The problem is not with the H1-B visa program per se. Nor with the raison d'etre for it.
The root cause of the problem, the loop hole that allows Indian IT companies to ship thousands of ill educated sub-standard programmers to USA is this: USA recognizes all degrees from India as though they are the equivalent of US college degrees. But sayin ALL graduates from St Mary's College of Engineering, Middle of Nowhere, Some State, India are equal to the graduates from UCLA or MIT is just bonkers.
If it were the case that were the problem, then the H1-B process wouldn't exist, because it wouldn't be possible for US companies to hire qualified programmers from overseas. Sure, they may be on paper qualified, but if they're not in practice, why would they be hired?
The H1-B program is, bizarrely enough, a way to prevent jobs from going overseas. You can't find (possibly because you can't afford) some of the right people you need to operate here, so you hire them overseas. If you don't have that option, you can't do business - at least, not in the US, and you end up outsourcing sizable amounts of your business to overseas operations.
That's the nightmare solution, because those H1-Bs do contribute to the US economy. They ensure people are employed in your office, because they reduce the need to ship it overseas. They buy local groceries. They rent local homes. That goes, that completely disappears, if you're forced to outsource everything. We complain about the cloud reducing the need for local IT people, but at least we're just shuffling deckchairs, IT jobs close here but they open in data centers around the country owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. Think that, except no jobs open in the US.
That's what no H1-Bs looks like.
By all means ask for reasonable reforms. Ensure they're paid decent wages by giving them a path to permanent residency, for instance. But this kind of complaint is unreasonable, and the reforms you're demanding would make H1-Bs impractical. And that means, guess what, you're more likely to lose your job, because now your employer cannot afford to run an IT department any more, and needs to ask a consultancy half way across the world to do the work instead.
All degrees are not equal. That is the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
The root cause of the problem, the loop hole that allows Indian IT companies to ship thousands of ill educated sub-standard programmers to USA is this: USA recognizes all degrees from India as though they are the equivalent of US college degrees. But sayin ALL graduates from St Mary's College of Engineering, Middle of Nowhere, Some State, India are equal to the graduates from UCLA or MIT is just bonkers.
There are ve
Re:All degrees are not equal. That is the problem (Score:2)
If it were the case that were the problem, then the H1-B process wouldn't exist, because it wouldn't be possible for US companies to hire qualified programmers from overseas. Sure, they may be on paper qualified, but if they're not in practice, why would they be hired?
The H1-B program is, bizarrely enough, a way to prevent jobs from going overseas. You can't find (possibly because you can't afford) some of the right people you need to operate here, so you hire them overseas. If you don't have that option, you can't do business - at least, not in the US, and you end up outsourcing sizable amounts of your business to overseas operations.
That's the nightmare solution, because those H1-Bs do contribute to the US economy. They ensure people are employed in your office, because they reduce the need to ship it overseas. They buy local groceries. They rent local homes. That goes, that completely disappears, if you're forced to outsource everything. We complain about the cloud reducing the need for local IT people, but at least we're just shuffling deckchairs, IT jobs close here but they open in data centers around the country owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. Think that, except no jobs open in the US.
That's what no H1-Bs looks like.
By all means ask for reasonable reforms. Ensure they're paid decent wages by giving them a path to permanent residency, for instance. But this kind of complaint is unreasonable, and the reforms you're demanding would make H1-Bs impractical. And that means, guess what, you're more likely to lose your job, because now your employer cannot afford to run an IT department any more, and needs to ask a consultancy half way across the world to do the work instead.