IT Becomes Mired In Immigration

    • We hear the drumbeat cry of the Tech companies “We can’t hire people for the work!”. What they mean is “We can’t hire people for the work at the price we want to pay”. H1-B visas are a way to drive down the salaries of ALL IT workers in the US, plus it puts disincentives on new people coming into the field. Why pick this as a career if you know they are importing more than the entire graduating class of the US every year for cheaper wages.

    • Again, another article that favors the side of the big Tech companies without looking at the facts.
      Why does this continue to happen when qualified U.S. citizens cannot find a job? The problem
      is not one of a talent shortage. The real problem is a lack of management talent at these
      Tech companies…..

    • It’s official. Mark Zuckerberg has convinced the Democrats to amend the Senate Bill to include the granting of U.S. citizenship to illegals who have a certain number of “Likes” from American Facebook members. In addition, any illegal who has had a Facebook account for at least 5 years will get Registered Facebook Status (RFS), with which he or she will be able to legally work and post in the U.S. After 13 years of being a Facebook member who regularly reads and posts, clicks on links, and abides by Facebook’s terms and conditions, will get U.S. citizenship.

    • I am an immigrant – documented – in the IT field. The problems in the high tech immigration system, to me, are that

      1. the requirement for term “high-skilled’ is very low. All it requires is just a BS degree and 2 years of experience in ANY country (if you are a IT manager you probably have seen many fresh Indian college graduates with more than 2 years experience in their resumes). But the paperwork is too heavy for newbies. These two situations discourage small business employers. But for those giant IT consulting companies whose business model is based on cheap H1-b labors they are big advantages since paperwork is not an issue for them.

      2. there are leap holes in the minimum salary determination. In short, benefits are not considered in the way it should be. For MOST IT professionals, they work 8 hours a day, and enjoy 10 days or more paid personal leave each year, have free or low-cost insurance, and receive reimbursement for business trip. But my co-worker, who used to work for a big consulting company, said he worked more than 60 hours per week, had no insurance, no paid leave days, and had no reimbursement for business trip. His salaries met minimum salary requirement but apparently he received far less than an average US citizen.

      3. The queue for Indian IT professionals to get green card is too long. It takes about 10 years for the majority of them to get green card and in turn have the freedom to work for ANY employer in US. That means their current employer can squeeze them for more than 10 years. This situation again encourage consulting companies to bring more immigrants.

      4. I believe, from my co-workers, EB1, L1-A, L1-B and H1-b are abused by consulting companies by faking job description and fake work experience. For example, L1-A is for high profile managerial staff. Unlike H1-b it is cheap and quota-free. Some consulting companies give their technical staff fancy titles and the apply L1-A for them.

    • Where are all these IT jobs? I know plenty of software engineers in the Chicago area who are having a hard time finding work right now. Maybe other places are better, but in one of the largest cities in the United States we have plenty of people taking contract jobs because no one is hiring full time.

    • The H1B visa program has destroyed the American middle class.

      It’s really a simple case of supply and demand.


      Consider an analogy. Consider, for example, what would happen if H1B were applied to plumbers instead of engineers.

      Pick any city, let’s say, Denver, Colorado. Now, bring in 100 busloads of freshly graduated Indian or Chinese plumbers (4,000 new plumbers), who want to enter into the plumbing business in Denver, and make a living.

      The result? Wage rates for plumbers will become depressed. The existing 960 American plumbers in Denver, once busy every day, and making a good living, will now have much less work, or no work at all.

      All the Denver high school kids hear from their fathers and uncles that plumbing is no longer a good way to make a living. The plumber wages are going down, down, down. In droves, they choose some other path in life. Who can compete with impoverished hordes of plumbers from India who will work for any price? India has 1.17 BILLION people, and many of them are coming here, flooding our labor markets.

      The H1B visa law was created, written and lobbied for by large American corporations as a means for decreasing their engineering labor costs. Indeed their corporate profits have zoomed up, up, up — while the wage rates paid to their American engineers have gone down, down, down.

      This is what the H1B visa has done to the American engineering profession. H1B has already brought in over one million foreign engineers to America, thus driving down American wage rates, and discouraging American kids from majoring in engineering.

    • As someone in the IT Tech field, I can honestly say that the H1B Visa program is a joke.

      I work with many Indian, Chinese and Russian H1B holders.

      Even those who hold Master Degrees from US Universities lack basic language theory and programming skills.
      Compare that to Indians, Chinese and Russian immigrants who came here as children… night and day.

      Every poster has stated that the use of H1B is a way to control wages and I have to concur.

      There are many tricks that these companies play to try and justify the use of H1B.

      Its pathetic

    • Stop the outsourcing. Hire people and train them. If you can’t find enough people locally, open a branch somewhere else and train people there. That used to work, and would still work.

    • I work for WIPRO at a GSK site. My company misused visa process to get usless people like myself into US, so well said by H1-B holder … obviously USCIS does not understand a difference between smart competent engineer vs. just useless ones!! So I am here.

    • The US needs more high tech workers with advanced skills than US-born workers at present can provide. Though it is true that the commoditization of foreign labor depresses wages and reduces opportunities for US citizens, the importance and practicality of utilizing a foreign-born labor pool is undeniable. This is true for the country as a whole, US business competitiveness in particular, and for individual IT workers regardless of their country of origin, That said, opening the floodgates to foreign-born labor is not the sole answer to the problem either.

      I would propose that businesses be taxed (or pay a substantial fee.. $20,000+ per year perhaps?) for each foreign worker hired. The money collected would then be utilized to train US-born workers for the STEM jobs of tomorrow. This would serve to keep wages for tech workers from becoming more depressed, offer greater opportunity to qualified foreign tech workers, increase revenues, address both the short term & long term needs of US businesses, and prepare the underemployed US-born labor pool for the future.

      The US government has a responsibllity to business owners, tech workers, and the growing number of citizens who’s skills are much less likely to be competitive in the more globalized information age marketplace which is already upon us. Such a solution would serve all those interests well and fairly.

      The number of H1-B visas (and associated fees) issued by the US government should be indexed and tied to the unemployment rate and median incomes for the industries affected. A policy of that sort would be a win-win for all concerned.

    • I own an IT staffing company and deal with several H1 visa holders on a daily basis. It is a complete misconception that H1 holders get paid less than local US Citizens or Green Card holders.


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