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Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

nytimes.com

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Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#101

Post by e15ctr0n »

hpagey wrote: post #88
logfromblammo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem may be with those who intend to apply for permanent residency while legally present on an H1B. Once you apply for a green card, you have to maintain legal immigration status continuously. Furthermore, nationals of India and China have to wait longer, due to country quotas and relative demand. There is something called a priority date, which is somewhat akin to taking a number instead of waiting on…

i-140 can transferred between employers and you retain your PD. Typically, sponsoring companies do not revoke i-140.

The previous employer can choose to withdraw the I-140 petition, and typically does so because keeping I-140 petitions around for ex-employees can create problems for the I-140 petitions of current and potential new employees.

Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#102

Post by makecheck »

diogenescynic wrote: post #91
makecheck wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who went through the process, I can tell you that the mere existence of a maximum annual number was insulting. If I get a job, and my company NEEDS me, and I'm GOOD at what I'm doing, I should get IN; period. There should be no crap involved. How the hell is it good for a company to be told that it can't grow because it happened to petition the 65,001st person out of 65,000 that year? How the hell is it go…

>Limits of any kind make no sense at all. They are trying to protect US citizens from losing their jobs (or getting wages cut) due to a sudden availability of cheap labor. A government is rightfully concerned with making sure its own citizens are gainfully employed. Citizens vote, foreigners don't. Every person within those borders who does not have a job puts a drain on the rest of the country. Someone without a job…

The thing is, "protection of US citizens" assumes a lot about what actually happens to companies, and it assumes a lot about what the citizens themselves are doing.

First, are you willing to pay $500 more for every product, and $10 more for every meal? Companies have to compete, and they are responding to what is necessary to survive. If a company employs 5,000 U.S. citizens and can't compete, it may stumble and lay off 1,000 U.S. citizens, or fail entirely and shed 5,000 U.S. jobs, all because it wasn't allowed to bring in a few immigrants to grow a little.

Entire companies (and successful companies, like Google) have been started by immigrants, creating potentially thousands of jobs for U.S. citizens. There is no reason to automatically fear immigrants; many of them are brilliant people.

A lack of a paid job does not make you a "drain" on society, either! What about children? What about volunteer work in communities? For that matter, I have met some astoundingly lax and irresponsible people over the years that have paying jobs, to the point where I almost thought of them as a net negative to the company.

Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#103

Post by bloomingfractal »

People, remember how many successful companies have been founded by immigrants (Sergey Brin comes to mind). This is not a zero-sum game, if innovation doesn't happen here in this country it will happen eventually elsewhere. The US is actually very lucky of having hard-working qualified people wanting to immigrate and contribute to the local economy.

Recall that crime rates in the US among immigrants are lower than in the general population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime#United_S...

That being said, the H1-B system is broken and needs urgent reform, I suggest looking at the point-system used in Canada.

Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#104

Post by geebee »

While I'm glad to see the NYTimes covering this issue, I am disappointed with the headline. The US takes over 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year. These new free and full citizens pursue educations and careers in response to their personal life interests and market signals. You know, that whole pesky freedom thing that corporations often despise in their workforce. Some enter high tech, some don't, and this article has absolutely nothing to do with this kind of immigration, at all.

This is about high tech companies lobbying congress for a special temporary guest worker visa (that allows for a dual intent to remain in the US), held and controlled by a corporation, where the guest worker resides in the US at the pleasure of the corporate "sponsor", on the grounds that there is such a shortage of critical tech employees that we need to empower corporations to bestow the right to live and work in the US on non-citizen who possess these skills. Some of these corporations have then turned around and fired US Citizens, some of whom are in fact immigrants, in order to replace them with workers brought in on this program.

While there is plenty of debate here on HN on the extent to which the new workers are "captive" in their jobs, I think we can all agree that the H1B workers absolutely are not free and full citizens, free to choose their own path in life, decide where they will live, what they will work on, what career they will pursue, and so forth. Even if they can change jobs, they need to find a new corporate sponsor who bestows the right to live in the US on them.

This kind of corporate power over individuals, on a massive scale, really bothers me. You can object deeply this while celebrating immigration that preserves the freedom and autonomy of the individual, and supporting general immigration (or even a more general version of skilled immigration).

Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#105

Post by logfromblammo »

utternerd wrote: post #38

If that replacement can serve the same purpose, and give approximately the same value to the company, why should the native and/or higher-waged person expect to have priority?

By the same argument, we could transfer Disney's copyrights and trademarks to Crazy Sven's Discount Intellectual Property Licensing Emporium, and t-shirts featuring Mickey Mouse could be sold at 30% off the previous price.

Why should Disney expect to keep that monopoly privilege and control if the public could still get the same benefit from someone else?

Why should the laws of a mostly free and mostly democratic society matter?

If you're playing a game, with rules, why can't you just help yourself to extra tokens and change the die rolls, and look at other people's cards?

Because the other players will frickin' kill you, that's why, you lowlife cheater. The rules are there so that everyone has a reasonable chance at winning, even in the enhanced-difficulty challenge modes.

For a variety of reasons, some supportable and others abhorrent, the rules-makers decided that unrestricted immigration would someday turn the country into an exploitative, stratified, third-world hellhole. So far, none of their grandkids have had the balls to throw open the gates and fill up their ancestors' neighborhoods with scary brown people with their thick accents and weird foods. Deep down, we're still tribal animals, and the law reflects that.

So the reason is that we follow the law, even if it is stupid, racist, and xenophobic. That's why the citizen gets priority over the foreigner. If you don't like it, you change the law for everyone instead of cheating it just for you.

We know that Disney knows how to lobby for changes in the law. And we know they can get stuff passed that would make ordinary people want to vomit. So why wouldn't they want a new law allowing a specific business category--one so narrow that it could only reasonably refer to Disney and a few other big companies--to import unlimited numbers of foreign workers at below-market wages?

Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#106

Post by hocuspocus »

lazaroclapp wrote: post #75
fra wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether 65,000 is the right number or not isn't the important bit. While it may seem unpalatable on its face, granting the visa to the candidates with the highest paying offer is the simplest, least prone to abuse way I can think of to bring about the stated purpose of the H1B visa.

Except this leaves out any organization that pays below market rate for exceptional talent. That might sound like a good thing in the face of it, but consider such organizations include: national labs, early stage startups, software foundations, etc. Also, unless you cap it in a per industry basis (which makes the whole thing very inflexible to changes in the economy) you just created an insurmountable problem for th…

Academia, publicly funded research labs, non-profits... are already cap-exempt.

Other than that, you're absolutely right. This would mostly benefit software companies in the Bay or NYC, and the ones that pay way above average at that. I'd argue it'd be better than current situation though. Indian employees are effectively tied to their employer due to the Green Card backlog. It's significantly less true for the H-1B holders hired by Facebook, Google, Amazon and the like.

Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#107

Post by davidw »

rayiner wrote: post #92
chimeracoder wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people acknowledge that the Iraqi people aren't ready for Democracy. This is a really contentious statement that you just drop in both as fact and as the basis of your entire argument. No, I would not say that 'the Iraqi people aren't ready for Democracy' is a true statement. I also wouldn't say that what 'most people [in the US]' think about the Iraqi people's readiness for democracy [in Iraq] is really relev…

It's an idea that was invoked by the American left to explain Bush's failure in Iraq, and eventually conceded by key figures on the right as well: http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-rumsfeld-admits-that-e... . So I'm not sure it's all that controversial. And we're not talking about whether individual Iraqis in Minnesota are ready for democracy. We are talking about the link posted earlier in the thread, which sugg…

> which suggested that the optimal number of immigrants in the U.S. would be two billion.

It suggested no such thing. Please reread it:

"What is the optimal number of imported tomatoes? Soviet central planners tried to figure things out this way. Americans shouldn’t. We should decide on the optimal terms on which tomatoes can be imported, and then let the market decide the number."

Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#108

Post by tyre »

logfromblammo wrote: post #89
Fat_Rat wrote: post #35

I'm not against immigration, but the most egregious offense here was having the replacement workers trained by current employees as a stipulation of their severance. Here's the article that was posted here a little over half a year ago. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-... It's nice to see some closure.

The intent of the H1B is supposedly to provide foreign workers for labor categories where no American national can be found to perform the work. If there is any training going on there at all, that is proof of fraud. If the ones doing the training are American nationals, that just makes it more egregious. Hadean justice would alter the H1B visa category such that the guest worker could perform no function for the com…

> If there is any training going on there at all, that is proof of fraud.

This is not true.

Let's say you need someone with expertise in a very specific category, like embedding javascript into Postgres. You find the one person in the world who does that and hire them using an H1B. Your whole company uses Macs and she is used to Windows.

Is training that new employee to provision an OS X machine fraud?

No.

Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#109

Post by rayiner »

davidw wrote: post #107
rayiner wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an idea that was invoked by the American left to explain Bush's failure in Iraq, and eventually conceded by key figures on the right as well: http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-rumsfeld-admits-that-e... . So I'm not sure it's all that controversial. And we're not talking about whether individual Iraqis in Minnesota are ready for democracy. We are talking about the link posted earlier in the thread, which sugg…

> which suggested that the optimal number of immigrants in the U.S. would be two billion. It suggested no such thing. Please reread it: "What is the optimal number of imported tomatoes? Soviet central planners tried to figure things out this way. Americans shouldn’t. We should decide on the optimal terms on which tomatoes can be imported, and then let the market decide the number."

Fair enough, but I don't think there is much of a distinction. The market would just import people wholesale to get the cheapest possible labor. The market hates the islands of civilization built in the sea of entropy. It wants to bring everyone to the global average, which for those fortunate enough to be already in the developed world, is a precipitous drop.

Re: Lawsuits Claim Disney Colluded to Replace U.S. Workers with Immigrants

#110

Post by dcre »

geebee wrote: post #104

While I'm glad to see the NYTimes covering this issue, I am disappointed with the headline. The US takes over 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year. These new free and full citizens pursue educations and careers in response to their personal life interests and market signals. You know, that whole pesky freedom thing that corporations often despise in their workforce. Some enter high tech, some do…

Very well said. I would add that "corporate power over individuals" applies to the fired employees just as well to the fired employees as to the H1B workers. Indeed, their power over the former depends fundamentally on their power over the latter.
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