oped: I agree IMO Mark Zuckerberg is a 30 sumpin' going on 15 punk..who ripped off two of his friends idea got lucky and made a fortune at the expense of others !
By Bill McColl
A battle is brewing between Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump and Silicon Valley over immigration. And “The Donald” is targeting his anger at Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
The issue is H-1B visas for foreign workers that are popular among tech firms, which use them to bring in skilled employees from overseas. Zuckerberg and other technology executives such as Google (soon to be Alphabet) (GOOGL) Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo Finance parent Yahoo (YHOO), are calling on the government to loosen requirements for those so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) foreign workers. Zuckerberg has been especially vocal, co-founding Fwd.us, a group dedicated to advancing the political goals of tech companies.
But
Trump, who has made upending the country’s immigration system a key
theme of his campaign, says doing so reduces the chances of American
workers-- especially those underrepresented in Silicon Valley-- from
getting tech jobs. So he’s calling for rules that would require companies using H-1B employees to pay them more money.
“Raising
the prevailing wage paid to H-1Bs will force companies to give these
coveted entry-level jobs to the existing domestic pool of unemployed
native and immigrant workers in the U.S., instead of flying in cheaper
workers from overseas. This will improve the number of black, Hispanic
and female workers in Silicon Valley who have been passed over in
favor of the H-1B program. Mark Zuckerberg’s personal Senator, Marco
Rubio, has a bill to triple H-1Bs that would decimate women and
minorities.”
[Mexican singer, actress jumps into the fray: Es un pendejo el Donald Trump: Paulina Rubio]
Yahoo
Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli points out Trump’s position is
creating a kind of a “strange bedfellows” situation.
“It’s
a case that’s been made before by, interestingly, mostly left-wing
voices to say this is a loophole of a law, it allows companies to get
cheaper labor than they otherwise wouldn’t be able to find under the
guise of getting scarce, skilled labor from overseas,” he notes.
But Santoli believes Trump’s notion of why tech executives want these workers might be a little misplaced.
“They
want to fill jobs,” he says. “It doesn’t seem to me that it’s about a
wage arbitrage situation. They simply feel they don’t have enough
qualified people and need those educated workers from overseas.”
Santoli adds the H-1B issue is really nothing new.
“It’s
been an industry objective for a very long time to enlarge the program
because they don’t feel they don’t have enough access to foreign
engineering talent,” he says. “The argument is there is a tremendous
supply of overseas workers who could do these jobs that we can easily
tap into. And interestingly one of the big selling points of enlarging
the program is many of these folks come over here to be educated in our
universities and then they go back because maybe they can’t find jobs in
the industry domestically.”
Yahoo Finance has reached out to Facebook for comment and is still awaiting a reply.
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