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Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

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Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#201
post #49

I've personally witnessed the hiring of a contractor from India at a small development company simply to save on funds. There were plenty of skilled workers in our pool to fill the position, the owner simply didn't want to pay the price. Weeks into his employment the developer came to me and asked if there was anyone he could report work complaints to. I gave him contact information for the state's employment agency.…

That sounds like free market though doesn't it? Hire the cheapest workforce that can do what you want?

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but if government regulation is involved, then by definition it's NOT A FREE MARKET.

H1B, by design, interferes with the free market in hiring. Even worse, the current implementation clearly stacks the deck in favor of corporations and employers and suppresses wages for the entire tech workforce.

Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#202

In the threads where we discuss H1B visa holders taking American jobs, can we also consider that American companies are selling their products in countries from where H1B workers come from? 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. Or another US company, lets say Pepsi, outsourc…

> 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 oper…

I have a few comments. Regarding the first paragraph, you mention that H1Bs depress wages, multiple times. I disagree. Actually, H1B allows companies here to remain competitive and increase their user base. This holds true for both tech and non-tech companies. And there is no way startups will be able to raise lot of money and software engineers earn so much if their market is only one country and they employ only natives.

Regarding the third paragraph, you say that "you're showing a strong nationalist agenda by claiming that only your country should be able to control foreign products". Please note that I mentioned this scenario to show how stupid is the line of thinking that global corporations should employ people of one country only. But then how many Asians should be employed by American countries who sell in Asia? I do not know. Based on users, revenue, country of origin of founders,... But it will be definitely more than the current miniscule H1B quota.

Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#203
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever people moan about enforcement of white-collar-crime laws, I can't help but think about the last scene in The Wolf of Wall Street: after a short stint in prison, DiCaprio's scummy businessman is still rich and admired, while the FBI guy who took him down shares a cheap subway ride with other poor, tired and depressed workers. Incentives are wrong all over the place, Reaganism made authorities fundamentally po…

"Reaganism made authorities fundamentally powerless" This topic is being abused by the most liberal companies in the most liberal cities. i get the feeling its mostly ignored and not prosecuted (like illegal immigration) is because they feel its better for everyone. I am not taking a stance on whether that is correct, but don't for one second blame that on Reaganism.

Reagan dismantled any ideological supremacy of the public good over private money, basically creating the "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" mantra that is now so popular. This creates a natural imbalance where money trumps everything else; at that point, big money is fundamentally unassailable by regulation, and all efforts to the contrary are little more than cosmetic - be it in immigration, finance or anything else. The Clintons are fundamentally Reagan Democrats, for example. This goes well beyond immigration (a topic that, at the time, wasn't really mainstream), it's an issue with the fundamental impossibility of public regulation of private companies' affairs when the money involved is beyond certain thresholds.

Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sentiment on hackernews is more pro-H1B than not. Of course, there are a few anti-H1B people here, just like there are a few Trump supporters, but they are by no means a majority.

What? Whenever H1B comes up here everyone is always "Derr H1B Indians taking our jerrbs". I actually don't recall seeing a single comment in favour of allowing any foreign programmers in America. I'm sure there must be some but they are the tiny minority.

I really don't notice that at all. If anything, its more like H1Bs are good for our industry, don't mess with them. I know all my posts on the topic have been pro rather than anti. Ya, the Indian body shops are a problem, but the H1Bs outside of those certain companies are overwhelmingly positive.

Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#205
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess we all support competition. Loyal and fair. H1B is to get workers without loans from places where diploma have been paid often by public taxes. Without loans you are more competitive than a worker having to reimburse them. H1BrainDrain also have a power of captation of publicly founded research that can be patented. (That's why young PhD are so interesting) It also undermines the competitivity of countries wh…

> 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?

Formation costs money. Losing a gifted student can set back the agenda of a university having almost strong enough results to publish.

When you have the person actually having the bleeding edge knowledge, you can fund him or her to end the work and either publish it (prior act) or develop a usable result that can be patented.

But most of the effort, especially in countries with public education, has been supported by the taxes of the locals.

It is not USA the problem here. Europe and other place with public education are a bunch of bullied that are masochistic and love to be stolen.

When a company claims that it will only steal from foreign entities for your national interest, and never you because you are a special snowflake, it tend to lie.

A pathological thief will steal everyone as long as he is not stopped.

Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#206
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a perverse question. The word "fairness" implies to all parties involved, typically by uplifting whoever would be disadvantaged in the system pre-fairness-implementation. You probably meant "advantageous to who?" and the answer to that is obviously the employer, and to a lesser extent the migrant worker. Capitalism is about favoring businesses (employers) in general, hoping for trickle-down benefits to individ…

Ok so then you feel that it's possible that it may increase net-fairness, but that it could be be unfair to some parties? So with regards to the indictment described in the OP, it would be very clearly unfair if indigenous workers were displaced due to the illegal availability of cheaper non-national workers, right? I don't see how it's a perverse question.

I agree with you since you use the qualifier "illegal". By intentional design, most things that are illegal are unfair (if designed well, which the h1b program is far from). However I feel your sentiment is directed towards "legal via loophole" immigration as well, which is not illegal. It would be disadvantageous to the displaced indigenous worker if they were unwilling/unable to compete with the migrant worker (including cost-value proposition to employers via wage level), but fair, if the migrant worker legally arrived.

While the indicted in this article did visa fraud, the majority of migrant tech workers are brought totally above board although at significantly lower wages.

Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#207
post #163

I've personally witnessed the hiring of a contractor from India at a small development company simply to save on funds. There were plenty of skilled workers in our pool to fill the position, the owner simply didn't want to pay the price. Weeks into his employment the developer came to me and asked if there was anyone he could report work complaints to. I gave him contact information for the state's employment agency.…

It took another week before I realized that he needed to be informed that the state agency protects him whether he's a citizen or not Hmmm... that gives me an idea. Maybe the gov't should clearly lay out protections for foreign workers up to and including preserving their work visa even if their original employer is found to be breaking the law? That would provide some serious incentive for sponsor companies to keep…

>Maybe the gov't should clearly lay out protections for foreign workers up to and including preserving their work visa even if their original employer is found to be breaking the law?

Why not let them have their work visa no matter what? Why should their visa be tied to their employer at all? That just invites abuse.

As for their employer, how about any employer found to be breaking the law with regard to foreign workers gets his citizenship revoked and is deported? We could use more hard-working immigrants, and then for anyone complaining about too many immigrants, if we ship out a bunch of our home-grown garbage (abusive managers) that'll free up room. We should deport all the HR people involved in these cases too while we're at it, because they're obviously complicit.

Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably hold a minority opinion, but I wish that the US would take millions of immigrants every year, up to even ten million(!). And people from OECD countries could come automatically as they pleased, ideally like a Schengen Area that extended throughout the whole OECD, with hope of eventually including the entire world.

How would this work in practice? I'm guessing you're from a reasonably financially comfortable background so you don't have to worry about loss of security. What happens in 10 years time when the market only seeks Tensorflow experts with a PhD in AI and you're relegated to flipping burgers or driving ubers which you can't do anyway because robots and so you rely on basic income and lose all sense of worth and purpose…

Sorry to answer so slowly; I'm travelling in Hokkaido without stable internet (Japan, not the most immigration-friendly place in the world but even this may be changing a bit).

Anyway, yes, I must agree that unfortunately social welfare programs and now something like a basic income have a natural conflict with large-scale immigration. Like you I'm also worried about massive AI-powered automation of society. Or, rather, about how to distribute the production of goods and services in a highly-automated society. Maybe the end is nigh for capitalism as we know it? That said, cordoning off countries is certainly not the answer. Why not? Most of our problems are global in nature and therefore require a global "Earth-first" and "Earthlings-first" mindset.

I found myself writing a long-winded answer to you, and don't actually have time to finish it...

But basically, within a rich countries' free movement area, a citizens' basic income should be portable (you get it no matter where you live). So wealthy countries presumably shouldn't worry so much about people from within the area coming to their territories.

Likewise, automation will hit all of these regions simultaneously, give or take say five years. Effects should be the same everywhere.

The crucial thing seems to be that if much labor can be automated, then much of the gains of that automation should be redistributed in a way that can provide for people, at the same time in economic terms keeping up the demand for the automated and non-automated goods and services.

Maybe some kind of robot tax combined with a Land Value Tax (not property tax) could provide this citizens' income. (I'd personally add a greenhouse gas emissions tax, or even simple energy tax.) These could all go toward the citizens' income.

You could take that and go to Stuttgart or Sydney, get a job there, and still have your citizens' income arriving monthly in your account.

Hopefully some day, San Francisco, Stuttgart, Seoul and Sydney would have the same citizens' income, by merging their accounts into a supra-national agreement. At this point, collective action on a global level would be far easier.

What's more, though some people post-automation (well, not that it will ever stop, but at least after the next big wave), some people might be untrainable and become a useless class (as the brilliant Yuval Harari worries), many and probably most people will also be able to use AI and robots to generate income in new ways, or to just use basic human skills which robots won't have (like being a good waiter, cleaning things, selling to others, coaching people, and so on).

Certainly these kinds of ideas aren't the most likely that our societies will choose. But we clearly need ideas now...

For immigration from poorer regions, there is a whole other story, set of problems, and also opportunities. Personally, for immigration to Europe, I'd like to see an EU Migrants Bond. Municipalities that accepted refugees would get an amount of money, borrowed from the European Central Bank, EU sovereign bonds due in say thirty years, to spend on education and settlement of the refugees or migrants. Once the migrants became productive members of society, the increase in revenue (from the increase in economic activity that comes along with increase in population) would fund the repayment of the bonds.

If, in the meantime, automation had taken everything over, then that automation itself could become the source for the repayment of EU Migrant Bonds.

In this way, poor areas which needed employment might even compete for refugees and migrants whom they could educate and integrate. At least that's the idea.

OK, way too much, excuse the length... and also the inchoate nature of the ideas.

Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not fair to replace a local worker with a foreign worker because they're cheaper. It's as fair as buying something for cheaper when you can. In fact, it's probably more fair as globalization lifts foreign workers out of poverty. A richer local worker loses while a poorer foreign worker wins and the U.S. overall wins.

Is it really fair? That rich people benefit from the laws and protections of the U.S., without having to deal with the corruption and laws of India. But they can then import cheap workers to displace the very people who paid for those protections to even exist in the first place? It seems a breakdown of the social contract to me. I think there's definitely two ways to look at this one.

> That rich people benefit from the laws and protections of the U.S., without having to deal with the corruption and laws of India. But they can then import cheap workers to displace the very people who paid for those protections to even exist in the first place?

If the tax system is so broken that the poorer are paying for the richer's protection, then fix the tax system so that the rich person pays the "correct/fair" amount. For example, remove most of the deductions and other rules and replace it with a simple flat tax.

Anyways, why are you saying "rich people"? Ordinary people own these companies and purchase from these companies. They benefit.

Re: Bay Area professionals indicted for H-1B visa fraud

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not fair to replace a local worker with a foreign worker because they're cheaper. It's as fair as buying something for cheaper when you can. In fact, it's probably more fair as globalization lifts foreign workers out of poverty. A richer local worker loses while a poorer foreign worker wins and the U.S. overall wins.

"richer" Being middle class in a third world country and being poor in a poverty-stricken American zip code are different enough that it's not even worth deciding who has it worse.

I'm not sure if your assertion is relevant because the jobs for H-1B are not that poor I think.

Your assertion may be wrong; it depends on what is "poor" in a poverty-stricken zipcode.

The median per capita income in India is 616$. PPP adjusted that is 2351$.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_... shows people at the 6.48th percentile in the United States earn $2500.

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