I'm honestly not sure what point you are trying to make. That US CS programs aren't as rigorous as foreign programs? That US CS programs aren't also filled with foreign students, further displacing and out pricing citizens?
My point is, we have 1.7 Million college educated grads currently unemployed[0].
We have an estimated 650,000 H1B workers[1].
I'd say we have plenty of educated, hard working, and able citizens to fill these positions.
There are many assumptions here that you should question.
- That the 1.7 million college grads who are unemployed work in the same field as the H-1B workers. H-1B workers tend to commonly be in engineering / science / medecine / etc. Mostly Bachelors in Science degrees. The most common majors in the US are mostly BA degrees. You can't just plop those people into what they're not trained in.
- That the 1.7 million college grads who are unemployed are unemployed because of H1B workers, and that if those workers weren't there, the unemployed college grads would be employed.
- That any worker can be anywhere at any time. If a company is in North Dakota and needs a programmer, it doesn't matter that there are 1000 unemployed American programmers in New York.
- That when someone graduates, they're able to perform their profession up to the standard required. That they are "good". This should be laughable if you've ever been to any college short of the top 30. 1.7 million graduates don't mean 1.7 million desirable employees.
Unemployment sure is a huge problem, but I think you might be barking up the wrong tree here if you're looking for a cause. Getting rid of the H-1B is not going to help much, from what I can tell.
> - That the 1.7 million college grads who are unemployed work in the same field as the H-1B workers. H-1B workers tend to commonly be in engineering / science / medecine / etc. Mostly Bachelors in Science degrees. The most common majors in the US are mostly BA degrees. You can't just plop those people into what they're not trained in.
I don't believe that a Bachelors degree necessarily limits your career options. Holding a four year degree basically means you are trainable, committed, and follow the rules. The ideal employee. I'm willing to disagree on this point.
> - That the 1.7 million college grads who are unemployed are unemployed because of H1B workers, and that if those workers weren't there, the unemployed college grads would be employed.
I made no such statement.
> - That any worker can be anywhere at any time. If a company is in North Dakota and needs a programmer, it doesn't matter that there are 1000 unemployed American programmers in New York.
This comment makes no sense when we are talking about foreign workers who have to cross continents and oceans to get to North Dakota
> - That when someone graduates, they're able to perform their profession up to the standard required. That they are "good". This should be laughable if you've ever been to any college short of the top 30. 1.7 million graduates don't mean 1.7 million desirable employees.
I think you are just repeating your first point here. I'd be willing to bet 90% of H1Bs don't hold degrees from the top 30, or whatever arbitrary cutoff you have. I'm not interested in pedigree. 1.7 million graduates should certainly be 1.7 million desirable employees (or at least 650k), and if it isn't, then it sounds like we found the root cause.
> Unemployment sure is a huge problem, but I think you might be barking up the wrong tree here if you're looking for a cause. Getting rid of the H-1B is not going to help much, from what I can tell.
I never once suggested that H1B is the cause of unemployment.
> - I don't believe that a Bachelors degree necessarily limits your career options. Holding a four year degree basically means you are trainable, committed, and follow the rules. The ideal employee. I'm willing to disagree on this point.
Some employers wont touch you for entry level roles, because they assume with a degree, you'd jump ship for something better paying in your field at the first chance.
> I don't believe that a Bachelors degree necessarily limits your career options. Holding a four year degree basically means you are trainable, committed, and follow the rules. The ideal employee. I'm willing to disagree on this point.
How is someone with say a Bachelors in Sociology an ideal tech employee? A degree is about specialized education and you're completely ignoring that. That's why it's called "higher learning", it's not Highschool Part 2.
Sigh. This is tiring, but I'll bite. You implied that the unemployed college grads could be working the H-1B workers' jobs. Heck, in this comment I'm replying to, you say:
> 1.7 million graduates should certainly be 1.7 million desirable employees (or at least 650k)
So, you did make such a statement. The sentiment that there is some overlap could be true to a small degree. But if you'll listen this time, I'll try to rephrase why the 1.7 million unemployed college grads might not be able to replace the 650k for the most part (or vice versa).
- Not having the right training. You seem to think a bachelor's degree is magic and if you have a BA in Political Science, you can be a Lawyer or a Chemist (or vice versa), simply because you're trainable and committed. I guess a person could be retrained to a different profession maybe (rare in reality), but that requires getting yet another degree. Who will pay for that?
- Not being good enough. Graduation standards are pretty low on average. I disagree about the grads being trainable, committed and following the rules part. Seriously, when I was talking about "top 30", I wasn't talking about H-1B workers, I was giving an exception to the trend I noticed where in most schools, merely graduating is the bare minimum. Which means that a college grad in the 1.7 million unemployed doesn't necessarily have skills.
- Not having homogenous demand across the country. The point with the NY-N. Dakota anecdote is that it's possible to have a shortage in one part of the country and too much in another. So what's the company in North Dakota to do? Immigrant workers tend to be okay with, well, immigrating. Most other workers aren't open to relocation, so they are tend to not fill those positions. So a position belonging to an H-1B in one of these places might not necessarily be able to be filled with a native.
Another way to think about this is consider how many orders of magnitude workers there are who are NOT immigrating to the US. By accepting immigrant workers, you're self-selecting people who are by definition more willing to move to places.
So the point is that it's not likely that these two groups of workers overlap very much.
If you want to rail on immigration, rail on the L-1. No wage minimums (to ensure undercutting locals), no skill or degree requirements, no quota, no requirement to have tried to hire a local, workers can't move to other companies. Some companies can apply for a blanket L-1 and they don't even need to file a new petition for each worker. The L-1 is legitimately everything you dislike about the H-1B.
How many of those 1.7 Million unemployed US college grads refused to consider market demand when they were choosing their major, because they were mistakenly lead to believe that either "Any college degree is good enough for any job, because it is still the 1950s." or "I shouldn't have to consider employment when picking my major because I should be able to study whatever I find intellectually gratifying and society will then owe me a good job in fields that I did not study."?
Perhaps my university was unusually good (I do not believe that) but all of the people in my graduating CS class that I still have contact with are happily employed. I know this because about once a year I ping them asking if they want recommendations at my company... I'm trying to get those sweet referral bonuses...
> "The foreign workers aren't actually that high skilled and their education is questionable."
I work alongside many H1B people. They are all highly competent.
A point I made above, but I don't really think a 4 year degree decides your future, it just shows you are trainable and can commit to something. I've worked with plenty of water walker software developers that didn't have a CS degree to know this is true.
> I work alongside many H1B people. They are all highly competent.
I work along side a lot of H1B people. They are all kind, smart, and competent. But they are people, there is nothing special about them, which was the whole point of the H1B program.
> "I don't really think a 4 year degree decides your future, it just shows you are trainable and can commit to something."
Jim wants a job in software development, but instead studied [something that isn't related to software development]. Do you know what Jim's degree says to me? It says that Jim is not willing to put in the effort to learn about something that he supposedly wants to be involved in. Is he actually interested in the work?
If Jim can somehow convince me that he actually does care about the work (say, an extensive github account, previous employment in the field, or even perhaps one hell of a cover letter) then I would be more than willing to overlook the fact that he chose to get a degree in something unrelated. In absence of those things though? I'd rather find somebody who can point to their degree as evidence that they care enough about the field to spend time studying it.
I don't fault for employers for using the system they are given to cut costs, but that's all it is.
I'd be fine if it were an immigration visa, but these worker visa programs have no oversight and there is no conversation at the decision making level representing the american worker.
the cheap labor angle isn't irrelevant just because you say so. It's been documented that a) there are plenty of STEM graduates b) H1B workers are under paid[0]
"Those certifications represented far less than 1 percent of the approximately 960,000 H-1B applications approved by the U.S. Department of Labor between 2002 and 2005"
Sorry, that's terribly weak sauce for an argument.
Alright, I stand corrected. Do you think it's worth the time/opportunity cost/H1B costs/lawyers as opposed to hiring a local worker, if there's not something else going on?
How would that make the field more attractive? If the aforementioned Europeans and Asians left, and Americans moved in afterwards, aren't you essentially implying Americans cannot keep up with them?
Except we're not talking about outsourced work, and not about unqualified work either. Great job misrepresenting and misunderstanding what the issue is about.
The only reason prices are so low is because it's all outsourced. If you want Americans to do the work of the SEA and China, then you're going to pay a lot more for your shit. Those low prices are the only thing that a lot of people rely on their livelihood for.
No, I'm implying that a lot of capable Americans prefer not to work in fields flooded with foreigners. The status attached to working in the field would improve and attract more native candidates.
