Even if they pay the same rate, they still have more leverage over people they can essentially make leave the country if they raise some issue about working conditions or ask for more compensation. Of course very employer is different, but you said yourself there are likely companies that take advantage. Like many things, it probably started with good intentions to recruit critical workers when needed, but it seems to have grown beyond that.
Based on what evidence has it grown beyond a need? Also, I think you would dismiss anyone claiming that we need to dismantle food stamps or other public aid because there is some amount of fraud. The response is enforcement, not elimination of the program.
Horsecrap. Companies love H1Bs because they can lower wages and they can hold their status over their heads as far as staying in the US. It figures you are in a company pulling this scam against American workers. It's nuts how many IT workers etc have been let go and even forced to train their replacements using the loopholes in this crooked program.
I mean, how do we define 'need?' Capital is always going to need labor that is at a disadvantage at the bargaining table, even if their salaries well-exceed the average person's. Probably even more so in those cases! I'm not suggesting we dismantle the program or boot out foreign workers, quite the opposite. My argument would be to take away whatever sticks the employer can wield against them if they say, attempt to unionize or raise issues about working conditions, just the same as any domestic worker.
You severely limit the program to just do true brain draining for defense industries and some other things. All it is now is a payoff to crooked big business interests at the expense of American workers.
I have no problem with handcuffing employers so they cannot wield excess power over the H1B employees.
demosthenes, these H1B salaries were not raised to match yours, but the other way around. You are getting paid less ... you are worth more than you are getting without the influx of highly obligated foreign labor. Look, I will grant that foreign workers work extremely hard to keep from going back to a third world country. But that is something else they are getting paid that you are not. You can't put a price on not having to work in a paddy of rice. The US dominated the IT industry long before H1B's showed up in numbers, and we certainly are not more dominant now than we were 25 years ago. But we have lost our technical workers to this H1B greed. About half of my Computer Engineering classmates from UF do not work in the tech industry at all. They are doing fine, but the US tech industry has lost their contributions forever. Their foreign replacements were lower quality in every case. Economics, ok I'll toss some in. 30 years ago, the USA was "doomed" because we wasted money and energy on gadgets and toys, which were not "capital goods". Every other country knew better than us. This was established fact and was repeated in news stories and economics classes. Well, we played with our toys and built PC's, then datacenters, then cloud infrastructure. That was all us. We proved the economists wrong. Our IT people started out with tinker toys and beat the house. That's why the US is atop the IT industry. Our people built it since before it was a cash cow everyone else wanted to come over and milk. Importing more H1Bs makes us weaker, it is pushing our best STEM talent into other, more lucrative fields. PS. I liked it better when Musk and Trump were feuding. For the same reasons I like reading Too Hot. You know what I mean, fellow THFSGator.
I've worked in embedded software for 25 years. All of the H1B holders I've worked with are either green card holders or US citizens at this point.
Yep that is another goal of the program to screw American workers for many years by letting them stay here permanently.
I think that IT and even software organizations were the ones that we most here the anecdotal evidence about "US workers were wiped out, and had to train their foreign replacements" when the H1B discussion comes up. I have been in the semiconductor industry for 32 years now and I have never seen a single co-worker displaced in favor of an H1B. Just the opposite in fact. Many of our recent college graduates, maybe as high as 15-20% at times, have been grads from US colleges transitioning from an F-1 and hoping to land in the work force and remain in the US on an H1B. Every H1B holder that I have ever hired has eventually earned a Green Card and then a naturalized US citizen. I have been to more than one "oath ceremony" through the years for men and women I helped to get sponsored. Further, in all my years dealing with HR, never once has the conversation come up about offering below market value for a MS in EE or PhD in Physics because the candidate was a visa holder. For our industry there are benchmark tables that HR uses for all RCGs based on degree field, degree level and any relevant experience outside of school. That is it, no big salary conspiracy with paying them below market or holding back my salary as a result of hiring an H!B. It just does not happen for us. Finally, I have never seen a mass importation of H1B visa holders in our industry. The closest thing that I have seen is the attempted lay-off of local IT support for some areas and then out-source it to another country, but that is very different that the mass influx of H1Bs. It has also ended in failure both times I witnessed it and both times my employer hired a bunch of local IT people to undo the damage of a short-sighted decision.
If they are here permanently, then the leverage held over them from the H1B is gone. So how does that screw over the American worker? Hell if they go on to become a citizen then they ARE an American worker! Companies definitely abused the hell out of H1B in the past, including documented cases having Americans train their lower paid “temporary” replacements. But when it comes to those people, if they go on to do other things or even become citizens/permanenent they aren’t screwing anyone (not that I’d characterize the worker as screwing anyone in the first place, to the extent it happened it would moreso be the company abusing the system and a system that allowed it). As was pointed out, some % end up huge creators of value and IMO it’s worth it just for that value creation.
I don't doubt you ncargat1. But conversation isn't needed. Importing supply lowers the price for your services, especially when the imported workers have a performance review readable by ICE. Employers know this. Go work as a government contractor where citizenship or a security clearance is required and you will get paid minimum 30% more. (You won't have to compete against H1B's.)
That is why only a few should be given out for brain drain purposes and not the large number given out for kickbacks to crooked big business.
To be clear, I’m not in a field that is affected by H1Bs but I am in a position to know the workings of it because I work with literally every function of the organizations. I can’t agree with your argument on quality. I’m not in a position to personally analyze the quality of their work but I do know generally of their reviews and they’ve been consistently high quality. Further, we still struggle to hire talented software engineers even with what industry data says are very competitive salaries. I think the answer is to focus more on STEM in our public schools than to artificially keep out talented workers that have proven to be a boon to our economy.
What is “only a few”? Even with the current rates (amounts to less than two tenths of 1% per year of the US work force or 1% of STEM jobs) we’re at functionally full employment in STEM (3-3.8%).
Musk is a petulant child? What does that make Trump? The screaming brat in the grocery store who is banging his head against the terrazzo floor when he is told that he can’t have another box of Coco Puffs?
