Apple's Ability to Hire Foreign Workers May Be Impacted by Trump Overhaul of Work-Visa Programs

[calaverasgrande]

85k new H1b visas per year. These H1b visas last 3-5 years, so it adds up.
That is about 200-400k jobs that could be Americans.
It is easy to think of this as Trumpite xenophobia, but H1B visa abuse was around long before Trump.
And it is a known problem in the tech industry.
Say what you want, I've seen it with my own eyes. East Indian tech workers working absurd amounts of unpaid overtime.
I've even interviewed for tech jobs and been told, to my face, that my interview was just a ruse to get an H1b worker in there! They interviewed me for a job I was under qualified for to prove there 'were no qualified people'.

Think about it, with so many people getting CS degrees and doing dev bootcamps to get in on the 3rd dot-com gold rush, how can there be a lack of talent? 85,000 lacks of talent a year and Facebook, Apple and Google want more.

 

[jdillings]

I very much doubt Apple is hiring foreign engineers from the countries affected. I very much believe Apple hires people from south Asian countries, but not the middle east, at least in large droves. Apple and other major tech love abusing the H1-B system by stating there's not enough talent in the US, which is BS. Apple and Co. love keeping salaries in engineering fields stagnant while hiring cheap talent who're more than willing to take on a low salary to send much needed money back home while living in squalor with 10 flatmates.

Yep and let's not forget Apple and most of the other major Silicon Valley companies were convicted of colluding to depress wages by agreeing not to hire each other's employees. Their interest in H1Bs is only as a tool to suppress wages. Who can forget Bill Gates going before Congress and asking for an "infinite" amount of H1Bs?

 

[AppleMark]

I don't make the laws in Germany. I'm no politician, and I didn't vote for Merkel's party. In fact, the majority of German's didn't vote for her. So tell me how I'm supposed to be guilty of what's happening here. Furthermore we are subject to the EU and it's laws, on which we have even less influence.

Not sure you even got the gist of my first comment. Your immigration system is a mess, meaning it needs much more than a (temporary) executive order to fix it. You don't agree with that? Great, you have every right to. But there's simply no need to turn the tables and accuse me or my home country of being even worse in that regard.

I did get the gist of your comment but felt it was hypocritical, regardless if you make the policy or not.

I did not say you had to be guilty and was not trying to burden you with the 'crimes' of your 'forefathers' either, as was [is..?] popular up until a few years ago...

I am also not from the USA, or a citizen. But yes my country's immigration policy (like yours), is a mess. However, yours [and the EU in general] is in a much bigger mess and partly why the majority of the people in my country, felt the need to vote to leave the EU and why Mrs Merkel may not be in power after September.

So compared to the US immigration policy (have you ever tried to get a green card / working visa?), it is a much more robust system than the useless EU entitlement policy, that allows criminals and undesirables to move around the EU (country to country) simply because of a birthright.

Something is better than nothing and the 'temporary 90 day' executive order is in place (as far as I understand) to enable a more robust system to put into place. Extreme....? Yes, but this is the policy that those citizens in the USA voted for and that the President campaigned for. Currently a Terrorist, can enter the shores of any country like Greece, Italy and travel all around the EU, unchallenged.

The only reason the guy who drove the truck through the Christmas market in your city was caught, was because "he looked dodgy" and was reported by a local person. This is arguably a racist policy and I would much prefer a policy that challenges people based on their legal right to be in a country (at a border), rather than to be allowed to wander over borders and be challenged based on what they may look like.

In regards to Trump. If you bring a junk yard dog (who protects your work premises) home to play with your kids, you should not be surprised, shocked and angry when it bites one of them from time to time

 

[sbarton]

Depends, if you use high-skilled workers (example being people educated at US colleges), then this is a hinderance. Only 85k workers per year? Quite low, more so in the STEM degrees which almost no US Citizen likes to study or drops out off.

Many of jobs that are actually filled with H1B employees at my company in SV are service type IT jobs which do not and should not require STEM degrees. Business Systems Analysts, IT project managers, System Administrators do not require advance degrees in computer science.
[doublepost=1485944695][/doublepost]

"Must" live, or want to live? I have to commute 45 minutes each day to my job. Would I like to live closer? Sure. Do I think I should have some kind of right to ride a bike to the office? No. I chose the job, and I chose where I live.

I think he was referring to the fact that to live and work in SV at anything resembling American middle class levels, especially with a family, you need to be pulling down 170k+. Rent here is 3500k + a month pretty much anywhere in commute range.

 

[gim]

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[sziehr]

85k new H1b visas per year. These H1b visas last 3-5 years, so it adds up.
That is about 200-400k jobs that could be Americans.
It is easy to think of this as Trumpite xenophobia, but H1B visa abuse was around long before Trump.
And it is a known problem in the tech industry.
Say what you want, I've seen it with my own eyes. East Indian tech workers working absurd amounts of unpaid overtime.
I've even interviewed for tech jobs and been told, to my face, that my interview was just a ruse to get an H1b worker in there! They interviewed me for a job I was under qualified for to prove there 'were no qualified people'.

Think about it, with so many people getting CS degrees and doing dev bootcamps to get in on the 3rd dot-com gold rush, how can there be a lack of talent? 85,000 lacks of talent a year and Facebook, Apple and Google want more.

So in the 90's when this was used for top flight talent and not used to just replace whole departments it was not a big deal. Now they use it to replace whole departments to save money.

People forget so quickly IT is almost always a cost center. They want to save on cost at all times. The use of H1B was bound to end up abused by IT department managers looking to cut corners on staff.

The issue long pre-dates trump. The issue existed well since around the mid 2000's

The peak has just hit now with intel dumping 10k in people and Disney a whole department and Disney went 1 step farther with insult forcing the American workers to train there new cheaper h1b carrying replacements all to save a few bucks.

I get it greed is the issue but when you have a system that can be abused in this way the greedy will do it and with no fine or consequence they will do it regularly.

They could fix the issues I expressed here with stiff fines for abusing the program. The thing is they won't do that. Trumps answer is to just make the talent more expensive. I am not sure that is the right answer either.