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Foreign STEM Workers in USA with Visas 8

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Tunalover

Tunalover

Mechanical
Mar 28, 2002
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I went on a job interview recently for an engineering position. When I was led through the "sea of cubicles" (but with low walls so you can see everybody) I noticed probably 75% of the workers appearing to be of central asian decent. Of course I don't have a problem with people from this part of the world and many of them could have been US citizens (I'm a caucasian born in the USA). But when I was offered the job the pay was substantially lower than at my current position. I made an appointment with the HR manager to discuss the offer. When I met with her in her office I noticed lots of paperwork on her desk having to with US H1B visas. She didn't budge from the salary offering in that meeting. A salary negotiation never took off the following week and I declined the offer.

It then clicked with me. All that H1B visa paperwork on her desk (sloppy of her to leave it on her desk for others to see) could mean the company sponsors many non-citizens with H1B visas and pays them less than US citizens. Not only that, these workers are always skating on thin ice because, with the stroke of a pen, the company could revoke their sponsorship. Of course they will always be on their best behavior and put forward their best effort so they can further their chances to immigrate!

Are non-citizens taking away STEM jobs from US workers!? It sure looked that way at this company!

Tunalover
 
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Possibly. Business as a group have been pushing the notion that there's a STEM shortage, despite the fact that only 30% of engineering graduates are actually working as engineers. It's all about profits, and for a labor-intensive business, engineers' salaries and benefits drive profits. To be able to pay someone 60% of typical wages is a great thing, coupled with the fact that an H1B employee can't readily wander to another company to get a pay raise, since the H1B needs to be sponsored by the company, based on their demonstrated need for skilled labor that's not available in the US.

The question that's not been answered is why only 30% become engineers. Is it:

> lack of opportunities
> poor training
> lack of actual desire

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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Even the dullest of new engineers can compute the probability of gaining even a modest amount of wealth by competing with slaves on price.




Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
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If it walk like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

Glad to hear that you were fortunate enough not to have had to take that job and could walk away. Many people are not as fortunate and are routinely taken advantage of just as you have seen, if not far worse. Far from making excuses for the USA, I can tell you that the worst of the treatment they might get in the States would be many orders of magnitude better than what typically goes on in a lot of other places. Also keep in mind what you have seen are workers with some kind of a visa, so now I'm sure you can imagine what can happen if for some reason some workers didn't have any visa at all, or some "problem" with the visa they did have. I can tell you from personal experience that it is not so nice a situation to be in, even under the best of circumstances, even if an "accident" that happened while you were working for one of the worlds largest American companies in one of their foreign locations, and if you have happened to lose your job (through absolutely no fault of your own), when you are in a foreign country, 1000s of miles from home and dependent solely on your employer for help. I just wound up getting a few extra vacation days, but the part of being personally deported by the boss of the country's national police organization was not fun. These types of situations can easily become ripe for instant and severe abuse. It still costs me an extra 50 $US or so every time I go back and want to board a plane to leave again.

Are these workers taking jobs away from US workers? Well, in your case we might could say ... no. But only because you didn't want that job. If another unemployed US engineer did want it, we could probably say yes. I can tell you that in the early 90's when I left the US, basically for good, I think it had a lot to do with the number of visas granted to foreign engineers to work in several extremely large engineering companies in Houston. I used that to my advantage at the time, because US engineering education and experience was valued at a premium on the world market for many years. Still it is somewhat true, but less and less every day, as the US loses technical reputation from declined spending on NASA projects, ring accelarators and coliders, and as more foreign engineers return to the world market, after they have gained USA working experience, if not their USA educations as well.

I don't hold anything against any foreign worker trying to take, or taking, my job, because I don't think they get the same money, so I know the company that hired them was after cheap, not necessarily quality, but I also know that they get more and more quality these days as technological capabilities increase throughout the world constantly. I have to go for a different market now, work smart, fast, make no mistakes, pay attention to all details, safety aspects, remember all of my previous experience, communicate better than anybody else, negotiate solutions and finally deliver high value pojects on schedule. I charge for that kind of added value today, because the USA doesn't have any technical advantages off the battlefield any more.

Because of a few certian experiences I've had above, I empathsize with foreign workers. Even though I am American, I am a foreign worker too and from time to time I have experienced just a tiny, tiny bit of what many of them must go through. I think it would be good if you can keep what you have seen in mind and try to help in any way you can with these attempts to exploit foreign workers, or any worker for that matter, if you should happen to get the opportunity to do so in the future.

Reaction to change doesn't stop it :)
 
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Do you really think that H1B holders have immigration as their ultimate goal?

That was never part of my plan. I experienced another country/culture. I was paid the going rate, from which I paid US taxes (without representation). I went home. Would do it all again if I had a time machine.

Steve
 
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Depends, Sompting- I think a great many H1B visa holders DO look at it as a route to US immigration. That's the carrot that makes the stick of pay at 75% of the going rate seem like a good bargain. I'm sure that some companies are using the H1B for what it's truly intended for, and paying the going rate for the specialists they attract with it. But the temptation to stuff cubicles with cheaper engineers must be far too great to avoid, especially among the bottom feeders in the marketplace.

Thank your lucky stars, as at least you have the H1B. We in Canada have nothing like it. Instead we get the same screeching about shortages, which really result from bad succession planning and inadequate hiring of fresh grads ever time a cyclic industry goes through a downturn- and the government responds with yet greater enrollments and more permanent immigrants. In reality they're trying to mask the lack of real economic growth- the stagnation that has resulted from globalization and the mass exit of manufacturing resulting from it- with demographic growth. It's a necessary strategy on their part, as they have no other option- they can't really create jobs, and it's too late to revert to protectionism irrespective of what people might think in light of Brexit and Trump. The real solution, taxing the very, very few people who benefit from the status quo and redistributing that wealth more fairly, is felt to be hopeless because of the perceived mobility of capital world-wide. Short of Picketty's global wealth tax, the race to the bottom seems unstoppable. The oversupply in engineering is just a symptom of a much larger trend.
 
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H1B is not that different than the Chinese working on the railroads back in the 19th century. Or even the people that illegally cross the border; the primary goal is to send money home to support their families. Not everyone wants to live here, particularly given the rather obviously blatant racism that's been revealed in recent years.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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That was the case back in the 90s, but it is certainly not what I've seen actually going on there in the last 5-10 years. Today Indians are running the entire UAE and most of the rest of the mideast as well and a lot of east Africa. Except for the military in Iraq and Afganistan, not too many Americans around anymore, unless they are doing the same thing, low profile, for their private security companies based mostly in Dubai, or keeping the drones flying.

Temporary jobs? Yes. Everyone goes to the mideast with the understanding that it will be a temporary job, as they don't hand out passports of any kind, then you don't see them except during Ramadan, for the next 20 years. The first time I stayed 10 in Saudi. I would have stayed another 10 in the UAE on the last visit, except the company experienced an Indian revolt and management takeover, diverting work being done in the UAE offices to the Indian offices in Chanai and Delhi, so quite a lot of us western expats in the UAE didn't get much more than a quick plane ticket home.

From the above link I posted,
"There are 14.2 million Indian migrants worldwide; after the United Arab Emirates (2,852,000), the United States (2,061,000) is the second-most common destination. Other popular destinations include Saudi Arabia (1,762,000), Pakistan (1,396,000), Nepal (810,000), and the United Kingdom (756,000), according to mid-2013 estimates by the United Nations Population Division. Click here to view an interactive map showing where migrants from India and other countries have settled worldwide."

Reaction to change doesn't stop it :)
 
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The Indians in the UAE drive the taxis and work in the hotels. The construction workers are from the Philippines. The Arabs drink coffee and count money. Hell on Earth.
 
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The Indians in the UAE work in the hotels, shops, banks, engineering, IT, maintain everything, oil & gas, airline pilots.... Afgans drive the taxis now. The construction workers are from the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Afganistan.

The Arabs drink coffee tea, own 51% of the companies and count money.
Hell on Earth. No, but if you look towards the west, you can see it from there.



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Anecdote time!

As an intern (and recently graduated EIT), I once went in to negotiate with my boss for a salary increase from my previous, pre-graduation/EIT rate. I was armed with all of the salary survey information provided by ASCE, my university etc.

He gasped at my figure, and balked. "I don't pay 'A' that much!". 'A' was a PE on an H1B visa.
 
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Tunalover, were you visiting the United Technologies R&D Center by chance? It appears to match what you described pretty closely. I know of other companies that do exactly the same thing. They hire these foreign workers because they can pay them peanuts and work them hard. And if they don't like it, too bad. They can go back home (which most of them desperately don't want to do). This scenario actually reminds me of graduate school in a way. These employees are effectively working as indentured servants. The companies that sponsor them save a lot of money this way. I know of an American citizen born here in the United States who has been employed in one of these companies working on R&D for over 20 years.

Based on his comments, it is not a pleasant place to work.

Maui

 
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Funny you bring up grad school Maui - that's where many of our H1B folk come from and there's certainly an indentured servant aspect to their employment here.

I frequently second guess myself on this issue for fear I'm more racist than I'd like to admit but it does seem like there are a good few cases of companies taking advantage of the H1B system so I certainly am included to agree with you Tunalover.

As part of the H1B reqs the company have to post notices of what their job description & pay range are etc. Even though the name isn't on the notice a lot of the time we can work out who it applies to, or at least narrow it to a couple of possibilities, and based on what I've seen they are paid on the low side and given lower job categorizations compared to some of us non H1B's (I'm an immigrant but due to my Mrs being a US citizen) doing mostly similar work.

While most of these folks are Drs, many with their grad degrees from the US, the reality is some aren't doing much a competent BS (or even AA) degree holder could do instead - and sometimes not as well.

That said we do have some folks here that truely are world class and probably fit the nominal intent of H1B, but there are a lot that I struggle to believe they couldn't find US applicants for.

The really obvious ones are the 'Disney' kind of situations where they lay off their own staff & replace by some 3rd party contractor who almost exclusively employ H1B visa holders. Guess the Judge determined that one didn't break the 'letter of the law' due to the distinction between being direct Disney employees V contractors.

Posting guidelines faq731-376 (probably not aimed specifically at you)
What is Engineering anyway: faq1088-1484​
 
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H1B justifications are probably a lot like sole source justifications we use for buying equipment. If you look hard enough, there will always be something that's so unique that management will buy off on it. I bought a Tek oscilloscope that I wanted after spending about an hour poring through the spec until I found a feature that wasn't available on the competing HP scope.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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and sure, engineers from the US wouldn't want to take a job for the rates that they can attract overseas applicants. Hence they can apply for H1B visas.

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?
 
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Just a generalized observation I have of many large US-based companies:

As long as the company meets the letter of the law, it's a free-for-all (enabled by our lawmakers with generous lubricant from those companies in the form of campaign donations, insider trading tips, and outright bribes). Many US business executives allow their moral compass to stray wildly as long as their reward system is so tightly tied to bottom line profits.

Maui, I won't tell who the employer was for fear of legal retribution.


Tunalover
 
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