As an Indian, I really really hope they ban Tata and Infosys (or any other Indian outsourcing company) from getting H1-B visas. The people they bring over are the bottom of the barrel in India and have no interest in Computer Science whatsoever. They suck at their jobs. They can't write a single paragraph in English without grammatical errors. Furthermore, incidents like these will perpetuate xenophobia against the general Indian populace (I already regularly encounter abuse where I live).
I had to clean up after the mess Infosys made of a client's code a few years ago. It was horrible. There were few comments, most of them made little sense, and the code was a spaghetti mess. A complete rewrite would have been cheaper in the long run. That said, I've seen code written by Americans that was just as bad. The bottom of the barrel anywhere isn't a good choice.
Nonsense. There are several Americans who are less skilled at the place I work. Xenophobia can't be stopped by Indians being better workers than locals. The article is about a loophole in law which any corporation would exploit, not just Tata and Infosys. My company (which is American) does it too, in way that isn't obvious. It makes zero sense to ban "any Indian outsourcing company"
> Xenophobia can't be stopped by Indians being better workers than locals
But it would. Every case I've encountered where there is a skepticism of Indian workers is due to horrific experiences with such hires. I haven't seen the same applied to, say, Russian engineers.
There may be a another reason, like just the sheer population and widespread English usage, but the result is that Indians suffer an unfair bias that other groups don't have. Things like MS shipping a major product made in IDC, with broken English in the dialogs. Or so many outsourced support and development failures. Perhaps it's because bad experiences are noticed because there was an interaction. But good experiences, say excellent code written by anonymous Google engineers, doesn't have any particular nationality associated with it (except American)? So if all tech support and dev was outsourced to Russia, then Russia would have a disproportionate bad rep?
It's not fair (or perhaps not even fixable in a fair way), but if more interactions were positive, then there'd be less resistance.
I feel bad for having an internal reaction when I start dealing with an Indian, but I try to balance that out by making an extra effort to be sure I'm concentrating on the work. And I know there's tons of far-more-talented-than-me Indians. It terrifies me that this bias might be mathematically incorrect, in addition to being individually unfair.
Companies like TCS and Infosys bring cheap labor mostly on L1 and not on H1. Most of the H1's I know are US graduates and majority are MS/PhD in CS. It is the L1 visa that allows a company to bring in cheap labor because the limitation on minimum salary by the DoL is not as stringent as H1. For H1 visa, a company has to file for labor certification with DoL and they decide what the minimum prevailing wage for a particular zip code, the skillset and the experience is. [1]
Having said above I agree that the H1 visa IS being abused but the main issue is L1, not H1. there was about 20% abuse a few years ago and there was a huge crackdown by the USCIS and DoL on those doing that.
"They suck at their jobs.", "They can't write a single paragraph in English without grammatical errors", "The people they bring over are the bottom of the barrel in India ", " have no interest in Computer Science" - Way too many generalizations IMO. There are over 100,000 employees in each of the companies, and of course some percentage of them might be what you describe, but I do have some some good friends who are good coders working there... and both the companies mentioned have billion dollars in revenues - not without a reason.
You get what you pay for. We have great outsourcers but they are well compensated and work for boutique firms.
The run of the mill outsources are terrible as you've stated.
This article is bad journalism. I worked in that industry for about 10 years and the way this operates is the company lays off 100 workers and replaces them with 120 contractors, 90 of which are offshore and only 30 are in the U.S. These 30 get, on average, about 60% of the wages (including benefits) that laid off FTEs used to get. However, the client company (e.g. Edison) pays the contracting company (e.g. Tata) roughly the same hourly rate for the on-shore guys. The major source of savings for Edison is moving the work offshore. The 90 folks in India cost about 20% of US FTE. This Google spreadsheet has the math: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g3upQ7KOlgo8sgKLf4Qd...
Let's say for the sake of argument that every Indian immigrant displaces one American from their job. Under what moral calculus is that a bad trade? The per-capita income in India is almost exactly 10 times less than in the US. By American standards, keeping someone from leaving India seems pretty equivalent to condemning them to life-long poverty.
Can you imagine someone making (with a straight face) the argument that people from Detroit shouldn't be allowed to move to San Francisco to take a better job, because they'll steal jobs from and drive down the wages of SF natives? What's the difference?
Because I am legally and morally compelled to pay taxes to my country, and in exchange my country is legally and morally compelled to look out for my interests and well-being--not to find the fastest and most economical means to replace me. It's called the social contract, that is my moral calculus.
I agree that you are legally compelled to pay taxes, but why do you say that you are morally compelled to do so?
Democracy is a kind of majority rule, isn't it?
If the majority votes to take 50% of my income in taxes, and uses the money to start wars around the world, I stumble when it comes to saying I'm morally obligated to pay those taxes.
1) Most of the taxes are paid by businesses and business owners
2) Immigrant workers are paying their taxes as much as you do (or more).
Considering the above and applying your logic, government should remove all restrictions (except security consideration) on bringing foreign workers into the US.
Valentino Mancini has been coming to your grocery store and he's offered to protect you against fire hazards. He made such a compelling offer you couldn't refuse it, and you've been paying him off for years.
Valentino protects you, he's been looking out for you. Like when they tried to build a K-Mart in the neighborhood, and the developer had an unfortunate accident.
But here's the thing, Valentino's consigliere has convinced him to let in a new grocer in the neighborhood, and business hasn't been that good since.
Is it ethical for you to go see Valentino and complain that, since you've been paying him off for years, he should kick that new grocer out of the neighborhood?
The government is different from the Mafia in many ways, and similar in other ways. Analogies are helpful as a source of moral intuition.
What matters in this example is that two wrongs don't make a right.
If it's morally wrong to prevent immigrants from finding jobs in the US, then the fact that the parent has paid taxes is irrelevant. Using it to justify preventing immigrants from getting jobs in the country is begging the question.
Because I believe morally the correct thing to do is not the thing that reduces poverty quickest in the short term, but reduces it the most in the long term. I do not believe economics is a zero-sum game, which would imply that the moral thing to do is to reduce our own fortunes to increase that of others less fortunate.
I think that some countries, being extremely successful, can both help guide other countries into successful strategies (there are hundreds of large scale economic experiments going on at all times by the nature of different states), and help bolster those countries that have followed strategies that were less optimal (global aid).
I do not believe this gives a blank check to some countries to ignore the less fortunate portions of the world, there is an obligation, enforced up by the reality of the threats these places produce, to attempt to help the world as a whole advance, which it largely has done over hundreds of years. This is analogous to the differences in the populace within a country, but I think it's easier for people to see it on a world stage, even if they don't equate it to income disparity within a country.
The global system we've been using, with countries largely distinct, has yielded great gains. Altering major aspects of that system should not be taken lightly, as unforeseen implications could cause great problems (would the world be served better overall if free movement between these countries caused a depression within America, and that happened to trigger a global depression?). That's not to say it shouldn't be tried. Indeed, as others here have posted, is seems the EU is trying this very idea out, to some extent.
> Because I believe morally the correct thing to do is not the thing that reduces poverty quickest in the short term, but reduces it the most in the long term.
I completely agree with this. It's my take on the evidence that immigrants tend to have little effect on wages of native workers on average (except possibly at the bottom of the education distribution), and huge benefits for the immigrants themselves. (As you say, economics is not zero-sum). You just hear more from the small concentrated group of people who are displaced than you do from the large diffuse group who have new customers.
In the other direction, if "brain drain" from poor countries to rich countries was keeping the former poor, then restrictions might be justified to keep skilled workers from leaving. But no one seems to really believe this: restrictions are almost always on immigration, not on emigration.
> Altering major aspects of that system should not be taken lightly
Absolutely. I don't advocate totally open borders tomorrow, but it seems to me that they could be much more open than they currently are without any drastic consequences.
I agree, I think immigration, to a point, just speeds up the speed at which social and economic change are happening, but doesn't drastically change the trajectory. If that's the case, I think it's largely a matter of whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about the future. There is, of course, the problem that advancing the speed to change causes disruption, and too much disruption can have cascading effects where are hard to predict.
Are you volunteering to give up your job for some one who will live in the states and make just about above minimum wage (if that even since Google and some others were caught paying less than minimum wage to migrant workers)?
Some how i doubt so, it's not a question of job displacement it's a question of competitiveness. An Indian developer will cost a fraction of what a US born developer costs even if they are working in the states. And why is that? Simply because it cost about a fraction of what it cost to bring you from infancy to your current stats to do the same to him. Cost of living in India is cheaper, education is cheaper, and well life overall is cheaper.
You have debts, whether they are direct debts say for example student loans or indirect debts to say your parents who brought you up and count on your direct and indirect support in the future.
Flooding the market with skilled workers who are willing to get paid much less tends to break it. No company in the world would say no dude keep the 120K a year + equity if you only ask for 35.
Highly skilled worker visas are there for a reason, they allow very specific people to migrate to the country to work.
The UK for example limits even inter-company transfer to salaries above 50K GPB(77K $), and limits open tier 2 general visas to salaries of 153K GBP a year and above.
There are exceptions for other classes of T2 such as elderly care workers etc.
But for the most part if a company wants to bring a highly skilled employee into the UK they have to either pay them a metric ton of money, or they have to be employed by the company and still get paid a fair wage (slightly less fair if you live in London, but even for London 50K isn't that bad for 1-4 years of experience jobs).
Also last time I've checked Detroit was still a part of the US, India currently isn't. Countries still take care firstly of their own citizens, unless you are advocating here for a complete globalization and abolition of all borders this is nothing more than a demagogic straw-man argument.
"By American standards, keeping someone from leaving India seems pretty equivalent to condemning them to life-long poverty."
That's a bit of a leap.
"Can you imagine someone making (with a straight face) the argument that people from Detroit shouldn't be allowed to move to San Francisco to take a better job, because they'll steal jobs from and drive down the wages of SF natives? What's the difference?"
Probably the fact that Michigan and California are 2 states within the US and whilst America is protectionist (as are most sovereign nations) against other countries when it comes to labour (with few exceptions like the EU), there are laws that prevent this kind of protectionism between states.
> Probably the fact that Michigan and California are 2 states within the US
And yet, until just 20 years ago, you couldn't move from Germany to France for similar reasons. You had to get a work visa. Just because they weren't part of the same union, even though they are neighbouring countries and you could literally commute from Germany to work in France (or vice-versa) every day if you wanted to.
It's more than a leap because it implicitly states that the only way a citizen of India can avoid poverty is to come to the US, and I'm pretty sure there are no shortage of wealthy Indians who became so without immigrating.
Absolutely. I don't mean that it's true on a case-by-case basis, only on average. If you force a large number of Indians who want to move to the US to stay in India, then you will keep a large-but-not-quite-as-large number of people in (relative) poverty.
If someone lives in India, they are likely to have a standard of living below what would be considered poverty level in the United States. If you actively prevent them from taking a job that would take them out of poverty, how else would you describe that?
> Michigan and California are 2 states within the US
This is my point. Why is it morally okay to exclude people from India, but not people from Detroit?
> If someone lives in India, they are likely to have a standard of living below what would be considered poverty level in the United States. If you actively prevent them from taking a job that would take them out of poverty, how else would you describe that?
And thus placing an American in poverty in the process. You've displaced their job and gave it to an Indian who is paid less (so the article suggests). Less federal income tax, less state tax and it's not unreasonable to assume that a portion of the paycheck will be returned to India.
This is why we have foreign aid budgets and charities. People do care and want to give, but what you're suggesting is not the way to go about it.
> This is my point. Why is it morally okay to exclude people from India, but not people from Detroit?
Morally it's not OK. Agreed. Even economically it's possible, but not without severely driving down US living standards. Politically though, it's a disaster.
There is nothing morally wrong with people grouping together to ensure their own collective prosperity. It's something humans have been doing ever since people banded together to hunt gazelle on the savannah. People throughout history have fought and died to have their own country where they could look after their own interests. It follows that there is no moral obligation on the part of tribes to take all comers, if doing so might reduce the properity of their existing members.
Look at it this way. Indians are much richer than sub-Saharan Africans. But go over there and tell them that they have a moral obligation to allow African immigration. People will laugh at you, if you're lucky.
>Indians are much richer than sub-Saharan Africans. But go over there and tell them that they have a moral obligation to allow African immigration. People will laugh at you, if you're lucky.
That wouldn't make them right. Humans are humans, doesn't matter what country they were born in. Just because people have been doing it since forever doesn't mean it makes any sense.
> Humans are humans, doesn't matter what country they were born in..
Doesn't matter to who?... The guy in the US? The guy from India that wants to replace the guy in the US? The guy in Africa that wants to replace the guy in India?
And how does the guy in India feel about the guy in Africa taking his job or lowering his salary, does his stand still stand - or was it one-sided all from the start?
Most humans do see nationality, race, and other attributes of the group - even to the extent of killing someone over it.
But surely at least the commenters of HN can see that the country you are born in is pure chance? And it's really important to remember that when thinking about whether workers from one country or another should be able to work for someone else in another country.
There is a lot more to a person than that single second you are born in... Like the other 1-100 years of your life, most of which you spend in that country and become part of it.
You really don't know that Detroit and San Francisco are in the same country and Mumbai and New York are not?
Because that is the difference. If you arguing that national borders are immoral... well, I might agree in theory. But many more things besides immigration change at that point, and we are not there right now.
According to the article, 50-60 year olds IT specialist who "install, maintain and manage Edison's computer hardware and software" are making $80-$160k / year ($120k on average).
Those salaries seem to be 2-3x market rate for such work. Even the salaries paid to the new, outsorced people ($65-$70 average (sic)) are on the high side for someone who installs software.
The article claims this is a "loophole" because H1B is supposed to replace "highly skilled, hard to replace workers" ergo those $120k/year are not highly skilled, hard to replace, which begs the question: how come are they all making $100-$190k/year (https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/1671...)?
The software they work is probably a lot more complex and customized to Edison. The article notes that some systems are involved in emergency response, which would make the system a lot harder to maintain due to the more stringent requirements.
To put it differently, think of a system that routes phone calls. Twilio and Plivo are great examples of such systems and are very reasonably priced. BUT you cannot route 911 calls through them[1] because they do not offer E911 support out of the box. Doing so would expose them to liability should their systems fail. Your home landline is required to have this and you pay quite a bit more. (Though if you ask me, WAY too much for what it really is.)
Bottom line, critical/emergency systems cost more to run and maintain, with people bearing the responsibility costing more.
The problem with H1-B is that it is temporary in nature and the person gets booted from the country if fired. That depresses wages and is also fundamentally unfair to the immigrant.
H1-Bs should be converted into greencards after 3 years.
Also, anyone graduating from an America college should get a greencard.
Also, anyone graduating from an America college should get a greencard.
No, please, no. We know where that will lead. The so-called "Masters Cap" exists, that's another 20K H1B visa on top of the 65K quota for those graduating with a Masters degree from an American institution. Who could have guessed that that would lead to a cancer of taught masters degrees?
These degrees are cheap to put on (just define a few advanced undergrad classes as required for the Masters degree) and come at no extra cost for the university (the class needs to be taught anyway). Boof, it's free money and a guaranteed stream of desperate foreigners. These "let-me-stay-in-the-US courses" need to be killed dead, they aren't even education.
Meanwhile any foreigner with an actual degree still gets to jump through extraordinary hoops for the green card.
[A]nyone graduating from an America college should get a greencard.
I think a new class of non-employer-dependent work visa for foreign graduates of US colleges and universities would be a great idea, if coupled with H1-B reform.
For example, there should be reform to wage calculations (e.g., forcing companies to use median or average calculations of the wage bands), a hard percentage cap on the number of H1-B employees and contractors a company can employ (in other words, getting rid of "H-1B dependent companies" under 20 CFR 655.736(a)), and tighter evidentiary requirements under 8 USC 1182(G)(i) regarding good-faith efforts to recruit US workers for a position.
Really, though, some of the current legislative brakes should be sufficient to curb some of these abuses. For example, 8 USC 1182(n)(1)(E) seems, prima facie, to be sufficient to deny visas to an H1-B-dependent company which is engaged in displacing US workers -- pretty much the textbook definition of Tata. The fact that it isn't being enforced indicates that there are regulatory problems as well as legislative.
There is no need to invent things here.
Simply removing caps from H1b quotas and employment-based green cards would drastically reduce discrimination of foreign workers.
I believe having a large technically competent domestic work force is of strategic importance to any modern country. If jobs are outsourced to temporary residents, (especially as wage deflation and reverse discrimination starts occurring), less natives choose to enter the fields or otherwise obtain these skills.
They still give the sugar cane industry in Florida large subsidies (even though most sugar is from beets now) because sugar is apparently of such strategic importance to the US. Is one specific kind of sugar of more or less importance than a mass of domestic technical ability?
I'm waiting for the day in which societies realize that the importation of low cost labor produces short term benefits... and then much larger problems which last for a very long time.
(Edit) The problem (mostly) goes away if immigrants come to be permanent residents and have a stake in the system. I'm very much in favor of immigration/citizenship to the US of talented individuals. Nor are my points on strategic importance a long winded way of saying "they took er jurbs!".
I some how doubt that people who go to MIT do it to get a six figure job after they graduate. There are plenty of much "easier" ways of getting paid six figures, heck there are plenty of "blue collar" jobs in certain fields which some are even related to engineering (and 40 years ago would had engineers filling those positions) which American's seem to not want to even touch.
My GF's dad teach meteorology and welding in Iceland (In Europe and Asia you'll still find that in a Uni), half of his students end up working these days in the states for companies like Caterpillar and the bigger ship yards, their starting salaries are between 80 and 120K and they are crying each year and trying to lobby for grants to get US students into these fields. Oil, Mining, and large scale construction and manufacturing which once were fields dominated by US companies are dying to staff various technical and engineering positions however with the current theme in US higher education they can only get workers these days from E. Europe, Russia and China for the most part.
Pushing some graduates out of software engineering and similar studies might actually be good for the US economy in the long run.
However doing it trough migrant visa's which take in people who are paid near to nothing and can't negotiate better terms since dismissal is equivalent to deportation is really not the way to go.
While the article isn't the best written piece I have ready, it as enough facts for me to be outraged as the customer. The rates Edison charges aren't exactly super high to begin with, so me as a consumer saving a few cents here and there isn't going to move the needle.
I would much rather see a company that enjoys monopolistic protection from the government be barred from pulling such stunts. Edison can be viewed as a quasi government entity and absolutely benefits from their monopolistic position. In return, their duty should be to watch out for the greater good of the community that funds it, including employment for individuals from those communities.
If they were subjected to true open market competition, my opinion of this would be vastly different... but they are not.
I agree that it's a loophole, although if it was closed, exactly the same number of jobs would be "lost", because there is a cap. The only difference is that different people would get the H-1B's, which would be good for other reasons.
There is an even bigger loophole in immigration law, which is that the government turns a blind eye to illegal immigration from Mexico. However saying so is considered "racist" since anti-racism is constructed to forbid comments about certain groups, and allow them about others.
It surprises me that liberals generally come down on the side unlimited illegal immigration when the people harmed most are marginalized poor workers who are overwhelmingly disadvantaged minorities themselves (lawful black and Hispanic residents).
Ironically, driving down the cost of labor is great for rich people who are generally conservative and oppose illegal immigration.
It's useful to decouple social liberalism, i.e. that belief that there is no such thing as White culture, and there is no (cultural) harm from large numbers of immigrants from Mexico, from economic liberalism, i.e. the belief that classical economics doesn't adequately describe the economy.
When you separate these things, it is consistent for an orthodox economist to promote more immigration from Mexico (not sure how a person could ever advocate for illegal immigration) while being a social liberal. In classical economics, immigrations is (1) good for the immigrant (2) bad for the local workers they are competing with and (3) good for the employers. According to classical economics, the net benefit is positive, and so (with appropriate taxation policy) the overall result is good for the nation.
Personally I am orthodox when it comes to economics. The only thing I don't understand is that the liberals apply orthodox economic arguments when it comes to Mexican immigrants, but refuse to apply these same arguments when it comes to H-1B visas.
To me it is clear that their real agenda is to promote non-White immigration, but to keep sentiment against Indian and Chinese immigrants as a safe way to express "racist" thoughts.
And here we go again with H1Bs. Let me spare the discussion and give a numbered list of options to stick with - I propose everyone just writes his number in his comment.
1) H1Bs are both good and evil. We need reform.
2) US Government sucks. I'm skilled and cannot enter this country. Increase the quota.
3) Immigrants hurt local labor so much I can't stand it. Just throw them out.
American jobs = jobs in America. Jobs that can be offered to anyone approved by the American government to live and work in the country.
Theoretically you could hire anyone. You just couldn't expect them to show up to the office unless the government lets them into the country. If the company doesn't like this, they can let the person work in their own country instead of coming to America, but then that's not an American job anymore.
Immigration laws and national borders aside, this is how an economy works. 'Price' performs an economic function of major significance by distributing resources according to demand.
It is unfortunate whenever I see that anger being directed at the indian worker who is just trying to make a living by working his ass off at a fraction of the pay on contract. The Congress isn't closing loop holes, the companies exploiting this are companies where most of the top management are americans and finally the indian outsourcing companies giving kickbacks to get the big contracts and paying only a tiny fraction of that.
What is the actual loophole, the article doesn't spell it out (or I missed it) it seems that if a company is laying off an employee and then replacing the employee with an h1b employee, then the company has broken the law. I don't see the loophole that is being exploited.
A couple of thoughts on this. What's the difference between allowing h1bs and allowing people over the fence along the border? Illegal entry into the country, even if we all for amnesty, puts a dent on the income potential of citizens and immigrants at the lower income levels, who legally enter society... But for the most part, society recognizes the plight of low class immigrants and work to have them legitimized, however, when immigration threatens people in the middle class, they resist.
What I'm pointing out is that middle class American citizens are quite in favor of allowing immigration, doing as it does not affect them negatively, economically speaking, once it does, the middle class retrenches. I think this explains why poor American citizens tend to oppose amnesty programs while the middle class typically support it. Typical, I support causes, so long as it does not affect me negatively.
The issue is the nature of the h1b: if you lose your job, you're immediately kicked out. This gives employers much more leverage over their employees, allowing them to suppress wages. It's the nature of the h1b, which doesn't encourage people to invest in and make roots in the country they emigrate to, the problem. On the other hand, there's very little evidence that there's a "fixed" number of jobs in the country: allowing more people in likely causes more opportunities, especially if they have children, buy a house, etc.
There are a few possible solutions to this, such as:
- Make it so once you have an h1b, you have the right to stay in the US for at least 1 year, whether your job is terminated, and make it easy for another employer to take over your h1b. This gives immigrants leverage over a bad employer, in the form of being able to go somewhere that will pay them more.
- Make h1bs go to the highest bidders: each company says what salary they're going to give the h1b holder, and those companies paying the most get the visas.
Illegal immigrants can also be deported and have this hanging around their neck throughout their stay. So I don't think it's that.
I think the middle class and upper classes say they believe in principles, except when believing those principles will affect their way of life.
For example, in SF, kids from areas with historically low scholastic performance are bused into schools with better performance, the hope is that aptitude will 'rub off'. Upper class SFers, are for this, it's socially responsible, but they put their own kids in private schools --the middle class immigrants I speak to, wish they could send their children to schools in their neighborhood, rather than ending up in a random school where performance is suspect.
Immigration laws and national borders aside, this is how an economy works. 'Price' performs an economic function of major significance by distributing resources according to demand (as long as they're not artifically controlled).
The article implies that american workers deserve better pay than foreigners and even deserve legal protection that would put discriminate foreigners in order to give american workers their jobs back.
There is something deeply wrong with that attitude.
I don't think there was any implication that the American worker deserves more, or that the foreigner deserves less. Just that is what the rates are.
And yes, you can't invite a foreign worker into America to displace an American. Most countries have that rule, what is wrong with attitude of a country trying to protect its citizens?
