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Bill Gates's Wish Is Homeland Security's Command
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Apr 12, 2008 07:38 PM
from the one-way-or-another dept.
from the one-way-or-another dept.
theodp writes "PC World reports that DHS has extended the time foreign graduates of US colleges can stay in the country and work to almost two-and-a-half years, an 'emergency' change that drew kudos from Microsoft and other H-1B visa stakeholders. Looks like when Bill Gates says 'Jump,' the government asks 'How high?' Bill Gates's Congressional Testimony, March 12, 2008: 'Extending OPT from 12 to 29 months would help to alleviate the crisis employers are facing due to the current H-1B visa shortage. This only requires action by the Executive Branch, and Congress and this Committee should strongly urge the Department of Homeland Security to take such action immediately.' DHS Press Release, April 4, 2008: 'The US Department of Homeland Security released today an interim final rule extending the period of Optional Practical Training (OPT) from 12 to 29 months for qualified F-1 non-immigrant students.'"
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H-1B Foes Challenge Bush Administration In Court 464 comments
theodp writes "Computerworld reports that the Bush administration's recent decision to extend the amount of time foreign nationals can work in the U.S. on student visas is being challenged in a federal lawsuit by H-1B visa opponents. The suit, filed in US District Court by the Immigration Reform Law Institute and joined by The Programmers Guild and other groups, charges that the administration — acting through the Department of Homeland Security — exceeded its legal authority with a no-notice-no-comments 'emergency' rule change that extended the Optional Practical Training work period from one year to 29 months. Critics say this is little more than an effort to skirt around the H-1B cap limit. Because extended stays are limited to those whose degrees are in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) fields, educators are speculating that the rule change will drive international students away from non-STEM majors."
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Misleading headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Yay, Flamebait! (Score:5, Interesting)
Now get off my lawn!
Re:Yay, Flamebait! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Nice propagandizing (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, they have access to government. No, there is no magic.
Disingenous tripe (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft does not use L1 visas, because they don't import cheap outsourced labor like IBM does. They are trying to bring in valuable, qualified college graduates to this country to fill higher-level positions that cannot be filled with US-based engineers because at that level, there truly is a shortage.
But hey, this is Slashdot so we can happily spin this so that it seems Bill Gates is manipulating US immigration policies for his own benefit. That way we get another "Microsoft is teh evil" bullet point for the "advocacy" folks, and Slashdot sells more ads. Everybody wins.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe MS does, but, even though standard salaries are technically required by law, in my experience it isn't working out that way. First, who is to say what the standard salary is? I've seen it where the H1-B's get much lower pay than the US citizens. And.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
But the "standard" itself is depressed by the existence of the H1-B workers. Hell, it's not even just the fact that they're willing to work for less, but also just the fact that they're there: if you increase the supply of workers, wages go down. Full stop. This is fucking microeconomics 101; it's not negotiable or debatable. It's a fact!
-1, Sensationalist Headline (Score:5, Insightful)
The majority of the people who are on OPT are folks who're in the US to go to graduate school. Rather than send them back, they are trying to extend the amount of time that they can stay in the country. How is this a bad thing?
If anything, the number of native US candidates going to graduate school is much lesser than the number of foreign nationals coming to the US for graduate school. How is trying to retain folks who get advanced degrees a bad thing in any way?
Finally, a lot of people with graduate degrees (i.e. majority of folks on OPT) are by no means cheap - so, the old excuse that they are being exploited etc. does not quite work here.
Enough of the bullshit, already. A lot of folks petitioned about extending the OPT status for international students who go to graduate school in the US, and have to return because of visa policies (the H1B cap was met within a few hours last year). So, the government considered what the companies wanted and agreed to do this.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
We need these folks to stay in th
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Why Single Out Bill? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
When has there ever been an H1-B Visa surplus? (Score:3, Insightful)
We're always hearing the employers claim that there's less H1-B Visas than jobs they want filled... how about letting supply and demand of the American workforce take over giving pay raises to nearly all of us IT workers.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The situation is pretty ridiculous right now. Every year there is only one week during the whole year (first week of April) during which employers can file H1-B applications. Then a lottery decides which
Re:When has there ever been an H1-B Visa surplus? (Score:4, Informative)
I can't blame the employers for taking advantage of an overabundant supply to pick the best employees who they think will need the least on-the-job training, but I don't see any evidence of a so-called shortage. It's not even a salary issue, me and lots of others are perfectly willing to take a pay cut rather than not working at all, but employers are very skittish about that, I guess out of fear we'll just jump ship to some mythical better job later.
Former co-workers in the SF Bay Area have it even worse. Hiring managers there have claimed to routinely get *thousands* of resumes for any IT job posting. People opening entry-level jobs are getting resumes from former VPs and Directors.
I don't see where this so-called shortage comes from. Even granting that maybe me and the couple people I know are just horrible unhirable schleps, are we to believe this is true of the thousands of people trying desperately to get *any* IT job just in the SF Bay area alone?
Parent
I'm a highly skilled coder from Carnegie Mellon (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know what wrong with you. I am not a doctor, but if you have good grades and you're from a good school, you should have no issues finding a job. Please notice how I say "any job."
I went to a public school and my grades were not fantastic. I got a job. My friends who went to public schools and earned decent grades got jobs too. My friends who went to good schools and got excellent grades found decent places of employment as well. And all of this was right after 9/11 and the economic
Good for social security, too (Score:3, Insightful)
This is enough of a problem that immigration policy should, first and foremost, be about balancing out the population curve so that the burden per taxpayer involved in fixing Social Security is manageable (hopefully permanently, by injecting enough money so that today's taxpayers are paying for their own retirement, not that of their grandparents). The best way to do this is to expand visas for highly-skilled laborers who will earn a good wage, such as H-1B. Furthermore, it's in our best interest to convince these workers to remain in the country permanently and become citizens, rather than taking their expertise back to their countries of origin.
Good (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, had no trouble finding a good paying job coming out of college, so I can't say I see foreign workers "stealing" American programmers jobs. I've worked with many H1-B's and the like, but I've never felt like they were unskilled people here taking my job for less money. Instead, companies tend to use their *very* limited supply of H1-B's to poach the top talent from the foreign workforce, and it has generally been a joy to work with these people.
People have this knee jerk reaction that "them foreigners is taking our jobs." However, this is stupid when you are talking about high tech work.
First of all, this isn't the steel industry or the construction industry. There aren't a finite number of jobs to go around in high tech. What we see is that in practice, when there are more workers than there are secure jobs in big companies, people create their own startups in new markets that the big companies are too conservative to explore, thus creating more jobs and opening up more markets.
For all practical purposes, there are infinite jobs in the high tech industry, because it has this property of increasing the industry in size in response to excess talent.
The other reason it makes no sense to criticize allowing more foreign workers into the country is that this is part of a larger highly successful strategy that the US has always carried out where we brain drain other countries in order to keep them from competing from us technologically.
It isn't that there aren't any smart people India who couldn't start their own software company. It's that all of those guys get hired by *American* companies, and end up contributing to the *American* software industry instead of the native Indian one.
Bringing the top foreign talent here, means that we have the first pick at top people that the entire *world* has to offer working for American companies, whereas everyone else has to settle for leftovers.
If anything, the criticism that I level against the H1-B program and other temporary work pograms, is that they are temporary. We should be recruiting top foreign workers for *immigration*. Highly educated people are a *boon* to our national economy, not a drag.
Remember, that the national economy is the big picture that the government always has to keep in sight. A rising tide raises all boats, and we can't sacrifice the common welfare because of completely unsubstantiated fears that American born programmers can't get jobs.
It won't improve the quality of Windows (Score:3, Funny)
The bottom line is that programmers don't *want* to work at Microsoft. They have 10,000 open positions at any given time. Ten thousand! It says something about a company when programmers would choose to be unemployed rather than work there and the only way they can anybody at all is through indentured slave visas.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, inflation is making this sort of thing more and more difficult.
5 digits -- $xxx.xx (Score:3, Insightful)
American Nerds should rise up and revolt.
Have Fun Storming the Castle.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
show me some proof that hb-1 visa's have resulted in pay cuts, because i keep hearing people running their mouths about it but when i look at http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm [bls.gov] all i see are rising wages.
Re:Well played Mr. Gates, well played. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Well played Mr. Gates, well played. (Score:5, Interesting)
Mean computer programmer salary:
$67,400 in May 2005 [bls.gov]
$69,500 in May 2006 [bls.gov]
This is an annual increase of 3.11%, which is lower than inflation of 3.39% in 2005 and 3.24% in 2006 [miseryindex.us]. So in some meaningless sense wages did rise, but in the meaningful sense of buying anything, wages went down.
You still have not addressed my question regarding the relevance of rising wages to the visa.
That said, I agree with the sentiment of your original comment.
Parent
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 50's and 60's American dads put in 40 hours a week in a factory with just a high school diploma and families lived pretty well. Moms stayed home with the kids. Now with college degrees, Moms and Dads put in 80-Plus, and can't even achieve the same living standards they had as children. (Or worse, they are another generation removed, and have no recollection of better times.) The median American wage earner has been losing ground for decades. More immigrant labor (legal and illegal) and "free trade" agreements are the threats used by the have-mores to get the have-nots to produce more and expect less.
Question: The 40-hour work week became a standard in the early 20th century. With all of the improvements in productivity that have come about since then, why are we not now on a standard 32-hour workweek? We should have been there 20 years ago. The answer is in the failure of economics professors to teach students to think critically about supply-side economic theories.
I'm not whining (or "whinging"). I'm pointing out that we are being skillfully played against one another and our lives could be better if we get smart enough to recognize it.
Oh, and by the way here's the proof you asked for:
http://www.usw.org/usw/program/content/3060.php [usw.org]
Parent
Re:Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Insightful)
Were the 50's and 60's better? Racism, male chauvinist oinks, and the boys club mentality... Add on the lack of being able to fly easily, travel easily, or have any luxuries.
You know you can live like the 50's and 60's. I am serious here. Get rid of your cable subscription, your cell phone subscription, have a single car, and everything that you did not have in the 50's and 60's. And you can live quite well.
The problem we have is that you have all of these additional costs because you want them. For example one of the things I have done away with is a cellular phone subscription. Here in Europe people look quite strange at me. I just say, "hey I hardly use it and it saves me quite a bit of money."
The problem is not immigration. Look at the following website.
http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=research_research05b5 [fairus.org]
The immigration levels at the time you talk so fondly of were per-capita higher than now.
The real problem is that due to globalization the West has to realize it is overpaid. The developing countries are just as smart and just as able, but paid less because they can be.
Heck, I have had to take a massive pay cut so that I can compete in the market place. But I take in stride as I have to.
Parent
Re:Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Did you see HOW those people lived back then? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. I saw it first hand.
Did you?
"Because, if you worked 32 hours, I would still work 40, so I could get a raise. If you work 40, I'll work 48, because I want my son to have more. This is America, competition matters, and if you want to have more, work more."
And if you work 48, I'll work 56 etc. And someone will have more as a result of it. But I doubt if it will ultimately be either of us. Where in this endless competition to work more do our lives actually improve? It won't until we choose cooperation over competition.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The "labor shortage" in the IT world is a myth. Perhaps you've not seen the infamous Cohen & Grigsby video?
Re:Before you criticize... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Before you criticize... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Oh FUCK (Score:5, Insightful)
This implies it's a factor of the company's hiring processes, not anything to do with their national or educational origin.
Outsource teams have their own common issues, but they have a lot more to do with the distance and management issues than with ethnicity or culture.
Parent
Re:Oh FUCK (Score:4, Insightful)
As an Indian, I have never, never, found caste being a problem, except when you want to marry a girl - and when a guy wants to bail out of some situation and invokes this card. Your hyperbole about "authority" and "cultural difference" is nothing but rotting xenophobia. That, or you are just pain trolling.
GP was dead on point when it stated that most Indians are taught programming in the companies - they completely lack any interest in over the top performance - they know they are cheap workers, and they know their job is laborious. So much for the motivation.O RLY? So you don't know anything about "over there" and want to make sweeping uninformed statements... I wonder why you are not preferred.I doubt GP had taken India culture as a course, or spent years in India. What you understand from what you see is a product of your mind. Until the Indians have personally told you how they are not taught to innovate(?), it is xenophobia - a complete lack of interest in people who are taking your jobs.
Parent
Re:Oh FUCK (Score:4, Insightful)
The GP's allude to how bad Indian programmers are perceived in the US. I was merely stating my observations from working with them in the business over several years. No, I don't know much about Indian culture, never been there, never had much need to learn it, but, from what little I do know or have read about, that was what I was basing my guess on as to the reasons behind my observations.
Just because you observe something, and it happens to be another race, culture or whatever, doesn't make you racist or xenophobic. I hate to think stating what you have experience with others, even if it is negative is the latest thing in the new 'PC' world that you can no longer state or discuss.
Sorry if what I and others have observed working with Indians, but, I cannot believe that all of us are making it up independantly. There must be some truth to it for these things to be stated so prevalently....sorry, but grow some thicker skin. If it doesn't apply to you, then don't worry about it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As you said...
>Just because you observe something, and it happens to be another race, culture or whatever, doesn't make you racist or xenophobic.
And you said...
> Sorry if what I and others have observed working with [Americans], but, I cannot believe that all of us are making it up independantly. There must be some truth to it for these things to be stated so prevalently....sorry, but grow some thick
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh FUCK (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Oh FUCK (Score:5, Interesting)
There are good reasons to do work in the US. If the work is the for the US market, it doesn't hurt to have it done in the US to save time in cleaning it up make it presentable to the consumer and you have cleaner communication lines with the US marketers and business folks.
What the immigration does is make the choice a little easier for corporations to pick the US over India. Sure, immigration does, to some small extent push down US wages. Know what pushes down US wages even more though? When they say "fuck it" and simply have the entire thing done in India for a fraction of the cost.
So, you can either swallow that people from India (and elsewhere) come here for high wages while at the same time knocking your wages down a little, or simply have corporations throw their hands up at the high cost of doing business and simply farm it all out to India.
Take your pick.
Stringent immigration policies NEVER result in great economic booms that nationalist promise. Immigration has never hurt the US. The US has a long time of kicking ass and taking in the economics and academics BECAUSE it has such a liberal immigration policy. Taking in skilled workers from elsewhere is a good thing for the US and keeps jobs here. If anyone has anything to bitch about, it is India. The US is the one stealing away their skilled workers, adding them to our economy, and leaving them high and dry.
Parent
Re:Oh FUCK (Score:5, Insightful)
None of this is going to push down US wages below the bizzare situations like cafe workers surviving from the charity of strangers (the "tip" system) and the construction of an illegal underclass that has to accept very low wages or get exposed and deported.
Parent
Re:Oh FUCK (Score:5, Interesting)
I call BS... The reason why there are so many H1-B visas is because America does not let anything else in.
I am quite serious here, as my wife and I were confronted with this situation. If you look at the visas of America there are no "skilled labor" immigrations like there is in Canada or Australia. In fact America is actually one of the few countries that focuses on family based immigration.
Look at your government statistics and you will see that per capita there is very little immigration to America. Per capita America has 25% of the immigration that Australia and Canada have. And of that immigration about 60%+ is family based. In Australia and Canada it is in reverse.
Parent
Give all H-1s US Citizenship Immediately (Score:5, Interesting)
Well we have PLENTY of citizens, but they do not like to do computer programming. Last time I checked, the only people that came here to the USA involuntarily were African Americans. The rest of us are ancestors of some "driving down the wages to citizens and giving them to foreigners that are just sending home is not helping matters..."
This ridiculous, xenophobic crap has polluted the American discource since the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam bitched about the new British arrivals in what would eventually be renamed New York. Yet, despite these waves of low wage immigrants, the United States has managed to become the riches single nation on the planet earth. I've got 13 aircraft carriers, a man on the moon, a kick ass freeway system and gasoline that even today is cheaper than any of our allies to say that a policy of open ended immigration works and works stunningly well.
My grandmother, as did many grandparents, sent money overseas back to Europe to their families when they had it. Family is an AMERICAN value. Remember?
I too, work with a lot of immigrants in Computer Programming, and for the most part I have found these people, whereever they come from, be it Malaysia, Viet Nam, China, India, Japan, Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, and Switzerland, to be hardworking, decent, law abiding, industrious, imaginative, family oriented, and in short the sort of people that the USA should be proud to have. These people want to work, value family, and want to be Americans. I think that, rather than making these people jump through hoops like dogs, we should be recruiting these people from around the world, agressively, and we should be honored to make them citizens of our country, and not the other way around.
By the way too, my uncle in law did THREE combat tours in Viet Nam, earning a silver star, a couple of purple hearts. He's not a computer programmer, but he got his degree at Khe Sahn. But hey, he's just a stinking Mexican... so now you can take that stereotype about lazy hispanic people and blow that out your ass too, while you were at it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I know a lot of H1-B workers that use the H1-B just as a way to try and get themselves into the USA.
Re:Give all H-1s US Citizenship Immediately (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not talking about immigration. We're talking about something akin to 'ringers' being brought in to drive down wages. H1-B workers are not immigrants, they are not coming here to work to become US citizen and stay here, they are temporary workers that drive down wages, send money home and leave eventually.
I know a lot of H1-B workers that use the H1-B just as a way to try and get themselves into the USA.I second that. I've been in the US for 7 years, the last 6 were on an H1-B visa, trying to get a green card (which I now have).
Saying that the H1-B visa is a tool for corporations to get cheap workers that can't quit when given crappy assignments is not really true. For me finding an other job was an experience issue, nobody would even reply to me until I had 3 years experience. Now I usually get contacted once a month by small and big name companies (latest one was VMWare), but I'm very happy where I am. It is true however that many 'recruiters' have no clue that an H1-B visa is easily transferable (takes 2 weeks) from one company to an other, and some would basically hang up when I mentioned I was on a Visa, making it more difficult to get an other job.
As for the salary, while I wish I would get more so I could afford a house in my area (prices are not going down), my total compensation is well within the average according to hotjobs.com. I also get a lot of perks at work, one of the best being to only deal with smart people.
Sending money home: I've never ever done that, my relatives don't need any help and I'm sure they would actually be very offended if I gave them any money.
Parent
Re:Why, DHS? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Why, DHS? (Score:5, Insightful)
We all know that most people's problem with illegal immigration and H1-Bs has nothing to do with the illegals being illegal or the H1-Bs lowering wages: It's plain old racism. Increasing the green card quotas would just bring more people with strange accents into the country, and that's not something that middle america wants.
I for one find it ridiculous, but I see the racism every day.
Parent
Re:Why, DHS? (Score:5, Informative)
Put it this way: no matter what country you hail from, granting citizenship to all comers is a mistake that few nations make. That's not to say that illegal immigration isn't just as big a problem for other countries as it is for America, but so far as legal immigration is concerned, the citizens of any nation have a stake in who is granted citizenship. The process of assimilation doesn't happen overnight, and just because someone is a "best and brightest" absolutely does not automatically qualify them as an asset, someone of benefit to our society. Bill Gates and his ilk would like you to believe otherwise, but only because they are insulated from the effects of their manipulations, and by their past actions have shown they don't care one whit about this country and its people. Their opinions in this matter are not to be taken seriously.
Citizenship should be earned, not handed out willy-nilly. Whether you're English, French, German, Venezualan, Russian, Chinese
My fiancee is a naturalized U.S. citizen who spent many years in this country before she was sworn in. She's proud of the fact that she worked hard, proved her worth, and is now a citizen of this great nation. However, she bitterly resents the fact that thousands of other foreign-born individuals (not to mention tens of millions of illegal Mexican immigrants) are being given rights and privileges that they have not earned and do not deserve.
Parent
Earned? I got mine the old-fashioned way (Score:4, Insightful)
That's funny. I was born in the U.S., and they just gave me a citizenship for being born. Boy did I have to work hard at that! You don't even have to grow up in the U.S., just being born here is good enough. If that's not willy-nilly, what is?
When people born here have to work as hard for their citizenship as your fiance did, then the system might be considered fair. As it is, I don't see the unfairness in giving rights and privileges to foreign-born individuals who didn't earn it, but rather, I see it as unfair that your fiance (and many others) had to work hard for what IS given out willy-nilly, on the basis of birth, like some aristocratic title. So, yes, it is unfair that others are getting for free what your fiance had to work for, but perhaps you should look first to those never had to do anything at all.
The U.S. never quite gave out citizenships to all comers, but it was once much freer in allowing immigration. It should be noted that that period of freer immigration was also when we rose from being a third-rate backwoods nation to the most powerful nation on earth.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You disproved your own point - companies are *not* willing to pay for that connection. Immigration processing expenses are a heck of a lot cheaper. So that's what companies choose.
The reason that the grandparent is right on target has to do with two business trends:
- trend towards disposable tech workers
- trend away from paying any relocation expenses to new or current employees
The first trend should be within most everyone's e