New H-1B bill will 'help destroy' U.S. tech workforce

[antigop]

http://www.computerworld.com/article/2868428/new-h-1b-bill-will-help-destroy-us-tech-workforce.html

New legislation being pushed by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) to hike the H-1B visa cap is drawing criticism and warnings that it will lead to an increase in offshoring of tech jobs.

IEEE-USA said the legislation, introduced by a bipartisan group of lawmakers on Tuesday, will "help destroy" the U.S. tech workforce with guest workers.

Other critics, including Ron Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University and a leading researcher on the issue, said the bill gives the tech industry "a huge increase in the supply of lower-cost foreign guest workers so they can undercut and replace American workers."

Hira said this bill "will result in an exponential rise of American jobs being shipped overseas."

Technically, the bill is a reintroduction of the earlier "I-Square" bill, but it includes enough revisions to be considered new. It increases the H-1B visa cap to 195,000 (instead of an earlier 300,000 cap), and eliminates the cap on people who earn an advanced degree in a STEM (science, technology, education and math) field.

[Travis_0004]

1. I never understood the 'H1 bad, undocumented good'

If you work in IT and an H1 employee undercuts your pay that is bad, but if you work in construction and an undoccumented immigrant undercuts your pay nobody seems to mind.

[dreamnightwind]

3. Crickets....

Good point, and a very complex issue.

I do not claim to have enough understanding of imigration policy and this country's history with it to weigh in, but you raise a point that obviously exposes some hypocrisy of one form or another, and I rarely see honest discussion of it, usually just entrenched interests yelling at each other when this issue comes up.

The way I remember things, undocumented immigration increased by orders of magnitude (I have no idea if that is literally true) under Reagan and GHW Bush, who no doubt looked the other way to give their corporate sponsors a large supply of cheap unregulated domestic labor (I call it insourcing, may not be the correct term though). Most Democratic politicians these days represent the same corporations, so there is that. It isn't only that, though, there is also a more tolerant and accepting attitude towards immigration on the left.

Personally I think we should make it easier to immigrate legally, set reasonable, even liberal, numbers of people to allow in, and they would then have full rights when they're here, no need to hide in the shadows and work for peanuts, which would help raise the wage floor for many others. Undocumented immigration seems problematic to me in a number of ways. But I make no claim to fully understanding the complexities of all of this, excellent point you raised though, one the left should probably have a lot more discussion of.

I'm an unemployed tech worker, older, out of date skills, so H1-B to me is bad news, I would hope we would train people like myself (Obama recently paid at least lip service to this idea while also pushing an increase in H1-B's) rather than importing people to do it. I would probably feel the same way if I was an unemployed construction worker, though that would be about undocumented imigration rather than about H1-B's.

[jeff47]

5. Actually, undocumented immigration shot up after NAFTA

NAFTA destroyed Mexico's agricultural sector. That lead to a lot of joblessness, and they came to the US looking for work. Creating a very, very large spike in undocumented workers.

Generally, undocumented immigrants are not directly hired by large corporations - the risk is too large. Instead, they will be hired by small businesses or suppliers to the large corporations. That allows big companies to have plausible deniability if a supplier gets busted.

[dreamnightwind]

7. How did NAFTA destroy Mexico's ag sector?

We get tons of Mexican produce up here, more than we used to. I don't doubt it, just wondering what happened and how it displaced so many.

What I do remember, though, is undocumented immigration took a huge leap in the days prior to NAFTA, during the Reagan/Bush years. GHW Bush in particular got a lot of criticism for it.

[jeff47]

8. Mexico's Ag sector was not as mechanized as the US Ag sector

So US farms could grow crops cheaper than Mexican farms, and Mexico had used tariffs to protect their farms. NAFTA removed those tariffs.

And since they weren't as mechanized, that meant losing their Ag sector caused a lot more people to lose work.

What I do remember, though, is undocumented immigration took a huge leap in the days prior to NAFTA, during the Reagan/Bush years.

That leap was nowhere near as large as the post-NAFTA leap. IIRC, that "leap" was around a million. The post-NAFTA boom was in the tens of millions.

[jeff47]

4. Both are bad.

But fixing the undocumented workers problem would require a non-insane GOP, or going after the employers (which both parties are going to block).

Additionally, the Democrats keep running with the idea that all the people who lose their jobs to free trade deals can just retrain for a STEM job....and then undercut that with H1B visas.

[Thor_MN]

2. Attach H-1CEO language

If executive wages are rising so rapidly, there is an obvious severe shortage of executive talent in this country and corporations simply must import talent from outside the country to be competitive. We need to bring the brightest and best executives to this country because there simply are not enough qualified executives here.

[OhioChick]

6. The H-1B program is a joke n/t