Bill Gates's Wish Is Homeland Security's Command

theodp writes "PC World reports that DHS has extended the time foreign graduates of US colleges can stay in the country and work to almost two-and-a-half years, an 'emergency' change that drew kudos from Microsoft and other H-1B visa stakeholders. Looks like when Bill Gates says 'Jump,' the government asks 'How high?' Bill Gates's Congressional Testimony, March 12, 2008: 'Extending OPT from 12 to 29 months would help to alleviate the crisis employers are facing due to the current H-1B visa shortage. This only requires action by the Executive Branch, and Congress and this Committee should strongly urge the Department of Homeland Security to take such action immediately.' DHS Press Release, April 4, 2008: 'The US Department of Homeland Security released today an interim final rule extending the period of Optional Practical Training (OPT) from 12 to 29 months for qualified F-1 non-immigrant students.'"

Misleading headline

Bill Gates has been testifying for years, yet little has been done to increase H1-B limits. It's hardly as if anyone is acting under his control...

Yay, Flamebait!

Thanks for the very opinionated analysis on how apparently Bill Gates is now ordering the US government but the fact of the matter is this request was good for both parties, good for science, and good for the industry.

Now get off my lawn!

Re:Yay, Flamebait!

Yeah, singling out Microsoft seems a bit out of line. How about a list of other companies who supported/opposed this?

Nice propagandizing

Or maybe, instead of "Looks like when Bill Gates says 'Jump,' the government asks 'How high?'", it's actually "When Bill Gates identifies a real problem, the government actually considers it."

Yes, they have access to government. No, there is no magic.

Disingenous tripe

Bill Gates, eh? What about all the other companies that lobbied to get this trough? IBM is one of the largest importers of foreign labor, but of course we don't want to mention that. Heck, IBM is the largest employer of L1 visa [wikipedia.org] holders. IBM uses these visas to get around the salary and posting requirements of H1-B visas. Thousands and thousands of Indians, Chinese and Russians are in the US occupying jobs under L1 visas and working for IBM and a few other companies, mostly on mid- and lower-level IT jobs that pay well but don't require high qualifications, and of which there is no shortage in this country.

Microsoft does not use L1 visas, because they don't import cheap outsourced labor like IBM does. They are trying to bring in valuable, qualified college graduates to this country to fill higher-level positions that cannot be filled with US-based engineers because at that level, there truly is a shortage.

But hey, this is Slashdot so we can happily spin this so that it seems Bill Gates is manipulating US immigration policies for his own benefit. That way we get another "Microsoft is teh evil" bullet point for the "advocacy" folks, and Slashdot sells more ads. Everybody wins.

-1, Sensationalist Headline

Wow, if you read all the articles linked, you'd know that it was not just Bill Gates, but others as well who testified on this subject. Secondly, a lot of companies support this, Google included. Finally, people from both parties support this.

The majority of the people who are on OPT are folks who're in the US to go to graduate school. Rather than send them back, they are trying to extend the amount of time that they can stay in the country. How is this a bad thing?

If anything, the number of native US candidates going to graduate school is much lesser than the number of foreign nationals coming to the US for graduate school. How is trying to retain folks who get advanced degrees a bad thing in any way?

Finally, a lot of people with graduate degrees (i.e. majority of folks on OPT) are by no means cheap - so, the old excuse that they are being exploited etc. does not quite work here.

Enough of the bullshit, already. A lot of folks petitioned about extending the OPT status for international students who go to graduate school in the US, and have to return because of visa policies (the H1B cap was met within a few hours last year). So, the government considered what the companies wanted and agreed to do this.

Why Single Out Bill?

Granted, Microsoft is far from alone [competeamerica.org] when it comes to relying on the Visa Crutch [eweek.com]. But it was Bill Gates whose pleas were singled out by DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff [flickr.com] as he rationalized the need for 'emergency' action [flickr.com].

Re:Before you criticize...

They're going to do the same programming and science work, whether they are here or in India/Romania/Singapore/etc. We can get them to pay US taxes and buy other goods and services in the US, or we can just ship our money overseas and let other countries take a lead in high-tech. Smart students exist overseas; the question is whether we can get them to come here and benefit us, or let them work elsewhere and allow the US to decline.

Re:Before you criticize...

That's why I don't get some people's claims that we're suckling at the American tit. We pay taxes, pay rent / buy property, buy products and services locally, etc.

Re:Oh FUCK

That's completely unreasonable. I've worked with many excellent Indian programmers. The ones who've been H1B and working here in the US have shown the same range of skill as US-native employees.

This implies it's a factor of the company's hiring processes, not anything to do with their national or educational origin.

Outsource teams have their own common issues, but they have a lot more to do with the distance and management issues than with ethnicity or culture.

Re:Oh FUCK

Every time there is a story about India, all comments are about call centers (yeah! I know they suck!), or Cows. Still, I have never read so much crap on Slashdot before.

As an Indian, I have never, never, found caste being a problem, except when you want to marry a girl - and when a guy wants to bail out of some situation and invokes this card. Your hyperbole about "authority" and "cultural difference" is nothing but rotting xenophobia. That, or you are just pain trolling.

GP was dead on point when it stated that most Indians are taught programming in the companies - they completely lack any interest in over the top performance - they know they are cheap workers, and they know their job is laborious. So much for the motivation.

I guess that over there, they learn to work based only on what is given them, and not to think as independently as we are over here, to look for a new way to do things, etc.

O RLY? So you don't know anything about "over there" and want to make sweeping uninformed statements... I wonder why you are not preferred.

Of course, this is based only on my observations from work experience.

I doubt GP had taken India culture as a course, or spent years in India. What you understand from what you see is a product of your mind. Until the Indians have personally told you how they are not taught to innovate(?), it is xenophobia - a complete lack of interest in people who are taking your jobs.

Re:Oh FUCK

"I doubt GP had taken India culture as a course, or spent years in India. What you understand from what you see is a product of your mind. Until the Indians have personally told you how they are not taught to innovate(?), it is xenophobia - a complete lack of interest in people who are taking your jobs."

The GP's allude to how bad Indian programmers are perceived in the US. I was merely stating my observations from working with them in the business over several years. No, I don't know much about Indian culture, never been there, never had much need to learn it, but, from what little I do know or have read about, that was what I was basing my guess on as to the reasons behind my observations.

Just because you observe something, and it happens to be another race, culture or whatever, doesn't make you racist or xenophobic. I hate to think stating what you have experience with others, even if it is negative is the latest thing in the new 'PC' world that you can no longer state or discuss.

Sorry if what I and others have observed working with Indians, but, I cannot believe that all of us are making it up independantly. There must be some truth to it for these things to be stated so prevalently....sorry, but grow some thicker skin. If it doesn't apply to you, then don't worry about it.

Re:Oh FUCK

Immigration is probably the only thing keeping your job here in the US. I wouldn't complain. Think about it from a corporations point of view. You have an international corporation that simply wants the work done and are truly indifferent to where it is done. When deciding where to do the bulk of their programming, the US is not exactly the most inviting place. We have some of the highest corporate taxes in the world, we have the highest wages in the world, and in general there is a very high cost of doing business here.

There are good reasons to do work in the US. If the work is the for the US market, it doesn't hurt to have it done in the US to save time in cleaning it up make it presentable to the consumer and you have cleaner communication lines with the US marketers and business folks.

What the immigration does is make the choice a little easier for corporations to pick the US over India. Sure, immigration does, to some small extent push down US wages. Know what pushes down US wages even more though? When they say "fuck it" and simply have the entire thing done in India for a fraction of the cost.

So, you can either swallow that people from India (and elsewhere) come here for high wages while at the same time knocking your wages down a little, or simply have corporations throw their hands up at the high cost of doing business and simply farm it all out to India.

Take your pick.

Stringent immigration policies NEVER result in great economic booms that nationalist promise. Immigration has never hurt the US. The US has a long time of kicking ass and taking in the economics and academics BECAUSE it has such a liberal immigration policy. Taking in skilled workers from elsewhere is a good thing for the US and keeps jobs here. If anyone has anything to bitch about, it is India. The US is the one stealing away their skilled workers, adding them to our economy, and leaving them high and dry.

Re:Oh FUCK

Historicly immigration has been a very major force in technical industry in the USA. People come from all over the world to work on large projects or meet in Silicon Vally to deliver the next big thing. US universities are full of the best and brightest from all over the world. Even if you did fix the appallingly poor levels of high school education to make that comparably to anywhere else it would still not match the benefit of the large numbers od skilled and educated people from all over the world coming into the univerisities or taking their ideas to where the money is. Perhaps it is the very susceptibility of poorly educated US investors to silicon snake oil (SCO, hydrogen car scams, naturopaths etc etc) that makes it possible for the googles and ebays to start in the USA and not in Japan, Germany or Brazil.

None of this is going to push down US wages below the bizzare situations like cafe workers surviving from the charity of strangers (the "tip" system) and the construction of an illegal underclass that has to accept very low wages or get exposed and deported.

Re:Oh FUCK

>When they do that, the job and money stays IN OUR economy. We're talking here about H1-B visa workers...temporary workers that have no intention on staying here and becoming US citizens.

I call BS... The reason why there are so many H1-B visas is because America does not let anything else in.

I am quite serious here, as my wife and I were confronted with this situation. If you look at the visas of America there are no "skilled labor" immigrations like there is in Canada or Australia. In fact America is actually one of the few countries that focuses on family based immigration.

Look at your government statistics and you will see that per capita there is very little immigration to America. Per capita America has 25% of the immigration that Australia and Canada have. And of that immigration about 60%+ is family based. In Australia and Canada it is in reverse.

Give all H-1s US Citizenship Immediately

I think the larger question is...why when we in the US have PLENTY of citizens

Well we have PLENTY of citizens, but they do not like to do computer programming. Last time I checked, the only people that came here to the USA involuntarily were African Americans. The rest of us are ancestors of some "driving down the wages to citizens and giving them to foreigners that are just sending home is not helping matters..."

This ridiculous, xenophobic crap has polluted the American discource since the Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam bitched about the new British arrivals in what would eventually be renamed New York. Yet, despite these waves of low wage immigrants, the United States has managed to become the riches single nation on the planet earth. I've got 13 aircraft carriers, a man on the moon, a kick ass freeway system and gasoline that even today is cheaper than any of our allies to say that a policy of open ended immigration works and works stunningly well.

My grandmother, as did many grandparents, sent money overseas back to Europe to their families when they had it. Family is an AMERICAN value. Remember?

I too, work with a lot of immigrants in Computer Programming, and for the most part I have found these people, whereever they come from, be it Malaysia, Viet Nam, China, India, Japan, Ireland, Scotland, England, Germany, and Switzerland, to be hardworking, decent, law abiding, industrious, imaginative, family oriented, and in short the sort of people that the USA should be proud to have. These people want to work, value family, and want to be Americans. I think that, rather than making these people jump through hoops like dogs, we should be recruiting these people from around the world, agressively, and we should be honored to make them citizens of our country, and not the other way around.

By the way too, my uncle in law did THREE combat tours in Viet Nam, earning a silver star, a couple of purple hearts. He's not a computer programmer, but he got his degree at Khe Sahn. But hey, he's just a stinking Mexican... so now you can take that stereotype about lazy hispanic people and blow that out your ass too, while you were at it.

Re:Give all H-1s US Citizenship Immediately

I'm not talking about immigration. We're talking about something akin to 'ringers' being brought in to drive down wages. H1-B workers are not immigrants, they are not coming here to work to become US citizen and stay here, they are temporary workers that drive down wages, send money home and leave eventually.

I know a lot of H1-B workers that use the H1-B just as a way to try and get themselves into the USA.

I second that. I've been in the US for 7 years, the last 6 were on an H1-B visa, trying to get a green card (which I now have).

Saying that the H1-B visa is a tool for corporations to get cheap workers that can't quit when given crappy assignments is not really true. For me finding an other job was an experience issue, nobody would even reply to me until I had 3 years experience. Now I usually get contacted once a month by small and big name companies (latest one was VMWare), but I'm very happy where I am. It is true however that many 'recruiters' have no clue that an H1-B visa is easily transferable (takes 2 weeks) from one company to an other, and some would basically hang up when I mentioned I was on a Visa, making it more difficult to get an other job.

As for the salary, while I wish I would get more so I could afford a house in my area (prices are not going down), my total compensation is well within the average according to hotjobs.com. I also get a lot of perks at work, one of the best being to only deal with smart people.

Sending money home: I've never ever done that, my relatives don't need any help and I'm sure they would actually be very offended if I gave them any money.

Re:Why, DHS?

They're changing because the H-1B cap is being reached now. An international student who graduates in the US no longer has a clear path to stick around and work. There's no point spending four years training someone only to kick them out when they want to stay. With 29 months, they can at least make a couple of attempts at the annual H-1B lottery.

Re:Why, DHS?

The students would rather have an easier path to green cards, and eventually citizenship, but it's not the most popular idea among most Americans.

We all know that most people's problem with illegal immigration and H1-Bs has nothing to do with the illegals being illegal or the H1-Bs lowering wages: It's plain old racism. Increasing the green card quotas would just bring more people with strange accents into the country, and that's not something that middle america wants.

I for one find it ridiculous, but I see the racism every day.

Re:Why, DHS?

You, like many other people that bring out the "racism" crap in an effort to neuter any meaningful discussion about immigration, keep losing sight of an important issue: assimilation. And if you want to talk about racism as applied to immigration policy, the United States and its people make a poor example. We allow thousands upon thousands of people from every country on Earth to emigrate here every year, and to try to become citizens if they so wish. Calling us racist demonstrates a remarkable degree of ignorance on this subject. Try emigrating to Japan, for example: unless you can show that you are as Japanese as humanly possible you will never be a citizen. That's a far more "racist" approach to immigration than U.S. policy has ever been, but you know what? It's their country, and it's their right to decide who they want to live there. Allow us the same privilege before you call us racist: contrary to what you may believe, you do not have any intrinsic right to come here. We get to decide that, not you.

Put it this way: no matter what country you hail from, granting citizenship to all comers is a mistake that few nations make. That's not to say that illegal immigration isn't just as big a problem for other countries as it is for America, but so far as legal immigration is concerned, the citizens of any nation have a stake in who is granted citizenship. The process of assimilation doesn't happen overnight, and just because someone is a "best and brightest" absolutely does not automatically qualify them as an asset, someone of benefit to our society. Bill Gates and his ilk would like you to believe otherwise, but only because they are insulated from the effects of their manipulations, and by their past actions have shown they don't care one whit about this country and its people. Their opinions in this matter are not to be taken seriously.

Citizenship should be earned, not handed out willy-nilly. Whether you're English, French, German, Venezualan, Russian, Chinese ... you want to know that the people you are allowing in to your country understand your culture, accept your culture, and are willing to give their allegiance to it. That takes time, often lots of it, and has nothing whatsoever to do with your technical skills and knowledge, or whether you're willing to work for half of a domestic worker's pay. It has to do with who you are, what you believe in. If you don't believe in America, don't believe in the Constitution, don't believe in us ... we don't want or need you. You're a liability.

My fiancee is a naturalized U.S. citizen who spent many years in this country before she was sworn in. She's proud of the fact that she worked hard, proved her worth, and is now a citizen of this great nation. However, she bitterly resents the fact that thousands of other foreign-born individuals (not to mention tens of millions of illegal Mexican immigrants) are being given rights and privileges that they have not earned and do not deserve.

Re:Well played Mr. Gates, well played.

Your link is a single snapshot in time which does not say anything to your claim regarding "rising wages." Further, I fail to see how rising wages would imply that H1-B has little effect on wages.

Re:Well played Mr. Gates, well played.

The link you cite is again bogus as this reflects the cost to employers rather than salary, which is the original poster's issue.

Mean computer programmer salary:
$67,400 in May 2005 [bls.gov]
$69,500 in May 2006 [bls.gov]

This is an annual increase of 3.11%, which is lower than inflation of 3.39% in 2005 and 3.24% in 2006 [miseryindex.us]. So in some meaningless sense wages did rise, but in the meaningful sense of buying anything, wages went down.

You still have not addressed my question regarding the relevance of rising wages to the visa.

That said, I agree with the sentiment of your original comment.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

So somewhere on the BLS webpage you see evidence that "real" wages are rising? 'Cause I don't see it in the real world. Did you adjust those figures for inflation?
In the 50's and 60's American dads put in 40 hours a week in a factory with just a high school diploma and families lived pretty well. Moms stayed home with the kids. Now with college degrees, Moms and Dads put in 80-Plus, and can't even achieve the same living standards they had as children. (Or worse, they are another generation removed, and have no recollection of better times.) The median American wage earner has been losing ground for decades. More immigrant labor (legal and illegal) and "free trade" agreements are the threats used by the have-mores to get the have-nots to produce more and expect less.
Question: The 40-hour work week became a standard in the early 20th century. With all of the improvements in productivity that have come about since then, why are we not now on a standard 32-hour workweek? We should have been there 20 years ago. The answer is in the failure of economics professors to teach students to think critically about supply-side economic theories.
I'm not whining (or "whinging"). I'm pointing out that we are being skillfully played against one another and our lives could be better if we get smart enough to recognize it.
Oh, and by the way here's the proof you asked for:
http://www.usw.org/usw/program/content/3060.php [usw.org]

Re:Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

This is political populism...

Were the 50's and 60's better? Racism, male chauvinist oinks, and the boys club mentality... Add on the lack of being able to fly easily, travel easily, or have any luxuries.

You know you can live like the 50's and 60's. I am serious here. Get rid of your cable subscription, your cell phone subscription, have a single car, and everything that you did not have in the 50's and 60's. And you can live quite well.

The problem we have is that you have all of these additional costs because you want them. For example one of the things I have done away with is a cellular phone subscription. Here in Europe people look quite strange at me. I just say, "hey I hardly use it and it saves me quite a bit of money."

The problem is not immigration. Look at the following website.

http://www.fairus.org/site/PageServer?pagename=research_research05b5 [fairus.org]

The immigration levels at the time you talk so fondly of were per-capita higher than now.

The real problem is that due to globalization the West has to realize it is overpaid. The developing countries are just as smart and just as able, but paid less because they can be.

Heck, I have had to take a massive pay cut so that I can compete in the market place. But I take in stride as I have to.

Re:Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

American real wages aren't rising - if anything, they are going down [nytimes.com].