As a former H1-B worker myself (please put down the pitch-forks :)), I can tell you that regular companies aren't hiring H1-Bs to replace you directly. Instead they contract swarms of us through companies like WiPro and other body shops. This, along with the inability to seek a more fitting job on your own regardless of skill level is the main problem I see. You're essentially shackled to these body shops. You can't go home because of their BS employee agreements that force you to pay thousands if you leave before a certain time, you can't ask for higher salary or healthcare benefits, you don't get to choose where you work so it may be Texas today, WA tomorrow, Alabama next week so forget having a family life, you're wife can't work if you bring her and kids with you so you have to just follow along to their whims regardless. It is pretty much human trafficking once you get here. I can tell most folks here are American, they have no idea how messed up the H1-B system is.
Your perspective is the one missing from this debate.
I don't have a problem with immigration -- my grandparents were all immigrants. I have a problem with this three-tier system of greencards, guest visas and systematic import of undocumented workers.
These leech companies are farming exploited quasi-immigrant labor while screwing up the labor market for everyone else.
You should be able to come to this country like my ancestors did -- pass a physical and get a green card. An Indian technology worker shouldn't be separated from his kids, a Chinese restaurant waiter shouldn't be an indentured slave, and Americans of all backgrounds shouldn't have their salaries kneecapped by thousands of workers with no rights.
Speaking totally from a selfish standpoint, these policies against immigrants don't make sense for the American worker either.
H1Bs lower the wage of American tech workers because it fills the workforce with those who can't ask for more.
Cracking down on illegal immigrants just forces them underground away from the ability to demand workers rights. This puts the American worker, who demands minimum wage, safe work places and overtime at a disadvantage.
I don't claim to know what the perfect policy is but as it stands the systems are set up to benefit the employer in every case.
I don't think I've ever heard this point made about H1B in particular.
Giving employers a way to shackle workers to a specific job and salary is bad from virtually every political perspective. It's anti-competitive (what kind of free market association is that?), it's anti-immigrant (obviously), and it's anti-labor because it artificially drops market prices.
It was never that automatic in the old days. From Ellis Island, for example, over 120,000 were sent back.
"New arrivals were processed quickly. In the Registry Room, Public Health Service doctors looked to see if any of them wheezed, coughed, shuffled or limped. Children were asked their names to make sure they weren't deaf or dumb. Toddlers were taken from their mothers' arms and made to walk. As the line moved forward, doctors had only a few seconds to check each immigrant for sixty symptoms of disease. Of primary concern were cholera, favus (scalp and nail fungus), tuberculosis, insanity, epilepsy, and mental impairments. The disease most feared was trachoma, a highly contagious eye infection that could lead to blindness and death.
Hospital Wards
Once registered, immigrants were free to enter the New World and start their new lives. But if they were sick, they spent days, weeks, months even, in a warren of rooms. Some, like the tuberculosis ward, were open to the sea, where a gentle New York harbor breeze cleansed their lungs, improving their chances. Other rooms were solitary, forlorn places where the illness itself decided when to leave or stay. Most patients in the hospital or Contagious Disease Ward recovered, but some were not so lucky. More than 120,000 immigrants were sent back to their countries of origin, and during the island's half-century of operation more than 3,500 immigrants died there."
>>You should be able to come to this country like my ancestors did -- pass a physical and get a green card... Americans of all backgrounds shouldn't have their salaries kneecapped by thousands of workers with no rights.
If anyone could come into the US by simply passing a physical exam, salaries would be impacted much more drastically, this time by the sheer increase in the labor supply.
In the 20th century the total population of employable humans doubled in roughly a decade. That is, when women were allowed to enter the workforce in a real capacity.
We adjusted and the economy grew.
Concerns like yours were the same concerns raised by Americans regarding Asians a little over a century ago, leading to our closed borders. These fears were unfounded.
America is still succeeding based on the momentum of our former liberal open border policy and in another century or so I'm sure we'll regret having tightened immigration as much as we have.
It's crazy that if you're born here by random chance you get incredible perks in life, but if you want to come here and earn those perks you're pretty much screwed unless you've already proven success in your current country.
We just systematically deprived those workers of their rights while they built stuff, worked in meat packing plants, restaurants, etc. Meanwhile the urban poor deal with 50%+ unemployment rates.
Is it a common reaction to raise pitchforks at H1-B's? I mostly feel sorry for workers on visa. They don't have the flexibility I do to change jobs if they're not happy. That would be the absolute worst for me, as someone who is always looking for a better gig.
This is a common misconception. It is a very easy process to change jobs on an H1B. The difficult part is the Green Card process, which gets reset (IANAL) and currently getting a green card takes upto 10 years, if you're from India.
The problem essentially is that many of these workers either don't know that they can switch jobs, don't have the skills relevant to get another job or, in many cases, have a sort of loyalty to their present company for 'giving them an opportunity to come to the US'.
The last sentiment is a lot more common than you would imagine.
The problem is that many of those workers WANT green cards, as getting one while you are an H1 is arguably the most sensible path forward, and chances are that a company that sponsors your green card will make you pay a penalty if you change jobs while the process is going + 1 year. The end result is that You have an H1, but you not only have to restart the green card process (or at least set it back, depending on the moment you are applying), but you might end up paying 10K+ for the privilege... on top of the other company sponsoring the H1 AND the Green Card.
So, in practice, the mobility provisions are only non-onerous in a small percentage of the cases: If you don't want to stay in the US, or you want to, but no Green Card paperwork has been filed.
There's also companies that play games with your green card: A friend of mine changed departments (the company he is on goes through constant reorgs, and the company decided that the job description had been changed enough that they had to file a new labor certification. Guess what? If you have a 10 year wait, and every time your job description changes a bit, you decide your green card must restart, you'll never, ever get it.
And you can't ask for the green card by yourself: The employer does, so you are at the mercy of their lawyers too.
You can apply for a new green card via the new employer (or any potential employer too). Once you get through to the I-140 stage of your second GC again - provided that the new job is one similar to your previous one - you can use your same place-in-line in the GC as before.
The green card application can get stuck in the bureaucratic backlog for any number of reasons - for years. These delays messes up with your peace of mind in ways you can probably imagine. Internet is full of horror stories about these things. This prevents people from changing jobs, or making any long term plans about buying a house etc.
It is a long-standing request from many people stuck in GC backlogs to not have them go through the _unpredictable_ re-application process, when they switch jobs. This was hinted as part of President Obama's Executive Action on immigration reform.
In a memo[1] dated 11/20/2014, Jeh Johnson (Secretary of Dept. of Homeland Security) stated:
As you know, our employment-based immigration system is
afflicted with extremely long waits for immigrant visas, or
"green cards," due to relatively low green card numerical limits
established by Congress 24 years ago in 1990.
...
To correct this problem, I hereby direct USCIS to take several
steps to modernize and improve the immigrant visa process.
But USCIS has not done anything to improve this situation yet. 18 months have passed since Secretary Johnson's original memo, but USCIS has not made any move to grant an EAD to people waiting in long GC backlogs. While everyone rails at politicians, body shops etc, USCIS gets a free pass at continuing their ineptitude.
The latest visa bulletin [2] lists India EB2 priority date as 1st Nov 2004. Let me translate that for people not familiar with the jargon - an immigrant from India who is being granted Green Card now applied on 1st Nov 2004 and s/he already had 5 years industry experience then.
USCIS rarely wastes an opportunity to remind [3] everyone that it receives very little taxpayer money for immigration services and about 95% of it's budget comes from fees. But this self-financing is made possible by leeching off of thousands of legal immigrants for decades. If they could do their assigned jobs properly - providing EAD for immigrants with approved I-140, recapturing unused green card applications from prior years etc - it would have been a huge relief for many immigrants.
A large number of well qualified Indian and Chinese immigrants are in the same situation. The Chinese situation is a bit better (China @ 2010 vs India @ 2004). However, none of us are taking a stand on it and making sufficient noise about it. There are thousands of tax paying legal immigrants stuck in limbo. The tax money + fees that are paid are in billions and yet apparently somehow we have no voice.
>>This is a common misconception. It is a very easy process to change jobs on an H1B.
No it isn't. Even though the process is informally called an "H-1B transfer", changing employers while on H1B actually requires filing a brand new H-1B petition with USCIS. The only difference is that this petition is not subject to the annual cap. Everything else - the crazy requirements and loops you and the sponsoring employer have to jump through - is the same.
What this means is that there is a big risk associated with the process. Since it's a new petition, it can be rejected. You are literally at the mercy of the USCIS officer processing your application, and they can deny it for any reason.
Of course, this also assumes that you're able to find an employer who is willing to sponsor your visa. Considering the legal expenses (thousands of dollars per worker), the hassle and the risk, most companies don't. And if your skills are in a niche field, good luck finding any that do.
I wouldn't say it's "very easy", but it's not super hard either.
I don't disagree with what you're saying in general, but shouldn't there be some cost incurred by the new company?
Remember, like it or not, the h1b program is technically designed to only come into play when a company can't find suitable local talent to fill a position.
In our case it was a few thousand dollars of legal fees and gov "expedite" fees
If we were doing a lot of them our legal fees could go way down, and we'd get good at doing them.
The cap is a big deal, and the reason most h1bs get rejected.
Like you said, if an h1b worker is already here, the cap doesn't apply -- I think that's a good thing.
It seems to be a common misconception that h1bs are bound to their employer.
With the IANAL caveat: that helps prevent one type of employee abuse, the "retaliation termination" intended to force an ex-employee out of the country rather than starting their new job. (Which is also the reason why a visa worker who is waiting on the H-1B "transfer" is advised by immigration lawyers not to tell their current employer that they are thinking of leaving, no matter how much they want to.) But, that's just one situation.
As a for instance, employers will(illegally) demand that the H1B worker reimburse them for the legal and filing fees as a form of retribution for transferring. While certain greencard sponsorship related expenses can be recouped if the H1B is that far down the line, any visa related costs (attorney, filing fed) must be payed for by the sponsor.
Yes, but it can be worse than that. There was a different article about it recently, where the employer threatened to falsely report their visa employees as illegal if they complained. Which means the employees can wind up leaving the country and possibly never returning. For an employee who has worked in that country for years and calls it home, this is akin to being threatened with exile.
> This is a common misconception. It is a very easy process to change jobs on an H1B.
Have you tried changing jobs on a H-1B, with an employer who wants to stop you, and who gets legal advice on how to go about doing that? It SHOULD be an easy process to change jobs.
I wouldn't say 'very easy' but 6 years after you get an H1B you are cap-exempt. So any new employer can apply for an H1B for you right away though it only gives you the years left in the original visa not another 6y.
WiPro, Disney, IBM, and others are the face of the "bring people in on a visa to train your job for offshore" -- WiPro often being the body shop.
In this instance it isn't the category of Visa, per say, but how immigrant visas are being used.
OP makes a good point about being shackled to a company. The bigs (MSFT, others), don't seem to do such, but the body shops certainly do take advantage of the situation.
Really, if you look at visas granted by company, those at the top are often body shops and should be both ineligible and required to pay significantly more.
Not all H1-B workers come via body shops. FB, Google, MSFT, Amazon all hire their own H1-Bs and pay wages no American could complain depresses anyone. This is how I came. It boggles the mind that body shops are allowed to exploit this system and abuse workers who come and do their best to drive wages down. The one solution is end the indentured servitude aspect of it. If H1Bs are free to move around and work where they please, the abuse would end overnight. Free markets work when the labor force also has, you know, freedom.
That's a horrible idea. The whole point of the visa is to service a specific job that was impossible to fill. It makes perfect sense that an H1-b holder should be forced to stay at only one job and not be allowed to compete on the wider job market.
The solution to the abuse of the visa is to get rid of all the legal and bureaucratic tests and hoops and auction off the slots instead. The firm with the winning bid gets to import a foreigner.
If this is really about filling important roles where it's impossible to hire or train an American, the winning bids should be in the hundreds of thousands. If it's really just a system of wage suppression, well the bids will be low, for all to see.
If you want indentured servitude, that's how you get indentured servitude. It is also, not a system of wage suppression that people think it is (although it certainly is abused in that way). The entire pool of H1Bs represent a tiny pimple of the US workforce.
That's an absurd comparison. The visa holder is not bonded and can return home at any time.
The work visa system is obviously broken. Forcing employers to put a dollar value on these supposedly necessary visas goes pretty far to fixing all the problems.
The workers are wrong, then. That is not the purpose of the H1B. Anyone who thinks it should lead to a green card should be barred from getting the visa.
The H1-B is a dual intent status. There are categories that are strictly non-immigrant intent, TN work permits fit this category. Border guards can and do test that you have non-immigrant intent during normal border crossings while under this status ("Where is your home?" "what will you do once your TN is over?").
If it really was intended that H1-Bs not have immigrant intent then there was a legal framework already in place to ensure that. Most likely it is you that is incorrect about the purpose of these H1-Bs.
The "dual-purpose" nature of the H-1B basically means that (1) you are not prohibited to enter on an H-1B with the intent to stay permanently, and, perhaps more significantly (2) you aren't required to leave the US for a period of time after entering on an H-1B before getting an immigrant visa which will let you stay permanently.
But it is still a non-immigrant visa that does not lead to permanent residency or citizenship, but requires you to qualify for, apply for, and secure an immigrant visa if and when you want to become an immigrant rather than a non-immigrant worker.
said by someone who doesn't understand US immigration. H1B is a non immigrant visa, sure, but it can open the door to the immigration process via company sponsorship. I know because I did it, and many others do too. Applying for a greencard from your native country is counterproductive. Basically a 10 year wait for some. Why bother.
They desperately need to turn this into an auction system so only the best candidates get chosen. It is also tough for those of us who have to work with sub par H1B candidates and clean up their mess.
Yes, but none of those companies save Microsoft are anywhere near the top of the list of companies employing H1-B workers. The top employers for H1-B workers are mostly bodyshops like WiPro.
Nobody is talking about L1B or L1A visas yet. L1B allows these bodyshops to overcome the limits set forth by the H1B visas. While H1Bs are indentured servants and tied to their employers it is still possible for them to switch jobs once they're in the US. However, L1Bs is worse. There are no limits to the number of L1B visas that are issued. They cannot switch jobs. They do not have to be paid fairly according to market wages. They are slaves.
Also - I'm on H1B. But the difference is I graduated from a top school in the US and I am employed not to replace an American worker but I have certain skills that are not easily found in the tech industry. Unfortunately, I'm lumped into the same category as the body shopping H1Bs and so I've not yet received my greencard despite paying taxes for the past 7 years. And FYI I've consistently hit AMT for the past so many years and I own property and investments in this country. So, this kind of BS not only hurts American workers. It hurts the genuine immigrants as well. It also hurts the economy overall because although I wanted to start my own startup I have not been able to due to my visa status and restrictions. I would've generated economic opportunity for several individuals. I have also had to turn down CTO positions because usually tiny startups do not have the ability to sponsor H1Bs and they just don't want to deal with the paperwork. I am also working with a founder right now who wants to bring me on but is in a legal dilemma due to my status.
Listen, there's no point claiming the H1 situation isn't a rampant clusterfuck. Actual skilled laborers lie in limbo while busloads of cheap, disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited and depress domestic wages. It's a full on disaster.
If you have to have temporary worker visas, fine. But don't tie them to a company. If there's a legitimate need, and they're legitimately skilled, they'll find work, and they'll more than likely find work that pays comparably to a native worker (or they'll get poached, because good help is always hard to find).
> disposable foreign workers are brought over to get exploited
"exploited" is a matter of perspective. To an onlooker who has lived their whole life in a first world country, seeing people work for $x - (less-significantlyLess) [where $x is what is "typical" for the job] can be seen as bad/wrong/sad etc...
I have spent time working in very poor parts of Mexico and Manila. Crime is rampant, I feared for my life at times. Polution/open sewage made my eyes burn. By the end of my job there (helping doing on site server data migration for a financial institution) I was willing to pay/do anything to get out.
We take many things for granted that foreign workers might consider "Perks of the job". $1 has far more buying power in Manila than a place like the Bay area, but I would live in the Bay over Manila, essentially taking a wage cut.
This does not condone the wage discrepancy btwn foreign/domestic workers, but offers a potential explanation why a person would happily take an apparent "pay cut", and even be better off.
I am an immigrant living in the united states. I still can't believe my luck that I get to live in this paradise on earth called USA. I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery.
One of my uncle works as day laborer in dubai. He works 14 hr days of hard labor in extreme heat and lives in a some shanty where he has to share a bathroom( hole in the ground) with 14-20 other people. His passport got confiscated by his "owners" as soon as he landed there and was put under some sort of draconian "contract" where they get to work him to death, work place deaths are extremely common and no one cares if its an immigrant. In native's eyes they are basically slaves with no rights. You can see videos online where the 'owners' beat the shit out of them for real or imagined slights. I went to a restaurant once in Dubai with my uncle, all the immigrants were separated out into a different room with no air conditioning and that is where immigrants were supposed to sit you could never eat with locals. I've also heard of many second-hand stories where women who go there to be be domestic help get sexually and physically abused for years. And shocking part is that he does all this voluntarily for the most part even though he never gets to see his family and kids and gets to have sex only when he goes back every 4-5 yrs. We had houses on the our street referred to as 'dubai houses' meaning houses build with money made in dubai, you can feel the eerie sadness when you look at a house. I can go on forever but I think you get the idea.
Seeing yourself as an individual and as a human being is privilege inaccessible to most people in countries like mine. Even Our philosophical frameworks and belief systems are designed to explain away and make sense of unbearable misery of life with concepts like karma and preordination.
Never thought of karma that way (as a westerner with no particular exposure to it). I always thought of it as, "Do good now and you'll be paid for it later."
"You are where you are because you deserve it, due to what happened in past lives" is a much sadder message. Good for societal stability perhaps, but horrible for ideas like individualism and self determination.
> I also feel guilty that got this incredible opportunity while much of my extended family and friends rot in third world hell holes waiting for their lives to be over quickly so they can be put out of their misery
Goodness - I know it's probably hyperbole, but what kind of fucked-up country do you come from?
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are common labor pools that many Mid East nations draw upon for physical laborers. It isn't just Dubai, though they are among the most egregious; you'll see these arrangements in nations like Saudi Arabia as well, even though it is not nearly as well-publicized.
Many developed countries in Asia (eg Singapore) use foreign labor for jobs that "no Singaporean would do". This includes jobs like construction.
Unlike the U.S., these foreign workers are truly 2nd class citizens. Often passports are confiscated, and the idea that they'd ever start a life or family in their host country is completely off the table.
It is official policy that they can be paid less than local workers for the same job, and have far fewer legal protections.
I don't think it's black and white though. Many of these foreign workers would be worse off in their home country.
It still rubs me the wrong way. For all its flaws, I still like the U.S. System better.
I'm guessing India because of the karma comment. What here in HN is a number on your profile, there it is a promise of a better future (but maybe in the next life).
Yes, of course. But that doesn't change the fact that companies are systematically exploiting their life context in order to pay them below a fair market wage (in many cases), and in doing so is also exploiting the rest of the workforce to pay them less. Just because someone is happy doesn't mean they aren't being taken advantage of in a systematic, identifiable, and preventable way.
If foreign talent = domestic talent and foreign wage = domestic wage; is there a compelling reason to hire foreign? And if being hired = increase worker happiness, than equal pay will decrease foreign worker happiness.
If all people are equal than whos happiness should we optimize for?
Your equations aren't telling the full story though. The salary for foreign talent isn't only lower because of potential cultural issues out education, but because ability for foreign workers to change employees is artificially limited. This artificial market inefficiency hurts both local and foreign workers and benefits corporations who exploit it.
>If foreign talent = domestic talent and foreign wage = domestic wage; is there a compelling reason to hire foreign?
Yes, it's diversity. Having people with a variety of cultural backgrounds on the same team will sometimes lead to more creative or more robust solutions.
It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."
I find that attitude pretty disgusting, but that's just me. The same people who complain endlessly about H1Bs, outsourcing, and cheap foreign labor will then cheerfully drive to Wal-Mart and buy a new DVD player for $12.
It will never, ever occur to them that there are two sides to every transaction, and that Mother Nature abhors an arbitrage opportunity even more than she abhors a vacuum.
> It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."
Fuck no, it's about getting your "membership benefits" from a communal system that you've contributed to. Americans get paid more by Americans because those Americans pay more to Americans, and invest in the American economy and interact with American laws.
Who you ought to be disgusted with are the people who break the rules in order to enrich themselves from "arbitrage" opportunities. On a fundamental level, that's called theft, the only difference is the kinds of rules being broken.
Ideas such as "membership benifits" and "Americans pay more to Americans" seems to create an us vs. them mentality and imply that the us party receive govnt benifits. The idea that country A receives befits over country B can be abstracted to simple free trade theory.
If you abstract a skilled worker to be a countrys "resource" and accept the idea that country A and B can ingage in "trade", than it is easy to see how US h1b style imigration worker laws are basicly tariff. They distort the price to protect domestic, by making foreign more expensive.
David Ricardo (Supply/Demand economist) and many other economists have shown countless times that countrys are better off in the long run by engaging in free trade.
If we removed the worker "tariffs" we would get more engineers, companies would be able to make more / do more. In the end US consumers would be better off by having more/better choices.
No, it simply recognizes a situation which already exists, because different nations have different laws and economies. If you want a world hegemony, it's up to you to find a route that doesn't inordinately harm specific groups (e.g. US workers) while transferring value to others (e.g. US companies and arbitrage groups.)
> If you abstract a skilled worker to be a countrys "resource"
Oh? Seems to create a "people don't matter because they're just objects" mentality :P
> In the end US consumers would be better off by having more/better choices.
Unemployed or underemployed consumers never have more/better choices.
Yes, but US labor and citizens fought generations for those wages. Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars, company / labor riots, taxes to subsidize industry, taxes for infrastructure, taxes for education, legal systems, all that. US taxpayers paid for our economy through blood and toil.
You don't think high wages just happen because companies feel generous do you?
Does what your ancestors might have done really make you more deserving of a better life? I understand that it gives you more chance of a better life, but just by the luck of the lottery of birth, not by any actual fairness.
Did civil war soldiers really know they were fighting for high wages 150 years later? Were taxpayers really choosing to pay tax because they expected it would give their grandkids a higher salary, or because it was the law and they'd be fined or imprisoned if they didn't? Every country had wars, and they're just meaningless wars. They weren't fought for the good things we eventually got. They were fought for a meaningless feeling of needing to support whatever group each soldier belonged to.
If you don't want other people to use your country, how do you tolerate babies being born? They never contributed anything. They're just like immigrants - appearing and competing with the existing people.
>Does what your ancestors might have done really make you more deserving of a better life?
Look at it this way. I work hard and I pay a lot of taxes. I pay attention to elections and I petition governments because I want an opportunity for a good life for my kids and my kids' kids. I think soldiers who fought in the Civil War certainly wanted a better life for their kids.
This has been going on for generations. This generation is the first generation, I think in US history, that isn't expected to have a better life than their parent's generation, excluding possibly the depression. There are more young adults living with their parents since 1880.
I'm certainly not anti-immigrant, I think immigrants are the bloodline of the US economy and culture. What I'm against is companies outsourcing labor to other countries to save a little money while excluding US workers for consideration of those jobs. It's the companies I'm dissatisfied with, not the labor. If I was destitute in China or India, I would take those jobs too.
It's bad short term planning. Not only is it gutting our market, but China is stealing billions of dollars of our IP for their own use, and that includes military IP. Very few people benefit form this and the cost is great. Had US companies not outsourced and politicians not gutted labor unions, the US market would be much bigger. That's good for big business, small business and labor. Why do you think Trump and Sanders are so popular? There is massive dissatisfaction with opportunity in the US. It's about to bite us in the ass.
>If you don't want other people to use your country, how do you tolerate babies being born? They never contributed anything. They're just like immigrants - appearing and competing with the existing people.
The phrase "grandfathered in" refers to familial relations for a reason.
Your post is precisely what I mean by "entitlement." 500 million not-so-red Chinese don't give a hoot about the Revolutionary War, Civil War, World Wars, company / labor riots, taxes to subsidize industry, taxes for infrastructure, taxes for education, legal systems, all that.
To understand the position of workers in the rest of the world, see above.
> It eventually has to come down to, "I'm an American, so I'm entitled to get paid more than everybody else on the planet for doing a given job."
Sure, if you don't want to think critically about the issue at all. Absolutely agree under that circumstance. But since many foreign workers are not able to job shop, they become a lower-cost source of labor that depresses wages for everyone (other foreign workers included) because their commitment to their host company is like a figurative gun to the head. I have literally no problems with the H1B system except for when companies bring them on primarily to lower their own personnel costs. I don't even mind when companies use them despite there being existing labor in the talent pool for them (which is usually the case, despite protestations), but then to pay them below going market rate* is my issue.
I'm not a software engineer here like most, though I dabble for fun. I am, however, experienced in labor market analysis and workforce planning. And, again, I don't care how many foreign workers any given organization has provided they aren't used primarily as a cost-reduction mechanism (if they are onshore). If a company wants you to work in America they should pay you like an American.
*This isn't a terribly fuzzy metric. Typical compensation for a given job in a given geography is readily accessible. Market-specific salary surveys, benchmarked by contribution level, are a transactional norm for any company with a competent compensation team. They typically guide vs. determine and are often 18 months out of date (at least in my experience), but they're not a white whale and very useful.
My point is that you're competing with those unwashed, underprivileged foreign workers whether they work here in the US or not. Our economy is, and should be, global in nature. If we build the wall that some posters in this thread apparently want, we'll find that instead of locking everybody else out, we've locked ourselves in.
There is simply no way to ensure that an American engineer is innately more valuable than a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or African engineer, unless we deny ourselves the benefits of the work done by the latter. To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.
> There is simply no way to ensure that an American engineer is innately more valuable than a Chinese, Indian, Japanese, or African engineer
Nobody made any claim of the sort! In fact, I made the opposite: when they enter into a labor market with local considerations (cost of labor, community investments) they should be treated as an equal. Right now, they are not. And one of the primary ways they are not is by being employer-constrained. That's the main issue I take umbrage with! Bring as many over as we want, but let them exist in the labor pool.
> To the extent geography or national boundaries come into play, these are artificial factors that we will all ultimately be better off without.
These are not artificial factors for any of the players involved. May we be better off without them? Probably so, in the long-run. But they do exist today. Maybe in a computer simulation they can be treated as such, but right now those "artificial factors" have exceptionally real consequences in the world we live in. While national boundaries may be an "artificial factor", cost of living is not, nor is added cost of labor due to social commitments at the national level. Nor are dozens of other things.
I agree that being locked to one employer is a kind of market distortion. Would you say non-compete clauses are too? I know they're not enforceable in California, but other states effectively lock local workers to their company because they're not allowed to move to another company in the same industry within a year or two of quitting.
Should we try to prevent companies from legally hiring local workers with non-compete clauses in their contracts? I think so. And I think it's a bigger issue than immigrants from the point of view of artificial wage distortion. Yet somehow these threads about immigrant workers get a lot more enthusiasm than threads about non-compete, so there's obviously something else to it. And I can't see what else besides the GP's "I'm an American".
These companies depress wages for the people that live & work in the US though, not just for the people they displace. The downstream effects on the places impacted mean this is a consequence that ripples through communities of people who live in and support their nation of residence.
Foreign workers (fw) who work for less $ than the Domestic worker (dw) drive down wages. In this case fw is benefited by making more than they would in native country, while dw makes less than the old rate.
Paying old rate generally means dw keeps old rate, while fw makes nothing. This is the inverse where the dw is benefited at the expense of the fw.
If all people are equal who should recieve the benift?
What's the utility to people in dw society of providing benefits to fw? This has happened across broad industries and dw through their governments have signed trade deals that usually include retraining for the workers affected. Otherwise, dw and their governments end up subsidizing the costs of corporations making bank which has so little social benefit that it's really not normal to allow it to go on.
It's not a free for all in places like India to allow fw to displace their dw or drive down their dw salaries. The US is getting taken for a ride with these policies.
dw's society can produce goods at lower cost than without fw. But really there doesn't need to be any benefit to dw's society unless dw's people consider themselves privileged and deserving a better life than the world's poor simply because they happened to be born into it.
No, not really. If the bosses and investors are taking the surplus value, defined as the gap between wages+capital costs and actual revenues, then the worker is exploited.
That is technically correct (the best kind of correct).
Just as I exploit electricity to provide light in my house, or exploit Exxon/Mobil when I derive $5 of utility from a gallon of gas that I swindled them into selling me for $2.50 or exploit Apple when I'd be willing to pay 50% more (or more) for my Macbook than they actually charge, because I use it to make money.
As applied to labor, "exploited" generally means something much stronger than "employed to a productive end".
The market in this case is being kept artificially inefficient to benefit corporations to the direct detriment of foreign workers and indirect detriment of local workers.
It's technically correct if you are a Marxist as Marx used the term that way. Otherwise the dictionary has "The action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work."
I agree with you (at least assume strongly that I do), but I couldn't find a dictionary with that as the first definition. Most of the first definitions were more along the lines of "make full use of and derive benefit from (a resource)", making GP technically correct.
I've had some experience with the H1B staffing mills, and yeah, I'd say exploited is pretty fair, if you compare the work they could be doing vs the work they are doing. I would imagine most of those people would call it a fair trade to be in America, but I really think it's a lose lose scenario for the country (which could be benefitting from the full measure of their productivity) and the worker (because they're wasting their precious time).
What your missing missing out is the societal destruction of the USA inherit in highly polarized wealth in a society. Crime increases with wealth inequality and it's because of companies exploiting visa's like the H1B.
You've seen this crime yourself why would you want to make America crap like the Phillipines?
Trivially non-contradictory. Consider a hypothetical situation in which all the good skilled workers are on visa statuses that do not permit work and have missed the H-1B lottery. Both things are then true.
The comment isn't talking about local workers. It is talking about (a) foreign workers who are skilled, (b) low-wage less-skilled foreign workers and how the H-1B fails to achieve its stated aim in two respects because it's easy for there to be unemployed (a) and employed (b).
The comment contains no argument that local workers are being replaced.
consider: age discrimination; or an otherwise very talented person is tied to some location (eg. home, or a rural town, due to dependents, or disability), or has the same name as someone "bad" in the news and thus look scary when googled (eg. "I'm John Tillman the nice Portland engineer not John Tillman the NY rapist!" (name is random contrived example)), or once made an un-PC undeletable post in a public forum, or is non-English-speaking, or simply bad with social skills but otherwise great engineer, etc. Also, much of the modern recruiting/hiring culture is still very oriented towards erring on the side of false negative/rejection, and riddled with irrationality and institutionalized jerky behavior.
If an engineer is Famous (due to several public accomplishments), like yourself, you may not have to encounter any of this. "Who cares where he lives or what he's said or how much money he wants, or age... it's Walter Bright!"
Wait til TTIP and TPP becomes law. Times are good now, but once hilary gets elected and these "free" trade agreements gets signed, the monied masters will immediately raise interest rates and cause a recession which will give cover for businesses to lay off a large swathe of workers ( this time its going to be IT/developers/tech workers who are going to face the brunt of it ) and offshore a lot of these jobs.
H1B is a significant problem, but so is offshoring. From a business point of view, the cost savings are too immense to ignore. If you can pay a foreigner $5K to do something an american workers does for $50K and pocket the $45K annual difference, it's a no-brainer to corporate executives. The shareholders will benefits and the C-Suite will benefit, the workers will suffer.
There is a reason why the leftist and rightist establishment are working so hard to get hilary elected. The amount of pro-Hilary propaganda on NPR, NYTimes, LATimes, etc was nearly unbearable while she was fighting against Sanders. Now that Sanders is done, I might have to stop consuming these media for the next few months.
As much as we like to pretend, there isn't two parties. There is one party ( the elite ), that control both parties to gives an illusion of choice. Even the republican establishment are trying to undermine Trump to give Hilary the presidency.
Complete protectionism/isolation isn't a good thing. But extreme liberal trade policies aren't a good thing either. Thought maybe Trump will get the nod and push policies towards the center, but there is too much money at stake for the elite so they are going to force hilary, TTIP, TPP, etc on us no matter what.
We are going to replace one corrupt chicago politician with another.
Assuming the off-shore worker is 10% as effective as the on-shore worker, which, I'll be blunt, I'm not so sure about considering the anecdata I've amassed over the years working with some of these outsourcing body shops, like Tata, HCL, Cognizant, Infosys, etc.
I think that a reasonable person could disagree with what you're saying here, but I don't think that justifies the downvotes. Your comment is reasoned and mostly uninflammatory, albeit considered a little "out-there" by most people. In the back of my mind, I tend to agree with much of what you say here.
> Complete protectionism/isolation isn't a good thing. But extreme liberal trade policies aren't a good thing either.
I'm just trying to figure out how we got into this bizarro world where being supportive of a trade policies with your 12 closest allies, notably leaving out the two countries with the second and third largest economies (and growing rapidly), earns you the label of being "pro-trade".
How the hell did that become our idea of a non-isolationist trade policy? It's the antithesis of free trade, particularly when you look 10 or 20 years forward and realize this treaty is (effectively) disincentivizing trade with what will be the two largest economies.
This causes some pretty strong mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, foreign workers are already disadvantaged compared with domestic workers and H1-B caps are absurdly low. I keep failing to see why we are all supposed to open world markets to the flow of every sort of capital and goods except labor, or why someone deserves a job for being born American, rather than Indian (Note that I feel the same way when Americans are disadvantaged elsewhere for similar reasons[1]). On the other hand, a clause requiring that you never say something bad about your employer nor discuss the situation under which you were laid off seems not only abusive, but repugnantly so. In a country that constitutionally enshrines free speech, the ability to sign away for money your right to complain publicly about a person or organization seems particularly dangerous, and the act of asking someone to do so seems truly vile.
The main issue is US employees are fortunate enough to have protections under the law, protections hard fought by unions, literally. Those protections cost money but are sensible, such as safety regulations, child labor laws, the right to not be discriminated against, minimum wage, no harassment, physical violence, etc.
When using Indian labor offshore, or any underdeveloped economy really, those protections are mostly gone because India doesn't protect their employees like the US does, which is also unfortunate.
Companies also benefit from the US legal system and infrastructure, including the liability protection from corporations, tax breaks, roads, public utilities, police, etc, all which are paid for by taxpayers.
Of course, to be fair, US corporations who benefit mostly from foreign labor should move their corporation to the country of their labor. Of course they don't want to do that, because of corruption, subpar legal system, infrastructure, etc. They want it both ways. Protection and benefits from the US government and cheap labor where the labor doesn't have the same protection.
It's not just wages US labor is losing. To compete, US labor has to give up all our labor benefits while still paying for corporate benefits through tax dollars. Taxpayers are also on the hook for people who can't find jobs while corporations do nothing but benefit. It's really another wealth transfer from the bottom and middle, up.
Besides it's against the spirit of the law. I'm ok with offshoring if US corporations are OK with losing all their tax breaks. I didn't think so.
Note that this is not really about offshoring. Offshoring falls under the "free movement of every form of capital and goods, except labor" that I mentioned and it is complicated for everyone involved. You get competition from labor without legal protections which can't move to places where they would have such protections, nor easily obtain them at home. We get companies that are pretty much untouchable by our legal systems. On the other hand, you/we get cheaper goods and a lot of people get better jobs than the alternative. Short of encoding better labor rights at the WTO/U.N. level, I don't see a fair long term solution for that one.
In the case of foreign workers in the U.S., labor protections and laws apply (except perhaps some employment mobility in some industries), and the employees involved pay taxes into the U.S. (without representation, I might add). So I don't see those as being the same situation, even if the final underlying cause (severe wealth disparity among nations due to historical reasons) is the same.
Yes, H1B is a different animal than offshoring as it is much more fair to the worker. Funny that the H1B has much more regulation than offshoring. That's probably why it's more fair.
Also, tech workers uses computers and do have free movement by remoting. Managers typically don't allow it. Economically, that's a heck of a lot of power.
Anyway, I'm pretty content with the current status of H1B in spirit. This company obviously didn't attempt to find domestic labor before using H1B, so they are in violation of the agreement. I think the employee(s) responsible should stand trial to see if the loopholes are indeed lawful. If not, I think they should be fined or imprisoned, whatever the law allows. I think they should lose all H1B privileges for 2 years and all of their current H1B's should be allowed to move to another US company. Non of that will never happen though.
It's only fair, you and I would face trial for shoplifting a $1 candy bar, something paid for by taxpayers that directly benefits corporations through determent, among other things.
Absolutely, happens all the time. If a company security team catches you, it's up to the company to press charges, but they can and they do. It includes arrest and trial. Here's an NPR story on it I found with Google.
> I keep failing to see why we are all supposed to open world markets to the flow of every sort of capital and goods except labor, or why someone deserves a job for being born American, rather than Indian (Note that I feel the same way when Americans are disadvantaged elsewhere for similar reasons[1]).
Neither of those conclusions are necessary in order to be against H1B abuse. Abusers of the program distort the labour market artificially and depress salaries by replacing Americans with foreign workers who are tied to one employer and therefore unable to negotiate for a proper salary. The italicized portion is what we should find troubling, not merely that foreigners are moving to America to work. This results in a transfer of wealth from the working population to employers who no longer need to pay prevailing market wages.
> The italicized portion is what we should find troubling
I do too. But I also realize that, right now, scrapping the H1B program means higher barriers to immigration, rather than replacing it with full work-and-residence rights for qualified foreigners. If the choice is between H1B or open-borders/conditional-green-card (e.g. skills-plus-clean-record based), I'd take option number 2, of course. Right now the national dialog seems to be H1B vs "go back to Mexico! We will build a wall!".
I'd like to add that full rights for guest workers could possibly solve the problem outright. Let the worker walk out and find a better job the day they land in the airport or cross the border or change status to worker. Make any "bond" illegal and declare the employer may not seek restitution for the worker walking out in search of greener pastures.
While this is definitely helpful, it solves a different problem.
You're assuming that H1Bs are only awarded to highly skilled workers. Therefore, if they are being "underpaid" they could get other jobs that would pay them more.
However, this is not currently true. Currently the problem is that certain companies are exploiting the H1B program to get workers who are "high skilled" but only meeting the minimum requirements[1]. As a result, these "minimum requirement" H1B holders are not being "underpaid" they are appropriately paid for their skill level, while still:
1. Hindering higher skilled workers from attaining H1Bs.
2. Undercutting the current US workers salaries.
Meanwhile, giving H1Bs via auction(ideally, based on the employees yearly compensation), ensure that the US only takes the highest skilled workers[2]. Encouraging an import of the world's best. Larger salaries for H1B holders on average, therefore more taxes collected.
[1] Because the minimum requirements are actually quite vague and to anyone not in the tech field, its really hard to asses the technical abilities of a potential employee.
[2] Utilizing salary as a proxy for skill, based on capitalistic company's abilities to accurately compensate skill.
I like this idea. However, I must ask what safeguards do we have from preventing this class from turning into the eb5 or indeed should we try to prevent h1b from turning into eb5?
H1Bs allocated via a typical auction, would not do much good. Except mean that companies with the most money, could buy them and then under pay their employees.
The best approach I've heard is the stack rank based on "minimum yearly income"[1], the top X number of potential employees are awarded H1Bs.
At the end of the year, the immigration office checks with the IRS. If the employee was fired/quit or was not paid more than the "minimum yearly income" the sponsoring company is forced to pay the difference in fines. i.e. At the end of the year, that H1B has to have cost the company at least the disclosed "minimum yearly income".
[1] "minimum yearly income" is some value less than: base salary + cash bonus + stock awards
> H1Bs allocated via a typical auction, would not do much good. Except mean that companies with the most money, could buy them and then under pay their employees.
Well the idea is that the auction "bid" isn't for a fee to the state, it's for the actual salary. Companies would then compete to pay their immigrant laborers more.
These Carly Fiorina-style arguments that no one has a special right to a job are ignoring a lot of context. In a world with even handed regulation and no borders, that could make sense. But that is not the world we live in. The current situation is not that trade is completely deregulated and labor is tied up in red tape. What is really happening is that there is a complex surface area of varying degrees of regulation and deregulation that in most cases benefits an elite class at the expense of others. Companies in America take advantage of rights to purchase land, subsidies, government contracts, military protection, tax advantages, tariffs, etc, all funded by American tax payers. Why wouldn't it be fair for Americans to have an advantage in the American market place? I actually agree that in an ideal world nations and borders wouldnt exist. But as long as the majority see benefit in their existence and they are being propped up by the powers that be, why would you kick the legs out from any small advantage you have from being a citizen of one?
Said in another way, capital is fungible but labor is not. This means capital can flow readily to the lowest cost suppliers and workers but workers cannot flow readily to higher paying employers.
This leads to a mismatch where, temporarily, employers can capture higher-skilled workers at lower costs.
Another comment, how are anti-disparagement clauses not a violation of first amendment rights?
> Another comment, how are anti-disparagement clauses not a violation of first amendment rights?
This is a common misunderstanding of the first amendment. It's a short amendment, shorter than your comment, so you might as well just read the amendment.
> Another comment, how are anti-disparagement clauses not a violation of first amendment rights?
First amendment applies to Congress (and after the 14th amendment, the state governments), not to any private citizen or organization. You're free to make private agreements that sign away any rights you have, except (after the 13th amendment) your freedom.
Thanks for the clarification. Makes sense. It feels weird there aren't basic worker protections against such agreements but I think I get it - people are free or not free to enter into such agreements and receive benefits for doing so.
Immigrants arriving would benefit the economy (as long as they aren't too poor and take lots of welfare), at least ideally speaking.
> Why wouldn't it be fair for Americans to have an advantage in the American market place?
This is pointless, just like banning trade with X country to allow more jobs to be in America. It looks good on the surface, but really Americans would be losing out on the cheaper prices of X country's goods and services.
The key idea is that trades are mutually beneficial. When an employer hires an immigrant employee, they both gain.
Ceteris paribus allowing anyone in the world to take a job if the employer wants them leads to better outcomes on average. That includes the situation where America is paying for global protection and other special negotiated treaties.
Even if you wanted to specially protect American workers, it would still be more beneficial to allow anyone to take the job then use the excess GDP to make up for the lost wages of Americans. The estimate by Borjas (the most anti-immigrant economist) is that wages would drop at most 5% (IIRC) if open borders happened.
Not narrowly defined (as in, it is not the government preventing you from expressing a political opinion). But it does have the whiff of a coerced surrendering of one's rights. Suppose you could sign a completely unbreakable "indentured servitude" contract with another person, whereby by a specific payment now, you are required to work for them exclusively for the next 10 years in whichever capacity they so chose (as long as the job is legal), without further pay and without the option to resign (even by returning the money or declaring bankruptcy). The above would probably not be slavery in the legal/historical sense, but I think no country that disallows slavery should allow such contract either.
All contracts have remedies for breach of contract. Note that jail is not a valid remedy. I've signed non-disparagement contracts, where the remedy was I had to pay back the money. Seems quite reasonable to me, and not a violation of my rights.
Charging someone with libel or slander is fundamentally different than suing for breach of contract. For example, you don't need an anti-disparagement contract with someone to sue for slander, nor is disparagement necessarily slander.
Now, Congress could pass a law saying the anti-disparagement contracts are unenforceable. But would we really want that? Suppose you hire a nanny to watch your kids, and then she quits and writes a tell-all book about your private, embarrassing personal life? You can bet that nannies for high-profile people have anti-disparagement contracts, and are paid well as a consequence. Which seems quite reasonable to me.
You might feel different if you were a celebrity. I know one, and it's sad to see the curtains always drawn on the windows of the house, the paparazzi camped out in front, etc. I could see a nanny being hired and then threatening the celebrity with a tell-all book, or just cashing in on it anyway.
I don't understand your point. The condition of employment at many places, not just celebrities, is that you don't talk about it outside of work. You get well paid for this discretion. Do you think that is a violation of your rights? I don't, the moment you accept the money.
How about NDAs? Should they be unenforceable?
How about Secret Service agents protecting the President. Should they not have to zip their lips about what they see and hear about what goes on in the White House? Is that a violation of their rights to accept such conditions of employment?
Many disputes are settled with the terms being non-disclosed. Should those be unenforceable, too?
> Now some of the workers who were displaced are starting to speak out, despite severance agreements prohibiting them from criticizing their former employers.
You can easily reveal the facts it in a totally non-critical way.
At ABC Data, workers were encouraged to collaborate with management to come up with creative solutions to streamline processes and save costs. When I realized that ABC could save money by replacing me with an equally capable, yet much cheaper worker visiting the country on a temporary work permit, I immediately pitched this idea at the next big cross-departmental meeting. There was much resistance among management. They objected on the basis of the unique knowledge and skills that I bring to the team, and how we all "go way back" to the startup days. In the end they saw it my way and agreed to relocate my posterior to that outdoor concrete fixture which separates the road from the sidewalk or lawn. I was unfortunately not able to talk them out of the egregiously generous severance package, though even with that expenditure, ABC ends up ahead. ABC is a great company to invest in with terrific fundamentals and future prospects, and is led by a highly ethical team whose decisions are beyond reproach.
IANAL but suspect disparagement is defined in such a way that a corporation's attorneys could prove this type of comment caused harm to the company, and thus meets the definition.
I find it interesting the amount of sudden vitriol by some of the formerly "free market" supporters that thought that the terrible job market for non-STEM majors would never, ever hit the technology industry. Those that decry artistry and creative industry jobs as beneath them and their money, those that felt working class people were just too lazy to find "good" jobs, and generally feeling apathy if not schadenfreude for those suffering from the corporate recovery of 2010-present.
Those same free marketers also agreed with the destruction of unions and protections like minimum wage. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, look at the comments. "H1-Bs are depressing prices" have replaced "why should I pay for music and movies" and "any industry that relies on ads should die".
Well, now with the tables turned, why should working class Americans and artists and content creators give one shit that the technology industry is suffering from "depressed salaries". Suffer with the rest of America.
I agree with you, actually; you can't have your cake and eat it, too. I believe employees in every field should be looking out for themselves. Signing a non-disparagement agreement is ridiculous. The company needs you to train the replacement, so make them pay through the nose. If they just say, get out, don't let the door hit you etc. -- fine. Move on. Don't dig your own grave then lie down in it.
People need to keep their resume up to date, keep testing the market, and be ready to move on if a superior opportunity arises, or if they become aware of an H1B replacement scheme in their group. That's the only real way to stop these practices; make the employers aware that people can and will walk if not treated right.
Former H1-B Worker as well. I was sponsored by Zynga Inc and Moz. Finally got my green card recently. As other people have pointed out above, I believe the problem relies on who is sponsoring these candidates. The following list speaks by itself:
Google, Facebook, Amazon and even Tesla or Palantir should be in the top spots. Setting a minimum wage to $100,000 would filter most of the sweat show applications out.
But it would also filter out most of the people outside of the Bay Area, New York and Chicago. In Missouri, for instance you aren't paying 100K to someone that isn't pretty darned senior: 65-70K is a competitive salary right out of school around here. So a recent foreign graduate would have to move to the bay.
We also have to understand that consulting companies are pretty great options when you want to get a green card (although not necessarily the big ones): If you are a consultant, and you work for a company doing layoffs, your consulting firm won't drop you like a rock, and might be interested in getting you another gig. If the same thing happens to you when you are working directly for a company, you have a much smaller clock before you should leave the country. When a Green Card wait can be 10 years, the chances you'll work for a company that has a few rounds of layoffs are very high.
That's a good point. It would obviously need to be a more complicated system. I think it would be good to prioritize companies like Google, Facebook and the likes but good, honest consulting companies shouldn't be excluded. Factors like innovation, skill scarcity and wage/cost of living can be weighed in.
That happened to me. I actually was at Zynga when they closed studios and I needed to start my green card application from scratch.
It doesn't need to be complicated. Just a rule that the employee must be paid a minimum of the median average wage of any similar domestic employees in the company, or the market average if there aren't any.
I hear you. Although, I believe that's one of the loopholes that companies like Infosys exploits. They pay just above market average and they have a really high number of H1B employees, bordering on the limit. Also, market average fluctuates a lot between regions so it can be circumvented as well. Hard problem....
I am not surprised that companies that are broken enough to do the outsourcing in the first place are also often broken enough to have this term in severance agreements. But it really should not be standard.
Company lawyers think of maximizing the company's power and safety in every contract. If the clause is not illegal and improves that equation, it'll be standard.
Is it really broken to fight an artificial government imposed monopoly, which is what labor restrictions on foreigners is? This isn't something that's going to make the incumbents destitute. They're IT workers, eminently hire-able and highly paid. I'm sure they can cope with a pay cut unless they've been living beyond their means, which would get them in trouble no matter what their income.
The way I read it, the anti-H1B movement and awareness is gaining steam. It would be interesting the stance Hillary/Trump takes next year after being sworn in.
It's always amazing that the H-1Bs who have these rare skills that are unavailable in US citizens nonetheless always seem to require training by the native workers they are replacing.
At this point, with both Corporate abuses from American corporations and the H1-B holding companies along with the frequency with which we've seen the more expensive American work replaced with a much cheaper "guest" worker, I believe we need to ask ourselves, do we not have enough surplus American workers that are unemployed such that the H1-B program might not be necessary for a year or two until we've managed to get the unemployed American workers back to work?
One of the best developers I've ever worked with is here on an H1B. He's better than 95% of all the US Software Engineers I've ever worked with. He runs an open source project in his spare time and gives talks to educate the community. He's the kind of person the visa is for and he is paid appropriately for a senior engineer (not a cheap import).
The problem is the mostly Indian outsourcing companies. They ballot-stuff the H1B process every year. I talked to an Indian engineer in the US on J1. He said these three companies come to every Indian University and indiscriminately "hire" every single graduate to sign up for H1B, regardless of skill, need, or ability. Then if they "win" they get a to come to the USA, so of course most take the offer. It is implicitly understood that they will work for low wages and in difficult conditions but the goal is not to ask questions or rock the boat and wait until they get a green card.
I don't blame the workers but it is clearly an abuse of the system; Infosys isn't hiring India's brightest engineers to import as contractors. They're grabbing as many people with a pulse as possible to ballot-stuff H1B applications.
That could be solved by restricting applications to X per applicant, including all affiliated companies and subcontractors.
The other H1B scam is that you only have to pay a software engineer around $60-$70k to qualify as "highly paid". I'm not sure what the exact trick in the rules is but the consulting companies can and do pay well below market rates for engineers and it's perfectly legal.
That low salary figure must be based off of homing them on some non-SF/Seattle/Austin/NYC city. There are a lot of places in the US where making 60-70k individually puts you into the top 5-10% of the populace.
>Infosys isn't hiring India's brightest engineers to import as contractors.
Not only Infosys, not a single Indian company mentioned here in this thread is hiring the best. Actually, the best here typically don't opt for the consulting/outsourcing companies.
From a cursory glance with my limited knowledge, that sounds like a very naive approach and one which will not pass a vote.
The problem is that of lower skilled (not low skilled) but cheaper labour from the body shop consultancies mixed with higher skilled ones in the same H1B pool.
As someone somewhere suggested, instead of a lottery, an auction of the seats would in a sense lead to lesser pay difference between the native and outsourced worker.
This is just theory that needs to be given a deep though.
The bottomline is that the H1B serves as a competitive advantage to the US. Software, now that it is eating the world, is a very important part of the economy... and the US needs to invest in giving it's corporation whatever advantages it can w.r.t technology.
The consequence of stopping the H1B altogether would be a shortage of technical workers, leading to the rise in software expenses for companies and maybe resulting in the US & US corporation to lose their technical advantage & leading positions globally.
Perhaps it is naive however, I did not suggest stopping it altogether, the idea is to merely restore some balance back into a system that seems to have gotten out of balance.
The auction is a good idea, but I fear it will somehow be twisted and abused as well.
Couple of things about H1B: 1. While H1B workers are cheaper, they are also pretty much stuck with their employer. Not 100% but much less mobility than citizen. Sorry, this reeks just a wee bit of indentured servitude. 2. If you take Corp. Execs at their word, and that rising H1B caps is good for country, then would be good for a journalist to probe: what about a 10M worker cap? Or 1.5 billion worker cap? That would make america even stronger, no?
In Canada Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program was changed. It was getting to the point where entire industries changed overnight out with long-time employees and in with near slave wage "TFWs" (many people just say refer to the people as TFWs).
It got so bad it became a huge political hot potato and the law was changed resulting in many TFWs disappearing as fast as they arrived.
The law here was similar to the TFW laws in the US and it was abused the same way. The law was meant as a way businesses could get help by hiring cheaper labour if they couldn't find local workers. But of course hiring someone at $5/hour versus $11/hour is strong motivation for a business to cheat.
This was every industry too each had its own preferred ethnicity mining (Chinese), fast food (Filipino), IT (India), agriculture (Central American). It's only now changing back to local people born in Canada.
I don't have any ill will against the TFW workers it's the businesses who are the ones who ruined the purpose of the TFW law and now have to suffer for it.
$5/hour sounds like they were violating minimum wage law which is now about $11/hour. Surely that itself is the problem, not whether the workers were foreign or local, or how much above minimum wage they were paid.
No Canadian citizen would ever be paid less than minimum wage it was only the TFW who could be paid that.
I'm not sure of the exact wage but I know it was less than the minimum wage which is roughly $11/hour, although each province sets its own rate.
There were also problems of TFWs being house in apartments that the business owner owned and took wages for rent. Often having a dozens of people in a small apartment.
Other reports of passports being confiscated and return tickets home revoked. It's an embarrassment and thankfully the previous right wing government has been turfed.
I think the law now states TFW get the same pay and only to fill labour shortages since the program was meant to fix a labour shortage and nothing to do with wages.
I'm not sure I get this - are the workers coming in to replace them actually in the USA physically? Are they staying in the USA physically?
I mean is this offshoring / outsourcing or is it replacing with cheaper workers?
Why can't the existing employees compete for the jobs? I mean WIPRO must have going through some pretty big pre sales workups, so who else was competing?
I think what I mean is that doing this in secret implies that no one doing the actual job was ever consulted about the viability of outsourcing / replacing them / so you never get a real understanding of the costs or opportunities for improvement (essentially automating a bad process)
In summary - any company that does this cheap shot is usually one that is going to get its ass handed to it by a better more automated competitor.
I work for []. They've had various offshored positions for years, working as outside contractors. For the last several years, they've been opening foreign offices and hiring direct employees of the corporation. Last year across some US-based offices, they split the employees into three groups, each roughly 1/3 of the office. Group 1 had their last day of work that day. Group 2 was told that they'd be training their replacements for the next 3-12 months, with large bonuses (60% of their wages for the time) if they stayed as long as the company wanted. Group 3 still works there (except the smarter ones who have bailed).
After* that day, they increased hiring in certain foreign countries known for having lower wages. I've been watching coworkers doing "Transfers Of Information" to the people replacing them.
If we could live in my area on wages similar to what is reasonable in the foreign workers' hometowns, maybe we could compete for the positions.
Abbott contracted with Wipro, who appears to be performing the work locally, though Wipro claims only 20% h1b labor.
Abbott tried to reduce the role of foreigners in the layoffs. Only about 20
percent of the workers brought in by Wipro would be foreigners on H-1B
visas, Mr. Stoffel said, while the rest would be American workers.
I thought the idea was 0% H-1B labor? You can't replace an American job with H-1B?
The requirements seem very stringent in writing but apparently utterly useless and ineffective in practice, or clearly both executives for Abott and Wipro would be facing criminal prosecution. You should not be able to circumvent the restrictions by a single layer of contract work.
The goal of the system is to use the guest worker program to augment your current workers with talent that you are unable to find and staff here in the US. The requirement is not at 40 - 60% of the cost you pay your US employees, but in skills that you cannot find or fill with US domestic workers.
These "scarce" skills and requirements are trivially gamed on a regular basis. Large numbers of positions that are eventually filled by H-1Bs don't, in truth, require skills and experience that you simply can't find domestically.
Sure, every once in a while you need a nuclear engineer or some other domain expert in a very, very narrow domain, and you may have a genuine shortage of talent. But for general-purpose IT and commodity development, these skill are not in short supply domestically if you're willing to pay market salaries.
As a Indian and worked in Indian body shops (but who never traveled aboard). My views on Indian-body shop immigrants :
In 2005, when I completed university masters degree. Our class has around 60 students, I'm pretty sure may be 5 or 6 of (1%) them are talented and good in computers. Most of us took IT job. We had chances to immigrate to other as early as 2007 through Indian body shops like Wipro, Infy, Tata, CTS etc.
In 2016, now most of them (60%) of them working in aboard. May be 40% in USA and 20% EU/ROW. How did almost 59% of these not-so talented friends landed in other countries? Did they gained sound knowledge in those 48 months or later. I really _really_ doubt that. Its because we are low-cost workers and got close to Indian IT management. Typical Indian IT managers are ass*. They want boot-lickers not skilled developers. So its easy for unskilled people to land in other countries in the name of skilled-person. I know few guys who worked in non-IT companies (later created fake IT experiences) joined these body shops and now living in US.
I assume almost 80-90% IT Indians in US are helping American companies simply because he/she is low-cost worker. Its not like US companies cant find local talent to fill these roles, but they want low-cost solution.
If you got laid-off due to low-cost workers, please remember, its the US company & IT Body-shop bosses & stock-holders financially
benefited a lot from these lay-offs not necessarily the worker who replaced you or the poor-outsourced IT slaves.
one simple solution : Please tighten the visa-interview process, make it more like real IT company interview (ask about data-structures and algorithms etc). This will ensure immigration rates from body-shops drop from 60%(from my numbers above) to 5% max.
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My personal experience with Indian & US/foreign freelancers greatly differ. Even though US/foreign freelancers are costly (1USD:66 INR), I find them worthy. They go-out and put extra-effort to finish the task. With Indian freelancers, they just want to finish the task quickly and get the paid. I find it amusing that US companies hire us for of lack-of talents there :)
"Marco Peña was among about 150 technology workers who were laid off....." Going on a limb but guessing Mr.Peña might be of hispanic origin. Most talk about Trump has been tone, but little of substance. Sizzle vs steak, and all. My hunch is that most of Pundits&Pols class focus too much on tone and too little on what Trump would actually likely do. And that there are many Mr.Peña's for whom, while the would prefer nicer words coming out of TV set, are more concerned with what their wallets are saying. And that while Trump might take us to uncertain unknown, Clinton is doubling down on a crappy known.
So, after thirteen years of my loyal and dedicated service, you're offering me $10,400 severance, six weeks notice (during which I must train my H1B half-price replacement), if and only if I sign a non-disparagement agreement? And otherwise, I'm out on my butt tomorrow?
No. You're going to give me one year's salary with benefits (after all, Lester Burnham got away with it in "American Beauty"). You're also going to pay me DOUBLE during the period that I am training the half price indentured servant who you imagine is going to replace me. Mind you, he'll never replace my previous loyalty and dedication; that's not something you can train into someone in six weeks... or ever. You have to earn loyalty, a lesson you'll discover over the next few months as you screw your employees.
Also, you will sign a mutual non-disparagement agreement; I say nothing bad about you, and you say nothing bad about me, and my lawyer says if you spread malicious and damaging gossip about me, it will cost me one million dollars in lost career potential, so that's what you will owe me if you do so -- plus punitive damages.
And if you don't give me what I want, I'm quitting as of 5pm today and will immediately write a book and blog about the stupidity of management here at Wrecked Lives Inc. In fact I've already reserved the domain names that will be appropriate for my upcoming tell-all. Lots of luck stopping me; I'll only tell the truth, and the First Amendment protects me. If you try to sue me, I'll sue you back, and the resulting publicity will make my book and my blog and my Youtube channel famous enough that I'll never need to work again. Your investors and commercial partners will also hear about it. So make my day.
I'm not saying most people would do this, or even if they did, that they would get away with it, but it's how a person in that situation ought to respond. Granted, we in the U.S. have at-will employment, granted it's a free market, and sometimes the smartest move is to simply move on and put this behind you. But we're also human beings with emotions, loyalties, and a sense of betrayal, and when a management team tries to pull the H1b-swap-and-gag on the employees, they have to recognize the price.
I've never even had the option to sign a no disparagement clause for a settlement like that. I've had to support my family with what I already had whether I liked it or not. So what they did is shitty, but I have a hard time feeling bad for the 1% who complain that they have the option of getting more money by signing away their rights if they so choose.
Immigration for "skilled" workers is flawed in US
Please look at other countries ( point based system ) and for the love of sanity just adopt best practices ...
flaws:
1) Skilled worker immigration should be based on "skills" (country of origin is incorrect: Indian and Chinese immigrants suffer, US workforce also suffers)
2) Immigration should be tied to individuals, influence from employer has conflict of interest. (employer wants to make money even if it comes at the cost of employees ability to immigrate)
3) Immigration as whole should be based on what new individuals bring to the table (skills, age when joining workforce, true intent and ability to adopt new country)
Point 3 is complex and involves true value for US or country of adoption.
*
Immigration overall is not as complex or difficult as most politicians publicize it, it has become far more political than it needs to be, thank you President Obama.
Another commenter alluded to it, but I find both the article and the discussion miss what is really going on. It seems like a lot of firms are basically outsourcing their IT workforce; something that has been going on for a long time now.
For most businesses, IT is a cost center, and if that cost can be minimized, they will do so, full stop. What the articles doesn't go into detail is whether those workers that are being trained will continue to work in the US, or whether they are in the US temporarily to understand the IT infrastructure and processes. It seems to me that the latter is the case here. Again, outsourcing has been going on for the longest time, and it really confounds me how many times the same issue will be brought up.
There is a simple solution, particularly in the context of congressional or other government investigations: subpoena them. Nondisparagement clauses don't & can't cover compelled testimony.
It's just businesses abusing the system. We need more legislation in place to keep businesses from Harmon Americans and shooting themselves in the foot long term. American workers who support unfeddered capitalism always end up wondering why they are starving when they supported tax cuts for the wealthy and big business while leaving no money to pay for the fallout of their disasterous decisions. Sometimes you get what you asked for.
H1-B isn't just abused to depress wages. Mediocre managers love it because docile H1-B body shop contractors are no threat to their careers. This leads to bad corporate IT quality and reduced competitiveness in US enterprises. You can even get them to pantomime the Agile thing and look all progressive and shit, even though those H1-Bs will never rock the boat.
A lot of uproar, but have you ever tried to teach a 60yo veteran working his paper trail to switch to python? The laid off personnel did not have the required skillset, and would be fired regardless of the source of replacement, H1B or local.
Honest question: if a guy in India can do the same job as a guy in the US, but coming from a country with worse economy agrees to do it cheaper, why would I sympathize with the american guy in this situation?
Honestly, to me it seems like american working class have been really privileged compared to the world's population in 20th century, and globalization finally brings some equality — which might not be a good thing to american middle class, but is a great one for workers from China, India and all other 3rd world countries.
I have long been an open borders supporter, anyone that wants to come to the US (or any other nation) and make a life for themselves should be free to do so.
I am also 100% opposed to even the existence of the H1B visa program, this program is a modernized version of Indentured servitude that allows companies to take advantage of those employees by conditioning their immigration to their employment. These people are often coming from circumstances they do not want to return to, poverty, oppression, persecution, etc. So the threat of being fired and deported is a coercive force that employers use to exploit these workers.
I am fine with immigration, I am even fine if immigrant are willing to work for lower wages, provided that agreement is free from the threat of deportation...
Sorry, I don't feel bad for any of these people. Even the poorest Americans have better material conditions than a lot of Indian workers. Why do you think the Indian workers are willing to work for less?
While US has quite better conditions, India is not some messed up rogue state. Many come here for a obvious reason, Money. The currency exchange rate is 1 : 66 for USD : INR. So even with PPP into consideration, that's huge and so they work for way less.
I was just using the extreme example of the comparison of low-skilled workers in the two countries. Even in the opposite extreme I have no particular sympathy, in my mind it's analogous to one American programmer losing her job to another American programmer.
> Two years later, his work with a local tech contracting company pays $45,000 a year less than his Eversource salary. Many of his former co-workers are also struggling, Mr. Diangelo said, but stay quiet to avoid provoking the company.
So basically, the company wasn't making enough money to support the affluent pay of its workforce so it had to take drastic measures to stay afloat.
If you are suddenly making $45,000 a year less than you were... Perhaps you were getting paid above your true market value
Why not ask the recruiter or company you are applying for if they are willing to sponsor or work with an H1B visa (pretend you are in that position) and move on if they say yes. It will be interesting to see how well these companies do when all they can hire are H1B workers. After all, they can only get so many of those visas, and there is only a 30% chance that the application will actually be approved. They do need a certain number of US workers to have a stable workforce. With that gone, all their projects will be at risk of failure. How much of this risk do you think they can keep up before they are forced to give up these H1B abuses? I say abuses because there are clearly qualified local candidates willing to work at the market rate, but they lie about the market rate and lie about not finding local candidates to hire their cheap labor. Ideally, they should have a Job ID assigned to all jobs where they are considering H1Bs and post the name, wage, and qualifications of the hired candidate if they hire an H1B candidate. That way, potential employees that were passed up can see who they were passed up for, and complain to the right people if they were unfairly skipped on for a cheaper employee with poorer qualifications just because they were cheaper or would be cheaper in the long run because they would never get a raise or benefits or unemployment or pay into social security and medicaid.
> After all, they can only get so many of those visas, and there is only a 30% chance that the application will actually be approved.
Once an immigrant is granted an H-1B visa, they don't have to go through the lottery process again for the next 6 years. If within that 6 years they apply for a Green Card and reach a certain stage in the processing pipeline, they will get extensions any number of times past the 6 years too.
This is simple "they stole our jobs" rhetoric. It's just like taxi drivers with their "Uber stole our fares". If you can't compete, go to another market. If you're already overcharging, charge less. "Depressing local wages" is a good thing - it reduces the cost to society of getting productive things done.
The other argument about foreign workers being exploited is a clear sign of people pretending to care but really not caring. Sure there are some who were tricked into debt traps, but for most, they know what they're getting into and they know it's better than what they have back home. So they're making a step up in life. You want to kick them back down because you care about their welfare? What it means is you only care about people in America and once they leave, they lose their status as worthy human beings who deserve good working conditions.
I used to be a foreign laborer. I was paid minimum wage to do grunt work that locals didn't want. It was wonderful. The currency was worth more in my home country than where I was working. It helped me pay off my student loan. I would have hated to be forced out by someone trying to protect me from myself. My coworkers loved it too, they'd send money home to help their parents run their farms and pay off their own loans. They'd laugh at the lazy local workers who were mostly overweight and doing the same job more slowly.
