H-1B Foes Challenge Bush Administration In Court 464
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."
Weak (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Land of immigrants (Score:5, Insightful)
Saying that this is a "land of immigrants", while true, is also irrelevant since no one is trying to prove that it isn't. The issue being settled is the duration of a visa. The argument is how much time is needed to realize the stated purpose of the visa. You first have to have immigrants (more like visitors, in this case) who are welcome here before there is a question of how long they may stay.
ABOLISH THE H1B PROGRAM (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Land of immigrants (Score:4, Insightful)
forget the fluff, focus on the true issue (Score:5, Insightful)
if anyone would like to explain how using emergency powers in a non-emergency setting isn't abuse, please, step up to the plate.
Re:ABOLISH THE H1B PROGRAM (Score:5, Insightful)
IBM says Americans aren't good enough (Score:5, Insightful)
Certain skills still are in strong demand, says Ms. Chota, adding that the company can't find enough qualified graduates with degrees in computer science and those who have knowledge of both business and IT. "In the U.S., unfortunately, there are not enough great computer-science graduates," Ms. Chota says.""
Um excuse me? So, Americans are not good enough for IBM. Even though they go to the same great American universities just like the smarter foreigners.
So, which is it?!?
Re:Land of immigrants (Score:3, Insightful)
It's unnatural, unfair and counterproductive to criminalize people for just coming to your country. Why not go further and impose Soviet-like registration of citizens, penalizing them for moving from state to state or even from city to city "illegally"? It's the same way of thinking.
Re:We already spend more than enough on education (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:H1b scam. (Score:2, Insightful)
What all those "target" countries fear is a strong, united "foreign block" that may abuse the democratic system to muscle for more say and more cultural influence. You can already notice it how candidates start wooing those immigrants by offering them something that is not necessarily in the interest of the rest of the people who are not from those areas.
That's what this immigration lottery is about. When you look carefully, you'll see that certain countries may not participate. Why do you think is it that way?
Re:One overlooked benefit ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lowering wages? Well... The golden billion [wikipedia.org] of human population finally starts to feel the globalization effects.
Re:Land of immigrants (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see, I get 5 weeks of paid vacation, free health care, free retirement insurance, free accident and handicap insurance, free and limitless unemployment insurance, secured workplace even when I'm sick for 2 months (they can't lay me off just because I'm sick), cheap housing and more money than in the US (especially with the current USD:EUR rate). Care to tell me again why I should want to work in the US?
Re:DHS = Get Out of Jail Free card (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:One overlooked benefit ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Weak (Score:5, Insightful)
The only structural problem with schools are the bloated administrations (which are not unionized.) But that doesn't even begin to explain why the schools are failing. The real problem is our culture. Parents treat the schools as (at best) a baby-sitting service. Too many of them simply don't care how well their children do academically. Failure and success begins with the parents.
Private schools generally pay their teachers *less*, so the teachers in them are no more talented. To the extent that private schools do better, it's because they cherry-pick the best students. You will fail if you simply try to privatize the schools on a large scale. That would just be shifting all the current problems into the private sector where it will be compounded by profit motives and shady accounting (seen the prison system lately?)
I get so sick of hearing that libertarian BS from people that don't even know the first thing about the real problem.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:One overlooked benefit ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The big trend has been to come to the U.S., get an education, save up some money, go home and buy some land and live well.
Americans are good enough.. just not CHEAP enough. (Score:5, Insightful)
The talent is there, they don't want to work in a field where companies don't want to reward them.
They can't get americans to buy their crappy pay, benefits, and job security, so they want to farm out slave labor they can have deported at their whim.
Re:Weak (Score:2, Insightful)
YR Online section? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:We already spend more than enough on education (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Weak (Score:5, Insightful)
Because they can pick and choose their students.
If you don't have to bother with problematic students, of course you're going to get better results at a lower cost.
Re:Weak (Score:4, Insightful)
( I.E. more leisure time, more likely to have one parent not working )
And related to that, parents that understand how much their educated led to their wealth, providing additional motivation to push/pull the kids in education?
Smaller class sizes in private schools?
More ability to apply technical assistance to leverage the instructors/instruction?
And if we go with all private schools, I cant help but think that the already large gap between the wealthy and the not wealthy will grow larger, I would argue to the detriment of both groups ( if the "have-nots" have less, where is the market that the "haves" will sell to? )
Re:Weak (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no mystery there.
Those four reasons lead to a less toxic environment in the classroom, which leads to better motivated teachers (even with the pay cut most private school teachers take), better motivated students, and: far better results.
idiocy (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, if the H-1b foes persist in this, it also completely screws people who have lived in the US for many years. But they aren't Americans, so who cares, right?
Re:About time (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, that remark is so stupid that I'm not sure you can even be serious, but I suppose there must be a reason you have trouble finding a good job. So, let's walk through this.
Why do you think the US (usually foundations and universities) are investing $500k in the education of these students? It's because they can't find Americans willing and capable of getting educated in these areas. So, after all that money is invested, you just want to send them away. What do you think they are going to do with their $500k education in India or China or Europe or Canada? Plant rice? Perform folk dances for American tourists? Work as bartenders?
I'll tell you what they'll do: they'll work for Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Google, whatever. Or they'll start their own startups and compete with US companies.
You won't get a job out of this. If Oracle doesn't want you now, refusing an H-1b visa to the candidate they want won't make them hire you. Instead, they'll just move that job and all the required support staff to countries where they can hire the candidates they want to hire.
Re:Don't worry, it's just jobs Americans don't wan (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Land of immigrants (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a downside to all that nicety however. Unemployment tends to be high. Try finding a job in southern Germany, even with the qualifications. Be prepared for a long and painful job search. I saw a friend - an engineer - search for a job for two years so that the could live in the same city as his wife. Why? Companies are reluctant to hire people because they can't fire them so easily. Try starting a company in Europe. Try getting VC. Better yet, start a company and fail at the first go. In the US, that would be shrugged off as a learning experience. In Europe, it makes you a lepper.
I'm in India right now and I see something different. I see a place where new tech parks are rising like crabgrass and replacing shacks. I see people equally as intelligent as their counterparts in Europe and the US willing to work much harder (already in school).
Re:Land of immigrants (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, and since we have the right to move wherever we like, I'm sending an invasion force of immigrants to Japan. Once there they'll vote themselves a roughly Anglo-European system of government, but they've got a right to go there and swamp the aging population.
Re:ABOLISH THE H1B PROGRAM (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Weak (Score:5, Insightful)
The normal kids that coexist peacefully need their own school.
The brilliant kids need their own schools because they are
our best hope of fixing most of the gigantic messes we have made.
The hell raising violent drug dealing bastards need a boot camp
type school that can get them to pull their collective
heads out of their asses.
The Three strikes rule would work well here.
3 strikes you go to the hell raisers school, 3 strikes in their
and you are out.
3 strikes on crime on the outside they are sent to labor camps
or can volunteer for EXILE and leave this country FOREVER.
I am tired of paying for ppl to sit in jail and watch cable TV
and eat food and not work and I get to pay for it all.
If they go to jail at a minimum they work a farm to feed all
the prisoners.
If they don't want that they can leave the US for all time.
Society is about working together, not anarchy.
If they want to be a jack ass that is fine, but not here.
Myths and Realities About the USA H1-B Program (Score:4, Insightful)
Myth: H1-Bs are the "best and brightest"
Reality: If that were true then the typical H1-B would a Nobel prize winning scientist. The truth is, the typical H1-B is an average student, hired right out of college with only a four year degree. The typical H1-B is no more qualified than the US graduates who are not getting jobs. The H1-Bs are just cheaper. And because of the lottery nature of the H1-B process, employers do not even know who they are getting. So how do employers know that they are getting the best and brightest?
Also, isn't it funny that almost all of the "best and brightest" come from countries where people earn as little as $1 a day? If it's really about the "best and brightest" then why aren't there more European H1-Bs?
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Myth: H1-Bs are needed because of the critical shortage of US technology workers
Reality: Serious academic studies clearly indicate that skills shortage is a myth.
> These studies done at Duke aren't alone in their assessment that there is in fact no skills shortage. They're backed up by other studies conducted by RAND Corporation, The Urban Institute and Stanford University, among others, all of which settle upon the same conclusion: There is no shortage of educated IT workers.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1081923#PaperDownload [ssrn.com]
This according to a well researched article at baselinemag.com:
http://tinyurl.com/yoy2rw [tinyurl.com]
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Myth: H1-Bs do compete unfairly, because H1-Bs are paid the prevailing wage
Reality:
> According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) as the measurement of U.S. wages, and the H-1B LCA disclosure data to measure H-1B wages, 90% of H-1B employers' prevailing wage claims for programmers were below the median U.S. wage for that occupation and location, with 62% of them falling in the bottom 25th percentile of U.S. wages, said Miano [founder of the Programmer's Guild].
> Ron Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology (currently on leave) and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, pointed to USCIS's most recent report to Congress, which shows that the medium wage in 2005 for new H-1B computing professionals was just $50,000 -- even lower than the entry-level wages that a newly graduated tech worker with a bachelor's degree and no experience would command.
http://tinyurl.com/4bvwyh [tinyurl.com]
According to the U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Service's (USCIS) annual report to Congress in 2005, the aggregate data for computing professionals lend support to the argument that the practice of paying H-1Bs below-market wages is quite common.
http://www.sharedprosperity.org/bp187.html [sharedprosperity.org]
H1-Bs are hired at four different skill levels, "4" being the highest. But most H1-Bs are hired for the lowest "1" level jobs - regardless of what kind of work the H1-Bs actually do.
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Myth: In the USA enrollment in technical disciplines is declining. Proof the USA needs to hire more foreign workers
Reality: This myth is designed to confuse cause and effect. Employers are not forced to hire offshore because enrollment is down. Rather, enrollment is down because of aggressive offshoring by employers. But even with enrollments down, there are still more than enough US workers.
> Due to both outsourcing and insourcing, many young people are concluding that technology is a bad place to invest their time," said Mark Thoma, a professor of economics at the University of Oregon in Euge
Re:Weak (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is that people think that all people are equal. It just isn't true. Some people are just dumb and/or lazy. They can't learn anything. Keeping them in school is the worst possible thing you can do. They are enraged at how they repeatedly fail, so they just disrupt the school. The best option is just to chuck them out as soon as possible
And there is nothing wrong with standardized tests. "teaching to the test" is a pretty silly cliche. These standardized tests have questions about BASIC math and BASIC reading. If a school isn't teaching this, then what in the hell ARE they teaching? If a school can't get their students to pass these simple tests then 1) the students are idiots 2) the teachers are idiots 3) both of the above
Re:Weak (Score:5, Insightful)
Equality means 'all men (and in these modern times women too) are born equal under the law' - ie that the same law applies t oeverybody, no matter whether you are rich or poor, clever or stupid. Nobody in their right mind has ever imagined that all people are exactly equal when it comes to talent, intelligence etc.
The problem with standardised tests isn't the idea of testing students' skills, but the sad fact that once you have the tests, that is all you strive for. If there were no tests, the schools would ideally strive to simply provide the best they can, whereas when you have the tests, you strive to score as much as possible. It's like intelligence testing - if you are tested unprepared, the test may show something about how intelligent you are, but if you are allowed to study the test and prepare for it, you can suddenly demonstrate an huge intelligence, except of course that the result is now worthless.
I am all for testing and making the quality of schools comparable, so the parents have a better chance of choosing the right school for their children, but the standardised tests are simply bogus - a bad attempt at solving some problems, or even a tool for deceiving the parents and the public.
Re:Weak (Score:4, Insightful)
So total segregation is the answer, huh? I'd love to see the fucked up world that would produce. Kids need to socialize with different kinds of people, not get isolated in places where everybody is the same. This would just lead to societal civil war or class warfare.
Re:We already spend more than enough on education (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on mods, why is this user's opinion "informative" with the only information being that they attended private school? this person listed almost no justification for their opinion and is in no way informative! I would love to be able to discuss this with you but you didn't say anything other than your opinion!
I also went to private school but I think that they are a good thing for the education system, i doubt they are a silver bullet that will solve all problems if we only had vouchers but that doesn't mean they are useless.
I enjoyed my school because of a more intimate environment, the majority (not all) of the students were more academically minded and while my school was far from the best by any means it was still leaps and bounds upon the public school which was in an intense competition with the neighboring county over which was the worst public highschool in the state.
If for no other reason I think the slashdot community can see the advantage in private schools so that those who shun science and demand to be taught creation can go to a private institution and leave the public schools to teach evolution in peace.