Americans used to be qualified to do any job. What changed?
17 replies (most recent on top)
How did America get along before H1B’s?
16 replies and only one really talks about how the US did well before H-1B.
Cisco culture in a nutshell.
Combination of factors: inflated foreign resumes, poorly educated citizens, corporations that no longer train workers, corporations hiring cheaper foreign labor.
Foreign born students represent a massively larger share of those getting PhDs as well as patents relative to the general population.
As a straight white American male who is not a shaky purse dog like so many here I can say a lot of Americans need to up their game. Working 40 hours a week for 40 years making the same mistakes along the way is no longer competitive.
@p5 Complete trash argument. Never in the history of the country have some of the highest paying jobs that could be sourced in the country has a specific type of visa been created.
Other immigrants started at the bottom. From the 1820s to the 1860s there were waves of Chinese and Irish that built the railroads. Others built farms in the Midwest.
From the 1870s to the teens, there was a huge industrial bo-m where immigrants worked mills, coal mines, and steel mills.
But now we've got them starting at the top, in the highest paid jobs in the country, all of which could be easily filled by graduates from our excellent Universities. Excellent graduates of all races and walks of life.
It's very unlike other immigration waves. The H1Bs take jobs away from Citizens and Permanent residents, no question.
Facts:
Chinese companies were allowed to enter USA, got hands on the technology and started outsourcing manufacturing along with corrupt politicians and greedy executives in USA. Now they are involved in dumping goods all over the world.
There’s a lot of abuse and bias during last 10 years. It started after Indian outsourcing companies started taking over all the h1-b visas meant for USa companies. They flooded the whole system with thousands of fake applications.
There was shortage of talent in 90s and early 2000s. Most of the talent came here to study and work with USA employees.
Last 10 years, too many students have entered USA. Uncontrolled immigration is causing issues in Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. They have introduced laws to control number of immigrants entering USA.
H-1Bs have a major role in where the Nasdaq is today. People complaining that H-1Bs are getting hired because of low wages are deluding themselves.
The same people made progress and are at every level of management due to their efforts. If the cheap argument was indeed true, then they would all be stuck at lowest wrung of the ladder.
Also, it doesn't hold water when you say lot of Americans are unemployed and are unable to get hired. If you don't have a job are you still not willing to take a job with lower pay if needed? Why are they not getting hired? It is just because either they were never skilled in the first place or did not have a solid work ethic or have not kept up.
The same “cheap” argument was made from hundreds of years about every wave of immigration into US. It was about Catholics, Italians, Irish, you name it.
What makes US tick and stand out is every new wave of immigration had a huge impact on driving it forward, because of the immigrant work ethic. They want to give it their all when they start a new life. Their descendants act entitled and don't have the same drive and start complaining about the next wave of immigrants.
Same story, rinse repeat.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5605801-marjorie-taylor-greene-h-1b-visas/amp/
Greene will introduce bill for ‘aggressively phasing out’ H-1B visas
@hh People will always generate a story to fit what they want to hear.
The facts are these.
This is a country of 340 million people, with the best colleges in the world. We could easily generate 65,000 people to replace the H1bs every year. Not all tech jobs have crazy hours.
Big Tech leans into the idea that there's a shortage, and that's why we need to import people. The government has tried to justify this "shortage" for 30 years now! Yeah, any sort of government that cared about its people over its businesses would address the "shortage" by doing other things to encourage more kids in college to go into tech.
Instead, 20 years ago I actively heard college kids saying they didn't want to go into tech because they all were afraid of getting outsources or H1Bd because their parents read newspaper articles spouting off this fear.
One thing that's become abundantly clear in the last 10 years or so is, whomever controls the narrative controls the truth.
Tell me they’re not pitting us against each other
Spoke to one of them the other day - and she was like but American workers don’t want to work those long hours right?. And I’m thinking lady do you know what I put into this.
We’re here thinking they’re accepting lower paying jobs and scared to lose their visa tied jobs - which probably has an element of truth.
Where is the truth - they’re convinced we’re not up for the job’s needs and they’re getting paid handsomely and we’re thinking they’re low wage workers who are scared.
Which back room folks are coming up with these narratives. Makes me sick all the while those higher ups just making off with the money and we’re getting slotted on both sides of the aisle.
In the 80’s, newly developed computer science degrees were booming. Everybody wanted to get into tech and even then skills were in short supply. This drove up prices for skilled tech workers. H1B was introduced to address this “shortage”, but it was mainly introduced as a way to moderate wage rises.
This became such a thumb on the scale of the tech labour market that people started to move away from tech degrees. By the 2000’s many universities had dramatically scaled back their computer science depts/faculties.
It was always about the money
What changed? A rare alliance between the two political parties. The GOP traditionally aligns itself with business interests, and business wants cheap labor they can control. The Democrats aligned themselves with pro-immigration, and didn't challenge the Big Tech line that H1Bs represented "the best and the brightest" (despite all the evidence to the contrary).
It's pretty disgusting that both parties sold out well paying jobs that would have gone to US citizens, but the last 20 years of history show that's exactly what they did.
There's long been a silent majority of tech workers opposing it, but nobody would give us a voice.
Times are changing though. Mass layoffs at Amazon last month, and a large reduction in tech jobs because of over-hiring lately is going to have a direct impact on how tech jobs are thought of.
We're not going back the other way.
H-1B started in 1990. For decades before that our wonderful democratic socialist governments at all levels provided great resources through educational institutions and R&D funding. There are many countries that couldn't afford to have high school minicomputers and university mainframes that cost hundreds of dollars per CPU hour back in the 1970s. Statistically the planet's largest countries surely had far more bodies at the highest levels of potential but back then they lacked the opportunities to realize it.
It’s all about cost. H1Bs are cheaper and the threat of losing their job makes them less liable to complain about it. Many years ago, like 20 years ago, I took the light rail back from work at Building F, and a Wipro worker opened their paycheck. They were making like 15 dollars an hour. Great for the billionaires, not so great for us working stiffs.
Your post sums up exactly why the US needs H1Bs. American schools at their finest.
cheap cheap labor took all the jobs. but AI will wipe out all these cheap h1b. race to the bottom. at least Ch1na makes products which can be exported. 1ndia exports its people, no job for them. thank you AI.
Too many people went to college. When everyone is qualified, nobody is qualified.
The bullsh-t narrative is all that changed to favor cheap foreign replacements brought here to dilute and destroy society and boost profits.