Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

> I mean I largely agree with you so I'm not sure what the issue is.

I called you out on your misinformation about FoM, that's all. I'm pretty sure we agree on the US topic :)

> With regards to unemployment going down, it is (like the Single Market) a complex issue. There's economic growth yeah, but we've also just had 5+ years of net emigration too, with foreign nationals leaving and ex-pats returning (in my country, I should say).

Again, you're trying to avoid looking at the numbers. Unemployment is in good numbers and good trends. "The economy" goes well, too - but one thing is not always the other.

> These changes are obvious on the ground, I feel. Anecdotally, the shift in demographics of public-facing service workers in my country has been stunning in the last 15 years. It's gone from almost all indigenous, to almost all Eastern European, to almost all indigenous again.

So that's your issue? the nationality of the workers you see?

If unemployment is almost only structural (very low %) - the nationality of those on employment is hardly relevant. Now if you had a 10% and all of them were locals, something must be wrong. That's not the case though.

> I'd be surprised if you hadn't noticed this in your own country?

I usually don't ask the nationality of random people :) and I work in a very international industry, so my views might be very skewed.

> outsources its IT work to an Indian company, Infosys

Infosys was also under scrutiny for the same visa fraud that's mentioned in this same article. They settled out of court for $34 million while claiming they just wanted to avoid "prolonged litigation". But it's just a PR stunt - Infosys' visa fraud is rather well-known, colloquially.

While it's an Indian-based company, it is a multinational company that also operates within the United States. It's part of the biggest problem with H-1B visas, in that it hires almost entirely H-1B visa workers with tailored positions and then "hires" the staff out through consulting contracts. It does this to artificially suppress wages while taking a hefty profit. Tata, another Indian multinational company, does the same thing. (http://www.epi.org/blog/new-data-infosys-tata-abuse-h-1b-pro...). It's one thing to offshore work to a foreign company with contracts. That ship sailed decades ago, and, for all its faults in execution, it helped a lot of countries build their economies. Including India. But it's another to hire only offshore workers, bring them locally, and then replace local workers with those contracts. There's no justifiable reason if local people can do it - it's just labor and wage exploitation.

No one's got a problem with skilled workers migrating and taking jobs. Plenty of people move around the world for that. That mobility is a nice thing. But the H-1B is a system designed to facilitate this migration while protecting industry wages. Yet it's being abused by companies to artificially control wages with fake claims of labor shortage. So it deserves all the scrutiny we can muster. The program should stay. But it needs much more oversight.

> And if xenophobic and protectionist polices

It's not xenophobic. There's a huge Indian population locally in the US, as well, and many of them dislike H-1B abuse. Countries are supposed to protect their local labor pool and economy or they'll face some very difficult times. That said, there has to be a balance in tariffs and immigration laws for proper trade.

> Google's Android biggest growth region is India. Why shouldn't then Indians work in Google? Maybe Google should move its headquarters from MV to Bangalore. Alphabet can remain in US.

There's a strong claim for having local offices when companies do a large amount of business locally. Google and many other companies do that. Last year they announced that they're opening a second office in Bangalore. But they also sell to many other countries outside of India. A local office is one thing, but moving headquarters is another. India's economic impact isn't really enough to force the entire company to move. You're also ignoring the fact that countries specialize and then trade. Specialization and trade end up being cheaper in many ways than generalization.

It's perfectly normal for countries to have a particular product or service that they're known for. Trade agreements are generally structured so that those countries can protect foreign competition in local specialties, while enabling greater exports with lower tariffs for those specialties. It just so happens that Tata and Infosys grew out of this practice (where they exported labor services).

If anything, you're showing a strong nationalist agenda by claiming that only your country should be able to control foreign products while exporting local specialties, and that all foreign companies should use as much local resources as possible on foreign soil just because they profit from your market. It's not xenophobia, but it's certainly a lot closer to it than insisting that companies don't abuse visa programs to avoid paying local market wages.

You should probably take a step back and realize that this is a labor and economic issue, and not a cultural/racial issue.

> You must be trolling but I'll say it once again, I know the general state of western economies. I understand that we are NOW in a period of low unemployment. I'm talking about the effect that immigration to certain western countries (half of OECD countries) had on employment levels, which you can verify in the study above whether you want to or not.

Are you kidding me mate? I have shown you data for +30 years!

> And as for the rest of your post...of course unemployment grew for all demographics during the recession.

Even though the crisis accentuated migration towards the strongest economies! Why aren't you going further than scratching the surface? I guess because it doesn't fit your narrative.

This is like discussing against a wall. You keep ignoring the evidence and then calling me a troll.

> Perhaps you're completely misunderstanding my point, because I never said that immigration caused unemployment, I said that it affected employment levels, i.e. the rates of employment between migrants and nationals, which again you can verify from the OECD study.

1) That's not what employment levels mean.

2) The nationals / foreign-born ratio is set to change, but as long as unemployment is low that's irrelevant.

> An OECD study of the impact of immigration on the unemployment of domestic workers in OECD countries (including the UK) during 1984-2004 found that an increase in the share of migrants in the labour force increases unemployment for those with skills most similar to the migrants in the short to medium term (over a period of 5-10 years), but that immigration has no significant impact on unemployment in the long run (Jean and Jimenez 2010).

> which again verifies what I'm saying and corroborates the data from the other study. So you keep saying you can't find any evidence of migration having any effect on employment and you now have two Europe-wide studies from the OECD showing that it does.

I'll read more about that study, thanks. Yet again, that's not what the LSE study says; it'll be interesting to find the differences and how big is that impact.

Yet again, you paint that as undesirable, when it actually ends up growing the economy and getting everyone back to employment - arguably with better skillset. It's pure competition.

In other terms, if I let you sell your stuff in my country, why can't I sell my labour in yours? As long as we play with the same ruleset it's fair.

> H1BrainDrain also have a power of captation of publicly founded research that can be patented. (That's why young PhD are so interesting)

I didn't get this point. Could you elaborate?

There aren't many of those programmers, either. The low hanging optimization fruit has already been picked.