GoDaddy CEO: If we can't hire skilled immigrants, they'll set up their own Silicon Valleys in their home countries

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GoDaddy CEO: If we can't hire skilled immigrants, they'll set up their own Silicon Valleys in their home countries

 The H-1B visa program — which enables U.S. companies to hire high-skilled foreign workers — has become a political lightning rod but remains essential for American companies to hire the technical talent they need to compete on a global scale, said GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving.

"We do not produce enough technically qualified candidates in this country," he said. "You can't take an 18-month training program and produce a machine-learning scientist."

President Donald Trump may soon sign an executive order revamping the H-1B visa system which, along with a related program, makes 85,000 temporary work visas available each year and is widely used by U.S. tech companies to fill technical roles. A draft executive order suggests existing policies prioritize foreign workers and aims to make sure the programs instead safeguard and emphasize "the jobs, wages and well-being of United States workers."

Irving was particularly concerned about overseas competition.

The American university system is good at training foreign workers for tech jobs, and it is essential that the U.S. government allows them to stay in the country to fulfill U.S. jobs, he said. Otherwise, we train workers from countries like China and India and then send them back to those countries to set up tech ecosystems that compete with Silicon Valley, Irving said.

Though there may be marginal instances in which some companies abuse the H-1B system to replace American workers with cheap foreign workers, those practices are extremely rare, Irving said. "There's always going to be some marginal groups that will abuse the system, it's true," he said. "There is a fraction of abuse."

Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants and H-1B workers fulfill highly paid roles where existing demand cannot be met by domestic candidates, he said.

"This isn't about trying to export jobs," Irving said. "People get confused with H-1B exporting jobs — that's just not the case."
 

Pure BS. The US has been allowing foreign students in forever to study. England in essence missed the internet pheonomon so they didn't get search giant on the net. There's still not one there. My point being as bad as they want a home grown rival, one hasn't taken root.

According to studies, there is no lack of STEM graduates. Something like 85% or higher of STEM graduates never work in their studied feild because of a lack of jobs. There never has been a shortage of STEM workers. There's been a lack of willingness by industry to pay the going wages and benefits to national labor.

I'll even give you an example of why. Almost every major industry has trade secrets and patented processes that allow their product to be unique in some manner. That uniqueness comes because in most cases they make this product in some special manner. Doing so takes special equipment that in all probablity no one else has or uses in like manner. So requiring years of experience on some process/machine/method is a smoke screen and always has been.

Back in the 70s and 80s, companies had on the job training programs to teach you these special procedures done their way and method. As part of cost savings and profit increases, companies did away with OJT. It became a simple thing to demand any worker have detailed knowledge of a process that likely only they used. Suddenly no one qualified and that allowed them to go for H1B vistas to claim no one was hirable.

It's all BS, nothing else. If it was about foreign countries exporting jobs, the US has been training those with a possible to do this for longer than I've been alive. It's not one company abusing the system with H1B workers; it's about all of them doing that.