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Trump To Overhaul H-1B Visa Program To Encourage Hiring Americans (theguardian.com) 619

Posted by BeauHD from the best-of-the-best dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: In a bid to court working class voters, Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday to revamp a temporary visa program used to bring foreign workers to fill jobs in the U.S. The president will use a visit to a manufacturing company in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a crucial state he snatched from Hillary Clinton in the election, to promote his latest "Buy America Hire America" offensive. Trump's executive order will call on government departments to introduce reforms to ensure that H-1B visas are awarded to the "most skilled or highest paid applicants," a senior administration official said. The executive order will also call for the "strict enforcement" of laws governing entry to the U.S. of labor from overseas, with a view to creating higher wages and employment rates for U.S. workers. The order will also call on government departments to "take prompt action to crack down on fraud and abuse" in the immigration system, a senior administration official said. The administration official sad: "Right now H-1B visas are awarded by random lottery and many of you will be surprised to know that about 80% of H-1B workers are paid less than the median wage in their fields. Only 5% to 6%, depending on the year, of H-1B workers command the highest wage tier recognized by the Department of Labor. [...] If you change that current system that awards visas randomly, without regard for skill or wage, to a skills-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers [...] It's a very elegant way of solving very systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa."
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Trump To Overhaul H-1B Visa Program To Encourage Hiring Americans More

Trump To Overhaul H-1B Visa Program To Encourage Hiring Americans

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  • Make America Great (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:02AM (#54255645) Homepage Journal
    We are making America Great Again!

    • Re:Make America Great (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PoopJuggler ( 688445 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:07AM (#54255685)
      You have a really low standard for "great" apparently. I would define "great" as leading the world in peaceful conflict resolution, technological advancement, social advancement, education, art and overall happiness and equality of a nation's citizenry. Trump is working towards, well, none of those.
      • What previous President(s) did that?

      • Re:Make America Great (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gatkinso ( 15975 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:20AM (#54255801)

        I would agree with that assessment of great, however using that metric, no nation has ever been great.

        So now we fall back to "richest and most powerful."

        • But it's a very well known fact... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gwolf ( 26339 ) <gwolf@NosPAm.gwolf.org> on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:35AM (#54255931) Homepage

          That US-Americans haven't learned to use that metric. Nor any decent metric. They are still stuck using Imperial.

          (hmmm, quite fitting for Mr. Trump!)

      • "To form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." Of the items you list, only equity of the nations citizenry is part of his job goals.

      • Re:Make America Great (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @09:04AM (#54256169)

        You have a really low standard for "great" apparently. I would define "great" as leading the world in peaceful conflict resolution, technological advancement, social advancement, education, art and overall happiness and equality of a nation's citizenry. Trump is working towards, well, none of those.

        Let's go through each of these.

        The first one is particularly telling. It was Trump, more than anybody (except perhaps Bernie, certainly more than Hilary) who spoke out against getting America involved in foreign wars. So much so that he was at 'war' (no pun intended) with a good section of his own party - Bush/Graham/McCain - over the Iraq war, which got particularly ugly during the SC primaries. He wanted to get along with Russia, but the Democrats made that impossible by obsessing over 'Russian interference' in the elections. Nonetheless, 2 weeks ago, most of his seniormost officials, like Tillerson and Haley, stated that they'd acquiesce with Assad remaining in power. This was as close to peaceful conflict resolution that one can get, and should have calmed Damascus. Instead, Assad launched a chemical weapons attack on Ibdil, making it impossible for Trump not to respond. One could hardly imagine a stupider Syrian response to what was essentially a peace gesture.

        After that, the North Korean thing can't be peaceful, given that President Un has stated that they are heading towards thermonuclear war. They have, in violation of many treaties, tested both nukes as well as ballistic missiles. Given that they could easily drop a nuke on Seoul, this is not a can that can be kicked down the road.

        Technological advancement - I'm not sure how any government is supposed to do that. The US is more technologically advanced than anyone else, but there are a few things here and there, such as protection of intellectual property, that can be done, but is currently lower priority.

        Social advancement - these days, it seems to center around anybody being able to enter bathrooms of their choice based on what they feel like. While more conservative factions of the party have taken a stance against that, the president has been careful not to.

        Education - well, college tuition costs are at an all time high, but education has not been landing people jobs, given how out of touch with the real world it is. If anything, it's a ball & chain that keeps young people deep in debt. It's hard to achieve overall happiness when things like education and health care are as screwed as they are, courtesy the previous administration.

        As for the nation's citizenry, they are equal. Equality of opportunity, that is. What you are looking for, perhaps, is equality of outcome, which is unattainable, even in pure Communist countries. What equality has come to mean is a code-word for affirmative action - something that's failed despite being around for 50 years.

        Trump's goals - making the US an attractive place to hire people, and making it militarily more powerful and politically more assertive, so that enemies like North Korea or Iran or ISIS don't mess with us, while adversaries like Russia, China, EU stop taking advantage of us - are certainly adequate in MAGA. So as Gatsinko noted above, making the US the richest & most powerful ever is the best path to getting there

  • It already bears fruit (Score:5, Funny)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:05AM (#54255657)

    Only hours after the announcement, corporations all over America started hiring lawyers to find new loopholes in the law.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by c ( 8461 )

      Only hours after the announcement, corporations all over America started hiring lawyers to find new loopholes in the law.

      Given the "swamp draining" skills Trump's shown so far, I'm expecting that he's going to outsource the implementation and enforcement of the H1B program to an Indian corporation...

      • Given the "swamp draining" skills Trump's shown so far, I'm expecting that he's going to outsource the implementation and enforcement of the H1B program to an Indian corporation...

        Instead, just start the countdown clock until he reports that "No one realized that visas would be so hard." or until he has a 10 minute conversation with a foreign leader who explains to him why he's wrong.
        Or until they find him in the corner of the rose garden smearing himself in his own shit as the dementia kicks into top gear.

    • Re:It already bears fruit (Score:5, Funny)

      by MiniMike ( 234881 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:42AM (#54255997)

      Yeah, but now they're hiring American lawyers!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ranton ( 36917 )

      Only hours after the announcement, corporations all over America started hiring lawyers to find new loopholes in the law.

      Most of that hiring was done months ago by lobbying groups involved in crafting the executive order. Now those lawyers will be working as consultants for the large corporations.

      No looking for loopholes necessary, they were already baked in purposefully. And this is a case where Trump is no different than any other politician so no Trump bashing is really appropriate.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @09:41AM (#54256507)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It's A Start (Score:5, Insightful)

    by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:05AM (#54255659)

    At least it's moving in the right direction. However, there is no shortage of skilled American workers. Just the opposite is true. We have a glut of skilled American workers, but there is a dramatic shortage of decent, livable-wage jobs in America.

    While tightening the rules around H1B is a good start, the system needs to be entirely gutted.

    • What we have is a glut of workers (in software anyways) that THINK they're skilled.

      Turns out floating through your undergraduate, gaining no work experience, and being terrible at interviewing makes you ill prepared to work in the field. Who knew.

      • Turns out floating through your undergraduate, gaining no work experience, and being terrible at interviewing makes you ill prepared to work in the field. Who knew.

        Floating as in being one of the best students in your class for instance? Floating because you are so smart that the classes and assignments are too easy and you spend most of your time working on your own projects? And how are computer science students supposed to get work experience if no one wants to hire them? Unless they are Indian of course. And lie on their resumes. The whole corporate HR hiring system is so idiotic and badly broken those monkeys have zero right to complain about there not being enou

        • And how are computer science students supposed to get work experience if no one wants to hire them?

          Internships and open source contributions...

          Seriously, there is no excuse for lack of experience. There is lots of opportunities to make high impact contributions to reputable open source projects.
          I didn't say it wasn't hard work, but the opportunities are there... And internships are widely available in the US, sure there is competition, but many of the good internships are well paid too.

          I wonder if putting an Indian name on my job applications would have helped.

          Try it, I bet it won't help... You can also try attaching a fake picture why not...
          Multiple studies have found that

    • I am against h1b because I think we should be going after people that want to stay here, not people that want to work and save and leave with their money. (Or send it "home.")

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 )

      > the system needs to be entirely gutted

      I don't know what that means, both in general, and in implementation. But it sure makes you sound tough on something. I'm not convinced you have any idea what it means either. Most people just seem to stop talking after their suggestion is to tear something down.

    • Re:It's A Start (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dissenter ( 16782 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @09:13AM (#54256263)

      Agreed. In the last 10 years I have seen more companies abusing this in the tech sectors than I have ever seen before. TATA Consulting Services or TCS has taken advantage of the lax H1-B rules in so many companies. Look at the more public cases like ComEd (midwest power company), Disney and others where TCS and other offshore companies were hired to place people here in the US to replace American workers simply because they were able to provide cheaper labor. They aren't paying prevailing wages, they are paying $50k - $60k for jobs that normally pay $75k to $80k. These workers live in apartments that are subsidised by TCS with roommates (2-3) so that they can afford housing. Sure it's white collar work with living wage rates, but these guys aren't bringing in 3-5 year veterans, they are bringing in college grads from India and other countries. We have TONS of college grads in technology that are looking for jobs. Many would be happy to take the $50k, but companies sign multi-BILLION DOLLAR contracts with these "offshoring companies" that require them to supply both offshore AND ONSHORE resources. As agile and other technical project management methodologies become more and more common, the need for having local resources that are able to work together more collaboratively has resulted in companies sponsoring ONSHORE replacement programs.

      That is the outrageous abuse that revamping the H1-B program needs to address. I have worked for and consulted for a number companies in the last 10 years and almost every one of them had some degree (some far more than others) of H1-B program in place that, at minimum, was using it to pay under-skilled foreigners less to "fill a role" that could be easily filled by native talent.

      To be clear, I am not an isolationist and many of the people that have come from these companies and countries are god friends of mine. Yes, on a personal level, I don't want to see them go, the the fact is that we are supposed to have a government that protects it's citizens, not a globalized economic system that puts us back into a pre-unionized age where the workers become oppressed and a slave class. Okay, that's a bit over the top, I mean getting paid $50k to sit at a desk and right code isn't anywhere near slavery, but my point is that it is regression and we shouldn't take that step back.

      To answer the obvious troll questions, yes, I am personally very frustrated by this whole issue. I have been in countless positions to hire talented people in junior roles where I can mentor and develop the kind of skills that college grads need. I have had interns from some universities that have shown promise, but rather than hire on some of these folks, I have been specifically told by one company that I cannot and that we need to meet the "contractual obligations of TCS and fill the role with an H1-B worker". When you're in that position, TCS doesn't send you top talent. The company, not the individual, has rewritten a resume for someone that has 1-2 years of offshore call center experience and coached them to lie in the interview. They coach them on what to say to basic job skill questions and often they have little to no experience other than a book they read on the plane trip to the US. I'm not joking, I have actually be told by a worker once that this was the case.

      Now, I've also hired a couple of VERY TALENTED folks that needed H1-B sponsorship and, if I am not able to find someone else to fill that specialized role (sometimes with jobs paying into the 6 figures) have agreed to cover the H1-B sponsorship costs. That is what this is supposed to be used for, but honestly, I can say that's been 2 times of the hundreds that I have seen over the last 10 years. This isn't an anti-world and anti-immigration thing, this is an anti-letting companies abuse policies that hurt US workers thing.

  • If the program really was there to fill a labour pool deficit, it never would have allowed for visas for positions where the wage was below the current median wage (for those employed, not for empty positions waiting to be filled). You'd still get downward pressure on wages as labour supply increased, but it'd be slower.

    If your goal is to outsource to cheaper countries, the existing program works very well... until companies that can decide to move as much of their operations abroad as required to cut cost

    • Re:Because the salespitch was a lie (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gmack ( 197796 ) <<gmack> <at> <innerfire.net>> on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:54AM (#54256087) Homepage Journal
      If the program really was there to fill a labour pool deficit, it never would have allowed for visas for positions where the wage was below the current median wage (for those employed, not for empty positions waiting to be filled). You'd still get downward pressure on wages as labour supply increased, but it'd be slower. If the program was there to fill a labour pool deficit, it would never be allowed to be used in an instance where employees have to train their H1B replacements before being let go.

  • Even simpler, increase the wages (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gatkinso ( 15975 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:07AM (#54255691)

    Raise the minimum salary to $100,000 per year, have it automatically increase by 1.5% per year. Done.

    • Still too low. Here is what I would do:

      Quarterly auction with an absolute cap on quantity, starting bid of $200,000/year (in total compensation) + 25% fee. Unused slots are lost.

      Full salary to be placed in escrow to be paid over time regardless of anything else that happens to the applicant (quits/fired, dies, doesn't enter the country, whatever). Visa is owned and held by the worker, remains valid until 6 months after last day of employment in-country. Criminal penalties for a company officer for failu

  • So actually enforce the law? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Fire_Wraith ( 1460385 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:12AM (#54255735)
    If I'm not mistaken, the law as written requires that H-1Bs be paid more than Americans. So what he's saying then is that there's nothing wrong with the law, it's just not being enforced? How about we actually enforce the law rather than change it, if that's the case, because the law can say whatever it wants and it won't matter a damn if you don't bother to enforce it.

    • Re:So actually enforce the law? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jonsmirl ( 114798 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:30AM (#54255895) Homepage

      Haven't you noticed hundreds of tiny ads in the classified sections of local newspapers asking for programmers or testers and they include salary information? But when you contact them you never hear anything back? Those ads are generating the "proof" needed for the government that the position can't be filled by American workers.

    • How about we actually enforce the law rather than change it

      Because it's difficult to enforce. How much does a 'software engineer' earn? The same job title applies to someone doing security and timing sensitive code for a microcontroller with 16KB of RAM and someone tweaking some PHP on a low-volume web site. The law requires that you pay the average wage for the profession, but if you want to hire people for the former occupation you're able to point to the large volume of people doing the latter to justify the salary. And the only thing that you have to do to

    • Re:So actually enforce the law? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jader3rd ( 2222716 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @11:24AM (#54257499)

      So what he's saying then is that there's nothing wrong with the law, it's just not being enforced?

      It's not just that. This EO is saying that someone has 220 days to create a report, for Trump to review about how the law is not being enforced. That's all. The reason for all of this bluster is to make his trust-and-don't-verify support base think that he's actually doing something.

  • Make the H1B minwage $100K + COL

    That will fix the issue.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gatkinso ( 15975 )

      Indeed it will. The fix is truly simple.

      The problem is that it is a real fix, with no way to game it, which is why such would be fought tooth and nail.

    • Talked to a guy who works with plenty of H1Bs and he said he didn't know anyone making under 125k. So, maybe there are a couple of big players really undercutting the H1B process, or we are just hearing about the abusive cases.
      However if they have official H1B stats claiming 80% makes under the median for their skill/trade, that's an issue. Would want to know where these stats come from though.

      • is it the subcontracted con game where they play this shell game where on paper they make 100K but there real pay is like 50K with staffing firm kicking back a big part of the pay back to the work site.

  • Biased article.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by slashkitty ( 21637 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:25AM (#54255851) Homepage
    I can tell the article and website are biased by the first phrase. "In a bid to court working class voters..." No, it's not a bid for voters. It's fulfilling a campaign promise. It's helping the American worker. As a programmer, (and mighty successful at that) I've been denied jobs at many companies who hire H1Bs over citizens like me. It must change.

  • If you change that current system that awards visas randomly, without regard for skill or wage, to a skills-based awarding, it makes it extremely difficult to use the visa to replace or undercut American workers [...] It's a very elegant way of solving very systemic problems in the H-1B guest worker visa."

    This person is either extremely naive or lying through their teeth. Awarding visas for skills does not automatically translate to paying comparable wages to receive those skills. They would have to monitor wages and ensure that the wages being paid do not fall below the median wages for the job and sharply limit the number of visa recipients to prevent flooding the market and thus driving down the median wage.

    Of course the problem is that reforms to the H1B visa program risk being basically a form of prote

    • Re:Logical failures (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GrooveNeedle ( 3847301 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:52AM (#54256065)

      There is nothing magical about computer code written in the US versus in China or Russia.

      I want to agree with this statement (assuming "China or Russia" can be replaced with a generic "overseas"), but my experience tells me otherwise. While anecdotal, I have spent time on many teams where I am one of a few, or possibly the only, non-Indian immigrant on the team (team size varies from 10-50 people). I'm a consultant, and I'm pulled in to help on different projects for my firm's clients.

      The immigrants I've worked with, while nice (very much so), and knowledgeable in very specific technology, have no broad critical thinking skills, software design/architecture skills, or outside-the-box thinking. Basically, if what they need to code doesn't match an example from whatever 6-week class they took before getting the visa, they won't have a clue. This means the solutions end up being a glut of cobbled together code until things work. There's entire segments of code that are usually obsolete or do nothing... worse yet, silently fail; users just get tired of reporting bugs and find their own workarounds, so management falsely believes things are being fixed when the bug reports die down.

      This isn't their fault mind you. They are being exploited... first by the inadequate training farms in their native country (or possibly online), and then by the "body shops" that bring them to the US and hire them out at outrageous rates while paying as little as possible. While their client is getting subpar coding infused into their software, ultimately increasing costs over time.

      I want the H-1B visas overhauled not only to ensure America jobs stay American, but also so these immigrants aren't exploited. They are more than welcome to move to this country, but it should be on better terms, even if that prevents a multitude of them from coming here without more effort than is being expended now.

    • Awarding visas for skills does not automatically translate to paying comparable wages to receive those skills

      I'm pretty sure the only skill that matters is the "being able to work for slightly above minimum wage" skill.

  • Lip service (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:35AM (#54255933)
    I have seen so much lip service from politicians on this, and with Trump being the least reliable of them all, I will rejoice when I actually see something done that makes a difference.

  • The simple way to fix the problems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:37AM (#54255949)

    Just set a minimum wage for H-1B visas so anyone imported in via a H-1B visa costs more than hiring an American to do the job would have cost and most of the abuse of the system goes away.

    Combine this with some sort of labor market testing so they cant bring in a foreign worker if there is an American capable of doing the job and 99% of the problems with H-1B visas go away. (if you do this right you can structure it to also avoid the situation where companies import foreign workers to train them up and send them back to their home country as cheap outsourced labor)

    Doing this ensures that H-1B visas only get used when there is no American capable of doing the job (and the company can demonstrate they tried to find an American for the job first) or when they need a specific individual for some reason (and can prove there is no American with the necessary skills/experience/knowledge to do the job)

    Will this solve every issue with H-1B visas? No. Will companies try to find loopholes? Yes. Would this be significantly better than doing nothing? Most definitely.

    • The trick about being a politician is to look like you put something in place but make it complicated enough so that when people work around it you can claim ignorance. The minimum wage idea is just far too simple and effective for that to work.

  • The executive order will also call for the "strict enforcement" of laws governing entry to the U.S. of labor from overseas.

    Good news for Canadians and Mexicans!

  • The very best immigrant coders...

    ...get sponsored for citizenship.

  • Now I'm worried (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dawn Keyhotie ( 3145 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @08:59AM (#54256127)

    This is the only Trump policy that I actually agree with. So I'm on the horns of a dilemma. Is this actually the only policy of his that is not actively harmful? Or am I on the wrong side of the issue?

    The use of H1B visas can only serve to short-circuit one of the foundational principal of capitalism, which is supply and demand. When demand exceeds existing supply, prices must rise in order to stimulate the generation of more supply. When supply exceeds demand, prices must go down to discourage excess production. If this mechanism is undercut, then supply and demand get out of whack and the relevant market becomes distorted. This happens any time that price controls are imposed on a market, or when there is a sudden unanticipated spike in demand for a product, or when supply is artificially inflated. This is true of any market, including the labor market.

    The use of H1B visas is actively depressing demand for more American STEM graduates, which is the exact opposite of what President Obama said he wanted. Who wants to go into a field where their jobs can be easily outsourced to cheap imported labor? Into a job market where the government is actively working against its own citizens? Nobody who has any sense, that's who.

    So I do feel that Trump is actually correct on this issue. Let's see how long it is before he flip-flops on this one, too.

    • Re:Now I'm worried (Score:5, Interesting)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @11:17AM (#54257435) Journal

      Is this actually the only policy of his that is not actively harmful?

      You must attribute superhuman powers to Trump in order to believe that every policy he makes is actively harmful. Honestly, it would be impossible for any human to do that on purpose, it would require omniscience. Odds are that there are any number of policies that you believe in which would also be actively harmful. The same is true for me, and for everyone.

      I disagree with most of what Trump is doing and has done, but I'm not arrogant enough to think that I can tell what is and what is not harmful with certainty, and I don't believe that Trump is Satan incarnate, doing nothing but evil.

      To put it another way: Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Trump will be right sometimes, too.

      But I actually think he's wrong on this one. H1-B reform is needed, but his change is inadequate. At a minimum H1-B visa holders also need to be allowed to change jobs without losing their visa.

  • High quality Indian applicants are scarce. (Score:5, Informative)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @09:11AM (#54256235) Journal
    I just got the results of this years lottery. My MS Mech UT Austin, and MS CompSci CalTech candidates did not make it. Makes me furious that they are going to bring in candidates with paper from diploma mills from my home state in India, while these good candidates are denied visa.

    Our company makes very sincere effort to recruit Americans and comply with the laws in spirit as well as letter. We pay way above median wage for our areas. We are hard core engineering software company, not IT. I have not seen applicants with degrees from Indian Institutes of Technology in the last 10 years. It has simply dried up. IITians now a days get fantastic jobs in India, or they go do MBA and come to USA to do MBA and get jobs in top Wall Street firms and top 4 consultancy companies.

    I do see applicants with degrees from next rung in India, NITs and good engineering colleges with Masters from USA.

    The only change they really need to make to the H1B program is to state that degrees from accredited US universities will be given first preference. Degrees from diploma mills from India should not count. That would be enough to make sure these companies like TCS, Cogniscent, Wipro, Infosys and the lesser known body shoppers like R-systems, UBICS, Bharat Desai's companies, Sunil Wadhwani's companies etc stop gaming our laws.

    (my background: IIT, IISc, UT, F1, H1B, Green Card, Citizen now.)

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @09:11AM (#54256239)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • do an HB1 visa auction! (Score:3)

    by kiviQr ( 3443687 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @10:08AM (#54256763)
    Do an auction - companies file for applicants, minimum wage is average salary + 10% within given region (and they must work within region), then allow them to bid. Create a race to the top (not bottom) and take 5% cut to support social security. Solved!

  • Scam, etc (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LesserWeevil ( 4776371 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @11:05AM (#54257297)
    The existing H1-B visa system is a cross between a bad joke, an outright scam and a tragedy. Truly exceptional foreign applicants get tossed into the mix with diploma-mill exhaust and are less likely to make it to the US under the existing system. Likewise, US workers are likely to get replaced with *much* less qualified H-1B visa holders under the current system and enforcement attitude. Glaringly overdue for a reset, the current system only exists because of a few US and Indian tech companies throw lobbying $$ at D.C. Enough already.

  • The Tautological President (Score:3)

    by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Tuesday April 18, 2017 @01:03PM (#54258365)

    President Trump has made a habit of signing executive orders which say we will do what we are doing.

    And that's all the latest executive order does. It literally doesn't change anything. It simply says we will do what we've been doing.

    And, really, that's all the president can do except veto things. Mr. Trump shouldn't even be able to order acts of war without prior approval of congress. It's one thing to attack terrorists (for which president's have some approval). It's illegal and unconstitutional to attack the legitimate military forces of sovereign nations without explicit approval by congress.

    When are people going to catch on to the fact that Mr. Trump isn't really achieving *anything* with most of his executive orders except publicity? He's dependent on congress to budget money and to change laws.

    And since his government is still largely unstaffed after nearly 90 days in office, he lacks the people to implement his policies. There is a serious disconnect between the presidency and the departments right now created by thousands of unfilled upper level positions.

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