InTheShallowEndOfTheSelfDealingPoolVille
By now you may have heard that his most highly excellent and most exquisitely exalted US'ian government-contractor-in-chief, Mr. Elon Musk, has gone to rhetorical war against the looniest of the MAGA goonery that is calling for the mass deportation of skilled immigrants who came to the country on H-1B visas.
Ostensibly, according to Mr. Musk at least, these workers are vital to the interests of the American tech industry because:
...“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote on X on Christmas. “If you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be.”...
But is that the real reason why companies like, say, Tesla hire huge numbers of workers through the H-1B program?
Perhaps not, as noted in an NY Times OpEd piece today by Farah Stockman:
Perhaps not, as noted in an NY Times OpEd piece today by Farah Stockman:
...Most H-1B visa holders are lower-paid labor, not top talent. In May, Musk laid off more than 14,000 Tesla workers, including many H-1B visa holders. Reddit threads filled with laments by workers who had moved to the United States from India only to be let go with no warning. They were desperate to remain in the country, but because H-1B visas are owned by the employer, they had few options for doing so...
Imagine that!
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5 comments:
I really like the part where the employer owns the visa. Sounds kind of “undemocratic”.
It's little more than indentured servitude...
so they own your visa but not you, however, if you don't own the visa you are at the whims of the employer who does own the visa. Indentured servitude is a very good description of these people's situation. It really is time to ensure the visas are owned by the people and not a corporation. Perhaps some Union might want to see if they could organize matters or better yet, have a .l.aw passed to outlaw this type of activity or the U.S.A. can be added to those lists of countries like they have in the Middle East where they import workers and they have not rights and thousands died while building a soccer stadium.
Perhaps along with the rights the employers have they ought to have obligations because this reads like they get to import labour and use them much like slaves. Ah, the American corporate ethics game.
I believe the system in Canada is a little different but not entirely and that employers here, for some work visas, also “own” the visa. As in the person has a work visa but it’s for a defined company or employer and if the employee, visa holder, leaves that employer they can’t just go and get another job somewhere else.
I know not all work visas are like that but I know some are as I have known people who did not want to sign a two year agreement to stay with that company. Often it meant they had to leave by a certain date or try other options, if any, to stay on.
Elon Musk suffers from two major ailments:
1) The delusions of being very rich and beleiving himself to be infallible.
2) He is South African, which imported their racism from the USA. Like the USA, racism is inbred and by now genetic.
This puts Musk in the "evil" category and when "evil" gains power, the world shudders from the effects. 1939 is a good example of that.
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