Trump is the Perfect Sore Loser

A corporate tax for hiring foreign workers when American workers are available.
And redirect the tax revenue funds to re-train and supplement income of displaced workers affected by H1B visas workers in work places.
Make it more attractive to hire American workers.

 

There are some technical reasons for taxing corporations at the corporate level but the number of corporate taxpayers is rather small. Most corporations and corporation like entities are pass through entities and taxed like partnerships. My own preference would be to levy the taxes on the corporation then pass a tax deduction or credit through to the shareholders and avoid double taxation that way.

I would also eliminate the deduction for all forms of interest paid. The tax preference for interest paid over dividends paid favors debt financing over equity and that contributes to financial instability. Or so it seems to me. That's not to say eliminating the tax preference would end leveraged buyouts but should we be encouraging the behavior pattern?

 

Oh, and regarding taxing long term capital gains as ordinary income? Yeah, I love the feel of that one, too, but it ends up being an inflation tax. Short term capital gains are generally taxed as ordinary income.

 

Did you know there are already laws on the books and processes in place to counter this?

This is a myth. Workers are not "displaced" by H1B workers. The H1B is issued because the employer cannot reliably locate American residents and/or citizens who would be able to do the job.

American workers are simply NOT in jeopardy from immigrant workers. No, American workers--especially unskilled ones--are most in danger from being displaced by technology.

If there is a problem--and I contend there is not--then enforcement is the issue, not more laws.

(NB: I have professional reasons to have significant first-hand insight into this issue.)

 

Question: do you consider yourself a "foreign worker"? Why or why not?

 

I meant H1B visa foreign workers.

 

Workers being displaced by H1B workers just plain doesn't even make sense from a definition point of view. No such person could exist by the very definition of what H1B even means. Such a person could not ever be identified unless within the context of some kind of investigation into illegal wrong doing. I'm not saying it could never happen from a general high level point of view but it would be impossible to identify specific individuals that fell into the category of "And redirect the tax revenue funds to re-train and supplement income of displaced workers affected by H1B visas workers in work places." And providing retraining for such individuals demonstrates further silly misunderstanding of what H1B is all about.

 

We had different experiences.

I think employers use this as an excuse to hire cheap and "slave like" workforce. I have many friends who are H1B.
The real need for H1B in my view is much lower.
I experienced when 2 floors of the company I worked for got filled with TATA consulting H1B and some other visas.
And hundreds of employees got let go.
This wasn't because of skills gap. It was business decision to outsource.

Same stories from my colleagues.

 

Well, back quite a few years ago I read a story in a degree forum - not sure if it was this one. Major American City - large co. outsourced their entire programming / analyst operation. 60-75 people, I forget exactly. They were all called to a meeting and told they were through and what their severance packages would be -- and that for a specified time before leaving, they were to help show the replacement employees exactly what was being done and how - or they could forget about their severance. As I remember, the average salary of the outgoing workers was $50-odd or 60K. They were replaced by well-skilled contract workers brought from India, earning average in higher 30Ks.

Is this the kind of thing some here are saying doesn't happen? Just asking. I have no horse in this race.

 

TATA and some other company had this agreement where they flew employees from overseas and rotated them every tree months.
This was under some other then H1B visa. Also they had non rotating H1B workers .
Hundreds of permanent employees were let go. It was very sad.
It started with one conference room were they crammed many people, and after filling the whole floor they also filled the next floor. They were overworked and sweatshop mentality environment.
No longer nice cubicles and offices , instead long tables and conference rooms filled with people.
Good chunk of employees who were let go were legal immigrants. Some were from of India origin.

 

Hmmm. "Let's replace all our foreign workers with their foreign workers." Nice... what a welcome to America.

 

There has actually been a lot of this type thing that has happened in the software engineering field. Typically the Indian employees remain in India though. So the jobs are basically shipped overseas. The advantage to that is that the pay scale is much lower in India while they all speak English and are generally well trained software engineers in India.

That is different from the H1B visa program though. We hired a few of these H1B visa folks at the SW engineering organization I worked at. The restrictions on H1B is that it is only a temporary hire and there should be something unique about the need so that the employer is not able to find the employee from within the USA citizen pool. They were always PhD graduates in my experience but that is not a requirement. I think that only a Bachelors degree is required. There is a limit of 5 years or something maximum that they can work in this country. Once that time is up they have to leave the country. (Unless they've gotten into some other situation like getting married to a USA citizen or something like that.)

 

Thanks, Bill. I guess the type of incident I reported is not the usual M.O. - at least nowadays.

 

Some get their permanent residence sponsored by the employer.

 

While I don't think this happened.
There are those who think it did.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/did-democrats-courts-rig-presidential-041135882.html

 

Um. Many of the judges and election officials are Republicans.

 

And with this latest conspiracy theory, Trumpism officially becomes a religion whose major tenent no one must ever question despite overwhelming evidence of the contrary truth. It's like Birtherism but written large.

 

and with that, I'm really outta here!

 

I looked it up and couldn't see any reference to this. If the H1B visa holder and and company want to work past the 6 year (not 5 year limit that I mentioned) the person has to go back to their country for at least one year before the H1B can be renewed. This is what it says in the source I looked up. There is a reference to a green card though but, I don't know if the employer can "sponsor" a green card or not, though. Anyway I was looking at this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Duration_of_stay

 

They can. The employer of an H1B holder can sponsor the employee for employment-based green card, priority 2 or 3. Technically this has nothing to do with holding H1B, but this is a typical path. It is a multistage process. The very first step, btw, is the "prevailing wage determination" - getting a document from Department of Labor on how much workers are paid for the position in question; can't sponsor green card if paying less. Another step is recruiting - companies must show that they tried to hire a local worker first and failed (or for university teachers, that they held nationwide search and the candidate won). The snag is, there's annual quota of about 40,000 per category, and 7% per country limit. As a result, an Indian national with APPROVED GC petition must wait for, literally, decades before his GC becomes "available".