9 ms·

Listen, there's no point claiming the H1 situation isn't a rampant clusterfuck. Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo while busloads of cheap, disposable foreig

by warcher 10y ago

Listen, there's no point claiming the H1 situation isn't a rampant clusterfuck. Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo while busloads of cheap, disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited and depress domestic wages. It's a full on disaster. If you have to have temporary worker visas, fine. But don't tie them to a company. If there's a legitimate need, and they're legitimately skilled, they'll find work, and they'll more than likely find work that pays comparably to a native worker (or they'll get poached, because good help is always hard to find).

WalterBright 10y ago
> Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo ... good help is always hard to find Sounds contradictory.
- arjie 10y ago
  Trivially non-contradictory. Consider a hypothetical situation in which all the good skilled workers are on visa statuses that do not permit work and have missed the H-1B lottery. Both things are then true.
  - WalterBright 10y ago
    That would require that there are no local good skilled workers, so the argument they are being replaced doesn't hold.
    - arjie 10y ago
      The comment isn't talking about local workers. It is talking about (a) foreign workers who are skilled, (b) low-wage less-skilled foreign workers and how the H-1B fails to achieve its stated aim in two respects because it's easy for there to be unemployed (a) and employed (b). The comment contains no argument that local workers are being replaced.
      - WalterBright 10y ago
        > The comment isn't talking about local workers. I think you and I are talking about different comments :-)
- syngrog66 10y ago
  consider: age discrimination; or an otherwise very talented person is tied to some location (eg. home, or a rural town, due to dependents, or disability), or has the same name as someone "bad" in the news and thus look scary when googled (eg. "I'm John Tillman the nice Portland engineer not John Tillman the NY rapist!" (name is random contrived example)), or once made an un-PC undeletable post in a public forum, or is non-English-speaking, or simply bad with social skills but otherwise great engineer, etc. Also, much of the modern recruiting/hiring culture is still very oriented towards erring on the side of false negative/rejection, and riddled with irrationality and institutionalized jerky behavior. If an engineer is Famous (due to several public accomplishments), like yourself, you may not have to encounter any of this. "Who cares where he lives or what he's said or how much money he wants, or age... it's Walter Bright!"
Idontreddit 10y ago
Wait til TTIP and TPP becomes law. Times are good now, but once hilary gets elected and these "free" trade agreements gets signed, the monied masters will immediately raise interest rates and cause a recession which will give cover for businesses to lay off a large swathe of workers ( this time its going to be IT/developers/tech workers who are going to face the brunt of it ) and offshore a lot of these jobs. H1B is a significant problem, but so is offshoring. From a business point of view, the cost savings are too immense to ignore. If you can pay a foreigner $5K to do something an american workers does for $50K and pocket the $45K annual difference, it's a no-brainer to corporate executives. The shareholders will benefits and the C-Suite will benefit, the workers will suffer. There is a reason why the leftist and rightist establishment are working so hard to get hilary elected. The amount of pro-Hilary propaganda on NPR, NYTimes, LATimes, etc was nearly unbearable while she was fighting against Sanders. Now that Sanders is done, I might have to stop consuming these media for the next few months. As much as we like to pretend, there isn't two parties. There is one party ( the elite ), that control both parties to gives an illusion of choice. Even the republican establishment are trying to undermine Trump to give Hilary the presidency. Complete protectionism/isolation isn't a good thing. But extreme liberal trade policies aren't a good thing either. Thought maybe Trump will get the nod and push policies towards the center, but there is too much money at stake for the elite so they are going to force hilary, TTIP, TPP, etc on us no matter what. We are going to replace one corrupt chicago politician with another.
- nickysielicki 10y ago
  I think that a reasonable person could disagree with what you're saying here, but I don't think that justifies the downvotes. Your comment is reasoned and mostly uninflammatory, albeit considered a little "out-there" by most people. In the back of my mind, I tend to agree with much of what you say here. > Complete protectionism/isolation isn't a good thing. But extreme liberal trade policies aren't a good thing either. I'm just trying to figure out how we got into this bizarro world where being supportive of a trade policies with your 12 closest allies, notably leaving out the two countries with the second and third largest economies (and growing rapidly), earns you the label of being "pro-trade". How the hell did that become our idea of a non-isolationist trade policy? It's the antithesis of free trade, particularly when you look 10 or 20 years forward and realize this treaty is (effectively) disincentivizing trade with what will be the two largest economies.
_audakel 10y ago
> disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited "exploited" is a matter of perspective. To an onlooker who has lived their whole life in a first world country, seeing people work for $x - (less-significantlyLess) [where $x is what is "typical" for the job] can be seen as bad/wrong/sad etc... I have spent time working in very poor parts of Mexico and Manila. Crime is rampant, I feared for my life at times. Polution/open sewage made my eyes burn. By the end of my job there (helping doing on site server data migration for a financial institution) I was willing to pay/do anything to get out. We take many things for granted that foreign workers might consider "Perks of the job". $1 has far more buying power in Manila than a place like the Bay area, but I would live in the Bay over Manila, essentially taking a wage cut. This does not condone the wage discrepancy btwn foreign/domestic workers, but offers a potential explanation why a person would happily take an apparent "pay cut", and even be better off.
- dominotw 10y ago
  I am an immigrant living in the united states. I still can't believe my luck that I get to live in this paradise on earth called USA. I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery. One of my uncle works as day laborer in dubai. He works 14 hr days of hard labor in extreme heat and lives in a some shanty where he has to share a bathroom( hole in the ground) with 14-20 other people. His passport got confiscated by his "owners" as soon as he landed there and was put under some sort of draconian "contract" where they get to work him to death, work place deaths are extremely common and no one cares if its an immigrant. In native's eyes they are basically slaves with no rights. You can see videos online where the 'owners' beat the shit out of them for real or imagined slights. I went to a restaurant once in Dubai with my uncle, all the immigrants were separated out into a different room with no air conditioning and that is where immigrants were supposed to sit you could never eat with locals. I've also heard of many second-hand stories where women who go there to be be domestic help get sexually and physically abused for years. And shocking part is that he does all this voluntarily for the most part even though he never gets to see his family and kids and gets to have sex only when he goes back every 4-5 yrs. We had houses on the our street referred to as 'dubai houses' meaning houses build with money made in dubai, you can feel the eerie sadness when you look at a house. I can go on forever but I think you get the idea. Seeing yourself as an individual and as a human being is privilege inaccessible to most people in countries like mine. Even Our philosophical frameworks and belief systems are designed to explain away and make sense of unbearable misery of life with concepts like karma and preordination.

by warcher 10y ago

WalterBright 10y ago

> Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo ... good help is always hard to find Sounds contradictory.

arjie 10y ago
Trivially non-contradictory. Consider a hypothetical situation in which all the good skilled workers are on visa statuses that do not permit work and have missed the H-1B lottery. Both things are then true.
- WalterBright 10y ago
  That would require that there are no local good skilled workers, so the argument they are being replaced doesn't hold.
  - arjie 10y ago
    The comment isn't talking about local workers. It is talking about (a) foreign workers who are skilled, (b) low-wage less-skilled foreign workers and how the H-1B fails to achieve its stated aim in two respects because it's easy for there to be unemployed (a) and employed (b). The comment contains no argument that local workers are being replaced.
    - WalterBright 10y ago
      > The comment isn't talking about local workers. I think you and I are talking about different comments :-)
syngrog66 10y ago
consider: age discrimination; or an otherwise very talented person is tied to some location (eg. home, or a rural town, due to dependents, or disability), or has the same name as someone "bad" in the news and thus look scary when googled (eg. "I'm John Tillman the nice Portland engineer not John Tillman the NY rapist!" (name is random contrived example)), or once made an un-PC undeletable post in a public forum, or is non-English-speaking, or simply bad with social skills but otherwise great engineer, etc. Also, much of the modern recruiting/hiring culture is still very oriented towards erring on the side of false negative/rejection, and riddled with irrationality and institutionalized jerky behavior. If an engineer is Famous (due to several public accomplishments), like yourself, you may not have to encounter any of this. "Who cares where he lives or what he's said or how much money he wants, or age... it's Walter Bright!"

Idontreddit 10y ago

Wait til TTIP and TPP becomes law. Times are good now, but once hilary gets elected and these "free" trade agreements gets signed, the monied masters will immediately raise interest rates and cause a recession which will give cover for businesses to lay off a large swathe of workers ( this time its going to be IT/developers/tech workers who are going to face the brunt of it ) and offshore a lot of these jobs. H1B is a significant problem, but so is offshoring. From a business point of view, the cost savings are too immense to ignore. If you can pay a foreigner $5K to do something an american workers does for $50K and pocket the $45K annual difference, it's a no-brainer to corporate executives. The shareholders will benefits and the C-Suite will benefit, the workers will suffer. There is a reason why the leftist and rightist establishment are working so hard to get hilary elected. The amount of pro-Hilary propaganda on NPR, NYTimes, LATimes, etc was nearly unbearable while she was fighting against Sanders. Now that Sanders is done, I might have to stop consuming these media for the next few months. As much as we like to pretend, there isn't two parties. There is one party ( the elite ), that control both parties to gives an illusion of choice. Even the republican establishment are trying to undermine Trump to give Hilary the presidency. Complete protectionism/isolation isn't a good thing. But extreme liberal trade policies aren't a good thing either. Thought maybe Trump will get the nod and push policies towards the center, but there is too much money at stake for the elite so they are going to force hilary, TTIP, TPP, etc on us no matter what. We are going to replace one corrupt chicago politician with another.

nickysielicki 10y ago
I think that a reasonable person could disagree with what you're saying here, but I don't think that justifies the downvotes. Your comment is reasoned and mostly uninflammatory, albeit considered a little "out-there" by most people. In the back of my mind, I tend to agree with much of what you say here. > Complete protectionism/isolation isn't a good thing. But extreme liberal trade policies aren't a good thing either. I'm just trying to figure out how we got into this bizarro world where being supportive of a trade policies with your 12 closest allies, notably leaving out the two countries with the second and third largest economies (and growing rapidly), earns you the label of being "pro-trade". How the hell did that become our idea of a non-isolationist trade policy? It's the antithesis of free trade, particularly when you look 10 or 20 years forward and realize this treaty is (effectively) disincentivizing trade with what will be the two largest economies.

_audakel 10y ago

> disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited "exploited" is a matter of perspective. To an onlooker who has lived their whole life in a first world country, seeing people work for $x - (less-significantlyLess) [where $x is what is "typical" for the job] can be seen as bad/wrong/sad etc... I have spent time working in very poor parts of Mexico and Manila. Crime is rampant, I feared for my life at times. Polution/open sewage made my eyes burn. By the end of my job there (helping doing on site server data migration for a financial institution) I was willing to pay/do anything to get out. We take many things for granted that foreign workers might consider "Perks of the job". $1 has far more buying power in Manila than a place like the Bay area, but I would live in the Bay over Manila, essentially taking a wage cut. This does not condone the wage discrepancy btwn foreign/domestic workers, but offers a potential explanation why a person would happily take an apparent "pay cut", and even be better off.

dominotw 10y ago
I am an immigrant living in the united states. I still can't believe my luck that I get to live in this paradise on earth called USA. I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery. One of my uncle works as day laborer in dubai. He works 14 hr days of hard labor in extreme heat and lives in a some shanty where he has to share a bathroom( hole in the ground) with 14-20 other people. His passport got confiscated by his "owners" as soon as he landed there and was put under some sort of draconian "contract" where they get to work him to death, work place deaths are extremely common and no one cares if its an immigrant. In native's eyes they are basically slaves with no rights. You can see videos online where the 'owners' beat the shit out of them for real or imagined slights. I went to a restaurant once in Dubai with my uncle, all the immigrants were separated out into a different room with no air conditioning and that is where immigrants were supposed to sit you could never eat with locals. I've also heard of many second-hand stories where women who go there to be be domestic help get sexually and physically abused for years. And shocking part is that he does all this voluntarily for the most part even though he never gets to see his family and kids and gets to have sex only when he goes back every 4-5 yrs. We had houses on the our street referred to as 'dubai houses' meaning houses build with money made in dubai, you can feel the eerie sadness when you look at a house. I can go on forever but I think you get the idea. Seeing yourself as an individual and as a human being is privilege inaccessible to most people in countries like mine. Even Our philosophical frameworks and belief systems are designed to explain away and make sense of unbearable misery of life with concepts like karma and preordination.