(Last) Weekly Roundup: Obviously No Americans Want A $156,000/Year Job Edition
Well, folks, the hits from HITLER DRUMPF just keep coming. His latest attack on American democracy is a sick and racist weaponizing of the DOJ against noted social benefactor Mark Zuckberg & Co., seeking penalties and damages for the totally normal business practice of deliberately concealing the existence of over 2,600 (two thousand, six hundred) jobs on American soil from American citizens so that said jobs could be used to sponsor new green card permanent residents from India.
Facebook's completely reasonable defense was that no American citizen wanted these jobs. And why would they? The average salary for these 2,600 jobs was a pathetic $156,000 a year. So naturally Zuck had to give them to immigrants, who are always willing to get the job done.
Can you believe that DRUMPF is objecting to this?
The Washington Post provides some fair-and-balanced coverage, but even they have trouble making Trump's DOJ sound like the bad guys:
The lawsuit reflects the long-running war between the Trump administration and the tech industry over immigration. In his four years in office, Trump has instituted a range of policies that crack down on foreign travelers, immigrants and workers, often drawing sharp rebukes from Facebook and its digital peers in Silicon Valley, which have challenged the U.S. government repeatedly in court. . Facebook, in particular, long has sought to expand the ranks of high-skilled foreign laborers in the United States, including programs such as the H-1B visa, as they aim to recruit the critical talent necessary to power their highly technical operations. Trump, however, has sought to restrict such programs in recent months — announcing in October, for example, new limits on the visas that later drew broad corporate blowback. . “Facebook knowingly and intentionally deterred U.S. workers from applying to and failed to meaningfully recruit U.S. workers for its PERM-related positions, when it subjected such applicants to more burdensome recruitment procedures because it preferred to employ temporary visa holders in those positions, because of their citizenship or immigration status,” the government said. . H-1B visas are, officially, temporary benefits for highly skilled workers. That includes doctors, I.T. professionals, engineers and others, and American companies say the visas are critical to attracting the best and the brightest from abroad to job sectors that don’t have nearly enough Americans to fill openings. In practice, however, a disproportionate number of H-1B visas go to workers in the tech sector, including companies like Facebook; the visa holders are disproportionately Indian nationals. The expectations of both the employers and, especially, the visa-holding employees are that the visas are anything but temporary.
Let me break this down for you in Homer Simpson terms: Facebook went through the immense effort of sponsoring Indian workers for 2,600 jobs paying six fuckin' times the median wage in this country. To ensure these jobs went to Indian workers, and Indian workers only, the company refused to advertise them anywhere Americans could see them. The existence of the jobs was concealed from Americans. If an American accidentally found about the job and did apply, he or she was put through a more rigorous screening process to ensure the hiring did not take place. In the end, all 2,600 jobs were filled by Indians who were then able to obtain permanent residence as a consequence of having the jobs.
Make no mistake, if you replaced "Indian" with "white" and "American" with "Black" in the above paragraph, Facebook's headquarters would literally be burning to the ground as we speak. CNN would be demanding something like a bill of attainder on Facebook 24/7. If you could demonstrate that any company in this country knowingly preferred 26, let alone 2,600, white applicants over equally qualified Black applicants, it would be national news.
This? This systematic plunder of the country by Facebook, handing... let me do the math... four hundred and five million dollars per year to foreigners through deceptive and manipulative practices? This is Page 19 shit right here, folks. Nobody cares. More along. Nothing to see. Business as usual. Should the media deign to notice it, the news will always be coupled with some weasel-word paragraph about "the critical talent necessary to power their highly technical operations", as in the WaPo article above.
I worked in tech from 1996 to 2018, earning (just a few) millions of dollars in the process and seeing the business from corporate, academic, and small business angles. I've been employed by JP Morgan Chase, Nationwide Insurance, Honda, IBM, a defense contractor I'm not even supposed to put on my resume, and plenty of other places. I understand the tech game and I can prove it. Therefore, believe me when I tell you that "the critical talent necessary to power their highly technical operations" is a joke, a myth, a cynical fabrication meant to pull the wool over the eyes of the 110-IQ morons who work in media and elsewhere.
I guarantee you --- and I'd bet real money on it --- that I could walk into any California prison, pick a Crip, Blood, or MS-13 member at random, and within six months I could have them trained to be a top-rated performer at Facebook or anywhere else. I don't care if they finished high school or spent their teen years on a corner. The vast majority of jobs in modern tech can be easily performed by anyone who can cook a dinner from a recipe off the Internet. Last week, my eleven-year-old son decided on a whim to write a Javascript function for creating a random animation of raindrops on a windowpane. It took him under an hour. That was a more difficult programming task than ninety percent of what happens at Facebook. In other words, my eleven-year-old son is overqualified to be a senior tech lead at any corporation in North America, and I can prove it.
Are you of the opinion that Black Lives Matter? Well then --- let's pass a bill that mandates, say, 75% of all new tech jobs hired in this country in 2021 be filled by African-Americans. Let's give these $156,000 jobs to people in at-risk communities. "Oh, but how will they get to work? Where will they live?" The same way the green card crowd does --- you give them a single mandatory housing choice and you have a bus to carry them around. What do you think it would do for the worst parts of, say, Oakland to have 75% of 2,600 new six-figure earners with family in the neighborhood? Do you think it would help? I'll tell you what it wouldn't hurt --- the companies doing the hiring.
Okay, I pulled a little trick on you above. I made you think my prison-to-middle-class thing was hypothetical. In fact, back in 2001 I took a 25-year-old Black kid who had just come out of an Ohio jail and I trained him to work for me on tech gigs, starting off at $25/hour. Six months after we met, he was representing me solo at client sites, earning $50/hour. He is now a senior admin at Amazon, earning perhaps $250k a year running their AWS platforms in Seattle. And before you think it was some Pursuit of Happyness secret-genius deal, he'd be the first one to admit that he'd just been locked up in the first place for FALLING ASLEEP IN A STOLEN CAR. Not a genius by any means. But a good dude, and willing to work hard. So yes --- I wasn't just speaking hypothetically.
Why does Facebook hate Americans so much? It's not hate of America --- it's love of India, on the part of Indians, who now utterly monopolize the stuff-with-computers game within the company that invented it. Nobody could blame them (in some cases, I mean you, since many of my readers are Indian tech workers) for taking advantage of the situation. Twenty years ago, the completely soulless ghouls who run American tech companies started using Indian outsourcing firms to save money on entry-level tech work. They could have done what I did --- grab kids out of jail --- but it was slightly easier to grab them from India, so that's what they did. Well, after twenty years a lot of those discount hires have risen into positions of power. Naturally they want to extend a helping hand to their own countrymen. It would be insane for them to feel any other way. If I went to India to work, I'd want to bring more Americans over to work with me. To call it "racist" is to ignore, or to be ignorant of, the fact that every culture in the world operates this way except Blue Tribe America.
(I can't stress enough that I completely understand, and sympathize with, the H1-B workers who engineered this transition of American infotech to an outsourced Indian operation. Were a Swiss company to offer six times the average Swiss wage to both me and my wife, we'd pack our bags for Zurich tomorrow and never think about America again. For reference, that would be $370k/year each. We could get a decent place in Zurich for $1.5m. Hell, I'd move to Switzerland tomorrow at my current wage. There's just one problem: the Swiss take their borders, and their immigration control, seriously. )
Remember when all the manufacturing jobs went away, and the media glibly told us that "high-tech work" would make up for it? They were right --- it did make up for it. But the jobs were all given to foreign workers. Indian-Americans have the highest average wage of any American subgroup. There are 4.1 million of them here now, with an astounding average household income over $116,000. Second place, by the way, would be Taiwanese-Americans at $93k, with Japanese-Americans in a distant third at $82k. It's a disparity so shocking you expect to hear Alec Baldwin telling you about it during a sales meeting. If you eliminate mixed marriages and focus on families that are exclusively Indian, the compensation goes up to $135k.
Remember that bit about my kid writing JavaScript as a hobby? I assure you that I'm going to cure him of that habit the way I'd cure him of torturing animals or cutting letters into his skin. You'd be a fool to let your American-born child train as a comp-sci student in this country. Not when the "tech giants" will literally break federal law to keep him from even finding out about new jobs. This is even true if you're an Indian-American who came here on a green card, because the tech firms would rather bring new "talent" over than hire your kid at prevailing wages!
You get the idea. There is no such thing as a STEM talent shortage. Rather, there was a desire to save money around the turn of the century that wound up handing over an massive portion of the economy to foreign workers. Pity the fellow who got a CompSci degree in 2010. He's a Starbucks barista now. Incidentally, that's how you get violent revolution in a country. Maybe the people who created the situation see it as a feature, and not a bug.
Donald J. Hitler-Trump's mild effort to slap Facebook's hand on what is only the most blatant and demonstrable of many such repugnant actions won't go anywhere. Facebook knows a Biden administration will squash like it a bug. Already, the exceedingly modest Trump-era immigration measures --- best described as "a decrease in the rate of increase of immigration" --- are being squashed by the usual judicial suspects. The GOP Senate, in a remarkably humiliating act of genuflection before the tech companies that just took their majority away from them and called them Hitler Racist Hitlers, just passed HR 1044, which will increase the rate of increase of tech-worker immigration from India.
The spice, as they say, must flow. The insane people who actually run this country are already laying the (pseudo-)intellectual groundwork for an America with one billion Americans. Why stop there? It seems like a lack of imagination. Why not two billion? Or three? Why not just have everyone in the whole world move to the magic dirt of America? Any other solution would be profoundly racist. Maybe your opinion on this is different nevertheless... but why would anyone listen to you? Facebook knows you better than you know yourself --- and according to Facebook, you're too lazy to take a $156,000-a-year job!
* * *
For Hagerty, I wrote about a lot of lost money and a very fast Durango.