A Tidal Wave in the GE: It's not just the trade agreements - it is the H-1B Visas

[Skwmom]

&feature=youtu.be


And Hillary on H-1B visas.

[tk2kewl]

1. When her corporate pals can make cash off immigrants then she makes sure they aren't illegal

“I am adamantly against illegal immigrants,” then-Sen. Clinton said on the John Grambling radio show in Feb. 2003.

“Come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties,” Clinton continued. “Stand in the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You’re going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to get yard work, and construction work, and domestic work.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/05/07/unearthed-audio-hillary-said-shes-adamantly-against-illegal-immigrants-audio/#ixzz42vVEqP41

She was still using the term "illegal immigrants" in the 2016 campaign

Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that her use of the term "illegal immigrant" at a town hall in New Hampshire earlier this month was a "poor choice of words."

...

"Well, I voted numerous times when I was a senator to spend money to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in," Clinton said. "And I do think you have to control your borders."

...

"Before one audience, she will talk about immigration reform and the need for it," O'Malley said on KLRU's Overheard With Evan Smith in Austin, Texas earlier this month. "Before another audience, she'll use the term illegal immigrants and boast about having voted to build a wall and barbed-wire fence."

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/261202-clinton-vows-to-stop-saying-illegal-immigrants

Instead of standing on corners to get picked up by people with yard work to do, H1B workers wait fo someone making >100% markup on their labor to get them a gig. It's a racket.

[liberal_at_heart]

2. K&R. They tell the American people it is their fault they don't have a job because

they don't have the skills for the STEM jobs available and then they go and give those STEM jobs to people who get brought in from other countries so they can pay them a lower wage.

[Skwmom]

6. People have every right to be fed up.

[DCBob]

3. I dont like the H1-B visas either but they do seem to be a necessity in some situations.

I am a software engineer and for sure the H1B thing is a threat to me but I also see why they are needed. There simply are not enough skilled software and network engineers in this country to fill all the openings. For sure the program is abused by some firms but not in all cases. I think the biggest problem is that few Americans are taking up high tech degrees. My wife is a computer engineer at UMD and in her classes there are few if any Americans. Most are foreign students from India, China and other Asian nations. How can companies hire Americans if there are very few graduating?

[Warren DeMontague]

7. Maybe because we've let fundamentalist groups like "the family" wage war on science education

So perhaps we should ask ourselves which of our candidates is still doing the "values voter", culture war, god-bothering bit, and which isnt.

[shawn703]

9. It's a tool to keep wages depressed

Without the H1B visa, what would the laws of supply and demand say would happen to your salary?

[bklyncowgirl]

14. Why study IT if you know your job is vulnerable?

Many people in that field went into it because they thought the jobs would be secure. They weren't.

[amborin]

4. she's all for increasing H1B Visas: in Ohio Training Their Replacements:

Hillary Wanted Increase in H1B Visas and Now: Fury & Fear in Ohio Over IT Layoffs
Hillary Urged Increase in H1B Visas:
The New Zealand Herald

June 1, 2007 Friday

Hillary Clinton's hi-tech sales pitch

Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has been in Silicon Valley trying to cosy up to America's hi-tech sector (), which she believes needs to "hit the restart button on the 21st century".

Lame slogans aside, Hillary is making a clever move. The US IT industry grew rapidly during the presidency of tech-friendly Bill Clinton and like Hollywood the IT sector has a more liberal bent, especially with the latest boom in user-generated internet services.

The last few years have been characterised by a lot of valuable IT work being outsourced to cheaper countries like India and the IT skills shortage has hit the US reasonably hard.

Hillary dangled a fairly big carrot in front of Silicon Valley executives today in the form of increased R&D funding, more IT training and a relaxation of Visa conditions designed to make it easier for foreign software engineers to work in the Valley for longer. Already, over half of Silicon Valley software engineers are foreign born.

Her bag of tech goodies includes:


- Increase the number "H1B" visas to attract more highly skilled workers from overseas.




Fury & Fear Over this in Ohio:

IT Outsourcing

Fury and fear in Ohio as IT jobs go to India

IT workers are training their replacements

Patrick Thibodeau By Patrick Thibodeau Follow

Computerworld | Nov 9, 2015 3:03 AM PT


The IT workers at Cengage Learning in the company's Mason, Ohio offices learned of their fates game-show style. First, they were told to gather in a large conference room. There were vague remarks from an IT executive about a "transition." Slides were shown that listed employee names, directing them to one of three rooms where they would be told specifically what was happening to them. Some employees were cold with worry.

The biggest group, those getting pink slips, were told to remain in the large conference room. Workers directed to go through what we'll call Door No. 2, were offered employment with IT offshore outsourcing firm Cognizant. That was the smallest group. And those....

snip

Offshore outsourcing is having "a fairly strong impact" on IT employment, said Janulaitis. Students coming out of college are facing trouble starting a career "and a lot of that is driven by jobs that are taken by non-U.S. nationals in our economy, and a lot of that is H-1B ," he said.

"Why are we talking about more H-1B visas for people when we have people who are unemployed?" said Janulaitis.

The IT offshore industry relies heavily on H-1B workers to deliver services, and large offshore firms, both in the U.S. and in India, are the largest users of this temporary, non-immigrant, work visa. The issue is getting a little more attention in the unfolding 2016 presidential contest, but it remains to be seen whether this attention will have any impact. ....

snip

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3002681/it-outsourcing/fury-and-fear-in-ohio-as-it-jobs-go-to-india.html

The New Zealand Herald

June 1, 2007 Friday

Hillary Clinton's hi-tech sales pitch

Presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has been in Silicon Valley trying to cosy up to America's hi-tech sector (), which she believes needs to "hit the restart button on the 21st century".

Lame slogans aside, Hillary is making a clever move. The US IT industry grew rapidly during the presidency of tech-friendly Bill Clinton and like Hollywood the IT sector has a more liberal bent, especially with the latest boom in user-generated internet services.
The last few years have been characterised by a lot of valuable IT work being outsourced to cheaper countries like India and the IT skills shortage has hit the US reasonably hard.

Hillary dangled a fairly big carrot in front of Silicon Valley executives today in the form of increased R&D funding, more IT training and a relaxation of Visa conditions designed to make it easier for foreign software engineers to work in the Valley for longer. Already, over half of Silicon Valley software engineers are foreign born.

Her bag of tech goodies includes:


- Increase the number "H1B" visas to attract more highly skilled workers from overseas.

[amborin]

5. workers in California training their lower wage replacements:

Michael HiltzikMichael HiltzikContact ReporterThe Economy Hub
Since last summer, Edison has been firing domestic IT workers, replacing them with outsourced ones from India

Imagine getting a layoff notice, then being ordered to train your replacement.

That's what has happened to hundreds of information technology employees at Southern California Edison. Since last summer, Edison, which serves nearly 14 million customers, has been firing its domestic IT workers and replacing them with outsourced employees from India.

snip

The Indian workers are brought in on H-1B visas, which are temporary work permits for "specialty occupations" — those requiring "highly specialized knowledge" and a bachelor's degree.

The purpose is to allow employers to fill slots for which adequately trained Americans aren't available, not to replace existing workers with cheap foreign labor. That's why employers such as Google and Microsoft, which say they're short of highly trained software engineers, have lobbied hard to expand the program beyond the 65,000 visas available annually. These high-tech companies say they can't meet their needs from the pool of U.S. graduates in STEM specialties — science, technology, engineering and math.


But Edison is using the program for a different purpose — to cut its wage costs, possibly by as much as 40%, according to data compiled by Ron Hira, a public policy expert at Howard University.

The pay for Edison's domestic IT specialists is about $80,000 to $160,000 not including benefits, with the average at about $120,000 for experienced personnel, according to records Edison submitted to the state Public Utilities Commission. The two Indian outsourcing firms providing workers to Edison, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, pay their recruits an average of about $65,000 to $71,000, according to their federal filings.

These employees perform the crucial work of installing, maintaining and managing Edison's computer hardware and software for functions as varied as payroll and billing, dispatching and electrical load management across Edison's vast power generating and electric transmission network. The workers I interviewed are in their 50s or 60s and have spent decades serving as loyal Edison employees.

They're not the sort of uniquely creative engineering aces that high-tech companies say they need H-1B visas to hire from abroad, or foreign students with master's degrees or doctorates from U.S. universities who also can be employed under the H-1B program. They're experienced systems analysts and technicians for whom these jobs have been stairways from the working class to five- or six-figure middle-class incomes. Many got their training at technical institutes or from Edison itself.

Some laid-off Edison employees say the transition is not going well.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150222-column.html

[Skwmom]

11. And they wonder why people are fed up. n/t

[Lizzie Poppet]

12. Any boss that asked me to train my cut-rate replacement...

...would be getting some seriously cut-rate training. Like "one step from monkeywrenching" cut-rate...

[Nonhlanhla]

8. I'm a former H1-B worker

My husband is in a field where there is a lack of qualified people, so he got an H1-B after he completed his training here in the US (we both initially came here to study). I have a Ph.D. from an American institution, so when I entered the job market, I also got on an H1-B. (Neither of us are in IT, so relax.) It is the normal avenue for legal immigration if you don't come in through family or the diversity lottery.

I understand that H1-B visas pose a problem in the IT world, but that does not mean that H1-B visas themselves are necessarily the problem. It is the way in which the US draws in some of the world's best and brightest.

[bigwillq]

10. K and R (nt)

[vintx]

13. K&FUCKING R

Just another tool in the neolib arsenal to help the elites destroy the middle class.

Sad to see so many people willing to sign on to help that team.