There are companies like Cognizant/InfoSys/Tata/... whose business model is based on abusing the H1B system, and that's obviously wrong and I'm quite surprised they get away with it. I'm not defending that.
To those who broadly argue against skilled visas, consider this: Most H1B immigrants are between 20-30 age range. The prime age to join the workforce. Think how much investment you have to make on a child's health care and education to make them into a highly skilled workforce. It would at least cost you 1$M and probably much more. Now all these immigrants have learned your language, passed job interviews, and are competing to come to your country to give you 1$M and help your economy. Why would you not want that? People seem to think that number of jobs is a limited constant and if you stop immigrants that will have a positive effect on the economy. But in reality companies can simply just scale. If they have more workforce they can do more. Things get done faster and they just make more profit. Stopping immigration obviously would dent the economical growth. Never mind that many top tech companies in the US were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
To those who say we must invest in local workforce, I wonder why would you have to stop immigration to start investing in local workforce? As if allowing immigration would reduce the amount of money for investment, while in reality immigrants pay taxes. I personally have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes so far. I'd be happy if this money was used to educate the American workforce. However I know that it doesn't. I would like to see that change.
I know this will probably be flagged or voted down, but at least please understand that I truly want to see people in the US get better and more equal. Here it goes: if the US wants to invest in local talent, the US had better invest heavily in education. And I'm not talking about an-iPad-per-kid kind of investment, but investment to hire great teachers, lots of them, to public schools to the point that tutoring schools become a joke, investment to set up a system that can fire bad teachers -- the kinds who ask students in grade 9 physics class "which is heavier, pound or kilogram". Investment to ensure that even the poorest area can have public schools that are at least as good as KIPP. Investment to really keep students in their discomfort zone so they can learn every day. Investment that builds a system that really pushes the limit of every student instead of being complacent with the craps like "Kids can discover most math by themselves" or
"left no kids behind" or "challenging math is systemic bias against the poor" or "math is racism" -- maybe they are, but then they are because our governments offer such low-quality education that family with means can get ahead by going to soul-sucking tutoring schools.
Education is the key to local talent, and is the key to equality. Yet, what has the US done to make our education better?
This comment is the reason why we need to rethink our current culture of censorship and social media outrage.
It explains a non-trivial logical connection, showing how something that could look unpopular from the surface, would pay off in the long run. Except you cannot make comments like this in public anymore. Because all it takes is an angry mob leader shouting "%USERNAME% is %CLICHE%ist" and that's it. Your employer fires you, your friends abandon you, you are socially bankrupt in an instant.
There are many bright people our there with great perspectives to share. Except they have to maintain radio silence, because they are not willing to take that risk. So the only voices to be heard are the most extreme ones that have nothing to lose.
I sincerely hope we can overcome this and get people to discuss problems and work together on solving them before our civilization sinks into medieval barbarism.
Explaining my downvote: I'm thoroughly annoyed at all of the versions of this comment on HN lately. It adds nothing to the discussion, and derails the conversation we were having to talk about some vague injustice where People These Days don't let you say Stuff Like This.
Can you point to something you've said that's resulted in the problem you've described?
Are you literally not looking around at all these days? Your filter bubble must be very, very small and selective indeed to somehow have missed Cancel Culture.
I've seen people get offended by celebrities with insensitive takes, but I've never seen anyone on HN get cancelled because of a comment. The worst I've seen is "this is wrong and here's why" or "I don't want to talk to you".
Generally I've seen people reach for "cancel culture" when:
1. Fear-mongering the left over perceived injustice.
2. Defending bad takes by tone-policing any disagreement.
Can you point to a comment by john_moscow where they've been 'cancelled'? Or maybe a comment by you?
I'm happy to have discussions with people I disagree with, but generally once you're down the "poverty is good, actually" [0] rabbit hole I think a discussion would be a waste of both of our time.
I think you should be embarrassed at edgelord takes like "I don’t see the value an impoverished set of humans can provide" [1], and I don't have any interest in talking with far-right extremists. Bye.
Read the rest of the comment, which is the point you’re failing to realize. You’re judging without understanding the complete picture. So again read that comment again and read it from a logical standpoint instead of emotional. It literally says the next sentence they have value in some situation and your failure to understand that some poor bread maker can’t have anything valid to say when writing software or building a rocket. That’s my opinion, change it if you want with facts. Not everybody that disagrees with you is a right wing extremist. Some of us are capable of discussing actual facts and values. And you also pointed to a comment made after your comment so how this can be influential in your first comment suggests you have some ability to travel through time.
To further explain my position, I actually don't disagree that help should be given if possible. But right now I don't see why given we have uneducated and poor people still within the US we should help another country. IFF we have this problem resolved, AND we have surplus resources (money, goods, etc), then clearly why not provide as much help as possible? But when we have yet to solve the problem here it's an ask to divert resources. So then the value proposition question comes up. If I must divert resources then this must somehow create more value for me to justify it, so that I can then in turn help those in need in my country that these resources could be going to help instead.
I don't see anything in the parent comment that's even remotely controversial. Almost everyone across the political spectrum agrees that we should spend more on education, at least in the abstract. There's plenty of disagreement on the details, but I don't see anything in the comment that stakes out a strong position on any of the major issues. Perhaps I'm missing something.
You’re not missing something. But that’s the point. You read the whole comment and interpreted it in good faith. What the comment you are replying to is saying, is that it is easy to cherry pick statements out of nuanced comments that do not hold up well on their own. So unfortunately many people are afraid of making nuanced points online, and stick to banal platitudes that can’t be easily misinterpreted in bad faith.
Here's the problem: you cannot guarantee equal outcomes across intersectional groups. Period. Not going to happen. A hundred years of psychometric research backs this up; there are simply differences that cannot be papered over by adjusting metrics and applying equalizing coefficients.
A highly effective education system that really gets the best out of every person involved is also going to be selective, it is going to group people into different classes based on ability, and the resulting output is going to be highly offensive to the militant people who right now are literally doing their best to take over American cities.
So no, we can't fix this problem. We can spend more on it, but ultimately all of that money is just IOUs against a decaying system that demands everyone be equal, even if that lowest common denominator means all but the super-rich end up living in a favela within a few decades.
In short, you're claiming that some races or genders are inherently more capable than others, independent of all 'nurture' factors? If so, you're wrong, but feel free to clarify what "hundred years of psychometric research" you're referring to.
No we are claiming that we need $4309582309239 extra spending on the Governor's wife's tennis partners' baker's niece's program to totally-not-put-all-those-dollars-back-into-the-governors-electoral-budget.
That will fix it.
What I mean to say is that 99.9% of those programs are just abusing the system (even if 10% of them started out with honest intentions).
How about you show me an IQ study with a big cohort that shows otherwise? You're the one asserting something that doesn't line up with anyone's experience with zero proof.
I’m going to go off the rails more. You can’t reform the education system in a vacuum without dealing with larger societal problems that affect the US.
The war on drugs - have unfairly targeted minorities breaking up families and when they get out of jail, its harder to get a job because of their criminal record. No matter how good the education system is, if the students home life is unstable, education suffers.
Government funding through court ordered fines and tickets that also cause people to enter the criminal justice system when they can’t afford to pay. They end up in jail and lose their jobs. Again an unstable home life.
Lack of affordable higher education. Also, colleges love to give spots to non US citizens because they pay the full tuition costs.
Education funding is based on local property taxes. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
But the California State government allocates the fund, right? If the state government decides where the fund goes, then can we still conclude that "the richer gets richer and the poor gets poorer" from the fact that local tax funds education?
I am assuming the state sends each school district the same amount of money per student and the local government makes up the difference. So yes it is the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
I know in my Metro area the more affluent parts of the city, love breaking off into their own city to keep their money even more localized.
> I am assuming the state sends each school district the same amount of money
It does not, not even per pupil since there is a 20% supplement for each designated “high needs” pupil, and additional funds iif “high needs” pupils exceed a certain threshold.
> But the California State government allocates the fund, right?
It allocates the state funds that make up the vast majority of education funding among the counties. It doesn't specifically direct how counties spend the money.
> The State is responsible for allocating education fund, with a few exception.
That’s between untrue and misleading. The state allocates a very large share of the total education funding among counties, but it does not allocate the funding counties have (whether from the state or from local funds) by line item.
Why are people so quick to always blame teachers? What makes you think throwing even more money at the problem will make things better?
Growing up in a poor area, I went to some of the "worst" schools you can imagine (one even had to get shut down) and I had one of the most inspiring history teachers there, that I still remember to this day. And all the other teachers were great too. It's not the fault of the teachers when students are too busy pencil fighting and throwing basketballs at the teacher's head, rather than studying.
What on earth do you mean with "low quality education"? I certainly didn't see that in the worse schools I went to. I think people misunderstand term "bad schools" and take it literally to mean that the schools are bad. this is completely incorrect. When people say "bad schools" it means the students who went to the school performed bad on standardized tests. It's not a reflection of teachers, or schools or funding. I went to such schools and still did just fine, so did many others.
No, I'm not blaming teachers for all the disciplinary problems in school. I am blaming bad teachers for squandering time of ordinary kids -- kids like me who have a shot if pushed and educated properly.
You're lucky to have great teachers, and I just think we need more of such kind. As for bad schools, let me give you a few examples and you can check out the documentary Waiting For "Superman" to get a more grim picture.
- Did you know that teachers in some Cupertino schools asked parents to grade student homework?
- Did you know that a straight-A student who graduated high school in NYC couldn't pass the math placement exam in The City College of New York? I mean, placement test in a college, how hard could that be, right? The story was featured in NYT, IIRC, a few years ago.
- Did you know that only 48% of public school students who took the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) met or exceeded grade-level standard in 2016. And we're talking about CAASPP, a standard that is really not that high.
- Did you know that SAT is not differentiating to say the least, yet the average score of SAT math in California is merely 536. Pathetic, shall we say?
- Did you know that elite students in the Bay Area routinely completed more than 10 AP classes, yet the average students could barely understand Algebra 1?
And now let me give a few counter examples to show what good teachers can do to students:
1. All 14 students in Jaime Escalante's class passed AP Calculus I back in 1982, even though the school was in a hood. The success was so shocking that people thought the students cheated.
2. KIPP. Merely extending the school time to 6:00pm and offering classes in summer helped students stay in school and make steady progress towards entering college.
3. Schools in other countries. Take the schools in China, for instance. Teachers enforce cultures. Great scientists and philosophers and writers become household names because of them. They form research groups to continuously improve teaching materials. Better ways to teach, better problem sets, better projects, and better exams. It is widely assumed that teachers are better problem solvers than students in China. Can we assume that in the US?
By the way, a student doing well in standard test may not be a good student, but a student who does not do well in standard test is definitely not good academically. I don't really see why people keep blaming standard test for student's miserable scores. Do we really think these students could solve much harder free-form problems when they can't eve deal with much easier standard test? There is a reason that multiple-choice problems are the easiest ones in other country's college entrance exams. It suffices to say that if students in a school couldn't even pass standard tests, then the school has failed the students.
You can't blame teachers if the students don't do well on standardized tests. If you want to know why students don't do well on these tests, just spend a week or two substituting for teachers (or go there as a student) in one of those inner city schools. I guarantee, you'll have an epiphany and you'll see why they don't score well. It doesn't have anything to do with teaching, the problem is cultural.
>>Here it goes: if the US wants to invest in local talent, the US had better invest heavily in education.
As some one who worked in US and returned to India. Let me tell you immigrants will support this as soon as they get their US passports and Green Cards.
It's just which side of the fence you sit on. Once these people have a stake in your country, they magically shift their loyalties to the exact opposite position to what they had before.
In India itself, many of these elites oppose policies like Right to Education Act. knowing well they can fund their kids higher education in foreign countries, and eventually their kids getting settled in US. They don't want poor people to have literacy or any edge in education. Meaning, less competition the better. Why work for Right to Education, when your kids go to expensive private schools, tuitions, coaching classes and then foreign universities, with jobs and citizenships overseas. You want less competition and lesser poor people and underprivileged people studying so that more opportunities are freed up for your kids.
People are deeply selfish at a personal level and unless they have a stake they feel no need to change. I honestly feel things in India will improve with fewer visas. People will work for good domestic education facilities once they realize they are trapped in their own country.
It has worried me for years why salaries for tech employees in, say, India, don't equalize with US salaries. It seems like there is something artificial preventing it.
But as long as the discrepancy exists, then it seems like there would be a tremendous benefit in allowing people to freely immigrate, even for those already at the destination. Fear of immigrants is based on the idea that they will work for less, but if it's still more than they were making, then the competitive situation for labor has improved, as long as one accepts that it is a global market. I wish there was a way to get political traction for this, as a self-interested goal for American (or other developed country) workers.
yes I don't understand why people don't just stay in their countries for a while. people need to stop hopping around the world chasing $. leaving dangerous/unsafe places is a different matter. we are in a digital world and the work done in the Bay on h1b can be done from India. people can stay in their countries and build them up and keep the talent there. if US tech companies are desperate for talent they should just build engineering facilities in India and figure out the remote work situation. Honestly the talented Gen Z Indian youths aren't even fussed about moving abroad and have enough opportunity domestically, why should they put up with the hardship of being an immigrant where they are not wanted when they can stay near their parents and still work for Apple on interesting stuff?
At this point, more money is not going to help. Education in the US is fundamentally broken. Combination of "no child is left behind" and standardized testing (because everything else will be called discrimination) ensures uniformly bad results. If you pour more money in, it's just going to be wasted on bureaucracy and busywork.
So H1-B is actually a great idea. If we can't educate, let's attract well-educated people from elsewhere. They want to live here, so we can choose.
We don't mind buying electronics made in China because they can do it better and cheaper, why not do the same with people. Finland seems to be doing just fine with education at a fraction of US cost, let the market do its thing and flex the comparative advantage.
It already invests heavily in education. USA already spends ones of the highest level of funding per school pupil in the world and for college its by far the highest spender.
The whole teaching towards the test, and prepping kids for college (which I've heard we even do a bad job at), is just awful. We don't typically educate to teach people in a way that can make a connection that to what can be used in the real world, nor do teach real world things, such as basic money handling matters. I was able to take a Math of Money class in high school, but that was my senior year and your had to have had to pass other classes to take that.
I know there are some classes for stuff like electronics and mechanics, but why not offer more career based classes?
I think the requirement for more advanced computer classes has come down, don't need a AP calc/trig credit to take a basic programming class anymore (it's been well over 20 years since I graduated).
This is the same argument that progressive educators have been arguing for decades, and I respectfully disagree. Schools teach students fundamentals. Simplified, but fundamentals nevertheless. You think learning Newton's laws does not teach student how to "make a connection to what to be used in the real world"? You think that years of training in maths didn't prepare the students for the real world? You think it's fruitless to study rigorously and hard on "spherical chicken in vacuum"? You think that all the algorithms, mathematical stats, or data structures have little to do with real-world engineering? Unfortunately, here is the shocker: they are very relevant, and they are the secret of a nation can educate millions of qualified engineers, scientists, and business people who can reason with data and numerical sense.
The only reason that students have to study highly simplified models is that the real-world is too complex. Without years of study of "simplistic physics" in high school, there is just no way that one can learn rigid-body mechanics. Without years of practice on algebra 1/2 in high school, an ordinary kid will have no hope of understanding calculus, and without understanding calculus, the kid loses hope of understanding stats, and without understanding stats, the kid loses hope of understanding machine learning, and without understanding machine learning, the kid won't be able to jump on the gravy train of being a machine learning researcher. And now should the kid cry wolf the world is not fair and the system is rigged? Of course, this is an extreme example and there are thousands of other professions. All I'm saying is that sometimes a subject looks hard and mundane and pointless, but it is actually useful in the long run.
And as specific as Math on Money? It's nice to have, but it's not necessary. I have no problem studying on my own the theory of options and quantitive finance even though I had no idea how money worked. But I have strong background in math, in stats, and in computer science, and some background in economics. And really, such fundamentals carries me a long way.
Why is everyone so convinced that we're getting "low quality education"? I've grown up here and went to "bad schools" and "good schools" and I have not seen any quality problem in education other than what subject matters are being taught and not taught.
The prison industrial complex is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.
Yea so this doesn’t clear it up at all. Are you suggesting we start legalizing things, so that instead of going to jail people are treated for mental health problems if someone robs a house or commits murder? Why can’t people just not commit crimes?
Through its reach and impact, the prison-industrial complex helps and maintains the authority of people who get their power through problematic means.
There are many ways this power is collected and maintained through the prison-industrial complex, including creating mass media images that keep alive stereotypes of people of color, poor people, queer people, immigrants, youth, and other oppressed communities as criminal, delinquent, or deviant.
This power is also maintained by earning profits for private companies that deal with prisons and police forces; helping earn political gains for “tough on crime” politicians; increasing the influence of prison guard and police unions; and eliminating social and political dissent by oppressed communities that make demands for self-determination in the US.
Why aren't all former penal colonies full of criminals? Maybe it's because there are a lot of crimes that are situational. For truly violent offenders who refuse to be rehabilitated? Keep them away from everyone else, including other prisoners. For everyone else though? We should be figuring out what they lack and help them find it.
The reason we DON'T do that is because state prisons are glorified slave rackets. The very existence of for-profit prisons is an obscenity that will be seen as being as barbaric as slavery in the long run.
Which crimes are situational? And I still don’t agree that someone committing a crime is the victim here. To entertain that idea is just silly.
For profit prisons are more cost effective than government run prisons. We are a capitalist society, people seek profit here, including the entirety of the country.
Nah, what's silly is the idea that we need to rationalize uses of force against citizens by private third parties. It's fundamentally stupid and should be illegal because it incentivizes incarceration.
And most people don't "seek profit" here in their day to day lives. That's zero-sum idiocy.
There are not enough such teachers to teach 1:1. There are not enough people who could be drafted to be such teachers either. It would require a lot of altruism to work as a teacher whereas there are much higher paying positions in the private sector.
We have the technology to amplify a great teacher's lecture to millions. However, the education system relies on the model of interactive lectures given to a class of people of whom many are not acutely interested in the subject. Following that lecture, parents are drafted as involuntary teachers to help their kids with homework. If the student's parents have sufficient background, this works. Else, we end up with the situation where students continue to fall behind as their parents are unable to teach them.
We need to bootstrap our students' learning to the minimally accepted level that sustains self-directed learning. I would define that as mastery of arithmetics as first phase and algebra as second phase. However, we are talking about mastery that does not require a review, which means spending more time on in-depth training without jumping ahead.
Such classes should be separate from mainstream math classes so as to not to bore those of us who already have achieved that mastery.
Look, the people coming over on H1B are the top picks from other countries in terms of motivation and willingness to work - people that see tech as their golden ticket
What you are saying is how can the US turn their bottom tier performers to match this
Nothing lights a fire under your ass as realizing you are a layoff away from leaving the country and having to start over
I think both are critical. Kids naturally listen to their teachers, probably because they treat their teachers as authorities. Plus, teaching is a profession, a profession that demands deep expertise. A quite amusing example: parents try to teach their 7-year old fractions, and only find themselves yelling and kids crying hard. Yet when a teacher in Russian School of Mathematics teaches the same concepts, kids just understand the concept without any problem, and start to enjoy the learning process.
problem is not in teachers. Problem is parents. Yeah parents.
Good parents with good parenting skills raise good kids.
Bad parents/single parents - it is much harder to raise kids and give them good education.
if you want reforms - you need to adopt Scandinavian policies in America (high taxes, universal healthcare, universal childare, universal K-12, universal college system) - that way it will be easier to raise well educated kids
Unfortunately parents don't know how to teach STEM topics, not in the US, especially given years of cultural slash on hard science and engineering. I don't have hard numbers, but I'll venture to guess that very few parents can explain how to use recursion to find the closed formula of a sequence, or the intuition behind vector space, or why 0.9999... is actually 1, or even as simple as modeling a problem as a linear equation system. And all these are really high school basics. I'm using math as an example, but the same idea applies to other subjects too, like not every parent knows how to write, let alone providing precise and accurate feedback to the writing of their kids.
And from a parent point of view, why would I want my kids to waste his or her time in school learning very little, and then to spend my own time tutoring them? All I want is my teachers to do their job, and do it decently.
H1B Employee with 100k Salary contributes $12,400 to Social Security and $2,900 Medicare every year. (Total:$15,300 per year).
Majority H1B from India and China are stuck in green card backlog; with the current immigration system, they will never get the green card. Option for them is to stay in the USA on H1B in green card waiting queue or return home. (I do not think this is right or wrong people who are stuck in the queue, they chose to come to the USA and work here, it is up to that person to decide if they want to stay or go back or go to another country). After returning to home country from the USA, Social Security and Medicare deducted is a contribution to the USA (I am not saying this is right or wrong, just a fact).
Just wanted to say that Social Security's Old-Age Income program is available to all non-citizens, regardless of immigration status. It is a good thing to be aware of.
The only requirements to meet is 10 years of work in the US (i.e. "40 quarters of coverage (QC's)"). I spoke to someone from India sometime ago, who had come to the US in their late 40s or early 50s. They were planning on going back to India after they had accrued 10 years of tax-paying years in the US, so they could collect on Social Security Old-Age when they retired in India.
With the exception of a few countries,the US government will in fact directly deposit money in your foreign bank account. [a] You don't need to have any ties to the US. The whole thing is actually quite profitable, if you've only worked in the US for 10 years. Per the formula [b], if they earned $130k per year, in 10 years they made $1.3 million (and contributed $198,900 at 15.3% in FICA taxes), which divided by 420 yields $3,095 - the AIME (Average Indexed Monthly Earnings). The benefits payable for it is: 960 x 0.9 + (3095-960) x 0.32 = $1,547. They can get $1,547 from age 67. If they live until 87, that's 20 years. And 20 * 12 * 1547 = $371,280.
All other federal benefits, plus the other programs funded by FICA taxes (ie OADSI / SSI + Medicare taxes) including SSI, the other parts of OADSI, and of course Medicare, are not available to non-resident non-citizens (with a few exceptions).
The max term of H1b is 6 years. You can stay on H1b beyond 6 years either by being on the green card backlog queue (after passing a certain stage you can renew your H1b beyond 6 years), or maybe leave US and come back again (likely requires another H1b lottery?). What I'm saying is sure stay in the US for 10 years on H1b is possible, but it's also quite hard.
No, you just get your your retirement pension once you become eligible age-wise. You do, however, need to earn at least 40 credits throughout the years, which translates to at least 10 years of employment in the US.
Much of what you say is true, but it's important to realize the H1-B is not designed with any of those benefits in mind. Its only purpose is to fill roles where there is no local talent.
The H1B is also not designed to support diversity or equality, which is crucial if we consider it a stepping-stone to long-term immigration (which many people want).
It would seem reasonable to place an intake limit of 10% from any one country, and limiting males to a maximum of 49%.
Right now, lets be honest, the H1B is giant immigration scheme for Indian males to get into the USA: 75% of applicants are Indian, and roughly 70% of applicants are male.
With these kind of diversity requirements, it would also be much harder for crooked companies like Infosys to racially discriminate against non-Indians:
We shouldn’t focus on diversity for the sake of diversity. The purpose of H1-B is to attract talent but when you say a certain percentage need to be from a specific country, or of a specific sex or race then it’s not about talent (and is actually racist, “you’re not indian so you can’t have this job”). Why do we even tolerate ideas like this?
The US could go all-in and treat the H1b program as a diversity program. The background of every candidate would be examined, and a deliberate effort would be made to amplify the most marginalized of communities.
India holds 17% of the world's population. Any program that is designed for diversity would have a 15-20% Indian population. That is much smaller than the current number, and in fact it would be a fairly different set of Indians: victims of sexism, casteism, "colorism", etc.
This could work out pretty well. Indian social inequalities would be reduced, US tech companies would get an infusion of extremely diverse workers on strong career tracks. If you believe that diversity is good for the workforce, this would be a huge boost.
But the straight/cis/brahmin/male Indians would get mad.
Here's a frank answer. I've worked with various foreigners and H1Bs over a long career and always enjoyed it. I worry sometimes that they're being seriously abused by their employers, but I figure that's for them to decide.
I feel less positive about the program these days given that a number of companies have made it a point of pride to emphasize hiring of "diverse" employees, which seems in reality to be a pretext for H1B hiring that would not otherwise happen. This stings a little bit for me personally, as it's become clear that I'm losing some jobs to H1Bs. And I'm sure it really stings for native techies that can't find work during this incipient economic depression. (I'm old enough that being whacked by H1Bs just means unexpected early retirement.)
For whatever reasons, I suspect the American base will continue to hollow out and turn into something different. It's a bit like British cuisine, which has (in my impression) been essentially overrun by Indian cuisine and that of other countries. Is that bad? I guess it depends on your point of view.
Anyway, as long as the hiring is legal, I'm good with it. Certainly I've never met a colleague from another country that I didn't enjoy working with.
I’m English, there was no English cuisine before Indian food. The closest thing we had to a national dish was fish and chips, which frankly, is fucking awful. About all you can say for English food is that we make nice beer.
Well, indeed, maybe it was an easy mark. But still, "fish and chips" was a thing here in the US in the 1970s to 1990s at least, and I still remember "Long John Silver's" with great nostalgia. (Not sure a Brit would care for it, but at least it was freshly fried.)
Mushy peas, on the other hand, are probably unsalvageable. Except, maybe, with a nice curry sauce... :-)
Also (if we leave aside the abusers like InfoSys etc), employers pay an additional cost for H1B visa workers (comparable salary + the cost of sponsoring the visa itself). Presumably this means there is a net benefit to the American company doing the hiring to be hiring these H1B workers. Seems like a win-win situation here all around.
If the concern is with abuse, then let's crack down on that.
HN needs to stop pretending only companies like Infosys and Tata abuse the h1b.
Even big tech companies like Amazon and Facebook hire h1b workers so they can create sweatshop environments. H1b workers are afraid of being deported if they do not perform well, and a certain percentage of workers are forced to be on the PIP plan every year in the stack ranking.
Can even lead to suicides or suicide attempts. Ex:
Sure- but there is never going to be a perfect policy. Facebook Engineering typically hires people with degrees from great programs, or great prior experience.
But most of the "IT" work done by InfoSys and others are things that can practically be done by Americans as well. It would take training, but it wouldn't take a degree from a top university.
So - companies like InfoSys and Tata are a good place to start.
Of course it benefits FB, but I'm not convinced it's about cost. FB is almost constantly hiring, implying there are more open positions than available qualified candidates. That coupled with what seems like on par compensation for H1B employees + the added cost of sponsoring a H1B worker to me means it's about hiring enough qualified candidates rather than saving money.
You can argue FB (and other FAANG companies) can just pay more. But 1) the FAANG compensation is already plenty high and 2) the talent pool is finite, and if FB pulls more from the local pool there is just less left for other companies. As it is less well known tech companies were (pre covid anyways) already having a hard time hiring because they can't afford to pay FAANG comp. Theoretically if you get rid of H1B workers and force up top end compensation, then we'll just have less workers available for the lower tier companies.
If companies like Facebook and Amazon had such a hard time hiring engineers, they wouldn't be cutting 10% of the workforce every year based on mostly political yearly reviews. That's why they are always constantly "hiring". Having visa workers that can be easily overworked is a huge bonus to try and force 80 hour work weeks and a toxic rat race.
The average engineer at these companies is not all that competent, the interview process is very noisy. I know many people barely able to write basic stuff like fizzbuzz, lots of them slither their way into middle or upper management.
All those costs are written off as expenses when the company files taxes. Perhaps we should double the tax instead to cover unemployment for the american that didn’t get a job?
There may be H-1B holders who plan to become immigrants, but H-1B is a nonimmigrant work visa.
> Now all these immigrants have learned your language, passed job interviews, and are competing to come to your country to give you 1$M and help your economy.
No, they are competing to come and reduce the market clearing cost of labor and increase the returns to capital in our economy. Which is good for you if you are (1) one of the incoming laborers, or (2) a person whose main interaction with the US economy is via capital investment, not labor income.
> To those who say we must invest in local workforce, I wonder why would you have to stop immigration to start investing in local workforce?
You don't have to stop immigration.
You do, on the other hand, need to stop importing labor in a manner specifically and selectively designed to avoid upward pressure on wages (and thereby, stop the incentive to develop domestic supply) for high-skill, high-demand positions and to terminate temporary residency when it no longer serves that purpose.
Or, you need to better capture the returns produced by those means and direct them to domestic workforce development.
I'm one of the most pro-immigrant and pro-immigration and anti-Trump, people you’ll find, and I would shed not a single tear if Trump managed to permanently kill, rather than merely temporarily suspend, the H-1B program.
Exactly. H1B is great. Most people don't come to SV just for money. They are seeking interesting applications of technology, researching on breakthroughs, climbing corporate ladder etc. Whether you like it or not, most tech companies are run by immigrants. If someone is against that, I don't know whether you're afraid of competition or think that only natives have the sacred right to work on interesting stuff.
I'm not saying I'm not against people who are abusing H1B. That should be banned NOW.
I can understand how this might seem unfair to immigrants.
this part is completely wrong:
"If they have more workforce they can do more".
The demand for labor is not determined by the supply of labor, it's determined by the demand for those products. When companies higher engineers for example, they don't just go, "hey, we just had two brilliant engineers interview, so instead of highering 1, we'll higher 2." It never works that way. Companies need the amount of labor they need, and not one person more.
The reality is there's a vast oversupply of labor right now in most fields. Wages have been stagnant for a long time. And even in the bay area, average engineering salaries lag behind the local COL.
Furthermore, the US simply won't allow for enough housing to be built. Even with the population we currently have, there's no where near enough housing. this problem is only getting worse. Sure, it's just politics, it's a choice voters have made, but we're stuck with that choice. And, having more immigrants/increasing population makes it worse.
Let's talk about immigrants that are being paid well, for a moment -- since Trump is seeking ban those people as well. (Also since I myself am one such immigrant, and I know several immigrants who were being paid extremely well, whose H-1B cases were denied by the US government under the guise of software engineering not being a "specialty occupation"[1]).
A friend of mine last year got a job as a L5 at Google, for around $380k a year in total ($190k base + $28.5k bonus + approx $160k stock). Plus a sign-on of $50k. First year pay is $430k. He's not doing rocket science, or managing. He's an individual contributor writing back end code.
Meanwhile, there are folks doing a similar jobs in Canada, who are making 100k CAD (on the high end), which is $73k USD. And the cost of living in big cities in Canada is shockingly high.
Now, you were saying something about bay area salaries being low? The salaries are, if anything, over the top insanely high.
Also, I'm trying to understand why companies go through all the processing delays, legal costs, frequent unjust denials since 2017, to hire someone who is not a citizen, while paying them well above the median for the job, if there is a supposed oversupply of talented top-tier skilled people who are looking for a job. The truth i that oversupply myth is just a lie, spun by people with anti-immigrant animus, plain and simple.
I can't fathom the head space you would have to be in to think that salaries are low. Incredible arrogance and entitlement, combined with a generous dose of xenophobia probably. Instead of being thankful, there are people who want to cut off / deport / exclude people from working in the US (and I mean people making these high salaries).
Also, I know a lot of H-1B holders with high salaries. I myself am one of them. (In fact I don't know any low-paid H-1B holders, but my social circles are all folks working at top companies or friends from other social groups.) The intense amount of hatred for immigrants on HN always continues to appall and amaze me.
I usually tend to refrain from commenting on these threads, because the toxic amount of contempt and hatred for immigrants that I come across in these threads is extremely upsetting, but sometimes it's better to speak up, than be silent.
Hatred comes from lack of understanding and knowledge. Most American citizens I interacted with on this issue have little or no idea of how the immigration system is designed or works. It’s hard for them to fathom why it is so hard for third world passport to travel or work in other parts of the world because they haven’t had to jump through odd Red tape hoops to do it themselves.
A google job is like the top 1-3%. The vast majority of people don't make anywhere near that much.
second, it's not about hatred for immigrants. It's just about jobs and housing. And, there's simply not enough of those to go around.
I mean, sure we could have more immigrants. But, make no mistake, it will reduce the amount high end jobs available and reduce the housing supply even more.
And, actually, most blue states are very welcoming to new immigrants which is especially ironic since they're the ones that don't want to support the housing growth needed to house an increase in population.
This doesn't address GPs question about why, if local talent is plentiful, companies are willing to spend a lot of money and jump through several hoops to pay top dollar to immigrants when they could pay the same to a local and not have to spend extra money and effort.
This is an extremely rude, blatantly false, offensive, degrading, and insulting comment to make about the 1 million+ high-skilled workers in the US. Plenty of people own homes, start families, etc. But, I'm not too disturbed/bothered anymore -- as I've come to expect these sort of low-effort low-quality dishonest, hateful/insulting comments due to xenophobia.
Here are comments from just one user on HN (who was sadly banned), but who is/was on the H-1B, who owns a $1.15 home, has an American kid, has lived in the US for 17 years, and makes $650K a year:
The laws of U.S. that were written by Congress, make it practically impossible for India-born to ever become citizens or even permanent residents through the EB2 or EB routes. This is large topic, I've covered in some of my previous comments like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19857687 (short comment) or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19857878 (long comment).
No one here has contempt and hatred for immigrants, you're just being melodramatic. People have contempt for companies abusing the H1-B system.
Your entire post seems fairly out of touch. You're talking about Google L5, basically the top 1% of H1-B jobs in the US.
> Also, I'm trying to understand why companies go through all the processing delays, legal costs, frequent unjust denials since 2017, to hire someone who is not a citizen, while paying them well above the median for the job, if there is a supposed oversupply of talented top-tier skilled people who are looking for a job. The truth i that oversupply myth is just a lie, spun by people with anti-immigrant animus, plain and simple.
Just because you can't understand it, doesn't mean it's not happening. I have personally witnessed the oddly-specific job requirement postings, and have had friends who worked at some of these consulting companies as H1-B. Things are very different outside of the top tech companies.
There is absolutely abuse happening. This is not some "anti-immigrant animus". This is happening. It's frankly ridiculous that you blame this on xenophobia on HN of all places.
I can't fathom the head space you would have to be to believe there isn't widespread H1-B abuse after reading countless articles and comments about it. Incredible arrogance and entitlement, combined with a generous dose of disdain for citizens wanting to protect their country from abuse probably.
Criticism of a widely abused immigration system and the companies that abuse it is not anti-immigrant sentiment.
In order for the HB1 program to pass muster, and validate its value for US citizens, people taking advantage of HB1 must put into the US least as much as they are taking out.
I dont see US citizens emmigrating / benefitting from similar benefits at foreign countries, like those given by HB1s within the US. In fact, as far as i know, there are no USA emigres going to india to work, drawing india SS retirement benefits, for example.
In other words, the HB1 program is asymetrical. Americans put in a lot more than they get out of it.
As such, the only logical thing for the HB1 to be discontinued.
> And even in the bay area, average engineering salaries lag behind the local COL.
> the US simply won't allow for enough housing to be built
You don't see the connection here? Why do you think there will be enough housing even with less immigration? The "housing must increase value at all costs" mantra is responsible for this.
There are 17 million vacant homes in the US[0]. With the exception of the half a million of us that are homeless at any given time[1] we all live in one of the other 121,520,180 homes that currently exist in the country. How much housing is enough? What if instead of focusing on how much of the population we can cram into the fewest (constantly under construction) places we figured out ways to incentivize commercial development and rehabilitation of derelict communities?
O type Visas have no quota [0]. This is what the H1B are represented as though in practice suppress wages[1][2]. This issue is decades in the making and companies exploiting these programs earned their scrutiny. Especially when there's massive unemployment companies importing labor under these auspices need to be called out.
O visas are much harder to get than H-1B. I've hired a bunch of people via H-1B that we could not have hired via O. None of them were displacing American workers -- we would have hired just as many (or more) qualified American workers if they had been available too. So it seems disingenuous to imply that O covers the intended purpose of H-1B. (For the record, I agree that companies like Tata abuse H-1B and that sort of situation should be banned.)
>None of them were displacing American workers -- we would have hired just as many (or more) qualified American workers if they had been available too.
Did you try increasing salaries until you could find applicants. I'm virtually certain that you did not.
What you mean is that you couldn't find American workers at the price you were willing to pay, and because you weren't willing to pay the market price, you found another market.
If you could hire 20 people on H-1Bs but you only have enough money to hire 10 local people. You have displaced 10 American workers.
Please don't put words in my mouth. We were paying well over market rate. There simply are not enough qualified Americans to do all of the highly skilled jobs available.
> People seem to think that number of jobs is a limited constant and if you stop immigrants that will have a positive effect on the economy. But in reality companies can simply just scale.
This is completely wrong. Jobs are zero-sum. One H1-B worker hired is one lost American job opportunity. It's not that hard to understand and taxes have nothing to do with this. Yes, companies can scale jobs but how often are they doing this and how does it help if they are also scaling up the number of H1-B workers?
It is very strange that people in this comment section shout "nationalism, BAD" when someone says that skilled people should stay in their own country and potentially help these countries to grow out of poverty, and statements like the one you just made - essentially rob these country of talented people and bring them into US - is somehow not nationalistic and good.
I left my country to escape a totalitarian regime. I think just because you are born in a place doesn't mean you have the responsibility to completely sacrifice your life. Humans collectively have an obligation to help lift poor countries out of poverty. The question is are you against immigration because you genuinely care about the poverty in my country?
For me it wasn't totalitarian but "corrupt beyond salvation" (think bottom 50 on corruption index). A friend of mine recently went back and lasted six months before he came back to the US - he opened a startup and had to deal with bribes, threats, blackmail and "forced partnerships". I myself would never go back there.
Because the opposite is to go and exploit them as it happened for most of the human history and is still happening here and there. Some of those country are drawn in poverty as the result.
Are you already tired of "helping" others? Don't forget that we aren't trying to cooperate for a very long time as it may seem to be. We aren't still great at doing it either.
What may seem to be broken to you isn't wrong in essence. We should help each other. We should support each other. And less poverty is better for all of us. Maybe we should just do it differently. Perhaps the way we are doing it isn't good and we should find a better way to do it.
Humanity's competitive advantage—the reason we survive, thrive, and outcompete every other species—is that we work together. We cooperate, to balance one person's weaknesses with another person's strengths.
Social Darwinism is entirely based on misunderstandings of science and history. It is a dead-end philosophy, and needs to be eradicated with knowledge, replaced by the spreading of compassion and cooperation wherever it is found.
I agree with all of this, except I don’t see the value an impoverished set of humans can provide. They will have a point of few that is valid and valuable in certain contexts but are these useful? Secondly when the new baseline is removing poverty you remove the desire to become something more, which is where the real innovation comes from. So by not helping them we get better results, not worse.
Also I would love some papers on how natural selection is no longer valid, this sounds like pure opinion.
This seems like a bow out and still I have no answer, just an assumption. So once again, what benefit does humanity have for decreasing poverty instead of the country decreasing it themselves?
Calling the Indian Government a totalitarian regime is stretching it a bit too much. India is still a paradise of liberty compared to China and some other countries in our region. Indians want H1B because they want to earn in dollars, plain and simple. All other reasons are secondary. H1B is modern-day bonded labor. You guys are the sugar slaves of this age, like it or not.
That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think? Bonded laborers were forbidden to leave their jobs under penalty of the law (like actual prison time). H-1B holders are free to leave any time, they just experience a massive drop in income.
It's not just a "massive drop in income"; if you get fired/laid off or want to leave your H1B job, you have 60 days to leave the country or find a new H1B job (which might not be so easy with quotas & applications etc).
By the very nature of a highly skilled worker, they likely cannot realize the full value of those skills without a certain economic and commercial context. It is definitely not the case that for most H1-B employees the counterfactual is "growing their own countries out of poverty." Most likely, the counterfactual is being another 75th percentile wage worker in a low income country.
In addition, this line of reasoning totally discounts the very real benefit of foreign transfer payments from workers in the United States to their international families, often supporting large extended families.
Their thesis is that many of the home countries of H1B visa holders do not have the social, technological, and economic infrastructure to support lots of jobs with the skills that they are able to use to their potential in the US.
Thus, if they go home, they will not likely be "lifting their country out of poverty"—they will just be stuck in one of the jobs that is available there. Low-skill, low-pay jobs, without any prospect for advancing to something more like they would be able to do here.
I don't know to what extent this is true, but this is my understanding of their post.
A highly skilled person can only thrive in the right environment.
As an extreme example, take the best programmer in the world, and send him back 500 years in the past, he's probably not going to be very productive.
(The counterpoint to this, which the GP didn't talk about, is that this person is still likely to be able to retrain and be productive in that society in other ways.)
Can you see how someone emigrating of their own volition and bringing their skills is different to a country purposefully trying to encourage immigration of skilled workers from [poorer] countries where there is a skills shortage.
The end result looks similar but motivation matters.
> Think how much investment you have to make on a child's health care and education to make them into a highly skilled workforce.
Let me fix that for you:
Think how much investment you miss out on — investment in a child's education to make them into a citizen who will carry your country's patrimony into the following generation.
All data indicate there is no shortage of US Citizens that could fill STEM positions and that H1-B holders on average make well below market rate. Outright ban is the wrong tool and I can't imagine that this is a reasoned policy response to a well understood abuse of wage-arbitrage. The right answer would be to mandate comparable wages for H1-B immigrants as for median employee with the same experience/tenure etc...
"A comprehensive literature review, in conjunction with employment statistics, newspaper articles, and our own interviews with company recruiters, reveals a significant heterogeneity in the STEM labor market: the academic sector is generally oversupplied, while the government sector and private industry have shortages in specific areas."
"Our examination shows that the STEM shortage in the United States is largely overblown. Guestworker programs are in need of reform, but any changes should make sure that guestworkers are not lower-paid substitutes for domestic workers."
"Sixty percent of H-1B positions certified by the U.S. Department of Labor are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation."
So 60% draw salaries that are lower than the 50%th earner in that occupation. In other words, they draw salaries that are largely in line with the occupation, although slightly on the lower end.
I suspect if you now do the calculation after adding the fees companies are required to pay the government, along with the lawyers fees most companies have to pay for an H1B visa holder, both of which in most cases will be closer to $10k per year, the H1B earners will be completely in line with the occupation they are employed in.
Your thoughts are right on but the right thing to do is make it trivial for people with sought after skills to become citizens so we can benefit from their expertise at the same time as eliminating H1-B exploitation instead of trying to fix said exploitation in some complex fashion that itself is likely to be gamed.
If you make the knowledge worker that any country ought to want a citizen he will naturally demand a market wage.
If there is no shortage of US citizens that can fill STEM roles, then the H1-B program has no reason to take in STEM workers. Its purpose is to fill skill shortages. There is clearly no skills shortage, therefore the ban, while perhaps overkill, is not unjustified. Companies simply use it to get cheap labor.
Yes, you are stating the obvious, however, you neglect to understand that much of the policies that support H1-B labor are lobbied by corporations who want cheap slave labor and Indian consulting companies who want to ensure the H1-B pipeline stays alive. They will say anything including lie about "skill shortages" to enact these policies.
This has gotten very old very fast (beyond the obvious cruelty). I have several friends who keep watching their colleagues just have to up and leave over this and it’s causing a ton of issues for businesses that employ folks on work visas in general. It’s just disruptive to be disruptive/feed the base.
It's just silly... even if you're a nationalist, isn't the prospect of bringing over talented people from foreign countries to work in America and help our companies profit plus deprive their home countries of their skills a really, really good thing?
If H-1B visas were being used how they were intended, they would be a good thing, but we often see them used as a way to get cheap labor, or even directly replace American workers. The company I work at has H-1B junior web developers, hardly "very niche, hard to fill" positions that they can't find any qualified Americans to do.
For a while I wasn't sure if this was just some "talking point." Then one day, on a hiking meetup, I met a guy who was ranting about his job that was to write "oddly hyper-specific job descriptions that might seem to make no sense" to bring in cheaper h1b candidates.
Years back I had a college friend who was hired on an OPT visa. When they wanted to convert his visa to H1B (I think) they kept getting suitable candidates so had to rewrite the requirements so its only suited to him. He confided this to me as he felt bad but really needed that job.
A company hires someone out of college, trains them and has them working and integrating into the company for about a year and a half, but then the government, because of a literal lottery, requires them to randomly replace them with someone else.
And you’re surprised a company that has spent all that money and resources on hiring someone and with the known hit or miss nature of hiring wouldn’t want to replace them with a random new candidate?
Edit: And it gets better. They don’t need to replace the person if someone else accepts the job. They need to get rid of that employee who they are happy enough to be spending tens of thousands of dollars on that they wouldn’t need to on their citizen counterpart, even if their possible replacement didn’t accept the job. Merely if the possible replacement’s resume fit the minimum requirements of the job.
That’s why companies rewrite the position to be hyper specific. Because if there is anyone else available eho can meet the bare minimum who applies for the job, even if they aren’t interested in it and will never accept an offer, they are required to get rid of their existing multi year employee who they are happy with.
There is no “opt” visa it’s “optional Practical training”. It’s for a limited duration after he graduates also the rules are sketchy if he Would be let back into the country if wants to travel home to see family . If the employer wants to continue his employment he has no choice but to go on H1b. And then H1b has its own requirements and problems with it. Try to understand a lot of people “abusing” the system have not other legal recourse to keep their lives going.
I guess this is indeed an issue. I’m a manager and I am trying to hire. 100% I’d rather find a person who can start in a couple of weeks than several months for a candidate who needs immigration. But there are rarely any local applicants and even when there are they don’t make in the interview. We pay in excess of 300k for all roles so it’s not like we are trying to find cheap talent.
Something isn't adding up here, even in areas with high COL people are clamoring for jobs like that. I'm not saying it never happens, something just doesn't sound right.
Also, the vast majority of people on H1-Bs that I've worked with are quite... average. It's nothing against them, but I doubt they were blowing people away in the interview. Many of them do have better attitudes, though.
That's not to say that there aren't exceptional examples, or a given candidate was bad, but we absolutely could of hired some kid from university, or a mid-senior level from a US company. They just tend to have more demands.
It's not exactly a secret the main reason for the program, is to lower wages here. ie. keep the wages of nationals in check. Of course, you also get access to a better deal on labor, and people that want the job very badly.
I could be off base, but many of the people I've worked with on H1-Bs simply cause less political problems. It's not necessarily a cultural thing, as I'm including many different countries. They have the threat of deportation hanging over their head.
No you aren't missing anything. "could of" (and its cousins "would of" and "should of") are common mistakes made (interestingly) almost exclusively by English-as-first-language speakers (my observation, so don't ask for citations I don't have any), since they sound similar to "could have", "would have" and "should have" particularly in "native" English accents (I'm thinking North American and UK especially).
I've never seen "could-have" (hyphenated) though. I don't think that's right either.
Maybe your recruiting to get interviewers into your pipeline and the interview process just isn't that good. Or perhaps nobody wants to work at your company. Bad management? Bad glassdoor reviews? Don't engage with the local tech scene?
If it's in excess of $300k for all roles it sounds like a Netflix type company or Netflix itself. I highly doubt nobody wants to work for that company.
Did u miss the part where he said “they don’t make it in the interview “?. It’s not about handing out a job because there is one ...there is a interview process and quite a rigorous one when it comes to FAANG companies. They don’t go out seeking cheap labor.
Without more context it's hard to know what the problem is there, but I strongly doubt it's that there is "no" talent locally available to start within a couple of weeks, whether it's a US citizen or foreign national with an existing work visa.
A small list of things that people may consider:
- competitive salary. 300k is one thing in (for example) Kansas City, but completely another in the Bay Area or New York City where it's not uncommon for senior roles to deliver at least a third again, if not more.
- the ethics of the company - does it engage in questionable behaviour? For example spying on users, building weapons, formenting unrest via algorithmic news feeds and so forth?
- the fundamental health of the company from a financial and existential perspective.
- does the company have a local reputation for being a poor place to work? For example, is it a bureaucracy where no-one can get anything done? Does it have a notoriously poor work-life balance, "face time" expectations, a culture where the loudest or most senior voice always prevails in decisions? What does Glassdoor (or levels.fyi) say about it?
- are the technologies you're hiring for overly specific? Are your job ads a buzzword bingo of "nice to have" frameworks, libraries or practices? Do the ads make it clear that experience in them is not required, provided you can learn them quickly thanks to experience of concepts or adjacent technologies?
> But there are rarely any local applicants and even when there are they don’t make in the interview
What exactly does the work involve, if it is so difficult to either find candidates or give a candidate with some missing skills a few weeks to learn something new?
The answer here is to actually fix the system with compassion rather than suspend it and harm everyone using it.
I'm not unbiased: I'm a former H1B visa holder and wasn't underpaid at all. I promise you we exist! It's not a fun situation to be in... if you have a pending green card application (up to a certain point in the process) you can't change jobs easily. And if you come from some countries (India, in particular) you have a wait of ten years or more before receiving your green card.
It feels like a collision of a bunch of otherwise unrelated decisions that ultimately harms both immigrant and native workers and only benefits companies. It's all fixable, but like so many things in the US right now, not politically possible.
Indeed, a friend offered to introduce me to a lawyer who would help me hire H-1Bs instead of similarly qualified residents. The gist was you have to figure out the unique qualities of the person you want to hire, and then construct interviews for the required X candidates such that these other candidates would not be as qualified across these trumped up unique qualifications / skills.
Companies hiring full time H1B employees directly will not save money because there is no incentive to and they have to pay the government additional fees simply for the H1B visa, and they have to almost certainly have an immigration team, or at a bar minimum a lawyer on retainer to keep up with the immigration stuff.
My company applied for an employee I manager’s permanent residency (she is on an H1B visa which has a limit of 6 years unless you apply for a permanent residency). The application process costs the company 30k on a one time basis, including fees to the government, lawyer fees, and associated expenses.
Its not in salary that you see the money. The savings are in training and legal costs.
The average tenure of an HB1 is much longer than a US citizen. Turnover is lower for obvious reasons.
Threats of litigation , etc are much lower too. I havent seen a single HB1 sue their employer. Similarly, i have seen multiple US citizens sue employers, and almost always without merit (often it was to stave off termination, retaliate, etc).
There is alson some risk in a US worker. There is a lot of entitlement even at the high end. I have seen many native engineers and even PMs hit bars every other afternoon...on a 3pm weekday.
These were people close to 200k year.
The HB1 is a shield against that risk (or poor hiring), and thats savings too
There seems to be a mix. Which is part of the problem with the national debate / conversation.
There are companies who found the absolute best in the world that they have to have. So they need that H1-B to get the job done and hire the best person.
Then there are companies who just want to contract out super cheap labor, so they do thousands of H1-B applications hoping a few hundred make it through, then the they charge a local rate, but pay the employee a fraction and reap the profits.
So the second example I’m assuming is the operating model of companies like Accenture, Cognizant, etc.
I’m flooding this thread a bit, but I’ve always been a little confused by the consultancy firms. Is there a clear difference between off shoring and H1B? Or is it mostly the same thing for these companies, with different margins for each.
Truth be said the consultancy companies barely make any or in fact lose money with the H-1Bs and they make way more margin on offshoring. But customers want people near them for various reasons and the offshoring doesn’t generally work well without boots on the ground.
So the H-1Bs are loss leaders with actual money being made in offshoring instead.
Consultancy firms often have an offshore team in a lower cost country (India, Phillipines, Mexico). The consulting firm typically employs a few people in the US on H-1B visas, contracted to the client, for communication with the offshore team, onsite support for the client, and generally managing things.
But the client often has their own employees on H-1B visas as well. This is unrelated to either offshoring/consulting.
Eg. Take a company like Apple. Apple hires employees on H-1B visas and pays them well.
But also Apple uses consulting firms (both US-based and offshored) for specific projects/functions. These workers are not Apple employees. They are employees of the consulting company -- or in some cases, there is a chain of contracts where they are employed by one company, which contracts them out to a consulting firm, which then contracts them out to end client (Apple).
We have h1b employees at our company. If we were to lose them right now it would be a significant disruption.
Personally, I can't take time out of my job to train employees - which in our case could easily take three months. I can't even imagine us finding and hiring some at this time. These guys are an absolute asset to the company.
Does your company not already grow skills over time? One should already be training (or coaching) individuals regardless of their present skill levels.
We grow skills. That's one reason they are so valuable. And we cross train. Everyone is able to take over for another employee at any time. But now is not the time. I just can't stomach losing our H1B members or any dev right now.
We are in the health IT sector and you may not know this (because it surprises most everyone) but there is an absolute revolution happening in healthcare. We're approaching version 5 of FHIR. And I'd guess 99% of the devs on HN are like "what the heck is FHIR". It's a core standard for exchanging healthcare data. And it's literally the tip of an iceberg. And that's my personal dilemma as a lead developer.
Speaking of skill growth, devs attended FHIR Dev Days last week, CCDA Implementation-athon a few weeks before that, and the FHIR Connectathon a week before that.
None of us are in the office and since we have formed personal relationships over the last few years we know how to "get stuff done". AFAIK we treat every employee well enough they have few reasons to leave. Now is not the time for us to lose a dev. Any dev.
I just ask the government to stop being jerks and let us ride out this covid year without too much more upset...
That's a very uncharitable reading of what they said. They presumably spent time training these people. They can't afford to train up a bunch of new people because someone decided that they need to be kicked out of the country for no good reason.
I am saying that they should already have a "training time allocation" built into their role and that they could choose to use it for remedial skills. That is, individually having time for training should be a moot point.
Now, if the business can survive in the meantime is a different matter. But the business has no choice in the matter. And the business is not alone in the matter. Which probably makes that a moot point too.
I don't claim that it will be easy. "I can't train people" doesn't compel me as a broadly satisfactory counterargument for the above reasons. That sentiment itself is not charitable making it hard for me to read it charitably.
You can always do what companies like yours have already done to residents: Have the H1B visa holders train the residents, and leave the H1B visa holders out of a job.
Does that sound unpleasant to you? Trust me, anyone on the shorter end of any stick isn't going to like it.
My question is, why preference H1B holders over residents?
I'm not sure you're making an argument in good faith here.
Still feel free to see my response just below. That said I'm not management but our devs are smart and knowledgeable and I'm sure are getting offers from other companies. And I like to think they are treated well and I hope I get to work with them for a long time to come.
No, it's just a way to bring in cheap labor, and bring salaries down. That's it. It's very rarely the case that there's genuinely no one here that can do the jobs. It's widely know that companies are making no legitimate attempt to hire a citizen. I'm not saying this is a good move, and I'm not commenting on the morality of it (ie. who says someone from another country shouldn't be competing for your job)
I understand it must be comforting to issue a blanket statement like that, but I it's just simply not universally true. I was hired on an E3, next job transitioned to H1-B and now have a green card. My work has directly enabled the hiring of three Americans. Is the H1-B perfect? Of course not. But on both occasions there were no other candidates, and when I was hired on H1-B I got a mandated higher salary to meet expected pay rates.
Having just gone through the H-1B application with my company for myself, causing my small startup to pay pretty large sums of money to the USCIS and spend significant time and resources putting together the paperwork, I think they would definitely prefer to have avoided that if possible.
I'm not saying there aren't Americans who could do my job, but I have been on the hiring side since joining and there is clearly enough demand for labour in the market right now that it is hard for them to hire qualified people at all, let alone qualified Americans. Employees in this field just have so many options that companies have to go to pretty significant lengths to get who they want. And I know Americans coming from my background and working in the same field and I can tell you I am not being underpaid relative to them.
If you classify someone as foo and have them do bar you can pay them above the prevailing rate for foo while actually being below the prevailing rate for bar.
It can also serve as a way for third party to earn a sizable chunk of that persons wages which would be a less likely scenario for someone hired stateside.
Why would they agree to be paid under when they are in tech where companies until at least a year ago were fighting for employees? They could literally cross the street in SF and land a better job at a better price. I mean, for a country that prides itself on free markets, it’s remarkable that you believe that free markets simply stop working.
And here’s the kicker. An H1B employee costs a company a lot more than a resident because of government fees and lawyer costs.
So if you have a citizen and an H1B holder drawing the same salary, it actually means the company values the H1B holder far more than they do the citizen.
H1B can't simply cross the street and change companies. If they find themselves between jobs they will shortly find themselves between countries and many companies have been found to have made agreements not to hire each others people.
As a nationalist, I think it would be better for those other countries to keep their skilled workers and so benefit. I think every nation has a right to its own existence, space, and policies. And they also get to decide what's right for them 'as a people'. Always optimizing for performance of 'the economy' is not in the best interest of the actual citizens of this country.
I think each nation[0] should be entitled to make decisions for themselves and have a right to run their state the way they see fit. I wouldn't presume to move to, say, Japan and then start telling them that they're doing things wrong.
What if they moved to Japan because of an opportunity provided by a Japanese organisation that needed their skills, and then they spent enough time there that they had buy in to the community and were a recognised member in it and were valued by that community?
I don't think this is too hard to imagine applying to a person living long term in Japan and definitely not hard to imagine in the US, where there are no true "Americans" in the first place, apart from maybe the indigenous peoples.
If I lived there a long time, I still wouldn't be Japanese. Look, it's definitely an emotionally charged issue the longer someone has been in a place, but that doesn't change the basic facts. We can discuss the merits all day long but not the legitimacy of the government to decide who can and cannot stay.
For the purposes of this debate, "Americans" means citizens and those that can vote, the ones to whom the government answers.
Geopolitics is inevitable: everything's interlinked--trade, laws, defense, research--everything. If a nation wants to persist and prosper, it needs to play the game; being an aloof loner or a blatant bully won't get you far.
Conquest fell out of fashion with the bomb; it's all proxy wars, psyops, and deniable covert/cyber attacks now. Slamming the door on H-1B’s (while it might be nice for my own income) weakens American companies and sends world talent elsewhere, like China. Who's only too happy to fund infrastructure in Greenland/Africa/Europe to extend soft power across the globe while siezing harder power closer to home (Hong Kong, South Sea expansionism, etc). Sitting out the game isn't an option, and going at it alone ain't much better.
Are you linking to "a politically organized body of people under a single government" or "a race of people, large group of people with common ancestry and language"?
The type of nationalism that is currently a component of the Republican platform can better be described as xenophobic nativism. The nationalist counterargument is going to be that US companies have gotten away with not investing in employee training and instead ship trained workers from overseas to do jobs that could have been held by trained Americans.
I had seen lots of H1B foreigners while myself worked in US, for couple of years. Most of them were brought not even H1B but on B1 Visa or J1, were employed illegally and produced bad code.
If that's what we were doing then it would be a good thing. But what companies are mostly doing is bringing over average people so that they can pay them less than Americans.
Companies profit but citizens lose out. Those two entities should not be conflated. This is akin to the outsourcing of many industries such as pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to countries that do not have the same worker or health regulations as the US.
The visa workers are second-class citizens and exploited by companies to keep cost low. It undermines all workers and in the long run undermines all nations involved. Take the US's relationship with China manufacturing where China has some of the worst pollution and is one of the largest world polluters as they do not adhere to any of the same regulations that nations of the west adhere to.
Currently there is the narrative that the US has a shortage of talented STEM. This is untrue. The shortage is due to a skewed labor market that suppresses opportunity for US citizens in the same way that a US manufacturer wouldn't be able to compete against a Chinese manufacturer not because we don't have the technology, demand, or resources, but that the difference in regulations makes it more costly.
Profit isn't the only important thing in life. If there are skills lacking in the market, they will eventually be learnt. Filling demand for CRUD app creation engineers instantly, is just another example of our instant-gratification culture manifest in business.
Is this being greyed down because folks just don’t want to consider the possibility that straight up racism might be just as much a part of this or did it touch a nerve for some parties who saw themselves getting called out?
Brevity does not need be dismissed as an immediate association or prelude to flame wars, nor does it reflect unsubstantive thinking. While I understand your desire to vanguard the guidelines, and aversion to the messy-nature of the ‘race debate’, dang, I disagree with your conclusion as applied in this case.
Assuming positive intent and being vulnerable enough to ask questions usually will do a lot more to mete out such flame wars than latching on to the first emotional misconstructions of the drafting of ideas.
I don't disagree that much with either you or solarkraft. Moderation is guesswork and not all of these guesses hit the target. FWIW, here is some explanation of the general approach we take.
To be clear, which topic specifically are you alluding to because I think anyone with any cognizance on the issues of race and nationalism have a lot of overlapping features and a lot of cloudy, hard to define nuance, so can you please disambiguate in this instance?
I don't think I was thinking of a specific topic when I wrote that. The OP was about Trump and immigration, which is obviously an inflammatory and divisive topic. The arguments about racism, protests, police brutality are others. It's not hard to recognize these.
There's something to that, it's admittedly not hugely insightful. Is it "reflexive", "flamewar style"? I wouldn't classify it as such, since the option presented is an in my opinion a real possibility. It may be a bit harsh and inciting for a rational discussion however, so maybe vsareto's subtlety is more appropriate here.
Generally I'm happy this place is moderated strictly to keep the discussion civil. That there doesn't seem to be a will (there are no dead comments under mine, as far as I can see) to allow a direct discussion on american racism feels a little weird, but is over all understandable.
Racism in America and related offshoots of the George Floyd story (for example protests, police brutality) have surely been the most-discussed topics on HN in the last month. You're probably running into the paradox that every story, even the most well-represented, feels underrepresented on HN.
There are likewise concerted efforts to get white nationalist taking points on the front page and painted as reasonable in the related threads. You see new accounts and sub-500 accounts that congeal around them almost every time.
I'm here on an L1 (intra-company transferee). I was initially supposed to come on an H1b, however, lost the lottery twice.
(Lottery is difficult to win due to rampant abuse by certain Indian-US outsourcing companies)
For H1b, you can at least change jobs. An L1 cannot change jobs at all. So, you are completely at the mercy of your employer. Fortunately my employer is benign, but that is not the case for everyone.
Having a proper points system (not one that is easily gamed) and giving people a greencard to enable them to change jobs would be a much better system. This would prevent low-skilled workers and the suppression of US salaries. And if there is a high demand, the US can just take those with the highest points (as the Australian system does).
There are two very good systems:
1. Australian 189 permanent resident system. Example of points:
There is limited positions, so only those with the highest points are selected.
(Compared to H1b where the bar is low and people are selected via lottery. This incentivises outsourcing companies to have 4 people apply for every one true position).
2. Japan's point-based high skill visa (Technical stream)
Agreed. H1B is just a front for immigration anyway. US Companies and the government should probably stop lying to themselves. If they want to bring over talented workers, give them rights too.
A common thing one hears from some Americans is "I'm not opposed to immigration; I'm opposed to illegal immigration". I have come to learn that this is almost always a lie; often these same folks will jump at any chance to hurt legal immigration as well.
Literally everyone who is for "legal immigration" belongs to 2 camps.
One means they want to limit immigration of brown people to as close to zero as possible while allowing white people from Europe with money to move here. Where they can't outright forbid anyone except white Europeans they want to increase the difficulty and bureaucracy to the point where virtually nobody gets through. If it takes 10 years to become a citizen great. If it takes 30 better. Let em die waiting.
Two lives in a fantasy land of law and order where the non criminal types could just queue up and prove that they are the right type of people and follow the law. In this fantasy land type one doesn't exist and the people sneaking in are proven to be bad people by the act of breaking the law. These people live in a world where the law exists to protect and privilege them and anyone not following it is clearly transgressing.
Virtually nobody whom we citizens are descended from waited 10 years, hired a lawyer, and filled out paperwork in triplicate and both types are hypocrites who are themselves a disease on the body politic. If you hear someone talking about how they are for "legal immigration" unfriend them, block them, don't hire them, don't associate. You can't fix them so contain the cancer.
Seems kind of silly to say without evidence that it's just to feed the base when there's a valid reason as to why it's being done (to prioritize Americans out of work)
> there's a valid reason as to why it's being done (to prioritize Americans out of work)
The "Fixed pie fallacy" [1] is probably both one of the most important tenants of modern policy-making, yet it's rarely explicitly discussed or debated.
Cyclone_, your thinking relies on this fallacy, namely that if one person is working a job, that's one less job available. [2]
In reality, there is quite a bit of empirical research that indicates when people work (especially highly skilled jobs like in tech), it does not reduce (and may even increase) the jobs available to others [3].
If globalization and automation are so good at job creation, why did the American manufacturing workforce collapse?
Economies are complex, counter-intuitive feedback machines, but the "supply and demand" model fits the last 40 years of data, while the "floats all boats" model really doesn't.
"Lump of labor is a fallacy, honest!" sure sounds like the kind of opinion I could get a good penny for if I were an enterprising economist, though.
Recent immigrants were responsible for creating tens of thousands of jobs, most of them for Americans.
Software isn't a zero-sum game even on a country level and certainly US benefits enormously because companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix etc. are global giants but employ massive amounts of highly paid people in US.
CNBC sure had to stretch that definition pretty darn far to get to "more than half," didn't they.
In any case, immigration is the least upsetting globalization policy IMO: it is exactly what it says on the tin, almost everyone agrees that too little or too much is bad, and the amount can be tuned using quotas. H1B, however, is not that. It pretends to be about scarce skillsets (which enter this calculation one way) when it's actually usually about standard skillsets (which enter the calculation in another). Further, it suppresses the bargaining ability of the people subjected to it, depressing wages for both them those they compete with. Worse still is "regulatory arbitrage" where low tariffs encourage companies to bypass environmental, safety, and labor regulation by shipping manufacturing (or what have you) overseas. I prefer immigration to both H1Bs and regulatory arbitrage, and not by a small margin.
As a more general point, exponential growth is one helluva drug and truly does create a "floats all boats" environment, but different economics apply once an economic sector plateaus. Those economics look much closer to zero-sum. Zero-growth = zero-sum. Low growth is low sum. That's why what happened to American manufacturing over the last 20 years is a good model for what happens to American software over the next 20, if we aren't careful.
We've had it good in software, but we're no longer in the phase where we can pretend the sigmoid is a neverending exponential.
Immigrants starting businesses aren't doing it on H1-B visas. Those are only for employees of existing companies and don't upgrade to permanent citizenship.
Because it was outdated technology, that’s not even what you are talking about. You’re talking about a fundamental change in technology, not production methods (automation) or market/labor expansion (globalization).
Frankly, I’m not sure what point you’re even trying to make.
Fair enough, replace a disrupted technology with census tabulators who were automated. My point stands: you can't look at job losses in the affected industry to tell the whole story. You have to look at jobs in the economy at large. Automation leads to new demands elsewhere, and so does globalization.
College graduate unemployment rate is over 8%, up from 2% a few months ago. There are a lot of skilled, educated, unemployed workers right now. I wouldn’t kick out H-1Bs, but no reason take in new ones right now.
You do know that H-1B's are already only in because there was no American that could do it, right?
Plenty of education and skill in the USA that doesn't have a fitting job (right now) to put that to use.
Say there are 100000 MBA's but you need someone who knows how to run a kubernetes cluster with a custom syscall shim for a modified kernel and there is someone in Norway who knows how to do that. Even combining all those college graduates combined with all their business education wouldn't be useful for such a role, but that Norwegian person would be. But you still want to stop H-1B?
The number of recent layoffs make it clear that there are plenty of people perfectly capable of performing even your pretend scenario. See eg http://layoffs.fyi/ and also eng layoffs at Uber, Samsara, etc.
Well, then the government in the USA is wrong, because they wrote that the Immigration and Nationality Act, section 101(a)(15)(H) is for foreign workers in specialty occupations, especially due to the need of skills that are urgently needed by the country.
Also, those mass layoffs you reference are rather recent and doesn't seem to have anything to do with this specific visa system. At the same time, the pool of available people might suddenly exist now, and that means that a company that needs someone with those skills now has a native worker available instead of having to search for people elsewhere. H-1B workers that were laid off have to exit the USA so it's not like they will add to that pool.
That said, it is still possible that those laid off people were selected to let go because their stills aren't as needed as others inside that company (i.e. positions that only exist due to scale). That doesn't mean those people happen to be the ones that you'd need to seek someone else for. Assuming that all tech people have identical skills doesn't help the conversation.
The average H1B doesn't seem to have a PhD or get more than $100,000/yr (indicating that they can't do something that rare or valuable that you likely can't find in the American labor pool). It seems pretty clear to me that the program gets abused and Americans could fill most of those jobs. It does, of course, also fulfill its intended purpose of supplying skilled talent when/where Americans can't.
If this is objection, why not just raise the minimum salary requirements to 100k instead of banning it? Most Silicon Valley companies would easily meet it.
I would support that. The program is supposed to allow for filling positions unfillable in the American labor market with specialized skills, not as a way to undercut American salaries.
My point is that Trump isn’t pushing for that, and instead just suspending it completely, because his goal isn’t to reform H1Bs, so mentioning specific criticism of the program is irrelevant when the primary objection is idealogical.
You don't need a Phd or a lot of money to have a skill that an American doesn't have. Assuming that those things are 'indicators' doesn't seem to be based on anything.
The difference here is that America has a large 'labour' pool, but the roles you need filled aren't as much just clocking in and out doing some random task, but have requirements that are harder to meet and apparently aren't met by the available Americans. Assuming malice isn't very constructive and to do something about it that actually helps anything needs some backing information.
The other way around: most people don't really want to work in the USA and will only go if the money is right. This also means that the company in the USA that is trying to find someone to fill a gap in their needs might have to spend twice as much getting their problem solved. At the same time, the amount of Americans asked to work outside of the USA is rather low as there aren't that many special skilled people that aren't already available. If you check out the sources listed at the WikiPedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_diaspora you'll find that a lot of emigration happens for other reasons, and only a small part is related to special skills needed in emerging markets (which are markets that need a lot of skilled people but are not very attractive to a lot of people due to cultural differences or stability worries).
Silly to say without evidence that preventing some people from doing their jobs somehow creates more jobs for other people. H1-B visa holders aren't competing with workers in the retail services industry!
But you don't consider that maybe it's still a net positive that they were able to come to the US to get decent working experience for a number of years? At the same time, an unemployed American worker may now have a chance for the same job. How is this a bad thing?
This is for all years, but the numbers for 2019 seem to indicate SV will be affected: https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...
Google is #8. Amazon, Facebook, Apple are in the top 20. I don't know how accurate this list is, but I am worried for my colleagues.
Your argument would be more convincing if Microsoft wasn't on the list. Even by the evidence you present, _both_ high tech employers are large H1-B consulting firms would be impacted.
H1-B was intended for highly skilled workers that the US had a real shortage of. But now it's just being abused to bring in captive workers that are willing to accept lower wages and worse working conditions than otherwise while crowding out US workers.
What if, instead of bowing to corporate greed which cares not a bit for our country or our people, we actually invested in our own population and trained them to do the jobs H1-B workers currently do.
Scaling back H1-B in this way is the common sense approach. And it benefits other countries too by reducing brain drain.
1. SV/FAANGs, like elite colleges, only hire some very small percentage of people who apply. Many people who are perfectly well qualified and have successful careers otherwise get denied employment.
2. The market cap of these FAANGs is in the trillions. Between talent and capital, there's literally no problem they can't solve (they can solve problems about cyber bullying, trolling, etc but their business relies on it.. so it's not really a "problem" per se).
3. There are SO MANY underprivileged and/or poor kids in SV, LA, Pittsburgh, all the places where tech companies reside. Saying there aren't enough skilled workers in the US is kind of dishonestly true, as they have tons of applications from many qualified people.. many of whom with some training and support may very well become highly qualified....
4. ...They could literally invest some of those trillions to build a pipeline from these areas, develop talent locally - or at least domestically.
So much of tech is about solving problems with the resources you have. Opening up broadly to a global labor supply removes the constraint on that resource, and therefore don't need to innovate or find clever ways to make it work. Now, they are companies that have only one duty - deliver profit to shareholders - and that's fine and how companies should be run. But public policy needs to exist to serve the interest of the people, and for the most part - not entirely - H1B has been to serve the interest of executives in Big Tech.
Also, finally, Trump is absolutely awful, horrid, all that. A broken clock is right twice a day though, and this is one of the few possibly accidental things he's done that isn't a complete self-shot to the head.
1 - I am the first one to complain about our broken hiring practices, but just because you get a first interview does not mean you are qualified for the job.
2/3/4 -> FAANG have a ton of money but no incentive at all to spend it on philanthropy. I wish it was not the case, but their only job is to make their investors happy.
3 - is it dishonest ? For sure there are some kids in SV, LA,etc that could work in tech if they got the education but the thing is, they didn't. Also, local talent is never going to compare to the global one.
I would love to see laws pushing FAANG and co to invest in philanthropic causes. Heck, I would not even mind if this was based on taxation. But cutting H1B is not going to solve any of these problems.
This is not a correct reading of what I wrote. Investing in local (or at least domestic) employment pipelines at all is not philanthropy. Seeing it as philanthropy is patronizing.
Let's just have a thought experiment (maybe we'll see what happens if the ban continues) - what will Big Tech do if H1B is not a thing anymore?
Second thought experiment - who benefits most from H1B? First of all, the H1B holders themselves. Second, the tech industry itself. Further out from that benefits are less clear and more mixed. We are a nation of immigrants seeking opportunity, immigration is important to this country. Immigrants brings a lot of economic and cultural benefits, and we must always fight bigotry and discrimination towards our immigrants. But there is also much more complexity surrounding immigration policies, and they have their cost, too.
There is an issue with 'diversity in tech' and, among other things, under-representation of African-Americans in STEM.
So why are the big tech corporations that are constantly virtue signalling about Black Lives Matter and social justice not simply training American engineers (not specifically black, but people coming from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, which would definitely include many African-Americans). Why do they bring Indian or Chinese engineers?
America does not lack people, it has good universities. It could certainly train a local workforce. Providing good jobs to those communities would do wonders to reduce criminality, drug abuse and various issues.
>America does not lack people, it has good universities
I am not american so not 100% certain, but from what I can see, the public education system in the USA is not that great and universities are way too costly compared with the rest of the world.
I 100% agree that there is a huge diversity in tech problem.
Not all of that problem is about hiring POCs either, a female friend of mine had to flee a job because none of her colleagues would accept to have a woman as their manager (that's in 2020 in the SV..)
>So why are the big tech corporations that are constantly virtue signalling about Black Lives Matter
You are answering yourself, virtue signaling is cheap. I can talk for my own company. They were happy enough to talk about the importance of BLM, but less interested in taking concrete steps.
I fully believe that companies should encourage their engineers to participate in mentorship programs. I highly doubt that it would magically solve systemic racism but it would be a relatively cheap way to find and hire junior engineers and good PR.
"What if, instead of bowing to corporate greed which cares not a bit for our country or our people, we actually invested in our own population and trained them to do the jobs H1-B workers currently do."
Who's this "our people" you're talking about?
As a US citizen, I consider every person in the world as part of my people, and I don't begrudge any individual coming and working or training in the US.
The more people, from whichever country, have access to good education and good jobs, the better.
Good education and jobs should not be reserved for people who happen to live or be born in a particular place, be descended from particular people, nor just those who managed to get certain bureaucratic paperwork.
All else being equal, I think most people prioritize their own country and countrymen over others', and would not sacrifice their own countrymen to benefit others'. You may not share this view, but I think most people do. Most people consider themselves a part of a national team, and they feel some loyalty to their teammates.
What's the difference between working on the hardware of a computer or the software that it makes sense to have one outside of the US and another one inside?
You can take the high approach and give up your job for someone else, then. Are you going to welcome strangers into your family and your home as well? Resources are limited, that is a fact. If you've never experienced that, consider yourself very lucky and privileged, and work to deserve that good fortune and privilege.
But we're not talking about your decision or his, we're talking about the decision made by the government whose literal job description is to make rules for this country alone!
This the opposite of what I believe has made the us great. Look at all the Elon Musks. High skilled immigration can never harm your country. It can give competition to some people who feel entitled to their high salary, though.
I def agree that highly skilled immigrants are important to America. I disagree wholeheartedly with the concept of open borders though. It’s too idealistic and in practice would cripple America.
There’s plenty of people living in poverty in America, along with the multitude of other major problems right now. I’m not a closed border person, we need immigrants. But we don’t have the resources to help every single person who wants to come here. It’s not discrimination, that’s a terrible argument. It’s a government helping its people.
Every time you file an H1B Visa, you pay something called a ACWIA Fee (“American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998”). For employers who have between 1-25 full-time workers, the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act fee is $750. For employers with 26 or more full-time employees, the fee is $1,500. [1] This fee was established to fund training and education programs administered by the Department of Labor.
As of 2018, there were 420K active H1B visas in the USA. These people need to renew their visas every 3 years (most are Indians and they can never become PR in their lifetime). So that means 300-630 million USD is being added to this fund on a recurring basis over a 3 year period.
That’s a very interesting thing, I had no idea. So a sensible thing to do would be to increase that fee substantially and have it go straight to subsidizing degree programs that aren’t creating enough home grown talent.
In other words, the company should expect to pay close to market rate per H1B plus the fee.
We remove the incentives to abuse the program for cost reduction, and straight up use the fees to fund college.
That brings me to some weird job posts that I keep seeing for some large bank. The role was for ‘Specialist’ developer, and I wonder if it really is some specialist role that they can’t fill in a major city (seemed like typical web developer stuff).
Shrugs, say it ain’t so, would hate to know that’s how it’s being gamed.
That's a good idea, but alas I fear such a proposal would be deemed too... umm nationalistic or something... better to have local talent pay through the nose for their qualifications so that they can then compete on the global market with folks that don't have such debt.
> In other words, the company should expect to pay close to market rate per H1B plus the fee.
what's different now? they're legally required to do both as of now.
Are you telling me that the H1-B that is hired doesn't do any work and free-loading off the American economy without paying any taxes (like Social Security, which they don't get to access).
Could you share what that job posting was? I'd love to look at it, if you suspect a violation, you should report it.
I’m not implying anything about the actual workers.
I’m mostly being suspicious of corporations that have over 50% of their staff as h1bs or off shore. I feel that’s probably set up that way for one of the common reasons in business ($$$$).
Just trying to learn how the math works out. I have no doubt Google is hiring the very best worldwide, but I have sincere suspicions that your average enterprise found a way to keep tech costs down by using these loopholes.
Also to your last point, this is something no one can prove. How am I going to prove that a company can hire that talent locally? They’ll just say they met with candidates and they weren’t up to snuff. You can’t prove anything in that situation, all you can really do is look at the numbers from a bird’s eye view and see that hey, over half your staff is world class rare talent apparently.
> Also to your last point, this is something no one can prove. How am I going to prove that a company can hire that talent locally? They’ll just say they met with candidates and they weren’t up to snuff. You can’t prove anything in that situation, all you can really do is look at the numbers from a bird’s eye view and see that hey, over half your staff is world class rare talent apparently.
So, you're telling me that they're gonna pay the same amount they'd pay for a local employee PLUS the H1-B overhead, just to hire a foreign worker?
Put yourself in the shoes of the employer, what are you to gain from this? (hint: it sure isn't monetary)
To me, what you mention seems like veiled xenophobia, I hope I'm wrong.
Posting this again from another thread:
> Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater.
> So, you're telling me that they're gonna pay the same amount they'd pay for a local employee PLUS the H1-B overhead, just to hire a foreign worker?
For the most part, sure, it should be cost prohibitive. I think companies should go out and find the best talent, they should try to do it locally, and if they can’t, paying the little overhead is nothing when you realize you just filled the role with world class talent.
It seems odd to have cost be a factor when you are basically saying you had to search the world to fill the role.
I personally don’t believe most companies need to scour the world to fill most roles. For those that do, they won’t scoff at the price. This will at least eliminate the arbitrage that is rampant in the global economy.
Most of the companies you speak of are multi-national companies providing their services world-wide, why should google, a service that is offered to the whole world ONLY have employees who're born in America, while their service is used across the world?
Lets be honest, a country's wealth is determined by how widespread the customer base is for the goods and services that originate within it. Economies of a majority of countries aren't closed loops, they're built on trade, selling goods and services that the rest of the world would pay a premium for would make it wealthy.
Considering that, it's only fitting that they would want to hire world-class talent.
Nothing is stopping Google from
being an international company headquartered in France. France has a lot of social welfare rules that dictate a safety net for it’s own citizens such that every company in their realm must adhere to if they want to benefit from everything France has to offer.
America has a lot to offer, and part of the tax is you must support American workers first.
If India and China is the better place to work, better salaries, better consumer market, better infrastructure, better freedoms, better everything - feel free to operate from those places and respect the offerings of the people of that country, and please, put them first.
But don’t take advantage of the offerings of a place like Germany, while taking advantage of the lack of worker rights in China, while paying taxes in the Caribbean. This is taking advantage of every loophole imaginable.
> If India and China is the better place to work, better salaries, better consumer market, better infrastructure, better freedoms, better everything - feel free to operate from those places and respect the offerings of the people of that country, and please, put them first.
Believe me, this is precisely what has been happening, and now it's only going to be accelerated. You'll get your wish sooner than you expected.
Those employees pay taxes. They pay into the Social Security which they can't access.
edit: literally, do the math, 420K+ active H1-Bs, they should be at least making upwards of 70K per year, tax revenues should be upwards of a few billion dollars every year.
Your presumption is either (if you not a h1 candidate) far away from the fact or don't want to accept the truth.
You are looking at the top 100 companies and their full-time employees but not at the 1000s of vendor-employer ponzi scheme/scams that happen every day in the form of contractors who apply with fake resumes, take proxy interviews and outsource the assigned work to someone in India. Doesn't stop there, the dependents of those do a unlicensed food selling, baby sitting, work in local stores, what not. The hard to digest fact is the student who comes on F1 visa, succumbs to the pressure of 90 days period to get into a job to maintain the visa status joins a consultancy company, which starts the game. These consultancies market the candidate with high experience fake resume, arranges proxy candidate to take interviews, even Falsify the requirement of GC/citizenship candidate requirement - all these to charge the client a 100$/hr and pay a mere 40$/hr to the candidate through their sister companies acting as layers. A honest try from USCIS to do a quick scan in containing these will drop at least 50% of H1B lottery applications, void 30% of the consulting company licenses and also help the right talent to get an opportunity. If you are a gov/USCIS rep, drop me an email I'll be more than happy to provide more details, and possible ways of catching the wrong ones.
Salary is not even the issue. The main issue is the employment restrictions. Instead of making H1-B a visa that lets an individual full freedom (like green card), it's tied to an employer and moving jobs is not that easy, and many employers also sponsor for green card, which is another process that can take years and make it harder to move. During this time the employee has little leverage asking for promo or raises. (promo and raises usually appear after the green card..)
Once you let employees freedom, the market will take care of the salary. I also understand that employers invest in the visa application and relocation of people, so it should be fair to them as well. This can solved by having a period (1-year is pretty reasonable) that prohibits new visa holders from moving companies.
Funny how ppl don't like to mention this and just focus on H1Bs getting paid "market rates".
It's almost like the SV's previous gentleman agreement of non-poaching got replaced with "hey, let's use H1Bs, sure we might have to pay near market rates, but at least we can tie them down for at least 3/5 years without any option of leaving".
H-1B holders can change jobs even without a green card. It's more of a hassle (takes 4-6 weeks) and has been made worse by this administration's repeated suspension of premium processing of applications. But visa holders aren't "tied" to their employers or "indentured servants".
I said it's not that easy, not that it's impossible. Also, H1-B transfer cost some money and involves lawyers, so some companies, like many startups, don't want to deal with that. The bottom line is that H1-B employees are at a disadvantage.
SV isn't the only place you find H1B's. Everyone from Toyota, AA, Sabre, etc in the DFW area has hired what seems like 1000's. There is hardly anyone but H1B's at Toyota in Plano from what I understand. I have heard some companies are laying of permanent staff and keeping H1B's because they're less expensive.
Personal experience in my part of the world seems to suggest that it is cost. Permanent employees are expensive and H1B's are so terrified of losing employment they are willing to work around the clock and for less.
I would like to see the whole program gone. I don't believe it is being used as it was intended.
I know of at least a few just from my office that are not on that site. Could it be that they are hidden through a contracting company and not hired directly?
Exactly, shut them down, American interests will be protected. Most of the folks getting on the H1-B have a masters degree in an American university, if they are in SV, it's usually a top-tier one. I've personally made some of the best hires on-campus.
I’d love to see comprehensive data on this. I worked at a fortune 10 oil and gas company in Houston. We had onshore contractors across a range, but I know a few of them made less than $18 an hour. The rest that we paid went to two different contracting companies.
It's possible (maybe even likely) that title deflation is happening, but based on my experience the salaries are definitely in line with the pay ranges for each job title (I worked at Amazon for 3 and a half years, so I have some first and second hand information on pay.)
If nothing else it's a great resource to see the unfiltered payscale at SV companies.
Thanks for the data. I see comments across threads on HN that say that H1-B hires are common. What is the incentive to hire them then? Are professionals in the US really that ill-equipped? I guess there is a bit of cognitive dissonance with FAANG complaining about no qualified workers but then FAANG only hired people who went to Stanford or Harvard and such.
I worked at two FAANG companies and my degree is from the University of Arizona. I only met a few people there whose degrees were from elite schools. Where do you get the impression that they only hire people from Stanford and Harvard?
Many SV companies are in constant need of more skilled engineers.
Since the H1B visa can be transferred, when I arrived in the USA, nothing would have prevented me from going door to door and find a better paying job. Especially in the SV where there are tons of companies hiring.
So companies have a good incentive to give you a fair salary.
This is not true for all visas. In particular there is one visa (sorry can't remember its name off the top of my head) that is an "international transfer visa" : you work for one year for the company in a foreign country and then you can move to the USA while continuing to work for that company. It is pretty easy to get that visa but it is also very hard to transfer it to another company afaik.
Hiring is also a bit broken in our industry. The thing is, it is often pretty hard to distinguish what makes a good or a bad engineer. This being said, there are just not enough skilled engineers in the USA.
It would absolutely be possible to hire more local engineers and train them on the job but that would cost a lot of time for uncertain results. Companies prefer to hire engineers that can already be pretty productive from day 1.
> Are professionals in the US really that ill-equipped?
Americans are plenty smart, but they are only 4% of the world population. American companies compete on an international stage and not having access to the other 96% of talent would be a competitive disadvantage.
I think it's more that they're fairly indentured. Their visa is tied to a specific _kind_ of work, they're legally prevented from making money in any other way other than their current job, and while they can change jobs, my understanding is it is generally viewed as risky (for instance, if the new place doesn't work out, you've got a few short months to find employment or your visa is no good and you have to uproot your life)
It'd be really interesting to see data on how often H1B's change jobs compared to the rest of the population.
My anecdotal experience as a hiring manager in tech firms for over a decade: it’s not about money, it’s about quickly finding qualified employees. Unemployment has been (until recently) low. There wasn’t some large supply of unemployed, qualified engineers sitting around. Nearly everyone I hired already had a job. Expanding the search globally just gave me a better chance of finding someone.
There are plenty of >200k H1B workers in SV, and I do believe these engineers and specialists will wonder how they can do their work elsewhere if they can't reasonably plan a few years into the future:
That argument is wrong. H1Bs are liked by Silicon Valley because they want to be able to hire the best people from anywhere, and not restrict their talent pool to 5% of the world population.
All reputable Silicon Valley companies pay people exactly the same whether they are on a visa, have a green card, or are a US citizen.
One thing to remember is that in many cases H1-B workers are brought over by sponsoring companies which take a huge cut (I know cases of 40% or more) out of their salaries for the service of securing them the Visa. So those salaries might appear to be a certain number but the workers themselves may actually receive significantly less while some rent seeking company stashes the differences.
I know for a fact that in my industry (not in SV) H1-B wages are lower, going off both public data and conversations I've had with H1-B coworkers, many who I consider my friends.
As a side note, I don't blame H1-B workers at all for coming here. They're generally great developers and great people.
If some of your best friends are H1-B workers wouldn't the right answer be changing the regulations such that companies must pay market rate (as in for the US labor market, not internationally) for H1-B employees here?
In the companies I've worked at, H1-B workers get compensated in software engineering roles just as well as their peers, I've also seen outliers where it's significantly higher (depending on when they joined, how much in demand they were with competing offers, etc).
I getting seemingly contradictory comments here but one could weave a coherent story out of all of them:
1) H1B's get salaries that are comparable to US engineer salaries.
2) A middleman takes a big bite out of that, the engineer thus takes home less.
3) H1B's are essentially like most immigrants, indentured servants who have no freedom to leave their employers, thus have little leverage asking for promotions or even autonomy as an employee.
4) Companies probably are most aware of 3) but it seems like at least for FAANG the biggest factor is they don't want to invest in training people and rather want people who already are skilled and such. It's probably true if you draw your net very tightly yes anyone can find that there aren't enough qualified workers out there who won't demand I guess near half a mill salaries.
I think it's an astro-turf campaign, it feels like it. Because no one thinking logically is gonna push an agenda that hard without actually thinking through it.
Not astroturfing. Technically underpaying is illegal but there are ways around paying an H1-B worker what a US citizen might receive. Title reduction, etc. Even if the total paid is the same, consulting companies that help sponsor workers get a huge cut of the salary so ultimately we have workers being paid less.
> Technically underpaying is illegal but there are ways around paying an H1-B worker what a US citizen might receive. Title reduction, etc. Even if the total paid is the same, consulting companies that help sponsor workers get a huge cut of the salary so ultimately we have workers being paid less.
I'm sorry to break it to you, if your company isn't paying prevailing wages, they're doing something illegal. They need to be shut-down, not the whole fucking program.
There’s nothing illegal going on here. I posted earlier that I was at an oil and gas company in Houston, a Fortune 10 company at the time. We had IT contractors from Larsen and Toubro. As an example, one guy who reported to me was paid < $20 an hour after L&TI and another contracting company in the middle took their cut. He wasn’t thrilled with that situation but his other option was to quit and go back to India. The worst part was I couldn’t hire him directly because of his contract. He wasn’t allowed to quit and directly work for us. Kind of live slavery.
> Employers must attest to the Department of Labor that they will pay wages to the H-1B nonimmigrant workers that are at least equal to the actual wage paid by the employer to other workers with similar experience and qualifications for the job in question, or the prevailing wage for the occupation in the area of intended employment – whichever is greater.
According to you, L&T were taking a cut out of the wages. Honestly, you should blow the whistle. L&T or whatever that middleman company is, they need to shutdown their H1-B program.
My company has a clause that we can’t hire people from this company for 9 months. If he waits around 9 months he’ll have to leave the country wayyyy before that.
Lots of companies such as Mahindra, Wipro etc bring their people on B1, J1, L1 and employ them illegally. They receive INDIAN wages, while working in US, and the poor folks work just for bagging power back in India. For them, having worked in US increases potential wage in their home country.
I came to USA for education in 2008-09. Payed for my own education thanks to my parents and their sacrifice of lifetime savings. Did not take any govt funds for education. I graduated with a masters degree with Perfect 4.0 gpa . I worked my way up from financial crisis to working SV today. I have family, kids going to public school and also own a home. I don’t remember anytime taking a pay cut to stay in the country. It’s been more than 10years that I was legally here and always followed the law and I am still 5 years out at minimum from getting a green card. I rely on h1b renewals to keep going.... so it’s not exactly easy for me to pickup and go back to my home country where I haven’t stayed for 10+ years now to “fix” this problem.
There huge nuance which is missed when talking about H1bs ... there are body shops which do cut wages and should be stopped. However the immigration system in USA needs significant reform as well. It’s hard already to build a life for your family with a normal 3 year lease ( h1b duration) for this kind of misinformed political rhetoric to have unintended consequences.
Unless your priority date is earlier than 2012, you are a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 30 years away from your green card. The backlog between 2009 and 2012 is around 40k people or 80k green cars so around 15 to 30 years
Yes, chop shops out there abuse the system, and have become substantial factor in some industries.
Much of the H1B candidates out there are graduates of american universities that are trying to take the next step to be in America. We should be embracing these people where possible, not villanizing them. Make it so the chop shops can be weeded out, not the good people that are forced to work under them due to a broken system.
Also, many jobs require base salaries that are VERY in line with the market, if not higher, as a financial check to the Employer to make sure they want said (H1B) candidate.
We had trouble finding a JR DevOps person, basically forced to go H1B, and a JR in the midwest was going to cost us 95K with little experience. That was widly out of line for a JR devops candidate
You can easily achieve this by raising wage requirements, instead of essentially having nothing changed and making the whole US a big open air prison for foreign skilled workers.
Make it easier for H1B's to transfer to another, better-paying job without losing their privilege of staying and working in the country. Then it's a real win-win, for both guest workers and citizens. The only actors who would lose are those seeking to abuse the system in the first place.
> You can easily achieve this by raising wage requirements, instead of essentially having nothing changed and making the whole US a big open air for foreign skilled workers.
Also stronger labor laws instead of gutting them, actually enforcing them instead of shanking the agencies responsible for them, and actually hitting guilty corporations where it hurts instead of handing out "cost of doing business" jokes.
And prosecuting guilty management as well. Middle manager 8374 might be less eager to ask for bullshit job requirements designed to only fit a specific H1B if their n+1 to 6 have just gotten years in the slammer for labor fraud.
Raising wage requirements just means companies will pay whatever the new minimum is for H-1B workers. Once employed, those workers are still locked into their job without freedom to jump to anther with better working conditions or a better salary (which makes them more appealing hires for companies than US workers).
If you want to see a more fair and competitive workforce, give H1-B visa holders more freedom to switch jobs without risk of losing their visa.
Except for the individuals. US educated students who want to remain in the US, work, and raise a family are now basically being told to go back. Or people who prefer the US for non-monetary reasons (crazy thought, I know).
But what I find interesting is that programs like the diversity visa (DV) lottery with even more relaxed requirements or even illegal immigration don't get scrutinized as much as H1-B. I wonder if it's because H1-B workers primarily compete for well-paying white collar jobs while most DV winners and illegal immigrants go for blue-collar jobs.
Instead of fighting the symptom you can also fight the cause. If you make the abuse not legal, and detect and enforce that, you solve the problem either way. You'll still need to educate the native citizens of course, otherwise nothing really changes. But you'll need to do both.
I don't know what local laws would apply, but I imagine that the same laws that have to do with equal pay can be made generic so that it applies to everyone for a position. In the end you should be paid for your value, not for your gender, color of your skin or the place you were born.
> What if, instead of bowing to corporate greed which cares not a bit for our country or our people, we actually invested in our own population and trained them to do the jobs H1-B workers currently do.
Wishful thinking under the current administration.
It's not like the country is paying for said education. And if they were, it's not like the money is "lost" in any way, as it goes back into local businesses which "stimulates" the economy and creates local jobs. I personally wouldn't use this argument.
If by a country we mean states, college is at least partially publicly funded in the US and outside generally. If by a country we mean expenditures by the citizenry, definitely true that college is an investment of time and money by the students.
A doctor leaves college maybe with 500k dollars in debt in the US, doctors in most other countries graduate with little or no debt at all: you could import thousands if not 100's of thousands of doctors willing to work a fraction of the current doctor's rate, thus making it cheaper for patients.
> And if they were, it's not like the money is "lost" in any way, as it goes back into local businesses which "stimulates" the economy and creates local jobs
Which money? I fear this is the broken window fallacy Bastiat liked to talk about.
Foreign students typically pay the "state" part of the support as well. For PhD students, well, all grad students are cheap high skill labor, so the uni is always the big beneficiary.
I’m curious. HN has largely agreed that the current pandemic showed that remote work is absolutely doable. At the same time, people are claiming that the H1B visa, which allows immigrants to work in the US at largely American salaries, are taking away American jobs.
So the stated solution is to do away with the visa and send those people back to their home countries.
So why does anyone believe that when those people go back to their home countries, their employers would choose to hire someone else instead of keeping the same people hired at a fraction of the cost?
I mean, people seem to think that companies would be unhappy about paying someone 75k/yr who was costing them over 200k/yr (salary + payroll taxes, etc) in the US.
It makes absolutely no sense that the job would go to an American. The likelihood is that the job would remain with the same person but now they would pay taxes and spend dollars in their home countries at a fraction of the cost.
Yep. This is already happening. As US becomes a less inviting destination for the best talent, the talent will find home elsewhere. This might be beginning of the end of US tech dominance.
That's a long road. Very few tech firms generate the kind of money from tech abroad like many US firms do. You won't be earning 300k in a non-US company in Germany very very likely when looking at similarly-levelled roles (to exclude high-powered roles) compared to the US. You'll be looking at 1/3rd the total comp max in many cases and that'll already be a very good salary in the field. And possibly higher taxes, no effective investment-based retirement schemes, and other disadvantages.
US firms have a very long way to fall before they get even the least unattractive, relatively. A young person emigrating from Germany to the US working in a (now) good tech job there making 150,000 plus benefits will be out-earning their age cohort back in Germany 2-3x at the start of their career. Heck even at 120,000 that's likely 2-3x what a somebody with a Bachelor's here would get. That's a tremendous difference no career-focussed person would shy away from wanting.
The comp only matters if you can actually come to the US and have reasonable life, right? There are over 500,000 people living in the US for a decode or more and still waiting to get permanent residence. They're vulnerable to capricious policies like we saw today. I know many personally who are actively looking at moving away, salaries not withstanding.
Having lived in US for 2 years and having visited Korea and Germany, people US do not even imagine how bad is QoL in US tech hubs, even wit higher wage. I mean Seoul or Berlin is SO much more interesting place than SF Bay. The only places in US I'd consider worth living is Chicago, Boston and probably Seattle.
Flipping that around, if a company can hire someone for less in a foreign country and get the same result, why bother going through the H1B process? Why the drama? Just do it.
No one knew about pandemic. No one knew we all can work remote. It's a mix day for folks who are cheering up ban. It proves work can be done be remotely. But how remote we be, is yet to be determined.
So many people here are celebrating this order due to its supposed abstract benefits but are somehow unaware of the its cruelty. So many visa holders in this country will be unable to leave and enter the country for the foreseeable future. If they have sick parents abroad they will not be able to visit them or, in the most tragic circumstances, say goodbye in person. It won't matter whether someone is a world-class researcher with extremely niche skills or database administrator using commodity technology. They will live in anxiety, fear and uncertainty. One wonders how many proponents of these measures would be willing to uproot their lives and leave the place they call home at a moment's notice. Life is about get a lot worse for hundreds of thousands of hard-working, highly-educated immigrants and there are comparatively few who will shed a tear for them.
> So many people here are celebrating this order due to its supposed abstract benefits but are somehow unaware of the its cruelty.
To be blunt, a nation's citizens and permanent residents' rights to economic prosperity outweigh any temporary worker's right to continued employment. Yes it may be viewed as cruel in the individual case, but the point of these visas are not to provide a vehicle for those workers to come live in the USA. They're meant to fill a need for companies that cannot find qualified workers.
In a country facing a staggering unemployment rate, continued job losses, and possible long term recession, it'd be malfeasance on the part of any public official to magnify the problem by allowing more workers to enter and compete against its own permanent residents.
I think this is called the single lump of labor fallacy where there is a fixed number of jobs to compete for and by allowing immigrants to come in and take some of them the citizens are collectively poorer for it.
In actuality additional workers demand lots of things themselves that create net jobs. If more people within the carrying capacity of the environment/structures decreased economic prosperity every country in the world would be looking to shrink their birthrate as much as possible so that the decreasing population could have an increasingly large share of the fixed prosperity. We know of course that the reverse is true.
Counterpoint - [in Western countries] those who have any chance to promote population restriction are "the 1%" and don't care provided the population can be controlled enough to keep working for them.
We've had a massive energy boom in the C20th, and grown fat from it, and now realise that's not sustainable for the planet. We can't continue that growth.
Robotisation will continue the current trend of increasing the wealth gap. And we don't have the energy or resources to just buy our way out of it by making more and more junk to sell (as per C20th).
Yes more immigration, or more pay for immigrants, increases demand from them for "middle class" luxuries (and reduces the ability of the native population in general to pay; but doesn't reduce the desire, and debt fills that gap), but we need to take the limitations of the planet in to account and realise resources aren't as infinite as they seemed - that means it has to be treated as zero sum, and indeed with restrictions on energy/resources that debt won't be there to cover things.
On top of this the ability for the Western nations to control others, and live better off their labour, seems to be finally ending.
IMO if we in the West want to maintain our current standards of living we'll need to entirely curtail population growth. Redistribution is going to hit hard, except for the robot owners who will get richer.
Regular Westerners (the 99%), to my view, will have a taste of living in a World where others have the wealth, and we don't have resources (skilled labour in particular) to bargain with - the elite won't need most of us. Heavy immigration can be a foretaste of that. Skilled immigrants allow the elite to bypass negotiation with their own populations (that might lead to democratisation of roboticisation benefits) whilst simultaneously leaving home countries devoid of skills and ripe for exploitation, not by nations but by the Capitalists.
Whereas we don't need ANY of them and can vote away their wealth and their power. If needed we could lop off their heads but we won't need to as its far easier and more defensible to lop off their wealth.
How does preventing a legal employee from visiting home and returning to the US help anyone who happened to be born in the US? It serves absolutely no purpose except to be cruel and to satisfy people in this country who enjoy cruelty towards immigrants.
>How does preventing a legal employee from visiting home and returning to the US help anyone who happened to be born in the US
From a pure economics view: it does because it constrains the supply of labor. Sure, many (most?) people would probably stay and not not go back, but there's always going to be a few who do go back. That constrains the labor supply, which in theory will raise the price of labor for everyone still here, mostly natives.
That makes no sense at all. A employee visits his home country on vacation, now information to return causes problem for both the individual and the employer, especially if that person is in a critical role and now unable to do their job.
>That makes no sense at all. A employee visits his home country on vacation, now information to return
Well technically it was announced in advance, so they could conceivably fly back and avoid the restrictions.
>causes problem for both the individual and the employer, especially if that person is in a critical role and now unable to do their job.
I imagine that's what the exemptions are for. Also, if your goal is to reduce the amount of foreign workers, I'd imagine that "shock" of someone leaving is going to be present regardless of how it's implemented.
In the UK immigrants, I gather, produce more in tax revenues than they use. That aside from everything else they bring - friendship, culture, knowledge, labour - indicates financially we have a net benefit.
So exclusion of immigrants can reverse this, lowering fulfillment and reducing financial wealth.
Sure, it “constrains the labor supply” by making people choose their livelihood over visiting their family. I think that very obviously qualifies as cruelty.
>I think that very obviously qualifies as cruelty.
Whether or not it's cruel is orthogonal to whether it helps native workers. Summarily executing all visa holders is also cruel, but would probably also help native workers by constraining supply.
Oh come on. Part of the reason why we're facing these job losses and high unemployment rate is because our administration fucked up hard managing the coronavirus and now they're looking for easy wins and scapegoats so people can blame the big bad other rather than the people responsible.
The fact that you're defending their cruelty because of the economy (that they fucked up!) is immensely disappointing.
Where's the whataboutism in talking about how an executive order is going to affect people it is directly targeted against?
Are you saying they should not be taken into account? I can't tell what your actual argument is beyond trying to make your own feelings into some sort of rationalist argument. It seems you're trying to use 'realism' in place of an actual argument.
Why do these programs always seem to target the worker, but not the employer? Enforcement of illegal immigration always seems to have the immigrants arrested and deported, but what about the people who hired the illegal workers? H-1B visa holders get blamed for "competing against permanent residents" but where's the blame for companies who hire H-1B workers over American citizens?
We live in a capitalist economy which follows pretty simple supply and demand curves. Where there is a demand (cheap labor) there will always be a supply (even if it's the black market). Arresting sex workers doesn't stop people from hiring them, and arresting drug users doesn't stop the dealers.
Immigrants don't come to the US because it's fun or easy, there come here because there are companies willing to hire them, legally or not. So if there are too many H-1B holders competing with Americans, why not make it harder for companies to hire them over an equally qualified American, or punish the company for abusing the visa system just to get cheaper labor? Same with illegal immigration, why not fine or shut down businesses that hire illegal immigrants?
You say it's not pretty it's just reality and I accept that reality... but it's also needlessly cruel to punish job seekers and not the companies who are enticing them to come here.
> So if there are too many H-1B holders competing with Americans, why not make it harder for companies to hire them over an equally qualified America
This is literally what the H-1B visa program does, it makes companies jump through hoops to hire someone from overseas. The path of least resistance is definitely hiring a citizen where they don’t need to worry about getting a visa.
I know this is a politically sensitive topic, so full disclaimer: I live outside the US but I work (and worked) for a company whose headquarters are in the US. So I know people in different visa situations.
I see this type of measure as something that has a xenophobic base.
The economic problem can be approached by applying sanctions to companies that use visas for cheap labor, not to the immigrants.
But that type of action will be seen from a part of the US society as anti-capitalist because it attacks companies and businesses. So a big chunk of the society prefers the xenophobic idea of blaming the immigrants because they "steal" the job positions, but very little is said about the companies that abuse from cheap labor to be competitive.
> They will live in anxiety, fear and uncertainty.
This. All my adult life(15 years) I have worked and lived here and my parents are old and you never know what can happen with current pandemic. Being from India the green card wait is over 11 years and increasing so I keep waiting. There needs to be a distinction between legit employers and ones who abuse the system.
I agree, this aspect absolutely sucks. I really feel, the people that have already been here for a long time should be eligible for citizenship to give them stability.
But, for the long term, this country really needs to start preventing "new" immigrants from coming because the US can't house enough people. Enough housing is not allowed to be built, so it doesn't make sense to keep having an expanding population in that type of situation.
Tell that to the majority of displaced American workers who lost their jobs and whose lives spiraled into homelessness and drug addiction because their jobs and dignity were lost to imported labor.
This is great news for Canada. Once the Covid situation resolves, if Trudeau doesn't give a lot of incentives for tech companies to build offices there Canada will miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Canada has already been benefiting from the recent restrictions on work visas and rejecting visas for no reason, for example by saying a forensic pathologist isn't a specialty occupation.
I hope it does.
But I wonder if a very bad economic crisis (that some say started in 2008 and we never truly recovered from) may cause a similar wave of xenophobia and civil unrest in Canada as we now see happening in the U.S. I know Canada is a very different country than the U.S and much less prone to massive civil unrest, but all and all it's not that much different than countries like UK, Germany, France etc - who are experiencing their own brand of populism and growing xenophobia now.
I don't think same would happen in Canada. What US lawmakers have done, is to put a tap on green card basis on the country of origin. Indians on H1B wouldn't get their green card, in their life time, period. If there were no Indians waiting for green card, it wouldn't have been a big issue. It is by design. Indians are new B
One have to put things in prerspective. It took 40-50 years for the silicon valley to become what is is today. Once there are enough tech presence in Canada, tech situation would improve. There would be ample amount of tech folks, and new innovations would come along. New companies would be founded and things would be at par, or even better. Anyhow I see, US heading towards political turmoil/instability.
A lot of immigrants want career opportunities, a reasonable path to permanent residence and/or citizenship, and a good environment for their family.
#1 could change, some tech companies have started to realize they can offer more remote jobs and save money while offering salaries that are still very competitive to anyone not living in the Bay Area. #2 was already problematic before Trump. #3 is often better outside the US.
That makes Canada even more attractive to tech companies because they can save money. Canadian salaries and living standards are still better than many other countries'.
Tech labor has historically cheaper than in the US. It would have been nice to see more Canadian tech success stories at 1/10 the number that have occurred in SV alone. There must be some other variables that explain the difference.
I think most Canadians working in the US for tech companies would be on a TN visa, which is not being suspended according to the Globe and Mail [0]. Internships would be significantly affected though, since they go on a J1 visa so it could help the new grad pipeline for Canadian tech companies.
I think the implication of OP is not that fewer Canadians would be in the US (though I'd point out that a lot of us Canadians are on H-1Bs too), but that immigrants from other countries could go to Canada and work from a satellite office in the same time zone.
TN allows for no immigration intent and can be rescinded any time you cross at the whims of the border guard. Most US companies will transition a Canadian to an H1-B and then a green card as quickly as feasible.
TN is for Canadian citizens working in the US. The opportunity for Canada is about (mostly Indian but other nationalities too) offering easy visas to skilled professionals so US tech companies can relocate them (or they can move independently) to Canada and not have to deal with the broken US system.
The TN visa comes from a treaty between the US, Canada and Mexico; it is not part of the immigration law that gives us the H1-B.
I have no specific knowledge of the wording of the treaty, but it seems highly likely that the leader of any of the 3 countries could suspend the visa.
A cousin of mine used to do staffing for highly specialized roles in the auto industry and the TN was very important in the Detroit/Windsor metro area. I don't think it is used in tech anywhere near as much as it is used elsewhere; since it is clear that the current administration is just looking for ways to give the tech industry a hard time, it seems unlikely that TN would be a target.
On the other hand, the method for getting a TN visa is very much different than other visas. A Mexican citizen coming into the US has a fair amount of advanced paperwork required but otherwise has almost no problem. A Canadian citizen just shows up at the border with a job offer, a detailed description of the job and proof of the education requirements. The immigration officer makes the determination on the spot and they either walk through or turn around! The administration could quietly issue guidance to immigration officers about how strict they need to be, and you might end up with very similar effects without all the publicity of an executive order.
>For the lakhs in India who aspire for an H1B visa, the news is disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. The options of Canada and Australia, which once seemed alternatives to the American dream, are also more distant now, given the dismal global economic scenario. One young couple, on a temporary visa in the US which will expire soon, had invested in acquiring a Permanent Residence (PR) in neighbouring Canada, but they are now unsure of that too.
Over 50% of Toronto, at least, is born outside of Canada and even then immigrants were overrepresented in my CS cohort at Waterloo in 2014.
So it seems plausible -- but these aren't people cynically exploiting Canada as a hop on the way to the US, they're people who were born outside Canada but moved to Canada as children and grew up Canadian.
Is that my post or my parent's post? Fwiw I'm well aware of Canada's property bubble but I'm sure that has more to do with foreign capital outflows than local talent being pushed out the market.
Not clear from the article what this means. Would it impact existing visa holders already in the US? What about those who got an H-1B in this year's lottery? Is their visa canceled or postponed to a later date not known yet? (normally for a given year October is the earliest people can start working on H-1B)
Not letting people in status travel and come back is crazy. It just shows the lack of common sense of the US government. It's the same lack of common sense of the US police and why it's such a mess (besides the systematic racism). Those people wouldn't leave the country as a result - all it means is that you prevent them from visiting their family, sometimes even in emergency situations. It has nothing to do with jobs, just pure stupidity.
There is a chance that common sense prevails and they probably will allow some exceptions for those in status. I’m just saying from what I read from immigration news sites and forums so far. We will know soon enough or they might leave it intentionally vague too.
I speculate this is what’s going to happen. When there’s enough backlash, they will clear up the language or ease some restrictions. Meanwhile, people who really need to go out of the country or are re-entering have their lives and careers ruined, probably irreversibly.
> Not letting people in status travel and come back is crazy.
During the initial roll out of Trump's travel ban, it seems like they seriously considered, and perhaps initially intended for it to affect Green Card holders as well. Perhaps the public reaction was what changed their mind. Perhaps public feedback could change it this time too.
It hasn’t been issued yet, so no way to know for sure but the rumor is that no one will be able to enter (including re-enter) if they fall under the executive order but those in the country in status will not be immediately impacted.
i don’t know how this suspension would work but the H1B is held in April. I would assume most people have had their visa processed by now but it’s possible i’m just if ignorant.
Regarding suspending H1Bs here is some not so breaking news: people on those visas are targeting jobs where no qualified people exist to fill them. Those people, by coming to the US create real value and increase the economic output of the US. They are also, in general, really smart people that fuel innovation. If you kill innovation the US is done.
Many/most such people are in the US and already working under something called OPT. They have a timeline where they can work under OPT, and they need to get a conversion to H1-B status before their OPT expires.
So if they were approved in April, and the OPT doesn't expire before October, they can keep working and simply switch to H1-B status in October.
Not sure I'm following. I know about Oct and that people overseas who got H1-B this year won't be able to enter. But many who got H1-B this year are already in the US (working on OPT, L1, etc) so they don't need to enter the country, they are just changing their visa status.
Visa holders already in the US still need to renew their Visa. If this order also suspends renewals then people are going to get kicked out of the country.
You don't get kicked out because lack of visa. For people in country in status, effect of this would be the inability to get back into US if one leaves.
You need a Visa one way or the other to stay in the US as an alien. Besides even if you weren't kicked out, how are you going to make a living without a work authorization?
Overstaying your Visa is illegal. I know ICE isn't going to knock on your door right away, but it's going to negatively affect future Visa applications (visiting also requires a Visa).
It’s just nitpicking but visa in US immigration parlance is only a tool for entry to the country.
Work authorization and visa are not technically same. You can stay in the country legally even with expired visa (the one pasted in the passport) but with work authorization approval documents extending the same visa category or another category.
These differences are academic at best, yes there are options open when your Visa expires, but they're all intentionally very bad options. No tech company will want to keep you on their payroll without a Visa for any extended period of time.
You're better off leaving the country because life without a Visa will be difficult and will eventually result in your arrest when your I-94 expires.
Wow. As an outsider, a lot of the immigration/illegal-alien discussion makes a lot more sense now that I am aware of that detail. And I can't say I'm surprised that it's been such a huge, contentious and problematic issue with that kind of grey-area.
> You need a Visa one way or the other to stay in the US as an alien
No - you need to maintain status, not visa. For H-1 workers and F-1 students, staying on expired visa is quite common and legal - as long as they do the paperwork to maintain their status.
If they leave the US to visit another country while maintaining a legal status, then they cannot return without applying for the visa.
For H-1 workers and students, a visa is only relevant for border crossings.
No, you do not need a visa to STAY in the country. Legal status and having a visa in your passport is not tied together.
Your legal status is shown in your I-94. You can get into the country in a status, and adjust to another, without having a visa to reflect the new status.
If you leave the country and want to get back in, however, you need to have the right visa.
Again, a visa is only required to have a CBP officer admit you into the country in a specific status. After getting in, it does not have much importance.
What Trump is trying to do is, hack his way into enforcing the policies he thinks it is a good idea. Since SCOTUS gave him a carte blanche with respect to admitting aliens into the country, in order to stop H1B, he is using the same legislation. That lets him only to stop people from getting in; other ways of stopping it either takes time or needs to go through Congress.
Your I-94 still has an expiration date, if you can't renew your Visa then your I-94 will expire eventually. Once the I-94 expires your stay is illegal. Also you're still overstaying your Visa, which is going to affect your future applications.
Also how would you transition to another visa when applications are suspended? You'll have to live in the United States without a job in the hopes the suspension is lifted before your I-94 expires.
You are still conflating legal status and visa in an improper way.
The I94 expiration case can happen in practice. I don't know all possible cases, but at least for H1B done through change of status, you are not required to get a visa as long as you do not leave the country. And no, you r I-94 does not expire for three years, so it is entirely possible to complete a whole H1B period without a visa.
As an H1 all your authorizations are tied to your Visa in some way. They may not expire at the same time, but if you have no way of acquiring a new visa (which under this suspension, you don't) you're in trouble whether you leave the country or not.
> You are still conflating legal status and visa in an improper way.
I am and you should speak to your immigration lawyer if your visa is expiring.
This is incorrect information. H1B "Status" and H1B "Visa" are two separate things.
A common immigration path is F1(Student) -> OPT -> H1B Status. If the person was already in the US(because they're going to a US college) then they would be given H1B status(read: no visa). Getting a H1B visa from the US consulate would be required IFF they: 1) Weren't already in the US, 2) Need to leave and reenter the US.
If the person is _already_ in the US when they receive H1B Status then they don't need to receive a visa. Not having a visa is not illegal or affect work status. A visa simply allows ingress and egress in/out of the country and does not confer work authorization(which is what an H1b "Status" does).
Source: I've gone through this process, and from a family of attorneys.
I am going through F1->H1B process. I do not have an H1B visa, and I have a document that tells me I am allowed to stay in the country in the H1B status between a time period, and you are telling me I am in trouble because I do not have a visa. Ok, I suppose.
I don't know how this order affects your current process, definitely talk to you immigration lawyer about that. But we're talking about immigrants who have not yet applied for renewal, they could be in a situation where they have no chance for renewal.
I guess you didn't read close enough? It says that it is "not expected to immediately affect anyone already in the United States". If that means existing visa holders currently outside of the US won't be allowed to return, or that those inside the country can't leave then that's a huge effect on their lives.
I am on H1B visa currently, one of those with high paying jobs in my current geographic area. I did my Masters in EE and have been on H1B since 2008, waiting for my GC, which may or may not happen.
I want to ask a question to those who feel that I should not be here. Why is it wrong for someone like me to move from my home country legally as a student, then decide to work and live here, since it is legal and that option is provided by the government. My employer is also willing to bear all costs of making that happen. Of course, USA is a great country, maybe the greatest, and people want to live and work here. Is it wrong to have such a desire, and go about fulfilling it in a legal way? I am genuinely interested to know, since I get the feeling that folks like me aren't exactly welcome, and would like to understand why that is.
On the ethical side of things, I have wondered if I have denied an American citizen a good life.I get the feeling that maybe I have, by the mere fact of me existing and being present in this country, since I haven't misrepresented, lied or cheated anyone to get my job. I have no doubt that given enough time, my company will find someone like me, but how long it will take is anyone's guess.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether you should or shouldn't be here, but I wanted to give a different perspective. It's really only tangentially related to this whole discussion.
A lot of Americans have been taught that the U.S is the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can come and through hard work can make something out of themselves. What people probably imagine when they think about this is poor immigrants coming and starting from the bottom, starting in food service jobs or doing janitorial work or something and working their way up. That's the American dream they were told about. None of them would imagine that through an H1B visa, we'd be allowing some of the most highly educated immigrants from other countries to come and immediately work in high level positions with salaries of 6 or even 7 figures.
I find it understandable that some amount of Americans feel that this is wrong and that they were told a lie.
Thanks for that perspective. I understand that it can appear unfair for someone whose ancestors had to build everything from scratch, to watch folks start leading a luxurious life, right from the moment they land here.
On the other hand, there are Americans who firmly believe that highly educated people like yourself from poorer countries shouldn't be giving your knowledge and work to first world western countries that are already wealthy. They think that people like yourself should be back at home, trying to make their own country better, rather than coming to make some other country richer.
In this thread, people who have no clue about how H1B works are making dumb comments (both for and against) with such confidence. Before some one asks me, I was a H1B visa holder and know how the system works. It makes me think how many such people are commenting in other threads that they've no clue about. Never ever follow any advice from a HN thread is a good rule to follow.
If you think someone made an erroneous comment, it would be good to correct them by replying to it, or just summarize the common misconceptions and share your expertise in a top level comment.
Saying that people are making dumb comments, I know how it works, but then not following up, is not in the spirit of HN
My point was to make people go do their own research and not believe what some random person writes (including me). If some one doesn't want to know the truth and here only for spicy half-truths/lies, it's up to them. Don't give me the spirit of HN crap, this is just another website.
Some of these make no real sense, like L1 and J1 visas, which are so few and uncommon and are often granted to individuals. J1's for example are for researchers coming abroad to collaborate with scientists here, there isn't a real argument that J1's are taking jobs from anyone else that I can tell. Not that anyone should be travelling at all this year but one would have to see if they get extended after covid dies down.
L1s also look like they're geared towards essentially overseas managers moving to the US, particularly in the case of a single international company moving their executives around physically.
J1 visas are what all the tech companies use for interns from Canada. Technically you aren't allowed to work under a J1 visa, but everyone seems to be doing that anyways - tech companies will always say that you are going to be treated just like a full-time employee during the interview, and then say you are only in the US for training when applying for the visa.
Well you're not completely truthful here. Yes you can work under J1, its an internship or traineeship visa. J-1 in general is related to learning tho. But there is nothing against doing something for money.
So may be I'm showing my ass here but I'm an academic. Our group was planning on collaborating with a French group who regularly performs nature-tier scientific work and we were planning on exchanging a graduate student and having them get their degree here, but if this holds it looks like they won't be able to do that. I don't doubt there are abuses (look up the thread, I see some iffyness around H1B's but the program itself being corrupt I don't think is true) but they're going to hurt everyone to score political hits for right wing xenophobes.
Look, my honest opinion is the abuses are generally bad, especially for immigrants who are being put in bad situations which because yet another thing the companies have as leverage over them, but then the people who should be targeted are the companies who are abusing the system, not the programs themselves which hurts everyone, especially the immigrants.
Maybe the OP means the modern SV aka FAANG and that is not far from the truth or very hard to disprove. Things turned out the way they did for a lot of reasons and none of them can be really discounted.
If you step out of the tech (STEM) bubble, you’ll see that this is going to have a lot of collateral damage. There are niche industries where H-1B is an actual necessity. I know that what people complain about, especially on a tech centric site like HN, is how it’s used in the development industry, but I hope that people remember that there is a world outside of tech that this negatively impacts.
if US bans H-1Bs these jobs wont go to americans, these jobs will just be offshored.
Large american enterprises already have gigantic offices outside US to manage IT/midoffice/backoffice or have relationships with contractor firms like Cognizant.
It is so much easier to send one/two americans as expats to India/East Europe to manage outsourced staff and the trend will just accelerate.
Anyone who thinks this is good for the US is stupid. In the era of remote working, all this will do it hasten the retreat of software engineering from the US. Facebook and Google do not care where their employees live, they want the best in the world. This will just mean that jobs will truly flee the US.
Right now the US is winning because of such a high concentration of talented software engineers compared to the rest of the world. It’s the same reason why there is only one Hollywood, the same goes for Silicon Valley. If you prevent people from coming here, the top companies will find them in their own countries and then those are jobs lost forever. And then the drain begins. This is a stupid self-defeating move by a self-defeating president.
Facebook and Google could have converted their entire software dev workforce to Indians in India any time they wanted. But they didn't, I wonder why hmmmmm.
Because all the best Indian software engineers went to US grad schools and then went to Silicon Valley. It sounds like you don’t live in Silicon Valley.
Xenophobia is a bitch. A few years ago I experienced an atrial fibrillation while exercising, so I called an ambulance, as I didn't know what was happening to me and thought that that was the end.
Once in the ambulance the paramedic started asking me where I am from and if I came in on one of "those visas".
I was afraid I was about to die, and this fucker was being xenophobic.
Thank you. Not everyone is like this however. I can't even begin to tell you how amazing, friendly and compassionate were the staff at the hospital(Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara). They definitely made up for the awful ride there.
I wasn't there, but this sounds more like cluelessness than anything else. I could imagine making small talk like this to keep someone's mind off of their pain or anxieties. Did it really seem like the gal or guy was hating on you?
I get asked where I am from all the time, because of my strange accent. However I've never before been asked about what visa I came in on.
The way he talked about the Visas, gave me the impression of someone who has been conditioned to believe that "those Visas" are evil.
Or maybe I completely misread it, and he was just trying to make conversation as you said, to calm me down. But choosing the Visa subject seemed quite odd. Usually when I mention my home country people chose a subject like history, mythology, holidays or current affairs.
So again, I wasn't there. I will say, having grown up in the sticks, I love hearing the accents of foreign people and sometimes ask them about theirs. I know they might take it wrong, but it's hard to resist doing so.
And indeed, when I see someone in pain or anxiety, I'm often tempted to just make small talk on any subject I can think of, to distract them. I usually don't, to avoid offense. But I think they'd suffer less if I did, no matter how stupid my words.
I never get offended when I am asked. Why would I? It’s natural curiosity IMHO. And actually makes small talk easier as it’s a subject I know and can chat about :)
But I don’t know, if I told you I was from Greece, would my visa be the first think that would pop into your mind for small talk?
Speaking just for myself, I often end up saying rather stupid things when thinking on my feet.
On the other hand, yeah, the could simply have been a jackass. Greeks, though? Who doesn't love the Greeks? The Turks, I guess, but in America, I think they are well-regarded.
Because somebody's feelings were hurt? That's a useless argument to make against a professional who's basically effective at his job and very useful to society. The US is useless at civil rights these days precisely because it's all between "my feels" and straight out looting. Conditioned knee jerking all over the place.
So when you're in an ambulance having a medical emergency, you'd be OK with being asked a question like that? And having to worry about whether the answer might affect the quality of care you receive?
Not everything about "my feels" is without consequence. Try and be a human being. Have some empathy.
I agree with you. Unless it can be proven that he provided sub-par care because I was a foreigner, which I am pretty sure that he didn't, then there is absolutely no case for losing his job, or even be warned.
It's good to talk about our feelings and try to be considered to each other, but we should put facts and reason above feelings, which are not objective, otherwise we are doomed as society.
Having said that, if I would see my employee talk to a customer like this, I would definitely ask them to be more professional and discreet. Either here, in US, or back in my home country, where I think xenophobia is worse.
Companies only care about feelings because of profit, not because they actually care about the social issues. Hurting customer feelings = potential loss of customer = loss of profit.
> Unless it can be proven that he provided sub-par care because I was a foreigner,
If the patient has an adverse outcome and it comes out that a question like this was asked, you can bet someone will try to convince a jury that that was the case. You think the ambulance company wants to waste months or years in litigation?
At best, the paramedic was a moron asking a pointless question in an emergency situation. And alienating the patient, potentially worsening their condition. As an employer, I'd put them on a PIP immediately.
At worst they've opened up the company to a multi-million dollar suit.
It seems in this story the only person who had their feelings potentially get in the way of the job is the paramedic, no? There's no reason for them to be asking such questions while doing their job.
Terrible idea. Upping the salary requirement for H1-B achieves the goal of using it only for highly-skilled workers.
Instead, now employers have to make do with bootcamp grads instead of foreign engineers at lower level positions, hurting businesses.
Yes, thanks, that summarizes the whole situation. Just make min salaries 200k, it could push up us salaries a little, but would mean many or most of those people like those laid off from us universities working in it would not have lost their jobs.
It does seem like the main point of H1Bs would be to make use of highly-skilled workers. We have plenty of low-skill workers already--we don't need more.
is this satirical? that's entirely the point, they have to train Americans rather than hiring foreigners. the entire point is to benefit WORKERS, not businesses.
I can see how some people see this as positive but the premise that a talented and hard working foreign worker takes a job away from a citizen is short-sighted. Zoom out a little and instead of a talented and hardworking foreign employee taking a job you will see (on an average) that they help grow or expand projects and companies that opens door to hiring more people. Not only do they pay tax here and support social security benefits that many enjoy, they also help businesses survive and grow and help them stay competitive in a global market.
I'm not calling for open doors to everyone, this certainly needs a balanced approach. However, with such suspensions I think we seem to be going one extreme path. Global talent has helped develop industries and businesses here. Increasing restrictions to this extent and suspending these visas is going to push this talent out and promising businesses who want to get the best talent to work with them, will not-immediately but definitely follow their way out too. I hope the people who are celebrating this, at-least for a few minutes, come out of the myopic view and look at the long term economic consequences.
I'm (worriedly) curious how this will affect people trying to change jobs on a H1-B, as technically you need to file a new petition each time, and I can see them somehow denying those too.
Extremely risky, I’d say. There would be people who have already changed jobs pending H1B transfer authorization (since premium processing was suspending earlier), also called joining “on receipt”. Normal processing takes weeks to months and if their transfer applications end up getting rejected now, they lose visa status.
the entry ban will be for visa issuance at Consulates and entry into the US from abroad.
what you are talking about would require a rule-making process and/or statutory change. they are going to try that, but it will take longer and will be subject to judicial review.
AC21 lets you change employers without waiting for the petition to be approved. that's statutory. much harder to change as it would require Congress.
eventually, your visa label will expire. after that, if you need to travel overseas, you will need a new visa label and under this proposed exec order, if it's still active you will not be able to return. so you will have to avoid overseas travel entirely until the ban is lifted.
So highly paid permanent resident tech professionals even more highly paid and a lot of non-permanent residents get even more harmed because of their country of birth....
I personally feel that the H1-B system needs to be rethought to encourage a healthier but not at the expense of bringing hard working immigrants into this country.
This will definitely expedite tech jobs moving to India. At current market rates, companies can afford to hire 3-5 engineers in India compared to 1 engineer in US with equivalent interview standards. I already see this happening with Amazon(with new hyderabad campus), Google & Uber.
This could be a knock-out punch for many US universities. H1B is the visa International students pursue after paying full out of state tuition to colleges here.
Certainly. But the risk is incredibly high. If trump gets re-elected he’s going to go after these guys big time. Breaking them up would not be stretching the imagination.
I’m completely unbiased. I voted for Trump in 2016. I think up until the pandemic he was probably going to win. The Democrats were deeply uninspiring except for Andrew Yang, and young people voted even less in 2020 than they did in 2016 which is why Bernie went down.
However after the pandemic and his complete lack of leadership over police brutality incidents and the BLM protests, he has turned off a lot of previous supporters and fired up a lot of unmotivated haters. I think it’s going to be a landslide Blue Wave.
To put in another way, if Trump wins again, the Dems need to dissolve the party and the liberals need to create a new party altogether. This is about as easy home run as it gets for them.
The "other side" has been playing these games with school board book standards and redistricting. It's naive to think that one side's restraint will be paid back with restraint from the other side. A better tactic might be to exploit as much as you can, so the other side also calls for reforms.
The same could be said for any loophole. If you don't exploit it, that does not mean that nobody else will exploit it. You should push for the loophole to be fixed while exploiting it to show why.
My common sense frustration here is how can the US possibly have a critical shortage of developers on languages that are 20 to 50 years old? We have the third highest population in the world and claim to have excellent education, and these are high paying jobs at 2x-3x the national average yearly income.
So what qualifies the shortage? Is it like agriculture where Americans are too entitled for the work? Are Americans viewed as generally too low quality?
2. No real investment/push into learning legacy langauges.
3. Philippines/Indian BPO encourage and actually train on the job. If you look at accenture/whatever agency, even IBM, they'll guarantee a job in that country if they stick with the on the job training. In those countries, entry level, know nothing developers make $500/$1000 a month, best, vs being experienced in the USA and making a minimum of $5000. 6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr. I feel like it's employer idea of infinite monkey theorem.
It's not entitlement, it's that in the USA, employers have to compete and everyone can easily get a job in IT that isn't even programming for $40-50k, think of help desk. All you have to do is show up, restart a few computers, and be relatable.
It isn't that easy to get a job in IT. It is easy if you have the right background.
I knew a kid who could program reasonably, was pretty smart but didn't go to college. Got "hired" somewhere on help desk, was on a training contract for 3 months (he was just doing normal work, no pay), offered minimum wage job at end, didn't get paid for overtime, and got fired when he wanted to leave work at 6 because he had arranged to meet family for his birthday.
I think many people significantly understate how bad the US job market is for a very significant minority of people.
Also, you are massively overstating how good development is in the Phillippines or India. India churns out masses of CS grads who have never seen a computer. The economics of training are different US/India but the incentive there is the low wage. Remove that low wage incentive, and companies I think there will be investment into US citizens.
(Btw, where I am there are for-profit companies that train ex-army people to do software development...it works pretty well...but no-one asks: why aren't tech companies doing this? Like these companies employ people on very exploitative contracts, why don't companies just do this themselves? There is something wrong with how tech companies are run).
There are just too many jobs and not enough qualified devs. Even in the pandemic. It's worse if you block our international people by limiting visas.
There's already a shortage of devs of course in he US. Plenty of companies have thousands of openings even in the pandemic - of course there are places that stopped hiring or even shutdown and people lost jobs.
If you lower the labor pool size, pay should go up, ease of employment should go up for those who can work here. There's already a shortage of engineers in those special fields like cobol. So it will be even harder for banks for hire for them if you can't get say people from India to move here and work on that. If you are working on a modern language with modern tools, libs etc (c++ or java) why would you want to go back to that old world where there were probably not tests, automation like we have today? If you have 10 years exp in one of the say top 10 tech cities in the us you are probably making at least 300k. I just don't see banks hiring someone like me and paying me enough more to match that far less desirable job. So that leads to banks only having a hiring pool of people who will work for less for various reasons (location, less exp, not interested or trained on c++).
I think this will just lead to more outsourcing to other countries, even though that has its own +/-, and imagine a world where some large us banks lost so much tech ability they are dependent on people in other countries (maybe already happened).
I saw it as the underlying issue. It's because CS is hard, people don't think they can do it, they don't know about the opportunities, they don't have the education or the pay is not enough for the intellectual demands. If a job is too stressful or they treat you like shit or demand overtime (ie gaming world for overtime) then just work somewhere else.
This is my experience as well. High pay, accommodating working conditions, and great benefits are clearly not the right motivators.
I suspect, contrary to many people’s desires, this is ultimately not a conversation about economics but a conversation on absent discipline and self motivation.
“Foreign nationals account for 81 percent of the full-time graduate students in electrical engineering, 79 percent in computer science, 75 percent in industrial engineering, 69 percent in statistics, 63 percent in mechanical engineering, 59 percent in civil engineering, and 57 percent in chemical engineering.”
Of course the bay area does hire tons of state university hires. I'm one of them. My first job was a fang. My undergrad wasn't in the top 100, my grad was maybe in the top 50, not sure but probably #50 ;-). I did a lot of programming in school, I practiced interview questions before I went. I've always been puzzled why other people run into this wall and can't break through.
Thanks. The reason I quoted this statistic is because I was surprised that there aren’t more Americans interested in taking advantage of the excellent education in STEM.
Could it also tell us something about interest in the field generally?
We also see significant immigrant ratios in entrepreneurial ventures:
"Immigrants are “almost twice as likely” as native-born Americans to become entrepreneurs, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation."
--- https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/10/25/55-of...
The shortage is false, a form of gaslighting, artificially created so that corporations and academic institutions can keep costs low and suppress wages by flooding the US market with cheap labor that also bypasses usual employment standards available to US citizens. Eric Weinstein has done some really good research into this.
'How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers'
Are you talking dev or academia? I read the paper and I'll give you my dev focused response. The paper is focused on phd supply in academia and the most recent dates referenced are the last 1990s. It has brief discussion of knowledge workers but not really devs. It's not relevant for devs in the us at least since the dot com boom until now.
There's a giant shortage of capable devs. i'm from the us in case it matters to you but in my 25+ years as a professional engineer across a few fangs, midsize and several startups all those companies wanted to hire every capable dev they could find. Microsoft used to have 5k plus openings when I was there and the other fang had similar. We hired all over the world and the us. We never hired as many as we wanted. New college students grads could make over 100k and we still couldn't hire all we wanted.
I worked on creative, original software. I think there is a hiring area that could be impacted by large number of immigrants in tech and that is more IT like positions. There's an oversupply in my experience of people that put software packages together, keep the it infrastructure of a company running - those are crucial jobs too, just like devs writing original software, but there's a lot fewer people in it support and maybe that's part of the issue.
I read the paper but I did not see any indication of wage depression.
Here are the trends I am observing from the comments of this thread:
* Immigrants in the US on visas earn less than US citizens. I have seen no data on this. How much less do immigrant software engineers earn as a percentage?
* Any evidence discrediting knowledge worker shortage is centered on academics. I am a senior software developer with 20 years experience at one of the largest and wealthiest employers in the US. Despite that I have no formal education in the subject matter. I am either entirely self taught or in some other disciplines trained by the military. So it seems, from my perspective, centering the discussion to academics is just a distraction.
I think the issue is some combination of: cheap alternative, unwillingness to train, unwillingness to consider a certain type of person, and unwillingness to take a risk (even if the alternative only secures you mediocre product).
Companies just have lots of choices. It is too hard to employ an American, maybe they need to get up to speed, they need to be paid more. Immigrants will live 10 to an apartment, they can be disposed of quickly, they do anything to keep their job because they don't want to get deported...I mean...who would you rather employ?
I have seen this in other countries. I remember reading about a Greek charity teaching computer science to illegal immigrants...most of those people were leaving countries where youth unemployment was actually LOWER than Greece. Another good example is Monzo (although a terribly managed company), they grew by just hiring all the CS wizards couldn't have done the job.
Call it nativist or whatever...it is a tragedy when people or companies are allowed to shed their responsibilities to the societies in which they live. It is very possible, it is just most tech companies are very bad at hiring/employee development (and why do they have to be good when you have H1B).
It won't happen, but it would nice to see a comprehensive plan to address the talent shortage that the H-1B is designed to address. Disadvantages faced by people of color is front of the mind right now; it's the perfect time to announce a detailed plan of training and education that would accomplish 2 purposes.
I think it is a very good idea ... poaching of the best and brightest talent from less developed countries who invested in the education of these people is a form of robbery.
If you need them , then let them work remotely and pay them fair wages as they would have received in the US and let them contribute their tax to their own country.
Robbery? I'm guessing you also feel that the people who escaped across the Berlin Wall were "robbing" the Soviet Union of their labor? I don't suppose the actual humans involved get a say in this, do they?
My dude, the people who came here to work and make their living are individuals, they have desires of their own to trade their services for a good life. Countries don't own their citizens, they are entities organized by people interested in living there.
Of course they do not own their citizen, that is why you can take them to the US or other developed countries. However yes you do rob these countries of skilled workforce, and yes you do create an environment, which stuntnts the growth of these countries and yes you do increase the misery of the other citizen who is left in that countries. You just have to be honest, and say that benefit for US outweighs the loss for say India or Ukraine.
I don't think someone from a collectivist culture will never be able to understand the motivations of someone from an individualistic culture, I believe it's a pretty deep seated blindness. I can't help you, rather, we can't help each other, you just have to be in the right region of the globe that supports your intrinsic culture. [1]
> which stuntnts the growth of these countries and yes you do increase the misery of the other citizen who is left in that countries
So, are you suggesting that each country imprison all their individuals and extract value for itself? Absurd.
What does it have to do with individualism or collectivism? Why are you bringing an opinion of Sapolsky as if he was an important person?
What I am telling that the current H1B system in US does not benefit anyone exception for the employer and probably enslaved employee. The original motivation behind the program is decent - let the really outstanding specialists to develop more (as US provides more opportunities for the top people), but what it become is essentially stripping the countries of intellectual power in bulk, and using back in US for a cheap price, basically enslaving them, by locking them via H1Bs. American workforce suffers, because they are under constant stress for being replaced by cheap H1Bs, the poor countries suffer, because of brain drain, world becomes more unequal, USA becomes more unequal.
I never said nothing about "imprisonment" - most of poor countries are not prisons, and especially not for IT specialists, who can have some decent quality of live with their salaries. And the only hope for "the prisons" as you mentioned before to improve, is to keep their intellectuals in.
> What does it have to do with individualism or collectivism? Why are you bringing an opinion of Sapolsky as if he was an important person?
This proves my point, you think like a collectivist, the individual doesn't matter much to you. Besides, the reason I posted that article is because I wanted to give you some reference to understand the construct I'm talking about (a bit of "meta" so to speak), so that you can orient your thinking and it didn't have anything to do with Sapolsky or his "importance" (seems like this matters to you more than actual facts). It seems like you're a collectivist AND not intellectually curious (they usually go hand in hand though).
Your grammar and "philosophy" sounds very Asian. Most of your thinking revolves around "for the greater good (of the country)". Your determination of the "border" for benefiting from "greater good" seems arbitrary, why not the whole world?
As an individualist, my advice to you is: do whatever feels right to you. If you're truly for the greater good of the country, who are you to decide what the country has to do? and why should I care about your opinion? whats the proof that what you say is actually happening?
I do not need any scolding from a random internet person. My grammar cannot be "Asian" because I am native speaker of an Eastern European language. You do not even know me, and yet are trying to psychoanalyze me remotely. I am neither "individualist" nor "collectivist", I am just a pragmatic - whatever creates more stable world, without concentration of power in one country or group of people (which is exactly what goes against individualism) rubs me wrong way. I, in my turn, would advice to grow beyond Ayn Rand books, and understand that neither "individualism" nor "collectivism" can be ultimate goals, they are just instruments for particular societal issue at hand. Attempt to coerce people to buy into libertarian ideology is very "collectivist" by the way, it is forcing people to be like you, to make you feel that everyone else are like you.
There are solutions to the problems we discuss these days. We have experts and researchers who are dedicated to find better solutions.
But sadly, Politics are focused to win the election and next elections. Populism and non-populism, left and right, social-networks and media, we all made it so hard for experts and scientist to be heard and to be trusted. We are so loud that we are only hearing ourselves. We can talk non-sense with insufficient knowledge and call it open discussion.
Most tech companies are WFH right now, so if the government does this, there'll probably be lots of work for foreign lawyers setting up subsidiaries in other countries so that all the people affected can literally work from Home.
Not at all. For most of the universities, grad schools are absolute cash cows. International students come here for grad school largely because of the associated 3 year(2 for non-STEM) OPT period and ease of getting a H1B during it.
I worked in the finance industry, IT side. I can say that these work Visas are abused in that industry. Less so in tech and startup space. I think having a min salary that's 2x average for the job would also solve this. I'm will to see what type of data this pause provides.
All my friends in the US are staying put now, they can’t go see their families after covid because they have no idea if they’ll be allowed back in.
Bad for america, good for the rest of the world though- maybe by restricting American foreign policy we’ll see more competition for SV open up globally.
Simple solution - auction off the H1B visas. This will ensure only the most needed, highest-value employees get it. Works with any number of visas. I fail to see why this easy, simple fix that also earns money for the government is not applied.
You need highly skilled immigrants to pay for taxes and healthcare+SSA for the economy and those retired. If you don't fund retirement programmes then you're in trouble.
Honestly I’m so tired of this shit. I can’t leave the US without the risk of not being able to come back, and my Mom is in a different country in a high risk category for COVID-19.
If she is infected and hospitalized, I have to quit my job and leave my home to spend last moments with her. Fuck Trump.
i have no dog in this fight but the comments in this thread...
the amount of layoffs and unemployment since covid 19. this move is not to please you. it is to please the American people. only employers will care. the middle/working class American won't care (this is the biggest voting bloc that Trump needs)
I think H1B visas should be obliterated.
One of the justifications is that they bring in international talent to fill in "shortages" in America. However, according this article by the Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2017/05/the-h-1b-visa-debate-explained
- There is mixed evidence that there are actually shortages in STEM
- People are graduating from STEM fields at a rather high rate than in the past, but only half of them end up utilizing their degree; in sectors such as IT, one reason being why graduates aren't entering the field is due to a lack of job openings
- Despite all the clamor about "shortages," some STEM fields pay embarrassingly low, and in fact pay STEM workers less than they have in the past
- There is no requirement that entities show proof of workforce shortage before hiring workers on H-1B visas
- Some workplaces have already had American workers train in their H1-B visa replacements and then were out of a job
Not in the article, but some of my own experiences having been in the STEM field
- Many internationals seeking to get hired in the US STEM force don't actually have the "everyday technology" that the US uses, such as in molecular biology labs; this means quite a lot goes into training H1-B visa holders. Couple that with poor English-speaking skills. I found myself having to explain to an H1-B visa holder what a "pen" was, or a "shelf." Granted, some H1-B visa holders underwent formal education in the US, obtaining PhDs and whatnot, so you'd imagine their English would be better, however...
- Many countries look down on the US. I have worked for many foreign employers in STEM, and have been insulted just for being an American, and their views of America are largely stereotyped (Americans love guns, they eat hamburgers and pizza and are fat, etc.)
- It changes the workplace culture; I've worked in a variety of STEM environments that had a lot of internationals, and more than once I was out-grouped for being an American. I have had opportunities closed off to me simply because my group's sense of belonging was rooted in being "non-American." This was detrimental to my aspirations in entering the STEM field as an American.
I don't believe there is a shortage in STEM. The fact that it's hard to even get a well-paying job in STEM, especially tenure positions in STEM, and that once you do land a STEM position you can face discrimination for being an American in AMERICA, H1B visas should be obsolete.
Get rid of the internationals. Focus on your American workforce and create incentives to enter STEM. Create a better system for learning math, and inspiring aspirations in science Create environments that will nurture American students instead of block their opportunities. Give Americans a chance to contribute to their economy instead of shoveling money down the pockets of people who don't even like America or Americans and would go back home if they could.
we need to get rid of the executive order or at least severely limit its scope. both Obama and Trump have abused it -- presidents should not be able to hand down sweeping regulatory change like this at the drop of a hat without going through the legislature.
By abuse do you mean use? If not, O admitted he was doing something unconstutional with it, numerious times. Which T example are you thinking of?
Many laws are written to deligate rule making authority to the executive branch, clearly the president has ultimate authority there. Perhaps you want the legslative branch to write more specific language?
The constitution is not the end all be all —- I’m saying that the use of executive orders to accomplish partisan policy objectives is overreach by the executive branch and should be curtailed. I don’t care much if it’s the legislative or judicial branch that does it.
I cant understand your comment unless you define partisan.
If the legslative branch deligates the rule making to the executive branch, then take it up with the legslative branch... right? Blaiming the executive branch seems pointless. Am I missing something?
The Constitution is the law of the land. Are you referring to the Magna Carta?
Humans have inalienable rights, can we agree?
I believe people have the inaleinable right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness"... someone could call that a partisan policy objective.
thank god, I've seen a lot of americans rejected especially POC of varied backgrounds turned down in favor of some H1B nonsense to often it really impacts the ability for folks to rise up and move to new industries
what's to explain? h1bs are widely used to gain access to bodies instead of training/developing local talent it's a joke every interview template i've been given seems like it was made to exclude many people who would otherwise be fine
it's not like immigration is bad or anything but the balance is screwed up and and it's causing long term damage it's bad for immigrants and bad for americans
Greece https://www.greece-is.com/when-can-i-travel-to-greece-again/.
Also, I'm based in the Netherlands and heard that Amsterdam already sees tourists from Germany etc.
Of course it's nothing like the masses that usually come there, but it's not closed.
As a former H1-B: makes sense. H1-B is abused a lot, and importing new entry-level workers when unemployment is at record highs after COVID makes zero sense. Although I'm sure Hawaiian judge will disagree.
It's not "banned", the proposal is to temporarily suspend it. When it is resumed, however, I would ask that they put a lower bound on the wages paid. Say, $100K for programmers - the "real" middle class living wage where I live. That will reduce abuse significantly. To reduce it even further, switch to the auction system, where a fixed size quota is allocated, and employers "bid" salaries for workers. I do have skin in this game: I'm paid a lot, and this will create more competition for me, but it will improve the ridiculous situation where people get into debt to get degrees and then can't find jobs. Why anyone in the US be against this is a mystery to me.
Stopping workers coming in from one place isn’t about making sure Americans have jobs tho. It doesn’t magically change the cost of rent. It doesn’t magically educate the uneducated. Nor should it. This is about being able to report to middle class white people that ‘immigration stopped’.
What's also hidden behind the numbers is that a lot (most?) of H1-Bs come from India and China, both of which have insanely long green card backglogs. Because changing jobs while on H1-B is a perilous affair (and employers know it), those folks end up basically in indentured servitude to their original H1-B sponsor employer, especially if they have families and/or property in the US.
Erratic government decisions can have severe consequences on businesses.
About time US companies realize that they need to have more fault tolerance to support their employees by open more global offices. This is especially true because the world outside is becoming more competitive and erratic business decisions like this will destroy product competitiveness.
As for foreign companies/entrepreneurs/would be business owners with capital, the US is shut. There is no need to do business here.
And yet everyone and their mother wanna move there no matter the price paid in uncertainty, pressure and mental health. They could try go to a country with a straight forward immigration process like Canada, but money is more important than anything else to some people.
If you're immigrating for economic opportunity, it would make sense to try to make the most of it.
A lot of people have a plan to make a bunch of money for 10-20 years and then go back and be entreprenerial in their home countries etc. Canada may (or may not) be a better permanent home, but if the goal is to make a bunch of money, that's not the best place to do it.
The immigration restrictions to Canada are more strict aren’t they?
Is there a minimum asset requirement? Is there a requirement that to apply have have to have been there for 3-5 years? An English language test? I don’t know for sure; asking.
I don't think Canada is more strict, not at all, but would like to hear from commenters who moved to Canada. Especially draconian is the fact that the spouse of a h1b holder can't work (last I checked). As an immigrant in the Netherlands that's not the case there and it's a huge deal breaker for me to ever think of the U.S.
There are companies like Cognizant/InfoSys/Tata/... whose business model is based on abusing the H1B system, and that's obviously wrong and I'm quite surprised they get away with it. I'm not defending that.
To those who broadly argue against skilled visas, consider this: Most H1B immigrants are between 20-30 age range. The prime age to join the workforce. Think how much investment you have to make on a child's health care and education to make them into a highly skilled workforce. It would at least cost you 1$M and probably much more. Now all these immigrants have learned your language, passed job interviews, and are competing to come to your country to give you 1$M and help your economy. Why would you not want that? People seem to think that number of jobs is a limited constant and if you stop immigrants that will have a positive effect on the economy. But in reality companies can simply just scale. If they have more workforce they can do more. Things get done faster and they just make more profit. Stopping immigration obviously would dent the economical growth. Never mind that many top tech companies in the US were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.
To those who say we must invest in local workforce, I wonder why would you have to stop immigration to start investing in local workforce? As if allowing immigration would reduce the amount of money for investment, while in reality immigrants pay taxes. I personally have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes so far. I'd be happy if this money was used to educate the American workforce. However I know that it doesn't. I would like to see that change.