H-1B visas see slow demand but finally reach limit

[Newsjock]

Source: San Jose Mercury News

After a slow start because of the recession, applications for the high-tech industry's favorite work visa, the H-1B, reached the cap of 65,000 this month, federal immigration authorities said this week.

The announcement by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services might appear to be one more sign of an economy on the mend, but compared to previous years, applications for the normally popular — and controversial — work visa have moved at a snail's pace.

... Roy Beck, president of Numbers USA, a group that favors immigration restrictions, said the visa is too often used to bring in average rather than top talent. "We don't advocate reducing the 65,000 cap," he said. "We just advocate increasing the criteria so H-1Bs are only used to hire really top quality programmers."

... The number of H-1B visas issued far exceeds the 65,000 cap because universities and their affiliates, non-profits and government research organizations are exempt from the limit. Combined, more than 276,000 H-1B visas were issued in fiscal year 2008, according to USCIS' most current data. For fiscal year 2009, Wipro, an information technology service company headquartered in Bangalore, India, was the top user, with 1,964 visas, followed by Microsoft, with 1,318 visas. Intel was No. 3, with 723. Among the many other tech industry or valley users are Cisco, Oracle, Google, Yahoo, Apple and Stanford University.

Read more: http://www.mercurynews.com/politics-government/ci_14066922?nclick_check=1

[Techn0Girl]

1. Well that's just great 64,000 more Americans displace from jobs this month. Thank you Big Business!

[JoeyT]

6. Yep.

We didn't need those jobs anyway. *grumbles*

[OhioChick]

2. This program should be halted with unemployment so high. n/t

[scentopine]

3. companies love them because

H1B employees are the most compliant employees. They aren't smarter, they just never tell the boss bad news. And if they should make that mistake - they could end up back in India in disgrace.

- you can pay them much less
- employers think they are unregulated and not protected by US labor law (it isn't true, but many employers think and operate as if its true)
- they are completely disposable, no hassles with firing them.
- *not* more qualified than American workers. Just the opposite. However, they are far more compliant and horribly prone to kissing ass even as the company goes out of business for poor quality and/or idiotic technical decisions made by inexperienced H1B employees.

I've watched this trend emerge for more than 30 years. MBA type technical managers love H1Bs because they seem like no hassle and MBA/managers love having their ass kissed - sort of a one night stand and you never have to say I love you. But H1Bs can quickly sink a company with their blind obedience and fear of management. The MBAs don't have the technical skills and experience to recognize when bad decisions are being made (often by H1Bs) and H1Bs dare not bring bad news to their bosses.

[Greyhound]

5. K&R. I couldn't have written it better.

The tyranny of the MBAs is ruining every American business.

[aggiesal]

4. Go to Qualcomm in San Diego, ...

I call it "Little Calcutta"
When I went to interview there, I'd swear that 99% are H1B's
from India.

I consider H1B's as slave labor, because although they are suppose
to be paid the prevail wage, they really get paid about 50% - 60% of
what a citizen would get.

They can't complain because they'd be on the next flight out to
where-ever they came from.

This is a slave.

[BlueSun]

7. H-1b

The H-1b visa is a temporary work visa, good for a maximum of 3 years (with the possibility of one renewal). IT DOES NOT LEAD TO A GREEN CARD OR ANY PERMANENT RESIDENCY. When the visa is up, the worker must return home.

The law on qualifying for H-1b visas has two requirements that are broken almost 100% of the time.

1) The H-1b visa is designed for American companies to bring in temporary workers if, and only, if they have a specific skill that the company has looked for, but could not find among American workers.

2) An H-1b visa can not be issued if the person receiving it will be depriving a qualified American of a job.

The companies who sponsor H-1b visas (just about every major corporation and software company that doesn't require a security clearance) routinely lie on both issues when they fill out their sponsorship papers for H-1bs. Most of the people who come in are decent enough programmers, but with skills no better than tens of thousands of out-of-work American programmers. They are willing to work for wages often a third of wages 10 years ago, and have dragged down the salary and hourly rate scales of the entire industry. They are far more of a threat than off-shored jobs, because they devalue each and every job, not just those that are sent abroad. In addition, most send the bulk of their salaries home, so our economy doesn't even benefit much from these workers.

They pose a second, and in the long run, more insidious danger. For a long time the media have been exaggerating the effect of off-shoring projects. Because of dramatically different social and business cultures between, say, America and India, many offshore projects were not particularly successful. No matter how detailed the specifications were, there was just too much of a gap in business cultures and practices. Mostly, the successful off-shore projects involved maintenance and enhancement programming, with full system development lagging in its success rate.

However, now we are bringing in hundreds of thousands of foreign programmers to work for 3 to 6 years in America's largest corporations and businesses. When they go home, as they inevitably have to, they take a thorough education in American business practices home with them to teach to other developers.

In addition to the short-term loss of jobs to foreigners and the savaging of formerly decent pay scales for highly trained and skilled "knowledge workers," we are now training other countries' software development industry to compete against us with much greater success.

As you can probably guess, I'm in the software industry, a self-employed high-level development consultant with over 30 years experience, so I've watched this phenomenon grow from the start. I can't even remember the last project I did in which anything approaching half of the developers were Americans or permanent resident foreigners.

If Obama is serious about doing something about the skyrocketing rise in unemployment, he can put at least a temporary stop to the issuance of H-1b and L-7 visas (a similar temp visa) and return hundreds of thousands of Americans back to well-paying positions in perhaps the last "knowledge worker" industry that we are (or used to be) highly competitive in.

I'm not holding my breath as long as he acts the captive of the very corporations that are profiting from the cheap third-world labor and generally slashed salaries.