alt Hacker NewsTrump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program
Comments
It's always seemed odd to me that your employer somehow sponsors your Green Card. It always felt like it should simply be a measure of
A) How long you have been working as an H1B in the united states (say 10 years).
B) How much you have paid in taxes (say 1 million).
Whenever either of the above has occured, you take some citizenship test, and then you have a green card. Nothing to do with your employer dangling something for you, literally a measure of your employment history and/or taxable income.
I know the administration is controversial, but this is the correct thing to do for a lot of reasons.
The biggest one is the program itself is racist as hell. Microsoft is literally bringing in foreigners, paying them much less to do the same damn job.
I know this is a much popular opinion now. But I can't help and ask this again:
If a company hires an engineer in India, instead of Seattle, how does America (and workers) benefit? Software doesn't require factories, or supply chains, its just a hiring decision.
The question is whether these restrictions increase American employment or just accelerate the exodus of jobs while making the US a less attractive place for talented people.
Over a decade ago someone on here commented that H1B1 visas should goto the highest paying jobs requested instead of random or whatever it was.
At the time we all saw the H1B1 program as a way for companies to hire cheaper labor that they can treat poorly.
Almost all of the graduates hired by my company are migrants, and they then chain migrate other people over by putting in referrals for random people.
From the company’s perspective it is great, you can pay them less and artificially suppress wages.
From society’s perspective… well 30% of young people are unemployed despite record low numbers of young people. No births and no jobs! It’s genius!
Honest question and I'm probably going to ruffle a lot of feelings:
In the age of AI coding, what is the point of outsourcing your programming to TCS, Wipro, et al? These consultancies are not building groundbreaking innovative stuff, they're building the drudgery enterprise software to handle taxes or business intelligence tools. Things that are perfect for AI (don't get me wrong, AI is perfect for a lot of other types of coding too).
Or is it that outsourcing is cheaper than AI tokens?
Microsoft isn't the biggest user of this program, Amazon is: https://miserablyunemployed.com/market/h1b
There are atleast seven other companies and not MS alone..
Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Capgemini, Microsoft and Adobe
https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/ussuspends-micro...
The entire program is a farce. It's the process generating the fraudulent "golly, we just can't find a US citizen for the job" claims, complete with fake ads designed to be undiscoverable.
Cynically I believe this is just blackmail for midterms.
The current administration will promise to Microsoft (and others) that they’ll reverse this decision as long as they are provided proper funding/support.
Any company that does layoffs should immediately have all their visas revoked as well as all of their contractors.
I’m quite shocked that this was even open to abuse to begin with. Clearly, the US has very strict immigration and green card laws. So enforcement has been lax? Or were deals made under the table with these companies and previous administrations?
The irony that the U.S is a relatively very young nation that was built then thrived entirely based on immigration.
So many other top firms committing this kind abuse.
Other large companies are massively abusing the employee sponsored green cards too.
This means that they could shut down the H-1B program today. Every day they choose to keep importing foreign labor they harm the American worker.
Good, the market is dropping. Now add a tax to American corporations that outsource. Then you can fix h1b etc
These companies are not going to need all the middle talent, or lower tier talent. Its a slap on the wrist for a wrist that isnt even there anymore.
What are the perceived methods of fraud in the PERM process?
1. Non-paywalled dup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50006948
> Secretary of Labor Keith Sonderling added that some of the largest IT firms in the world would also be suspended from that program, including Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini.
> "We will not accept any new or process any pending permanent labor certification applications involving these companies," Sonderling said.
2. I'm kinda surprised those firms were even trying to get green cards for their employees. I thought their whole model was to rotate offshore people into the US for temporary assignments on H1-Bs.
> Under the PERM process, employers seek certification from the Department of Labor that there is no qualified, willing or available US worker for a specific job. It's a step required before filing petitions for most employment-based green cards.
3. That was always kinda bullshit and was unfair to everyone. You've got some guy who's settled, been working for years, made friends, etc. then you check that there's no US qualified worker? That check should have always been the first step of an H1-B. Delaying it actually made me pretty sympathetic to the attempts to game the system to prevent and American from getting the job. Even if H1-Bs were technically for temporary workers, everyone saw them as a step on the way to permanent residency.
4. So have they done anything about offshoring yet? Because focusing on H1-Bs and green cards is focusing on the problems of 20+ years ago.
It's probably been 15 years since my employer sponsored any significant numbers of employees for H1-Bs, it's all offshore hiring in Asia to company offices in Asia now.
> “They’ll put an advertisement in a small-town newspaper. They’ll go out there and say that ‘We have advertised for a position with our company, and nobody is responding to it.’ And they will use that lack of response to then go and replace American workers with what is effectively foreign indentured servants,” Vance said. “There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has used this system more than Microsoft.”
> ... Microsoft last year laid off 6,000 American workers but also obtained 6,300 H-1B visas and almost 3,000 green cards.
I'm glad someone is finally taking this more seriously. There are a lot of big tech teams where you can't even get a job there unless you're Indian. H1B's should be for unique, foreign talent, not senior software engineers.
PERM certification it looks like
Tata and Infosys too apparently, which is actually good. Those were the real abusers of the h1b program.
so these are just indian companies and microsoft which is lead by an indian guy? is the government signaling something here? i know amazon, meta, google are all doing the same thing- but amazon and meta are licking the ass.
giving the same excuse of "oh these companies post jobs where they are not seen" is the lamest excuse you can give. are you saying this government is so poor and incompetent that it cannot verify where the job was posted? how many people saw the jobs, how many clicked and applied?? are you really saying that the most power country, with SI is not able to do this basic check??
Party of free market
a move to satisfy nationalist and ai hater at same time.
I don't like nationalism, but I see no way out of it.
I understand this is a politically charged topic, and every comment is going to be a flame war nonetheless, so here we go.
No matter your political inclination, overabusing green cards to import cheap labor in detriment of the American wage is not even a secret: everybody does it. So the claim is, at least, correct in its formulation.
However:
- It doesn't include Amazon, the biggest offender by far?
- Suspends green cards but not H1Bs? so what the point is exactly? replacing cheap labor, for a potential revolving door of cheap labor? make sure cheap labor is never guaranteed to stay, so they don't dare to think about not being cheap anymore?
- People really thought that Microsoft was different to Tata in methodology and discipline? Did you really have to interact with people in either company? I did, and let me tell you, "highly skilled" or even "skilled at all" is nothing short of an exaggeration.
If the talent can't come to Microsoft, Microsoft will offshore near the talent.
GCCs
All sorts of good and interesting arguments ITT, but at the end of the day it's all academic; companies are going to compensate by offshoring. I doubt this nets us more citizen-jobs, pressures salaries to increase, or provides any benefit other than the messaging to the base.
Is there a full list of companies?
We need clawbacks from these companies’ c suites, present and past, that were awarded compensation based on criminal practices
My two cents:
Private Businesses should not be able to offer citizenship as a side payment to their employees, they should stick to offering cash. If you are the french foreign legion and you want to reward military recruits with citizenship, then at least it's a government that is receiving the benefit and selling the citizenship, but private business should not be able to sell citizenship, or an easier way to get citizenship, to anyone. It's not a resource that belongs to them.
This sill last about .. 4 days, 2 weeks at most, before a federal district judge puts an injunction on it.
The language is confusing for folks who haven’t experienced or researched the US immigration scheme. A few terms first:
* H1B visas are work permits issued to foreign-born workers sponsored by a company to work in the USA. These visas are bound to a specific employer with limited ability to transfer elsewhere, and on their own have ZERO ability to convert to a Green Card
* Green Card is Legal Permanent Residency (LPR), the first real step towards Naturalization. It lets you live and work anywhere in the USA, provided you generally contribute more than you receive in benefits (though this is very fungible depending on political incentives). Obtaining a Green Card is incredibly hard to do outside of family, with employer sponsorship being one of the few other viable routes.
So what seems to be happening here is that the regime wants to block Microsoft et al for applying for Green Cards for workers currently on H1B visas - not unheard of, but a rarity among the hordes of H1Bs employed yearly by technical firms. I suspect the goal is to discourage workers abroad from applying for H1Bs since employer green card sponsorship is off the table, but it won’t necessarily stop green cards via other routes (like marriage). It also doesn’t address the real grievances around H1Bs themselves, like how it coerces labor into taking more toxic or abusive working environments and lower wages while also robbing domestic workers of opportunities.
In other words, and assuming I’m understanding this messaging correctly (a big if), this is a nothingburger. It doesn’t stop H1B abuse, it doesn’t help American workers, and it punishes the handful of folks who deserve the Green Card conversion from their employers. It’s a packet of lies and misdirection meant to look bigger than it actually is.
Note that this appears to be about green cards/permanent residency rather than h1b.
Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said other companies that would be suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program included Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., Infosys Ltd., Tata, Wipro Ltd., HCL Technologies Ltd., and Capgemini SE. He said there were multiple active federal investigations ongoing into the matter.What do ya'll think about the conjecture that the elites in the USA want to destroy the actual economy while keeping their world of financial bullshit going?
The current K shaped economy being just the beginning. The elites realised that making more money wont change much for them, but they can make everyone else poor and then live as feudal lords.
In a normal world, I would praise the government for taking a action to address issues with a program that has definitely been abused by major tech companies for a long time.
However, it's really hard to separate the message from the messenger here.
Beyond the fact that this is obviously a political stunt designed to make headlines just a few weeks before the mid-term elections, there is little reason to believe that this is being done in good faith targeting the worst offenders. The people who have been chosen to run the federal government are simply corrupt sociopaths who will do anything to promote their extreme ideological agenda and are not to be trusted in any way.
Until proven otherwise, I have to assume this effort has to do with kickbacks or political retribution mixed with blatant racism, rather than for any sort of public benefit. I doubt this will result in anything besides a larger donation to the Republican party - or direct payments to Trump family members - by the affected companies.
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not much in there beyond the headline but quotes from the admin
I was thinking about this the other day in the context of the boardwalk town that I vacation in sometimes. There are a lot of college student aged workers who come from Europe for the summer and work in every service industry job imaginable in town. There are agencies that find these European workers and help them find jobs and housing.
It makes me wonder why there aren't more American young adults taking these jobs. I think it would be great fun to live at the beach for the summer. Maybe the wages are too low, or American kids are focused on internships? Or maybe the European workers are better employees? I don't know.