FacebookBuysCongress

Updated 20 May - added to end
Why Facebook

Bought Congress

And avoided offering engineering jobs to U.S. Citizens.

Facebook has a problem, they are close to having 15% of their total workforce on H-1B (non-immigrant) visa and if that happens, they will be legally “H-1B dependent” forced to offer engineering jobs to U.S. Citizens. Note that more than 95% of firms in the software business do not have 15% of their total workforce doing engineering at all, so most firms can have 100% of their engineers be on H-1B visas, and never need offer a job to a U.S. citizen. Firms like Google, Wall Mart, and Facebook want engineers to make private software applications, and private profits, that will never benefit you unless you go their store or visit their web site. Hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed, so why is Facebook asking you to furnish them with green cards to pass out so they can bring more in?

To solve their problem of too many H-1B engineers, Facebook needs to “graduate” many of their H-1B visa holders from non-immigrant H-1B status, to “Green card” immigrant status. So what they need now is a rather larges stack of green cards, worth at least $100,00 each, and where can they get them? Well, you can pay for the cards they give away.

The idea that members of Congress will do pretty much anything for money is not new.

In 2000, Rep. Tom Davis said," (H-1B) is not a popular bill with the public. It's popular with the CEOs." "This is a very important issue for the high-tech executives who give the money." Rep. Davis said his constituent mail was seven to one against H-1B. And in2008, then candidate Obama had dinner with CEOs seeking more H-1B visas and collected $7.8 million in campaign contributions. If you want to be re-elected, you don't take that kind of money and walk away.

In 1989, when the H-1B visa was created, the purpose was to drive down the costs of engineers with advanced degrees, leading to higher profits. The National Science Foundation warned that it would distort the market, leading to a loss interest in science by U.S. Students, and that is exactly what has happened. Tthe USA still graduates more than twice as many students with degrees in STEM subjects than the industry wants to hire (why pay in cash, when you can offer the taxpayer provided services that come with a green card? The same argument that farmers use to get their corps picked, “Be a slave now, and the taxpayer will pick up your retirement and health care.”) More than 70% of H-1B visas are to people who are certified by their employers as ordinary people who will be doing ordinary jobs you or your child could do.

 

he story about how Facebook and universities, are holding out their hands to get valuable bundles of green cards is as much about the failure of the press to investigate as it is a story about government for sale. The press too often listen to lobbyists and repeat as facts, things that are anecdotes that tell one person's story, but are not true for the industry.

The Columbia Journalism Review make these points, “Figures from the National Institutes of Health, the National Academies, the National Science Foundation, and other sources indicate that hundreds of thousands of STEM workers in the US are unemployed or underemployed. But they are not organized, and their story is being largely ignored in the debate over immigration reform...a narrative that has been skillfully packaged and promoted by well-funded advocacy groups as essential to the national interest, but in reality it reflects the economic interests of tech companies and universities.” Private profits, seeking to socialize the cost of labor.

http://www.cjr.org/essay/it_doesnt_add_up.php

If you want to be heard by Congress, what you need is money and the IT industry knows it.

"[We in tech] control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals...We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment" -- Joe Green, leader of Mark Zuckerberg's new immigration lobbying group.

You can't expect out of work STEM students to argue with Zuckerberg, or the lobbyists he sends to newspapers.

Here are few easy puncture myths the press repeat.

NY Times By SOMINI SENGUPTA Published: April 11, 2013

“Unemployment in the technology industry hovers below 4 percent, far less than the national average.” Proof that if you have a degree in computer science, lose your job, and are about to lose your house, you get a job doing anything. The same numbers are quoted for all college graduates and yet it has been reported that 38% of college graduates have jobs that do not require a degree, like stocking shelves at Wall Mart, BUT they are “employed.” 50% if IT grads do not get IT jobs, much of the cost of their education is wasted, “taxed” by underemployment.

“Supporters of the program point out that new H-1B workers admitted every year represent less than 1 percent of the total American work force.” Huhh? Cops, teachers, firemen, dentists are each less than 1% of the “ total American work force.” The entire IT engineering group is less than 1% of the “total American work force.” Since 2004, immigrants have been the MAJORITY engineering workers in IT, holding more 80% of the jobs in the DC area.

“Immigrants start more companies than do average Americans” Not apples to apples. Every programmer starts a company; after Microsoft had a problem with contractors demanding (and winning) the stock benefits of employees, Microsoft and most others will not deal with individuals, only with corporations (who can not claim to be employees, but can contribute to elections.) On the other hand, skilled workers at Ford do not start a car company. Starting a company is strongly related to the work you are doing. Ford will not hire a company that has only one employee; IT does.

 

Ask yourself, “What do these companies do that is worth letting them drive wages down, bribe Congress, and send the IT industry to India and China?” (We might need a bit for our own security).

The answer is “Nothing”. Google, Facebook, and often Microsoft, are sellers of applications, not inventors of technology. In fact, you can't name a single important thing that Microsoft has invented; give it try but leave out the Internet, word processing, the graphic user interface, spread sheets, the browser, relational databases, web pages, HTML, and everything else: they did not invent it. They sell applications. Facebook is to technology what a hula hoop is to plastic. If you don't know what a hula hoop is, that is my point, exactly (in programming we say, “What Algol68 was to Algol.” Exactly.) In fact most of those innovations were paid for by the U.S. or E.U. Governments (Internet, browser, WWW web pages) and spread sheets were invented at a university and given away free. Al Gore did sponsor legislation to create the Internet (but never said he “invented” it) and we, the taxpayers, paid for it, but why do we want to pay for Facebook?

Who is going to pay now?

Immigration reform is feeding frenzy for lobbyists. A new report by the Heritage Foundation estimates the cost at $3 trillion over 50 years. That figure can never be confirmed but the fact that Congress is not willing to discuss the costs at all has to be worrying (we rushed into Iraq and that also seems to be costing $3 trillion. Let's do better this time.)

We also understand that Wall Street expects to get anything from the reform, and not the bill. Someone other than Wall Street and corporate profits will be hit to cover the costs, and is , or should be, our right to hear a frank discussion of costs. If you want one, you need to call your representative and insist on it. Somebody has done the math, someone will pay for it. As Warren Buffet has said, “If you don't know who the fool in the room is, it is you.” We can't keep on being Congress's fool, we can no longer afford it.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz has said that nothing comes out of Congress unless it has a present for Wall Street, and considering how our campaign financing works that is what we expect.

Economist Paul Krugman has said we can not afford open boarders and the public services we call a “safety net”. If a liberal thinks that, shouldn't we be asking questions? Krugman has also said that out-of-work college graduates today are likely to never catch up (entering the workforce two years later is not something you catch up from).

Walmart is hiring, or at least asking DOL permission to hire, a number of H-1Bs under the job title Programmer Analyst. In fact, the firm has asked for more of them each year, 130 in the last year shown, 2011. Walmart is using as its prevailing wage rate figures in the $50K and even $40K range. http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/WalmartsVsWipros.txt Walmart is looking for ordinary people to do ordinary work, for low wages and a valuable green card provides access to public benefits. Why would you want to help Wall Mart out? Why can't they hire 130 U.S. graduates?

 

The current H-1B visa system has already forced 500,000 U.S. Citizens out of the industry, leaving a majority of foreign workers (20% of whom will return to their homeland with that they have learned here). Do we want to have a policy that incentivizes our own best and brightest to avoid STEM careers? Will we be secure?

Every bill has winners and someone who pays. Often you can identify the winners and losers by where they are in a distribution of income. In the last 40 years, the bottom 40% have taken a real beating, the average family net worth for those two quintiles is less than $1,000. You can't get blood out of a stone, so the beatings seem to be moving up to take what the middle class has left. Do you really deserve an immigration plan that helps a guy, Mark Zuckerberg who already has $13 billion and agrees with Alan Grfeenspan that your wage is too high? Where is benefit for you? Your children?

Providing Wall Mart and Facebook with low cost labor that adds to public expenses, while our own children can not find work , is a bad Idea. We won't benefit from Facebook or Wall Mart software, so why are we paying for it?

Don't spend your children's future by helping Wall Mart and Facebook drive down U.S. wages. For one thing, Facebook is losing market share, they are just entertainment, not cancer research, and they may have already peaked. This is not the time invest in buying them software. Let them invent an act two, and if they can, let them keep the profits, and Wall Mart is the largest corporation in the USA today, let them start paying U.S. living wages.

Senator Mark Warner at 202-224-2023 - Senator Tim Kaine at (202) 224-4024

Update, thanks to comment by Ran Kaille, an excellant resource on this issue:

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_04_05/caredit.a1300063

"Wouldn't you think that before taking a step with potentially momentous long-term consequences for important national institutions, leaders would try to discern the likely effects? If the subject is high-skilled immigration, that supposition would be wrong. With President Barack Obama pushing for action on immigration reform "as soon as possible," we may be only weeks away from congressional consideration of the widely touted proposal to "staple a green card" to every STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) graduate degree issued in the United States.

"Politicians promote this provision as a solution to a mythical technical talent shortage and a boost to innovation and economic growth. (As The Washington Post points out, they may also have in mind the massive political contributions and lobbying efforts by large employers of STEM workers.) Actual experts on the science labor force, however, see quite different possibilities: a financial bonanza for universities, economic benefits for employers, and even harder times ahead for STEM workers, who are already struggling.
"The incentives are all aligned to create massive downward pressures on the labor market" should "stapling" become a reality, says Hal Salzman of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "It will lower costs in the labor market and effectively disincentivize people to go into [STEM] fields. It diminishes the quality of the jobs. The good Americans [will] go elsewhere."

"Salzman notes, however, that he can only estimate the likely scope of the fallout because, as he and co-authors Daniel Kuehn, a Ph.D. student at American University , and B. Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration, both in Washington, D.C., write in a forthcoming research study made available to Science Careers: "[T]here has been no comprehensive assessment of the potential impact this provision would have on colleges, students, or the workforce." Nonetheless, Saltzman believes, by extrapolating from the study's findings and considering what we know about postdoctoral appointments and certain visa programs, we can paint a probable picture of things to come.
....

A market transformed

Entitled Guestworkers in the U.S. Labor Market: Analysis of Supply and Employment Trends of the IT Workforce and scheduled for publication by the Economic Policy Institute later this month, the study examines the "best available evidence" about the effects of high-skilled foreign workers on a particular segment of the STEM labor market. It finds that "the STEM and IT labor markets appear to be responsive to standard economic signals of wage levels and unemployment rates." During the 1990s tech boom, for example, "the IT industry was able to attract increasing numbers of domestic graduates during periods of rising wages and employment, leading to a peak in wages and numbers of computer science graduates in the early 2000s."
Since then, however, a large and continuing flow of foreign IT workers on temporary visas has caused drastic change. "The IT industry [now] appears to be functioning with two distinct market patterns: a domestic supply (of workers and students) that responds to wage signals (and other aspects of working conditions such as future career prospects) and a guestworker supply that appears to be available independent of standard wage and employment signals, plentiful even when wages decline or are stagnant. … [T]he flow of guestworkers from low-wage countries appear[s] to provide firms access to labor … in plentiful supply at wages … too low to induce increased supply from the domestic workforce."  
After rising rapidly during the dot-com boom, "wages in IT have been flat for about 12 years," Salzman says. "Wages today are what they were in 1998–99." As a result, science "[i]s not thought of as a good career."
The effects on domestic workers have been unfavorable, the study finds. A year after receiving their degrees, for example, a third of domestic computer science graduates and almost half of domestic engineering graduates do work unrelated to their major fields. Half of these computer science graduates say they found a better job doing something else; a third say they could find no IT job. Guestworkers, meanwhile, constitute "between a third to a half of the number of all new IT job-holders," the study states.
It is apparent that depressed wages and career opportunities have discouraged Americans from pursuing IT and other STEM careers, but the inestimable benefit of entry into the United States makes guestworker jobs attractive to many hundreds of thousands of foreigners.
The chance to gain permanent residence simply by earning a degree would be a far more powerful draw, Salzman predicts.
.....

(follow link to see the whole article)