alt Hacker NewsTrump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program
Comments
A good step in the right direction. What I voted for.
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.
GCCs
It won't do shit b/c Microsoft can just hire subcontractors to pull off the same shit with even less stable pay.
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.
If the talent can't come to Microsoft, Microsoft will offshore near the talent.
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.
This sill last about .. 4 days, 2 weeks at most, before a federal district judge puts an injunction on it.
Great. Now do H4, PERM, and OPT next. Close all the loopholes. Numberwise H4 is 4x bigger than H1B.
H1B is a lamb big tech is willing to sacrifice to satisfy the populists. You want real change, get rid of the rest.
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.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
not much in there beyond the headline but quotes from the admin
A lot of these comments I find so tone deaf. Are any of you recruiters?
You say hire Americans, as if Americans are more qualified than another higher-qualified foreigner.
You don’t just hire someone because they watched the same kids show and basketball match as you, you hire for talent. The majority of the brightest people I’ve worked with at my time during many FAANGS have all been foreigners.
My knee jerk response to this is short term, more offshore and vendor hiring while companies pivot. Long term, more US firms will set up global offices to spread out their concentration to make onboarding easier.
In the best case we could hope this will lead to increased wages to American citizens, but realistically I think the most likely impact is it pisses a lot of people off, causes a lot of headaches for a lot of people, and has no real impact for most.
Edit: Would love to hear a coherent argument as to why my comment is off topic and deserving of downvotes but I'm sure that won't happen.
> “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.