Court Orders Shutdown of H-1B Critics' Websites 605
theodp writes "Computerworld reports that a NJ Superior Court Judge ordered hosting firms to shut down three Web sites that oppose the H-1B visa program and seeks information about the identity of anonymous posters. GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Comcast and DiscountASP.Net were ordered to disable ITgrunt.com, Endh1b.com, and Guestworkerfraud.com. Facebook Inc. was also ordered to disable ITgrunt's Facebook page. The judge's order was made in response to a libel lawsuit filed by Apex Technology Group Inc., which is citing its copyright ownership as it seeks the identity of the poster of a since-removed Apex employment agreement on Docstoc.com, which drew critical comments on US and India websites."
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Doesn't look like they got all of them. (Score:5, Informative)
"Even More Proof That Global Warming Is A Communist Front"
"Thai troops raid Hmong camp, deport 4,000 seeking asylum: What a concept - deporting 4000 people. Perhaps the U.S. needs to do the same to the FOUR MILLION India, Inc. racketeers running loose in the U.S. raping our economy."
"India, Inc. hacks Citigroup for millions"
Re:getting myself a glass of iced tea (Score:0, Informative)
I'd be all in for people to understand that the DV program gives green cards to (supposedly) randomly selected people, while H-1B is a temporary permit for people to work in specialized areas.
Now, which one you think hurts the most the average American?
First amendment (Score:5, Informative)
How is this not clear cut first amendment? A collection of websites expresses a political opinion. A potentially tort-able act, distributing a copyrighted document occurred. That doesn't give the courts the right to issue a blanket cease publication order.
Assuming the Computer World story is correct Judge James Hurley should be removed from the bench. I want to post this here for comment, since I live in NJ and thus have a state Senator that has oversight.
Re:Reviews of Apex Technology Group Inc., (Score:3, Informative)
Excellent link. Apex doesn't score very well. (Read as: "Scores VERY Badly.")
Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score:5, Informative)
1) The recession is partly DUE to this practice.
2) It's not that the people won't work- it's that it's not being offered in the first place and they're claiming a "shortage" of workers (even though there's not...) and getting the H1B's in here
Re:First amendment (Score:3, Informative)
Please excuse my ignorance of the case because I have not read all the details or TFA but I did skim it and it sounded like it was just a temporary injunction. This sort of thing is common in civil cases where the plaintiff alleges some type of damage if the "behavior, action, etc." continues during the litigation. A court will issue a temporary or preliminary injunction in the meantime. The plaintiff normally has to show that it is likely to win the lawsuit. Sometimes the plaintiff also has to purchase a bond in the event that it loses and the defendant suffers harm due to the injunction. I highly doubt a bond was required in this case.
I'm not saying the judge's decision was correct. I'm just pointing out that this probably was not a permanent injunction.
Re:Copyright BS (Score:5, Informative)
The answer to your question: The Berne Convention [wikipedia.org], which affixes copyright on anything written down anywhere. Really. This comment is copywritten by yours truly thanks to that rule and that fun text at the bottom of the page, and as such if I were wealthy and a complete jerk I could sue someone for infringement if someone decided to plagiarize me.
So now it's becoming increasingly common to suppress the publication of a bad contract via copyright rather than via an non-disclosure clause. Among other things, asserting copyright gives the plaintiff all the DMCA suppression capabilities that a contract violation does not.
Re:Reviews of Apex Technology Group Inc., (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is a job for WikiLeaks! (Score:5, Informative)
related post on itgrunt from google cache [74.125.155.132] ... I would like to take this oppurtunity to highlight several aspect''s of the 9 page legal agreement which might be important for you. For example: 30 day termination notice or forget your last paycheck when you quit, If you join a company (including any level between you and Apex) then pay $35000 or face a law suit, $9000 for legal,training and guest services when you quit. $35000 if you quit in between a contract...etc. The legalities of the agreement are convoluted,complex and can/will be used against you if you displease Apex technology Group Inc. So once you sign that document you are at the mercy of the employer and much worse than a bonded labour in India. Apart from above, employees don''t receive their salary at the end of the month. It is usually received @ a random date in the following month, provided you are lucky. Else you would have to chase HR/Accounting to get your pay check. This process helps Apex technology group inc to hold back pay incase you choose to accept employment at another location. The most important aspect of your transaction''s with Apex Technology Group Inc is that they tell you one thing before you transfer your H1B to their consulting firm and then later do not stick to what they say(aka lies & cheating). In other words once you file/transfer your H1B to them you more or less become their slave and you will get entangled in thier web of lies and legal documents...
Holy indentured servitude Batman!
Re:Job Reclaimation, not creation. (Score:3, Informative)
And you haven't thought it through very well: protectionism works both ways. Cut yourself off from the world, and US companies won't be able to outsource any of their products. They'll have no option but to move their entire operations outside of the US, then you won't have any jobs at all.
That's fine. They can sell their products outside of one of the largest markets in the world. Plenty of other companies will be happy to sell products in the American marketplace, employing Americans to produce them.
...But again, at a closer look, the reality is the opposite of what Friedman naively portrays in his book. In fact, Japan subsidized Toyota not only in its development but even after if failed terribly in the American markets in the late 1950's. In addition, early in Toyota's development, Japan kicked out foreign competitors like GM.
Globalism is nothing new. It's been going on since the 1500s. Protectionism works very well for countries who want to build themselves up. All of the countries that have become industrial powerhouses -- the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Korea, and now China -- did so by using tarriffs to block imports, and government subsidies to foster national industries. Check out this Thom Hartmann article [huffingtonpost.com]:
"Yet "free trade" is a guaranteed ticket to the poorhouse for any nation, and the evidence is overwhelming. The concept was introduced, in fact, by Henry VII, as something that England should encourage other countries to do while it maintained protectionism; a process known as the 1485 Tudor Plan that led to the rapid industrialization of England and the deeper impoverishment of its trading "partners."
Thus, because the Japanese government financed Toyota at a loss (for roughly 20 years), built high tariff and other barriers to competitive imports, and initially subsidized exports, auto manufacturing was able to get a strong foothold and we now think of Japanese exports being synonymous with automobiles.
... For about 200 years, we understood this in the United States. Had the fathers of the United States like Lincoln, Washington, Jackson or Grant applied for IMF loans, they would have been denied: All of them believed in high tariffs and a heavy control of foreign investment, and considered "free trade" to be absurd.
In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton submitted his Report on the Subject of Manufactures to the US Congress. In it he outlined the need for our government to subsidize new industries and subsequently protect them from the international markets until they become globally competitive.
Additionally, he proposed a roadmap for American industrial development. These steps included protective tariffs on imports, import bans, subsides, export bans on selected materials, and the development of product standards.
It was this policy, followed largely for most of the history of our country with average tariffs through most of the 19th and 20th centuries of around 40 percent, which built our American industry. All three times we radically dropped tariffs - for 3 years in 1857, for nine years in 1913 (just down to 25%), and in 1987 - what followed were economic disasters, particularly for small American manufacturers.
Since Reagan blew out our tariffs in the 1980s (and Clinton kicked the door totally open with GATT, NAFTA, and the WTO), our average tariffs are now around 2-4 percent. And the predictable result has been the hemorrhaging of American manufacturing capacity to those countries that do protect their industries through high import tariffs but allow exports on the cheap -- particularly China and South Korea."
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:First amendment (Score:3, Informative)
Well my issue is First Amendment. Courts are not permitted to take illegal action in an injunction. For example they can issue an injunction preventing you from mowing your lawn they can't burn your house down.
And it probably wasn't a permanent injunction, I agree but think that is irrelevant. The judge should still be off the bench.
Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score:1, Informative)
They don't have to prove the H1B holder has the skills, only that they couldn't find an American who did. Also the salary requirement just needs to be within 15%. Their mere presence here depresses salaries see supply and demand economics 101. You are the racist.
Libel trumps Free Speech (Score:3, Informative)
Libel trumps free speech. If the plaintiff's libel case is proven, then issuing a permanent injunction against the libelous page would be an appropriate resolution (legally speaking). As long as a libelous page is up, it continues to cause harm. These two facts together then justify a temporary injunction for the duration of the case.
At least that is the legal reasoning. I'm not saying I agree with it, but that is the way the law currently stands. For example, in this case the information isn't time critical, but if it were then a temporary injunction could be as bad as a permanent one.
Keep in mind that since the defendants haven't yet been identified they probably don't have any lawyers there to speak for them. Taking down the entire site seems excessive but is probably due to the plaintiff making as broad a claim as possible and the judge not being on the ball enough to limit the scope of the injunction.
Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score:3, Informative)
You are confusing Indian coders working in India who receive outsourced jobs from the US, with Indian coders that are brought to the US on H-1B visas. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it is generally understood that many, many Indian coders working in the US are of a much, much higher quality than the recipients of outsourcing working in India.
I'll correct you, then. Every Indian programmer I've worked with was completely incompetant, and some actually were harmful, like the guy whose only contribution to a project was breaking the build 2 hours before a major release. I'm sure there are good Indian programmers out there... But the good ones aren't going to work for the salaries they want to pay them.
Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score:3, Informative)
There are some great US Army programs to become a US citizen. Any foreigner can sign up and fight for America and earn their citizenship in the process. One of the programs i know of is MAVNI, mostly for people who know languages other than english and people who know medicine.
http://www.army.com/enlist/mavni.html [army.com]
http://www.goarmy.com/info/mavni [goarmy.com]
http://www.defense.gov/news/mavni-fact-sheet.pdf [defense.gov]
Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score:3, Informative)
The truth is, we can't find qualified Americans for the positions in question. We want employees, not contractors, from some positions (for a variety of reasons...) and almost all Americans with one of the skillsets we require work only on contract basis.
So we can either hire American contractors, which some of our clients do not want, or we can hire Indian/Eastern European/Chinese workers on H1B visas as employees.
ITgrunt.com still in Google Cache. (Score:3, Informative)
See The Thugs At Apex Technology Group [74.125.155.132].
There's nothing there which could possibly be a copyright violation of Apex's content. They're quoting from "Tunnel Rat" on "endh1b.com".
"...I would like to take this oppurtunity to highlight several aspect''s of the 9 page legal agreement which might be important for you. For example: 30 day termination notice or forget your last paycheck when you quit, If you join a company (including any level between you and Apex) then pay $35000 or face a law suit, $9000 for legal,training and guest services when you quit. $35000 if you quit in between a contract...etc. The legalities of the agreement are convoluted,complex and can/will be used against you if you displease Apex technology Group Inc. So once you sign that document you are at the mercy of the employer and much worse than a bonded labour in India. Apart from above, employees don''t receive their salary at the end of the month. It is usually received @ a random date in the following month, provided you are lucky. Else you would have to chase HR/Accounting to get your pay check. This process helps Apex technology group inc to hold back pay incase you choose to accept employment at another location. The most important aspect of your transaction''s with Apex Technology Group Inc is that they tell you one thing before you transfer your H1B to their consulting firm and then later do not stick to what they say(aka lies & cheating). In other words once you file/transfer your H1B to them you more or less become their slave and you will get entangled in thier web of lies and legal documents..."
That sounds like a legitimate labor complaint. Some of those terms are probably illegal under U.S. labor law. See, for example, California law on prompt payment of wages. [ca.gov]
Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score:3, Informative)
So, if companies are required to apply the same exaggerated requirements for skill-sets after they can't fill the job with US workers, and apply for the H1B process, then there's no reason to exaggerate. Ergo, listings such as "14 years experience with .Net 2.0 environment running on Core 2 quad processors" shouldn't exist (except as the result of very occasional typos). Yet, they do, in abundance.
Analogy: Fox news has labeled 18 republicans caught in affairs, homosexual encounters, or criminal acts as democrats. They have never made the same mistake in reverse. If you wanted to take the position that Fox wasn't motivated to do this deliberately, shouldn't the burden of proof fall to you to show how such a statistically one sided result could be caused by random typos, or otherwise not be proof of deliberate intent?
You somehow managed to build your point three out of ignoring that fact (unless. by "more skilled" you really meant 'have invented time machines to somehow acquire the necessary skills').
Point 2, on salaries, becomes unsupportable if your point 3 is wrong. If the job requirements can change drastically during the process of 'proving' an H1B is needed, then the government requirement has no teeth. So, you'd have to put up some actual figures about pay for broader classes of programmers rather than specific jobs. You certainly could gather figures and then make the claim that those '30% salaries' are an infrequent anomaly, but the other side has already gathered figures and made the claim that programmer wages have been depressed, as a whole, compared to other skilled professions. If the flat salaries situation exists, and low salaries in H1B positions exist, don't you have some proving to do? Sounds like you need to not only show that the mechanisms by which hiring at below prevailing rates affects related wages wouldn't be enough to depress wages in the broader industry as much as they allegedly have - you'd need to suggest some other causes.
I understand how you must feel about the characterizations to which you are responding. Unfortunately, you've made several unsupported claims, and given your very first sentence, you've done harm to your cause.
Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score:5, Informative)
You have made numerous sweeping generalizations and exaggerations in your post.
1. Far from ALL Indian coders are "shitty". Look at the many inventions and innovations attributed to Indians in American companies. Google for names.
To be fair, certainly not all. But in my experience, a significant majority are sub-par.
2. The salary is an exaggeration. H1B requires the companies to pay as much to an H1B hire as to an American citizen with the same experience/profile.
This is the standard propaganda. The truth is that in the vast majority of cases, H1Bs are much cheaper. Why else would a company front the $2000+ it takes to host a single H1B? Of course, the kicker there is "with the same experience/profile". In my experience, the replacement H1B is nowhere near as qualified, on paper as well. They're just cheaper. The indentured servitude angle is also very attractive to the employer. You can treat them like crap and they won't leave because they can't. It does wonders for a worker's "attitude".
3. If the companies scam by listing out ridiculous requirements for job positions, don't they apply to Indians as well?
No. The requirement are conveniently changed later. Or the H1Bs resume is deliberately falsified to turn them into a match. Or the employer "throws up its hands" and works out a deal with someone like TCS to hire consultants only from them. Throw in an artificial rule like no consultants allows to work there for more than a year and you end up with a little invasion.
Are you suggesting Indians are generally more skilled than Americans? If you are, then I can see you have explained why an H1B hire could be of more value than an American.
An individual Indian could easily be more skilled than an individual American. And many highly skilled people are coming here on H1B visa. In my opinion, they deserve to be here (when the economy is good). But no immigrant, no matter how qualified should ever be allowed to replace an American (of any descent) who is already established here.
But as a group, the Indians I've seen here, when a company has clearly abused the H1B program, have been far less qualified than the people they replaced.
And not only are you racist, you're ignorant. Do you know how many Indians graduate from American Universities with Masters/PhDs? Those are a huge chunk of H1B holders.
It's convenient to use the examples of when the system has worked as intended to explain away the vast abuse and injustice taking place in our country. It's convenient to call us racist when we complain and take steps to protect the livelihoods of the people who are already here. This argument always makes me think about taking an IT job in India. Oh that's right, I can't. I would never be issued a work visa for an IT job because they protect their labor pool like we should be. But they're not racist.
Re:Good way to end this BS (Score:3, Informative)
Re:getting myself a glass of iced tea (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong, they said they've suspended operations until January 6th, in order to poke us for donations. The actual quote is "To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have very reluctantly suspended all other operations, until Jan 6.".
You may repent for your assholery by donating $10 to wikileaks [wikileaks.org] right now. I just now donated $10 to cover your sins in case you also count free-riding among your glittering social skills.
Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score:5, Informative)
Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, that's what the law requires, but the law isn't enforced to any meaningful degree. There are plenty of companies that pay their H-1Bs as they're supposed to, but there are also plenty that don't. Every company I've worked for that used them also lowballed them and held them in line via restrictive contracts that were prohibitively expensive to break.
As regards skills, my experience is that they're roughly on par with American folks - some are good, and some suck. In particular I've had the pleasure of working with a few guys from Singapore and Sri Lanka that were simply incredible, but I've also dealt with an Indian that thought his shit didn't stink and couldn't do anything at all without explicitly direction on every tiny thing he was to do, and even then the code quality was just abysmal.