
McCain and Obama Unite on H1B Issue - bincsearch
http://blog.bincsearch.com/?p=440
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Dilpil
A poll for those who think we need to restrict H1Bs to protect American tech
workers: Why? Do you have trouble finding a job despite your degree and
qualifications? If so what kind of job? Furthermore, why does being born on US
soil give someone exclusive rights to write code on it?

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fallentimes
Finally, some fucking compromising/agreeing.

If only they could "unite" to cut waste, reduce spending, protect privacy and
lower taxes. Baby steps I suppose.

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qqq
Democrats don't want to do half of those things.

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colinplamondon
Yeah, we want to help lift people out of poverty, improve education, balance
the budget, and pay down the national debt- monstrous! Monstrous I tell you!

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qqq
So, do you want to do more than half the things on the list, or not? Which
ones do you want to do?

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colinplamondon
It's possible to cut waste and still increase funding for infrastructure,
early childhood education, and local programs with a track record of success.
That's what Obama proposes.

We can also cut taxes on the majority of Americans, offsetting that cut by
reverting the tax rates on the rich to where they were during Bill Clinton's
administration.

As for privacy, it sure as hell isn't Democrats that are indefinitely sending
people to military prison camps without trial. Or spying on domestic phone
calls and intercepting internet traffic for deep packet inspection.

It was under Clinton, a Democrat, that we had a balanced budget and fiscal
responsibility - when was the last time we had a Republican president where
that was true?

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qqq
So you want to raise taxes on some people, and raise spending. You say this is
a good idea; maybe it is, maybe it isn't. My statement above, that dems don't
want to do half the list, stands.

You don't have to be so partisan in response to bland factual statements.

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pauljonas
A great deal of misunderstanding about H1B and outsourcing...

Perhaps I will be down voted for dissenting, but I do write from personal
experience. I've seen thousands of jobs outsourced, and contrary to the wisdom
expressed on internet forums here and elsewhere, H1B is a prime facilitator of
moving work offshore. Entire support/application teams relocated, but
supplanted with a liaison team of slightly more experienced non immigrant visa
workers brought on shore to work with business units.

It's had a direct effect on wages and opportunity, and a big cause of why
American students decline to pursue computer science degrees. Sure, there have
been winners and survivors, but the average wage / contract rate for a
programmer is less than it was 20-30 years ago. Worse, opportunity has been
snuffed out — 20 years ago, corporate jobs would go in search in-house looking
for anyone who wished to step up and learn the craft, applying their business
knowledge. Now, project work is simply delegated to offshore vendors.

I have no gripe with bringing in the best and the brightest from abroad. There
should be no restrictions in that regard. And for many reading Hacker News, it
is all about that. However, the bulk of H1B is allotted to entry level
programmers that could have easily been filled by Americans, who could have
the choice of a better career path alternative. I know, because I was the guy
who had to train those guys who were flown in from India, and I would quickly
determine that the extent of their training was reading a manual on the plane
ride to the U.S.. No problem, the offshore vendor marketing representative
would shrug, we'll send another guy tomorrow.

Many posts in defense here of H1B will cite 1s and 2s but corporate outfits
use up hundreds (if not 1000s) of such slots. My past experience in Arizona,
working for American Express, Honeywell, APS (power company) I can attest to
thousands of positions filled by H1B that used to be manned by employees and
on-shore contract workers. Most all of those positions are not the "best and
the brightest", but imported entry level workers.

Then we consider that our reservation systems, utility company billing
systems, charge card systems, claims adjudication are staffed predominately by
foreigners. In a few years, the Americans who serve as subject matter experts
will step aside and the expertise will be entirely with the offshore vendors.
Now, I not going to invoke nationalistic appeals, because I do believe it
should be a meritocracy, and some of the rhetoric I hear from xenophobic
protectionist interests is simply sickening.

And yes, I've experienced difficulty in finding work in spite of my degree and
qualifications. Or have seen my consulting rate / salary depressed because of
H1B. I've retooled and work now for less than a third of what I made in the
corporate world, as a web developer for a non-profit now — I've been blessed
with a spouse that makes double that as a registered nurse. Soon, due to her
having health issues, I may need to seek a better paying gig(s). My inbox does
occasionally see a recruiter solicitation, but the rates/salary offered are a
joke.

Furthermore, the adage that a company cannot find qualified help needs to be
qualified with "cannot find help at the pay / rate being offered" — I could go
on in this post with detailed occurrences but will cite just one that is
emblematic of the issue. A colleague at a past work contract needed to hire a
GIS developer and had a candidate in mind. But he could only offer a temporary
3-6 month contract at a rate less than market value. Still, his preferred
candidate would have snagged it if there was some guarantee of full time
employment at end of the "probationary" period, or an increase in rate or a
bonus paid. None of it was to be forthcoming, so it was settled that an H1B
candidate got the job.

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KWD
Well here I can say I disagree with both. Let's focus on utilizing our already
underemployed tech staff and give companies incentive to retrain and retain
our existing 'knowledge' staff. The U.S. has plenty of capable employees
without importing more.

The only instance I have some agreement with H1Bs is when a foreign student
completed a degree from an American university. Otherwise, special processing
to import employees for consulting firms, tech companies, etc. should not be
allowed at all.

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markessien
Looking at the issue with an objective eye, don't you think that if one took
the very best from other countries that it would improve the overall skill
level in your country, instead of taking the mediocre local talent and trying
to train them to make them good?

The intelligence percentages are roughly the same for all countries (maybe 1%
high gifted, 10% quite gifted and so on), so if you took the 1% from other
countries, that would give the U.S of A a highly competitive advantage, don't
you think?

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geebee
Yes, I agree. The part where I start to get worried is that 1) the visas tilt
heavily toward high tech, and 2) it's indentured. Both could be fixed...

Right now, we have a situation where Americans know that if they go into law,
they'll be largely protected from competition. This also holds true to a
lesser extent for medicine (my uncle, who is a radiologist, told me that
licensing is a big factor in keeping the work in the US).

So if we expand this program, we should expect less interest among Americans
in high tech, and more interest in law. This leads to a positive feedback loop
(or negative, if you want to call it that). Fewer Americans -> more need for
visas -> further deterrence to Americans -> greater shortage -> more visas...

The only real solution would be a global workforce where credentials and
licenses are equally available regardless of nationality/border. But
obviously, that's not happening.

As a result, I'd compromise by supporting a limited number of visas under
terms that preserve the mobility of the worker. But a large expansion of the
existing program? I think it's a bad idea.

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pfedor
OK so you observe that it's easier to hire foreigners in high tech than in law
or medicine. How about you ask yourself a question then: do you want American
high tech companies to match the efficiency of its healthcare and legal
system, or maybe the other way around?

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geebee
the other way around, without question. I'd much rather see this resolved by
opening up other fields, rather than closing off high tech.

that said, it will be a cold day in hell when the US legal system opens up to
international competition, and the imbalance itself is destructive. If my goal
were to use government policy to discourage americans from engineering/science
and encourage them to study law or medicine, I would probably design something
very similar to what we have now. The US government goes out of its way to
insulate lawyers from competition from overseas. It goes out of its way to
subject us-based engineers to increased job competition from overseas.

So we have our young people more interested in law than engineering. Why do
our wise policy makers scratch their heads about this? They created this
situation.

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pfedor
Yes the imbalance is destructive. The high salaries of American doctors and
attorneys are due to the access to those fields artificially closed, not only
from the foreigners, but also from most American. Would you want to introduce
such system to the high tech industry? No code writing until you have a degree
and a special license? Even if you would, you still probably couldn't elevate
American software engineers' salaries to the level of doctors and lawyers--the
doctors and the lawyers can only get away with it because they have captive
audience. If you brought down the American software industry to the level of
the healthcare system, Americans would simply start using programs and web
sites created abroad. (I read that many people go abroad for more expensive
medical treatments, e.g., heart surgery in India can cost $10k and is not in
any way worse than the same procedure in a US hospital which costs $100k+)

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geebee
No, I would definitely oppose a licensing system for software engineers
similar to the one for doctors and attorneys. Not because it's a terrible idea
in theory, but because I'm positive the implementation would be so bad that it
would be worse than no licensing.

But I'm not advocating special protections for US based software developers. I
just think that the US government has gone out of it's way to specifically
expose US scientists and engineers (and related high tech occupations) to
foreign competition. I'd be satisfied if the US government simply stopped
doing active harm to this profession and treated it like any other unregulated
profession (ie., immigrants are free to go into it as they are free to go into
any other profession - but no special visas for this specific field).

Actually, I'm not even completely opposed to some specific targeting of high
tech. Because high tech tends to be a wealth generating field, it might make
sense to target tech workers. Like I said earlier, I would support a moderate
number of visas under terms that preserve the freedom and mobility of the
engineer (ie., no indentured servitude).

But what we have right now - ie., hundreds of thousands of visas under
indentured conditions with almost no enforcement of the paltry protections
that are there? It goes way too far, and ends up a creating a deterrence for
US students who might have otherwise gone into engineering.

I also think that this threatens the long-term viability of high tech in the
US. We do need a healthy flow of our own citizens (and by this, I mean people
who grew up in the US and came through our educational system) into high tech
occupations. Otherwise, we _will_ , guaranteed, one day lose our high tech
industry in this country.

So I'd say - yes, supplement our work force with judicious use of visas, but
also be very careful to ensure that we are not bringing in so much competition
that US citizens are deterred.

I'd say between 50-60K visas a year would be fine. I'd also point out that
there probably aren't that many talented foreign nationals out there every
year - much of the overflow is really just a way to drive labor costs down in
run-of-the-mill crap programming jobs (which is why most of these visas go to
foreign outsourcing firms, not highly innovative positions at google or
microsoft).

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mynameishere
This is the main reason Obama needs to win. I'm so fucking sick of anti-
American republicans. Can we _please_ allow the democrats to ruin the country?
Please?

