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Although this is a very heated topic, any foreign workers who are on H1B Visas in the United States should not be allowed on government facilities working for government contractors.
One huge reason the technology sector got obliterated over the last 9 years is due to the proliferation of lower waged technical workers shipped over here from India. This shift has caused the average American technical worker to dip into bankrupty, lose their life savings, and be reduced to minimum age workers with a master's degree.
It is difficult enough for American workers to find Atlanta jobs online. The commercial corporate world hires H1B visa cheaper technical workers before they hire Americans because of economies of scale. It's cheaper. Government contractors are required to hire United States citizens as a requirement of winning a contract with Federal, State, Local, or County government agencies. If H1B visa workers were allowed to work on government contracts, America would literally take a nose dive as this would destroy the last remaining hope for jobs for Americans.
I am glad that the Government stepped in and did not allow these contractors to hire even cheaper labor for the contracts awarded to them. America needs to rebuild from this recession and the first thing that helped during the first Great Depression in America is government jobs during the World War. Hiring Americans first should be a priority of the American Recovery Act. If you hire Americans and put them to work, you stop all the attempted suicides, all the bankruptcy proceedings, all the past due debt calls, etc.
Let's for once stop helping everyone else and instead help Americans survive, get relief, and have a job to pay their bills. No one wants to not pay the car payment, not pay their insurance, not pay their house note, and sit around looking silly being broke.
Comments
Gerard, please join www.Brightfuturejobs.com where we are promoting senate Bill 887. This bill would be the ultimate jobs bill for the U.S. workforce because it would make it illegal to bypass U.S. workers in favor of cheap indentured foreign labor on work visas.
You may be surprised what is legal to do to the U.S. workforce.
Currently, a company does not have to prove that there are no U.S. workers available.
A company can legally force it's workers to train their own H-1B /L-1 visa replacement as a condition of employment. It's like forcing someone to dig their own grave!
Gerard, please visit Brightfuturejobs dot com where we are promoting bi-partisian senate Bill 887. This bill would be the ultimate jobs bill for the U.S. workforce because it would make it illegal to bypass U.S. workers in favor of cheap indentured foreign labor on work visas.
You may be surprised what is legal to do to the U.S. workforce.
Currently, a company does not have to prove that there are no U.S. workers available.
A company can legally force it's workers to train their own H-1B /L-1 visa replacement as a condition of employment. It's like forcing someone to dig their own grave!
It is nice to see a minority person with this view (after all, African Americans are disproportionately represented in the IT ranks). The IT industry and their lobby are trying to marginalize us all as "disgruntled, angry, racist, xenophobic, white, middle aged men".
We should have encouraged minority students to pursue tech degrees if there truly was a shortage, not import cheap labor. The motivating factor was greed. It should have been building a stronger nation with smarter workers.
How are minorities ever going to have their shot at the American dream if they get left by the wayside in favor of importing cheap and exploitable foreign workers? No wonder our prisons are full. Read your profile - your prison reform work is very important. Too bad you are an Oracle/Java guy :-) We have to disagree on something :-) .NET rocks :-)
Hey Gerard, I would like to raise a few points before you think of banning H1B workers from working in US companies. (For a moment, lets generalize this to all US IT jobs not just government jobs that you are referring to).
1) Will US companies accept a reciprocal ban on US products from those countries whose workers were banned from working in the US.
2) Lets assume that you get an IT job after keeping foreigners out. Will you be willing to accept low wages, equivalent to a worker in China or India, like $12000 a year, working in your IT job. If not, be sure that your company will not able able to keep your job and it will be transplanted somewhere in India, China or Vietnam.
3) Will you be able to tone down your wastage, be highly productive and keep your lifestyle to a modest minimum without extravagant credit card purchases.
If the answer to any of these questions is NO then that itself explains why America needs to import foreign workers while keeping its own jobless.
1) Let's compare products to products and workers to workers... not workers to products (hard goods).
2) If every American IT worker has to work for $12,000 - which I guess assumes that most other American workers will be making even less than that - then due to the cost of even modest living here, Americans might as well just all shoot themselves. This #2 argument of yours is tantamount to saying "don't fight H-1B visas, just shoot yourself". The entire American Middle Class, just roll over and die.
3) This argument seems to be related to #2: even if he did all that, at $12,000 a year he would still be below poverty level.
We should not allow H1-b on government contracts because Americans need jobs. In fact we should cancel these visas while Americans and Permanent Residents are unemployed.
Equally disturbing is the unwillingness of Indian IT outsourcing companies to give U.S. citizens a chance to compete for jobs on U.S. soil. This massive open discrimination, practiced by WIPRO, TATA, and Satyam where fully 90% of their U.S. based workforce are Indian citizens. These same companies are now complaining that their current growth, is affected by U.S. immigration policies. How can this be possible at a time when IBM, Microsoft, Oracle... and many others are laying off skilled hi-tech workers? How can their growth within the United States be affected when there are hundreds of thousands of unemployed hi-tech workers? It could only be the case, if these companies never intend to hire U.S. workers for U.S. jobs. It's about time that these Indian comp
Dudes, look at the numbers... No one is hiring even H1B holders right now...
Gerard, the black community has been devastated in I.T. with the flood of cheap Indian labor. Indians are the most racist and nepotistic people in the world and have done all they can to purge Americans, especially minorities and women, out of the industry.
When I started in the biz in the 90's, I had plenty of black co-workers and lots of women. Now you will find I.T. departments that are 80-90% Indian. Indians have special derogatory terms for blacks and refuse to work with them.
Thanks for writing about this, and do all you can to muster support in your community to stop the importation of cheap H-1Bs. Many young blacks could studying engineering and CS but the colleges have flooded their campuses with students on H-1Bs because their tuition is fully paid for by their corrupt sponsors in the Indian oligarchy.
And please do something about the University Of Georgia furloughing American workers, but giving H-1Bs a paid vacation.
Google this: "university of georgia furlo
look at the websites: endh1b.com and noslaves.com
The world's "best and brightest" should be welcomed, but only a tiny percentage of H-1Bs are in that league. Meanwhile, the H-1B program results in many of our own best and brightest U.S. citizens and permanent residents being squeezed out of the market once they accumulate 10 years or so of experience, and worse, many top college students are discouraged by H-1B and offshoring from pursuing the field in the first place. In other words, H-1B is causing an internal brain drain of American talents.
First, America's priority should to help unemployed Americans and permanent residents get jobs.
Now that there is no job shortage, it's time to cancel all guest worker visas and send this temporary workers home. This is not an immigrant visa and it's only usage is for temporary labor shortage.
Wake Up America. For companies, to forsake Americans citizens for the sake of profit is very unpatriotic.
Look at all the companies that H1bs have touched and they have gone bankrupt.
Bravo!!!!
It's bad enough H-1b stole my job - now I'm going to pay taxes? Hello government, how many homeless tech workers living in cars does it take for you to wake up and end the fraud and abuse.
American citizens - the people funding these positions- had ZERO voice in passing discriminatory laws that allow non-citizens to take our jobs.
Anyone who buys into there's not enough qualified talent in the US is either the corporation, lobbyist, or regulator paid off to pass these laws.
End H-1b fraud and abuse - it's over 20% and restore American jobs for American citizens / American taxpayers.
Legislators - you were elected for the people by the people, not BUY deep pocket lobbyists representing the private interests of corporations. These laws impede Americans basic rights - life, liberty, and the pusuit of happiness.. Google pursuit of happiness it means JOBS.
Thank you for writing this piece. It's about time our government uses plain common sense and help Americans first in finding jobs. We should never consider these temporary guest workers under h1-b visas as immigrants because they are just temporary workers that are here to fill a labor shortage. With the recession there is not longer a labor shortage.
Lets do it. Lets throw temp workers out, then who will consume all the products US exports to these countries. Where McD, WalMart, DELL, APPLE, will go to sell products as our market is totally saturated.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, if these temp workers are replacing people here then US products are replacing domestic good in other countries. This is what you call Capitalism.
If you open a firm, your goal would be to provide best product with minimum cost; then why are we blaming corporates who are hiring temp workers at low cost. If we throw them out they will take the job with them to their country because of low cost communication. They all will work from offshore on the same components and on the same jobs.
At this point everybody has to think out of the box and find innovative ways to move ahead.
Good luck to all in this bad times, and the best part is it will get over!
@Hopeful
what at the expense of millions of Americans unemployed so Mcdonalds, Walmart and Dell can sell their products.
Globalization is a big lie at the expense of the American middle class...what we need is FAIR trade and not FREE trade.
Just remember America is still the number one consumer, India and China are not really buying our products..Only MCdonalds and Walmart are doing well there...
Dell is not because they are buying Lenovo computers, same thing
with our other products like dvds they are buying chinese products.
Thank God there are still Americans like you, Gerard. Otherwise scumbag politicians like Chuck Schumer that want to increase the H1B program would go completely unnoticed. Vote Them Out Now. It's the one advantage we have over the cheap, foreign labor.
Are you sure the H1B workers are responsible for "American technical worker to dip into bankruptcy" ? Because in France, H1B don't even exist, and our politics are full focused on "social protection" (you know : forbid to fire an employee, whatever the context), and .... our salaries are lower than yours.... Or maybe it's just that France is a third world country ?
Georges, you don't mention how much lower salaries are in France, nor give any indication of the scope. One difference may be that France has a state-subsidized medical system: in general people - even unemployed people - don't have to worry about paying thousands a year of out-of-pocket $$ for health care. So their salaries could be a bit lower while still maintaining a comparable standard of living. Also, I believe that once one gets outside the major cities like Paris, the cost of living may be somewhat lower.
Please don't insert the phrase "third world" in the age-old effort to paint all H-1B opponents as retrograde chauvinists who denigrate developing countries. BTW I love France: been there 3 times.
Why no H1B NIH cap? Because in 2000, econ 101 guru Phil Gramm co-sponsored a bill, S 2045, with Arlene Specter that successfully inserted a no cap exemption from for the universities and the out of control US government to “ensure that the U.S. economic expansion will not be impeded by a lack of skilled [ foreign] workers.”
Therefore the H1B cap does not include universities or the out of control US government and the NIH. These H1b numbers do not count in the cap, so there is no control on the H1B numbers in these cases.
The inclusion of the science money in this manner will go directly to the H1Bs and will further destroy US jobs by exporting technology as some workers return to foreign countries, including communist China, and become key builders of competitive companies to small US biotechnology companies.
The NIH ARRA is a horrible waste of money and detrimental to future science jobs and reveals the disconnection between government/science leadership and the taxpayers/wo
For my Labor Day weekend report I can only report more future American science jobs destroying policies.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) money to going to the universities and the NIH is just 10 billion dollars of future science jobs destroying waste for Amercians.
There is not a single H1B restriction on this ARRA money and most of it will go to employing foreign H1bs, not taxpaying Americans.
Not one single mainstream article has discussed how the NIH ARRA stimulus money has discussed how this taxpayer derived money is going to create jobs for US citizens, even as the unemployment crosses over 10 %. … absolutely shameful behavior.?
Consider this, there are a minimum of 20,000 H1Bs at just the top 100 H1B using universities. At 50,000 dollars a year this means 1 billion dollars is absorbed immediately into the foreign H1B workers, the real figure closer to 3-4 billion in salaries.??
There is no cap on the numbers of import H1Bs and J1s for NIH-universi
Dude, Get your facts straight. H1Bs enter only areas where there are no American Worker is willing to work at a cost the American business can be competative; Also H1Bs pay more taxes including Social Security tax; H1B children pay internartional fee and help run American Universities that inturn keep american job and help make American business work. They do not get even a penny out of the social security they pay out of their hard earned money; Infact but for H1Bs the Social Security would be bankrupt much earlier than it is prjected now.
Thats is not true...I live in nyc and most east Indians are replacing ppl jobs in areas where the average person works.. talking about the Jobs where AMERICANS and Vets can work and are not been hired over H1b-s ..This problem didnt start until BUSH became President....when A H1b can get jobs on NYC 100,000$ after just getting here, there's a problem...especially when we are willling to do the same work and have more experience. Just look at all the Corporate Hiring practices today..you can see the change.
@jockey -
Sorry to straighten your lie. There is no labor shortage because a lot of locals are out of work. There a shortage of companies that want to pay a decent wage. We should cancel all guest worker visas like H1-b so we can get locals back into jobs and the work force. Americans are willing to take any jobs that H1-bs are currently taking.
Sadly, there are boatloads of H-1b subcontractors working on DoD and other federal government contacts. H-1B contractors teach each other how to play the WMBE game to secure contracts through firms like Booz Allen - not only that, they give each other awards for their good work in bypassing qualified American citizens.
Obama needs to enact legislation like TARP for the bank bailout that mandates business dealing with the Federal government to require at least 50% American citizens for American citizen funded government initiatives.
Why doesn't the mainstream press cover this issue? Does the media think covering Michael Jackson is more important than the 'legal' elimination of the US middle class with discriminatory laws that bypass taxpayer citizens?
I suspect the H-1b debacle and fraud by US corporations will make Bernie Madoff look like Mother Theresa.
Jockey, you are a MORON. H-1Bs don't pay more in taxes and they have taken jobs from thousands of Americans who are more highly skilled. American companies where extremely competitive during the 90s when there were few H-1Bs in the country. I am a software engineer and my wages have dropped by a 3rd so don't tell me H-1Bs are doing the work Americans won't or aren't doing. H-1B labor is cheaper and lower quality and they are taking jobs from Americans in an industry invented by those very Americans.
Okay, I might be stepping into doo-doo here as I comment on the comment that "Displaced Worker" posted, but since this is an article by an African-American I believe it is relevant. My simple question is: why are Indian males (in IT fields especially) considered a minority group for WMBE purposes? Here is my understanding: practically all Indian H-1Bs and immigrants to the U.S. are from the Caucasian majority, rather than from India's hard-to-categorize tribal minorities. Most are from the Hindu upper castes: descended in part from the ancient Aryan (Caucasian) invaders from the northwest who introduced the caste system. So in other words: Indian males in the US are virtually all Caucasian males. If this is wrong then someone will tell me and I will apologize for posting incorrect information. So my question is: why is a Caucasian male working in an industry that Indian males dominate or practically dominate in the U.S. (IT services contracting) considered a minority for WMBE purposes?
To IP Daley-Majority of the Indian IT workers are from South India. South Indians are classified as Dravidians and not Aryans. Dravidians are racially and culturally different from the North Indians.
To Anita Bonghit-jockey is right if it is not for the H1B workers, Medicare and Social Security will go bankrupt very soon.
To Anon: Majority of the Indian IT workers WHO HAVE COME TO THE U.S. are from South India? I have heard differently. Can you reference this fact? If I'm wrong I'm wrong but first I would like to know that I am really wrong. As to "if it is not for the H1B workers, Medicare and Social Security will go bankrupt very soon": this sounds like absolute unvarnished way-off hyperbolic hogwash to me. In fact I'm sure it is... the numbers just aren't there. Medicare and Social Security may go bankrupt very soon but it won't have anything to do with that.
We don't need indian history lessons. Have somebody told the new Obama czars, Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra that it's not nice to hire cousins for projects here in America.
To IP Daley-The Chennai consulate with the jurisdiction of the four Southern states handles the most number of non-immigrant visa applications in India. A new consulate in Hyderabad was opened last year to serve the Southern states. The waiting time to get an appointment at these consulates are much higher than the other three.
To Concerned American-Vivek Kundra was born in India but moved to Tanzania and then to the US at a very young age and studied at the University of Maryland. Aneesh Chopra was born in Trenton, NJ which makes him American.
Excellent article, Gerald.
I work for a Government and here are my two cents:
My American worker: Spends 80% of time thinking about football,weekend and 20% serious work
My H1B worker: Works over weekend to complete the project without even filling out overtime sheet...
Whom do you want your tax money to spend on????
Dont compare oranges to apples!!!
Both workers are completely different!!
Hey Spink or what ever!!
How many contracts have to lost due to your inability to bid competitively to H1B consultants???
I agree..H1B visa workers should not be allowed on government contracts and on similar lines Walmart, Home Depot, Macy's should not be selling Chinese and Indian goods, they should sell only American goods. Any true American should buy only American goods and employ American Labor.
I.P. Daly makes a good point about WMBE Businesses. While researching the reasons behind my own layoff, I discovered that often the H-1B companies with US offices typically in NJ and Indian HQ are "women" owned.
Gotta give these H-1b abuser companies credit, they fleeced Congress, our universities, employers and health care system. How can this abuse and fraud go on?? The numbers don't lie - there is no labor shortage - and there is no need for H-1b or L-1 temporary visa workers at this point in time.
Temporary guest workers, kindly leave. Now.
It's not "economies of scale", it's just that they're so much cheaper you can have several of them for what a good US citizen worker would cost, but keep the US worker, so he can undo the damage from their mistakes.
US science and tech workers are consistently rated best. One researcher found, "U.S. engineers... [are] more creative, excelled in problem solving, risk taking, networking and [have] strong analytical skills..."
Hey "David", who said :-
"My H1B worker: Works over weekend to complete the project without even filling out overtime sheet..."
Slavery is always to be discouraged in the U.S. We already went down that road, and the H-1B visa program, as you clearly demonstrate, is an attempt to steer us down that road again.
Choose among the many competent U.S. workers available to you and send the H-1B back to help in the development of his own country where he is a free man and dosn't need a sponsor to give him permission to work.
"Whom do you want your tax money to spend on???? "
This does not parse in English - wonder why - anyway if you are a US citizen or Permanent Resident you might want to think about who is going to pay these taxes after we offshore and inshore cheap labor to do all our work.
Unfortunately, the H1b workers are of very low quality most of the time. About 90% of their time is used fixing mistakes they have made, where as the American programmers innovate and bring in results.
It looks like professional posters from India have taken over. We as Americans would rather pay our tax money on our own fellow Americans. We don't want to subsidize sub standard work from H1-b workers, yup they stay in the office late, but they don't do anything except read news from their mother country. They are good pretenders that they are doing something. Very minimal production and bad products.
The US government should not outsource jobs. That much is obvious.
H1b's may be cheap in the short term; in the long term their inability to get the job done, understand the basic business of an organization, and fake resumes come back to haunt the employer. The H1b/L1 program are major reasons the United States can't innovate anymore.
I didn't even know there was anyone left that still thought outsourcing jobs was good for the economy. I guess there truly is a fool born every minute.
Dr. Norman Matloff testified on this issue to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Immigration on April 21, 1998. Nowadays you would never know it by the way our politicians and reporters are talking. You can find his writings by doing an internet search on his name.
Mr. Spinks, I don't know who told you that government contracts don't allow for the hiring of H-1B workers. There are literally hundreds of contractors in the Washington, DC area, and all over this country that have legions of H-1Bs working on these contracts.
Further, there are plenty of defense contractors that are hiring H-1Bs all of the time. It would be nice if this was stopped, but then most of the outsourcing firms would be complaining to the WTO.
Why should government employees be the only ones protected from this scourge? Some of us will never be hired for a government job. H-1b workers should be sent packing in the private sector, as well. There is not now, nor has there ever been a shortage of high tech workers. As I write this I know one H-1b recruiter who was just hired to specifically recruit Filipino nurses. Don't you find this blatantly discriminatory? In the Philippines there are no middle schools. That means a high school diploma in the Philippines equals a middle school certificate of completion in the USA. That Filipino Bachelors degree is a High School diploma in the USA. Indian Bachelors degrees are obtained in 3 years. With the language issues they deal with there, that is an Associate in Arts at best. These foreign work visas are cheap labor programs designed to cut the feet off highly trained American workers. This economy will never pick up as long as we allow a never-ending supply of cheap labor.
FirstEnergy Ohio using H1B contractors to work on its Department of Energy funded project. What a joke, money given out by the government for generation of employment is abused.
Does everyone realize that if the jobs are not done by h1b's here in the US, the jobs get outsourced "offshore" to India. What are we going to do about that? The job doesn't stay here.
Hi my friends,
I work for a Mfg company as Engineer on H1B in a very remote area in South. The crime rate here is very high so I ended up here as no other American engineer wanted to move his family here!! My company had to keep this position open for 3 months before hiring me!
The other surprise I had here was all the other engineers I work with dont even have a degree in engineering and in one of our conversations one of the quality engineer said he studied History as major before accepting this job.
Now what is wrong me accepting this job on H1b and helping the company and USA to make goods under the supervision of real engineer?? Am I also included in the Go back H1B slogan???
I forgot to mention in the previous post I have MAsters degree with Honors from a Georgia State!
Please don't image every H1b is fake or something...real H1b struggle to get a job and work hard for this beautiful nation and toil of such individuals are what made this country(hardworking skilled immigrants)
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