Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she will introduce a bill to end H-1B visas, which allow companies to bring skilled foreign workers, days after Donald Trump backed the program.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she will introduce a bill to end H-1B visas, which allow companies to bring skilled foreign workers, days after Donald Trump backed the program.
The program doesn’t need to end, it needs to have severe restrictions on use.
It 100% needs to end…
Like, how it was intended was fine, but now it’s used to get employees who can’t quit. Sign them to a contract that doesn’t get OT and make em work 100 hr weeks when here till they burn out then replace them.
So Americans need to put up with it, or they won’t get hired.
I think it needs to be replaced immediately with something less exploitative a skilled persons visa that’s closer to a green card and requires multiple companies or a union to request skills then a government agency checks if those skills are actually in higher demand then capacity and issues reasonable length visas that merely require regular employment in a certain industry and become a reasonable speed onramp to green card status. Or something similar.
The reality is getting rid of skilled labor visas entirely is shooting ourselves in the foot in a way that reminds me of how much of the Manhattan project’s scientists came from axis nations. What we have now is hurting the visa holders and the labor they compete with, but we really do benefit from being able to bring in the exceptional.
Could go either way.
It 1000000% needs to end as it is currently. I think we could make it a lot better but the ownership class wouldn’t like that.
Yep, it’s basically slavery via holding the visa for foreign workers who have to put up with the corps holding their status over their heads, all while driving down pay for citizens. It was a good thought, but it’s being heavily abused now.
It was never a good thing. It was only ever intended to put downward pressure on domestic workers wages and increase the labor pool.
I would support an h1b program if the base wage had to be 10x the normal wage for the position they were hired. If you are truly an exemplary unicorn worker that can’t possibly be found in the rest of the US, then why not mandate a healthy and definitely non-exploitive wage for them?
That’s a fair point. When I say good thought, I was more referring to it being used as a stepping stone to help someone get into the USA to gain citizenship, not the way it’s used now. Which is slave labor that’s used to suppress wages of US citizens.
I’m not sure when it was a good idea and I also don’t know a time when it was not being abused, if I’m being honest. At least in IT (and in general, engineering, or so I’ve heard) going back to the 90s…
Now, the other threat they hold over our heads is that companies will just outsource if we don’t allow this, but that’s not a law of nature or anything, either. There is no reason we should not tax such services like that, too.
America kept telling their youth (and probably keep telling them) to “learn to code” because those were the jobs they were told Americans should aspire to, etc. Since I’ve been in IT since the 90s, I have more than my share of doubts about this promise, since I’ve seen how we are treated and the strong desire in the corporate world to suppress wages, benefits, any sense of autonomy, etc…if America is serious about this message, maybe they ought to look out for the workers.
The original (presented) heart of the visas were to pull in some of the best and brightest of other countries to fast track them to become Americans, thus bolstering the output of America. This actually resembles the current American brain drain, where other countries are taking advantage of the mistreatment of scientists and other high-intelligence fields in the US to help their country have an even better output. In theory, the original plan makes a lot of sense. Improve the compensation of some of the smartest people around the world, and improve America. But in practice, it is being sorely misused.
I think if you’d ask most (non-racist) Americans about this, you’d probably get a willingness to find some way to get exactly that kind of result. Seems like a win-win all around, except for corporatists only looking at next quarter’s profits.
The underlying rationale seems well-founded - there are smart people everywhere, how can we get entice some of them to come here and work for us? Hell, whether it was true or not, that used to be very much America’s brand, too.
Unfortunately, the charade and exploitation that is where the H-1B very quickly ended up is very much our brand, now, too, and that just sucks. I’d love to find a way back to that original idea and find a way to live up to it…
America will never look out for the workers. The workers have to unionize. Probably even the H1B employees. I think until that happens, we’re going to see wages stagnate and fail to keep up with inflation.
Unfortunately people are so cowed by their employees and the system that they won’t unionize.
Personally this is why I think we don’t have universal healthcare and basic social support systems. They would enable us to negotiate.
Well the H1 came decades before (and still exists, its more generic), and the B was supposed to be specific gaps for skilled workers - longer term allowed, you can change jobs on this one (the original requires you to get a new visa, the h1b you just need to file a petition), allowed for a longer stay which was helpful for people trying to become citizens, it was meant to be used far, far, far less than it is today and has limited that are constantly ignored, etc,
The H1B came out in 1990, it only took a few years for companies to work around the limitations that were intended and use skyrocketed.
So probably for around 2-3 years it was a good idea.
It’s not really slavery…
Because you can quit, you just go back to your home country.
And your home country might suck, but if you got a H1B, you’re upper class. No one goes from starving to getting a 100k salary in tech on a H1B.
It’s more like how Americans work on an oil platform. They come here to earn a shit ton of money on a short timeline, then go back home where the money is worth a shit ton more instead of spending here or even “investing” it.
No? You just need an engineering degree from a half decent university or a similarly valuable skill and you’re set, and in a weaker economy there’s no guarantee you can even find work with that degree or skill. I mean, in plenty of places computer science/engineering degrees have only recently come to be seen as valuable.
When someone hangs a carrot over your head and says “if you want to stay, do what I say” that’s a form of slavery.
You’re right and it kills the need for the local citizens to get paid properly when a company has the option to pay way under market for someone who’s home country might suck.
And this isn’t an issue because???
Not ever bad thing is slavery…
But you don’t seem to understand any of this
Nobody said every bad thing was slavery.
Right, but they said h1b’s are modern slavery…
Which means they don’t know how bad either are/were…
But fuck man, if you didn’t understand before this comment, I doubt this will help. It’s not exactly complicated and from your response you didn’t just miss a little thing, you fundamentally dont know how the English language works.
“Not every” means that not only are they wrong here, they’re so fundamentally wrong that they’re most likely long about other modern things they think are “modern slavery”.
It’s like a 9 year old saying homework is modern slavery. At least that makes sense because they’re 9.
n adult that thinks H1bs are modern slavery is a fucking idiot that doesn’t understand either
The English language does not require strawman arguments. Everyone understands what you’re trying to say.
It was getting abused since at least the 90s, at least as far as I could see. Sure, it was anecdotal as far as what I saw, but you’d hear others saying similar things.
The sad thing is that even after the dot-com bubble, we still had H-1Bs, when something like that should have been an obvious trigger point to shut them down to zero, at least within IT jobs, and only raise them above zero once some other trigger point is reached, and even then, only very cautiously.
If companies really need to find such rare talent, maybe they find some kind of way to have Congress build them a path to bring someone in as a full citizen and work. We’ll see how many “shortages” of local talent they have once all that rare talent are also free agents entirely capable of finding another job, LOL. I think the real “shortage” they are talking about is a lack of workers beholden to them, and willing to work for less than the prevailing wages…
I agree with this in principle (the whole concept of citizenship is frankly fucked up in the first place), but you don’t even need to go that far. There are much less oppressive work visa programs out there.
I was laid off from my first job soon after I trained an H-1B loaner engineer.