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How Is Expanding the H1B Visa Program a Winning Issue for Marco Rubio?
There’s a stinging jab at Rubio at the end of this emotional report. (The video is at the link; no embedding option, unfortunately.) We’ve heard these stories before about quality workers being fired and forced to train their replacements but the Disney angle on this one seems to expand the outrage from many different directions.
Is this where Jeb steps in to differentiate himself?
Published in Immigration
There’s a leap. Maybe you’ll quote me and take me through your logic in getting from what I said to that conclusion.
Eric Hines
On the first point. My apologies. I was categorizing all those illegally here, regardless of means, and thus considered those that overstayed visas to be illegal immigrants since they de facto are living in the USA.
According to that source between 33-50% of illegal individuals living in the USA overstayed a visa. So reforming and dealing with that is an important means of fixing that issue, thus Rubio’s prescribed solution by increasing enforcement and oversight will hopefully rectify that issue.
On the second point I was referring to illegal immigrants more than H1-B visa holders, since H1-Bs are skilled workers more or less according to the legal description, but the point still remains on those fringe benefits and other regulations that do not affect them and makes native workers less competitive in terms of costs to productivity.
If you eliminated those taxes and regulations then firms could make that decision for themselves rather than be compelled and foreigners would have no cost edge, after all they have a cost of being brought in (giving a native a cost advantage).
This can easily be turned around: Roadrunner believes that American shareholders should accept lower dividends and American consumers should accept higher prices so that someone can keep a job that another person is willing to do for less. This is a fun game.
This is exactly right. Don’t commit the fallacy of lumping all jobs into broad categories like “STEM workers” or “Engineers” or “Construction Workers”. Those categories are useless when analyzing the employment picture in the fragmented labor markets of high tech, heavy construction and manufacturing.
Heck, even ‘welder’ is too broad a category, because today welders can specialize in many different types of welding and need certifications and special training for them. A person qualified to weld a muffler on a car may not have any capability at all for welding exotic alloys or doing mil-spec work on large structures.
You can have a city full of unemployed web developers with a 2 year web programming diploma and a few years’ experience as an HTML/javascript coder, and it won’t do you a lick of good if you need a scientific programmer who knows his way around a Fast Fourier Transform or a data architect who knows how to build a performant, scalable database application.
This is the main employment problem facing HR people in high tech firms. “Programming” or “engineering” jobs are not fungible – they are made up of narrow specialties that makes the individual talent pool for some of them very thin.
There is a serious problem with labor mismatch in the U.S. For example, for all the whining about the loss of manufacturing jobs, there are over 600,000 open factory jobs in the U.S. right now at an average salary of $23/hr, and yet the average age of an American factory worker is 56.
Most factory managers are terrified of not being able to keep the doors open as their workers retire. They are offering increasingly higher wages to attract young people, but either finding no takers or discovering that the expectation for work load among the young is so low that they are scared off when they see what the job entails.
Why is this? Because we have set expectations for youth WAY too high. We tell them they all have to go to college, and when there they shouldn’t worry about taking something useful, but should ‘find themselves’ and use the opportunity to become ‘good citizens’ – that being defined by going into debt up to your eyeballs to pay some ‘studies’ professor to indoctrinate you into being a good social justice warrior by instilling a sense of resentment and entitlement.
Do you think a person with an Ivy-League degree in critical theory or gender studies will stoop to being a lowly factory worker? Factories are evil anyway. They’d rather be unemployed. So factory owners look for H1-B applicants and other immigrants, and are then vilified for giving away ‘good American jobs.’
Recall that Microsoft laid off 25,000 employees over the past two years, while they are one of the biggest agitators for more H1B visas.
What kind of employees did they lay off, and what kind did they hire on H1Bs? There might be a clue in that. And it really matters.
In my experience, high tech H1B workers do not make less than local tech workers. The market just doesn’t work that way. You have to pay to attract the talent, and it’s extremely expensive to lose someone after you’ve trained them in the job because they discovered you were paying peanuts compared to jobs they could get elsewhere.
Or let me rephrase that: The H1-B workers may make less per hour, but the cost to the company is not lower because it’s really expensive to hire and maintain H1-B workers.
This is an area most people don’t think about too much. My company pays head-hunting firms something like 10% of a worker’s annual salary for people they bring in. Then they know that even though they are paying this person $75,000 per year, it’s going to take them a month or two or three to become fully productive. When you’re hiring someone on a 2-year H1-B visa, those costs are a significant fraction of the cost of employment. So they might pay a little less in salary in some cases, but they’re not getting a free ride or an inexpensive employee. It’s just that the mix of visible vs invisible employment costs are different.
One of the reasons that H1-B candidates are attractive is the lower salary is what hits the manager’s cost center. If the firm’s cost accounting isn’t well done, that manager never sees the legal and recruiting costs. I had to drive that proper allocation–back to my cost center–to get my board to grok the issues w/ H1-B. My predecessor had shifted the real costs away (while the board was complaining about our law firm and HR).
You got me. As a true American I should work to have my country overrun with foreigners on as many fronts as I can.
No, not necessarily. I am for monitored but fairly open immigration, but I don’t believe that there is a right to come here or anything of that sort. If a majority of my fellow citizens don’t want further immigration, I would believe it to be a mistake but they can get the policy that they want.
What you could do is realize that either position has real costs to Americans, some more obvious than others.
What you say is true, but it doesn’t address “the big picture.”
After graduating with a Masters, I was hired by a Fortune 500 company to do Advanced Development/Research in radios. Although I was enthusiastic and did my best, my first two years were a net loss to the company. During the next 3.5 years, I was much more effective, and submitted and shared in 8 U.S. Patents on my program . I left that company due to internal politics.
Many recruitment ads in my field asked for 3-5 years of experience for this reason. Does it make sense to pass up an American if it takes less than 3 months to become effective? How are they going to get any experience if H1-B’s are the norm?