Lottery to decide my life

i wouldn't mind it, actually. i secretely like politics. don't tell anyone. i mean, to be in it. i got a sniff of awhile back, while still at home, and it can get right into your head. you feel strong and important and all-knowing... it's quite alarming in retrospect. i wouldn't want to become that.

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ehBeth wrote:

for folks who know where/what Nimh's doing, perhaps a note to the larger organization about the importance of the specific project?

(I'm going to drop a note to a former colleague whose wife works in the New York office - try to get an idea or two)

What Dag said, please. Though the kindness of the thought is of course appreciated! The thing is that, far as I know, only we ourselves, the head of one other program, and the heads of the Budapest and US offices know about this, noone else yet. We've been told to for now not tell anyone else within the organisation. (I only brought it up here cause I'm anon here, and wanted to vent.)

Also, its true that we know, in fact, very little or nothing about what the practicalties will actually be. I doubt they know. The two new projects will still take place, its just that other programs will do them. The third, nobody knows, I assume it will still be done, perhaps still by us in the remainder of the year under direction of another program, perhaps simply by another program, perhaps it wont be. And us? Nobody knows. We could be fired; we could be fired but only at the end of the year; we could be reassigned ourselves to various other programs too; perhaps even as a team, collectively (that would be ideal, of course). Nobody knows, and I think they simply havent actually thought it through yet themselves.

A comforting thought is that the organisation does tend, generally, usually, to just shift people around rather than fire anyone - they're pretty good like that. But that could mean another country - unlikely, but possible. And on the other hand, I dont really see how they'd incorporate us into other programs, or me, personally, because of what I wrote above, so I dunno. No idea. Just have to wait and see for three weeks, and then perhaps we'll know more. But our program will be pulled down, that decision has been made, nothing much to do about that.

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dagmaraka wrote:

Hmm, so my boss is related to Kennedy's assistant for foreign affairs. He's having dinner with her in-laws this evening. He asked me for talking points
We'll see if one of these pink sleazeballs will pick me up as a living example of the immigration system's screwups and pimp me in public to get some mileage for his own agenda. joy.

Dag,

After reading through Durbin's bill and, knowing what I know of the current system, I'd encourage your boss to talk up pushing the bill.

One of the little tidbits I found out the other day:

There is a company (probably more than one that does this but) here in the U.S. that specializes in contracted IT Services. They hire people and then send them to work for other companies (including Microsoft. IBM and others).

This particular company searched India and came up with just over 12,000 people as potential employees. They did the H1B paperwork on every single one of them and dropped off 12,000+ H1B applications directly at the St. Albans, VT processing center Monday morning. They hand delivered these things when the office opened.

Now my problem with this is that these people aren't being hired directly by the company producing a product. This imtermediate company was created just to bring people in and get them H1Bs and then outsource them to another company. They know they won't get 12,000 visas but they also don't have 12,000 positions to be filled. By flooding the system with all of these applications they might get 3,000 or 4,000 visas out of the lottery. They'll bring over whoever wins in the lottery and immediately outsource them to fill positions in companies that didn't get H1Bs for the people they applied for.

The kicker is that every H1B they do get is one less than the company they are outsourcing to gets.

Durbin's bill would shut these sorts of companies down. That would give the legit employers a fair shot at getting the people they need and give people like yourself a much better chance of getting your H1B.

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Nice analysis, fishin', makes it easier to make suggestions in letter-writing campaigns too.

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dlowan wrote:

Oh bugger, Nimh. [..]

I don't suppose you and Daggles coud tell us more about what you actually DO?

dagmaraka wrote:

nimh's job is top secret. he works for a very big organization, in fact the biggest, but his work has to do with the smallest groups. and media. and computers. and lovely hungarian girls.

Ha ha ha!

<grins>

Deb, I'm just a lowly website manager / desk researcher. I coordinate the content of our website, decide what goes where (and keep the programmer from going off on development tangents); write the texts and make the webpages (through a creaky CMS and manually tweaking the HTML), prepare documents for the web. I coordinate the work of the external assistants working on an online library, follow the news and all the mailinglists and put up relevant news and announcements (well, I now have a part-time assistant for part of that). Also, we have Calls for Papers, and I edit incoming papers for online publication, quite thoroughly (three-four rounds usually) - I like that, it's the most substantive part. Write our newsletters, too, do the outreach to other lists and sites.. Do the occasional translating, answer incoming info queries.. etc etc.

Bit of everything, nothing high-brow. Bit of web development, but I dont know any programming languages, so in IT theres no work. Bit of text editing, but I havent studied English, cant compete with professional proofreaders. Bit of text writing, which is always cool, and I'm sorta good with words, but I'm no PR person, and certainly no journalist. Bit of desk research, but I dont have the academic credentials to compete for university jobs, not really - just the MA, seven years ago, havent published anything substantive since (apart from the article Dag mentioned). Bit of organisational NGO work - well, quite a bit of that, from funding applications to organising a conference and coordinating a minor international NGO project (with some help from my boss) - but I so really dont want to go back to phoning people, trying to ease and persuade them into taking part in a project we dont have money to give out for, writing bullshit funding applications, all that stuff I did in my previous job. Plus, there's a lot of people out there with exactly the same kind of experience.

So yeah, I'm pretty worried about what to do if it's the worst possible scenario and I end up on the street soon. But again, thats no way a given yet, a number of other things could be happening instead. So I'm crossing my fingers. Best would be if the four of us work-bees were collectively transferred to another program, which is still a possibility, at least for the duration of this year, though not a particularly probable possibility.

Any case, yeah, the ideal job with the ideal team and boss in the ideal place with the ideal arrangements that Ive enjoyed the past two years - that's going to disappear, for sure. Only question is how big the damage will be. I really hope I can keep working for this organisation, here in Budapest, for at least this year -- that would already make me happy enough -- but its by no means certain.

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Oh, and if it was the larger context you asked about, I think I've already said here that I work for Mr. Soros - but that doesnt say much, his organisation has dozens of programs on the most varied subjects, from environmental issues to legal aid to minority rights to university scholarships to whatnot.

I've deliberately not mentioned the name of my program because I dont want this thread to show up in Google when you type it in - but we do research, basically ... in-depth research on various human rights topics, focused on legislation, data, national and local policies, and always accompanied by sets of recommendations for local/national authorities and international institutions. It's pretty well heeded - our big splash last year was when the Romanian president was on TV with our report, pointing at his paper and going on about how the government had to do this and that what our report wrote about. We were pretty impressed by that :wink: .

OK thats more than anyone would have ever wanted to know.

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nimh, i decided to start worrying when things fail. meanwhile i am enjoying my little campaign. if you can trick yourself with this jedi mind trick, do it. or find something to occupy self that also highlights the importance of services your office offers - more mailings? short report? dunno, something.

fishin, i agree. and i wrote to durbin that i stand behind his reform bill and that i'm a prime example of what current approach does to honest people like that follow the rules. but... his bill won't help me, it will help people next year. in the meantime i need his help to put a patch in for this year - how do we address the state of the art of this years applications? it's a fiasco, but there are better ways out of it than a lottery, methinks.

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dagmaraka wrote:

fishin, i agree. and i wrote to durbin that i stand behind his reform bill and that i'm a prime example of what current approach does to honest people like that follow the rules. but... his bill won't help me, it will help people next year. in the meantime i need his help to put a patch in for this year - how do we address the state of the art of this years applications? it's a fiasco, but there are better ways out of it than a lottery, methinks.

The same points that are on Durbin's site can be used to push for changes to this year's system.

I'm guessing you'll probably cringe that the suggestion but they could put a hold on the lottery and scrub the applications looking for submissions from companies like I described above. It shouldn't be that hard to identify the companies. They're the one's that submitted thousands of applications.

I don't think the lottery part of the system is ever going to go away but a quick change in the law that limits the number of apps/company for this year could improve your odds greatly.

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it would, but i don't think they can change it in retrospect now. that would not be fair either.

i hope that the reform bill WILL eliminate the lottery, because, to me, that's the least sensible part when it comes to jobs that are to be selected on the basis of merit and need.

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Quote:

The kicker is that every H1B they do get is one less than the company they are outsourcing to gets.

Durbin's bill would shut these sorts of companies down. That would give the legit employers a fair shot at getting the people they need and give people like yourself a much better chance of getting your H1B.

Fishin, some say that that would only lead to more outsourcing. It would probably shut these companies down, you're right. But they wouldn't turn to the American worker. Rather, they would move to India or wherever, so the U.S. would loose out even more in the end (taxes, sales, whatever little jobs there were for American workers).
STILL, it IS a good bill, but for different reasons. The achievable benefits of this bill is to minimize cheaters and free-riders and thus also heightened the quality of the final H1B visa people pool. It would make sure that those that get the visa are the right people and with stricter guidelines also that there is no workforce in the U.S. for these jobs, due to specialization, expertise, what have you.

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I'm writing an op-ed right now. On the whole process, and on the Durbin bill. Ha. This is really fun.

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Oh, great idea!

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fishin wrote:

dagmaraka wrote:
Hmm, so my boss is related to Kennedy's assistant for foreign affairs. He's having dinner with her in-laws this evening. He asked me for talking points
We'll see if one of these pink sleazeballs will pick me up as a living example of the immigration system's screwups and pimp me in public to get some mileage for his own agenda. joy.

Dag,

After reading through Durbin's bill and, knowing what I know of the current system, I'd encourage your boss to talk up pushing the bill.

One of the little tidbits I found out the other day:

There is a company (probably more than one that does this but) here in the U.S. that specializes in contracted IT Services. They hire people and then send them to work for other companies (including Microsoft. IBM and others).

This particular company searched India and came up with just over 12,000 people as potential employees. They did the H1B paperwork on every single one of them and dropped off 12,000+ H1B applications directly at the St. Albans, VT processing center Monday morning. They hand delivered these things when the office opened.

Now my problem with this is that these people aren't being hired directly by the company producing a product. This imtermediate company was created just to bring people in and get them H1Bs and then outsource them to another company. They know they won't get 12,000 visas but they also don't have 12,000 positions to be filled. By flooding the system with all of these applications they might get 3,000 or 4,000 visas out of the lottery. They'll bring over whoever wins in the lottery and immediately outsource them to fill positions in companies that didn't get H1Bs for the people they applied for.

The kicker is that every H1B they do get is one less than the company they are outsourcing to gets.

Durbin's bill would shut these sorts of companies down. That would give the legit employers a fair shot at getting the people they need and give people like yourself a much better chance of getting your H1B.

fishin, do you have a source for this firm that appied for 12,000 visas in Albans, Vermont? I want to include it in my op-ed. I found only articles about scramble of Indian and US IT companies to file in Albans (why there of all places?) but couldn't get the number or names or anything... Thanks.

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Dag--

I believe both Time and Newsweek have weekly from-our-readers pieces. All sorts of people write on all sorts of subjects--light and heavy.

Money collected from two hundred thousand applications at $5,000 a application should pay for reading a lot of applications.

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You'd think, eh? Well the Durbin Bill does propose additional 200 DOL workers to read the applications... which is another one of its features.

Actually, the whole bill is good. It's just that their justification (helping the American worker) is unreasonable. That cannot be achieved through this bill. Only through dealing, in a comprehensive manner, with the problem of outsourcing. Creating new incentives, etc. It can't be done through a patchwork of prohibitive measures.

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dagmaraka wrote:

fishin, do you have a source for this firm that appied for 12,000 visas in Albans, Vermont? I want to include it in my op-ed. I found only articles about scramble of Indian and US IT companies to file in Albans (why there of all places?) but couldn't get the number or names or anything... Thanks.

The story was related to me by a friend who ummm.. works for the federal government, and I wasn't given the name of the company. I'll ask if they can fill me in on more or point me to a publicly available source. Wink

St Albans is one of the two processing locations. St. Albans for the East Coast and Dallas, TX for the West coast. I didn't even know that there were such facilities in VT. I thought all of these things got done in DC. Embarrassed

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Oh, OK. Yeah, I'd need a publicly available source. The "source who doesn't want to be cited" is not very popular these days.

THANKS!

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fishin wrote:

Dallas, TX for the West coast.

God, I love the way our leaders think!

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If i say: "An inside source reported that one firm dropped off 12,000 applications on behalf of Indian...." do you think they will reject that? I have no idea.. I suppose I can ask my friend who studies journalism at Columbia U.

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There was something with 12,000 applications last year as well ...

Quote:

This came as a shock to the immigration community which was told several days earlier on May 25, that as of that date, some 12,000 visa numbers remained. USCIS offered the explanation that 12,000 additional cases were in unopened envelopes in its mailroom, and it had neglected to inform the public that the numbers posted on its website were therefore not a true reflection of how few numbers remained.

source

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Lottery to decide my life

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