Thursday, February 5, 2015

Kudos to 2 Republicans Who are Sane on STEM and Visa Worker Bull-Stuff

Republican Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) have been fighting the good fight of exposing the "shortage" BS surrounding STEM workers (Science, Tech., Eng. & Math) in which many companies claim there is a "shortage" in order to rent more visa workers from other countries. It's an issue I've often written about.

In short, businesses lobby for more STEM visa workers, typically under the H-1B and L-1 visa programs, because such visa workers are more abuse-able due the practical circumstances they are in, because they are typically under-payed for the type of work they do, and because having the world to choose from means companies are less likely to have to train a citizen on a specific set of tools that the company happens to be using.

The STEM lie was exposed recently as Microsoft was caught hiring visa works AND laying off large counts of citizen technology workers at the same time after a slump in sales. They didn't want to bother to re-train many of their very own employees on different technologies, despite having reasonably close experience, choosing new visa workers instead. 

For example, rather than re-training PC programmers on mobile device programming (tablets and smart-phones), they let go long-time PC programmers and rented new mobile programmers under visa programs. That's not "shortage", that's cherry-picking for free. Their excuses were laughable and disturbing at the same time, revealing an almost psychopath view of the world.

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