immigrants from Mexico good?
Re:Open borders! Open borders! Open borders! (Score:5, Informative)
Niether is good, no matter what you have heard.
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You are very confused. Net migration from Mexico is very positive. Net migration OF MEXICANS is break even, slightly negative, or slightly positive.
This isn't just a semantic point, since you basically suggest the solution to illegal immigration is to make source countries richer. Not a completely insane suggestion if you're just talking about Mexico. Quite insane when you realize you're talking about most of Central and South America.
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give them green cards (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:give them green cards (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, real immigration improves life overall.
Well, yes, it does... in the long run. But the orthodoxy gets stronger in the longer run, too. Look at SF housing crisis. You don't think that having non-voting immigrants effects your community? You may have cheaper software services. But you have completely skewed housing market because so many of the residents cannot vote. H1B visas are usually a path to immigration. But they are a longer path. And that's inherently dishonest. They are, in all respects, resident aliens. But the legislature doesn't given them full citizenship rights that resident aliens can get after 5 years. So their voting rights are lagging by 5-6 years (however long it takes to get a green card for an H1B visa holder). Which means their rights to vote to change local laws to allow more construction are delayed by those 5-6 years. This effects not only them, but also the low-end housing market consumers. So what little consumers save in electronic services, they lose in other parts of the market because the lower-end consumers are less politically represented by the legislatures.
Re:give them green cards (Score:5, Interesting)
However, it seems I misjudged the H-1B program specifically-- the truth is that I thought it was an alternative path for immigration (which, based on your comment, it seems not to be).
Actually H-1B can be a defacto alternative path for immigration. It is one of a few *dual-intent* visas that allow you to simultaneously be a guest worker, and apply for a green card (which gives you resident alien status). The problem specifically for India and China is the lack of available green-card slots at the end of the H-1B 6-year tunnel as employment based green-cards from a specific country are limited to 7% of the max total. Basically no other countries come close to the limit, so they are the only which are actually impacted in the ability to convert an H-1B to a Green Card, so H-1B is effectively a path for immigration for many high tech workers *NOT* from India or China.
The H1-B *gotcha* is that if the employee only qualifies for EB3 green card status (employment based preference level, basically a Bachelor's degree only) the employer needs to sponsor the green card and that is where the staffing companies can withhold this support and effectively make H-1B into indentured service. If the employee only qualifies for EB3 level preference and they are immigrating from India or China, well, the 7%/country bottleneck will make it unlikely for them to get a green card before their 6-year H1-B expires without lots of support from their employer and if they used up say 3 of 6 years, it's mighty unattractive to an alternate employer to hire them away so they are effectively stuck...
On the other hand, if the employee qualifies for EB1 or EB2 (basically extraordinary ability, PhD, masters+5years, or executive preference level), they can probably self-sponsor (and often companies will sponsor them anyways as a good will measure) and these are not the stereotypical low-wage H1-Bs and are ahead of the queue for those seeking green cards from a country with only EB3 preference.
Re:give them green cards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:give them green cards (Score:4, Informative)
This assumes that H1B holders are actually as skilled as they're claimed to be, and can find work easily after losing a job. Which was true in the 90s, but not since. If an H1B worker loses his/her job, he's actually out of status: in fact, that's what people bring up when they point out that immigration overstayers outnumber those who illegally come from Mexico.
Also, your latter statement is a technicality, but actually applies more to an H1B holder than a GC. The people who feel tied to their employer are H1B workers whose employers have applied for their GC: they are compelled to either remain until their I485 is approved, or reset the process. The only way your first statement holds true is if an H1B worker is here w/ no plans to apply for a GC, and wants to return to his country after a while. I actually have come across such colleagues, but they are rare. If a person wants his employer to apply for his GC, he'll at least be w/ them as long as it takes to get the GC.
Also, once one gets the GC, as you mentioned, he's as good as a citizen (just can't vote, or serve on a jury). If this process is speeded up, companies would actually have a lot less of an incentive to sponsor them, since instead of taking, say, 5 years, they would only have to be w/ the company for a year or less, making them a lot less attractive for a company to hire them in preference to local talent
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No one cares about the competition (Score:5, Informative)
I have always viewed every discussion about H-1B on Slashdot with the assumption that the only reason people complained about them is because they're salty about the competition
There is plenty of work to go around. No-one cares about that at all.
the truth is that I thought it was an alternative path for immigration
it is but it is a TERRIBLE path. I have a number of good friends who came in as H1-B and eventually became citizens. That is great, I'm happy they made it in. But the H1-B program allowed for basically years and years of legal abuse for these guys. They really could not think of looking for another job and during layoffs they were way more fearful of being laid off than most workers. Similarly if there was a problem in the workplace they simply could not speak up because of potential consequences if they lost their job.
That's my problem with the program, is that it is abusing people in the system, all while claiming to be a benefit... primarily it helps companies get cheaper programmers who cannot complain.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you increase the supply of something and demand remains fixed - the cost of that something will go down.
If the cost goes down, why would the demand remain fixed?
According to your theory, since the supply of programmers is high in Silicon Valley, the cost there will be low. And since the supply in Nebraska is low, the cost will be high. Do you think that matches reality?
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Not as many programmers in SV as there could be (Score:2)
since the supply of programmers is high in Silicon Valley, the cost there will be low. ...which completely ignores the "Demand" side of the equation. The supply of programmers in Silicon Valley is in fact not at all high compared to what it could be, primarily because of the cost of living in that area. It keeps many potential programmers away...
Meanwhile the demand in that area from companies is astronomical which is why the programmers that are there earn so much. That at the fact that you have to pay
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Re:"equalize the marketplace" (Score:4, Informative)
Every H1 job here in the US generate 2-3 jobs in the local economy.
Citation Required.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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The problem with giving them gree cards you see is it dries up companies sources of cheap indentured labor. Can't have freedom, it's bad for business.
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>The only way to make them not compete is to put them on the same legal footing as the US citizens and others who are not afraid that losing a job would mean a possible deportation.
This is where globalization ultimately leads; it increases the standards in developing nations with the incentive that in the short term you get to exploit them. You know, until they've caught up enough that you can no longer afford them.
Forcing an immediate elevation of that foreign labour to equal in every way to the domest
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...nothing is lost by giving them green cards on the 1st day. This is not a security threat because they are physically present in the country regardless of the visa
If you gave them green cards the first day, they wouldn't have to work. Thus defeating the entire purpose of the system. It's a fair deal: They work, they get to stay. They pay taxes, they receive benefits. That is why there are work visas, and educational visas, and travel visas, and each one has different stipulations.
No country on earth permits aliens to immigrate to the country, obtain benefits, and not provide something in return. Here in America, there are lots of people who think that even natu
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If you gave them green cards the first day, they wouldn't have to work. Thus defeating the entire purpose of the system. It's a fair deal: They work, they get to stay. They pay taxes, they receive benefits. That is why there are work visas, and educational visas, and travel visas, and each one has different stipulations.
Why would they leave? H1B visas cannot be legally used to suppress wages. If they are qualified and are getting competitive wages, why would they not stay on the job? Oh, and since they pay taxes, why shouldn't they be on the same track to citizenship as other resident aliens? Why should they not have a right to vote for mayors and city councils of the communities where they live for an extra 5-6 years that it takes them to get green cards?
I can only speak for the software industry, but if you are an H1B Software Engineer who is being treated unfairly, I can point you to multiple companies in my local area that are hiring smart people and will sponsor you.
Oh, no, I am a US citizen. But I don't bother even considering
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I'd like to respond, but I honestly don't know what you are trying to say. I'm really confused. In your post, you seem to be saying that people should get green cards for doing nothing, and that they should not have to hold jobs. But...then your response to my post doesn't seem consistent with that. So I'm really lost. Sorry.
If they are qualified and are getting competitive wages, why would they not stay on the job?
Most probably would. But you would seriously reduce their incentive to work by giving them a green card while asking for nothing in return. Why stay in a high-skill high-pressure
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Why should they not have a right to vote for mayors and city councils of the communities where they live for an extra 5-6 years that it takes them to get green cards?
This is a general civics question and I suggest you do a Google search on it. While there are a few countries that allow non-citizens to vote in small local elections, it is generally a bad idea to allow such significant foreign influence.
Think about it a bit more. You'll realize that you replied in too much of a rush. I wasn't advocating for non-citizens to get voting rights. I was advocating for their path to citizenship to be as long as everyone else's instead of what it is now (roughly twice as long). C'mon though. Before knee jerking into "you just don't get it" mode, think about how much a person should know about the world to make an informed judgement and to propose a simple and yet innovative solution to how to solve a social p
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I can only speak for the software industry, but if you are an H1B Software Engineer who is being treated unfairly, I can point you to multiple companies in my local area that are hiring smart people and will sponsor you. There's no reason to put up with bad working conditions or lower salary.
You are talking about what should happen to the best of them. What about those who are not the best, but who are still pretty good? Or even just Ok? Why should they not be on equal playing field with their colleagues at work? With their neighbors in the community where they live? You do realize that we are creating a class of people who think they must be better just to get equal treatment and who, once they get all their legal right, will retain a degree of bitterness towards those who "had it easy"?
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You are talking about what should happen to the best of them. What about those who are not the best, but who are still pretty good?
Why would a country go out of their way to import workers who are average? There's plenty of such people. If a country brought in average workers, then that would put a citizen worker out of a job.
You do realize that we are creating a class of people who think they must be better just to get equal treatment and who, once they get all their legal right, will retain a degree of bitterness towards those who "had it easy"?
That is false. You have never met an H1B worker.
Let me tell you about H1B workers I know: Jitu, Song, Haichuan, Anish, Bala, Tong, Dmitry, Pratima, Anjalee. Those are real names and real people, not some fictituous strawman I read about on the internet. Some of them are citizens now. Every one of them is tru
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It's sad too, when I asked Dmitry what it was like in Russia. He just said, quite darkly, "They don't have video games my friend." (He knew I was a gamer, so he was teasing me, but also drawing a real contrast.)
This caricature is out of date that I tend to doubt the whole story. It's hard to imagine that anyone thought that someone could fall for this. "My friend"? This is the caricature part because no one talks like that outside of a hollywood movie.
Another guy talked about living in Germany before the wall came down.
To put it in perspective, the Soviet Union was officially dissolved 25 years ago. It only existed for 73 years. So your references are getting more and more dated.
It's quite inspiring to see a new Chinese citizen say "Today I learned I have the right to own a gun! That no one can take it from me, and that nobody can stop me from saying president XYZ is a @!#?@!"
You are sooooo full of shit. No one but no one talks like that. The fact that you came up with so
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You have provided no references whatsoever. But you are sure mine are all fake!
P.S. I said Russia, not Soviet Union.
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Clueless trust fund baby detected.
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Have you compiled any needful code lately? (Score:5, Informative)
Er...have you have had to deal with H1B code? Most of the "security vulnerabilities" and other showstopping bugs I've seen over the last ten years could be traced to a "consultant" working as an indentured servant for one of the interchangeable Indian body shops.
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Fix the abuse, keep the program (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing I really don't like about the H-1B program is the abuse. There's nothing wrong with keeping a few visa slots open for truly exceptional people. I've seen the program used for this purpose and it mostly works. The problem is the companies that use it to directly replace older workers in routine, run of the mill IT and dev jobs. Companies are totally aware of what they're doing when they hire Tata, Infosys or Cognizant -- it's a "Pontias Pilate" move that lets them wash their hands of the IT department. That's what has been happening with the big stories making the news (Disney, Southern California Edison, etc.) The outsourcer comes in, has to make a profit on the deal, and so they offshore everything they can and slowly replace domestic workers with H-1Bs for things they can't. These are not the best and brightest -- its mostly DBA and dev work that requires just enough on site interaction to make offshoring ineffective. I've worked in outsourced IT environments -- everything takes twice as long and nothing new will ever be attempted in a company that has someone else running their iT, partially because change orders cost so much.
Allowing the abuses is essentially a brake on IT workers' careers and an artificial salary cap. I've been lucky enough to become the senior guy in our engineering group over years of experience, and feel very strongly that we oldies (I'm 41 :-) ) have to develop the next generation. I don't want the pipeline of newbies to dry up because they're worried there's no future in technology. Young students are going to make rational choices and we're going to be stuck the same way the mainframers are now...no one will take the leap to learn enough to replace the retirees.
Also, I totally don't buy the argument that there's no domestic talent. No one is a drop-in replacement for the last guy, and especially today it's impossible to be an expert at everything. That narrative that paints offshore consulting firms as world-class experts on technology has to change. I would love to hear accounts of domestic hires that had zero talent -- I just haven't experienced it!
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...I've worked in outsourced IT environments -- everything takes twice as long and nothing new will ever be attempted in a company that has someone else running their iT, partially because change orders cost so much.
I have also experienced this first hand, where top developers, engineers, architect, cryptographers, and scientists each waste hundreds of hours per year dealing with "IT self service". If one had to add up all of the lost hours and productivity by these people, it would greatly exceed many times over, the savings companies like mine save by outsourcing their IT, which in our case was with ATOS [wikipedia.org].
BTW, outsourcing IT, should also include using flaky and insecure cloud services, especially Microsoft Office365,
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It's called "Externalized Costs". And basically it invalidates any economic theory, such as Free Market theory, which makes the assumption you can know the true cost of something.
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The guy on an H1 may not know the exact job but he will spend hours of his own time learning the job because he has the motivation of deportation . He will sacrifice personal time, family time even skip going to the doctor to come up to speed. You will not get the same dedication from a Citizen who can always go get a job at a better workplace. Want a level playing field? Banning H1Bs will not do it as the work will just go offshore. THe only way to level the playing field is to give Greencards to every H1
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In my experience they have (mostly) been clueless monkeys just in the US to get "Worked in America, know English" on their resumes. Do the 6 month contract and go home. While riding on the coattails of the clueful workers who work overtime to clean up their mess.
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Skilled labor? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hahahahah that's a good one. I have met maybe 1 in 5 H1Bs who weren't clueless and unmotivated ("severity 1 for our biggest client? I'll fix it Monday").
And most of the ones with a clue were the women. The men were a waste of oxygen.
India! Send us your women!
Re:Skilled labor? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Being the only guy that can cook (Boy Scouts for the win!) in a share house with four other guys that don't know where to start is interesting. Exploding cans and caramel on the ceiling interesting. Fish fingers in the pop up toaster interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I kid you not, a friend of mine, she burned boiled eggs. I'm serious.
I go to visit the house she, a friend, her brother (also a friend of mine), and another guy were splitting and in the kitchen there is this small pot with indescribably burned, crunchy, black goo stuff in it. She had crammed about 6 eggs into a tiny pot, put in some water, turned the gas on high, and then went to take a shower and do her hair. With predictable results.
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Knew a guy -- he was nice but clueless. After a few months they added him to the on-call rotation. Monday morning, big uproar. Off call people had to babysit and restart the customer facing app multiple times. Where was the on-call guy? After a while h
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When you buy flying pigs, that black gooey stinky sticky stuff tends to get everywhere.
Stop the low wages (Score:2)
So its not a skills issue. The US education system is still offering the education people can use.
No rush to other advanced nations for a better, more useful education.
So US workers out of the better US university settings or in the work force are still smart enough globally.
Can a brand tell the entire USA about a job on offer? Thanks to the internet that distance or
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If a US university cant produce the workers needed, no students would bother to attend any US university for any advanced degree..
If you come on a student visa, you have find an H1B job within 6 months of graduating or go back. So many of them actually have US education. The only way to fix this is to eliminate H1B visas and give them green cards from day one.
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The graduate can return to their own country, apply for a job in the USA given the skills they now have, then get the correct work related paperwork to work full time in the USA.
If any nation only offers a restricted education visa and will not offer any later employment visa, thats the normal risk anyone education shopping takes.
Full employment for decades in som
What field are these abused H1B visa workers in? (Score:3)
For a few years now I've seen posts on Slashdot saying that H1B visa workers work for lower salaries or longer hours than other workers. What geographic location is this? What field? Because that doesn't jive with my experience at all.
I have been writing software for almost 20 years. For 17 of those years, I have worked in Maryland and Washington DC along side H1B visa workers. They work the same hours as everyone else on the team, with the same expectations, for the same salary range. They are subject to the same labor protection laws as everyone else. What idiotic manager would hire a less qualified software engineer for 10% less? Everybody I know takes the most qualified person possible within the salary range.
The real salary question is: Are H1B salaries significantly lower comparable green-card holders? Foreigners typically make less than their native counterparts because they have poorer communication skills since they were born overseas, and because there is a significant risk that they will up and leave for their home country. In the case of H1B workers, the company has to pay for sponsorship and probably can only bring them on as a contractor through a third-party. So all that will affect their salary. But these stories of H1Bs working 80 hours for 20% less money doesn't jive.
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They are subject to the same labor protection laws as everyone else.
Oh? I had no idea that all programmers face deportation within 6 months if they get fired.
What idiotic manager would hire a less qualified software engineer for 10% less?
What idiotic manager would not hire an employee of equal skill, but who can be pressed to work longer hours without compensation, over a citizen who can simply change profession if gets tired of this type of environment?
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I had no idea that all programmers face deportation within 6 months if they get fired
Nope, just H1Bs. Also: it's 60-days, not 6 months.
What idiotic manager would not hire an employee of equal skill
Interviewing doesn't work that way. There's no such thing as equal skill. Everyone has advantages and disadvantages. Companies that are large enough to sponsor H1B visa workers aren't splitting hairs over 10% salary differences.
but who can be pressed to work longer hours without compensation
Who? Where? What field? You are just repeating the claim. I am trying to figure out who this is happening to. I know it isn't Software engineers. So who is it? Do you know any?
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The idea is for places to simply close down their internal IT shop and send the work out to one of these hives. Often with the soon-to-be laid off current IT workers having to do a knowledge transfer for their foreign replacements. The use case of a few developers hired into a team to work along side them as equals is still not great, but it is not the source of most of the
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I've heard about Tata. Is Cap Gemini that same way?
I know a local company that just outsourced most of their IT department to Cap Gemini. I know much of Cap Gemini's workforce is overseas. I've been politely listening, but so far no one has mentioned any H1B visa workers involved. Slashdot has had a few articles on the topic, but I have yet to see any real evidence that H1B was involved in these cases.
I agree about permanent residency. I work with some H1Bs who would love citizenship, and are absolutel
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Thanks for the link. That's a good start. We can try to guess what the fields are from the job titles. Hmmm... This link [myvisajobs.com] shows it by occupation. That's interesting.
Okay, so this is painting a picture for me. There are two kinds of H1Bs. One kind is hired by a company that does actual work and makes an actual product: Apple, Microsoft, Intel. Those H1B visa workers are probably not being abused, and they probably aren't displacing American workers. Those are the kind I know. The other kind is the IT
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I agree that Germans have an amazing work ethic. I can't speak for French. Having worked in England, I can tell you that they work 9am to 5pm, and 5:01 they hit the pubs. American's tend to work longer hours in general.
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You might not realize that your fellow employee is taking shit and grinning because they are just waiting for the greed card to come through.
So let me get this straight: I ask for evidence that H1B visa workers are abused, and the best I get is that even though I work with them, party with them, and go to church with them, secretly my boss is being an asshole to them and I don't know it. And this has been going on for 17 years without my knowledge. But an AC on the internet knows the real truth about my coworkers and my friends secret lives.
I'm looking for someone to tell me who and where H1B visas are being approved. Because I don't see it.
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A few questions: Do you know their title? Do you know where they were working from? Or why could they not find a job locally?
Since you say you were writing software, I assume the other person was also writing software. The government should have turned down the H1B application if the person was not being paid a market rate since that is a requirement of the program. I wonder if the CTO was actually lying to you about the salary. Could it be that the remote employee was making more than you, and the CTO
Sure, 11% more jobs in Banglore (Score:2)
Silicon Valley does not have a monopoly on writing software. If not for our carefully cultivated brain drain, these graduates from world's top universities would have started companies where they live. Look where most of world's smartphone makers are. Federal government, please do not mess with our tech OR agricultural immigration that you simply do not understand. It's as idiotic as Republicans talking about female reproductive system or Democrats talking about guns.
One in ten (Score:2)
So one in ten jobs were shipped overseas.
It's probably more complicated, in the sense that the jobs were going away anyhow many times, and companies like Intel just outsource for the end of a lifecycle of whatever system. I can definitely see companies and analysts responding with something like that.
At the same time, for all we know this 11% figure is low. Look at what data they used.
There's no denying that outsourcing has been abused and that the rules are tipped in favor of large company profits over nee
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Re: no comments? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are several big problems with the article:
1. It covered the period from 1994 to 2001, when anyone remotely qualified could get a tech job, and companies were desperate to hire. In 1998-2000, my company was offering college freshmen $10k bonuses to quit school and come work for us. I am extremely skeptical that 11% of techs were unemployed during this period.
2. It assumes that nearly every job taken by an H1B is one less job for an American. That is not true, since some of these jobs would have otherwise been moved overseas, or the company may have never filled the job opening at all. Job markets are not zero-sum.
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But for the first few years we were just recovering from the Bush recession. Bush in fact lost due to this. By 98 the boom had started but it was delayed. I for one did ot start earning a decent wage until '96.
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The media famously laughed at Bush for saying that there were two quarters of economic growth. See what happens with media lies - they work.
Now we have bubble heads like you regurgitating sh!t.
Don't take my word for it. Look it up. NYTimes called it the Clinton Recovery before he even took office:
Signals of the Clinton Recovery - Rebound Is Seen, but a
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I doubt they would have given him the airtime if they thought it was helping him or the Republicans in general.
Missing the bigger flaw... (Score:2)
Of course there were fewer programmers working in 2001 compared to 1994-2000. Many went from a $100k "web developer" position to baristas at Starbucks. It took until 2004 or so for employment to really recover, for the top half of people that were working in the field before the dot bomb.
H1Bs have plenty of issues, but it is important to focus on goals. Stealing the best and brightest from other countries is good. Replacing the bottom 25% of Americans is a different discussion, and is als
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It is for places like IBM where the outgoing people "made redundant" train their guest worker replacement.
Some places have no strong evidence either way but the places we do have strong evidence of are enough of the total to matter.
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There are a lot of problems, like somehow assuming there will be more jobs available if those jobs have higher salaries (i.e. you can afford fewer employees), while also acknowledging that lower wages lead to lower prices (meaning consumers can afford more of a thing, leading to more production, thus more jobs).
Perhaps they meant that 13% of programmer jobs would go away--the Indian jobs--and be replaced with 11% more non-H1-B programmer jobs. Fewer in total, but more that aren't outsourced.
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"It was also a period where the recruitment of so-called H-1B labor was at or close to the cap"
This would show you the affect of H1B Visas on the labor market. And *YOU* assume these jobs would be moved over seas. Off-shoring did not pick up traction until the 2000s.
FYI Potsy if the company doesn't fill the job position then there isn't a need to increase the H1B Visa cap.
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It covered the period from 1994 to 2001, when anyone remotely qualified could get a tech job, and companies were desperate to hire.
I worked for a video game company that went on a buying spree in the run up to the dot com bust. After the banks stopped financing the mergers and the company started selling acquisitions to pay off accumulated debts, upper management figured out that they overpaid each acquisition by two to four times the actual value. Fun times.
Re:Xenophobia (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Xenophobia (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a difference between immigrants and indentured servants who have to return to their country at then end of their contract.
Troll? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Troll? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Globalization is causing the lowering of wages, and it won't stop until the poorest country becomes as rich as the richest one.
Odd. The billionaires in America seem to be getting wealthier. It is only those with less than 100 million dollars that seem to be losing. Fuck that.
It's OK to hit a racist (Score:2, Insightful)
This study is racist and xenophobic and slashdot is also for posting it. America is a country of immigrants and Indians have just as much right to a programming job as anyone who was born here.
Racism is usually usually defined as prejudice or antagonism based on race, and xenophobia has something to do with fear.
The problem with your argument is that there is no actual racism or xenophobia involved. No one is "afraid" of people from India, no one "fears" the Indian programmer, and from the looks of things in this country no one tries to keep "the Indian savage" down or prevents them from doing anything a regular citizen could do.
They drink at the same water fountains as anyone else, and no one ca
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How is this racist?
It's the one and only page from the liberal playbook - if you disagree with something or somebody, call it racist. It's like Mr. Miyagi's crane technique - "if do right, no can defense." It's been working for them so well for the last fifty years, why would they try anything else?
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This study is racist and xenophobic and slashdot is also for posting it. America is a country of immigrants and Indians have just as much right to a programming job as anyone who was born here.
You are trolling. Did you even read the study? I guess not because of your comment. Stop playing a victim here.
Study Link [umich.edu]
Overall, our results suggest that high-skill foreign workers contribute to the well-being of the typical US consumer, mainly through the assumption that these workers contribute to innovation at the same rate as US high-skill workers. Indeed, under our calibrations, accounting for foreign workers’ effect on innovation, the gains to consumers are an order of magnitude larger than gains excluding this effect. At some level, this is hardly surprising. While simple models of the impact of immigration on native welfare suggests the immigrant surplus is second order (Borjas, 1999), if the immigrants shift out the production possibility frontier, their effect will be first order.
Although our results suggest that the introduction and expansion of the H-1B program in the 1990s brought gains to both US consumers and IT sector entrepreneurs, we also found indications of losses for US computer scientists and potential computer scientists. Recent work (Peri and Sparber, 2009, 2011) has emphasized the importance of immigration affecting the occupational choice of US natives. Our results tend to support the importance of this view.
Indeed, our estimates suggest that high-skill immigration has had a significant effect on the choices made by US workers and students.
However, the study assumes that all H1B are high-skill foreign workers. I am not so sure about that assumption...
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One of those makes it stronger, the other make it weaker.
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It's not a free market it is captured labor. Both for the company using the H1Bs, who cannot quit, and the Indian companies where emplyees have to give 90 days notice.
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Sounds like free market competition to me.
H1Bs are not "free market", since it is difficult (although not impossible) for the visa holder to change employers. There should be several reforms to the H1B program:
1. The workers should be able to change employers at will.
2. Instead of a lottery, there should be an auction. That way the quotas go to the companies that need/value them the most, and it is doubtful they could be used for "cheap labor".
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Providing foreign students with the world's best education, and then sending them back to their country to compete with us is asinine. I think that for skills in demand, we should staple green-cards to their diplomas.
I don't have to read the study to know it is full of crap. Without the talent we imported from the whole world, Silicon Valley would not have been nearly as successful. They created more startup companies, employing more white American-born programmers like me, than could have happened otherwis
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Give it up Potsy. The H1B Visa program is being abused. The majority of H1B Visas go to off-shoring firms like Tata and InfoSys. They do not go to business trying to find hard to find skills. The H1B Visa program is meant to supplement NOT replace US workers.
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to compete with us
Uh, they are competing with us. That's kind of the point.
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Sounds like free market competition to me.
H1Bs are not "free market", since it is difficult (although not impossible) for the visa holder to change employers. There should be several reforms to the H1B program:
1. The workers should be able to change employers at will.
2. Instead of a lottery, there should be an auction. That way the quotas go to the companies that need/value them the most, and it is doubtful they could be used for "cheap labor".
At the very least "Guest worker" programs should pay people 10% or 20% more than prevailing wages, let people change jobs "by right" without any additional paperwork and be capped well below demand and auctioned off according to the highest salary.
But much better to let people that actually want to come here and be Americans stay here as either green card holders and put them on a path to citizenship. There are already far too many people living here that are living in a society apart from the rest of us.
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This seems to back up the idea that there's a shortage of qualified domestic labor. The unemployment rate among CS grads is like 3.5%. If all those folks replaced H1B workers they would only make up 1/3 of the total jobs filled by H1Bs.
Not sure where you get those number, or if you're adding up percentages :)
Regardless, an unemployment rate a 3.5% is not necessarily good for growth... This the problem with unemployment, if you have no companies can't grow, if you have too much -- well, yeah nobody wants to be unemployed. Particularly, not in a country like the US without any safety net.
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Yes, but how many of those 96.5% employed CS grads are in jobs that use their skills? How many of them are stacking shelves at the local store because they can't get work in their field?
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our model suggest that immigration increased the overall welfare of US natives
Also this isn't peer reviewed.
But yes, ofcourse immigration has negative effects in the short term for the people affected. Honestly, I don't feel bad for software engineers in the dot-com era making a few percent less. Back then, and indeed today, there is some pretty outrageous salaries in the bay area.
On topic: the easy fix is setting minimum H1B salary, it's stupid simplistic, it'll satisfy the stupid people (Trump). But it won't affect most H1Bs like me, except m
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When the program was started, the minimum salary was set at $60,000. Adjusted for inflation, it would be $110,000 today.
Not many bachelor's degree programmers with less than 7 year experience make $110,000.
Any fixed value we set it too would quickly become cheap again due to inflation.
So we need to set it at a quintile. If we said that H1B's had to be paid a minimum of top 10% income, then companies would only import workers they really needed (as was intended).
However, the cow is out of the barn. If wag
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cheap employees
Not just cheap, but willing to work 70-80 hours a week. Never taking time off to look after a sick kid or go watch their little league game.