Parsing the Truths About Visas for Tech Workers

[OhioChick]

Published: April 15, 2007

THE United States has benefited immensely from its role as a magnet for the best and brightest workers from around the world, especially in innovative fields like high technology. Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, sounded precisely that theme in Senate testimony last month when asked about the visa program for skilled workers, the H-1B.

Mr. Gates said that these workers are “uniquely talented” and highly paid — “taking jobs that pay over $100,000 a year” — and that America should “welcome as many of those people as we can get.”

But that is not how the H-1B visa program as a whole is working these days, according to an analysis by Ronil Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The median salary for new H-1B holders in the information technology industry is actually about $50,000, based on the most recent data filed by companies with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. That wage level, Mr. Hira says, is the same as starting salaries for graduating computer science majors with bachelor’s degrees.

Yet salaries, according to Mr. Hira, are only part of the story. He says that while Microsoft may be paying its H-1B visa holders well and recruiting people with hard-to-find talents, other companies have a different agenda. The H-1B visa program, Mr. Hira asserts, has become a vehicle for accelerating the pace of offshore outsourcing of computing work, sending more jobs abroad. Holders of H-1B visas, he says, do the on-site work of understanding a client’s needs and specifications — and then most of the software coding is done back in India.

“Information technology offshore outsourcing has just swamped the H-1B program in recent years,” he said. The list of the top 10 companies requesting H-1B visas in fiscal 2006, the most recent government data available, was dominated by Indian-based technology outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies, Wipro Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services, and a few other companies that offer outsourced services and have sizable operations in India like Cognizant Technology Solutions, Accenture and Deloitte & Touche, according to a paper last month by Mr. Hira, which was published by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/business/yourmoney/15view.html?ref=worldbusiness

[Deja Q]

1. Gates is a greedy little boy. Microsoft's history is replete with examples.

Anything else I've got to say is stuff I've said plenty of times before. Except this:

America has unique people too; this so-called 'asperger geek' people love to call Bill Gates is in reality nothing more than a very astute marketer. Marketing requires people skills and in many cases the lack of scruples or ethics; Asperger's Syndrome is the very antithesis of social skills. Sorry to reveal the truth to everybody.

Gates hates America. His contributions to offshoring and converting his wealth from dollars to the euro speak volumes.

Whether he is assisting in shoving the middle class back to a slave class, helping to make America expendable (that'd eliminate a lot of oil usage there and then...), or just a greedy little sod using clever excuses to justify his actions, we have no idea.

[acmavm]

2. I absolutely agree with you. Gates never had an original idea in his life.

He always stole from somebody else. And he found talented people who could improve on the ideas that he appropriated.

People don't stop and think when they hear the name Bill Gates. A shitload think he's a good guy and a great humanitarian. They see the money he 'gives' to charity and don't stop and realize that he made shitloads of that money off investments in the very things that are killing the earth and the people on it. The Bill and Melinda Gates organization is not really a people friendly entity. First priority is to stuff their pockets.

And then there's the tax situation. He gives money to charity he claims it on his taxes. Then he gets a nice tidy deduction over and above all the deductions he's been provided this administration.

Here's some of the foundations investments:

Berkshire Hathaway Inc.**
Canadian government

Between $1 billion and $1.5 billion
Fannie Mae
German government

Between $100 million and $1 billion
Abbott Laboratories
Archer Daniels Midland Co.
BP (formerly British Petroleum)
Canadian National Railway
Exxon Mobil Corp.
Freddie Mac
French government
Japanese government
Merck & Co.
Schering Plough Corp.
Tyco International Ltd.
Waste Management Inc.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gatesx07jan07,0,6827615.story?coll=la-home-headlines

<snip>

The Gates Foundation has poured $218 million into polio and measles immunization and research worldwide, including in the Niger Delta. At the same time that the foundation is funding inoculations to protect health, The Times found, it has invested $423 million in Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and Total of France — the companies responsible for most of the flares blanketing the delta with pollution, beyond anything permitted in the United States or Europe.

<snip>

Investing for profit

AT the end of 2005, the Gates Foundation endowment stood at $35 billion, making it the largest in the world. Then in June 2006, Warren E. Buffett, the world's second-richest man after Bill Gates, pledged to add about $31 billion in installments from his personal fortune. Not counting tens of billions of dollars more that Gates himself has promised, the total is higher than the gross domestic products of 70% of the world's nations.

Like most philanthropies, the Gates Foundation gives away at least 5% of its worth every year, to avoid paying most taxes. In 2005, it granted nearly $1.4 billion. It awards grants mainly in support of global health initiatives, for efforts to improve public education in the United States, and for social welfare programs in the Pacific Northwest.

<snip>
In addition, The Times found the Gates Foundation endowment had major holdings in:

• Companies ranked among the worst U.S. and Canadian polluters, including ConocoPhillips, Dow Chemical Co. and Tyco International Ltd.

• Many of the world's other major polluters, including companies that own an oil refinery and one that owns a paper mill, which a study shows sicken children while the foundation tries to save their parents from AIDS.

• Pharmaceutical companies that price drugs beyond the reach of AIDS patients the foundation is trying to treat.

Using the most recent data available, a Times tally showed that hundreds of Gates Foundation investments — totaling at least $8.7 billion, or 41% of its assets, not including U.S. and foreign government securities — have been in companies that countered the foundation's charitable goals or socially concerned philosophy.

This is "the dirty secret" of many large philanthropies, said Paul Hawken, an expert on socially beneficial investing who directs the Natural Capital Institute, an investment research group. "Foundations donate to groups trying to heal the future," Hawken said in an interview, "but with their investments, they steal from the future."

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