Granted that H-1B visas should ostensibly be filled only for positions where it is difficult to find qualified American citizens or permanent residents, but in all honesty are the Department of Labor's allegations really that surprising?
In the Bay Area, qualified job candidates are so scarce that it's quite common for citizens/permanent-residents to change jobs frequently. H1-B candidates are attractive for companies because it is harder for them to switch jobs. Companies can lock these employees for longer, and they can pay them less.
Rather than going after the companies, shouldn't we be focusing on fixing the H-1B visa process instead? It almost seems like the government has set up a broken process for companies to take advantage of, and instead of fixing things, they blame the companies.
Seems like such a simple issue to fix: the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary, say above 150K. Doctors included, I see no reason to protect them from competition. Hop jobs at will but need to maintain within 85% of that level.
If a company can't find workers, it should pay more up until a level that puts the competitiveness of the economy under question. Below that level, it's the citizen's right to a fair salary without labour dumping from a poor country. Above that level, it's everybody's right to fairly priced services without professional rents.
When I was on an h1b, I was making around 60k in the middle of the country, working for an amazing startup where we were ramen profitable. My skill set was highly specialized for the job. However, I couldn’t be a founder due to my visa status and we couldn’t pay each other even basic salaries. But we did some pretty amazing stuff for DARPA, DOD, and eventually some commercial enterprises.
You would price out people like me and make it virtually impossible for me to become a citizen eventually. But maybe that is by design and I don’t mind that opinion. All countries have nativist subsets of society so it is just a normal, natural stance.
Historically, america has attracted the best minds. Historically. But maybe now the populace believes the natives need to be protected from outside competition so that they can improve. Fair enough.
Yes there's nativism, but that's not the only thing here. In purely economic terms h1bn visa holders are potential employess that are extra attractive because they have less power; power they cannot get back and power other classes of residents cannot give up.
This is classic artificially divide the market and race to the bottom.
> You would price out people like me and make it virtually impossible for me to become a citizen eventually.
> Historically, america has attracted the best minds. Historically.
You are making the classic mistake of holding the macroeconomics constant. If we had sane immigration policies as proposed in this thread, the going rate might have been different.
Maybe you have been payed more, matching the coasts. Maybe we all would have been paid less, matching you. Maybe the incumbents wouldn't have had a competitive advantage such that you all had to be underpaid to be even ramen profitable.
The big point is given a skill set (projection of the labor market), residency status shouldn't be economically observable. Policy should be constrained to affecting the residency status distribution accross slices.
Off topic, but I hadn't heard this expression before so I looked it up and stumbled upon an interesting Paul Graham blog post derived from it: http://www.paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html
From my point of view - both excluding you from the job market or giving you general purpose work visa are better for the rest of the people in your industry(with second option better for you of course). Than work permit depending on sponsorship.
If you are valuable enough to work in US, you are valuable enough to do it as a full market participant without shackles or handicaps.
Exactly. The reason startup salaries are low is that the companies don't have the cash to pay. If they had customers who believed in them they would have cash. If they had investors who believed in them they would have cash.
Asking the government to let in someone whose company might eventually make it big enough to pay "the going rate" is asking the government to take a risk -- it's like asking them to invest in the company on the promise that the payoff will be as good or better than the next person in line.
Actually, we were very proud of being bootstrapped and not selling stake to an investor. But perhaps that is not a big deal to other people, so I can see your point.
Nativist implies a racial undertone. I would call it tax-payerist: regardless of your background, the state prioritizes the interests of current tax payers to the detriment of future potential citizens. It's true even for migrants on other types of visas, they should be protected from labour dumping.
It's the only way a rich nation can function really, the alternative being open borders and a rapidly decreasing standard of living. They all do this in some convoluted way, despite any rethoric to the contrary.
Future potential tax payers. Like myself btw. I am giving so much money to Uncle Sam these days that it makes me sad. I could invest in multiple YC companies with that money.
The problem with this is that "absolutely anybody in any country" can be a future potential tax payer, there are way more people willing to migrate into the US than there is economic capacity to integrate them all. Not to say that an excessive rate of migration, especially concentrated to certain hotspots, can have other political backlashes - see the Trump era.
A financial threshold is a nice way to limit that influx to manageable numbers, while guaranteeing they can mostly take care of themselves and become productive taxpayers and without exposing them to employer exploitation. The actual amount is debatable of course, it could be 2x the national average salary, 1x, 3x... or it could be dynamically allocated to fulfill an intake quota.
Wow finally someone thinking similarly. Never understood why people think the US owes immigrants (especially skilled ones) anything. If you are truly bright and gifted of course you can make a living in any country! On several occasions I've had my future immigration path clouded and people have always asked me "gosh I bet it's frustrating" but I'm like "not really". I do like the US and would love to continue being here but hey it's your country your rules do whatever. Im sure I'll be just fine in another nation too.
Yea it’s not worth fretting about the whims of the American political class and neither the American populace. Some people have advantages by accident of birth, but so what.
Cheers to the immigrants who battle the crappy system here with national origin quotas and prioritizing chain migration over the American educated and trained foreigners like us.
I do have my green card but I’ve been contemplating not getting the citizenship because of the anti immigrant sentiment from all sides. Alas, the American passport allows travel more easily so I might just cave - but never vote.
I think there should be a monthly allocation of visas that can be issued, and companies are allowed to bid on the salary that they would pay the worker. Each month, the highest salaries get visas issued. If they don't bid enough, their candidate doesn't get in. If companies really need these specialists, they should pay them enough to secure a visa in a market-based system. I suspect this would create upward pressure on the salaries of these visa workers and prevent some of the abuse that we see today
So pretty much only companies in Bay Area or a couple similarly high $ hubs, and candidates wanting to go there specifically. That intuitively feels like promoting an unhealthy environment (not because of Bay Area in particular, but because of promoting concentration).
Yes, that is probably how it will play out. At least at first.
But I think the side-effect of this is that other industries & locales would not get as many workers as they currently do, which would put upward pressure on wages in those areas. Compare this to the current system, where wages for lower paying jobs and areas are kept lower than they would otherwise be by adding worker supply through this visa program.
>the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary
Countries in Europe do precisely this but take it slightly further. Take Ireland[0] and Sweden[1], for prime examples. For those of you who don't want to read the links: The company has to have a minimum salary (oft above the standard cost of living) for the employee to obtain (and retain) the permit.
(On an aside, in Sweden, they go a step further in that the contract must also be approved by the relevant union that company has agreements with.)
It is not really a specialist salary enforced in that law. I've been living in Sweden for 5 years now, as an immigrant, soon to be citizen.
The required salary quota, which is 15.000 swedish krona per month, is less than half of an average developer salary.
And that thing about union, is not as bureaucratic, as you make it sound. Company has to be part of a Union as a whole, to offer work-visa for immigrants. That's almost all there is to it. They dont really check each individual contract.
(Jag tänka att du inte förstod min svar men jag ska skriver i engelska, så alla kan att läsa.)
>It is not really a specialist salary enforced in that law.
To which law do you refer? The minimum stated on the original page that I referred? You would be correct that it's not a specialist salary; however, to suggest that it simply does not exist would be fool-hearty. Migrationsverket has documentation specific to that[0].
>The required salary quota, which is 15.000 swedish krona per month, is less than half of an average developer salary.
An average developer's salary, where? I can tell you that the average developer's salary in Östergötland, for example, is far less than in other places in Europe.
>They dont really check each individual contract.
A "check" is vastly different that an approval, yeah? You could've easily found this information[1] yourself, as it's freely available on Migrationsverket's site.
Needs to be adjusted for cost of living, salary changes over time by profession (Tech salaries are in a bubble rn. which makes 150k reasonable by bay area standards, but they may go significantly up / down in the future) which is complicated enough but there's edge cases like Universities / Non profits etc. that can't pay salaries to compete with the private sector but people work there anyway because of passion.
I disagree, if you can find cheap programmers in Des Moines, Iowa, then by all means expand there, spread the love within the country before going for import labour. As for bubbles, that's the point, there shouldn't be any if labour is available and willing to come in.
Most IT / h1 roles are not based out of the Bay Area [1]. Significant amounts of H1b population goes to doing cookie cutter consulting projects spread across the country and setting a 150k min on the wage means that you won't be able to hire H1s at all in other parts of the country. Obviously this creates a lot of demand for American programmers and personal experience suggests that this will cause a labor shortage.
That doesn’t seem too hard to solve. You just say that an h1-b job needs to be at the 85th percentile, salary-wise, in a basket of similar jobs by location/position.
That's what the regulations say right now - for each title, there's a prevailing wage level that DOL publishes and a H1 has to meet that wage level. It is however a single level across the country so it tends to be a bit on the lower side.
Actually it isn’t. “The prevailing wage rate is defined as the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment.“
https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/pwscreens.cfm
I don't think that's necessarily the case. A lot of people that work at a university do so because they're an international grad student who has no other way to stay in the country. They're barely scraping by, hoping they can finish and that an advanced degree will land them a job.
The problem is that there's two very different things achieved by the H1B process:
a) Getting talented entry-level employees who graduate from US schools to stay in the US
b) Getting talented experienced employees to move to the US
The H1B is actually rather bad for b) due to the long processing time (6 months) during which a candidate cannot work in the US and high chance of not winning the lottery. Revamping the O1 visa makes more sense for that case. So that leaves a) for which salary requirements based around experienced employees make little sense.
> Revamping the O1 visa makes more sense for that case.
Canada has a pretty sane skilled worker visa program that gives you points for academic achievement, proficiency in English, French, age and other factors. I see no reason the US couldn't have that.
Having said that, factors that would increase the wish to move to the US would be things like universal healthcare, a sane schooling system (with less inequality between school districts, easy access to higher education), better lablr laws, and overall social security. Without that, I don't think it's that much attractive.
>Without that, I don't think it's that much attractive.
Given that salaries can be something like 5x what you get in Europe for the same experience level with lower taxes there is a big reason. Probably even more compared to places outside of Europe. If you're working at a large tech company making good money then healthcare doesn't matter (since you got solid medical insurance), school district doesn't matter (since you can afford to live in the good district), labor laws don't matter (in fact their lack is probably why you're making 5x the money) and social security doesn't matter (that's what saving the decent chunk of money you make is for).
These are all things that don't matter to me - I was always under some sort of health insurance since before the day I was born and never seriously contemplated needing social security systems. Still, living in a society where everyone can enjoy that makes for a better living experience.
Earning 5x what I would earn (which is not what I observe on my compensation level) does not compensate for knowing there are people who were driven out of their homes and now live in tent cities because I could pay more. In fact, I would not want to live in a society that encourages that and, most definitely, don't want to raise my kids to think that's normal, or desirable.
One big problem with restricting to salaries above 150k is that you’ve disqualified anyone who may be early in their career. Not many who are below a mid-level career role will get that kind of salary.
What does that affect? All undergraduate students coming to the U.S. who spend $$$ on a 4 year college degree here and then try to find a job. You’ve just wiped that demographic out because they won’t get 150k salary.
Why would they be inclined to come to the US and spend all that money on an education here? They won’t.
And if the best talent doesn’t come here to compete intellectually with Americans in a classroom then Americans lose.
H1Bs comprise a big chunk of people who come here, get an education here, prove their competence and make the American economy grow.
You won’t get them to come here with a high salary cap like 150k.
> You won’t get them to come here with a high salary cap like 150k.
That's not the purpose of the H1B visa. The purpose is to fill shortage areas with temporary workers; it's not some kind of college recruitment program.
>What does that affect? All undergraduate students coming to the U.S. who spend $$$ on a 4 year college degree here and then try to find a job.
That’s great... hire locals not foreigners just because they paid for a degree. I don’t care what they paid for. This is supposedly for specialized knowledge—-it shouldn’t be going to ANYONE entry level or undergrad...
Not really- the way H1-bs are sold the general public are that they are for “extremely hard to find” labor and requirements state you must look for us persons to fill your position before getting an H1-b visa to do so.
$150k is at the 95th percentile of individual income for the entire US. I’d argue that if a company in any industry/profession isn’t upping their advertised pay to higher than what 1/20 us persons currently make, they aren’t trying sufficiently hard to attract a US person.
I generally favor looser immigration in the US, but H1-Bs as written unduly benefit the sponsoring company at the expense of labor generally.
Here's a simpler proposal: anyone from anywhere can come here and take any job. If you leave your job, voluntarily or not, you have 90 days (up from the current grace period of 60 and strict rule of 0) to find another job. If you've been here for a few years you can apply for citizenship, independent of your employer.
The primary objection to this is crowding out the labor market, to which I'd say: protectionism doesn't work. If there are people in another country willing to do the same job for cheaper, the invisible hand will figure out how to move the jobs there, perhaps through competition. Fighting the free market isn't going to work: figure out how to work within it. (For instance, offer a UBI for citizens only.)
Again, protectionism. If a billion people in India and a billion people in China are competing in global markets, my country's culture isn't going to survive anyway. How is Ottoman culture doing these days? Honestly, how is the British culture of even a century ago doing these days? How long did the Japanese culture so carefully preserved survive Matthew Perry's arrival?
(Also as it happens I'm an American-born child of Indian immigrants, so I am actually a carrier of American culture and not Indian, so I have reason to question the implicit assumption that immigrants will destroy culture.)
You're a carrier of American culture (at least in some superficial way) because you grew up surrounded by Americans. If 500 million people moved here, they would not grow up surrounded by Americans.
Well, okay, but there are multiple times 500 million people living in other countries growing up extremely not surrounding by Americans, and they are preparing to quash America's culture entirely in 100-200 years through economic dominance. Do you prefer that outcome?
If you dig in, a lot of cultures have roots going back centuries. People might be wearing tshirts and jeans everywhere you go, but the way they handle family matters and daily routines is very different.
You're a superficial carrier of American culture. Sure you speak English and consume American media, but you have socialist values which are not American. This is the land of the free, not the land of government-enforced equity and insanely high marginal taxes for the rich. Let me guess, you're anti 2nd amendment? If there were more people who thought like you in America, the country would indeed collapse in on itself.
No, I'm pro-Second Amendment. Probably more strongly than you: I believe the original purpose of the Second Amendment was to maintain a continuous threat of violent revolution against the government, not to let people hunt deer or whatever, and as a result I believe that the people have a right to own weapons sufficient to win a war against their own government—either by letting the people have a nuclear deterrent, or by disarming the government to the point of having no weapons the people can't have.
Not sure what that has to do with anything, though.
Bummer, isn't it? I left the US because of its work culture (always working all the time, or trying to look like it) and now it's infecting Europe, or parts of it at least.
But that was without throngs of Americans moving here
To be fair, American culture is the destruction of other cultures if you take a critical eye at American history. It's quite funny to see people so protective of it.
Well, I'm not talking about American culture, I'm talking about any country taking in immigrants, and general reasons to object to it. It certainly isn't economics-only. (America has already undergone this process in many waves, e.g. when non-Quakers took over Pennsylvania, or when Californians move to Idaho.)
This is a thread and topic about America and immigration in America. To suddenly shift and say that you're somehow not talking about American culture seems rather incredibly disingenuous.
And that said, a culture does not deserve to live by virtue of existing. It's protectionism and xenophobia, founded purely because of fears that immigrants will somehow replace your culture with something you view as being lesser. This is a two-way street because I have seen people use it as an argument against letting in people that would destroy woman's rights or what now here in America...and I've heard it used in fears of immigrants fighting for minority rights or woman's rights in countries like Japan.
It's an argument born out of irrational fears and one I find not compelling at all.
Well I certainly object to the destruction of America’s culture too, but the construction of geofft’s argument is that categorically he could only think of one possible objection to immigration.
And it’s not an irrational fear. It’s a very obvious fact that America with wide open borders would be a worse place for existing Americans to live, just look at the average country and ask if Americans would like to live there, and why not.
I don't believe it's a very obvious fact at all, considering America has had very lax borders in the past and I would not describe it as being a far worse place to live. If you're going to describe something as an obvious fact, how about you back up your obvious fact with citations or data? Otherwise then yes, it would be an irrational fear.
And I would imagine the converse is true: If you asked anyone in another first world country if they would like to live in America, I would bet you'd see the results end up rather negative. Especially after the past few years of nonsense we've exhibited to the rest of the world.
Simply by increasing population, traffic, and pollution it would make the country worse off.
You don’t need studies and citations to figure this out, you need to hold in your head a model of reality. You need above average people, who give more than they take, in order to drive the quality of the country upward.
Let's take your argument to the extreme then: If increasing population -> more traffic -> more pollution, then the obvious thing should be to reduce the birth rate in America which is a far more pressing issue than immigration if we're talking pure population growth.
Not only that but by your own argument since we need 'above average people' who 'give more than they take', the end result should be forcing people out of rural areas (the dense metropolitan areas tend to be more economically powerful) while also ensuring they can't procreate. What I'm getting at is essentially using population growth as an excuse for restricting immigration is itself an excuse, because there are many ways in which the issues of population growth are stymied and more effective at doing so.
And yes, I do want studies and citations. You're essentially begging the question in lieu of actually providing evidence for your own claims. I want you to give me explicit citations for your claims and your 'model of reality', because you're assuming that your model of reality is correct without any factual basis.
Then you're admitting that you're not here to actually debate in any sort of rational manner. If you make a claim and can't substantiate your claim when called out on it, then your claim has no rational or factual basis. At which point your entire argument falls apart, especially when you call something a 'very obvious fact'.
It's obvious now that you're not actually willing to properly argue on your side of the debate. The argumentative burden of proof is on the person making the claims, not the one disputing it. The fact that you're being so flippant about your claims does not do your argument justice.
Not only that, but now you're attempting to twist the argument into something that it wasn't in the first place. Even if we did decrease immigration, that wouldn't fix the issues of traffic and pollution in America because those are born out of poor city planning combined with lax industrial standards. Unless you want to somehow argue that immigrants contribute more to pollution than corporations doing things like say, flaring in West Texas.
If you can't support your claims with evidence when called out on it, then you shouldn't make such bold claims period.
> Simply by increasing population, traffic, and pollution it would make the country worse off.
This doesn't at all seem obviously true to me. It rather seems obviously false: I find big cities more pleasant to live in than small towns, even though they have more of all three. More population seems like an inherent virtue to me. More traffic gets turned into more efficient traffic via public transit, or building denser and more walkable cities, or whatever, which I find more enjoyable than cars. More pollution is a side effect but a solvable one.
If your argument is the model of reality in your head, then you need to admit that the model of reality in lots of other peoples' heads is very different, and there's no reason that your model should win (unless you're claiming that your political opinions matter more than others'?).
I think waiting in traffic and being forced to use alternate means of transportation is a net negative. There are already Big Cities in this country for anybody that enjoys the city-slicker lifestyle, and increasing total population won't make the world better for those people.
Okay, that's correct. And I disagree(d) with what the primary objection is and would be. Maybe not your objection, but most people's, in every country.
I haven’t actually told you my immigration policy, and it’s clear you’ve incorrectly decided you know what it is.
My immigration policy would be to let in the set and sequence of immigrants that makes this country as nice a place to live as possible. Approximated with a greedy algorithm, that means picking the individual that makes this country the most nicer place, letting them in, and then repeating the calculation until we’ve run out of people that make the country a better place for us to live. Culturally, that means cultural optimization, not preservation.
I’d happily stop 99.999% of noncitizens from moving here and working here while allowing Californians to move to Idaho. (I’d also remove the financial penalties California places on people that moved from Idaho to California.)
That's not a coherent policy - that basically describes everyone's policy. That describes the current US policy. That describes my policy. It's just that you've shifted it to a discussion of what makes the country a "nice place to live," which obviously lots of people disagree on. In particular you haven't answered what to do when there are conflicting arguments over whether bringing in a particular person would make the country a nicer place to live or not, or for whom it's nicer.
Specifically, I think that this country would be a nicer place to live for myself if I can hire whomever I want for my team regardless of citizenship and without big government second-guessing my decision, and if they can feel confident about their long-term future once they move, therefore making them a) more likely to accept and b) happier and more productive when they're here.
I also think that the number of people who have moved into the SFBA (myself included, I'll be honest—feeling uncomfortable with that is part of why I left) have made it a worse place to live. I think there are ways to solve that other than internal migration restrictions, and I have other philosophical objections to internal migration restrictions, but I do see their appeal. You, for some reason that I don't totally follow, either don't think that SFBA has become a worse place to live or that this isn't an important criterion in deciding internal policy; I'm curious which it is (or whether I've misinterpreted).
That doesn't describe current US policy, which prevents people from coming that would make the country a nicer place to live, and lets many people in that wouldn't. By design, it even brings in random people.
I'm not describing a policy, I'm describing an ideal. (A simple concrete policy proposal is below.)
You said:
> Here's a simpler proposal: anyone from anywhere can come here and take any job.
So that doesn't describe your policy proposal either. Plenty of people can hold down a job and make the country a worse place for others, or a subset of others, simply by competing for resources, driving down wages in the sector they work in, by being a criminal, or by voting immorally.
I want to let everybody you'd let in, except for people whose immigration would make the country a worse place. Define that ideal as you will.
As a pretty good approximation, we could limit immigrants to those that could qualify for military service.
> myself included, I'll be honest—feeling uncomfortable with that is part of why I left
That's also a reason why I left. My policy as a national policy, is to make the country a nice place for all of its citizens (except criminals and slovenly degenerates) to live in. So that includes people that might like to move from Arizona to California. They're making their own lives better, which counts for something.
> I think that this country would be a nicer place to live for myself if I can hire whomever I want for my team regardless of citizenship and without big government second-guessing my decision
If you're like most employers, that means you're happier if you get to drive down working class wages, while you get to reap greater profits from your pre-established position in the market. That's good for you, but not good for the average American.
To make my goals a little more nuanced: Economically, I want only the smartest immigrants, which do advanced stuff like start companies, work for them, or work in healthcare, which drive up the demand for working-class labor, letting average Americans negotiate a better piece of the pie, while driving down the cost of their healthcare. Culturally, I want supply limited so that immigrants assimilate, and I want all the immigrants and their children to be crime-free pro-life Republican voters. :-)
This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever seen. Why bother being a country at that point? You’d have 2 billion people moving here tomorrow and living in the streets. Bad idea.
Not sure what you mean by "being a country," but, no, you wouldn't. If they didn't have jobs they couldn't stay. If they did they'd find housing - perhaps some would even build housing for the rest. To imagine that two billion people could move to the US, find employment, and all be homeless is to imagine an interesting form of market failure that I don't yet understand.
So they would definitely get back on planes rather than just going rogue and trying to stay in the country and working illegally? And existing citizens would not lose out through massive oversupply problems in the labour market?
I can't say I agree at all this would be of benefit to any nation willing to do this.
Like I've been saying in this thread, existing citizens are going to lose out anyway. The labor market is global. There is no way to have the government interfere in the free market to preserve jobs for certain people of certain backgrounds, and not have it backfire. It is already backfiring, in many industries.
So if you care about not making existing citizens lose out—which I do!—find a solution other than protectionism. Find a solution that works. A UBI, so that not finding a job doesn't ruin your life, is a good one. Fund it with income taxes on immigrants who come here and do well. (And on a UBI you can spend as much time as you want training in an advanced skill or learning a complicated profession so that you can compete in another segment of the labor market.)
No country is going to do this because no country wants to admit to their citizens that the "country" and "citizen" abstractions are powerless against the reality of the global free market. It's too politically incorrect; people would rather believe that protectionism works. But it's the right thing to do.
Not for all countries! Definitely an imbalance there, and US is already pretty generous with immigration numbers. We've also seen that cheap labor does not reduce cost of living in developed countries, so importing foreign cheap labor is a loss for not-rich folks.
That's not what I mean—what I mean is that labor is in the service of products and services, and the market for products and services is overwhelmingly global. You can get software from anywhere. You can get PCBs from anywhere. You can get oil from anywhere. You can get clothes from anywhere. You can get cars from anywhere. You can get produce from almost anywhere. (Prepared food is hard, as are a few other things like haircuts, but my argument is those are the minority.) Soon you'll be able to get truck drivers from anywhere with remote oversight of self-driving cars.
So if you're in any of these fields, you're competing with people around the world. You're not competing directly—the playing field is still quite bumpy—but it's becoming more level.
So if the actual goal you have is "I want citizens to not starve and be homeless," which is certainly my goal, protectionism is a temporary patch holding back a storm. One day it will stop working. Better to prepare for that day instead of denying it.
(Unless you plan on dying before then and don't care about your kids' future, but I assume all the people in this thread saying "culture" care about that....)
OK, I am fine with amending my proposal to "any job that pays at least a living wage in the area where you live."
A bonus of that amendment is that if you want to bring family, you must all in sum earn a living wage for your family, but you can split that however you want, so e.g. you can legally bring children who aren't going to work or legally take more than 90 days to raise a child.
(Also it might embarrass the government into raising the minimum wage for citizens to a living wage.)
This is such a one-sided point of view. Imagine that you're immigrating to a country, and after a few years you get fire, or you want to take a sabbatical, or you want to change industry for a lower paying job.
Now under your rules you cannot do that. What do you do? You've created your life in the US, you have friends, perhaps a girlfriend, maybe even a house. Now you have to leave?
(I say this as someone who lived in the US on a visa for years)
That's part of the deal. Any immigrant arriving on a visa knows what they've signed up for, and it doesn't involve taking a sabbatical. It also really should not involve buying a house, if you're being sensible. Being fired 100% sucks, but you can transfer an H1B to a new employer. H1B is at least a dual intent visa, so after some years you can apply for a green card, get one, then take all the sabbaticals you want.
(Also, if your life is settled enough to have friends and a girlfriend you don't want to leave, US immigration does offer an answer: marry her!)
The second you are fired, you no longer have an H1B to transfer (usually USCIS allows transferring even if there is a short lapse, but this isn't guaranteed, and during that lapse, the visa holder is actually the US illegally)
This isn’t correct. Once you have an H1B it’s yours for 3 years (plus a 3 year extension). If you lose your job you can use the remaining eligibility for another job, though you may have to do your job search from outside the country.
The real problem is the path from L1/OPT -> H1B -> green card is purely based on how many years you have worked in the US and performed as some kind of lottery. The transition may take at least 8 years, almost identical for highly-educated Top-N employees & questionably-legal "labors" from IT Consulting Companies (there are lots of fake identities/backgrounds in these companies' H1-B applications).
As an immigrant to another country, that's just how it is. It's a risk I accepted the day I decided to pack up and get on the plane.
I'll definitely be upset if things don't work out in my current home, but I'm prepared for the possibility. If anyone out there expects their new country to bend over backwards for them and try to keep them from returning to their old country, they're either not fit for the difficulties they'll inevitably face or they're incredibly wealthy.
1) Qualified job candidates are scarce? Just... what? The only difference between here and there is when people lie and say they're qualified, the company is willing to pass this lie on to the government to say "the qualified candidates are over there". There are people who can do the work, and there are companies who want to pay less in total compensation. I feel like my entire generation was raised on a CS/SE pathway. How are there no qualified candidates? What decade will we be fit do to the work? Maybe I'll move to the third world and get rehired back. That's the entry-level job.
2) H-1B is not an loophole to get "loyal" employees. Again, you keep employees with competitive wages & benefits.
3) Companies should be shamed as much as the government for an exploitable process. The government must change for the people it serves. Companies can be dissolved if they're not supporting the area they base themselves out of (and benefit from).
WRT #2 it's certainly not supposed to be that way. But if an H-1B worker quits, they have something like two weeks to find a new job or else be deported on the spot. In other news, mysteriously, H-1B workers tend not to quit even faced with low wages and poor conditions.
I love discussions about hiring and immigration. People always focus on their idea of what others should do while ignoring all the data and the reality at present. When you see otherwise rational people ignore data, focus on unqualified conclusions, and opinionated targets their bias is laid bare. Regardless of what you believe is the right answer what does the hiring data actually say?
> H1-B candidates are attractive for companies because it is harder for them to switch jobs. Companies can lock these employees for longer, and they can pay them less.
This is ultimately what it's about.
I work as a software engineer in the Bay Area and the number of H1Bs doing the same grunt work coding that I do is astounding. H1Bs were supposed to be for some sort of super specialized work no?
So an obvious solution would be allowing H1B holders to freely change jobs, even with gaps. Accordingly, the employers won't be able to lock the visa holders. Then there will be fair competition that makes sense.
But anyway the big companies don't want to lose the "lock" so it would be hard to change.
Clarification in case any H1B holders are reading: you absolutely can transfer your H1B visa, though I think a break of more than 30 days would be a violation.
The trick is when you H1B employer also offers to sponsor your green card. That isn't transferrable, and if you're from certain countries (like India) it can take up to ten years to get one.
> "The trick is when you H1B employer also offers to sponsor your green card. That isn't transferrable"
Yes but the priority date itself is transferable. This allows you to job hop as many times as you want, without losing your place in line. If you have to wait 10 years for your green card, you might as well take advantage of this option and only worry about your green card 9 years down the road.
You don't lose your priority date if you get a promotion within the same job role. Eg, you can go from entry-level developer to senior-staff developer, without any issues. Google senior-staff developers make over half-a-million, so that's quite a high ceiling. I even know someone who made the switch from hardware-engineering to software, and kept his priority date.
A talented (foreign) friend of mine had the opportunity to switch to a better, higher paid role but due to the effort involved, the risk and the pause in H1B premium processing just hung on to his current role.
The H1B program itself is not a problem and in-fact is a big positive contributor to the US economy; but it definitely has issues like the one you highlighted (e.g. harder for employees to switch jobs) that should be addressed by the government to make it more viable.
I tried to get the H1B twice, couldn't get it through the lottery, so I had to move out of the US for a year and a half while I was waiting for the green card. The process is so backward.
I can’t help but wonder if a lot of the indignities that we tolerate (open-plan offices, unpaid overtime) aren’t worse because there are so many people in our industry unable to fight against them.
The process could (and probably should) be adjusted, but the intent of h-1b is clear that it is to fill positions that are not fillable with local talent at prevailing wages.
If companies aren't really looking for local talent, or aren't really paying prevailing wages, they have been defrauding the government, and hurting the labor market. When large scale abusers of h-1b are prevented from getting future visas, it gives room for other companies to use the visas, and hopefully they follow the rules.
The practice of hiring someone "because it is harder for them to switch jobs" so the company "can lock these employees for longer" and "can pay them less" sounds like unlawful wage discrimination.
If the existence of a governmental program helps a company in pursuing an unlawful practice should that be relevant in determining the wrongfulness of the practice?
That seems like a very weak argument.
It seems reasonable that a company should see the program as intended to make H1-B candidates attractive because of their skills, not because it will be "harder for them to switch jobs" and the company can "lock" them for longer and "pay them less".
If there are citizens or permanent residents that have the same skills then what legitimate reason exists why companies should be filling them with H1-B candidates instead?
You did just discuss the difficulty of finding qualified workers without mentioning salary. Yes, talented software developers are scarce at 50k. They even appear to be scarce at 150k/yr. To me, that doesn't signify a shortage, it signifies that employers asked the market for engineers at a particular price point, and the market said no. This isn't a shortage, it's the market's answer, it's the rational decision of people who have freedom to choose their profession in response to market signals, personal preferences, and costs.
The entire point of the H1B visa is to create a pool or workers who are not free to choose their professional path, but are allowed to live in the US only under the work conditions determined by their employer.
> "H1-B candidates are attractive for companies because it is harder for them to switch jobs"
The extent to which this is true, is severely overestimated. Both by citizens and by the h1b holders themselves. I have a close friend who has switched companies 4 times while on a h1b, and it was a breeze.
The only complicating factors are Trump-era changes such as suspension of premium processing and greater risk of rejections. Combined, these do have a chilling effect on job transfers, which ironically leads to h1b abuses like mentioned in the article. But even then, these are easily surmountable hurdles.
There's a side-effect, however, that's being ignored.
If US companies don't like/trust the talent coming out of US colleges, they should have a stake in improving those programs. But if their solution is just to hire immigrants, it cheats colleges out of feedback from industry.
Colleges really need more practical courses, at least starting in upper years, that set developers up for success in the workforce. How many devs today come out of college needing 3-6 months of learning just the basics? That shouldn't be happening.
That's true of pretty much every engineering discipline. You may disagree but university engineering programs, especially at the better schools are not designed as job training programs. Personally, I don't think they should be. The hot technologies today will be last year's news soon enough. For companies that really do want to hire people whose training is focused on the practical, there are always code camps and other professional programs.
Why is it not okay to discriminate on the basis of your skin color at birth but okay to discriminate on the basis of which side of a border you were born in? Surely, there would a lot of outrage in HN if someone said - "Granted that H1-Black visas should ostensibly be filled only for positions where it is difficult to find qualified whites"?
I suppose it depends on whether or not you consider it morally acceptable for a country to prioritize the prosperity of its own citizens over that of non-citizens.
Why is it morally acceptable for a country to prioritize the prosperity of its own citizens, but not for whites to prioritize the prosperity of fellow whites?
You cannot change your skin color, you can change your citizenship though. And it's not just America, you'll run into these restrictions in every country, often times more strict.
> You cannot change your skin color, you can change your citizenship though.
Not on your own. You need to find a country willing to accept you as a citizen. For the vast majority of people in the world, the only countries that would accept them are those where they would be worse off. So the countries that do (successfully) prioritize prosperity of their citizens also effectively lock out most people from elsewhere. The trickle of immigration is just that, a trickle - it is deliberately constrained with various rules and requirements, and it would be a much bigger stream if anyone who wanted to change their citizenship could apply (even if you filtered out, say, people with criminal records and such).
Can you elaborate on why you think that isn't true?
Imagine I'm a cab driver in Pakistan and want to become a cab driver in the US. Can you point me to what form I would fill out in order to apply for a visa?
I'm having trouble understanding which level of abstraction you're trying to discuss.
Are you arguing that two human attributes in particular, race and birthplace, should for some reason be subject to the same level of discrimination in hiring?
Or are you asking a more abstract question? I.e., given any human attribute ${attrib}, what are the principles a government should use when deciding if ${attrib} is a legally protected class?
I'm just engaging in common-sense ethical reasoning. It seems wrong to require that all whites employ a much higher bar for hiring blacks. And, I have the same intuition about requiring all Americans employ a much higher bar for hiring foreigners.
Also, I think there is a big difference between allowing discrimination (which is only wrong if you belong to a protected class) and requiring discrimination, which is pretty much always wrong.
So its one thing to argue about whether employers should be allowed to discriminate against foreigners (or blacks). There are some good arguments on both sides. But I don't think there are any good arguments in favor of requiring that employers discriminate against foreigners (or blacks).
Yet mysteriously, every country in the world does this (discriminates against foreigners) to some extent, and has for recorded history. If you can't figure out why, perhaps you shouldn't be talking about policy, in the same way you shouldn't delete code you don't understand.
Although I don't necessarily agree with what GP is saying, it seems to be spreading ignorance to say "if you can't figure out why [then I'm not going tell you] and you shouldn't be talking about it". Instead of alluding to a mysterious reason, which you insist one ought to understand to talk about policy, why don't you tell us what the reason is?
Might doesn't make morally right but it can make factually correct.
Two parties disagree and eventually one says to the other "if you don't stop it I'll make you stop it."
This is a truth claim that can be honestly verified through physical struggle. If they win, then their might did make them factually correct. If the other side was mightier than the other side proved themselves correct when they said "no you won't."
No?
Edit: human beings since forever have never stopped warring with each other over stuff. It's almost like our M.O. is Argumentum ad hominem, ad baculum, ad infinitum - "argument by beating a man with a stick for eternity"
That's a reasonable argument; we should think it through to the conclusion. In a more general form the argument is:
Given that certain forms of discrimination are unacceptable, why is okay for any group to discriminate against any other group? Why is it ok for a nation to enforce borders, a company to keep the proceeds of a new idea to themselves, or for a wealthy family to favor their own children?
Many people have asked that and tried to create systems that forbid such discrimination. Unfortunately the result is always disaster. It's simply so counter to human nature that it cannot be imposed without a totalitarian government and the problems that come with totalitarianism are far worse than the problems of inequality that come with freedom.
But perhaps a moral person should still seek to follow such a policy of their own volition? That might be viable, if dealing only with other people who follow a similar policy. But how many people are willing to work for such a system, rather than merely using "equality" as an argument only when it serves their own self interests? How many are willing to make the sacrifice when it's their turn to do the dirty job, to work hard without keeping the proceeds, to share their home with strangers, to fight criminals and tyrants with nothing to gain for themselves?
That's an empirical question and many experiments have been conducted on communes, kibbutzim, ashrams, etc. Experience has shown that the answer is: far too few to make such a system viable. Even voluntary societies of this type are plagued by freeloaders and cliques, and must impose borders to prevent being overrun by outsiders.
So while it certainly seems like a good moral position, and has seemed so to many, many people throughout history, it simply fails to work in practice, over and over and over again.
because countries look out for their citizens. not everyone in the world. Why not ship the entire population of india and china and all of africa into the US? im sure they'd all like jobs and by your logic they are entitled to it over the citizens of the US.
> Why is it not okay to discriminate on the basis of your skin color at birth but okay to discriminate on the basis of which side of a border you were born in?
Same reason you take care of your own kids first. Would that imply that you are discriminating against kids that aren't yours?
America is the most powerful nation in the world today not because it has the most number of people, but because it has the best and the brightest, gathered from around the world.
There are 4x as many geniuses in China as in the US. This is not because they are superior genetically. This is simply because the population of China is 4x that of USA. If one in 1,000,000 people are geniuses, then China must have 4x more geniuses than the US. That's a threat to the US. If our economy is to remain strong and if we are to remain a superpower we should invite the smartest of the Chinese to immigrate to the US.
Abuse of H1B must be stopped. It is not intended as a mechanism for undercutting American workers. But the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. We should expand the H1B system and make it easier for immigrants to become citizens, while at the same time preventing abuse.
> America is the most powerful nation in the world today not because it has the most number of people, but because it has the best and the brightest, gathered from around the world.
I agree, there is a non-quota limited O visa for temporary workers for the best and brightest [1].
>> The O-1 nonimmigrant visa is for the individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and has been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.
H-1B is also required for jobs that can't be filled but is definitely being abused.
The best and brightest from around the world can ALWAYS get in with no limit with the O visa [2].
>> There is a misconception about the H-1B program that it was designed to allow companies to import workers with unique talents. There has long been a visa program for exactly that purpose. The O (for outstanding) visa program is for importing geniuses and nothing else. Interestingly enough, the O visa program has no quotas.
The H-1B abuse is more a situation where large companies are abusing it to lower labor costs and wages while owning employees. It will never affect the best and brightest from working in the US by getting an O visa though.
> I agree, there is a non-quota limited O visa for temporary workers for the best and brightest
Just saying, the requirements of the O visa are usually very unreasonable.
An application must satisfy 3 of the below requirements:
1. Receipt of nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence in the field of endeavor
2. Membership in associations in the field for which classification is sought which require outstanding achievements, as judged by recognized national or international experts in the field
3. Published material in professional or major trade publications, newspapers or other major media about the beneficiary and the beneficiary’s work in the field for which classification is sought
4. Original scientific, scholarly, or business-related contributions of major significance in the field
5. Authorship of scholarly articles in professional journals or other major media in the field for which classification is sought
6. A high salary or other remuneration for services as evidenced by contracts or other reliable evidence
Participation on a panel, or individually, as a judge of the work of others in the same or in a field of specialization allied to that field for which classification is sought
Employment in a critical or essential capacity for organizations and establishments that have a distinguished reputation
Afaik, this would usually put a person in the domain of top PhD student or professor. I doubt any masters/undergrad would be able to qualify for such a requirement. A PhD isn't for everyone, and IMO isn't always positively correlated with intelligence. (in that many of the smartest people have no intention of going into research /academia).
The kind of people from India who would qualify for the O-1 would usually be in the 99.99th percentile. At that point we aren't just talking about the smartest people. These people go beyond that. (at least in CS, where PhDs are very competitive)
In practice these requirements aren’t that hard . I have an O1 visa and I know a few others and none of us are close to a Nobel prize or fields medal .
Yeah like I mentioned, the argument about "best and brightest" isn't really a problem, it is a common point about H-1B but there is always a way in with the O (outstanding) visa.
H-1B is for the pretty good developer or when there are labor shortages of certain skills. There is a market need for it but it is also being abused to lower wages and own people undoubtedly.
I never said H-1B wasn't needed nor am I against immigration. But the argument that with less H-1Bs the best and brightest wouldn't get in is not correct. The O visa are always there for that and a separate line. The H-1B line is a line that is the pretty good and needed extra labor to fill shortages, but again, ripe for abuse. That is why it has quota to begin with, without quotas I have no doubt companies like Oracle would have large percentages of their workers if not all as H-1Bs.
Ultimately H-1B could be expanded and made easier even if companies didn't abuse it. One way to change this is allow H-1Bs to change companies, though I am sure this would be abused by middle man contracting companies as well. So ultimately a quota is the only failsafe for abuse. The problem isn't immigration/temporary workers, it is companies using it to lower wages and that harms all workers domestic and foreign and at a macro level our entire economy.
Side note your items some of them are merged full list (8 where 2-8 are pretty doable with 5-8 even more doable for the truly best and brightest):
> 1. Receipt of nationally or internationally recognized prizes or awards for excellence in the field of endeavor
> 2. Membership in associations in the field for which classification is sought which require outstanding achievements, as judged by recognized national or international experts in the field
> 3. Published material in professional or major trade publications, newspapers or other major media about the beneficiary and the beneficiary’s work in the field for which classification is sought
> 4. Original scientific, scholarly, or business-related contributions of major significance in the field
> 5. Authorship of scholarly articles in professional journals or other major media in the field for which classification is sought
> 6. A high salary or other remuneration for services as evidenced by contracts or other reliable evidence
> 7. Participation on a panel, or individually, as a judge of the work of others in the same or in a field of specialization allied to that field for which classification is sought
> 8. Employment in a critical or essential capacity for organizations and establishments that have a distinguished reputation
>>Yeah like I mentioned, the argument about "best and brightest" isn't really a problem
I think you are being uncharitable to your own cause here.
If you want to pad $1 trillion to your economy, you are going to have to drain a few millions down the lane. And its absolutely worth it. For some paltry cents and nickels you get to be the most powerful, most wealth super power on earth. Starting a few Google like companies absolutely requires getting a good double digit percentage of people, who are likely to try and fail. There is no guaranteed recipe to these things.
Its already a miracle that somebody like Germany, France, UK or even India(Though Bangalore shows a lot of early promise) hasn't set up a SV like economic zone. Then you have to compete with them. As of now all the tax they pay goes into the kitty to pay for social security cheques, space projects and range of other moon shot first world projects.
You are guys currently sitting on the world domination throne. And your biggest debate at this point is debating legalese and getting worked up about local politics. A little a short on vision is what I would say.
> You are guys currently sitting on the world domination throne.
Not really, not the workers. The reason the US is ahead in this is mainly investing, financing, education and credit. I'd also argue America has independence, innovation and disruption embedded in the core, other places squash that via corruption or authoritarian controls.
Nowhere in my statement did I say anything against immigration or temporary workers, I solely blame companies for exploiting it. I like that America attracts people, people want to come and work here for the higher pay and higher quality of life. I'd rather people come here to work for market value not below.
From the OP article, Oracle purposefully abuses the H-1B system to lower wages for not only temporary workers but domestic and immigrant workers as well, to lock them into basically a prison of working just for Oracle at lower wages.
> “These students required work authorization to remain in the United States after graduation,” the Labor Department said in a court filing. “In other words, Oracle overwhelmingly hires workers dependent upon Oracle for sponsorship to remain in the United States. This preference for a workforce that is dependent on Oracle for authorization to work in the United States lends itself to suppression of that workforce’s wages.”
> Of about 500 recent college and university graduates hired into three job categories at Oracle from 2013 to 2016, some 90 percent were Asian, the filing said.
> At the same time, Asians, blacks and women were “systematically underpaid,” according to allegations in the lawsuit, which also claimed that unequal pay cost workers $400 million in lost wages.
> “Industry’s key argument for more cheap H-1B and OPT guest workers is that there’s a shortage of U.S. talent,” Hira said. “That argument completely falls apart in the face of these findings. In fact, the industry is using the visa programs for cheaper guest workers, undercutting U.S. workers, damaging the U.S. talent pipeline, and exacerbating its woeful record on workforce diversity.”
What Oracle is doing is lowering the quality of life for people here, immigrants, and guest workers.
The H-1B system also makes it very hard on small to medium businesses to bring in H-1B due to being locked to one company, allowing them to work for others may solve this and the pay issues.
Right now though the H-1B system is only beneficial to large companies, and most are looking to decrease quality of life or wages. I want even temporary workers to get paid market rate if they take the risks coming here.
What would be your solution to stop companies from abusing the system for the purpose of depressing wages for both domestic and foreign workers?
If you have no solution, understand the companies are the ones breaking this system, not the people seeking opportunity. The employers that abuse H-1B would be happy with a lower quality of life for all, making people more dependent. Noone wants that except the uber wealthy, those are the guys "sitting on the world domination throne". We want people to come here, but if we don't fight for quality of life, the reason people want to come here, people won't want to come here.
As far as I know, while Chinese students are way more than India students in USA, Indian H1B holders are about 4~5 times more than Chinese. In short, the vast majority(about 50+%) H1Bs are taken by India, Chinese is about 10%.
Indians abuses the system severely by setting up phony staffing companies and do fake multiple filings on h1b application, etc.
There is a saying, that if an Indian becomes a manager, soon all his department becomes Indians, which really stands out among all other races. I will not be surprised someday they will be sued for not following equal job rights.
> Indians abuses the system severely by setting up phony staffing companies and do fake multiple filings on h1b application, etc.
Most Indians I know, hate this H1B abuse as much as Americans. (maybe even more. I have seen people spout some genuine hate towards it)
It ruins the reputation of most Indians in Masters programs at well regarded R1 universities (most people at such programs, get proper full time roles to my knowledge)
> There is a saying, that if an Indian becomes a manager, soon all his department becomes Indians, which really stands out among all other races. I will not be surprised someday they will be sued for not following equal job rights.
haven't seen enough teams here to refute this claim. Hope it ain't so, but knowing Indians, I wouldn't be that surprised if some Indian managers did behave in such a manner.
I have seen the Indian manager phenomenon in 3 separate companies. Literally everyone other than me was Indian previously in my management and adjacent chain. All of them were financially intertwined. When one quit they all quit. I was only there because they hadn't hired me. There was not a single person that they hired that was not Indian. This is definitely a real phenomenon.
Just saying, this isn't quite relevant to CS. This was a hairdresser with a business. So, the Indian person in charge was most likely not well educated. It is disingenuous to extrapolate that to H1Bs.
Secondly, this happened in Canada where Sikh/Punjabi immigration was not skill based, but rather fueled by mostly uneducated people looking for a better life. This is completely in contrast to the H1B which is a skill based employment visa.
I haven't seen Blind take on overall positive stance on anyone ever. The complete anonymity of every poster invites hate, this likes of which I have only seen on 4chan.
That being said, there are a decent number of accounts which go both ways.
Being a manager usually takes English proficiency, so Chinese managers in western companies are not as common. Given the racial breakdown of people in software, that leaves most people with either an Indian or white manager.
However, people never generalize white people culturally, because it is well understood that their color doesn't say much about how they are culturally or ideologically wired.
Similarly 'south asians' as a racial group are pretty culturally and socio-economically diverse. So generalizing such a huge subgroup is not very helpful. People differ in key ideologies of how to go about things as you cross state, religious, developmental lines in south Asia.
That being said, I can hypothesize why certain Indians may display traits that are considered undesirable among managers. But that write up must wait for another day.
> if an Indian becomes a manager, soon all his department becomes Indians
This exact phenomenon plays out in India as well at a more granular level and across all job families and public/private sector companies. The more you zoom in more granular it gets.
E.g., South Indian manager prefers South Indian reportees, a manager in Karnataka prefers someone from his caste, and so on.
I wonder if it's an Asian specific phenomenon. Where family, regional, clans etc., affiliation trumps meritocracy. I've heard similar stories in Indonesia too where relatives or those from same islands are given preferential treatment by the bosses.
In my 20 years in IT and finance, I've always had a fair number of Indian coworkers, though mostly American-born or raised and US-educated. Some of my best buddies come from that pool. A couple of interesting points to note about my last two jobs though: the first was a small startup in NYC with ~15 employees, founded by two Americans. They had zero Indian employee! I mean there was one Indian-American guy, but he was gone as soon I joined. A lot of talented young folks, but they lost most of them and they eventually went to Canada and Eastern Europe for new blood.
My second was a ERP startup also in NYC much bigger than the first and fits your narrative -- the founder was Indian-American[?], a Princeton and HBS graduate, who had made a wad load of money in outsourcing business. Most of the principles reporting directly to him were also Indians who had worked at Cognizant and Infosys previously and whose technical or management skills were ..umm.. not very good or non-existence. The company still hired mostly H1Bs straight from India and Indians graduated from well-known US universities. They hired a lot of kids with advanced degrees, but who weren't clearly from top of the crop -- for lack of better words -- or passionate about their chosen field. Some were good, but many questionable. There were also new recruits with a master in CS (from US univ) could barely write a single line of code and had to be trained to perform monkey work from clean slate.
>There is a saying, that if an Indian becomes a manager, soon all his department becomes Indians, which really stands out among all other races.
That's nonsense. Indians aren't one race. Indians are multiracial themselves. There are dark-skinned Indians that are mistaken for African American, and there are light skinned Indians that are mistaken for Italian Americans. The states of India are like countries of Europe in that each state has its own language: Gujarathi, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali etc.
How do your observations refute the original proposition? Race is a problematic concept, but that doesn't mean it can mean anything you want it to mean. If someone had made a similar observation e.g. about American managers in Europe, would an objection to the effect that "America has multiple races!" mean anything?
I corrected a factual error, but I am not refuting or supporting the rest of your claims. But I will note that you are complaining about people who you perceive to be your competitors. You inherently have diminished credibility because of that.
Legal and controlled immigration is absolutely beneficial for the US overall.
But targeting specific industries is unfair - the software industry has been the main target, lowering the income levels respective to other, protected professions (physicians, etc.), or business executives.
Since people in the trades like plumbers or electricians do not fall under the umbrella of "importing the best & brightest", their hourly rates have been going up steadily (for self-employed people).
In rural America, we have been importing doctors from other parts of the world because we don't have enough American doctors who want to serve outside the big cities and high-paid specialties.
That's probably because foreign doctors don't know what they're getting into. From speaking with American doctors, many have been offered double the salary to go to rural and non-rural positions in the south and Midwest but they would not even consider it due to the racism and hate there. Can't say I blame them. I'd do the same and I'm white. Culture matters and having a culture of hate like most of rural and quite a bit of non-rural America does is extremely unappealing especially to people smart enough to become doctors.
>software industry has been the main target, lowering the income levels respective to other, protected professions
I don’t see software engineers suffering. Starting salary in FAANG conpanies is $120K to $250K. That’s better than doctors when you factor in years of education.
Salary is not enough to determine quality of life, a faang salary in the Bay Area doesn’t get you very far as an individual and for families it’s often not enough.
Changing the H1B visa to let holders change companies easily would be a good start at removing the pay disparity and incentive to not hire qualified US workers.
Letting them be promoted within a job would be a good start too.
If reforms like this happened, the incentive for companies to abuse the system would go down. Setting up fake staffing companies would still be a problem, but catching immigration/employment fraud is a different problem and should be resourced appropriately.
You're not making much sense to me. How can the genius ratio in the US and China can be the same if US kept importing the "best and the brightest, gathered from around the world", assuming that Chinese "are not superior genetically"?
If cheap credit made countries powerful, Japan would be the most powerful country in world history. They've had access to among the cheapest rates of credit for two decades, a time in which their economic output has gone nowhere.
Cheap credit helps one party and harms another within a country. It doesn't make a nation powerful. Technology, invention, scientific output, universities, capital for investment, scale, production / manufacturing, attractiveness to foreign talent and investment, modestly sane regulatory and tax policies, strong protections for property rights, ease of establishing and doing business, ease of trade, etc. Those are a few of the things that help to make a nation powerful. Those are things the US has either been the leader in or one of the leaders for the last century plus.
Much of Western Europe has had cheaper borrowing than the US for many years now, including in real-estate, corporate borrowing and at the government level. It didn't spur a great boom and increase their power. At best it has helped them tread water, which is all it did for Japan.
When someone confuses a temporary work permit used to bring in scarce foreign labor to fill gaps in the labor market, with a permanent work permit that brings geniuses to the united states to live their lives, ignoring everything that goes in between including family, politics, and motivation.
When someone appears to be unbelievably naieve, they are often trying to sell you something. Either you're a foreigner who wants to convince us you're worth it, or you're a a corporate plant.
I agree, with one tiny quibble. My emphasis would not be about gathering people per se, but about educating them. OF course, tolerance of immigrants is key to keeping our doors open for students from overseas. Our higher education system, embattled as it is, remains the envy of the world.
We are the most powerful nation on earth because of our immense resources, geographic diversity, access to almost every major ocean and lack of powerful enemies on our border. Geography is destiny. Having the most arable land, having exploited the most oil, having access to the pacific, atlantic, arctic, etc and the ability to develop in peace due to having much weaker nations on our border is why we are a superpower.
The idea that we are the greatest nation because we have the best and brightest from around the world is simply not true. If it was true, our immigration policy would be based on IQ today.
China can't be a superpower because they are hemmed in by Russia to the north, India to the south, US/Japan/Korea alliance in the east and Iran/Central Asia/Middle East to the west.
If it is true that number of "geniuses" makes a nation the most powerful in the world, the most powerful nations would have been china and india. We know that's not the case. So your theory contradicts itself.
Top teir software companies might claim the H-1B program allows them to hire the best and brightest from around the world, but that's not how everyone else uses the program. It allows consulting/contracting firms to hire low wage tech workers who are desperate to stay in the US and lock them into a form of indentured servitude because the road to a green card or citizenship is now a decade long journey and changing your job effectively restarts that journey.
> Top tier software companies might claim the H-1B program allows them to hire the best and brightest from around the world, but that's not how everyone else uses the program.
I am fine with immigration as it is a feature of a good system which people want to join, the US should attract the best and people looking to contribute, but it is obvious the H-1B system is rigged and bad for pretty much all but large companies in many cases. I have known many H-1Bs and I feel bad for their situation when they want to leave a company or feel locked in. The moment H-1Bs can work at other companies other than the sponsor, all that becomes more market priced via competition and will improve pay and discourage the H-1B abusers just looking for low wage ownership of workers.
If companies REALLY wanted to hire the best and brightest from around the US and the world, remote development would be bigger and more widespread to the US and around the world. But as with most things, companies use it to own people rather than compete fairly or pay market rates. Remote development can be a cost savings and make companies more robust to employee/worker life changes over time rather than need employees to live near the company. Companies that abuse H-1Bs would rather have employees on site that they can lock into lower wages and control more.
There is also the O visa that would really mean they want to hire the best from around the world [1][2]. But ultimately companies that abuse H-1B just want to lower wages and lock in their workers. Cringely in 2012 wrote this:
> H-1B isn’t the only way for foreigners to work in America. They can work to some extent on student visas and, in fact, many student visas are eventually converted to H-1B for those who have a job and want to stay but maybe not immigrate.
> There is a misconception about the H-1B program that it was designed to allow companies to import workers with unique talents. There has long been a visa program for exactly that purpose. The O (for outstanding) visa program is for importing geniuses and nothing else. Interestingly enough, the O visa program has no quotas. So when Bill Gates complained about not being able to import enough top technical people for Microsoft, he wasn’t talking about geniuses, just normal coders.
> I don’t want to pick on just Microsoft here, but I happen to know the company well and have written over the years about its technical recruiting procedures. Microsoft has a rigorous recruitment and vetting process. So does Google, Apple — you name the company. All of these companies will take as many of O visa candidates as they can get, but there just aren’t that many who qualify, which is why quotas aren’t required.
> So when Microsoft — or Boeing, for that matter — says a limitation on H-1B visas is keeping them from getting top talent, they don’t mean it in the way that they imply. If a prospective employee is really top talent — the kind of engineer who can truly do things others simply can’t — there isn’t much keeping the company from hiring that person under the O visa program.
> H-1B visas are about journeyman techies and nothing else.
Oracle though, will literally do anything to save a penny and the last thing on Oracle's list is developer pay and developer usability/user experience. Oracle tools and systems are a nightmare and Oracle is only sold in on the golf courses from top down. Oracle is still in legacy licensing land. Oracle sees developers as nothing but resources to extract value from then discard. Oracle == IBM == SAP and all those are not developer or employee/contractor/worker friendly systems and all of them do the same gaming of H-1B systems just like the TCS, Infosys and Cognizant type companies of the world.
Can't believe this is only recently getting attention. It's not just Oracle, it's common knowledge how the same thing has been happening in several large corps. I know from the inside because Deloitte came in and scooped up our entire foreign students batch on graduating (Pennsylvania). Same thing happened the next year as well. Many of my friends still work there.
I remember there was a fire drill that took place in their campus in Harrisburg, and my friend sent me a pic he took when the entire campus was out - You could've mistaken it for a campus in Bangalore or Pune. There's definitely some preference they're giving to foreign nationals (specially from India). Please note, I'm an Indian national myself working in the US.
In 2015, I got a call from Oracle India and interviews were arranged and I got hired into Oracle India. It was my first job change.
Before to that, I used to work as a contractor for one of the US companies via one of the services company in India.
Oracle offered me way less than what they are offering to other engineers in the same BU, for the same value generated.
Reason Oracle told me that, since I am coming from a lower salary band, Oracle is still giving a reasonable high pay hike.
I argued back IN WRITING that still it is way less than ( lesser than 1/3) of Oracle generally pays.
Oracle said to me, Ok, we will raise your salary in the first pay review which happens. I asked clearly and concisely, what they mean by review, they said you will be in the band.
I left Oracle in 2018.
They never met their promise. Few of my financial aspirations were burned down, trauma different.
During all the time at Oracle,
I knocked many doors, all of them simply said "Oracle never committed in writing, a phone call means there is a miscommunication ", hence I do not stand a case.
It is not Indian Director which simply reneged from the bargain, it was the US director, US legal team, which simply reneged.
Escalating to Safra's office also did not help.
Oracle is full with corrupt directors who simply trick Oracle's own rules to cheat the potential hires and trick them to get a lower paying offer.
This was done my director of SW dev in US but I was an India employee.
I told you Sir, It was my first job change.
I did not knew the tricks of the trade.
Yes, I have myself to blame because I trusted the people involved in hiring from one of the top 5 tech companies in the world. Id did not occur to me that I am being played upon.
However, If you had noticed, I mentioned I argued with hiring team [ PM, director, recruiter] IN WRITING BEFORE JOINING THE COMPANY. I still have those emails. As a response to those they used to call on phone, NOT reply in writing. It was evident to me that they are calling back because they have read the emails. I forgot to take the same thing in writing, because I trusted them.
So, Yes I joined them because of verbal promises, but the emails do exist still, in my mailbox, where I have asked them in band pay, before joining.
Initially when I approached the company's authorities they said " I am making this stuff up", but when I showed them emails from my mailbox, they switched to "since you do not have replies, ... .. .. you do not stand a case"
A simple solution to the H1B "cheap workers" problem is to sort applications by (descending) order of salary, and pick the top 65K as authorized by Congress.
They pay competitively for their location. Pay is determined by demand and supply. If you sort H1Bs by pay, the places with highest cost of living will get all of the H1Bs. Perhaps a better idea is to do the same thing, but on pay that is normalized against a cost of living index.
I don't think CoL indeces are relevant because salaries are based on how much value a developer brings to the business.
Suppose you have two jobs: $140k in NYC, and $100k in Dallas. If only one company can get an H1B, IMO it should clearly be the NYC company.
The NYC job will yield higher personal income federal income taxes. Also the NYC job is delivering at least $40k more value to the business than the Dallas job. This additional value again translates to higher corporate federal income tax.
I'm not sure what benefit the federal government has by favoring the $100k job, even though normalized for CoL ($1.5 NYC=$1 Dallas according to one index) the Dallas job is "higher paying".
Salaries are not based on the value a company gets, but on supply and demand of workers. If the said developer brings in $200k of value to me, but I can hire the developer for $100k a year in Dallas, then I am going to hire them in Dallas. The reason I am willing to pay $140k and hire in NY is because the same developer cannot be found in Dallas. So it is possible that the Dallas employee is actually more valuable to the company ($100k profit vs $60k profit), but they still have to pay more just because people are not willing to move to Dallas from NY.
Indexing on CoL will help is better distributing wealth across the country - think of the impact of $100k going into Dallas economy vs $140k going into NY economy. So there are some long-term benefits to the economy in general.
not true. for instance an employee at google hq vs a satellite get paid different based on market rate for developers in that locale. the companies pay based on market rate, not “theoretical value produced”. no one who works there thinks the satellite office engineers are producing less and plenty produce more profit for the company than ones who get paid more
> an employee at google hq vs a satellite get paid different based on market rate for developers in that locale
I agree but that doesn't fully explain the salary disparities. The employee at Google HQ is also worth more to Google than an employee in a satellite office, because the former will communicate more efficiently with the rest of the organization.
That argument might seem ok if you compare satellite vs. hq (tho I doubt that's actually true), but breaks down if you compare two non-hq offices (e.g. Boulder vs. Zurich).
i actually don’t think it’s ttue at all having worked at the hq and seeing people from ny and la and zurich offices. there really wasn’t any difference in value
The salary is a proxy for how valuable a job is to the economy. So sorting by salary effectively awards the visas to arguably the most valuable jobs. Also, federal government maximizes it's tax revenue from the visa holders when the visas are awarded by salary.
not true. if company X has a satellite office in low COL area. each engineer produces the same value but gets paid less therefore the company has more profit. and govt gets more corporate tax.
> Perhaps a better idea is to do the same thing, but on pay that is normalized against a cost of living index.
Why? The current pay is determined by current supply and demand, but that doesn't make the current supply and demand desirable. If H1Bs are sorted by pay, all companies may learn to raise their bid.
With the recent articles doing rounds about the feds Looking into Oracle paying minorities and women less, this seems part of the scheme to basically get lower wage workers under H1B who they know will work like minions for long hours because their visas are tied to the job. It's a pretty standard way of gaming the H1B. Oracle is no different.
Hiring manager at Oracle here- Oracle is very balkanized, different business units have different practices and policies, so I can only speak (unofficially) about the one I am part of.
Whenever I have openings for junior positions, I get flooded with resumes from men and women with degress at universities in China and India, and only a very small fraction from people educated entirely in the US. My personal speculation is that younger software engineers in the US would rather not work at a company that is perceived to be a dinosaur, and is definitely not as sexy as other FAANGs or startups. People who want to be H1-B sponsored have fewer options, and I think Oracle's name isn't as tainted in China or India.
Also, for the (unofficial) record, the women and those with H1-B visas (incl women with H1-B visas) on my team are paid the same as US born men on my team with similar experience.
1. Expose the pay disparity at Oracle and other companies so candidates know ahead of time what they are getting themselves into.
2. Make it easier for any H1B employee to get a job at a different company if they have the ability and desire.
I am on this visa called the E-3 which is almost identical to the H1B except:
- No annual cap
- No 6 year limit
- Only available to Australian nationals
I have never had any trouble finding a tech job despite being an asian foreigner. My pay has varied from 60k - 180k and the companies i've worked at have varied from multi-nationals to 3 person startup.
High Minimum salaries would disadvantage startups and companies in smaller cities.
Here's how to fix the h1B
- No hard annual cap
- No 6 year limit
- For any company that hires more than 10 H1B hires, the average salary of h1b employees should not be lower than the average salary of non-h1b employees.
- Additionally, for large companies (say > 10,000 employees) the average salary of h1b employees of a certain level of seniority should not be lower than the average salary of non-h1b employees of that same seniority.
This will give companies more certainty that a potential H1B hire would be approved, providing H1B candidates more job mobility. It would also prevent larger companies from abusing this system.
You may be correct, but possibly for the wrong reasons that you are are inferring.
The University of California lost a lawsuit in which they were accused of preferring international students to in-state and out-of-state students because the international students could afford the higher tuitions. UC has several of the top CS schools in the nation.
It's possible that the we could could replace many of those accepted with US students, but it would take a major audit of the university systems to find out.
This super prevalent in manufacturing related jobs too. It's funny how the rhetoric is to save our manufacturing nowadays when we give a crap ton of IP to countries like India with the process. The sad part is, I've seen a lot of unqualified people fill up these H-1B positions and then we'll have to train them. By the time they can start doing some real work from us training, their visa coincidentally runs out and this process repeats. We literally pay relatively high wage to train India's engineers. Yet managers turn a blind eye because it helps them balance their numbers.
I am sure locking in employees played a part in their decision. However, I have to point out that foreign graduates, especially from China are preferred in my profession due to their strong technical background. Its kind of how things evolved over time. So a similiar thing might be going on here.
I don’t know if my experience in the mid-2000s is unique. A company I worked for laid off thousands of American workers and replaced them with H-1B and off-shore labor.
Many (most?) of the H-1B workers were utterly unqualified. Right out of school, inexperienced, and some just hopeless. The impact beyond the obvious was anyone pursuing a tech career at that company found alternate work.
The lesson was not lost. They learned that they could be replaced at any time by much cheaper global labor.
So I wonder if some of the scarcity in the tech labor market isn’t due to this perception.
It's really not hard to see why, H1B have none of the bargaining power and all of the risk. Especially for a shady company like oracle it's just pure exploitation going on here.
Duh! It is 1/3 the cost (bullshit aside) for someone from a culture of hunger, hard work, desperation, and oppression. That makes them easy to work very hard, unlikely for them to push back, and so they have superior output for 1/3 the price. There is no book-cooking megacorp in the US that doesn't prefer H1b to citizens with the same qualifications. Not one.
A "competitive" work schedule in China is 9-9-6, or 9am to 9pm for 6 days a week. That means "normal" is a 72 hour work-week plus commute. A 40-hour work week, is comparatively cake. The 72 hour work-week is 80% increase over a 40 hour work-week. The HR ghouls say imagine salaried employees being glad to work 80% more hours, including nights or weekend hours, for the same pay: amazing; sold!
The book-cooking for h1b is intense, but after talking personally with a dozen or so folks, they really do only take home about 1/3 to 1/2 what their peers do. There is bs about job duties, titles, responsibilities, but that is just folks trying to pay the lowest price for a commodity worker. I've seen several fortune 100 companies say they prefer "low cost geo's" as much as h1b so that gives a second population with similar pricing. It is open knowledge that engineers in Malaysia, India, or Costa Rica are paid 1/3 of US wages for what is, as far as HR can tell, the same job. They do the same job, and get a lot lower wages for it.
When someone was bullied as a child, they are easier to bully as an adult. Stupid/evil/inept bosses love employees who they can abuse without pushback. Folks from cultures of oppression aren't going to report safety issues to safety folks. They aren't going to report managerial violations to those who police managers. They are non-reporting victims. The HR ghouls see them as "don't make waves" or "get along" and the hiring managers see them as "easy prey". In grad school there were prof's who wouldn't let overseas grad students get even a short break to attend their own mothers funeral, and those guys got away with it. That is "liberal academia" and not the underbelly of corporate/industrial America. Think about what that means for bully-bosses in the workplace.
It isn't going to change unless the value of the commodity can be forced into a competitive market, where the price will go toward actual parity, and the rate of preference will go to parity with citizens. Until that, h1b is the lottery where the only way to lose is not to play.
There is one and only one solution, and it is a lottery. If it becomes an auction, then the h1b prices will double or triple - that is to day they will go up to parity for US wages for the same job.
There is so much hate for the H1-B visa, but let me play devil's advocate. US "lax" (not really) immigration policy improves the image of America/American companies abroad.
If US starts tightening immigration laws, US companies will start outsourcing their work (which they have already started). If they start to clamp down on outsourcing, countries like India have no incentive to let US to freely use their market. They would simply follow china's method and restrict entry to all foreign players. If US follows US first policy in everything, the third-world already suspicious of western countries will only see this as west's new imperial ambitions.
Software is easy to replicate, specially by people which have already worked in Google, Facebook, etc. People in third world already have expertise to set up the competition to US companies. All that is stopping them is competition from US companies.
US being the becon of freedom and hope the world is a net good for US and US businesses according to me.
Currently Top Talent in those countries want to move abroad to earn more and have a better standard of living. If they see no way out, they have stay in their countries and then US companies will have access to top talent for cheaper.
For example, US is the best destination for doing a Ph.D. currently and ph.D. students then work in US. If US stops them from working here, they will go back work and form competitors.
That might be better for the world. Maybe if everyone wasn’t moving to America, they’d make their own countries better... spread the love out.
I’d be fine with a few less tech companies. Life would go on. I care more about the impact on American workers and as I’ve said, bringing in severely underpaid workers that they can abuse isn’t really going to help.
Yeah, China is really somewhere people are desperate to get into... the air and freedom! /yawn...
I am not saying people from around the world are trying to get into china.
People of chinese origin have already started to go back and people from china believe they are better in China then is US. They have kept their highest talent and have used them to compete with US in spaces in which US held monopoly for an extremely long time.
If other countries get better, US's heigmony over the world will be challenged again and again. US's attracting/sucking talent from around the world keeps US at the top. People have a net positive outlook of US. people want to be in US.
If they start seeing US as nothing but an colonial like power, trying to take advantage, then America will lose a lot of its soft power.
So not bringing over underpaid foreign workers makes us MORE colonial? Got it...
Some of us don’t care about US hegemony, which doesn’t really exist anyways... this is about labor. You’re just moving the goalposts to all this other non-sensical stuff.
US currently controls the entire see trade. International money transfers, etc. If US puts UNILATERAL sanctions on a country, everyone has to follow it.
Every country has its advantages. US has capital and already monopolized a lot of industries. India/China have cheap talented labor. They use that to their advantage. If you want to stop them from using any advantage and still demand access to their resources, their markets, that colonization 101.
If US puts pressure on the advantage india has, then India will retaliate. Both sides will have loses.
At this point, if you are too entrenched in your world view and nothing I say would change your mind, just say so.
I am just pointing out that H1-B even if it's causing trouble in US's market (and not that much) it's able to get them world's top talent, makes America looks good and give US advantage over othet countries in terms of talent. Dude just look at Google's CEO or Microsoft's CEO or other immigrants. If these guys were denied visa and they started companies back in their country (maybe they could have, maybe they wouldn't have) none of the jobs you are talking about would exist.
This is not a zero-sum game you are making it out to be.
There is another loop hole other than H1B. Do your post graduate in the US and you will get hired easily. Its common among indians who can afford post graduate study in US.
You could fix all of the problems with the US immigration system by abolishing the welfare state and opening up the borders.
I love America and I’d move there in an instant if I’d get a chance, but I’ve got too much dignity to go thru the US immigration system and put myself in a limbo for many years.
Posted this elsewhere, but as a former H1B here's what should be done to end abuse:
1. Award a fixed pool of H1Bs to qualified applicants with the highest wage in the offer (and monitor that this wage is in fact being paid). This should be easy to pass if your representatives in congress are in fact _your_ representatives. The president will sign this immediately, since he was the one who proposed it in the first place.
2. Establish at least 6 month grace period if the H1B person leaves the sponsoring company to go work elsewhere. Currently if you leave (or are laid off/fired) you have to GTFO within 2 weeks, so people endure abuse and low wages for years until they get a green card.
There. There's your solution. No need to do anything else, guaranteed to work. It should not be possible to hire foreign workers into entry level positions at all.
> It should not be possible to hire foreign workers into entry level positions at all.
And with that, you perhaps got rid of a (imo) very useful subset of potential future Americans: ones who went to college and graduate school in the US.
This group went through it’s formative years in the United States. They are deeply imbibed in the culture and eventually start identifying with it. However, if they can’t get an entry level job, they now have to leave the country to go back to where they came from (or some other alternative like Canada / Australia). Instead, you would rather be bringing in 30 year olds from foreign nations who are unlikely to change and adopt America as much as someone who moved here at 18 would; and who have formed habits more suited to their nation than to the US.
But as I mentioned above, perhaps this is desireable.
> 1. Award a fixed pool of H1Bs to qualified applicants with the highest wage in the offer
There is no reason for a fixed pool to exist, and it's not easy to rank applicants by wage given significant disparities in cost of living depending on geography
It blows my mind how, at the same time, the same people can argue in favor of "equality", and in favor of importing unlimited amounts of cheap labor to depress the wages of people who need money the most. It just doesn't compute, at all. And I'm perfectly fine with high cost of living areas getting all the H1Bs. Those areas also happen to have some of the highest tax rates in the country, so the US benefits.
First of all, there's a difference between imposing a quota on the number of H-1Bs and raising the bar for applications to be approved. I'm in favor of the latter, and the former makes no sense. If the U.S. needs more skilled labor than it can provide, then it should allow as many immigrants as needed to come over to fill the gap. I hope that strikes you as a pretty obvious argument
Second, inequality in the U.S. has nothing to do with an abundance of cheap labor. It has to do with macro trends in globalization and cheap jobs being outsourced to (mostly) Asia.
How so? I claim that severe discrimination (like banning a group of people from entry level positions) based on circumstances of birth is ethically dubious. I think that's why we don't entertain the idea of banning people from entry level work because they were born to black parents. Why doesn't it generalize to being born to Indian parents?
Because it’s intellecually dishonest and an argument based on the fallacy of appeal to extremes.
There is obviously a difference between citizenship and race... the entire purpose of a government is to service its citizens. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a Star Trek utopia where there is free movement of all people. If one country were to allow this first, they’d just be harming themselves, which would be against the interests of its citizens. You look out for your own citizens first. That’s just a government fundamental.
...why? Whether you agree with it or not, “people should have the right to relocate to other countries for work” doesn’t seem like an outrageously offensive or trolling opinion.
Why does it cause such an emotional reaction for you?
Because immigration is not a "right". It's a privilege. And if this privilege is afforded at all, it should be afforded in such a way as to not screw the citizens whom the government represents, through social contract and otherwise. Otherwise the citizens should elect the government that will represent their interests. I mean it's not rocket science, it's civics 101.
Based on the US's history, relatively free immigration has made the country as a whole very successful. It's not obvious that citizens should want protectionist immigration policy.
Yeah not really. This is a bit of a myth (a little bit like the "90% income tax rate" magic that people seem to believe)
1 - Immigration was severely limited by the technology (and let's say societal limitations) of the time. Getting a ticket on a ship was expensive, even for 3rd class. 2 Million Irish went to the US around the Famine time (time frame of 40yrs +/-). Compare that with the number of people from Latin America in the US (though % the number of Irish is higher)
2 - About 'societal limitations' going was nothing but a gamble. There was no expectations of government aid, of non-prejudice. No credit cards, no easy way to take money unless you actually took your money with you. Getting a ticket back was not an option.
The real tightening of immigration seems to have happened around the 60s (though some other acts are from the 19th century like the one that limited Chinese immigration)
So it was certainly "freer", in the same way that immigration for the ultra-rich today is almost free as well.
Note that I'm not arguing against immigration (within some limits), but once a country's population increases I guess there are more people against it, and less of a practical interest in it.
To push the idea furter, a lot of things we call “rights” are privileges in that sense.
The basis of most of them is citizenship, which is basically people born in the right place or from the right parents. If you are born in Germany you have the ‘right’ to move anywhere in the EU. If you have Japanese parents you have the ‘right’ to work in Japan.
The same way wealthy foreigner will have the means to buy these ‘rights’ and become citizen.
I'm on my phone and can't check right now but I'm fairly confident there is global consensus (Geneva convention? or UN or similar) on when/how citizenship is a human right and that there is no such consensus on immigration being a right (modulo refugees), so no, these are not comparable.
I'm not sure what you searched for but you shouldn't need obscure sources like that for this... a bit of quick searching re: citizenship rights found [1] for me from the UN. Whereas for migration there's [2] which makes it clear there is no universal agreement on migration rights. [3] seems to make it even more clear that it's up to countries to decide migration policy. I'm sure more can be found via some more searching.
> The right to a nationality is a fundamental human right.
> States shall introduce safeguards to prevent statelessness by granting their nationality to persons who would otherwise be stateless and are either born in their territory or are born abroad to one of their nationals.
> States shall also prevent statelessness upon loss or deprivation of nationality.
> It is increasingly clear that a lack of human rights-based migration governance at the global, regional and national levels is leading to the routine violation of migrants’ rights in transit, at international borders, and in the countries they migrate to.
> The Global Compact reaffirms the sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy and their prerogative to govern migration within their jurisdiction, in conformity with international law. [...]
Thanks, this was in a very good read. I didn’t look it ip from the right angle I think.
It is very interesting that it’s a right to have _a_ nationality, with nothing more really.
It makes sense for all the issues described in the doc , and it also anchors the notion that except some specific cases that can trigger violations of human rights, a state basically does what it wants regarding who get nationality and who doesn’t, or how it deals with migration.
It reminds me a lot about rules in EU countries forbiding from evicting people from their home during the winter, or more broadly rules requiring to provide help to someone in situation of danger.
It seems a pretty bad mischaracterization of what I posted above to say "except some specific cases that can trigger violations of human rights, a state basically does what it wants regarding who get nationality". It's the exact opposite. The whole point was that in general states cannot strip away your nationality except for the specific minority of people who have another one.
At the risk of cementing your conviction of my troll status, I have some civics 101 questions for you. (I also have rocket science questions, but I'll leave that for another day.)
1. At a time when blacks were not citizens of the United States, many people argued that giving blacks basic freedoms would screw the whites that the government represented. I hope we all agree that according to basic human decency 101 that was not a compelling argument.
2. This is true even if it would indeed screw over whites by say pushing down their wages from, oh I don't know, absurdly high to only moderately high.
3. Which freedoms are privileges and which are rights? The freedom to not be a slave, a component of which was working for whomever you wanted, seems to be a right. The freedom to rent an apartment from a willing landlord irrespective of your skin color seems to be a right. But the freedom to work for Oracle for less money than you'd like if I was born in the wrong country seems not to be one. I'd appreciate a civics 101 lesson on why.
I'm not taking a position either way -- I'm confused why you think the contrary opinion is so horrible that it merits the admins of the site getting involved and shutting down the discussion.
As an immigrant it'd be disingenuous for me to suggest that. But the real answer is, it depends. I pay six figures in taxes. I can tolerate a little bit of screwage if my wage gets depressed by increased supply of my skill. Now consider the working poor, who are aiming to get that sweet, sweet $15/hr minimum wage (with benefits!). They're currently objectively screwed because there are hundreds of thousands of people coming over the border willing to work for half that, with no benefits, and tolerate abuse. Or consider a student who has just got her degree and has $100k+ student loan to pay back. Their tolerance for wage depression is a lot lower than mine. So I argue it is not correct to consider "citizens" as a uniform, average mass. Some strata within this mass will do just fine if they are paid a little less, some most definitely will not.
What are you talking about ? Most Indians I know on H1B did one and sometimes more job transfers it never came as a problem. Don't believe me, go check LinkedIn. I can point you to atleast a dozen profiles of folks I know personally who did that.
H1B is perfectly transferable and I don't know anyone who was worried about moving to/within FAANG because of H1B.
Enough hyperbole please. Yes, its frustrating to not get greencard, but H1B is very far from slavery.
Spouses were not able to work since the invention of H1B decades ago.
That rule changed only in 2014 and Trump hasn't cancelled it yet despite talking about doing so for almost two years. If he doesn't do it in the next year, chances are spouses will still be able to work without an extra visa.
You seem to be misinformed, The H1B is not for everyone, if your spouse doesn't fit the description it's game over. I know many people here on a H1B who have moved with their spouse who hasn't been able to work for years. It really takes a toll on you.
So basically 2 things: 1) Things will be worse than indentured servitude if you go back. 2) Dollars are more valuable Rupees even it is earned by slavery.
Did you get the sarcasm in your parent post? If you really believe that your indentured servitude in the "land of the free" is better than living a free life back home, you have no reason to complain.
From what I know, going back to India is not bad at all. A lot of Indians return to bigger and better prospects back home.
It's self-evident that the world as a whole would be better served if people who go to the United States, the EU, Japan, or anywhere else with top notch institutions and learn valuable skills were to go take those skills and apply them in places where they aren't generally available. As a bonus it will be extremely lucrative for those persons, since they will have highly marketable skills that aren't widely available in their locale.
If you see tens of millions of people doing something you think is stupid you might want to reconsider who the stupid one is.
For all that India, China and other developing countries are getting better they’re nothing like the US, South Korea or Western Europe[1]. And all those people who invested in skills who leave were motivated by the possibility of leaving. People study things that will let them leave. Some of them do, some don’t. The Philippines has huge numbers of qualified and experienced nurses not despite the prospect of migration but because of it[2]. If you think working in developing countries could be highly lucrative I encourage you to try it. The people who know more about those countries than you are not particularly inclined to do so or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
[1] Personal experience. Neither of Shanghai or Mumbai is near being Western Europe but Shanghai is at worst at Poland’s level.
I too have moved to the US, but let's be honest. The US is not the only place in the world where you can live. There are a bazillion countries where you could have a good life, do interesting work and that would treat you better.
> all my immigrant friends who started working the same time have already gotten their green cards
Well it’s happening because US is trying to give equal chances to all countries, by giving them equal opportunity and quota, the fact that there are way more people from India who come to work here is the reason you wait longer than other nations, no?
Because there is an yearly limit of how many people can get h1b visa -> green card in USA. If there was no limit per country then there will be a disproportionately large amount of a single nationality immigrating to US. You want to have diversity of immigration instead.
You should stop feeling so sorry for yourselves. And I'm in the same boat as you, been in this country for 16 years, and on H-1 for 12. I understand it is hard, esp because the system is broken, but as many people said, it is your choice to stay despite this.
I have very restricted choices, it’s different from the choices you have and that is why it is easy for corporations to keep the wages down , the “lower wages” I get here is still way higher than what I’d make if I chose any of the choices I have.
So you're choosing the best option according to an objective standard, which is your wage. Restricted choice != no choice, and in the face of that, to compare it (and the salary that exceeds most of the world) to true slavery is pretty melodramatic.
They’re obviously getting what they want, a higher wage and living in America. If all they wanted was higher wages and a better standard of living, there’s any number of other countries, that have more relaxed immigration policies, they could have moved to. If they can get a job and a visa in the US, they’re obviously good enough.
Yeah. It's not that hard to move companies as a non-citizen. It's more difficult than a citizen, sure. But I agree with the poster above that I have many many friends who have done exactly this.
I want American to be a shining city on a hill, a place so great that people are strongly motivated to want to live here. I also want immigration to be fair. You might consider what your statement says about what you want about these two things.
That may be true, but do you become Irish by working for 5 years? I know countries in Europe where even if you were born there, the native population will still consider you a foreigner. In the US, people will treat you as one of their own as soon as you step out of the airport.
Is staying in the US really that much better than trying to make it big in India?
Ironically, many of my Chinese colleagues have returned to China because they can make a lot more money there. And they will have a higher chance of being promoted to executive positions.
In addition, among my Chinese American friends, just about all of them say that their relatives that stayed in China are wealthier and more successful than those that came to the US.
There's another oft-ignored dimension to why some not-so-well-connected Chinese do not return home, that doesn't always surface in these discussions.
It boils down to favoritism and nepotism that is rife back home. This probably doesn't get much airtime since its hard to even grasp for people in Western societies. The closest that comes to mind is the Italian concept of Raccomandazione - the practice of using social connections to gain an upper hand in employment and in other aspects of public life in general [1] [2]. The Chinese-origin UK lady in the video explains this in the Chinese context.[3]
I'm sure the Indian context is much the same in substance if not in the degree, to which this factor plays a role in determining why they rather not return.
[1]
Raccomandazione (Italy) - Global Informality Project
I have to agree with diogenescynic here (and I'm surprised he's being downvoted). That just sounds like the "Old Boy Network," or even just basic networking.
It's not unlike the fact that many VCs often only work with those from schools like Standard, Harvard, and MIT.
I find this hard to believe, are Chinese software engineer salaries FAANG level? It's not unheard of for senior engineering salaries to push 250k easily for a large company.
Also, isn't the work life balance horrible for Chinese workers?
Sure, but do the employees see any of that? Do Alibaba employees get generous equity grants? Vacation time? Cash bonuses? SV type salaries?
I'm not doubting China has some great companies and things going on, it's just a very bold claim with seemingly no evidence behind it. It's the kind of claim I hate.
> Sure, but do the employees see any of that? Do Alibaba employees get generous equity grants? Vacation time? Cash bonuses? SV type salaries?
Logically speaking, the employees are probably paid near their global market value. The converse (they're grossly underpaid) seems less likely because of the global free market.
If Alibaba has SWEs of equal or greater skill than their global counterparts, they could get a job in the US or Switzerland. If they want to stay in China, they may be willing to trade a small amount of salary for that. I don't think most developers would be willing to trade more than 20% though.
My previous colleges in Baidu and Alibaba in China are paid similarly as in US (6~8 years SWE). USD $200K~$300K is very common. The range is very broad though.
Also, Beijing is not a cheap place. Real estate prices are comparable to NYC.
Due to demand and supply, SWEs are among best paid jobs.,
No offense to you personally, but most Americans would probably be happier with fewer H-1Bs. They are only brought over to depress wages and underpay workers. So while I sympathize with your condition, I’d like an actual ban on these types of fake specialized knowledge visa categories. L-1 and H-1 are so grossly abused it’s not even funny. The entire prevailing wage is famed and they bring over people from India with no degrees doing these fake “experience evaluations” they just pay some accreditation company for. It’s a scam filled industry. And all the body shops like Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, etc should be outright banned from operating in America.
There should be a $150k-$200k minimum on bringing over specialized knowledge workers. Save it for the doctors and medical workers. We can train engineers here.
Plenty of companies like Facebook have to apply for waivers because they claim they are “H-1 dependent” this is simply a lie because they aren’t willing to pay fair wages to hire locals.
I voted for Obama. I believe in immigration. But bringing in hundreds of thousands of workers to drive down wages is bullshit for the average American and only to the benefit of billionaires.
*Bringing some facts:
For example, somewhere between 47% and 85% of H-1Bs are being significantly underpaid compared to their peers, evidence that the program is not being used to bring over workers with "specialized knowledge" as they claim--but to drive down wages. It makes sense though, when you look at the biggest H-1B recipients: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx It's mostly the low quality outsourcing shops like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, and Cognizant.
Instead of accepting 65,000 H-1Bs at random--accept the 65,000 H-1Bs with the highest wages. That way we are getting the immigrants with the highest valued skills and stopping companies like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, and Cognizant that game the immigration system by applying for the cheapest H-1Bs possible.
So, you are ok with blue collar American workers getting affected by the programs like DACA, TPS, illegal immigration etc., but when it comes to your white collar job, you don't like uncontrolled "driving down wages"?
DACA is for people who were brought over as kids. Not really their fault. What are we supposed to do send them to a country they never even grew up in?
TPS? Like Vietnam war era refugees? I mean, you’re clearly trying to conflate some big differences in immigration...
No, I’m for immigration that’s actually needed—like doctors and specialized researchers. But having worked for an immigration firm an seen what a lot of tech companies are doing, I can assure you it’s not for the benefit of the common man.
Irrespective of the reason for non-citizens to be here, It could drive down wages. You, an Obama voter is echoing the sentiments of Trump supporters that the immigrants, illegal or otherwise is hurting American citizens.
You are genralizing here, not everyone who is from India works for the body shops you’ve mentioned. The body shops like TCS, Wipro etc exist because the rules allow it, they use temporary visas like B1 and L they try to get H1 but rarely do - outsourcing is different from immigration
You’re not even supposed to work on a B1... but of course that’s often abused. Pay someone in India to come work in the US for a few weeks/months... yeah that’s not really what I want either.
They should be banned because they are a drain on the wages to the average worker and they’re used to bring over workers they can abuse, intimidate, over work, and under pay while stringing them along for a green card. It’s a scam that only benefits the billionaires.
There are many kinds of people on H1Bs. There are people that are brought here by the consultancies you mention and there are graduates from American Universities who get H1Bs after or during their OPT. While I've heard that H1Bs are brought over to depress wages, although there is no data to back that up. In both these cases, there are a mixture of really good people, really bad people who got lucky and everything in between. I also know that there are rampant scams that involve faking Resumes to fake universities, however, there are many many many good people still holding out in the hope that this backlog for Indian's and some other countries resolves and lets them lead a better life.
However, according to this article[1], the number of open positions in Programming and Comp Sci. was about 500k and the US produced about 50-60k grads a year, 85k H1Bs wouldn't be enough to take all the jobs and flood the job market.
Also, from my own experience, I make over $250k as a Software Engineer, stuck on an H1B forever, while people who were born in other countries get to move on to a Green Card, even if they earn less than that. My company interviews hundreds of people, settling for 'good enough' and yet struggles to fill many open positions.
Either you’re lying or misinformed. The data is obviously available, the government has to approve the applications... there are literally dozens of websites that track this “h-1b salary info” and yes they are usually underpaid compared to their peers of comparable skills. I have linked plenty of studies in prior comments. See my above comment showing most are underpaid.
Then train local candidates or do apprenticeships. It’s a lie that local workers can’t do the work. Most h-1b is not the complex work... it’s the QA and grunt work.
> While I've heard that H1Bs are brought over to depress wages, although there is no data to back that up.
Then why would Disney fired experienced workers to H1Bs? Where the H1Bs that the experienced workers actually trained, more experienced? Clearly not. There is no universe where it could be argued that Disney had a shortage of skilled workers given that they fired the very skilled workers they claimed a shortage of.
> My company interviews hundreds of people, settling for 'good enough' and yet struggles to fill many open positions.
You know how you don't struggle to fill open positions? You raise the salary offered, improve the benefits, the working conditions. Netflix doesn't have a shortage of workers, but Cisco might. Compare the pay differences between those two companies and you'll quickly understand what "shortage" really means. I find it extremely hard to believe there's a shortage of entry level sysadmins, yet you'll find plenty of H1Bs working sysadmin jobs while experienced Americans sit on the sidelines because their salary requirements are too high (meaning, they expect something more than $75k per year in the Bay Area.) That doesn't define a shortage -- those workers do exist but H1B is cheaper.
Of course, there are outliers like those ultra-genius Nobel winner-level people -- however, there's an "O" visa for that category of extraordinary high achiever. Your average H1B is not particularly extraordinary. I've never in my life met anyone working for Infosys that I'd trust to program an alarm clock, let alone trust with mission critical code. However, I've also worked with a few extraordinary H1Bs -- people far smarter than I'll ever be -- but those are certainly the exception in terms of statistics of the visa.
> most Americans would probably be happier with fewer H-1Bs
America's education system is pretty poor. It would be nothing without H1Bs. Take it from Michio Kaku[1]: "The United States has the worst education system known to science. Our graduates compete regularly at the level of third world countries. How come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. If we are producing a generation of dummy. If the stupid index of America keeps rising every year [...] how come the scientific establishment of the US doesn't collapse. Let me tell you something. America has a secret weapon. That secret weapon is the H1B. Without the H1B the scientific establishment of this country would collapse. Forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley, there would not be a Silicon Valley without the H1B. [...] You realize that in the US 50% of all PhD candidates are foreign born. [...]"
the rest of the video is pretty good too. I recommend watching it.
> There should be a $150k-$200k minimum on bringing over specialized knowledge workers
This is stupid because you are privileging fields that can afford theses wages. Plenty of over fields which are not IT are in need of foreign experts and cannot afford to pay these salaries.
If there’s a quota to specialized knowledge workers, give them to the highest paid thus the most needed. Shouldn’t be given out in some stupid lottery... I want them to bring in people making the highest wages so they contribute the most to the economy. Not these $70k H-1Bs with fake work locations.
Except the top colleges like MIT, stanford, etc, most foreigners get into US colleges because it is an easier path to get a work visa in US, that's it. Also, the 70k h1-B are currently working in US, so they pay US taxes. If they are not allowed, most of the work will be outsourced (and a lot of that has already been), so it will be a further loss to US.
Also, India uses human resource as a balance in trade. They allow US companies to sell stuff in India in luie of them highering indians abroad (which send a part of the salary back home to their family) or in India. If US applies an America first policy in everything then India has no incentive to allow these companies into India. Software companies are not creating super critical things which can't be replicated, specially by indians who are already working for Google, Facebook, etc who will lose their jobs.
EDIT : Currently there are no tariffs on Tech companies. What are people even arguing ?
I disagree with the education claims. This article is mostly talking about engineers in the computer science/engineering field.
Tangent: I feel like those on work visas in the comments here are already outside of the norm that I receive resumes for and I honestly feel for their situation, hope they can stay so long as they choose to, and are paid fairly. Everyone deserves to be treated as equal humans and I feel like this is forgotten all too often.
The United States education system, while it does fail regularly, has taught most educated persons to question and be creative, yet also deliver quality. This is super desirable in this field.
I’ve reviewed a few hundred resumes, and at least a hundred on-site interviews, and I’m still trying to hold out hope for the h1b system yet am continually disappointed at the quality of candidates I’m being fed by the “approved” contract houses at the absurdly ridiculous company I work for. Faked resumes are the norm, as well as listing the fact that a dev has “Implemented UI Table View” as an Android candidate or the equivalent opposite for iOS candidates.
(50% of the team I’ve hired are on work visas currently. The one contract house in question occasionally has a dev.)
The contract houses almost wholly refuse to source local talent. At first I thought it was a fluke. From one contract house - I’ve only ever been given two local devs and every other dev has been h1b. I get complaints that our hiring process is too strict because the dev can’t build a rest client app in an hour and a half, or write a method that parses a string and returns a double and an int.
Meanwhile, there are local devs I went to school with, and know of their skill level, who are looking for work.
I don’t think the education system has failed in this case - I think contractor culture of corps and contract house greed has failed us all. Also, the requirements of bachelor’s or master’s degrees has exacerbated the problem with the ridiculous cost of those degrees depending on the US schools chosen.
If companies want to profit off local talent, then open up dev shops in other countries. China is the only country that’s potentially prohibitive of this practice depending on your business.
Also, which fields are you mentioning that require foreign “specialist” work that can’t pay these wages? They could apparently pay those wages in 1989. This program was setup to supply the US with skilled workers it urgently needed paying them an equivalent minimum of $121k in today’s money ($60k in 1989, which remains unchanged today).
H1B isn't the O1 visa. It's just very generic and broad. It could be brilliant engineers but more often than not it's just shitty consulting (Cognizant, Infosys) spaghetti coders. Look who takes the lions share of H1Bs and you'll see who we're bringing in. These are not experts lol, they're just cheaper and more desperate.
Which is exactly why the largest block of H1B visas goes to the shittiest companies.
While I admire H1B's that have a goal of a green card, my sympathy for the argument is pretty low considering that an H1B was never intended as a path to citizenship. From the very first moment, there is no ambiguity in the intent of the visa: Temporary, non-immigrant workers.
"Temporary Worker Visa" != "Immigrant Visa"
Whether or not we should have more skilled immigrants isn't the argument, nor do I have much of an opinion either way. What is a bit ridiculous to me is how people on temporary non-immigrant visas feel some level of entitlement to a green card when an immigrant visa was not the visa for which they applied.
I do think the US should move away from family preference and enact a points system like the UK, NZ, Australia, Canada, however that's a different debate than H1B "immigration."
The problem of the system is that US left close to nothing to regular work visas. The premise that only "high end" companies are deserving to be let hiring cheap workforce is wrong.
In reality, it seemed to me, that pretty much any "white collar" job was passing H1B invariably of the salary, but even very high skill requirement "blue collar" jobs were denied by default.
This is my experience from the time one of my past employers tried to make a final assembly plant for electronics in Washington state. It was very hard to find well educated assembly line workers. The company ended hiring fresh master degrees grads to simply do assembly from knockdown kits for 70k, but even they were not up to the task.
Disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment. Maybe the real reason that Oracle favored hiring Asian students is that they are more talented than domestic alternatives?
As a foreigner with an American degree, I find this news unsurprising. In fact, I had wondered why some companies were seemingly reluctant to fill in the H1B paperwork, considering these workers are probably more loyal than their citizen / permanent resident counterparts.
As for me, the lack of proper immigration avenues in practice was one of the reasons leading me out of the country, this despite the higher salaries, having adopted the “American way of life” during my stay, and my many friends in the country. I found it bizarre, for lack of a better word, that a country would welcome people for 4 or more years of highly specialised education and training (F1, J1) and yet so few alternatives would be offered later for working (basically, the H1B programme, and the O programme, the latter not being a path to permanent residence).
I believe the current system mostly benefits the employer by making it difficult to switch jobs, and that this causes a real depression in salaries or working conditions.
As an aside, and an example of this depression, during my stay I was only allowed to work campus jobs(1). Even though my work was voluntary (i.e., I did not _need_ to work to remain in the country), I wanted to because I thought it would help me gain experience and I found a technically relevant position. But, because I had to work on campus, I was making significantly less than I would have made outside.
Edited: formatting
(1) There are some exceptions to this for things like internships, unforeseen financial hardship, etc.
Having been through H1B, I think the system is designed fairly well. It's extremely hard to figure out whether a particular hire required a foreign worker. And, in doubt, the US in general always sides with what's easier for companies. So, in doubt, immigration will consider that there is more harm done if a company doesn't get the worker they need than if a US citizen's job is taken by a foreigner. And probably even more so in tech, where jobs are allegedly plenty.
As with everything some companies will exploit it, which is forbidden, but then they get outed, and then they get sanctions, and abuse is reduced...
Having been through H1B the system is not designed fairly. I tried twice and failed the lottery. So I had to go through a green card process that took a year and a half. Such a waste of time and a lot of moving around countries.
Sure, but how about fixing the deeper issues that caused the problem? I agree H1B works well, but I also think it can be made better. Both statements can be true.
Slightly off-topic, but there's something about H-1B abuse that the vast majority of people in the SV bubble don't realize. H-1B appears to hurt the poor.
No, I'm not talking about struggling coders in India who dream of a life in Seattle. I'm talking about the really hand-to-mouth poor who apparently rely on seasonal H-1B visas to feed their families.
For example, there was a report on Radio New Zealand this week about how dirt-poor Samoans can't get H-1B's to go to American Samoa to work in its last fish cannery because all of the American visas have been slurped up by the mainland tech industry.
I know H-1B's are supposed to be for specialists, and according to Wikipedia: "A specialty occupation requires the application of specialized knowledge and a bachelor's degree or the equivalent of work experience."
But I suspect that the "specialist" requirement is lifted for U.S. territories so they can get the workers they need. There are a great number of mainland labor rules that are relaxed, voided, or otherwise not valid in U.S. territories, so I wonder if this is one of them.
In the Bay Area, qualified job candidates are so scarce that it's quite common for citizens/permanent-residents to change jobs frequently. H1-B candidates are attractive for companies because it is harder for them to switch jobs. Companies can lock these employees for longer, and they can pay them less.
Rather than going after the companies, shouldn't we be focusing on fixing the H-1B visa process instead? It almost seems like the government has set up a broken process for companies to take advantage of, and instead of fixing things, they blame the companies.