US senator seeks higher pay for H-1B workers

[OhioChick]

Source: Economic Times of India

9 Apr, 2013, 02.57PM IST

WASHINGTON: Senators finalizing a massive immigration bill are arguing over plans to boost visas for high-tech workers, Senate aides and industry officials say, with disputes flaring over how best to punish companies that train workers in the US only to ship them overseas.

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who has taken the lead in pushing to crack down on outsourcing firms, also is seeking higher wages for workers brought in on the H-1B visas that go to specially skilled foreigners, aides and officials say. High-tech industry officials say his efforts risk punishing companies not involved in the abuses he's trying to target, and lawmakers including Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida are taking the other side.

The dispute comes as aides to four Democratic and four Republican senators have been racing to put the finishing touches on sweeping immigration legislation that would secure the border and grant eventual citizenship to 11 million people in the US illegally, while also allowing tens of thousands more high- and low-skilled workers into the country on new visa programs.

Aides worked into the evening Monday on the high-tech visa issue, and senators were to resume meeting in person Tuesday after returning to Washington from a two-week spring recess. They were hoping to complete their legislation this week, though next week may be looking more likely. The high-tech visa question loomed as one of a few remaining unsettled matters.


Read more: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/nri/visa-and-immigration/senators-to-add-high-tech-visas-dispute-details/articleshow/19456505.cms

[DainBramaged]

1. More American high tech jobs for low tech Foreign workers

what a country we live in.......

[xtraxritical]

2. The H-1b program is just to legitimize outsourcing and break unions.

[adieu]

3. That's a nice solution to the whole H1-B scam

Require that H1-B visa holders get paid as much as US citizens working in the same field. That would completely deflate the who point of H1-B visas, which was to be able to hire people at 1/3 or less the wages of US workers.

The only incentive for hiring H1-Bs is for the lower wage rates. It's not because the US is deficient in skilled workers. The US is deficient in skilled workers at low rates, that's the problem for corporations and employers. We have plenty of skilled workers. Just not willing to work for $15/hr when they could and have worked at $150/hr.

[alp227]

4. The law should ban pay discrimination based on immigration status.

I'm thinking of a ledbetter type law. durbin seems to be out for show.

[Xithras]

5. There is a simple solution to this problem.

Simply mandate that all H1-B's be paid at the prevailing wage, based on the Davis-Beacon style model. One of the fundamental problems with the H1-B program today is that it requires companies to pay the "prevailing wage", but then sets very poor standards on how that is defined and then includes no effective enforcement method.

If the law was changed to use the Davis Beacon style minimum prevailing wage model, hard regional compensation floors could be established for these workers. By further amending the laws to require the H1-B visa holders themselves to report their annual income for verification, it would become trivial to catch employers who are violating the law (this would also be beneficial to the H1-B holders themselves, as underpaying companies could later be forced to repay the wages they shorted, just as we already do with employers who pay under the state or federal minimum wages...there would be little incentive for companies to cheat).

By eliminating the wage differential between American and imported workers, many of the H1-B abuses would stop.


Of course, I also heard another proposal recently that made a LOT of sense as well. Establish a federal "pre-outsourced" jobs database and require H1-B employers to utilize it. Before a company is allowed to hire an H1-B, force them to list the position on a federal jobs site for a minimum of 30 days. Workers in impacted fields across the country would have access to this database and would be able to list their skills and experience with the system. When a company is considering hiring an H1-B and posts a position and requirements, anyone registered with the system who has the matching requirements will be given the option of applying for it. While you can't force the employers to hire Americans, you CAN force them to identify the specific reasons why each of those Americans was unsuitable for the position. This would provide a lot of benefit to many different groups. It would benefit employers because it would give them access to qualified American employees who might not otherwise see their job advertisements. It would benefit the government because it would provide a mechanism to identify employers who are consistently hiring foreign workers over American workers. And it would benefit the workers themselves, as legitimate passovers would provide those workers with detailed reasons as to why they're not being hired (perhaps a specific skillset is missing, or their experience with a particular technology needs work). The workers could take that feedback and use it to improve their marketability to other employers.

[aggiesal]

7. This looks good on paper . . .

but I'm sure that corporations would have lawyers parse every word to find loop holes
to keep from paying US wages.

I still believe that H-1B visas should be tied to the Engineering Unemployment
numbers. If engineering unemployment is high, then H-1B's should be at a
minimum. If engineering unemployment is low, the H-1B's could be raised.

[Xithras]

8. The trick with that...

...is that you'd have to closely tie the engineering employment numbers to local regions, and most locales don't track their unemployed workers with that kind of granularity.

There is a legitimate use for H1-B's, and one of them happens to be filling employment in "skill deserts". It's relatively easy to find an engineer in the main urban areas, but have you ever tried hiring one in a "skill desert"? I once spent six months trying to find a senior level programmer/administrator for a job in a rural area and never found one qualified applicant. We even offered to pay for training, on the condition that the employee sign a repayment contract to prevent them from bolting for higher wage jobs elsewhere the moment the training was done. We never got a single taker. We ended up hiring an H1-B because it was the only way to fill the position.

The problem with hiring based solely on unemployment rates is that those rates can mask huge disparities in skill availability across the country. It's trivial to find a skilled programmer/administrator in the Silicon Valley, but try to find one in rural Tuolumne County California, where the median income is $35k a year and where the first thing that anyone with any techical skills does is LEAVE.

[aggiesal]

9. Yea, that hot bed or engineering Tuolumne County, . . .

Sure H-1B's might work there, because nobody is going to move there unless they have
an anchor, like family.

Unfortunately, the abuse occurs in the hot beds.

I live in San Diego.
I have a friend that is a manager at a high tech company, whose name I won't
mention, but it starts with Qual, and ends with Comm.

I told him the I felt that his company was abusing the H-1B's and he justified it
because all the companies were doing it.



He also told me that one of the requirements to get an H-1B is to first advertise
the position in the US. But the way they work around that requirement is to advertise
in a NON high tech hot bed area, like the middle of the great plains, where nobody
would even consider looking for a high tech position.

[Xithras]

10. Which brings us back to my original statement.

"The problem with that idea is that you'd have to closely tie the engineering employment numbers to local regions, and most locales don't track their unemployed workers with that kind of granularity."

Can you tell me the percentage of unemployed computer programmers in Tuolumne County? How about the percentage of unemployed senior-level network engineers in San Diego county? The answer is generally no, because the counties that track and report the unemployment numbers rarely (if ever) have the data to narrow their unemployment records with that kind of granularity. It doesn't do anyone any good to say "you can't hire a senior Ruby programmer on an H1-B in California because we already have a 5% unemployment rate for programmers in this state", if the actual job is located in Tuolumne County where there is a 0% senior level Ruby programmer unemployment rate. That doesn't do ANYONE any good...the unemployed in the other parts of the state STILL aren't going to move to Tuolumne County with its crappy payscales and status as California's redneckistan, and the employer is simply left with a position that can't be filled. It's a lose-lose solution.

Tying H1-B availability to unemployment rates is ONLY useful if the data is available to restrict that limitation to the economic area where that job is actually located, and to the type of position actually covered. Our unemployment data doesn't provide us with that kind of flexibility.

I wholeheartedly agree that H1-B abuse is flagrant and needs to be reigned in. I'm simply saying that imposing blanket restrictions based on general unemployment rates isn't the solution we need.

[aggiesal]

11. Here is a link to . . .

The Bureau of Labor Statistics site: http://www.bls.gov/lau/lausad.htm

This allows to Extract [font color=Red Size=20]L[/font]ocal [font color=Red Size=20]A[/font]rea [font color=Red Size=20]U[/font]nemployment [font color=Red Size=20]S[/font]tatistics (LAUS) Data.

I'm sure you'll be able to extract data for your area, or somewhere near by, like Sacramento, or Silicon Valley or maybe even Reno/Carson City.

[Xithras]

15. The BLS numbers aren't particularly useful for this

The BLS categorizes unemployment using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system to determine job titles. The SOC uses only very generalized job groupings for unemployment statistics. For computer engineering, for example, they only break it down into three broad groups. 1) Computer Programmer. 2) Software Engineer. 3) Web Developer.

A VB.Net programmer is of no use when you're looking for someone to code out a Ruby/PLSQL web application, and yet the SOC codes treat them as the same job. I wouldn't even want to think about how long it would take to retrain someone from one skillset to the other (years, probably). The fact that there are 50 unemployed PERL programmers nearby isn't of much interest if you need someone to maintain your Java codebase.

The fact that the BLS numbers can't offer more detail makes them fairly useless when determining the relative availability of potential applicants for jobs like these. For the job I mentioned above, we actually received HUNDREDS of applications. We had lots and lots of VB people. We had a few Java people. We had a bunch of applicants who had graduated from the local community college with entry level AS/CS degrees. They were far outnumbered by the people with dated C skills and Cobol, and were probably even outnumbered by the poor souls who truly believed that knowing how to code macros in Excel qualified them to run and code and administer a modern browser based web software system on a day-to-day basis. We did interview about a dozen of the more promising candidates. None could even tell me what a Responsive web interface was, much less how to maintain one. Only one applicant had any knowledge about our target technologies at all, and when it became obvious that his understanding of the technology was rudimentary, even he confessed that he'd only spend a half day reading some online sites about it after we offered the interview.

Hiring technology people isn't like hiring assembly line workers. The skills are very specific, and it can take months (or even years) for workers to become proficient in them. They can't be easily interchanged, which is why general unemployment numbers aren't particularly useful when determining labor availability in the technology fields. It's like a medical practice looking at hiring a new gynecologist...the number of unemployed local "doctors" doesn't mean much, when those numbers don't differentiate between gynecologists, GP's, and neurosurgeons. There's a huge difference in both skillset and compensation for those different titles, and they aren't interchangeable.

[Le Taz Hot]

12. Great.

More more inland California bashing. 'Cause racism and stereotyping never gets old.

[aggiesal]

13. I was neither racial nor stereotypical . . .

Just stating that Tuolumne County does not have a lot of high tech positions,
and that not a lot of people move into that area unless they have family or friends.

So when a high tech position becomes available, an H-1B worker would probably
be the best way to fill out that position, but that hot beds like Silicon Valley and
here in San Diego, the option to get an H-1B over a local US citizen is more likely
to be abused.

Sorry if you felt slighted.

[Le Taz Hot]

14. Your original premise is incorrect

unless you can back that up with some sort of cite source which, of course, you can't, because it doesn't exist. You do know we have these institutions of higher learning here, right? They're called colleges. And just last week? In one of our lean-to's they installed a flush toilet AND a ceeeeeement pond. Yeee haw!

[ChromeFoundry]

6. Simple solution

Require companies to pay 150% of the TRUE prevailing wage. If the company uses the visa holder to train a US citizen replacement for the same job - within 18 months, they get reimbursed the extra 50% back. After 18 months, the employer pays an annual 15% fine based off the prevailing wage. This would force companies that claim there is a shortage of skilled workers in the field to pay a premium for the skill sought, and would thwart the proliferation of low wage slave laborers. I don't think anyone would claim that the H-1b program is not needed if companies using the visa holders were forced to pay more than hiring permanent workers.

[JCMach1]

16. That would work as the companies then would only do it if they had a LEGIT

shortage of experts.

[ChromeFoundry]

17. Precisely the intent of the original program...

yet, everyone that has seen the program in action knows better.
And companies and immigration lawyers will argue that this will reduce a company's ability to compete in the marketplace. I won't hold my breath on a solution like this to be implemented - ever! There is a whole world full of people to exploit in the name of richer corporate profits and project manager cost reduction bonuses. How the people on DU that praise the glory of these broken programs (H1, L1, etc) sleep at night is beyond me... they may as well be recruiting slaves for Foxconn China to build the next iGarbage.

The way I see it, if a company needs to import talent from offshore sourcing, then the resulting product and results will yield a premium profit - thus allowing the added investment of paying more for the people performing the work and the training of local talent to reduce the cost in the future.