A Murder Shatters the Dreams of Immigrant Tech Workers

[IronLionZion]

I subscribe to Wired and the printed title was: "Murder in the Heartland".

https://www.wired.com/story/adam-purinton-shooting-olathe-kansas/

“He’s back, and he has a gun!”

Adam Purinton strode toward the patio of Austins Bar & Grill, a black and white cloth tied around his head and military-style medals pinned haphazardly to his white shirt.

He burst into the patio’s flimsy side door shouting, “Get out of my country!” and fired his handgun at two Indian men seated at a high table, according to eyewitnesses and police records. Customers screamed over the din of the TVs and dove for the ground. At least three bullets hit the man facing the door, Srinivas Kuchi­bhotla. Another bullet plunged into the leg of his friend, Alok Madasani, who crawled for the door before collapsing on the concrete. Alok’s wife was pregnant with their first child, due in four months, and all he could think of was living to see his baby’s face. Survive, he thought.

Ian Grillot, a 24-year-old former Marine, ducked under a table nearby, counting the blasts of bullets. The shots stopped. When Purinton turned and ran out of the bar, heading toward the back parking lot, Grillot bolted after him. Hearing footsteps closing in, Purinton allegedly whirled around and sent a bullet tearing through Grillot’s hand and into his chest. On the patio, a bloodied Kuchibhotla sank to the ground. People scrambled over upended tables and broken glasses to the wounded men. One knelt at Kuchibhotla’s side, pushing napkins into his wounds. Another ripped off his own shirt, tying it around Madasani’s leg as a tourniquet. Several people ran out to Grillot, who kept talking talking talking to retain consciousness as his blood seeped out.

...

A survey last year found that 70 percent of voters of Indian heritage were in favor of Clinton. “Indians kind of despise Trump,” says Sanjoy Chakravorty, a Temple University professor and coauthor of The Other One Percent: Indians in America. “But many of them live in these very suburban communities where the sentiment runs the other way. They keep a low profile and don’t discuss with neighbors how they feel.”

...

In Kansas, the tech industry’s gripe about the shortage of qualified talent is becoming a full-throated dirge. Four math or computer-related jobs remain open for every unemployed worker in the area, according to the Mid-America Regional Council, but recruiting from outside the Midwest is difficult.

Some important quotes from the article

“Where are you from?”

“Why are you here in this country?!”

“We pay for your visas to be here. You need to get out of here! You don’t belong here!”

“You’re going to stick up for them?”

“What a douchebag!” “We’re all Americans.”

“You must be a tech guy too”

She closed with a question, in all caps: “DO WE BELONG HERE?” The Kansans sitting on the patio at Austins that night, the ones who ran to Alok and Srinu’s side, had one answer. The man with the gun had another.

It's a good read. Very well written and it humanizes the people involved by going into their stories.

On a related note, I'm American, born and raised, yet people think I must be on some visa.
I'm qualified and work in the business/functional side, yet people think I should be writing code.
And for some reason I always get selected for the completely random extra screening at airports...Every...Single...Time.
Being from America helps only on paper until they see my brown face.

Some people are worried that someone is coming to steal their jobs. Other people are worried that some loser is coming to kill us.

[IronLionZion]

1. Before Charlottesville, a String of Killings Raised the Specter of Far-Right Violence

The death of Heather D. Heyer, who was killed on Saturday after a man drove a car into counterprotesters at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., was the latest in a string of fatal attacks that have raised the specter of far-right, racist or anti-immigrant violence.

The police said James Alex Fields Jr., 20, of Ohio was driving the car and charged him with second-degree murder and related crimes. The Department of Justice was opening a civil rights investigation into Ms. Heyer’s death; Attorney General Jeff Sessions called it an act of terrorism.

During the rally, Mr. Fields was photographed marching with Vanguard America, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as a white supremacist group that uses Nazi rhetoric. One of his former teachers, Derek Weimer, told The Cincinnati Enquirer that Mr. Fields once wrote a paper “very much along the party lines of the neo-Nazi movement.”

Here is a list of recent killings that law enforcement officials have linked to suspects with a history of racist and anti-immigrant views or affiliation with white supremacist groups.



https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/14/us/charlottesville-nazi-kkk-attacks.html

[dalton99a]

2. +1

[Amishman]

3. I work in tech, the threat of H1B replacements is real

Foreign labor is a threat to people's livelihoods in the tech industry. I've lost two jobs due to the work (our entire team's jobs) going overseas. I've been squeezed out of another job due to management aggressively trying to bring in as many H1Bs as possible.

Action is sorely needed, but the anger is very misdirected.

It's not the immigrants fault, they are doing what is in their best interest to make their lives better. They absolutely should not be the scapegoat.

The problem is the employers. They are more interested in higher profits than the best interests of the employees. And it can be a huge cost savings to offshore work or bring in H1Bs. The savings of.offshoring is obvious, but H1Bs are less so. The program requires the foreign worker to be paid a competitive wage. And while this gets fudged a little, the real savings is in hours. An H1B worker is far less mobile in the workplace, and it is easy for.an employer to overburden them into working 60 or 70 hours a week. Most domestic workers would quickly leave for another company, but guest workers can't due to complicated sponsorship requirements. So the employer gets 1.5 person's of work out if one person with no extra expenditure and little fear of the worker quitting.

The other argument is that the foreign workers are needed due to a shortage of domestic talent. This is true but misleading. The reason for the shortage of talent is few employers are willing to train and deal with the learning curve that comes with an inexperienced employee, plus they might just up and leave after coming up to speed. This essentially creates a barrier to entry and keeps the talent shortage ongoing. Much easier and profitable to bring in someone from overseas.

We do need reform in this area. My idea is twofold: make all guest workers (H1B and other programs) hourly and subject to overtime. It removes the financial incentive to exploit these workers. The second part is financial incentives to create what would essentially be white collar apprenticeship program to build talent.

As automation expands we are going to have a lot of people not just losing their jobs but losing their existing career. We need to rebuild our labor market so they can find new careers.

[IronLionZion]

4. Very few Americans would tolerate the working conditions of foreign labor

the long work hours, the frequent relocation, limited ability to change employers, being far away from spouse/children for long periods of time, and and straight up dishonesty and abuse. It's thankless work and the ones who do it are the ones who find it's much better than what they had back in their home countries where conditions are worse. Workers want jobs just like anyone else. No one is trying to "steal" a job from someone else.

You make very sensible points. I'll add the nature of IT as a cost center (rather than revenue generating) in many companies is why much of it is contracted out. Americans don't like the contracting lifestyle. I certainly don't. It's taken me many years and switching companies several times with several periods of unemployment before I got to join a great company that values it's people and invests in career growth.

I will say that the job openings are real, even though they are not what I want. I get plenty of recruiters contacting me about opportunities for testing/development/system admin/etc. in the red areas of the Midwest and rural South. Places where my grandparents were smart enough to steer clear from because they were still segregated when they immigrated to America.

Tech apprenticeships would be a great way for companies to grow their own talent. It happens in some software and services companies who hire paid interns as a form of recruiting talent. The university I attended had a mandatory requirement that everyone in my program must do co-op/internships as a requirement to graduate. It was difficult finding internships but it is doable. Colleges and tech schools should do a better job partnering with employers to facilitate this.

Way too many employers and clients have completely unreasonable expectations for how much experience and training a person should have while offering a very low wage and no job security.

Automation has always been the biggest threat to jobs. Elevator operators were put out of work by buttons. Lots of construction and excavation workers were put out by machinery like backhoes and bulldozers. Same with farming and factories. When I worked in testing/QA it was becoming increasingly automated with scripts that would replace lots of tedious manual testers. So Americans won't do it and increasingly humans won't do it.