The diary of Anne Frank is falling behind

[Pat Hartman]

The H1b visa system is rigged. Having been in hiring positions for both consulting firms who were renting out H1b people and corporations that rent them, I can tell you what you get.

In the early days, the candidates came mostly from the UK and Eastern Europe. That has now switched to India, Pakistan, and China.

The idea of the program and how it is always sold to Congress and the public is to import "high" level workers because American universities are not graduating them at a fast enough rate. The program specifically forbids replacing American workers with H1b visa holders and also specifies that visa holders MUST be paid the going rate for an American worker. So much for that.

The reality: At least as far as the Indians go, they lie about their credentials so you are not getting the cream of the crop, you are getting ordinary, entry-level workers. The consulting firms that sponsor the H1b visa skirt the wages rate by toying with the job specs and thereby eliminating the US job pool of applicants. The companies who hire the consulting firms are "clean" because they do not employ the visa holder. They employ the consulting firm who provides the worker and is solely responsible for their wages and benefits. There is NO financial contact between the hiring company and the individual worker.

All over the country we have big name companies like Disney, United Technologies, United Illuminating, etc who lay off their entire IT department and replace their citizen workers with busloads of H1b visa holders. It is perfectly legal. It may violate the spirit of the H1b Visa law but not the substance. And that is of course by design. Big business wants cheap workers. They don't care what their policies do to the local IT ecosystem and Congress delivers

 

[Isaac]

I know my brother in law (Mexican national) has a degree in Accounting plus experience.

He is a regular, stand-up guy with past experience and references.

Many firms cannot find employees, so they are farming out some of their more basic accounting to the Internet, to get around not finding people in the USA.

Why not give my brother in law a Visa? He wants to come here and Work, pay Taxes, buy a Home, raise a Family.

I have read extensively about the current nature of society, ethnicities, racism/casteism/whatever you want to call it, religious tensions, etc., in India.

I am a bit worried about that exploding here. You get one in a position of I.T. leadership, guess who they approve for more? The same of course.

Not surprising, but it's a trend that I think has gotten so singularly focused it might not be for the best.

Plus, we share a border with Mexico. It is in our BEST INTEREST to treat them as well as is fair to do. (Don't you try to maintain a soft spot in your heart for your next-door neighbors? I know I do, it just seems right. I try to accomodate/watch out for them a bit more than the average neighborhood resident)

Easily granting Visas to their skilled workforce when they live right next to us and we don't have enough workers here any more seems like a no-brainer!!

 

[Pat Hartman]

Has your brother-in-law looked into trying to get an H1b visa? If he is willing to work for a cut rate, he might get in assuming his English is good enough. Although even that doesn't seem to be relevant. On one assignment I acquired an Indian who didn't speak English. I'm sure he was a nice person and he may have actually been competent but I'll never know. He was USELESS to me since I couldn't communicate with him. I had to use one of the other Indians to give him direction and guess how that worked out? Both of them were now wastes of time. I never got a straight answer as to why I couldn't give him to someone else if they didn't want to send him back. As I think back on it, maybe his "significant other" made a deal with the consulting company to take both of them for a cut rate and place them together so the partner could take care of him

Many firms cannot find employees, so they are farming out some of their more basic accounting to the Internet, to get around not finding people in the USA.

For jobs like this, they can't find people for the "low wage they are willing to pay".

I don't set immigration policy. The people who set it, do it based on what K Street and their donors want. They don't look at the big picture and set policy based on who would be the best contributors REGARDLESS of where they come from. In the 19th and the early part of the 20th centuries, we took pretty much anyone who wasn't sick except for the Chinese. There was some ban on them for some reason that is not at all clear. Then in the 60's we started going woke and we were all about chain migration. So, if one member of a family got in, they could bring in a hundred other "family members" regardless of skills or even their ability to support themselves.

I would set my priorities this way:
1. You can't hate us (like Ilhan Omar does) . You'd think that someone like her that was rescued from a refugee camp in a war zone would be at least a little grateful. But no. She hates us.
2. You have to want to be an American and all that goes along with that. That means you don't get to set up your own courts like the Chinese and Muslims do and bring the old country to our country. You left the old country for a reason. Teach your children the language, celebrate your special holidays, cook your native food but assimilate. Immigrants don't assimilate any more so we are becoming Balkanized. "Out of many, One" has turned into how dfferent can you be? How many boxes can your check? People need to come together, language is a start.
3. You have to speak English if you are the family member who will be employed.
4. You have to have a skill that will support you (and your spouse and children if it is a package deal). Just try immigrating to another country, say Australia, if you can't support yourself. Try immigrating to China
5. Citizenship should not be an option if you or any of your dependents have been on the dole in the past 5 years. Plus you MUST be fluent in English, not just have the ability to pass a simple test.

Then, we need to have special allotments for refugees. But, refugees are expensive and harder to assimilate because they may not actually have wanted to immigrate. They may never get over their desire to go "home".

And special temporary allotments for necessary workers who are in short supply.

We also need much better seasonal worker programs. We have a lot of farm workers and hotel workers who come for seasonal work. It is hard for a citizen or permanent resident to live on seasonal work but many people from poorer countries can earn significant (from their point of view) incomes by coming just for 4 - 6 months each year and then going home again.

I think we are taking way too many foreign students (especially from China). These students are frequently funded by their governments and are willing to pay pretty much whatever is necessary to attend a decent school. This has done a lot to raise tuition rates to their ridiculous current levels. When American students can't afford tuition, foreign students take their places.

 

[Isaac]

To paraphrase, people with guns kill people, not always, but often enough. I don't think Texas is that liberal.

 

[Pat Hartman]

To paraphrase, people with guns kill people, not always, but often enough. I don't think Texas is that liberal.

Sane people are not mass murders. Sane people kill for emotional reasons or for vengeance and frequently with no prior planning. They use various weapons, knives, drugs, guns, etc. Frequently, it is whatever is at hand like something heavy or sharp or even a car. I always loved the scene in "Fried Green Tomatoes" where the older women freaks out and bashes her car repeatedly into the car the young chippies just exited while shouting out that they may be young and fast (they snuck in front of her to take the parking place she had been waiting patiently for.), but she was older and had better insurance. Was the woman crazy as she was destroying their car?

If you were to examine the mental health of mass murders (almost always men BTW), you would find them to have some mental health problem. Many of them gave warning signs of impending action. Therefore many mass murder events could have been prevented but we are too politically correct to handle the problem. Even when dangerous behavior is reported to the police and FBI and coorabated, they don't/can't do anything because they would be accused of violating the "rights" of the dangerous person. I guess it is better to just let the crazy person go out and kill.

In the US, we've always had guns and in the past, we had more guns. Did we have mass murders in the past? I don't know but I'm pretty sure they are a product of the 20th century.

We emptied our mental hospitals in the 80's and let all those people out to become homeless because it just wasn't "fair" to keep them in mental hospitals. Of course, without supervision, they didn't take their meds and their conditions worsened to the point where many became dangerous. This precipitated the homelessness crisis we face today.

And now all of our children seem to have some "condition" that requires drugs. How many of the younger mass-murderers were on prescription drugs for hyperactivity, depression, autism, etc? How many had been victims of bullies that the schools never reprimanded or stopped from injuring other children because the parents would have sued the school if it had taken action. How many had been victims of abuse or neglect at home? Can we at least talk about this instead of running off and passing new gun laws that won't do anything to solve the problem?

 

[Steve R.]

In the US, we've always had guns and in the past, we had more guns. Did we have mass murders in the past? I don't know but I'm pretty sure they are a product of the 20th century.

Additional thoughts.

• News is now instantaneous, 24/7, and has become headline click-bait. In the past, many sensational stories may have dissipated before traveling too far. So a person in Los Angeles many never heard of an incident in New York.
• We have many more people now than in the past. More people means more societal problems. It also does not help that many societal (mental?) problems are treated through (ineffective?) drugs as @Pat Hartman and others have pointed out.

 

[Pat Hartman]

Lots of mass-murderers are looking for that 15 minutes of fame. I would be OK with the media NEVER, EVER mentioning the perpetrator. Who cares? It won't bring the victims back. Why give them the recognition they want? If it keeps ONE crazy from setting out to become famous, it worked. You can bury the name and other information in print stories to satisfy the people who have to know who did it but keep it off TV and radio.

 

[Isaac]

Sane people are not mass murders. Sane people kill for emotional reasons or for vengeance and frequently with no prior planning. They use various weapons, knives, drugs, guns, etc. Frequently, it is whatever is at hand like something heavy or sharp or even a car. I always loved the scene in "Fried Green Tomatoes" where the older women freaks out and bashes her car repeatedly into the car the young chippies just exited while shouting out that they may be young and fast (they snuck in front of her to take the parking place she had been waiting patiently for.), but she was older and had better insurance. Was the woman crazy as she was destroying their car?

If you were to examine the mental health of mass murders (almost always men BTW), you would find them to have some mental health problem. Many of them gave warning signs of impending action. Therefore many mass murder events could have been prevented but we are too politically correct to handle the problem. Even when dangerous behavior is reported to the police and FBI and coorabated, they don't/can't do anything because they would be accused of violating the "rights" of the dangerous person. I guess it is better to just let the crazy person go out and kill.

In the US, we've always had guns and in the past, we had more guns. Did we have mass murders in the past? I don't know but I'm pretty sure they are a product of the 20th century.

We emptied our mental hospitals in the 80's and let all those people out to become homeless because it just wasn't "fair" to keep them in mental hospitals. Of course, without supervision, they didn't take their meds and their conditions worsened to the point where many became dangerous. This precipitated the homelessness crisis we face today.

And now all of our children seem to have some "condition" that requires drugs. How many of the younger mass-murderers were on prescription drugs for hyperactivity, depression, autism, etc? How many had been victims of bullies that the schools never reprimanded or stopped from injuring other children because the parents would have sued the school if it had taken action. How many had been victims of abuse or neglect at home? Can we at least talk about this instead of running off and passing new gun laws that won't do anything to solve the problem?

It would be interesting if we could take every child (or adult), pre-Adderall, and somehow magically quantify their overall disruption to life - theirs and others. Then take their life post-Adderall, (while on), and magically quantify the overall disruption to their life and others'.

I will say, I've taken it, and Elon Musk is right - you do have to be careful about it causing you to obsess inexorably about an issue, as well as somewhat increasing the piquancy of any otherwise-organic state of anger.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if God is up there shaking his head at the meds we use that actually cause more harm than good.

But he doesn't have to study that - he can just watch schools trying to persuade 11 year old girls that they may wish to morph into boys - doing that at the exact stage in life where we all know every human becomes a bit confused and uncomfortable with their body/sexuality....is really a form of psychological torture and molestation. No wonder people are angry.