The new immigration bill, up for a cloture vote today, is a terrible bill for US HIGH-TECH workers. Every day, there are layoffs in this sector. Every day, more and more jobs are outsourced.
The Repukeliscum answer? Bring in more cheap Chinese and Indian high-tech workers to undercut US Markets and saturate the labor market.
The new bill will immediately increase H-1Bs from 65 K to 115 K in 2008. Thereafter, the numbers will increase, with no limit, by 20 % a year. That means, by 2011, there will be 200 K H-1B visa holders coming in.
In the US, American kids coming out of college cannot get good jobs. They are taking jobs at Starbucks because US high-tech jobs are being given to Chinese scabs.
Call your senator today, and tell him/her to vote against cloture for this bill. It’s not right to give good jobs to foreigners when our own kids cannot find work.
If we had a shortage of workers, salaries would be going up. The reality is that salaries are, at best, stagnant. I have over 20 years experience, but I get paid like I just got out of school. I don’t know what’s left for me when the next layoff comes.
You want fries with that?
Yep, that’s exactly it. The companies ALL want to pay their employees like they just got out of school… or if it’s an entry level job, like they’re college interns. That is why the push for HB1 visas — because the foreign tech workers will work for those wages, and better yet, after a year or two, they’re gone — so the company can hire yet another programmer or technician or engineer at those same low wages. And young people are cheaper to insure, too….
I hear this story about the terrible “shortage of engineers” a lot through work… thing is, there IS no engineer shortage, we have plenty of engineering graduates. But the companies would rather hire cheap foreigners who will work for a year or two and then leave, thus not even requiring the company to worry about pension or retirement costs, or have to give them more than a token raise.
And jobs that used to provide a very good middle-class to upper-middle-class living aren’t any longer — companies would rather hire a junior person and try to get them to do a more experienced person’s job for entry level wages, than hire someone with twenty years experience at a rate commensurate with that experience.
It all comes down to greed… and the demands of stockholders for higher dividends every quarter, stockholders who have no connection to the work a given corporation actually does or even what industry it’s in. The people with the biggest clout in terms of a corporation’s policies that affect its bottom line — whether that’s worker safety, production standards, employee wages and benefits, or consumer safety — have little or no connection to the corporation, other than the quarterly dividends and the power to buy or sell their stock.. It’s all about the profits — and not just steady profits, but a demand for a sizeable INCREASE in those profits every single quarter. Stock holders are looking for fast returns, not slow gains… they will dump stock that doesn’t pay them back enough, and corporate management and the board of directors know that.
This is why the whole “free market” and “market value” is a myth. Because NO corporation can afford to let the natural “free market forces” interfere with its profits — so they will go for every loophole they can find (or create), from pushing de-regulation through generous campaign contributions, to offloading more and more of their health and retirement benefit costs onto employees or the government, to hiring cheap workers from overseas (or across the Rio Grande), either legally or illegally, or taking their entire production line to an overseas factory where none of those pesky “market forces” can affect them.
So in the end, American jobs are not nearly as important as corporate profits — or corporate campaign contributions.
Call your senators now. Tell them to vote against cloture.
For once, I’m glad to have republican senators. Sessions and Shelby are both against the trade deal. Probably for all the wrong reasons, but I’ll take what little I can get.
I think there are some who are thinking this part of the bill is good for our technology base, but in fact, it is just another way corporate America wants to squelch the pay and standard of living of the middle class.
But there would be a way to not only fix it, but build this country. Whenever a category of employment (say, nursing or electrical engineering) becomes so scarce that H1-B visas are justified, there should be a statue of limitations on it (say, two years.) At the same time, an automatic scholarship/loan program for college juniors and seniors in that major would become available for Americans. So as we invited in foreign nurses, we would make nursing school free or cheap for those who are already in school. (It might be a loan that’s forgiven if you work two years in the field.)
We can’t just give up on American kids!
Provided there really is a shortage. First take a look at unemployed people with similar experience. Just because you don’t have the exact skill set needed, doesn’t mean you can’t pick it up. All of my education since college has been self taught. You can get away with that if the company already employs you. Forget it if you are trying to get a new job. They won’t even talk to you.
Well, there certainly are some fields where we are in dire need. Nursing is the first one that comes to mind, that I could easily document. You can’t learn it from a “Nursing for Dummies” book. But the problem is that we give them enormous responsibility, impossible shifts, and very low pay relative to their responsibility.
So H1B visas for nurses make no sense unless you are an HMO trying to keep salaries down! If every request were limited to two years and accompanied by scholarships, it would make the point…
But I do not expect the big money corporations to go for such sense.
There are already programs in Nursing that do this. They trade tuition for a committment to work at the hospital for a certain number of years. As I said it isn’t just jobs that are considered professional. Remember the jamaican hotel workers that were displaced due to Katrina.
researchers, nurses, and in some cases even service workers.
It’s anyone who works on a computer because if your job is such that you can telecommute, it can be shipped overseas. We’re in a race to the bottom in wages and as Americans, we have the furthest to fall. You have to wonder just who the corporations think will buy their products when we’re all working for 3rd world wages?
Call him/her right now. Call some other ones too. Come up with a zip code if you need one, or a home address for an answer to the inevitable question.
I am called Sherrodd Brown (used to live in OH) and Claire McCaskill (work in MO).
I will also call Feinstein and Boxer.