To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Fri Mar 22 10:54:02 PDT 2013 The latest report shows what utter folly the Capitol Hill search for an H-1B solution has become: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237808/Plan_to_hike_H_1B_cap_to_300_000_seen_dead_130_000_cap_still_possible The Senate is rejecting a simple, effective solution for byzantine, ineffective one. And worse, they're doing it on the basis of an obsession with a false, misguided premise. You can't read the above link (thanks again to CW for being on top of this subject) without proper background. The reference to "large H-1B users" is a euphemism for the Indian outsourcing firms. Microsoft, for instance, is a large user but would not be covered by any of these proposals. As I said in a recent post, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/Scapegoating.txt a variety of players in the H-1B debate have motivations, largely hidden, to adopt a "blame the Indians" strategy, in which one asserts that all or most of the abuse of H-1B occurs with the Indian outsourcing firms. This assertion is false, as I've shown before. While it's true that the Indian firms tend to hire lower-level workers compared to the mainstream, ALL the industry is using H-1B to get cheap labor. I've employed a car analogy: The Intels are buying Camrys at a discount, while the Infosyses are buying Corollas, but they ALL are getting substantial discounts. The discounts are on the order of 20% for what I call Type I savings (hiring H-1Bs more cheaply than Americans of the same age, education, skill sets and so on), and about 50% for Type II (hiring young H-1Bs instead of older, age 35+, Americans). This greatly reduces job opportunities for Americans, a problem that Congress ostensibly wants to fix. But their way of doing that is overly complex, and more importantly, won't work. The debate reported by the above article is absurd, involving various Rube Goldberg, indirect ways to craft legislation that MEANS "Indian bodyshops" without SAYING it. Common sense should immediately show that they won't work. These are ONE-TIME fees that pale in comparison to the savings accrued by the employer EVERY YEAR FOR 6 YEARS OR MORE. Just do the math! So it would be business as usual for the bodyshops, albeit with slightly more incidental expense. There is an alternative that is SIMPLE and would be EFFECTIVE: The definition of prevailing wage in the Grassley/Durbin bills of past Congresses. It would set the legally required wage at the 50th percentile for the given occupation and given region, WITHOUT BREAKING IT DOWN INTO EXPERIENCE LEVELS. Before I go on, let me point out that if you (Congress and the people with vested interests in bashing the Indians), want to address abuse by the Indian bodyshops, then THE DURBIN/GRASSLEY PROPOSAL WOULD NEATLY SOLVE THAT PROBLEM. This is because the "Corollas" are on the low end of the occupational wage structure. Simple, huh? And it would work! It would solve part of the "Camrys" problem, and basically all of the "Corollas." As I said, the proposals mentioned in the above article would NOT work. I suspect more and more that Congress DOESN'T WANT IT TO WORK. The self-mocking "Senator from Punjab" doesn't want it to work. (She's no longer in the Senate, but there are many others like her.) Enrique Gonzalez, Sen. Rubio's immigration-lawyer consultant, doesn't want it to work. The "Camry buyers" don't want it to work. Again, the key point is that the Grassley/Durbin proposal for prevailing wage does not break the numbers down by experience categories. The worst part of the current system is that it does do so, with 4 categories. It used to be 2 categories, but that was changed in the 2004 legislation. This change had been pushed heavily by immigration lawyers, so you can see that it was NOT made in order to protect American workers. (If I recall correctly, the IEEE-USA lauded the change, yet another illustration of how that organization has failed American workers ever since 2000.) So there you have it--Congress has the choice of a simple, effective solution and a complicated, ineffective solution. Which will they choose? Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/SimpleVsByzantine.txt