I'm just amazed they have the gall to apply for a patent for such an obvious kind of thing.
...

Where's the innovation in this scheme? What new approach are they using to try to justify having a patent on it? It's like the idiot-phone trying to get patents for installing a digital camera into the phone. What is not obvious to anyone about how to do these things?

"It's not just software development, but any job. If the employees are happy about how they're being treated, they'll do the best job they can, because they want to stay with the company."
...

It also means they've got "buy-in". They approve of what you're having them do. The goals/aims are ones they want to work toward; they're worthwhile. They might see themselves as having a chance to have a proportional share in the firm's success.

But if the firm is doing bad things; if set A are getting the big bonuses or otherwise getting ahead, while set B of workers are knocking themselves out for nothing... they're not likely to be happy.

At the same time, if
1. someone does something or sees someone do something of no note but garners extravagant praise and other rewards; and/or
2. if he does something great or sees someone else do something great and the person/people who did it gets no praise or no rewards; and/or
3. if he sees people getting hollow praise but no other rewards for doing worthwhile things,
it kills his enthusiasm and his happiness, and undermines his ability to improve himself in his job, and most likely in his career for the long-run.

The trouble with "prevailing wage" is that it is a legal term of art. If you look up "prevailing" and "wage" in even a good dictionary, it would give you little insight into the meaning of the legal term "prevailing wage". It does not mean, as many would think, "the wage that would have prevailed for the job and the abilities of the individual worker if there had never been any H-1B visa-grantees in the area doing this kind of job". It does not mean "local market wage for the particular job".
...

In practice, it has always meant a little less than local market compensation for the average worker doing this particular kind of work (and, yes, job titles and such can be and have often been gamed*). Sometimes and in some places in the USA, it has meant 2% below local market compensation; other times and in other places in the USA, it has meant 35% below local market compensation. (And we must remember that L visas have no local market compensation or "prevailing wage" requirement; they can be paid at the levels of their country of origin.)

But, the H-1B grantees, if we are to believe the lobbyists, are each and all "best and brightest". And someone who is "best" or "brightest" should be earning a significant premium over the average. Since the very best software developers have been found to produce as much as 10 or 12 times as much value as the mediocre, then the premium commanded by one of the "best" or "brightest" should be as high as 10 times the compensation of the average.

But what has been found? Those H-1B grantees who were also sponsored for green cards (i.e. most likely the better ones), were earning 0.001% above the median. Not 10 times the median, not 5 times the median, not 130% of the median.

So, absent other more or less objective measures of the skill levels of the individual H-1B grantees (IQ, SAT, ACT, LSAT, MCAT..., increased value of stock granted as part of the pay package), perhaps a 150% of median or average would be reasonable. But, once again, what do we see in practice? If pay is a few thousand dollars BELOW the average for new (most likely lower-skilled wet-behind-the-ears, inexperienced) college grads, i.e. if pay is merely $60K, many standards for H-1B grantees and their employers are waived under current law.

( * For instance, the rules allow, or at least allowed, e.g. a cross-border bodyshopper to pay all H-1B grantees the same, below-market compensation, so long as they were all paid the same and no US citizens were employed at that location at a higher compensation. And this was even the case when an employer dumped all of his US citizen employees doing the same work at a higher compensation level in favor of contracting with the bodyshopper. The new, below market compensation, because it is the same for all of the bodyshop's employees doing that kind of work in that place, is the "prevailing wage".

Domestic bodyshoppers have also pulled the equivalent of this scam; negotiate a deal; employer dumps all his people in a particular kind or kinds of work; replace them with cheaper bodies shopped who are paid significantly less by the bodyshopper (in hourly wage, benefits, training, etc.), and charges original employer slightly less than prior total costs of employing people; the difference going into the pockets of the execs of both firms. Voila, the new "prevailing wage" is less than the local market compensation used to be. Some people with few alternatives will absorb the cuts in a lowered quality of living and hire on at the bodyshop; others will be unemployed or under-employed for extended periods, will seek greener pastures elsewhere...)

"if you're primarily an embedded or industial automation developer, you're going to have an easier time finding work in an area that already does a lot of similar work"
...

Certainly... as long as by "in an area" you mean within a radius of 2K miles or so. "Industrial automation" covers a lot of ground, from citrus juice processors near Orlando, to heavy-metal manufacturing in TN, KY, OH, IN, IL, to metal refining and such in PA, OH, MT.. to consumer products manufacturing in OH, NJ, KY, TN, KS, GA, PA...

But with the surplus of STEM workers we've had over the last 30 years or so, old clusters like Route 128 in MA and the Chippewa Falls, St. Paul, Minneapolis super-computing hot-bed, or even the mini-clusters around Detroit, MI and Dayton, OH and Cleveland, OH and Rochester, NY and Kansas City, KS and Oklahoma City and Ponca City, OK and Ft. Huachuca, AZ... have dumped tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of STEM pros into unemployment and under-employment.

I met people in San Diego who said they did embedded programming, and H-1B guest-workers there who said they were data-base experts who were either so shy of industrial espionage or incompetent to talk shop. There was supposedly a biotech cluster there, but you'd never know it from recruiting efforts. Ditto with the NJ pharmaceutical cluster. US citizens need not apply.

I'm positive H-1B is a scam. I'm optimistic that reform (i.e. reduction, moratorium; institution of reasonable standards) can be achieved.

"The real fiction is when companies lie and say that they can not find local qualified workers in order to justify hiring H-1B workers."
...

There are several fictions rolled into such claims.

How local is "local"? "Oooh, we couldn't find someone who was already living within 4 blocks, so obviously we had to take someone from 5K-6K miles away, instead. Surely, you didn't expect us to advertise the job across the 3 neighboring states, let alone across the country, did you."

"Qualified", as in "an important qualification for this job is to be a pliant indentured guest-worker much less likely to jump ship to another employer or blow the whistle on unethical activities than a free US citizen willing to stand up for himself". "Qualified" as in, "We must have a purple squirrel (software designer + algorithms specialist + software developer + data-base analyst and architect + graphic artist + accessibility specialist + internationalization expert + PR/marketing/sales specialist + mathematician or physicist or chemist or pharmacist or economist or historian or mechanical engineer or psychologist or 12th century literature expert or utilities app area expert or...) for this job! A team of 6 or 12 collaborating specialists just won't do."

"Surely you didn't expect us to offer average or below-average market pay and benefits for someone with well-above average intelligence, creativity and industry, with the expectation that he work hellacious hours did you?"

So, the Tata VP, Vandrevala was lying when he said H-1Bs were 25%-35% cheaper than US citizens? The LCAs which repeatedly showed the H-1Bs were 10%-25% below local market compensation (most clustered around 12% below local market; and this for people we were supposed to believe were "best and brightest", the kinds of people who should be commanding compensation up to 10 times local median compensation for the job) are a figment of all our imaginations? Former cross-border bodyshopper Vivek Wadhwa was lying when he admitted that the core thumb-on-the-balance was that H-1Bs were cheaper? Yah, sure.
...

"the company made a good-faith effort to fill the positions with Americans, but wasn't able to find people with the needed skills."

I must congratulate you on not using/abusing the transparent weasel-word "qualified".

Tell us about this "good-faith effort":

Did they put the hiring manager's e-mail address and desk-phone number in the half-page or quarter-page display ads in newspapers across the country and in trade publications, the way employers did before H-1B?

Did they include them in their postings on a dozen or more job boards? (A lot of firms place job ads on sites, either without an e-mail address and phone number belonging to a manager, or at a site which blocks such contact information from job-seekers.)

Did they offer to fly candidates in from Maine, Florida, Hawaii, Alaska, Kansas... for interviews, and were the executives and mangers ready and willing to cover the hotel, rental car, and meal costs the way employers used to do before H-1B?

Did they offer relocation assistance the way employers did before H-1B? Did they offer to buy the new-hires' homes and re-sell them at the company's risk the way better employers did before H-1B (some firms offered this service on a contract basis to other firms)? Did they offer coaching or assistance in dealing with movers?

Did they offer 2-16 weeks of new-hire training (and 2-4 weeks per year of retained employee training) the way employers did before H-1B?

If applicable, did they offer to sponsor the new employee for necessary security clearances?

Were able and willing candidates' info buried in their "applicant management system's" black-hole data-base, never to be seen by human eyes again?

Were they actually offering market compensation (not just a bodyshopper's hourly rate, but total package of salary, insurance, paid holidays off, paid vacation off, sabbatical, company gym, company cafeteria, training, tuition and fee and text reimbursement, company thrift plan, credit union membership, on-site or near-site day-care, stock-share grant, stock options, IRA, Keogh, intrapreneurship grants, flexible hours... whatever)?

Were the "needed skills" actually *needed*, or were there a lot of "nice to haves" listed as "required"? Did they describe an actual human being, or were they seeking a purple squirrel kind of candidate to do -- for one below-market wage -- the jobs appropriate to a team of 5 or more specialists? Or was it merely a very peculiar niche?

"If we wan't to go back to a 1968-style economy and income distribution we're going to have to repeal the 1965 Immigration Act, and that's all there is to it."
...

Yes, but I can only think of 1 or 2 politicians (maybe Jeff Sessions) who favor immigration reform. Most prefer to keep on making the visa and immigration laws worse and worse -- doubling down again and again on the bad they and their predecessors have done over the last century.

As to founding new businesses, I can't see that happening until a lot of the licensing, taxing, etc., are eliminated... but, instead, state legislatures have tended to require more and more. (Here, the government agency in charge of business and professional licensing has been spending some of their money on ads, telling people to only do business with licensed individuals.)

But then some of that is perception. Perhaps, out of ignorance or whatever, the immigrant is more likely to go ahead to start a "black-market" business and be able to make a go of it for a while before the governments hunt them down and demand protection payments (and then ask for and get "forgiveness"). Those stronger (i.e. not yet eroded by Great Society and other government programs) family ties and investment round-tables (by whatever name) can also boost likelihood of business founding as compared to an nth generation US citizen with little personal savings who feels overwhelmed by the crushing government burdens (town/city, county, state, federal).

Some immigrants, particularly illegal aliens, are performing jobs that others refuse to do, for ethical reasons, or when employers are offering below-market compensation and working conditions, which is to say they are used to undermine standards and living conditions.
...

According to BLS reports, we have many US citizen roofers who are unemployed, carpenters who are unemployed, steel-workers who are unemployed... We have many US citizen tool & die makers, precision machinists, chemical engineers, biologists, chemists,... who are unemployed or under-employed. We have millions of US citizen software product developers, systems administrators, network administrators, operating systems developers, mechanical engineers... who are unemployed or under-employed. We have US citizen biophysicists who are under-employed. We have US citizens certified to be teachers (including STEM teachers), lawyers, paralegals, real estate brokers and sales-people who are unemployed or under-employed.

Altogether, each month over the last 5 years or so that I've been paying particular attention, we have been short about 29M to 32M jobs, according to BLS employment/population ratio data. And the USA has had a jobs dearth for the last 60 years according to economists such as Lester Thurow.

The H-1B laws, regulations and practices have never had effective minimal standards such as to select and attract the genuinely best and brightest to become US citizens. Early on, applicants were required to prove that they owned property or had other anchors to their countries of origin, to ensure that they would go back, but those were quickly eliminated when it was converted to "dual intent". The wordings of the laws and regulations, and unguarded statements from those who lobbied for the H-1B and its several expansions and loosenings make clear that the purpose is an "infinite" supply of cheap, young, pliant, low-skilled foreign labor with flexible ethics. In the process, a very few* bright people were brought in, but that is incidental (*less than 8% of H-1B recipients according to some analysts, less than 2% according to others).

E-3, F with OPT, H-1B, and L visa grantees are not only directly abused to displace perfectly capable and willing US citizens, but indirectly to displace them, to facilitate both domestic bodyshopping in addition to the more obvious cross-border bodyshopping, and to facilitate off-shoring through transfer of knowledge and intellectual property, in addition to performing middleman functions to keep off-shoring functioning.

"Also I hope you at least feel sorry for somebody who crossed the border as a child (as in, their parents took them)."
...

So, we're supposed to "feel sorry for" children whose parents took them along on bank robberies? Yah, it's terrible to have criminals for parents.

I'd probably have more sympathy if all of the "children" we were talking about were smuggled across the borders when they were less than 8 years old. By the time they've reached 17 when they invade, and are covered with gang tattoos or came through under sponsorship by CAIR or Hamas or Fatah or the caliphate or al-Qaeda or Hizbullah or Muslim Brotherhood or some similar violence-initiating organization of Irish, French, Italian, Scandihoovian, Colombian, Russian, Red Chinese, British, German... origins, the sympathy train has left the station.

The fact that the vast majority of them are NOT trying to be Americans is an important one.
...

And, yes, it is a political matter. Even legal immigrants do not have the same foundations of knowledge of the USA's history and concepts of what constitutes individual rights and liberty, and many politicians have been maneuvering for over a century to distort what is taught in government schools to distort or obliterate that history and those foundations in order to promote their anti-liberty, anti-individual rights agendas.

The business executives and academia executives want more cheap, pliant, labor with flexible ethics, while the immigration lawyers and the lobbyists for all of the aforementioned want more money under their control, while the politicians want more votes for their side, and more money and power for themselves and for their families and friends, with little regard to the USA, the US Constitution, or the individual rights on which they are based.

Only a tiny fraction of H-1B grantees are sponsored for green cards....

Only a fraction of green card holders become US citizens.

Foreign students on F visas with OPT and on J and M visas are abused to displace US citizen workers. Guest-workers on H and L visas are abused to displace US citizen workers. Green card holders are abused to displace US citizen workers.

Immigration reform is dead because politicians like Orrin Hatch, Luis Gutierrez, Nasty Pelosi, Harry Reid, Schmuckie Schumer, John McCain, and Lindsey Grahamnesty are so viciously against reform, and much prefer reprehensible immigration law perversion, instead.

STEM is kind of broad, and even includes accountants (the M part, mathematics.) It doesn't just include engineers (that's just the E part.) Aaafrgh.evilmalware!!!!!! Accountantsarenotpartofthemathematicscategory.

AnubisIV wrote:
"Also of note, looking back at the numbers again then, they seem a bit odd if we accept your number. There were roughly 13.1M listed as unemployed last year, and about 10.8M listed as unemployed this year. A reduction by 5M for the reason you cited would suggest that despite losing 5M at the end of the year, they had picked up an additional 2.7M over the course of the year. I don't know what that means or how it matters, but I thought it was interesting."

Curunir_wolf wrote:
"Those numbers are based on unemployment rolls. Congress ended the EUC (Emergency Unemployment Compensation) on December 31, so that took about 5 million people off the list."

Which numbers are based on unemployment insurance claims? Those are different (they do have an "insured unemployment rate" they publish weekly; "The advance unadjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.6% during the week ending February 15, unchanged from the prior week.". They don't break them down by occupation and industry. That's totally separate from the unemployment rate (U3, U4, U5, U6), durations of unemployment, employment/population ratios, labor force participation rates, etc.). It doesn't matter whether or not you're collecting unemployment insurance benefits. If you're unemployed and actively seeking work you're part of these figures. "The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not provide information about unemployment insurance (UI)" See the FAQ and the methods book linked at the top of the FAQ page:
http://www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm

I've been using numbers from the monthly BLS Household Survey, a statistical survey of about 60K households, and from an un-published quarterly report by detailed occupations based on the same raw data, which they send to media and on individual request to others (just click the data request link at the bottom of most BLS pages)... with lots of caveats about small sample sizes for many detailed occupations making the figures subject to high error probabilities. That caveat is the reason why I give ranges, and I'm basing those ranges on looking at the last 8-12 quarters and the annual data within that time. (BTW, I haven't yet gotten the annual report for 2013, which should have more reliable figures than the quarterlies. Sometimes they don't send that until later, with the new year's 1st quarter report.)

There are CES figures from the monthly Establishment Survey for industry groupings, like the Information Industry (2.135M employed in January), and Software Publishers within that (i.e. for REAL jobs developing software products, of which only 234,300 were reported being employed in December; they're always a month behind). But they throw together all "production workers" which lumps in a lot of other non-management people who are not actually designing and developing software.

Anyway, since the last 2 of the detailed occupation reports showed total aggregate unemployed as 9,263,000 for 2013Q4, and 10,049,000 for 2013Q3, you must be talking about other aggregates from either the Household or the Establishment surveys. So, from the Household survey:
Civilian, non-institutionalized population 16 and older (CivPop16+=CNIP16+*): LNU00000000: 246.915M.
Civilian labor force (CLF16+ =employed+UEASW): LNU01000000: 154.381M
Employed: LNU02000000: 143.526M
Not in the labor force (NILF): LNU05000000: 92.534M
Unemployed and actively seeking work (UEASW): LNU03000000: 10.855M
total not employed: 103.389M
employed/CNIP16+ men: LNU02300001: 63.5%
emp/Emp/CNIP16+ women: LNU02300002: 53.2%
emp/Emp/CNIP16+ total: LNU02300000: 58.1%
emp/Emp/CNIP16+ black: LNU02300006: 52.7%
None of these are "seasonally adjusted", and that's the way I prefer them. (* In one spread-sheet I got started using one abbreviation, and years later when I created another for a different purpose I used another abbreviation; they designate the same things.)

"U6 is specifically the one that counts underemployment!"
...

U6 only counts some kinds of under-employment. Let's see... http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/sr... "Series Id: LNU03327709
Not Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Unadj) Special Unemployment Rate U-6
Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Percent/rates: Unemployed and mrg attached and pt for econ reas as percent of labor force plus marg attached
2014 13.5"

It counts people who want to be employed full-time, but are employed part-time. It counts those "marginally attached" to the labor force. But it doesn't count mechanical engineers or software engineers or biophysicists... who want to be employed full-time, long-term as mechanical engineers or software engineers or biophysicists...
but who are employed full-time, temporarily, as ditch-diggers, as being under-employed. As far as BLS is concerned that's a fully-employed ditch-digger... for now.

"Series Id: LNU03327707
Not Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Unadj) Special Unemployment Rate U-4
Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Percent/rates: Unemployed and discouraged workers as a percent of the labor force and discouraged workers
Year Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Annual
2014 7.5
Series Id: LNU03327708
Not Seasonally Adjusted
Series title: (Unadj) Special Unemployment Rate U-5
Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed
Type of data: Percent or rate
Age: 16 years and over
Percent/rates: Unemployed and marginally attached workers as a percent of the labor force and marg attached
2014 8.6"

"I've been trying to fill a position for six months now, but no qualified person will work for what I'm permitted to offer them."
...

Don't take this personally; I'm just using what you wrote, and how you wrote it, to illustrate a couple of the other problems with the dysfunctional US STEM job markets.

Define "qualified". It's a weasel-word, intended to be as hard to nail to the wall as jello. "Yes, you scored in the top percentile on the SAT and GRE, and have years of experience. Sure, your previous employers often said they loved your work. Sure, you were granted several security clearances in the past. But you only know version 6.8.3, not the 6.8.5 we 'neeeeed'. You're not qualified. We'll have to hire this chap from the 3rd world who just finished his US-government-subsidized 6.8.5 cram-course, instead."

Make that: "The only people able to do the work and willing to work for this firm in this town, aren't willing to do so for less than what they need to pay for a car, home, utilities, taxes... here, especially if you're in Silli Valley, DC, or NYC. Hmmm, maybe we should move to a higher quality of living location."

"This is a natural outgrowth of the old HR saying about attracting "the best and the brightest" but only paying "market" salaries, i.e., 80th percentile talent for 50th percentile pay."

Or, in many cases now, 60th- or 98th-percentile help for 30th- or 40th-percentile total compensation, and then after a few months, we'll dump that batch of cheap labor and bring in more.