34 Comments
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Tracey's avatar

Broken indeed. 22 years ago I had to train my replacement from India. My colleagues and I had been laid off in favor of foreign workers whose H-1B visas were held by a large contracting company, enabling my company to skirt the law regarding the company being unable to find local talent. Today, they don't even try to find local talent, just claim there is non available. The company I landed at after the layoff 22 years ago has also been replacing local with foreign talent due to the cost savings. It's disgusting.

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Mary Williams's avatar

The same scenario is playing out for my 30-year-old and 28-year-old sons who currently work for Big tech corporations. They train in inept underpaid H-1B visa people and then my guys end up doing the job of the H-1B Visa holders because they cannot. They H-1B visa workers get to stay here and my guys will not be able to advance according to their skills.

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Tracey's avatar

Yes, that happens too. When we complained that all the newer, more interesting tech work was going to the contractors, we were told we didn't have the skills and management "wanted us to be successful" so we were stuck doing grunt work. The contractors had less experience than we did. Such a slap in the face. Good luck to your sons.

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Ferg ferguson's avatar

War room…for this information

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alexei's avatar

Seems like an open door for potential Chinese spies.

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AgainsttheLies's avatar

It is. Every single Confucius Institute at American universities is a Trojan horse. America first, America only.

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Publius Brutus's avatar

So True, So True. And Musk and Vivak don't know this?

There are smaller scale examples of this fraud playing out all over the country.

Big mistake poking this issue after the millions of American tech workers laid off after 911 and the wave of layoffs that followed every financial crisis, most self inflicted, since.

Thanks and Happy New Year.

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Harry's avatar

How many H1Bs at Tesla, SpaceX, or Starlink? How many of those H1Bs are Chinese?

Where does Tesla sell half of its cars?

Musk is a security threat to the United States.

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CharlieSeattle's avatar

There are more H-1B at 7/11 and many other chain stores paying half the prevailing US wage.

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Mary Williams's avatar

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1873174358535110953

I'm not sure that's true. This has some good data points from the last 5 years.

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CharlieSeattle's avatar

Sent to Newsmax.

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CharlieSeattle's avatar

The CCP, Wall Street, The US ☭hamber Of ☭ommerce and ☭orporate Ameri☭a bribed ☭ongress to write the laws that made it legal to screw over America and allow the greatest transfer of jobs, wealth and intellectual property in modern history to an avowed enemy, Communist China, making them the threat they are today.

☭orporate Greed trumps national security concerns every time!

☭ongress and ☭orporate America are the real enemy!

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Michelle Dostie's avatar

I once applied for an Immigration Law firm position, since I had some immigration and legal experience. After the second interview I was asked if I had any questions. I certainly did, since this was 2008, in the middle of the Great Recession. I explained frankly that with many Americans unemployed it was odd the employers were paying fees for applicants. The manager tried to explain that not every sector of the economy was having difficulty finding applicants. She didn’t fool me and she knew it. No third interview for me.

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Pawsative's avatar

It’s probably a lot worse and those numbers likely much higher. What the staffing companies do with J1 visas - which are for college students to come over to be lifeguards, etc, for the Summer, is to cancel their visas after they are here so they can reissue / resell the visa to another foreign college student.

It would be interesting to see who owns and runs these visa mill companies and how many are related to politicians.

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Rosalee's avatar

a local Costco looks like a gathering of the UN

(a horde of H-1B are working in the area for businesses e.g. INTEL, a massive complex)

Now I hear 'we need to make it possible for them to integrate fully and become citizens'

The idea that NO AMERICAN is talented enough is at best insulting

Bad enough that we outsourced almost all manufacturing to China and other areas of Asia

now we bring them into the US.

One of the greatest populations are from India

It does NOT need H-1B, because their economy is booming

One more thing that burns me up

US is allowing 'post grads' to 'study' at Ivy league. . .when in fact they are Chinese military

Their purpose?

STEALING whatever American technology they can get their thieving hands on

Trump in all of this?

I hear he is fully engaged in more and more and more and more H-1B

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Pawsative's avatar

No one from China should be allowed to attend school in the U.S. kick all of the communist Chinese visa holders out of the country. All of them!

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Rosalee's avatar

the thieving is endless and we have also allowed them to set up shop in major cities

to spy on Chinese who managed to escape from mainland China. .

One more blackeye for Congressionals who supposedly represent American citizens

They have all broken their oaths by allowing ILLEGALS to violate

our national sovereignty by INVASION for FOUR long years

In violation of

Article IV, Section IV of US Constitution

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Corwin Slack's avatar

What we need is green cards with no chain migration.

Also, keep in mind that a knowledge worker does not need to be onshore to do knowledge work.

H1B has many problems but burning women on the subway is not one of them.

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CharlieSeattle's avatar

No H-1B .........period!

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Irv77's avatar

It’s the attitude of abortion towards babies now extended to American adults: you have no intrinsic value, you can be wholly disposed if that’s economically easier, your life is not my concern.

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Terry M.'s avatar

Thanks for the overview. I wonder what the purpose of the program is. Your analysis assumes that it is to achieve some kind of proportionate, fair representation of a number of countries globally, then an internal spread of the social strata of specific countries like India. I doubt very much that that is its purpose. It is designed and paid for by the US Federal government, I believe. Its purpose is the bring the best mathematical and IT talent to the USA. Other secondary justifications may have evolved over time but it is essentially there to support US competitiveness. Given the continuing global status of Silicon Valley, Nvidia, X, Facebook etc. it seems to be doing a good job. If I were you I would present a more granular look at it by comparing talent measures of American and Indian universities for example to see whether the program is in fact needed. The riots over the last year when Harvard’s best students were neglecting their studies either because they preferred to be political activists or could not access the labs because of the disturbances cannot be written off as momentary lapses. The USA is in a state of post-excellence vacillation. That is more important than specious cross-national comparisons based on a desire for global equity. That can never exist. India is a friend of Russia, now, 2024.

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Danimal28's avatar

Great work, Jordan. If I may add to this:

https://x.com/johnkonrad/status/1872817287855567358

DEI is at work everywhere but the free market…

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Leslie Benjamini #🟦's avatar

You should write an open letter to Elon Musk & PDJT bc SUBSTACK shares to Twitter/X get shadow banned because EM thinks they are competing with SUBSTACK notes.

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Mlon Eusk's avatar

I work with several H1B visa holding engineers. They’re smart hard working people. You mentioned that Indian middleman companies submit multiple entries under one applicant’s name to trick the lottery system as proof of “massive fraud”. That is just bullshit. Evidence of alleged fraud involving a minute minority from the pool of Indian applicants is NOT evidence of massive fraud.

I welcome reform that aims to ensure that ANY fraud is minimized and that the best and the brightest get the opportunity they deserve. But your article does not provide enough evidence to support broadly smearing the H1B system as fraudulent and corrupt.

Many of the comments here just reek of supremacy and racism.

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Jake's avatar

Two things can be true at the same time.

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CharlieSeattle's avatar

F#@k your censorship.

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