This is not just about IT people. The state of California has forced electric utility companies to remove trees all over the state. The utilites hire predominantly hire latino owned companies that hire almost entirely illegals and H1B or similar. Where I am located, natives to the region are told not to bother applying for work with these companies which is purely and simply discrimination. I have spoken with several crew leaders who were hired just to be translators and public representatives for the company. If there were no illegals in this industry, these tree work jobs would get done and probably in most instances be done better. Speaking as one who was involved in tree work many years ago and still does his own on his property.
There's no difference in the construction industry. Framing crews, roofing crews, are almost 100% illegals and/or their hiring supervisor is here on an H1B Visa...
This BS has been going on in Georgia for decades!!!
Spot on. Crews become 95% or 100% Latino, and everyone else is excluded. I work with industrial recycling facilities in urban cities with plenty of poor Americans, the jobs don't require degrees, and the staffs are 80-95% Latino. Solid work, lots of overtime, and benefits.
When I was a kid I worked picking fruit. It was hard work but you got paid based upon the work you did. Other members of the family worked in fruit packing sheds for the primarily owned by Japanese/American farmers and they were quite fair. That work went away because of farm labor contractors who only hire hispanics. One labor contractor had over 400 employees and there was only 4 social security numbers provided for the whole group. Food prices did not get cheaper as growers had to pay more. Labor contractors and their union leaders did however, do quite well financially. These arrangements are rife with fraud and non-compliance regards paying taxes or health benefits that American citizens are required to pay. I don't think the same tax escape mechanisms exist for the high-tech H1Bs.
Offshoring is also continuing at a rapid clip with almost all Democrats and the remaining Neoconservative Republicans in full support. Consider Jack Kelly's October 2024 article in Forbes titled "The Globalization and Offshoring of u.s. Jobs Have Hit Americans Hard." This all needs to end but there's too many people in the legislature still supporting the mass offshoring of U.S. jobs to foreign workers and mass insourcing of foreign workers to take U.S. jobs in the United States as well. Additionally, many low-information Americans haven't yet grasped how badly this harms employment prospects and real wage growth for both them and their progeny.
If this WAS a Free Market system then talented people could game it, take the ladder 🪜. But it ain't a level field, is it? Nor a "free" market. Oligarchs form C.A.R.T.E.L.S. and Monopolies. They install Law Makers, buy Opinion. Billionaires are merely the most competent THIEVES amongst Humanity. They are fair Game, Open Season, reap this whirlwind.
If these imported workers were so damn smart and their culture was awesome, why, then, are they leaving their countries? Because they are shitholes. And you hit the nail on the head, Techno: because culture. Opportunity without (too much) corruption, optimism, and people who know, for the most part, how to communicate with each other across many different boundaries, this is the USA.
I’ve followed this argument on X and there’s truth to all of it. Yes, the visas have been abused by companies and that’s got to be stopped. Elon made an excellent point about how even if we bring in more electrical engineers on visas, we’re still going to fall very short of what we’re going to need going forward. So we’re going to need to bring in the best and brightest from other countries to help fill that void. Have you seen the college crowd? They’re out there protesting in favor of Hamas, needing safe spaces and going into meltdowns if they’re addressed by the wrong pronoun. Young people want to be TikTok influencers not engineers. That’s how screwed up our education system is. I believe it was Vivek who pointed out that we need to change our culture and our education system. We have high school students glued to their phones instead of paying attention in class. America definitely needs to do better. We sent men into space using slide rules and now our kids are illiterate and can’t do basic math. Sorry my answer is all over the place but I have a grandkid bouncing around me. Bottom line is, there was no right or wrong side to this argument. It’s all true and needs to be fixed.
Something for you to consider: instead of listening to Elon, Vivek and X, maybe listen to those who work in the field. I lived in CA near Silicon Valley - I knew LOTS of highly qualified people who had worked in Silicon Valley and were very passionate about their field, were hard workers who were American and very good at what they did. I knew so many who were laid off in recent years that I lost count. The qualified, intelligent Americans are out there, they aren't all idiots. There is also a woman on X who worked in the field for decades who will tell you that lots of recent graduates today are highly qualified but can't get hired because they can't even get an interview, in spite of their excellent qualifications - because companies want to hire low paying H1B foreigners. Elon and Vivek want you to think there aren't enough qualified Americans to hire because they want you to think that (especially Elon because he doesn't want to pay his employees much money, & foreigners are cheaper). They are wrong, we have plenty of folks to work in the field but they can't even get an interview because foreigners are cheaper (but not a qualified). I've lived in a major university city for several yrs, can't tell you how many folks I know who are very highly qualified in tech field but can't get an interview either.
Your making the point all of these arguments fail to grasp: the idea there is some on going tech labor shortage is a fiction manufactured by big corporate tech to foster programs like H1-B. Without the illusion of labor shortage, there would be zero political traction for H1-B.
I first witnessed this practice working as an engineer in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, when large corporations such as Intel, AMD, Memorex, HP, started laying off experienced engineers out one door and hiring cheaper engineers in another. While announcing layoffs, the companies would be running large Sunday ads in the San Jose Mercury News looking for engineers. CEO tech luminaries started to whine to the fanboy press none stop about not having enough engineers and needing more science math curriculum in school. This set the groundwork for the STEM tiger mom culture that got pushed generations of kids, along with widespread abuse of the H1-B.
It’s not just tech that can’t get an interview. Nobody around here has gotten any callbacks from anybody. I don’t know what that’s all about. And yes. The VISAs have been abused by many companies. But we will still be short. This article seems to back up what Musk was saying. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/addressing-the-engineering-talent-shortage
The system has been gamed for decades. The instability in IT jobs, for example, scares away women who want career stability.
Another benefit of the H1B Visa is that techies are tied to their company for 3-6 years - i.e. indentured servants. They may also not get stock options.
And many H1B workers years later are found not to be coding, but in other fields.
P.S. The tech side of campuses aren't typically playing silly political games.
Yes the visas definitely have way too many loopholes. I’m not sure about instability in there h field. I have a couple of family members who are coders and they’re in stable jobs. There just aren’t many tech jobs here I live. My nephew was born to code. He was self taught and by the time he went to college to officially get degree, he knew more than the teachers. He actually wound up helping teach. So maybe there’s a teacher shortage in tech, too, that needs to be addressed.
A friend's husband had a high school degree, went to a tech school, learned the C+ language, and had a job after a few months of classes. This was over 20 years ago, but even young kids teach themselves coding.
Agreed, tech is different. I was one of the only women working in tech at my first job in Silicon Valley. There were only 4 of us who were programmers.
But there aren’t enough of them working towards those degrees. I believe Musk said even with American workers and the top 1% of visa workers we’re still looking at around 400,000 short of electrical engineers for future needs. Companies need to step up and no better by their employees too. Kids see how their parents and grandparents have worked themselves to the bone with not a lot to show for it. They have collectively said “eff that” and I say good for them. So there’s a lot of work to be done on several fronts.
Agreed 100% - many have been laid off and today's grads can't even get interviews, because foreigners are hired due to cheap labor, but they aren't nearly as qualified.
I will listen to Musk as long as Trump stands by him. Where will they get training? College loans are a mess. Degree requirements are ridiculous. There are a lot of degree requirements that aren’t necessary. But they have to be taken which drives up the cost of college. Until we revamp our education system, from kindergarten to college, we aren’t going to gain any ground.
You need to know about Musk and how Trump works. Literally every single person Trump hired for his presidency are deep state. I love Trump & have watched him for 45 yrs, he works in very unusual ways. He has "hired" them because he is exposing them so he puts them in the spotlight so we can see for ourselves how worthless they are. Of course Musk wants to hire H1B, he has huge companies and wants to pay cheap labor but these H1Bs aren't nearly as good as Americans and there are huge numbers of new grads who can't even get interviews because tech companies want cheap labor. This comes from those who have worked in tech field for a very long time. Huge numbers of highly qualified Americans have also been laid off in favor of cheap foreign labor. I've known a number of them. Mus is exposing himself as someone who doesn't give a damn about Americans' welfare or jobs for them, he just wants cheap labor. He comes from a very satanic deep state family, look up his background and research it - I did and that's what I found.
I agree with you that Trump puts people in the spotlight to be exposed. Case in point: Fauci, Birx & Pence.
And I think Ramaswampy is a conman. But I do not think Elon Musk is one of them. I could be wrong, but I've done extensive research on him. Even met his brother. I believe Elon is acting.
"MUSK. You magnificent bastard, Q read your BOOK!"
That's what Musk said but he has an agenda - he owns huge companies and wants to be pay low wages so of course he wants to hire H1B - but he isn't telling the truth. I've known far too many friends who worked in Silicon Valley who were very good at what they did but they got laid off so cheap foreign labor could be hired who aren't nearly as good. Read what those who have been in the field are saying - they are all saying same things, Americans can't even get interviews to be hired. Companies want cheap labor and don't care that they aren't as qualified as Americans.
Completely agree with you. Vivek is right. Too many college grads lack the appropriate education and, more importantly, the work ethic. Ask any employer. These kids don't get the 9 to 5, five days a week regimen.
If you talk to tech folks who have worked in tech and are still working there, they will tell you same thing - they aren't hiring very qualified Americans, they want cheap labor who aren't as good. Lots of grads can't even get interviews because of that. The talent is out there but tech companies want cheap labor. This has been going on for quite awhile - I know lots of highly qualified, hard working Americans who have been laid off in favor of cheap labor. Do you really believe that every single person who graduates from college is a moron? They aren't, I should know, I've been living in a college town for awhile now and talk with lots of these young people - they are smart, eager to work but aren't even being looked at by tech companies.
I think they want to work. They just don’t want to get screwed over like many have seen happen to their parents. Think about it. A lot of them, especially over Covid, have been given no hope. I see my own grandkids struggling to make sense of it and they’ve got good, hard working parents. My 21 yr old worked hard at Culver’s only to see lazy employees getting special treatment from the managers because they were friends (she was younger at the time). There were other bad experiences with managers. Now she’s in college and wants to teach kindergarten. She works part time as a sub. One day, a woman comes into her room and starts barking out orders. She never introduced herself or stated her title - nothing. Who does that? Happened several times. She went to her boss and said “I won’t go back to that school.” My 18 yr old grandsons have been working at a family owned pizza place since they were 15. Two of the owners sons also work there. They got into a fist fight and were arrested on site! Then, on top of all this craziness, our pastor keeps talking about end times. So if I’m a kid who watched a Covid death ticker every day on TV for a year or more, went to church on Sundays and heard over and over that the rapture was at hand and how not everybody was going to go AND had to deal with crazy adults on a daily basis, do you really think I’m going to care much about my future? My grades? My career choice? One of the absolute best things Trump brought to the table was HOPE. The hope for a better economy, better jobs, better health. That’s the culture that we need to be giving our kids. Trump says “the best is yet to come”. We’ve gotta make sure our kids get ahold of that. Sorry I’m prattling on.
There are several intertwined problems with immigration:
+ The biggest problem with unbridled immigration is that we have lost our Christ-centered culture. When a population group (university students, then professors, and now large sectors of technology workers) does not embrace the culture they immigrated to, the culture is disrupted. God blesses us for faith and curses us for a lack of it. We have been poor stewards of our forefathers' values.
+ The specific problem with H1B visas is that workers hired under one have no mobility: they cannot quit and work for another company. Many companies use this to force a sort of indentured servitude. This is the mechanism that suppresses wage growth for everyone, not just visa holders. Wanna bet visa factory companies are unwilling to accept meaningful reform that allows job mobility?
+ Immigration should be tied to a desire to become a member of a culture, not a workforce. By substituting national identity for corporate identity, we have created a perverse incentive where the people who choose to immigrate are not coming to be part of our country, but to earn money from a company.
+ Immigration should be a long-term process where immigrants have a period of time to understand and adopt the culture of their new country, with plenty of opportunity to change their minds. It should not be an easy or whimsical process because your allegiance to your country is a serious matter. People who are clamoring for making immigration "simple" should be hard-ignored. But there is also a lot of corruption and malfeasance in the US immigration process (it should not require a lawyer to grease the skids for you and there are many inequitably-enforced rules and deadlines). That should be fixed, but with care.
I made a career change from Sales to HR/Training. So 13 yrs after undergrad got my Masters 1999. There were many openings that "preferred bilingual. If u check 1999 huge influx of Hispanics. What a slap in my face. I sacrificed wages. Time & money to make the change. I really think it was unfair.
My biggest gripe since the inception of these phony H1B visas is:
Assimilation, assimilation, assimilation!
They want the American dollars to spend, spend, spend or send back to their family in their "home" country, BUT, they don't want to really be Americans, because......they refuse to assimilate.
It's been a scam on the American Middle Class, since it's inception
I read today that there is an H1B mass immigration firm that imports people from India, puts them in an apartment, gives them a 4 week training program in basic tech, then creates fake resumes for them, trains them in interview techniques, and gets them placed in tech jobs at companies they used to work for...and get this. They are the contractor so they get the salary and then pay the visa holder half or less than half...So why not train our workers? Maybe the ones who are going to be out of a job due to DOGE. I am sure there are plenty of American workers who could learn basic tech in 4 weeks too.
Great article Techno, and I’m glad we get to read your take. I like the idea of O1 visas too, but then I read an article about how there is fraud associated with that too. Apparently, if you pay a firm a lot of money, like 20-30k, they will publish an article in your name and base your visa on it.
My view on H1Bs is that the companies who hire them don’t care about the US or even their company. They want lower labor costs that they can report to the board so they can get a bonus. When the company starts to fail due to lack of ingenuity and high turnover of staff, the CEO bails with a golden parachute. This is also like the companies that get everything made in China, between IP theft and the price gouging, they also make US companies go bankrupt. Company boards better wake up. Except maybe they have all the same players sitting there too…
According to Steve Bannon, Trump tried to do that (I think via an EO) but it didn't get very far until almost the end of his term and then Biden stopped the whole thing.
Trump expelled almost 3 million immigrants using Title 42 between March 2020 & May 2023. And yes, there were a couple other EOs.
Trump also said in January of this year that he will use Title 42 again. So don't freak out if they push the bird flu or whatever -- that may work in our favor.
Charlotte, in your first paragraph you are describing the activities of a sort of 'tech-coyote'. But rather than smuggling people in using vehicles, they are providing fraudulent credentialization.
Everyone in this discussion is missing a key point. I just retired after 40 years in heavy manufacturing starting in skilled trades and ending in middle management supervising 20 salaried engineers. My salaried people were always good. No problems whether they were US born and educated or Indian, Brazilian, South Korean, Chinese or Eastern European and I've had plenty of each. The real problem was union hourly workers. Number one problem was attendance followed closely by productivity and bad attitude. Unions suck and they foster nothing but problems. I have seen thousands of jobs go to Mexico an China directly due to the hourly workforce being over priced and problematic. That's it. Period.
In addition to the millions of U.S. jobs sent overseas, almost one in five people working IN the United States is a foreign-born worker. (1) That's a LOT of jobs being denied to native-born U.S. citizens. Almost the entire Democratic Party, and the Neoconservative Republican Party hold-overs, continue to promote large-scale offshoring while simultaneously importing foreign workers at a rapid clip to replace U.S. native-born citizens IN the United States, obstruct U.S. native-born citizens from jobs, and lower real wages due to flooding the U.S. labor market with an artificial foreign labor supply.
A lot of U.S. citizens have been and continue to be harmed. Class-based examples include new STEM graduates fresh out of college who can't find good work in the fields they trained for sometimes ending up as unpaid or low-paid interns or, more commonly, in an entry level service sector job; aging technology sector males who developed health issues and cannot find good paying work anymore living below the poverty level on Medi-Cal often with student loans they'll never be able to pay off; people who picked up a record in their youth and then reformed graduating college or tech programs and cannot find work, etc.
This also is a real contributor to present record-level U.S. homelessness (2) and federal, state, and local non-entitlement spending. Ending the offshoring of U.S. jobs and insourcing of foreign labor has the potential to create an almost full employment scenario for U.S. citizens at sustainable wages which would materially decrease non-entitlement government spending, and if combined with the deregulation President Trump advocates, drive a brand new housing construction boom not seen since the 1980s and materially decrease homelessness.
Combined with President Trump's economic trade, energy, and immigration agenda there is no doubt the combination would usher in a new American renaissance!
But how to get the people in political power to stop taking the political contributions, stock tips, revolving door opportunities, etc. to continue this very harmful practice to U.S. citizens and their families and future progeny?
May God answer our prayers and give us both a true Christian awakening and a new political socioeconomic consensus across class sectors of U.S. citizens, from poor-to-rich, that accommodates the citizens in them. May the populace finally vote in new political representatives with keen minds and right hearts to primary the political offenders who are putting U.S. citizens last: out of office.
MAGA still needs to grow if it intends to reform and reshape the nation and the West toward a better future for citizens in the long-term. The movement will need to become more than another self-serving special interest group if it wants to achieve that objective. The danger is that it doesn't and then the U.S. becomes like Argentina which has a long history of swinging from the radical-left to the radical-right and then back again. The man on Argentinian television swinging around a chainsaw is economically desirable at present for that nation but make no mistake; he's a radical-right ideologue who, after he completes the heavy lifting, is not smart enough to nominate a successor who will construct a contract with about half of the rest of the nation to secure a three-quarter moderate consensus that could normalize Argentina for a century.
Technofog is correct. This practice of mass offshoring of U.S. industry, manufacturing, etc. (e.g. U.S. jobs) overseas while insourcing an artificial foreign labor supply into the U.S. to continue displacing U.S. workers and lowering their real wages needs to end.
Thanks for another great perspective on the H1b visa system.
Seems to me that there are two other issues (aside from low wages) promoting the immigrant visa dilemma: 1) DEI mindset in corporate culture (particularly HR) and 2) the increasingly bad K-12 education system. On the later, if perhaps the corporate employer exerted some influence on K-12 curricula, students might have more vocational skills of value to the local community. This in turn might lead to less student confusion related to gender transition and more interest in issues of the real world.
On the former, I, for one, would be happy to discuss an improved immigrant visa program IF corporate culture would fire their DEI departments and reprogram their HR departments to merit based hiring. Seems likely that HR might find more qualified in country applicants with just these two simple fixes… meanwhile this would buy time for the education system to catch up with a more reality based curriculum.
Not likely to happen in my lifetime, sigh…. But a girl can dream 🤣
Until I did a deep dive, I had no idea of the extent of abuse of this program. My impression had always been that this program was for the highly skilled mostly technical/computer type positions that couldn't be filled by American workers.
Imagine my surprise to see pretty standard white-collar type jobs on the list, including accountants and program managers. The difference is those asking for those positions to be filled with foreign workers want to pay at least 20% to 100% less than market value.
My nephew is an electrical engineer and has worked for a number of companies. He states the workers from India etc are ok on project teams but lack independent thinking and need a great deal of supervision and management. He also stated they didn't last long at the companies. His biggest complaints about companies he has worked for is the constant buying and selling of the companies to bigger companies then being spin off. He says the churning is constant. Sounds like the accountants run the businesses for short term gain. Workers get messed over again.
This is not just about IT people. The state of California has forced electric utility companies to remove trees all over the state. The utilites hire predominantly hire latino owned companies that hire almost entirely illegals and H1B or similar. Where I am located, natives to the region are told not to bother applying for work with these companies which is purely and simply discrimination. I have spoken with several crew leaders who were hired just to be translators and public representatives for the company. If there were no illegals in this industry, these tree work jobs would get done and probably in most instances be done better. Speaking as one who was involved in tree work many years ago and still does his own on his property.
There's no difference in the construction industry. Framing crews, roofing crews, are almost 100% illegals and/or their hiring supervisor is here on an H1B Visa...
This BS has been going on in Georgia for decades!!!
Spot on. Crews become 95% or 100% Latino, and everyone else is excluded. I work with industrial recycling facilities in urban cities with plenty of poor Americans, the jobs don't require degrees, and the staffs are 80-95% Latino. Solid work, lots of overtime, and benefits.
When I was a kid I worked picking fruit. It was hard work but you got paid based upon the work you did. Other members of the family worked in fruit packing sheds for the primarily owned by Japanese/American farmers and they were quite fair. That work went away because of farm labor contractors who only hire hispanics. One labor contractor had over 400 employees and there was only 4 social security numbers provided for the whole group. Food prices did not get cheaper as growers had to pay more. Labor contractors and their union leaders did however, do quite well financially. These arrangements are rife with fraud and non-compliance regards paying taxes or health benefits that American citizens are required to pay. I don't think the same tax escape mechanisms exist for the high-tech H1Bs.
Offshoring is also continuing at a rapid clip with almost all Democrats and the remaining Neoconservative Republicans in full support. Consider Jack Kelly's October 2024 article in Forbes titled "The Globalization and Offshoring of u.s. Jobs Have Hit Americans Hard." This all needs to end but there's too many people in the legislature still supporting the mass offshoring of U.S. jobs to foreign workers and mass insourcing of foreign workers to take U.S. jobs in the United States as well. Additionally, many low-information Americans haven't yet grasped how badly this harms employment prospects and real wage growth for both them and their progeny.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2024/10/15/the-globalization-and-offshoring-of-us-jobs-have-hit-americans-hard/
If this WAS a Free Market system then talented people could game it, take the ladder 🪜. But it ain't a level field, is it? Nor a "free" market. Oligarchs form C.A.R.T.E.L.S. and Monopolies. They install Law Makers, buy Opinion. Billionaires are merely the most competent THIEVES amongst Humanity. They are fair Game, Open Season, reap this whirlwind.
If these imported workers were so damn smart and their culture was awesome, why, then, are they leaving their countries? Because they are shitholes. And you hit the nail on the head, Techno: because culture. Opportunity without (too much) corruption, optimism, and people who know, for the most part, how to communicate with each other across many different boundaries, this is the USA.
A friend taught in Mumbai for two years. He said men defecated on the street. (Not all, but some.)
Delhi smells like a urinal, yes, t is a thing there. And you can taste the air in China—there is a reason all the pictures you see are at night.
I’ve followed this argument on X and there’s truth to all of it. Yes, the visas have been abused by companies and that’s got to be stopped. Elon made an excellent point about how even if we bring in more electrical engineers on visas, we’re still going to fall very short of what we’re going to need going forward. So we’re going to need to bring in the best and brightest from other countries to help fill that void. Have you seen the college crowd? They’re out there protesting in favor of Hamas, needing safe spaces and going into meltdowns if they’re addressed by the wrong pronoun. Young people want to be TikTok influencers not engineers. That’s how screwed up our education system is. I believe it was Vivek who pointed out that we need to change our culture and our education system. We have high school students glued to their phones instead of paying attention in class. America definitely needs to do better. We sent men into space using slide rules and now our kids are illiterate and can’t do basic math. Sorry my answer is all over the place but I have a grandkid bouncing around me. Bottom line is, there was no right or wrong side to this argument. It’s all true and needs to be fixed.
Something for you to consider: instead of listening to Elon, Vivek and X, maybe listen to those who work in the field. I lived in CA near Silicon Valley - I knew LOTS of highly qualified people who had worked in Silicon Valley and were very passionate about their field, were hard workers who were American and very good at what they did. I knew so many who were laid off in recent years that I lost count. The qualified, intelligent Americans are out there, they aren't all idiots. There is also a woman on X who worked in the field for decades who will tell you that lots of recent graduates today are highly qualified but can't get hired because they can't even get an interview, in spite of their excellent qualifications - because companies want to hire low paying H1B foreigners. Elon and Vivek want you to think there aren't enough qualified Americans to hire because they want you to think that (especially Elon because he doesn't want to pay his employees much money, & foreigners are cheaper). They are wrong, we have plenty of folks to work in the field but they can't even get an interview because foreigners are cheaper (but not a qualified). I've lived in a major university city for several yrs, can't tell you how many folks I know who are very highly qualified in tech field but can't get an interview either.
Your making the point all of these arguments fail to grasp: the idea there is some on going tech labor shortage is a fiction manufactured by big corporate tech to foster programs like H1-B. Without the illusion of labor shortage, there would be zero political traction for H1-B.
I first witnessed this practice working as an engineer in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, when large corporations such as Intel, AMD, Memorex, HP, started laying off experienced engineers out one door and hiring cheaper engineers in another. While announcing layoffs, the companies would be running large Sunday ads in the San Jose Mercury News looking for engineers. CEO tech luminaries started to whine to the fanboy press none stop about not having enough engineers and needing more science math curriculum in school. This set the groundwork for the STEM tiger mom culture that got pushed generations of kids, along with widespread abuse of the H1-B.
It’s not just tech that can’t get an interview. Nobody around here has gotten any callbacks from anybody. I don’t know what that’s all about. And yes. The VISAs have been abused by many companies. But we will still be short. This article seems to back up what Musk was saying. https://www.bcg.com/publications/2023/addressing-the-engineering-talent-shortage
If you’re white, you need not apply. That’s the reality across all professions these days.
94% of jobs were given to non-whites in 2021.
The system has been gamed for decades. The instability in IT jobs, for example, scares away women who want career stability.
Another benefit of the H1B Visa is that techies are tied to their company for 3-6 years - i.e. indentured servants. They may also not get stock options.
And many H1B workers years later are found not to be coding, but in other fields.
P.S. The tech side of campuses aren't typically playing silly political games.
Yes the visas definitely have way too many loopholes. I’m not sure about instability in there h field. I have a couple of family members who are coders and they’re in stable jobs. There just aren’t many tech jobs here I live. My nephew was born to code. He was self taught and by the time he went to college to officially get degree, he knew more than the teachers. He actually wound up helping teach. So maybe there’s a teacher shortage in tech, too, that needs to be addressed.
A friend's husband had a high school degree, went to a tech school, learned the C+ language, and had a job after a few months of classes. This was over 20 years ago, but even young kids teach themselves coding.
People don't understand that programming really isn't that hard if a person has an aptitude for it. And many do.
I don't think it's lack of stability that drives women away. I think it's the attitude of a lot of the men in the field that bothers them.
I worked in tech for 20 years. Dealing with the politics can be a real grind and that can turn anyone off.
Politics is in every job. I worked in printing for over 20 years and then HR at a veneer manufacturing company. Lots of politics.
That is true. But tech is a special world. Maybe no worse than other places, but the stress is different from most.
Agreed, tech is different. I was one of the only women working in tech at my first job in Silicon Valley. There were only 4 of us who were programmers.
But there aren’t enough of them working towards those degrees. I believe Musk said even with American workers and the top 1% of visa workers we’re still looking at around 400,000 short of electrical engineers for future needs. Companies need to step up and no better by their employees too. Kids see how their parents and grandparents have worked themselves to the bone with not a lot to show for it. They have collectively said “eff that” and I say good for them. So there’s a lot of work to be done on several fronts.
I wouldn't listen to any statistics offered by Musk.
If good jobs are there, Americans will get the training to fill the jobs.
Agreed 100% - many have been laid off and today's grads can't even get interviews, because foreigners are hired due to cheap labor, but they aren't nearly as qualified.
I will listen to Musk as long as Trump stands by him. Where will they get training? College loans are a mess. Degree requirements are ridiculous. There are a lot of degree requirements that aren’t necessary. But they have to be taken which drives up the cost of college. Until we revamp our education system, from kindergarten to college, we aren’t going to gain any ground.
Sure, it needs revamping. But kids are still going to college and are getting a decent education in most schools if they decide to choose STEM.
I think a lot of kids would do well to go into plumbing, though.
I agree about plumbing! But I’ve got 3 grandkids in college and I’ve seen their curriculum. I sure hope the STEM classes are better.
You need to know about Musk and how Trump works. Literally every single person Trump hired for his presidency are deep state. I love Trump & have watched him for 45 yrs, he works in very unusual ways. He has "hired" them because he is exposing them so he puts them in the spotlight so we can see for ourselves how worthless they are. Of course Musk wants to hire H1B, he has huge companies and wants to pay cheap labor but these H1Bs aren't nearly as good as Americans and there are huge numbers of new grads who can't even get interviews because tech companies want cheap labor. This comes from those who have worked in tech field for a very long time. Huge numbers of highly qualified Americans have also been laid off in favor of cheap foreign labor. I've known a number of them. Mus is exposing himself as someone who doesn't give a damn about Americans' welfare or jobs for them, he just wants cheap labor. He comes from a very satanic deep state family, look up his background and research it - I did and that's what I found.
His grandfather was an early transhumanist.
I agree with you that Trump puts people in the spotlight to be exposed. Case in point: Fauci, Birx & Pence.
And I think Ramaswampy is a conman. But I do not think Elon Musk is one of them. I could be wrong, but I've done extensive research on him. Even met his brother. I believe Elon is acting.
"MUSK. You magnificent bastard, Q read your BOOK!"
Whatever. 🙄
That's what Musk said but he has an agenda - he owns huge companies and wants to be pay low wages so of course he wants to hire H1B - but he isn't telling the truth. I've known far too many friends who worked in Silicon Valley who were very good at what they did but they got laid off so cheap foreign labor could be hired who aren't nearly as good. Read what those who have been in the field are saying - they are all saying same things, Americans can't even get interviews to be hired. Companies want cheap labor and don't care that they aren't as qualified as Americans.
And how are you privy to what Musk pays his employees?
https://h1bgrader.com/h1b-sponsors/tesla-inc-op0l16qz2l/salaries/2024
Read comments by people who have worked either for him or in tech. The info is out there but you have to look it up and do research.
He doesn't hire H1Bs for SpaceX because there are government regulations that won't let him. NASA is the same way.
So, disgruntled employees? Like I said before, if Trump trusts him, so do I. You just sound like someone who’s trying to cause division.
Completely agree with you. Vivek is right. Too many college grads lack the appropriate education and, more importantly, the work ethic. Ask any employer. These kids don't get the 9 to 5, five days a week regimen.
If you talk to tech folks who have worked in tech and are still working there, they will tell you same thing - they aren't hiring very qualified Americans, they want cheap labor who aren't as good. Lots of grads can't even get interviews because of that. The talent is out there but tech companies want cheap labor. This has been going on for quite awhile - I know lots of highly qualified, hard working Americans who have been laid off in favor of cheap labor. Do you really believe that every single person who graduates from college is a moron? They aren't, I should know, I've been living in a college town for awhile now and talk with lots of these young people - they are smart, eager to work but aren't even being looked at by tech companies.
I think they want to work. They just don’t want to get screwed over like many have seen happen to their parents. Think about it. A lot of them, especially over Covid, have been given no hope. I see my own grandkids struggling to make sense of it and they’ve got good, hard working parents. My 21 yr old worked hard at Culver’s only to see lazy employees getting special treatment from the managers because they were friends (she was younger at the time). There were other bad experiences with managers. Now she’s in college and wants to teach kindergarten. She works part time as a sub. One day, a woman comes into her room and starts barking out orders. She never introduced herself or stated her title - nothing. Who does that? Happened several times. She went to her boss and said “I won’t go back to that school.” My 18 yr old grandsons have been working at a family owned pizza place since they were 15. Two of the owners sons also work there. They got into a fist fight and were arrested on site! Then, on top of all this craziness, our pastor keeps talking about end times. So if I’m a kid who watched a Covid death ticker every day on TV for a year or more, went to church on Sundays and heard over and over that the rapture was at hand and how not everybody was going to go AND had to deal with crazy adults on a daily basis, do you really think I’m going to care much about my future? My grades? My career choice? One of the absolute best things Trump brought to the table was HOPE. The hope for a better economy, better jobs, better health. That’s the culture that we need to be giving our kids. Trump says “the best is yet to come”. We’ve gotta make sure our kids get ahold of that. Sorry I’m prattling on.
There are several intertwined problems with immigration:
+ The biggest problem with unbridled immigration is that we have lost our Christ-centered culture. When a population group (university students, then professors, and now large sectors of technology workers) does not embrace the culture they immigrated to, the culture is disrupted. God blesses us for faith and curses us for a lack of it. We have been poor stewards of our forefathers' values.
+ The specific problem with H1B visas is that workers hired under one have no mobility: they cannot quit and work for another company. Many companies use this to force a sort of indentured servitude. This is the mechanism that suppresses wage growth for everyone, not just visa holders. Wanna bet visa factory companies are unwilling to accept meaningful reform that allows job mobility?
+ Immigration should be tied to a desire to become a member of a culture, not a workforce. By substituting national identity for corporate identity, we have created a perverse incentive where the people who choose to immigrate are not coming to be part of our country, but to earn money from a company.
+ Immigration should be a long-term process where immigrants have a period of time to understand and adopt the culture of their new country, with plenty of opportunity to change their minds. It should not be an easy or whimsical process because your allegiance to your country is a serious matter. People who are clamoring for making immigration "simple" should be hard-ignored. But there is also a lot of corruption and malfeasance in the US immigration process (it should not require a lawyer to grease the skids for you and there are many inequitably-enforced rules and deadlines). That should be fixed, but with care.
I made a career change from Sales to HR/Training. So 13 yrs after undergrad got my Masters 1999. There were many openings that "preferred bilingual. If u check 1999 huge influx of Hispanics. What a slap in my face. I sacrificed wages. Time & money to make the change. I really think it was unfair.
My biggest gripe since the inception of these phony H1B visas is:
Assimilation, assimilation, assimilation!
They want the American dollars to spend, spend, spend or send back to their family in their "home" country, BUT, they don't want to really be Americans, because......they refuse to assimilate.
It's been a scam on the American Middle Class, since it's inception
.
I read today that there is an H1B mass immigration firm that imports people from India, puts them in an apartment, gives them a 4 week training program in basic tech, then creates fake resumes for them, trains them in interview techniques, and gets them placed in tech jobs at companies they used to work for...and get this. They are the contractor so they get the salary and then pay the visa holder half or less than half...So why not train our workers? Maybe the ones who are going to be out of a job due to DOGE. I am sure there are plenty of American workers who could learn basic tech in 4 weeks too.
Great article Techno, and I’m glad we get to read your take. I like the idea of O1 visas too, but then I read an article about how there is fraud associated with that too. Apparently, if you pay a firm a lot of money, like 20-30k, they will publish an article in your name and base your visa on it.
My view on H1Bs is that the companies who hire them don’t care about the US or even their company. They want lower labor costs that they can report to the board so they can get a bonus. When the company starts to fail due to lack of ingenuity and high turnover of staff, the CEO bails with a golden parachute. This is also like the companies that get everything made in China, between IP theft and the price gouging, they also make US companies go bankrupt. Company boards better wake up. Except maybe they have all the same players sitting there too…
Would be amazing if the Trump Administration cracked down on the visa abuse. Fingers crossed.
According to Steve Bannon, Trump tried to do that (I think via an EO) but it didn't get very far until almost the end of his term and then Biden stopped the whole thing.
Trump expelled almost 3 million immigrants using Title 42 between March 2020 & May 2023. And yes, there were a couple other EOs.
Trump also said in January of this year that he will use Title 42 again. So don't freak out if they push the bird flu or whatever -- that may work in our favor.
Charlotte, in your first paragraph you are describing the activities of a sort of 'tech-coyote'. But rather than smuggling people in using vehicles, they are providing fraudulent credentialization.
Interesting- I haven’t heard of that.
Neither have I, until you described it. 😁
Rulers and slaves in 15-minute cities, Oh, Joy....
We were born free, and #Trump2024 is likely our last best hope. MAGA.
Everyone in this discussion is missing a key point. I just retired after 40 years in heavy manufacturing starting in skilled trades and ending in middle management supervising 20 salaried engineers. My salaried people were always good. No problems whether they were US born and educated or Indian, Brazilian, South Korean, Chinese or Eastern European and I've had plenty of each. The real problem was union hourly workers. Number one problem was attendance followed closely by productivity and bad attitude. Unions suck and they foster nothing but problems. I have seen thousands of jobs go to Mexico an China directly due to the hourly workforce being over priced and problematic. That's it. Period.
Unions have never been a big force in Silicon Valley which hires a great number of the H1Bs.
It would be hard to blame Americans, though, if they did decide to unionize in response.
In addition to the millions of U.S. jobs sent overseas, almost one in five people working IN the United States is a foreign-born worker. (1) That's a LOT of jobs being denied to native-born U.S. citizens. Almost the entire Democratic Party, and the Neoconservative Republican Party hold-overs, continue to promote large-scale offshoring while simultaneously importing foreign workers at a rapid clip to replace U.S. native-born citizens IN the United States, obstruct U.S. native-born citizens from jobs, and lower real wages due to flooding the U.S. labor market with an artificial foreign labor supply.
A lot of U.S. citizens have been and continue to be harmed. Class-based examples include new STEM graduates fresh out of college who can't find good work in the fields they trained for sometimes ending up as unpaid or low-paid interns or, more commonly, in an entry level service sector job; aging technology sector males who developed health issues and cannot find good paying work anymore living below the poverty level on Medi-Cal often with student loans they'll never be able to pay off; people who picked up a record in their youth and then reformed graduating college or tech programs and cannot find work, etc.
This also is a real contributor to present record-level U.S. homelessness (2) and federal, state, and local non-entitlement spending. Ending the offshoring of U.S. jobs and insourcing of foreign labor has the potential to create an almost full employment scenario for U.S. citizens at sustainable wages which would materially decrease non-entitlement government spending, and if combined with the deregulation President Trump advocates, drive a brand new housing construction boom not seen since the 1980s and materially decrease homelessness.
Combined with President Trump's economic trade, energy, and immigration agenda there is no doubt the combination would usher in a new American renaissance!
But how to get the people in political power to stop taking the political contributions, stock tips, revolving door opportunities, etc. to continue this very harmful practice to U.S. citizens and their families and future progeny?
May God answer our prayers and give us both a true Christian awakening and a new political socioeconomic consensus across class sectors of U.S. citizens, from poor-to-rich, that accommodates the citizens in them. May the populace finally vote in new political representatives with keen minds and right hearts to primary the political offenders who are putting U.S. citizens last: out of office.
MAGA still needs to grow if it intends to reform and reshape the nation and the West toward a better future for citizens in the long-term. The movement will need to become more than another self-serving special interest group if it wants to achieve that objective. The danger is that it doesn't and then the U.S. becomes like Argentina which has a long history of swinging from the radical-left to the radical-right and then back again. The man on Argentinian television swinging around a chainsaw is economically desirable at present for that nation but make no mistake; he's a radical-right ideologue who, after he completes the heavy lifting, is not smart enough to nominate a successor who will construct a contract with about half of the rest of the nation to secure a three-quarter moderate consensus that could normalize Argentina for a century.
Technofog is correct. This practice of mass offshoring of U.S. industry, manufacturing, etc. (e.g. U.S. jobs) overseas while insourcing an artificial foreign labor supply into the U.S. to continue displacing U.S. workers and lowering their real wages needs to end.
Footnotes:
1. https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/foreign-born-workers-were-a-record-high-18-1-percent-of-the-u-s-civilian-labor-force-in-2022.htm
2. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/ahar/2024-ahar-part-1-pit-estimates-of-homelessness-in-the-us.html
Thanks for another great perspective on the H1b visa system.
Seems to me that there are two other issues (aside from low wages) promoting the immigrant visa dilemma: 1) DEI mindset in corporate culture (particularly HR) and 2) the increasingly bad K-12 education system. On the later, if perhaps the corporate employer exerted some influence on K-12 curricula, students might have more vocational skills of value to the local community. This in turn might lead to less student confusion related to gender transition and more interest in issues of the real world.
On the former, I, for one, would be happy to discuss an improved immigrant visa program IF corporate culture would fire their DEI departments and reprogram their HR departments to merit based hiring. Seems likely that HR might find more qualified in country applicants with just these two simple fixes… meanwhile this would buy time for the education system to catch up with a more reality based curriculum.
Not likely to happen in my lifetime, sigh…. But a girl can dream 🤣
I'm glad that this debate is happening.
Until I did a deep dive, I had no idea of the extent of abuse of this program. My impression had always been that this program was for the highly skilled mostly technical/computer type positions that couldn't be filled by American workers.
Imagine my surprise to see pretty standard white-collar type jobs on the list, including accountants and program managers. The difference is those asking for those positions to be filled with foreign workers want to pay at least 20% to 100% less than market value.
H1Bs are almost never highly skilled in practice. Bottom of the barrel is the standard expectation. Often shockingly low productivity.
One thing to add. If granted an H1-B visa, that person is “owned” by the company that grants it. Those imported workers can’t go anywhere else.
My nephew is an electrical engineer and has worked for a number of companies. He states the workers from India etc are ok on project teams but lack independent thinking and need a great deal of supervision and management. He also stated they didn't last long at the companies. His biggest complaints about companies he has worked for is the constant buying and selling of the companies to bigger companies then being spin off. He says the churning is constant. Sounds like the accountants run the businesses for short term gain. Workers get messed over again.