H-1B visas used by firm to create low-cost workforce, U.S. alleges

[primavera]

68. Wow, a lot of issues there

Let me see if I can sort them all out.

I appreciate that the world is a different place than it once was and that the early work on the internet was done by pioneers by people with different skill sets than are employed today. Is that a bad thing? I guess I'm not really sure, it makes intuitive sense to me that, as an area of activity develops and becomes more sophisticated, people with more specialized skill sets would naturally come into play more. Should we still be hiring liberal arts grads with little or no prior training to tackle the complex programming tasks associated with the modern internet?

With respect to software localization, no doubt you are right that the linguistic components requiring native fluency could be outsourced overseas, but even you do not contest the need for native fluency. At that point, the question becomes one of whether you're going to have that work done here or abroad - not whether it's going to be done at all. From a business perspective, it arguably makes a certain amount of sense to have someone in house who can provide that expertise without having to be constantly communicating with someone halfway around the world. From a public policy point of view, the salary paid to someone working in the US as opposed to someone working outside the US provides benefits through the ability to tax that salary through income tax and through secondary economic activity, i.e., the foreign worker living in the US will spend much of their income at US grocery stores, gas stations, department stores, restaurants, etc., etc., etc., which benefits the US economy. The salary paid here is thus at least partially recycled back into the economy. When it's paid tp an outsourced service abroad, all of the benefits of taxes and secondary economic activity go to the host country and that salary is a dead loss to the US economy. So, if you're going to have to hire someone to provide a service unobtainable in the US, there are valid reasons for bringing someone to the US to perform it rather than outsourcing it.

As for advertising jobs, whenever I did this sort of thing, I was aways required to publish ads in multiple publications, at least one of which had to be the newspaper with the largest circulation locally. That obviously varies from region to region. In some small town in the middle of nowhere, the most widely read publication may be the local paper or it may be the main newspaper from the nearest major city. Practitioners look to - and receive - guidance from the Department of Labor on such points. It also varies depending upon the type of work. For more academic positions, ads get run not just in local newspapers, but nationally in trade journals and professional association newsletters and so on. Publication in multiple sources is standard. You may have seen ads run in small local papers, but that doesn't mean that the same ad wasn't run in other publications as well. I'm sorry, but you're mistaken when you say that the Department of Labor doesn't mandate specific advertising requirements. I've done this for many years, at different times and in different parts of the country, and DoL has always given me extremely specific requirements for advertising. Are there instances where some local DoL office fails to do so? I couldn't say, I'm sure anything is possible, but I can tell you that they have certainly never cut me any slack when it came to advertising requirements. True, that's anecdotal evidence based solely upon my personal experience, but then, so is your observation about having seen ads in small town newspapers. Unless your personal experience exceeds my own, which I doubt, I'm not persuaded that your anecdotal experience is more valid than mine.

The duration of advertising may or may not be sufficient, I'm honestly not sure. Practitioners follow the guidelines established by the laws governing such matters - what else would you have them do? If there's a problem with ads not being run long enough, then I, for one, would be fine with changing the regs to require longer publication periods. But I do think that there needs to be some balance between protecting local workers and creating undue burdens upon employers. You say you don't believe that the required advertising periods are long enough, so what would be long enough? Does the employer need to run ads for a month? For six months? For a year? At what point does the employer get to say, look, I honestly made a good faith effort to find US workers and no one took me up on my offer? I get the impression from your statements that you don't believe that that ever occurs; that, if an employer were to simply look hard enough, they would eventually find a US worker to do the job they require. But it's not always easy. Some of the employers I've worked with were based in out of the way parts of the country and nobody wanted to move there. In that regard, the migrant has a formidable natural advantage: they are already leaving their home and the families and friends behind; going someplace that isn't home to them is already a price they've resigned themselves to paying. At that point, one place that isn't home is more as less as good as any other place that also isn't home, so they can go pretty much anywhere. There's nothing sinister or nefarious about that. I presently live in New Orleans and the local job market really sucks, but I love New Orleans and I don't want to live anyplace else, so an employer in Raleigh or wherever, even though they have more and better jobs to offer, is not going to be receiving any job applications from me. So how long does the Raleigh employer have to keep trying unsuccessfully to persuade me to apply before they will can be allowed to conclude that I'm never going to want their job and they need to look elsewhere?

Your reference to the testimonies delivered to a subcommittee investigating H-1B abuse I think sheds some light on your perspective. A committee specifically dedicated to investigating abuse is naturally going to focus on just that: the abuse. They're not going to spend a lot of time talking about the majority cases when the program functioned flawlessly and with perfect integrity. So any testimony provided within that specific context is of course going to be heavily skewed towards the problems with the program. At no point in this discussion, or any of the others like it, have I ever said that the H-1B program doesn't have its fair share of abuses. I have no doubt whatsoever that every endeavor, public or private, ever undertaken in the entire history of the human race possesses SOME level of abuse. The world contains opportunistic and unethical people, there will always, always, always be some abuses and there will never, ever, ever be a program so ironclad that people will not be able to find some chink in its armor somewhere. The question then is not whether there is abuse, but is the abuse so extensive that it negates the positive benefits of the program. In addition to having worked in the private sector with H-1B clients, I have also worked for many years as an immigration policy analyst with various DC thinktanks and, although the H-1B program was not my focus, I ran into reports prepared by other analysts on a regular basis and none of them concluded that the rate of abuse in the H-1B program was exceptionally great. Again, that obviously doesn't mean that there is no abuse, nor does it mean that we shouldn't be constantly seeking weaknesses in this - and every other program - to try to make it better. And I applaud the work of people like Grassley and Durbin in trying to find those weak points and fix them; no matter how good a program is, it could always stand to be better. What I do not applaud is the wholesale, reactionary condemnation by many of an entire program that, on the whole, does a lot more good than harm.

I also do not appreciate your dismissive insinuation that I'm attacking you and am doing so because I'm losing on merits. This is, as you say, a legitimate subject for discussion, and I am merely correcting your misunderstandings.