Ask Slashdot: Reasonable Immigration Policy For Highly-Trained Workers? 357
davidwr writes "What are a reasonable temporary-worker or immigration-visa rules to apply to workers whose skills would quickly net them a 'top 20th percentile wages' job (about $100,000) in the American workplace, if they were allowed to work in the country? Should the visa length be time-limited? Should it provide for a path to permanent residency? Should the number be limited, and if so, how should we decide what the limit should be? The people affected are already likely eligible for special work-permit programs, but these programs may have quotas, time limits, prior-job-offer-requirements, and other restrictions. I'm asking what Slashdotters think the limits and restrictions, if any, should be. (Let's assume any policy to keep out criminals and spies remains as-is.)"
Are the hars working and honest? (Score:5, Insightful)
let them stay. Educated immigrants are more likely to start their own business. So where do you want that business to be?
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More importantly, can they spell?
"Hars working", sheeesh.
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It's not their fault, the Queen's English committee folded yesterday [guardian.co.uk] due to the severe apathy towards actually communicating with people.
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If they're going to pay their workers generously, let them stay.
If they're planning to pay their workers as little as possible (market wages), then it doesn't matter so much where they set up their business.
Remember, it takes two people to create a job, and each side always tries to take advantage of the other. Business owners aren't as saintly as some would make them out to be.
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If they're planning to pay their workers as little as possible (market wages), then it doesn't matter so much where they set up their business.
You'd rather the job be created elsewhere while you're left paying for unemployment benefits? (Or prison warden salaries, if the unemployeds' lack of welfare is such that they turn to crime to eat?)
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Unemployed, or underpaid? Tough choice...
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I wasn't aware it was hard for them getting in (Score:2)
Assuming you're not from a country where security issues might be a concern.
Re:I wasn't aware it was hard for them getting in (Score:5, Informative)
I was fortunate enough to have a company sponsor me on a H1B. It took me six years of waiting and thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees to adjust my status, i.e. go from H1B to Green Card. It's not that easy. The people on the Mayflower would be turned back if they made that trip today.
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I was fortunate enough to have a company sponsor me on a H1B. It took me six years of waiting and thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees to adjust my status, i.e. go from H1B to Green Card. It's not that easy. The people on the Mayflower would be turned back if they made that trip today.
I was with you until your hyperbolic Mayflower comment. Half of them died before the first winter was over, and the second half of the trip across the sea was in a relatively small ship fighting gales and nasty seas. You had it easy.
Re:I wasn't aware it was hard for them getting in (Score:5, Funny)
I was with you until your hyperbolic Mayflower comment. Half of them died before the first winter was over ...
Obviously, they did not have the appropriate skill set. They should have been turned back.
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The US was founded by ignorant religiously intolerant bigots (they didn't come here for freedom of religion, but freedom for their and only their religion) who form no plans and can't even follow good plans when handed to them on a silver platter.
You paint the entirety of settlement of the US by one colony. Sorry, but some colonies were most certainly founded under the auspices of religious freedom, having it their original charter.
Re:I wasn't aware it was hard for them getting in (Score:4, Insightful)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."
The first thing in the Bill of Rights was preventing establishment of a religion (followed by free exercise thereof). The first thing to do is to ban a state religion. After that, they address the issue of exercising ones personal religion. The reason being that so many of the colonies were explicitly religious, with explicit official religions that having them fight for religious control of the country would cause a civil war.
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Our nation's founding fathers fought it for us, and it's up to us to preserve the legacy.
We lost that battle when we didn't listen to George Washington's farewell address when he warned us of the evils of partisanship. A thousand little failures since then gave us what we have now, which is not what the founders had in mind at all.
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I was fortunate enough to have a company sponsor me on a H1B. It took me six years of waiting and thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees to adjust my status, i.e. go from H1B to Green Card. It's not that easy. The people on the Mayflower would be turned back if they made that trip today.
The American Indians wouldn't have suffered as much genocide had they been able to enact and enforce a meaningful immigration policy.
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I was fortunate enough to have a company sponsor me on a H1B. It took me six years of waiting and thousands of dollars in lawyer's fees to adjust my status, i.e. go from H1B to Green Card. It's not that easy. The people on the Mayflower would be turned back if they made that trip today.
The American Indians wouldn't have suffered as much genocide had they been able to enact and enforce a meaningful immigration policy.
They were doing pretty well at "enforcing immigration policy" when the Vikings tried to move on from Greenland and settle North America. It was disease that reduced their numbers later and made them vulnerable to the bible thumpers.
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The American Indians wouldn't have suffered as much genocide had they been able to enact and enforce a meaningful immigration policy.
They were doing pretty well at "enforcing immigration policy" when the Vikings tried to move on from Greenland and settle North America. It was disease that reduced their numbers later and made them vulnerable to the bible thumpers.
My guess is that the American Indians would have been better off letting a few more Vikings in (but not too many). A small permanent settlement in the colder less populated far north would have allowed the slower introduction of both technology and disease for a while before getting hit with all of the new technologies and diseases at once.
Re:I wasn't aware it was hard for them getting in (Score:5, Informative)
Might need a bit more historical data to back that up... It's pretty well known that Vikings did come to the new world, but I haven't seen anything yet to suggest they were pushed out by the natives.
I'm not even saying you're wrong, just that I haven't heard about it (and would find it fascinating...)
I only learned about this lately myself. Have a shuftie at this:
The Myth:
Our history books don't really go into a ton of detail about how the Indians became an endangered species. Some warring, some smallpox blankets and ... death by broken heart?
When American Indians show up in movies made by conscientious white people like Oliver Stone, they usually lament having their land taken from them. The implication is that Native Americans died off like a species of tree-burrowing owl that couldn't hack it once their natural habitat was paved over.
But if we had to put the whole Cowboys and Indians battle in a Hollywood log line, we'd say the Indians put up a good fight, but were no match for the white man's superior technology. As surely as scissors cuts paper and rock smashes scissors, gun beats arrow. That's just how it works.
The Truth:
There's a pretty important detail our movies and textbooks left out of the handoff from Native Americans to white European settlers: It begins in the immediate aftermath of a full-blown apocalypse. In the decades between Columbus' discovery of America and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in human history raced up the East Coast of America. Just two years before the pilgrims started the tape recorder on New England's written history, the plague wiped out about 96 percent of the Indians in Massachusetts.
In the years before the plague turned America into The Stand, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as "densely populated" and so "smoky with Indian bonfires" that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea. Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years after Columbus landed there is like trying to understand what modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from I Am Legend.
Historians estimate that before the plague, America's population was anywhere between 20 and 100 million (Europe's at the time was 70 million). The plague would eventually sweep West, killing at least 90 percent of the native population. For comparison's sake, the Black Plague killed off between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's population.
While this all might seem like some heavy shit to lay on a bunch of second graders, your high school and college history books weren't exactly in a hurry to tell you the full story. Which is strange, because many historians believe it is the single most important event in American history. But it's just more fun to believe that your ancestors won the land by being the superior culture.
European settlers had a hard enough time defeating the Mad Max-style stragglers of the once huge Native American population, even with superior technology. You have to assume that the Native Americans at full strength would have made shit powerfully real for any pale faces trying to settle the country they had already settled. Of course, we don't really need to assume anything about how real the American Indians kept it, thanks to the many people who came before the pilgrims. For instance, if you liked playing cowboys and Indians as a kid, you should know that you could have been playing vikings and Indians, because that shit actually happened. But before we get to how they kicked Viking ass, you probably need to know that ...
More... [cracked.com]
I haven't done a huge amount of research into this, but if it's true then it sounds to me like someone needs to get busy digging deeper into American history and bringing Hollywood up to speed on it.
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Even "after the apocalypse" tribes like the Comanche made moving westward or northward (if you are Mexican) difficult. It took a fairly industrialized US Army to dislodge some of the tribes in the interior regardless of what other apocalypse scenarios were going on.
Also, plagues tend to hit "civilized" societies hardest. Densely populated urban areas are much more likely to be impacted. You still see this today with Africa and malaria.
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>>>The people on the Mayflower would be turned back if they made that trip today.
And America would still be controlled by the Indians. Lax immigration policy is never a good idea, because the people you greet as friends, will then go all-out war against you in the 1800s, and force you into reservations.
Re:I wasn't aware it was hard for them getting in (Score:4, Informative)
Too little too late but you could have just done 6 years of waiting and zero dollars of lawyer's fees. The information on the process is all out there and free. There are filing fees and waiting periods, but the lawyer, despite what they might tell you, doesn't get it done any faster or better.
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Mod parent up. The notion that some people on Slashdot portray of an easy life for H1B workers is a complete falsehood.
Unless you have a masters degree (or equivalent), you will most likely be in the system as H1B status for years. This means that:
* You need somewhat of a life here, but if you lose your job for any reason you need to leave in ~10 days, which may involve selling property (cars), and ending lease agreements. If you take too long to leave you may be barred from re-entry. Technically the 10 day
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Some of my favorite colleagues have been H1-B's but they had real talent. They weren't just IT scabs. They made less than I did despite the fact that they were clearly more qualified. They were in a weak bargaining position with a company willing to take advantage of them.
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It can be very hard, unless you have enough cash to start a significant business. I think $5MM is the number that I have seen for a few countries. I looked in Thailand and Australia about 10 years ago: Australia wasn't too hard as long as you were young and upwardly mobile, but Thailand was the opposite. They didn't want to let people in that would become the new elite. They set it up to milk 90% of the people that come in-- between lawyers fees and accountants, you would be spending at least $10k per
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Even from a company like Ireland or Canada, there are quotas.
Ireland and Canada are companies?
A few thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
We should favor workers who are looking for permanent residency. They are good for the economy and the community.
We should make sure it costs no less to hire a foreign worker to work in the US than it costs to hire an existing resident.
We should not be using foreign worker visas to train people as a prelude to off-shoring.
I'm wondering if an auction system for tech visas would work out.
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The tech worker visa auction thing just might work. The trick would be to keep the cost of a visa at a level that just barely makes it unprofitable to screw with the system (to bring in lower-paid foreign workers or as you said, just bring them in as step one of an outsourcing plan) while still being affordable enough that any company seriously looking to hire someone from another country could easily stomach paying for the visa.
Let them all in (Score:3)
I can empathize form where you are coming from, but you are ask subjective question where people give the wrong answers.
Even the simple one on permanent residence. I worked on a study on Scandinavian immigrants to the US in the late 19th century. Over ½ said they were going to return. Almost none did. The predictive power just was not there. I am going to rely on antidotal evidence but I still think it holds true. People come to the US with plans and after 5 years those plans almost always gets
Re:Let them all in (Score:5, Interesting)
Rules:
1) must have an advanced degree capable of pulling in $100,000 or more per year in the US market.
2) No violent convictions.
3) No pre-existing medical conditions (TB, AIDS, smoking, cancer).
They are issued two 6-month visas and four 1-year visas (not at the same time, but sequentially), where they must be employed at $100,000 or more and have no criminal convictions of any kind (I used to have to put in "other than minor traffic tickets" but Texas finally decriminalized traffic tickets sometime after 2001, when I moved away, and I think they were the last where 1 mph over the limit and such was a criminal misdemeanor).
At the end of those 5 years, give them a green card or citizenship or something like that. It would suck for those who would make $102,000 in today's market, but $95,000 in a market filled with others like them so that a quota would help them, but the real effect is that the $110,000 per year jobs would settle in around $100,000 per year, and immigrants looking to move to the US would aim for the $150,000+ jobs for the extra cushion.
If 1,000,000 can get in after 5 years (no quotas), then let them all in, they'll make $100,000,000,000 minimum (taxes and economic value).
My "fix" for H1-B was always to charge the same for the visa (to the sponsoring company) as it would take to train someone into the position. Then train someone into that position and revoke the H1-B visa. I'm not sure it would have the effect I'm desiring, that companies would begin training themselves, rather than outsourcing the training to the US government, but I'm sure someone smarter than me could fix that.
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surely the pre-existing medical condition is a bonus if they're paying for health care themselves. Got to keep the American medical industry thriving, how else can you afford to hire foreign doctors on exorbitant salaries?
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So Basically What You're Asking Is (Score:5, Insightful)
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Should now read:
"Give me your inventors, your geniuses,
Your bored singletons yearning to spur economic growth,
The fertile intellects left from your teeming chaff.
Send these, the able, patent-ers to me,
I lift my GDP beside the golden door!"
Let's face it, work visas are handed out like bouncers controlling admission to a club. You are asking these questions that sound like they treat people with respect and offer them opportunity but what I hear is basically: Are you going to be a net positive for the United States? And how do we accurately measure the Nikola Teslas and Yao Mings from the Dr. Nasser al-Aulaqis (Fullbright Scholar and father of Anwar al-Awlaki).
You know what? It's a dirty business and I don't want any part of it. In my own humble opinion, it's unethical. Your questions sound like "Can we implement a brain drain on the rest of the world with little or no risk?" I think it should be all law-abiding individuals or none and, despite 9/11 and the Mariel Boatlift [wikipedia.org] that consisted of criminals and mental patients, I personally lean toward letting everyone in unless they are known to have committed or been convicted of crimes in their country of origin that are 1) credible sentences and 2) also misdemeanors or higher in the United States.
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America wasn't founded by god damn law abiders.
We should look at the 'crime' and decide if they were breaking a 'stupid law', if so they are in.
For example: We don't want to reject someone just because they are ambitious enough to build and operate a still. I'd go so far as to reject anyone from a dry (e.g. saudi) or overtaxed (e.g. all of Scandinavia) country that didn't have a conviction for bootlegging. I'd accept them only if they could prove they had 'got away with it'.
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On the flip side
You have somebody who send back remittances
Make come back and bring additional skills.
Creates demand and excitement for education, encouraging more people to enter the field.
IIRC, in the field of nursing, the tipping point is 20%. There have been studies trying to figure out if educating nurses for oversea work helps the local economy. If less then 20% of the nurses head overseas, then the county has more nurses then it would normally have.
As Gandhi (?) said – Better a brain drain then
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I don't think "Give me your tired, your poor..." was ever said out of the goodness of the nation's collective heart. It was said at a time where we had factories that needed workers. Now we have workers that need factories.
100 million (Score:2)
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Good point.
True. So let's bring in people who will eventually contribute to the consumer demand that will make building more factories (or service industry places of employment) here profitable.
Furthermore, don't make it short-term. If we limit them to a short period of time here, they
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I don't think "Give me your tired, your poor..." was ever said out of the goodness of the nation's collective heart. It was said at a time where we had factories that needed workers. Now we have workers that need factories.
Actually, the phrase "Give me your tired, your poor..." is from a poem (The New Colossus written by Emma Lazarus in 1883) which was inspired by about the US experience of poor Jewish immigrants escaping persecution in Eastern Europe.
As for the US immigration policies of the 1900's, there were certainly lots of factories that needed workers and eastern and southern Europe had people that wanted to work resulting in immigration of about ~700K/year (out of 1M/year total or ~1%/year) per year from those countri
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the Mariel Boatlift that consisted of criminals and mental patients,
But the criminals were often political prisoners, who weren't in for violent crimes, and a large percentage of the asylum inmates were committed due to "mental illnesses" such as homosexuality. It would be like getting sent criminals and committed from the USSR and getting Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
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I'm not sure why the U.S. gets all the flak for not accepting every person that comes knocking. Somehow we seem to be held to a higher standard than everybody else.
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Let's face it, work visas are handed out like bouncers controlling admission to a club. You are asking these questions that sound like they treat people with respect and offer them opportunity but what I hear is basically: Are you going to be a net positive for the United States? And how do we accurately measure the Nikola Teslas and Yao Mings from the Dr. Nasser al-Aulaqis (Fullbright Scholar and father of Anwar al-Awlaki).
You know what? It's a dirty business and I don't want any part of it. In my own humble opinion, it's unethical. Your questions sound like "Can we implement a brain drain on the rest of the world with little or no risk?" I think it should be all law-abiding individuals or none and, despite 9/11 and the Mariel Boatlift [wikipedia.org] that consisted of criminals and mental patients, I personally lean toward letting everyone in unless they are known to have committed or been convicted of crimes in their country of origin that are 1) credible sentences and 2) also misdemeanors or higher in the United States.
+5 Insightful.
In a way, I see a parallel between how open a country should be with how open software should be. The fundamental philosophy behind the two things is the same, in my humble opinion. Just like software, a country, especially the USA, will NOT go bankrupt or even lose its income earning potential if it recognizes that intellect and intellectual property should be nurtured and left free, not be caged and locked away. I may sound over the top while making this comment, but there are very few count
Why should wage matter? (Score:3)
It seems any system that differentiates based on wage is inherently flawed.
Most try to differentiate based on skill and if that skill can be found locally.
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Wage should be -a- factor, since higher wages for the middle class means a stronger economy. At present, all the money is at the extreme end of the food chain, so there's no fiscal circulation, which in turns means stagnation.
But it should not be the only factor. Capacity to -generate- wealth should be more important than capacity to earn it, where you need to ignore all right-wing dogma over who actually generates wealth. Inventors generate wealth. Discoverers generate wealth. Engineers of pretty well any
Opinion != news (Score:5, Insightful)
Y'all Come Policy: Bring Em under the Tent (Score:2)
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The myth of immigrant labor taking jobs is pretty much busted.
This myth was busted a long, long time ago. See The Lump of Labor Fallacy [wikipedia.org]. Economists have understood for centuries that economics is not a zero-sum game. But uneducated people continue to believe it is.
All based on what you are trying to accomplish. (Score:2)
Personally, I have my doubts that immigration is logical in a democracy.
But if you are a capitalist and are coming from a standpoint of increasing the economy, then allowing anyone who wants to come and work on whatever is the only logical policy.
Let's have an exchange program (Score:2)
For any bright person that wants to immigrate here, they should sponsor someone in the US who is currently unemployed to immigrate into their home country.
Maybe the idea is half-baked: what additional cooking do you suggest?
Too many steps? (Score:2)
2. When the border is secure - really secure - amnesty current illegal trespassers so we can end the situation of having two classes of people in the country and can stop having to show our papers any time we want to do a little bit of work.
3. Give out plenty of visas to software engineers because the cost of shipping sof
You're asking this... (Score:2)
HERE? This is one of those topics that is guaranteed to garner intelligent discourse by a few amidst a horrifying see of flame from the majority. Why not look into studies on the impact of skilled workers joining a workforce, and the cultural effects of immigration instead? My take is that there should be minimal (but some) financial incentive on the short-term for employment of such workers (IMHO, H1-B is *too* much incentive) and incentives towards citizenship. I believe that immigration of good skill
Highly trained workers (Score:4, Interesting)
As has been pointed out before, the point of H1-B visas is to get rid of older American workers who with education and experience have become highly trained, and replace them with less trained, cheap foreign labor. In 2010, during record-high unemployment, 117,409 people came in on the H1-B visa. Which is just one of many visas that people come to the US and work on. Professor Norm Matloff has a web page [ucdavis.edu] about this.
I'm trying to get an English PhD in now (Score:4, Interesting)
.
This sucks.
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EB-1
dude (Score:5, Insightful)
Let 'em all in. If you're going to pull down six digits (and pay taxes on it) then I say: WELCOME TO THE U.S.A.
Here's the thing. We Americans don't actually build stuff, grow stuff or put stuff together anymore. Well, we do, but it's becoming more and more rare. What do we do? We make software and design stuff. Unfortunately, the kind of endeavors one might easily imagining doing somewhere else. We really, really don't want that to happen, since it's this kind of activity we're going to rely on moving forward to support the rest of the economy, which is inwardly focused (medicine, finance, service industry, etc.) That's why we really want all the world's bad-ass scientists, engineers and developers to re-locate their Hindi / Mandarin / who-the-hell-cares-as-long-as-they-also-speak-English selves stateside and get to work building the next Facebook Google.
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Let 'em all in. If you're going to pull down six digits (and pay taxes on it) then I say: WELCOME TO THE U.S.A.
Here's the thing. We Americans don't actually build stuff, grow stuff or put stuff together anymore. Well, we do, but it's becoming more and more rare. What do we do? We make software and design stuff. Unfortunately, the kind of endeavors one might easily imagining doing somewhere else. We really, really don't want that to happen, since it's this kind of activity we're going to rely on moving forward to support the rest of the economy, which is inwardly focused (medicine, finance, service industry, etc.) That's why we really want all the world's bad-ass scientists, engineers and developers to re-locate their Hindi / Mandarin / who-the-hell-cares-as-long-as-they-also-speak-English selves stateside and get to work building the next Facebook Google.
You should visit the Midwest some time. There are entire states devoted to growing stuff.
Let anyone in with a technical degree (Score:3)
As in medical, engineering, software, geophysics, etc. The best thing that could happen to the USA is a population bias in favor of intelligence. At the moment, it would seem that we desperately need that.
However, I would also propose that those with without technical degrees (e.g political science, ethno-musicology) need not apply, but good luck in your country search.
Don't treat them like Mexican goat herders (Score:2)
... because that's how it currently feels when you want to get a US visa with a strong education and the intention to create a company there. Scratch that; this doesn't even remotely begin to describe US immigration officials. I'd wager that they export more US jobs (by having them created elsewhere, directly or indirectly) than all other professions combined.
Seriously... Just open the floodgates and let anyone who applies with a degree come and settle, including those after lower quintile jobs. People with
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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The rest of the US economy just isn't a "free market" so you cause a massive imbalance by having one part of it being so.
As an immigrant to the US myself I can also tell you that your solution would get you an endless stream of people coming from economically poorer countries who's only plan is to come to the US for a year or two, live cheap and send the vast majority of their earnings back home i.e. out of the US economic system, then eventually move back home and live it up there as they are now relativel
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Typo: I meant skill-sets not skillets. :-)
You can never devalue the good ol' US bar-b-q
H1-B then EB-2 or EB-3 based immigration (Score:2)
It is (relatively) easy for skilled workers to work in the U.S. either temporarily or to immigrate.
Basically, there has to be no American that can be found that meets the minimum job requirements at the prevailing wage.
I did write skilled.
Of course, "found" has different interpretations depending on whether the stay is temporary (H1-B) or permanent (EB-2 or EB-3 "Green Card").
For the temporary case, the employer has to assert they can't find any Americans (and not have layed off any in the last six months,
Let Me Understand This Correctly (Score:2)
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With an average unemployment of over 8.2%, and you can't find a single American to do your job?
We are talking about the 20% top percentile, 6-figure salary type of jobs, you know. This is not about filling job slots, but bringing highly trained talent into the country. If we are to survive the inevitability of globalization (and the cheap-o manufacturing flight that comes with it), we must do this.
Re:Let Me Understand This Correctly (Score:5, Interesting)
What field do you work in?
It took me three plus months of searching to find a good IT employee to help me with my workload. I'm at a company that has tripled its revenue in the last two years. I have more work than I can handle on my own, but I need someone competent to do it... not someone who I need to train and hold their hand. I need to be more productive, not less productive. I need someone I can delegate work to and know that they will do it just as well or better than I can. Those people are not easy to find. I had to sort through a whole slew of unqualified candidates before finding the guy I hired.
And right after I hired him, I asked for a raise because going through the hiring process made me realize just how limited the supply of qualified technical workers really is. They gave it to me, because the company knows it too.
There is a serious problem with Americans. Too many people think that they deserve a high paying job. They think they can go "get an education" and get hired by a company that will give them a career track.
Most of the people I know who are doing well are doing what they enjoy. They are in IT and they like computers. They are doctors and they are fascinated by life and the body. They are engineers and they are complete geeks for building things. They are into biochem and are thrilled to be working with the building blocks of life. They all have passion and they work hard and are constantly thinking about work... not because they have to, but because their brains are wired that way. They enjoy it. It fascinates them.
Too many people get too focused on being "successful". They do not realize that success comes from excelling at what you do. The drive to excel only comes from passion. Either passion about the task, or passion about the reward. People who are passionate about the task will be successful their entire lives. People who are passionate about the rewards will eventually burn out.
100K+ is made by 20% of workers?! (Score:2)
Household income will come closer, but only 6-7% of people make that kind of money.
Limited visa = no high potentials (Score:3)
I worked in Germany, the US and now Canada. Had a green card for the US due to my American wife, but decided that Canada would be a good place to sit out the Great Recession. I wouldn't be here if this country didn't have fairly transparent immigration rules that allow for certainty that you and your familly will get permanent residence status.
Payed of handsomely for Canada. After all I pay a heck of a lot of taxes - not considerably much worse than what I had to pay in the US though and my salary increased by a good margin when I made the move.
It depends.... (Score:2)
What are a reasonable temporary-worker or immigration-visa rules to apply to workers whose skills would quickly net them a 'top 20th percentile wages' job (about $100,000) in the American workplace...
It depends. Are we at economic full employment with american workers in those positions? If not, why would want to encourage businesses to hire non-american workers? On the other hand, if we are at economic full employment with american workers in those positions, then by all means, fill the empty positions with skilled non-americans.
Reciprocity (Score:2)
Re:With unemployment where it is at, send them hom (Score:2)
We have lots of citizens who need jobs. Send the foreigners home. Locals may need training, but let's get them working again.
Read my lips. No amount of training is going to bridge the shortage of skilled workers in the USA. Until something is done that actually addresses the problems in your education system this is always going to be an issue.
Oh, and there's plenty of work available in the fields picking fruit, but only foreign workers will do it.
education system what on the job skills that can't (Score:2)
Education system what on the job skills that can't be done in the class room or the lack of entry level jobs so people can work there way up.
shortage of skilled workers some times comes from people what a overload of skills that NO one has.
more apprenticeships are needed college for all is (Score:2)
more apprenticeships are needed college for all is a issue with the system as is.
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Hiring the existing unemployed skilled workers might bridge the shortage. You won't know if you don't try it.
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Oh, and there's plenty of work available in the fields picking fruit, but only foreign workers will do it for $3 an hour.
FTFY.
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No amount of training is going to bridge the shortage of skilled workers in the USA.
Exactly. I can only speak for IT, but it has been hard to find qualified candidates for mid-level positions. The guy I ended up hiring is mostly self taught and loves the work. The large majority of the candidates all wanted to be IT managers and were very light on technical skills.
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Re:With unemployment where it is at, send them hom (Score:4, Funny)
If I may make a modest proposal here... why send them home? Consider this: 40 million Americans live in poverty. 3.5 million American children are at a risk of hunger every day! Meanwhile, foreign workers are rich in fats and protein - a good part of which, I must add, coming from them being well-fed and well-cared for in an American society, courtesy of the American taxpayer! How can you possibly support shipping all those valuable nutrients to third world countries like UK and Germany when American citizens are dying without them? Not to mention all the CO2 emissions produced by planes flying them back.
Think of the children! Think of the environment!
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The theory is that we have plenty of talent to fill the 20k-90k/yr jobs and don't want to dilute that market for current residents and citizens.
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I would argue that the theory is exactly backwards. We should only be allowing people to immigrate who have specialized skills that are not available in the current labor pool in the United States. Thus, those jobs should also be the highest paying jobs. Instead, what we have turned the immigration policy into is a way to bring in people to perform the middle clas
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Because we really can't find qualified people? We're a large company, and in this region, to find someone with the skillsets I'm looking for is nearly impossible, and we're paying top $$.
Training? I provide additional training, but if you don't come in knowing your shit, why the hell should I pay you $100k just for the privilege of teaching you all the crap you should know for this position?
maybe your skillsets is to big or to long (Score:2)
maybe your skillsets is to big or to long
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Yes, I do have a very big and long skillset.
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Sounds like you are not paying top dollar enough or you would find somebody. Or perhaps the needs are too specific. I just hired a guy with lots of technical background in various languages, but no experience in language X to be a programmer for me in language X.
On the other hand, we also recently tried to hire some entry level programmers, and we didn't get very man
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We're a large company, and in this region, to find someone with the skillsets I'm looking for is nearly impossible, and we're paying top $$.
Sounds like you are not paying top dollar enough or you would find somebody. Or perhaps the needs are too specific. I just hired a guy with lots of technical background in various languages, but no experience in language X to be a programmer for me in language X.
Could very well be. But $100k to $120k, and not in NYC or SF should bring in a decent selection of candidates at the very least. But I'm in one of those rare fields where there very low or near zero unemployment, unfortunately.
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And if that is the case, then in fact that is what the H1B program was designed for, and back in the 70s that is what it did. Now it is used to bring in entry and mid-level developers, which we already have in spades, in an attempt to artificially lower the cost of labor and destroy
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Honestly, I prefer to hire locally, but my peer managers have had trouble finding qualified people as well. It's a freaking pain to do a H1-B. I would go through the pain and hassle for the right candidate, but, damn, surely there're some good people who learnt these kinds of shit on their own.
I did...
college what about tech school and people who lear (Score:2)
college what about tech schools and people who learn on there own??
OR apprenticeships
CS is not IT. Tech school do give the skilled needed for a IT help desk / desktop / system admin job. CS is more on the programmer side and even then it tends to be very top level with lot's of lacking skills.
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Just because you prefer to read into what I did not say is not my fucking problem. The top guy on the team makes $120k and does not have a college degree, so fuck off.
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Because I'm not hiring for a junior position. Is that really a difficult concept?
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I've moved on beyond proving shit to random idiots on the Internet. While I have personally consolidated 3 positions into one (and my boss doubled my pay for doing that) this is not one of those times.
You've just shown that you're a fucking idiot with a chip on your shoulder, no wonder you can't make more than $50k, tops.
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So you can't prove it.
"While I have personally consolidated 3 positions into one (and my boss doubled my pay for doing that) this is not one of those times."
And you are an asshole.
When I need to be, yes. Why, this is "kiss your ass day" at your company is it?
By the way, when I consolidated 3 positions into one, that is *ME* taking on additional responsibilities when those people left. So my boss was happy to double my pay. And ultimately I ended up working only 3 hours a day, and playing starcraft the rest of the time. And my boss was happy about that, because I tripled the entire team's productivity *AND* improved their skillsets.
And I did hire a junior to be my backup, and made
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Competition is good
Only if the competition is fair. Are they paying the same taxes? Are they living in the same area with the same cost index?
I could live like a king in many places on my wages, but not in the northeast USA, or on the Pacific coast, and then take a look at other places around the world, and the difference is even greater. Sure if my living costs were lower I could see dealing with the cut in pay.
So I iterate again, Competition is good only when competition is fair.
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If you have skills look up BC PNP.
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Get over it. The 90k/year immigrant is quick to note that he can make a better wage elsewhere, and the company will be looking for a new guy as soon as he moves on. Plus, the odds are they're only offering you the interview because the spotted the immigrant, and they need to show immigration officials that they failed to locate the needed candidate before sponsoring a visa. The real issue here isn't the immigrant, it's the immigration policy, the hiring policy and the going bout of deflation.
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As soon as we can accept the reality that we are already competing with them for jobs, all the reasons not to have them here fall away.
The countries that recognize this first will gain the most benefit.
Oh please. Have you looked at our state of education lately? Have you noticed how few of us go into the most important fields of study?
And here is reality. (Score:2)
How about training local citizens for the job, at low or no cost to them.
That requires local citizens willing/inclined to pursue the education necessary for a 6-figure salary. And please don't tell me that cost is what drives locals away from doing that. We have an abundance of Marketing/Creative Writing graduates (and too few STEM graduates) to prove this is not a factor.
You need to change the ethos of our society before you can even have a soapbox from where to ask your question. As it is, it's just jingoistic posturing. Deal with it, and suck on it. We do not have a society