Senate approves restriction on foreign hires by banks receiving bailout

[luso]

US companies typically prefer to have just one American or two to head foreign operations -- so as to provide oversight. The rest of the staff they prefer to hire locally and they pay them local wages (much cheaper). When I was living in Pakistan in the mid-'80s, I remember that the Pakistani #2 of a US bank (Citibank?) was earning about $800 a month -- which wasn't much in Pakistan even then. For the Americans posted there, the banks or companies don't encounter that much difficulty in securing a work visa.

That is not always the case. You will be surprised how many so called LOCAL ppl are actually US Citizens. In my firm, we always send colleagues to the offices outside of US where they originally come from.

It is not just financial companies, most of the big multi-national companies don't like to use local people as managers, they prefer to send ppl originally from there. But make no mistake, they look like local, talk like local, indeed they are Americans or Europeans.

That's why nowadays a lot of business leaders are worrying about the issue. They make huge profit outside of the G7 countries, and they can't afford to play with this kind of games.

Remember last year GS had issue to send a manager from Singapore to head an important dept in China? At the end, they have to send someone from NY office who was born in China to replace that role in Beijing? We had an article about this posted on Quantnet.

 

[DominiConnor]

bigbadwolf, there is a dynamic in ex-pats that I do not fully understand, but my samples
imply that the situation you state is changing...

Even before the current clusterfu [FONT=&quot]с[/FONT]k, expat packages were in real decline, some that reached me put the moved staff at a serious financial disadvantage.

curioUno is right, I should look at the bright side of things, as a headhunter, it actually makes my life easier. I need churn in the labour market to prosper, and racist Democrats have given it to me. I also do more business in London than NY, so increasing the quality of people in London is also good for me.

I think we may part company in whether they will compete with US firms and workers based in the USA. I think that inevitable in many cases.

They have been trained by American banks so their ideas about business are going to be more similar. Also there is an important thing about the ex-H1Bs being younger.

There are new ways to make money in finance coming, already we are starting to see them. These people will more loikely be involved in the sort of business that US banks will want to do in future.

Short version, the next wave of innovation will be more London & Mumbai more than NY.Of course "innovation" is aprt of how we got in this mess so you can call that good or bad

 

[bigbadwolf]

and racist Democrats have given it to me. I also do more business in London than NY, so increasing the quality of people in London is also good for me.

Dominic, I'm not competent to comment on the rest of your post: you're the man on the ground. But anti-immigrant stances are hardening across Europe as well. In the European elections, the centre-right prevailed and the centre-left and the left took a drubbing -- at least partly because of the anti-immigrant stance of the centre-right. Britain now has Messrs. Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons as its representatives in Brussels. Europe is more xenophobic than the USA (with the possible exception of some white trash enclaves in the US). And has been for years upon years.

Since you've been in IT, you may recall that about ten or twelve years ago the Germans decided to issue 20,000 work visas to foreigners -- but these were not immigrant visas, and were valid for four years only; furthermore workers couldn't bring their spouses and children. German wages were lower than American wages and taxes and cost of living higher. Now what Indian in his right mind would accept such shabby conditions? This is Europe in a nutshell: xenophobic, suspicious, offering crud terms, and living in the cloud cuckoo dream land looking back wistfully to an earlier period of hegemony that no longer exists.

For the reasons above I think the USA will remain the country of choice for skilled Third-World workers (assuming the choice is between USA and any part of Europe). Given a choice between NYC and London, I know which city I would choose.

On a side note, racism towards people of other skin pigments usually goes hand-in-hand with an anti-immigrant stance -- but the two may not coincide. British workers have been protesting against Italian workers in Britain; Norway is trying to kick out its Poles; and a lot of Brits don't take kindly to the large number of East Europeans who have arrived in Britain after 2004.

 

[Stefan Zota]

bigbadwolf, there is a dynamic in ex-pats that I do not fully understand, but my samples
imply that the situation you state is changing...

Even before the current clusterfu [FONT=&quot]?[/FONT]k, expat packages were in real decline, some that reached me put the moved staff at a serious financial disadvantage.

curioUno is right, I should look at the bright side of things, as a headhunter, it actually makes my life easier. I need churn in the labour market to prosper, and racist Democrats have given it to me. I also do more business in London than NY, so increasing the quality of people in London is also good for me.

I think we may part company in whether they will compete with US firms and workers based in the USA. I think that inevitable in many cases.

They have been trained by American banks so their ideas about business are going to be more similar. Also there is an important thing about the ex-H1Bs being younger.

There are new ways to make money in finance coming, already we are starting to see them. These people will more loikely be involved in the sort of business that US banks will want to do in future.

Short version, the next wave of innovation will be more London & Mumbai more than NY.Of course "innovation" is aprt of how we got in this mess so you can call that good or bad

This is a biased view of London job market.
In the scope of immigration, I really don't see the flux of talent from New York/Chicago to London or else in Europe. The laws in most Europe are conservative, they don't have the experience of immigration compared to a country that was built on this movement (U.S.).

On the other hand, there is large risk that skilled labor will return to China/India or Asia south-east. The numbers are significant here and the dynamic of these markets makes them tough competitors in 10-20 years horizon. This is the core of the issue.