Something that I personally feel unfair about the H1B lottery is that it doesn't consider where you live and what you are currently doing. Students that graduate through a STEM degree get to work for 3 years in their OPT (Optional Practical Training). This extends then to them having 3 chances (one per year) at getting the H1B. Now what's unfair is that an employer in the US can apply H1B for employees living oversees. That application then goes to the same pool where H1B application of the employees that are already living in the US go. The very same people that already hold a college or graduate degree, are already living in the US, and are contributing to the US economy. Unfortunately, the lottery is fair. So those that don't get picked up even after their third attempt are kicked out. They leave their life that they were trying to build in the US, potentially their girlfriends and partners, their friends, and their possessions. While that happens, someone who has never stepped foot in the US soil gets to go to the US. So in a sense it's fair for them. And while there is no real metric to measure this, when compared, between the fairness people oversees get and the unfairness people already living in the US experience, I personally think that the later tips the scale by a huge margin.
If it were up to me there wouldn't be an h1b. People would be admitted via a points based system like Canada (but stricter) and would then be on a green card path and be granted perm residency after 5y, citizenship after 10.
That's of course my pie in the sky 'we can get congress to agree on things' version. If I were president, I would simply make the h1b go to the highest bidder, so the people that enter the US are, supposedly, the cream of the crop. Yeah, that would make students return home vs someone with more skills and experience. The whole point of the h1b is to bring over people with skills we can't find here in the US.
Why stricter than Canada? Why green card eligible after five years (Australia, NZ, Canada and others, you get the PR immediately long as you reach the points requirements) and citizenship after TEN? (again, other countries you become a citizen after four)
Lol, how are they "lax? And "significant issues" like what? According to who? You?
Those countries are only afloat because of immigration. Their homegrown economies are uncompetitive ones based on resource extraction and the trades, and their populations are uneducated and unambitious.
The mess that the huge flood of immigration of all sorts (students, refugees, etc) has created (housing, food banks etc) has been in the news - mainstream news - for months here in Canada.
It's a political problem, but it's not clear that it's an actual economic problem. Immigrants are easy to demonize, so absent anything else political provocateurs tend to default back to complaining about immigration. Real life studies show that immigration is a net positive for the economy.
Or maybe it’s you doing the demonizing of “political provocateurs”?
Notice the phrasing, if you are against immigration, you are demonizing IMMIGRANTS. Not for instance the politicians who set immigration policy, it’s not them being demonized, it’s the immigrants being demonized!
Immigration being a net benefit to the economy is also a given. It is still a consensus to have immigration. Even far right parties want immigration. The question is more that if you take in more and more immigrants do you have unending economic benefits for the average member of the population and is more immigrants simply always better regardless of who they are or what they do?
We got to the point where immigration levels in Canada in 2022 were such that the population expanded by 2.7% year over year, which is enough to double the population in 26 years, despite the population having well under sub replacement fertility. Is that too slow to reap the real economic benefits of immigration? Should we ignore the provocateurs and believe studies and try to double the population every 13 years?
Housing affordability had been an issue in Canada even before recent changes to immigration. Cities have been hesitant to upzone and no premier wants to upset voters in suburban homeowner ridings.
A right wing populist clamps down on migration, color me surprised, it must be because of real problems and not to appease anti migrant voters.
It's very interesting how NET migration figures are rarely mentioned when this happens. Yes migrants are entering NZ in record numbers but citizens and migrants alike are also leaving in record numbers. (not uncommonly for the exact reasons I mentioned - the NZ economy is not competitive and it's not a place educated, ambitious, career minded people can maximize their potential)
I am about the most opposite of a right wing populist as you could be. I was simply calling out your grandstanding and hypocrisy; I don't care what side of the aisle anyone is on, I will call out people being that snide in discourse any day of the week.
Still waiting for your citation about how to measure a populations "ambitions" and how that factors into economics. Maybe work on the source citing, and a bit less on the personal attacks.
Because there are billions of people in Africa, India, Pakistan and so on. And you cant just let them all in.
Millions would come even from second tier countries if they could.
Look at any war conflict, refugees would come to the western countries too, if allowed.
> Because there are billions of people in Africa, India, Pakistan and so on. And you cant just let them all in.
> second tier countries
Maybe you didn't intend it, but your comment reads like you have an issue with immigrants of certain racial profiles. I'd suggest rewording, unless of course that was your intent behind the comment.
It also comes off as racist/supremacist to term certain countries as "second tier". Unless of course, that is intentional on your part.
except even when white Western Europeans from first world countries immigrate, that too is also a problem because - you guessed it - they too be stealing dose jerbs
never mind that we’re talking about points based, highly selective visas for educated, experienced professionals, coming to work in fields the homegrown population don’t
Canada has been pulling back in immigration, specifically student visas by a third because things got modestly out of hand and it ended up with about the same number of international students as the US, uh, not adjusted for population. This is after a decades long pro-immigration cross-party consensus so I should highlight how irregular this is as now 2/3 major national level parties have supported curtailing immigration.
“Schools” would open up in strip malls and most of the students wouldn’t show up which existed simply to justify visas.
Some enterprising types would go out and take out mortgages and buy a house and have a dozen plus people living in it.
Public services like the healthcare systems and food banks saw overflowing demand. People were allowed to come to Canada to study with proof of just 10k of credit, which you will obviously blow through long before you complete a 4 year program, and that’s not actually enough to live in Canada.
Housing prices absolutely exploded in no small part to all of this, and in case you’re thinking maybe the immigrants will build more houses, Canada has about 9% of its population working construction compared to 2% of immigrants, because for some reason the immigration ministry was unconcerned with taking in immigrants who can build homes during a housing shortage.
GDP per capita has actually been backsliding, and while this is largely demographics and an aging workforce and low productivity, national bank of Canada economists pointed to there simply being more people and this spreading our economic output thinner. I do notice how immigration numbers are multiples of the number of new jobs in the statscan data. The jobs are also going down in pay over time.
Of course you are correct about these economies being uncompetitive but framing them as resource extraction economies is reductive and mostly wrong. These are service based economies for the most part. If anything, the main economic driver in recent times has been building and selling houses and products and services to people who want to live in the beautiful lands and breathe in the clean air of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia to new money bringing fistfuls of cash. You aren’t wrong about these counties being kept afloat by immigration, but this sort of thing is taking the air out of the rest of the economy though because it’s inflating cost of living and gutting the cost competitiveness of other businesses. Also we took in a whack of students who were fuck poor and went to school at a fake strip mall school they did not attend which does not seem like a wise strategy if we want this educated economic juggernaut of a population.
Framing these countries as uneducated is somehow even more wrong, Canada has repeatedly topped the entire world in numbers of those with a post secondary education despite grads constantly bleeding south. In no small part because Canada both has a shitton of student immigrants as I just mentioned and all these students subsidize the education for the rest of the students. It seems like education is not actually the key to economic success and in practice actually results in people getting bachelor degrees to do menial work so they can get hired over somebody with a mere diploma, while the most economically productive graduates fuck off to America.
You're claiming the native population of rich western countries are uneducated? And immigrants from the third world are all doctors and rocket scientists coming to save the day? uhuh...
Have you spent a day in Australia? Overflowing with homegrown bogans working in resource extraction and the trades (at best), meanwhile professionals like Drs and Scientists (including Computer Scientists) are overwhelmingly migrants. So yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Those working in resource extractions and the trades are some of the most objectively productive sectors of the population, even more so than computer scientists.
It has definitely been noticed how immigrants don’t tend to work in the trades. It is one of the key issues reducing support for immigration due to a shortage of tradesmen and housing only becoming more extreme when you take in doctors and computer scientists instead of carpenters and plumbers. If these governments took in more people who actually were skilled tradespeople, there likely would be more support for immigration, but I honestly think the people who set immigration policy are mostly white collar types who do not respect tradespeople or understand the desperate need for them and just see them as uneducated bogans to turn your nose up at. It’s incredible to me how you observed one of she biggest problems with contemporary immigration but completely misinterpreted the situation instead of thinking “hmm, why are all these Australians working in a different line of work than me, maybe they know something I don’t!”
Canada only instituted a category based immigration system specifically to take in more tradesmen to START to remediate this problem in May 2023. If we were taking in way more tradesmen a long time ago, contemporary political issues wouldn’t even be issues because as we took more people in they would have been building enough houses for their countrymen to keep cost of living under control.
The people here "concerned" about immigration are starting a conversation about how points based, highly selective visas for educated, experienced professionals, coming to work in fields the homegrown population don’t, need to be made a lot stricter... using chaos with student visas as the justification. Just what?
The problems with the economy you're mentioning are because of the exact reasons I mentioned - Australia and Canada are simple aren't competitive, dynamic economies, they're essentially glorified banana republics trying to pretend you can have a healthy economy based on resource extraction, fixing up each others houses for tax breaks, with a sprinkling of property developers building condos for foreign investors on top.
"resource extractions and the trades are some of the most objectively productive sectors of the population" "why are all these Australians working in a different line of work than me, maybe they know something I don’t" <-- this is comical, and so is attributing policies failing to immigration and immigrants.
In any case, people who think like you are in control so congrats and good luck with it.
Sorting the applications by 2 year guaranteed total comp would be a great start.
You then have to have a whistleblower program to stop the inevitable practice of inflating the total comp on the understanding that most of it will be kicked back to the employer.
How it would work with startups that pay via non liquid equity?
Or what about innovative works that is not well funded. Most of jobs will go to large corporations while new businesses will suffer. And it will reinforce corporations even more.
> If I were president, I would simply make the h1b go to the highest bidder
The article makes clear that many H1B aspirants are manipulated into indentured servant like conditions and debt. Selling H1Bs would just amplify that class divide.
I think the goal of the H1B system is to benefit American labor market, it's not a sort of "Ivy League" that is for elite reproduction.
The stated goal of the H1B system is to allow companies to import high skilled and high quality labor that isn't available in the US market, into the US. That it doesn't behave that way in practice is at odds with the intent of the program.
The stated purpose of the H1B program is solving a problem that didn't exist. The problem was that highly skilled people exist, but they know what they were worth and demand living wages. That's the problem that the H1B program solves: how to get skilled people who the company has enough leverage over to prevent them from negotiating high wages.
The labor market is highly political and any policy that significantly affects it is going to have lipstick on it. US politicians will never admit that the southern border issue is driven by the demand of US business (agriculture, manufacturing, services) for inexpensive+disenfranchised migrant labor, but that is the bottom line for a lot of the stakeholders.
So basically you want to extend the luck/financial privilege that those people have had to be able to study in the US to extend to additional advantages for future visa applications. Not sure that I’d clasify that as fair, personally. As you mentioned, they already get multiple chances at a H1-B already.
Side note: my understanding is that there’s already a secondary lottery for people who hold a US masters (the advanced degree petition). If you are not selected in the first lottery, and you meet that condition, you get placed in a second lottery which has much better odds as there are far less people who meet this criteria (it also makes up almost 25% of the total H1-Bs granted). So basically each year you have 2 chances, and there are better odds for one of those chances.
> So basically you want to extend the luck/financial privilege that those people have had to be able to study in the US to extend to additional advantages for future visa applications. Not sure that I’d clasify that as fair, personally.
It's not fair to uproot someone from a life they've already established, just to give someone else a chance.
Also, this is a US policy meant to serve US goals. Absolute fairness to some overseas person is not the point. It makes sense to favor an existing immigrant over a potential immigrant in similar way as it makes sense to favor a citizen over an immigrant.
The problem with your plan is that it essentially grants the ability to determine which people get to immigrate to the admissions committee of private colleges.
If you propose that you have to defend it on policy grounds. I don’t like that idea at all, that decision is the function of a democratically elected government.
> The problem with your plan is that it essentially grants the ability to determine which people get to immigrate to the admissions committee of private colleges.
Who said anything about "admissions committee of private colleges"? 99% of the immigrant college grads I've known went to public colleges, most of which were not particularly selective.
And even if "admissions committee of private colleges" were given that exclusive power, that sounds a lot better to me than the mindless operation of an unjust lottery.
IMHO, all OPT visa holders should be given first dibs on H1-Bs, in front of the likes of HCL and Google bringing new people in.
> And even if "admissions committee of private colleges" were given that exclusive power, that sounds a lot better to me than the mindless operation of an unjust lottery.
It's not. A lottery is infinitely more fair than letting an unelected and unaccountable group of people on a college campus decide basic questions like who does and does not get to become long term members of our country's society.
H1-B visas are non-immigrant visas so anybody coming in on one knows it's finite then they need to leave after the fact (assuming they don't change status).
On paper it's finite, but in practise everyone on H1-B applies for green card asap to get the I-140 approved, and then the H1-B is not finite, you are cap exempt for extensions until your I-485 comes through
And the people on OPT (Optional Practical Training) have F "student" visas, which required them to prove that they needed to get education in the US in order to use it in their home country and have no intention on staying in the US after finishing the education least "building a life" there. Supported by evidence of strong ties to the home country, stated under penalty of perjury.
> H1-B visas are non-immigrant visas so anybody coming in on one knows it's finite then they need to leave after the fact (assuming they don't change status).
So what? I don't see how that's relevant to the question, unless you're being unreasonably legalistic.
Also, I've known only one person in my career who came to the US on temporary visa who intended to leave. Everyone else's ultimate goal was a green card.
I know quite a few, and there was a time where almost everyone I interacted with was an immigrant with an H1-B or OPT, though I think all of them did go to school in the US and got hired as full-time employees through the same process Americans would go through.
I also know immigrants who left after a few years, but only one had planned/wanted to do so from the start (and that's just because he didn't want to bother the uncertainty of trying for an H1-B).
You are the owner of a house and you have a tenant person X, that's living in that house. You let person X to live in your house. They in turn, paid you the rent regularly, took care of your house, and never gave you any reason to complain. Personally, person X built a garden in the backyard, got a dog, got married while living in that house and now live with their partner and 3 other kids that go to school, have friends and consider your house to be their house.
You were fair though. You were very clear to person X at the very beginning that at the end of every year, you will put them in a lottery system where the winning odds are 1 in six, and the other 5 people you are pitting them against can potentially replace them from your house. And if they don't win for three consecutive years, you will throw them out and get a new person, person Y that won the lottery to live in your house for 6 years. But you don't know anything about person Y, i.e. if they will pay you the rent, if they will take care of your house. But you are completely fine with it.
You were clear to them so it's not your fault. They should have been more careful about getting that dog or getting married because they knew there is a rather high chance that they would be kicked out. But they are dumb and they did it either ways. So its them not you.
However, if you put yourself in person X's perspective, you were doing everything right. You were a great tenant, you were paying rent, taking care of the house, and even got attached to the house, knowing fully that there was a high chance of you being kicked out.
To me what you're saying sounds like slavery. Those immigrants are also humans, just like you, who may fall in love. If they lived 5/7 years in the US (for example, they did a PhD) and met someone and fell in love, it is inhuman and very stupid to me to expect them to think about it and possibly reject the love and the relationship just because they might loose their visa in the future. Imagine telling someone I can't be with you because I might not have a visa in 3 years from now and be kicked out of the country!!!
An immigrant has the right to live a life with dignity and not be deprived from human experience and oppressed and exploited just to have a chance to stay in the country and get a visa. What's shocking to me is that you think such a person is stupid!! Are you okay?
I went to a rural high school where 20% of the “senior” class every year was Chinese exchange students, a large portion of them continued to study in the US for their post-secondary education, exactly 1 of all the people I spoke to has a parent who is even an active member within the party and he is a mid level bureaucrat in a no-name city. It’s not nearly as common as you seem to believe. Many people go into debt to study in America, with their family’s homes used as collateral (which was the case for multiple students I met in college from India).
> most of the students who pay these high tutution fees are sons and daughters of corrupt.
While there's some of that, at least in regards to China, I don't think that's broadly true. Chinese families are prodigious savers and value education very highly. Middle class households can pay those high tuition fees for their only child.
In my experience most folks either use their parents' savings or take bank loans. Sample size in the dozens. Stop generalizing this unsubstantiated crap.
I would expect that to be partially counter balanced by companies being more willing to sponsor someone already in the US over someone currently overseas? Haven't had to go through that process fortunately but seems likely from a practical standpoint.
> Sponsored green cards take like 1.5+ years to process, so someone could be OPT the whole time but the employer would have to get the application rolling quickly after hiring or else risk their employee having to go back to their home country for some period of time when OPT runs out and the green card is approved.
Add to that:
1. Some (many?) companies do not file for green cards right away, because they like to keep their employees tied down with an H1-B. I think my employer has a policy of not applying for a green card until the employee has 5 years or service or something.
2. IIRC, there are country-based quotas for employment-based green cards, so it could take very much longer than 1.5 years to get one. E.g. I think it can take 10+ years for an Indian to get one. Though I think having an active application for one is enough to stay in country for H1-B holders (though I'm even less sure about OPT holders).
Did some policy change in the last 10 years to cause the wait times to go up? Because I just checked the USCIS backlog, and it looks like they're now processing Indian green card applications from 12 years ago, and I've known people who've gotten employment-based green cards in approximately that amount of time.
I did scan some Cato institute blog post that claimed the wait is 134 years, but they're a biased advocacy organization (so have reason to exaggerate for political effect) and what they say conflicts with what I've personally seen.
You do not understand how the processing work - the processing dates don’t move in tandem with the calendar days. For instance , by end of 2024 , you’ll find that the priority date has only moved 2 months . So the actual number is somewhere around 100 years at the current gc numbers
... if you don't get the H1B after 3 tries, some international companies will send the employee overseas to an office in a more tech-work-visa friendly country, have them work there for a year then bring them back on an L-1 (intracompany transfer).
Every system who's main job is controlling or gatekeeping a limited resource in high demand will 100% always get abused to some extent for personal gain or for profit. Same with housing.
Especially when there's litte to no negative consequences for those caught abusing it. Like why wouldn't you? If you don't abuse it, then you're basically leaving money on the table versus your competitors who do abuse it.
Until law enforcement picks up and fines outweigh this "cost of doing business", system abuse will continue as per.
Wait, one can file fraudlent applications for visa sponsorship, get caught and will not be banned for like 5 years from the system? Why? It makes no sense
This is not true. If you commit fraud you will be punished.
The problem however is that Congress refuses to fund USCIS.
For example, until a few years ago, USCIS was incapable of taking digital payments because Congress refused to fund any digitization efforts for over 2 decades.
They’ve still only allowed this only at the margins, so applications are not digitized. They exist in massive boxes of documents in basements. So they don’t even know who’s applied and how many times they’ve applied.
Why is there a lottery anyway instead of a salary ranking/salary threshold system? This'd disincentivize bad actors, ensure the US domestic labor pool is not undercut, and (more or less) lead to higher quality H-1B immigrants.
Because in spite of what the law actually says, the entire purpose of the H1B visa program is and always has been a way to get mostly adequate people who'll work cheap.
No, this isn't true and never was. The reason is that having a lottery is a set of tradeoffs. You sort of corruption-proof the system by not allowing rich industries to monopolize foreign talent. In exchange, since you can't use salary or terminal degree to distinguish, you kinda have to make sure abuse is tamped down as much as possible.
The H1B program is extremely important in a country which has 1) an aging, shrinking population and 2) generally poor educational outcomes for its citizens compared to developed nation peers.
The very fact that some of the biggest companies in the world are helmed by former H1Bs tells you how helpful of a program it really has been for the US.
From my observation the number of highly qualified H1Bs is a small share of the total number. Most are average or below average that are held captive by Infosys and friends.
Yes that is the kind of abuse that needs to be tamped down. 100%. But the reason for the H1B system was never to let Infosys bring Indians to the US and pay them very low wages. It was to foster a welcoming environment for talented individuals, and it still does that even as it's being abused.
That is a different form of abuse from if only the rich could afford to bid. I think it is overall worse (see my other reply) - but I'll freely admit there may be some abuse I'm not aware of that makes my current alternative worse.
And how did you analyze them to refute it?
That's essentially the point. There are no "skill checks" anywhere in the system. There is no proof that any H1B holders have any skills.
I made this observation by working in different companies and also looking at the statistics which companies apply for H1B. Amazon is far up and then Infosys, Tata and other body shops. Other tech companies are way down the list.
>“There is no doubt,” he says, “that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy.” -- Economist Milton Freedman
Of course it's a benefit to employers and of course talented people coming from poorer countries will work for less. That doesn't mean it isn't beneficial to the country as a whole, which, as I said, suffers from an aging, shrinking population with poor educational attainment metrics. Without H1B the CEOs of many tech companies wouldn't be here just to name one important contribution from this program
Well, that's your opinion. The way the law was written, it's pretty clear the intent was that we'd only import labor we could not get at home, and thus it would have no impact on worker wages. I think people forget that laws exist for the benefit of the people as a whole. If it's having any impact on the wages of citizens, that's clearly not in the best interest of the average US citizen.
> The way the law was written, it's pretty clear the intent was that we'd only import labor we could not get at home, and thus it would have no impact on worker wages.
Yes that's why I wrote that the current process is a tradeoff which requires additional measures to prevent abuse from the Infosys type companies.
But you can't expect the richest, highest paying country in the world to be able to fix its talent shortage and companies not try to take advantage of the pay discrepancy.
> If it's having any impact on the wages of citizens, that's clearly not in the best interest of the average US citizen.
Unfortunately this is false. There are industries where the cost of training enough American citizens to be experts enough to earnsignificant sums makes the business infeasible. I worked in an AI lab at a top University in the US. It's 90% foreign graduate students in those programs. The current AI boom couldn't happen here without this visa program, honestly.
US citizens don't benefit from a stagnant economy like many European nations. They benefit from an economy with lots of businesses popping up and a robust economy. And unfortunately, since Americans are not well educated and are shrinking in number, those kind of businesses need to be staffed by the highly educated from abroad. And those people will accept less pay than US citizens would just due to upbringing abroad. No one in the world expects the pay Americans expect.
If the H1B visa exists to undermine the wages of us citizens, congress should amend the law and face the election consequences of their actions, because the current law explicitly does not say that, in fact, the opposite.
I wish the rich monopolize it. You really think some foreign person is key - then bid $1million/year salary to that person. You want some cheap labor, then only bid cheap and risk not getting them.
Of course this is open for abuse so we need to investigate every instance of someone leaving - if we determine you were mistreating the employee then you pay them the full $1 million despite them finding a job elsewhere that might only pay $100k/year. (if they just take that lower paying job because it is interesting you are fine, but if they go for better working conditions it will cost you)
> I wish the rich monopolize it. You really think some foreign person is key - then bid $1million/year salary to that person. You want some cheap labor, then only bid cheap and risk not getting them.
I don't think rich industries should monopolize it, but I definitely think they should be forced to pay more.
My personal favorite solution to the H1-B problem is to keep the quotas but remove the indentured servitude aspect. You really need this person? Sponsor them, then treat them well and pay them enough to want to stay with you. Otherwise, they can just leave and get a job like someone with a green card.
> You really think some foreign person is key - then bid $1million/year salary to that person. You want some cheap labor, then only bid cheap and risk not getting them.
I mean this a foolish solution that will just make industries reliant on certain specialized experts not feasible.
The reality is that the majority of Americans don't even have a college degree and Americans are a shrinking, aging populace. The few left in such a field would command wages so high their output wouldn't make up the difference or make it worth hiring them. Many companies would not be viable in the US if we didn't hire foreigners in high-skilled positions.
Easier said than done when most Americans don't even graduate college. The time cost, monetary cost, and risk of developing experts from the American population would make things like the current AI boom impossible in the US
That could potentially be solved by having different buckets for different regions and industries? Seems like that'd be a much fairer system than the current lottery one.
Well, then you check tax return of employees -- if they don't actually reside in the same region, the last person who touched the immigration form is getting a date with a rattan stick.
Set the thresholds using a countrywide baseline (1.0 = countrywide median household income) and adjust according to the median household income of the city the job would be located in. Also adjust thresholds based on the profession.
Those same companies then claim position is small town x, but that office magically closes when H1-B arrives.
A better way might be weighing based on the applying company. Give a weight based on the size of the company and another for the type of company. These weights would be assigned based on the top-most owner(s) and not the applying companies themselves.
Also add penalties for larger companies acquiring smaller companies with H1-Bs that were hired within the last X number of years. Not sure what penalties exactly. At least financial to fund the system, but probably to the weighing as well.
Well, not all specialties pay the same so it'd be problematic if some of the worse paying ones had a bunch of unfilled spots while higher ones didn't. There isn't a (financial) incentive to quit your better paying job to work a less paying one.
I think a better solution is just a "tariff" where a company has to pay an additional 50% of the total compensation to the government. Then if you could fill the spot with an american you'd want to because it saves you a ton of money; but if you actually can't find somebody (at your offered price) then you still have the option of offering a visa.
This completely ignores higher order effects, if you can't employ someone to do a task at a wage that makes profit, it creates conditions where capital investment in innovation and labour multiplication makes more sense.
It never makes sense to import someone who has less earning potential than any other candidate; at least not in a long term context (it makes plenty of sense for a current business for their own short term profit).
If the problem is a lack of local talent in the US, then it seems like a reverse auction would be the best way to ensure they aren't just importing cheap indentured servants. And the money brought in from that reverse auction could be used to fund education where there is the most demand.
Downvoted but im honestly not sure why. If you stack rank visa allocations based on pay, the same pervasive fraud culture will find ways to bid rig, including… “paying your employees high but require they rent their office space, health insurance and IT equipment from you.”
The H-1B system is voluntary indentured servitude.
It’s well paid, especially by the standards of the source country. Employers love it. Visa applicants still find the prospect appealing, even if their experience may not be great.
But the power dynamics of the situation are not that different from what a migrant lettuce picker in California has to navigate. The lettuce picker actually might have more freedom.
No, that's slavery. Indentured Servitude is slightly more complex where the person is paid (poorly), but is beholden to the employer in one way or another that makes it impossible or at least impractical to seek better conditions.
In the past it was debt slavery, as in you get paid but that money goes towards working off some debt that the company imposed, often unfairly. But it can also include things like holding on to your visa so if you want to ask for better working conditions or consider changing companies they can kick you out of the country.
That is not the case. Indentured servitude is labor that was paid for in advance by some service provided - e.g. passage to another country. Just because payment was received in the past, or that it was in-kind, doesn't mean the labor isn't paid labor.
Perhaps not, but that doesn't mean it's not paid for. And in any case, I'm sure the terms would have been different in different cases, and it probably was possible to quit if you were able to pay for your previously-rendered services in some other fashion.
Of course, these are just details. Fundamentally, those indentured were held captive and forced to work. But that still doesn't make it unpaid, or involuntary for that matter. The bondage existed only to enforce the terms previously agreed to. I have no way to know, but I imagine many indentured servants were happy with the trade, though many also weren't. Lots of fraud too, with people being tricked into it.
As I write, I can't help but think of student loans which have similar characteristics.
I mean...sure...if you want to call the exchange of one service for another "pay". Even though the rest of the world uses that term for money. But what is your point, do you think it is equal to the OP's assertion?
That's the voluntary part. Voluntarily choosing to go back, when an entire family may depend on the income, is not that voluntary.
The indentured part is the extended commitment to a single employer, enforced by law, with clocks running all the time on the various phases.
The servitude part is the threat of deportation that hangs over the person if they dare to question workloads or treatment. Most places don't make this obvious, but they don't have to - it is an iron fist in a velvet glove.
Since H-1B says it is supposedly intended for high-value employees unobtainable in the US, why not auction the visas, with a reserve price that would prevent them being used to push down wages?
Because the system is really intended to drive down skilled worker wages and subsidize American universities that essentially sell American permanent residency to full-tuition paying foreign students.
Not "high value", but rather "high skill". Some examples of occupations that need a professional degree in order to be filled.
Information Technology
Software engineers
Database administrators
Teachers
Primary
Secondary
University
Health care professionals
Physicians
Nurses
Dentists
Psychologists
Engineers
Civil
Chemical
Mechanical
Industrial
Surveyors
... and Fashion models
With an auction approach, would the software engineers completely at big tech companies (or consultancies capable of demanding big tech compensation) continue to be able to drown out the other professions?
The visa lottery makes it difficult to reliably get H1B visa teachers. H1B visa abuse makes it even more difficult. An auction would make the H1B visa program into a "visa for software developers where consultancies charge high prices to win auctions and pay their employees little."
It might be my naiveity, but, shouldn’t highly-skilled and in-demand professions be the highly valued ones? Something’s gone terribly wrong if there’s few teachers, it’s hard to get new teachers, but the price of teachers remains the same. It makes no sense from a labor standpoint.
Compensation is often coupled with revenue generation - not skills.
Teachers generate no revenue.
Compare the compensation for big tech software developers vs those employed directly in public sector. Its not that public sector are less skilled, nor less in demand - but rather public sector doesn't generate revenue and its budget is a different path.
I would contend that this isn't "teachers and public sector software developers are necessarily poorly compensated" (though I will say that teachers should be paid more) but rather that the revenue that is coupled with a software developer in the private sector is disproportionately high and so companies in that domain can compensate more highly.
The control of teachers salaries are based on what funding the school district gets which comes from taxes. The public tends to prefer low taxes and models which do not allow tax dollars collected in one spot to be used in another which depresses the compensation for everyone in public sector (including teachers).
Unless you are at or near the top and have control of the budgeting, rarely will public sector pay on the same scale as private sector.
>Something’s gone terribly wrong if there’s few teachers, it’s hard to get new teachers, but the price of teachers remains the same. It makes no sense from a labor standpoint.
Its because the state has a near monopoly on hiring teachers, so they can keep wages artificially low.
The school has a budget that comes from property taxes (in most cases) that people tend to be resistant to raise.
Let's double the teachers' wages, but first you need to double the budget, and for that, need to first double the local property taxes.
Put doubling the property taxes on the next ballot and see if that passes. If not, there is no money to raise the wages for teachers.
Where wages can go up is when teachers move from a cost center to a profit center ... such as with a private school, though that is still limited by the amount that people are willing to pay to go there.
A local private high school (midwest - median household income is $75,000) is $16,000 per year with enrollment of about 500 students. You have $8M to use. There are 100 people on staff (this includes grounds and maintenance). Let's apply a broad stroke and say that this is 75 teachers and 25 kitchen, maintenance, grounds, and secretarial jobs. Pretending that all other expenses are $0 and that the non teaching staff is $0 also... $8M into 75 is $106k. That places an upper bound on the amount that teachers make there ... unless we raise that $16,000 tuition or find other revenue sources.
The idea that private schools could serve anywhere near the amount of kids that public schools do and that would somehow result in higher wages for teachers is rather unserious on its face.
The parent comment was confused how demand is high, supply is low, yet wages are also low. I explained how these wages are fixed. You're the one coming up with these new assertions.
A counter argument I've seen - with auction only IT companies will be able to hire H-1B workers and other industries like healthcare and pharma and even chip production will be out-priced. Different industries have different level of salaries. $200k/y salary may suppress SDE wages in Silicon Valley but it is well above market rate for an electrical or a chemical engineer.
It's only a counter argument if you make an assumption that H1-B program is designed to bring, specifically, healthcare or pharma workers.
Unless you can point to a reason why law of supply and demand was breached, high salaries reflect high demand vs. low supply and low salaries reflect low demand vs. high supply.
My understanding is that healthcare and pharma are not exactly poor industries so if they don't pay their highly skilled workers a lot of money, the most likely explanation is that there's abundance of those workers.
What follows from that is that we don't need to import them from abroad.
And that logic generalizes to all industries hence it really is that simple as letting in those who can score the highest salaries.
It aligns the interests of U.S. in general (highly paid workers put way more into taxes than they get back in benefits) with the interests of the companies.
It's hard to game, simple to apply and trivial to verify (once you issue SSN you check with IRS once a year if they are really paid what the company said it will pay). And if companies try some fraud they are now in the business of tax fraud.
It boggles the mind that this is not a rule applied by all governments in the world. Unless, of course, you understand that government is not exactly pre-occupied with doing the best thing for the country but with doing the best thing for themselves. All those speeches you can give, on both sides, about immigration!
> It's hard to game, simple to apply and trivial to verify (once you issue SSN you check with IRS once a year if they are really paid what the company said it will pay). And if companies try some fraud they are now in the business of tax fraud.
This is one of the areas where it may be easier to game - at least until the people committing the fraud have gained a bit, shut down the business, and moved on (at least for the smaller instances - larger consultancies would have more difficulty but they game in other ways).
Government agencies are notoriously siloed and often have laws preventing all but the most limited data exchange between agencies.
This leads to it being easier for each department to establish its own set of data (so it doesn't need to go through the difficulty of having an IEA with all of that additional bureaucracy and since there's more than enough work for for underfunded agencies working with data that you don't have gets deprioritized) ... and such fraud is likely easier to do or takes many years to raise up enough discrepancies to merit further investigation by qualified investigators.
Saying "raise the wages in those industries" is equivalent to "let's raise salaries of a school district by 20x and raise the corresponding taxes to compensate."
The issue is that high tech software development compensation is disproportionately high because the corresponding revenue for those companies is likewise high. This is only an issue if you are trying to say that other industries should match it or are competing based on the same scale. I do not begrudge high tech their revenue and compensation, but rather believe that if we paid everyone with a college degree where a H1-B could be employed 250,000 / year that it would cause even greater problems.
Sounds good in theory, but not at all practical. Apple just laid off 600 employees working on their electric car initiative, they moved employees internally where skills were transferable, but the rest were let go. But in your proposal, they would now not be able to hire for ANY job function on H1B.
I think 1 year is a lot of time in the industry for a blanket ban. If apple wants to get out of building a car but pivot into building AI (which is what they’re doing) or if a different company wants to reduce its sales and marketing footprint while increasing its dev efforts (a lot of tech companies are doing this), then these blanket bans are unreasonable and detrimental to everyone (customers, existing employees, shareholders including people’s retirement funds), including citizens.
However, say Apple fires 600 car engineers and then files for 400 H1Bs for 400 car engineering positions after 6 months, then they need to be held accountable. Which to a certain extent already happens. USCIS will often deny H1B petitions in such cases and green card processing (PERM certification part) is usually paused at a company level after significant layoffs. As of today Facebook and other tech companies that had significant layoffs last year, are not filing PERM applications for their current employees and they won’t for at least a year after the layoffs.
This is an interesting proposal. Unfortunately, the way around this is a "business solutions" company, whose main solution is providing H1-B'd temps to large companies. There are tons of those around: local companies hire people on H1-B. Foreign companies send people over on L1.
Everything is a push for outsourcing. Workers rights is a push (looking at you Boeing, moving from WA to SC). Ecological rules - looking at all toxic production which had been moved to the places with less accountabilities instead of fixing it. I'm pretty sure there're more examples.
Above all, I wonder why brain drain is not viewed as a geopolitical tool. High skilled young professionals from China and Russia are essentially non-replaceable due to their declining birth rates. You can do a lot more damage this way than through various sanctions. A lot of people already want to move to the US, so this can easily be done by getting rid of the cap and switching to a tax on the employer to simplify the process.
The trouble is that optimally using that tool would involve completely draining one category of brain in the target country. That would make a missing link in their economy, but the incoming workers would terribly suppress wages in that sector in the receiving country.
The unfortunate answer is: love them or hate them, people can't pass the leetcode interviews
I've worked as a hiring manager in multiple companies, and recommending or not recommending a hire is done without any knowledge of their status, but solely on the 45 minute interview I did. If they need some sponsorship thats done without communicating to me, I just say yes/no. And with that, somehow most of the Yes's need sponsorship, so what else can you do from an interviewing perspective
Not always. I passed hiring committee but couldn't team match in multiple companies because of hiring freezes/layoffs. Recruiter told me that the majority of candidates would not team match. But somehow they still needed all the h1bs.
There are actually four large “buckets” on H1B usage in software. First are the “regular” software jobs. At the large tech players or other regular companies (eg a software job at a bank). Like you said, there is a lot of supply due to layoffs and not a lot of demand. H1Bs in this area are also limited this year due to this.
Second are the college graduates. Once you complete a STEM degree as a foreign student you get three years of OPT which is for all practical purposes a work permit to work in STEM jobs (with some conditions). If the student (now employee) needs to continue working for the company in the US after this they need a H1B or a green card. Most genuine companies apply for H1B for these employees the moment they join and because it is a lottery keep doing it in the hope that the employee gets a H1B and continues working. These are not new jobs but people in jobs for up to 3 years that the company wants to continue employing and does not intend to layoff. Supply and demand plays a smaller part here.
Third are the outsourcing companies, TCS, Accenture and the like. These companies have people in India and contracts with large Us companies. They predict some number of demand for moving people from India to US (to help support the rest of the offshore team, to replace a higher paid employee at the US company with a lower paid employee of the contracting company etc). These companies will mostly but just barely follow the law (they have also been caught and paid files) and will use all loopholes available to them. These are the biggest “abuses” you see in the press. While the general “abuse” news in the press is about these companies replacing American workers with lower cost H1B employees the other problem is they are not catering to current demand but predicting work at a “client” based on current or future contract, creating “job openings” based on this (which they can, it is their own company) and flooding the lottery.
The fourth are smaller body shops and “consulting” companies in the US. These also predict demand and “create jobs” to enter applicants to the lottery. But the difference is typically the companies in the third category don’t get the employees to the US if there is no “client project” (as in, real demand) and even if they they do, they have the means to pay the minimum required pay the H1B demands - they are big enough to afford a bench of employees. The companies in the fourth category will get people to the US first on fake, or near-fake demand and then pitch them to “clients”. In the meantime the employee is not paid the companies skirt the law in all ways as possible to continue “holding” the employee. They also refuse to share paperwork with the employee (preventing them from moving jobs) and sometimes have the employees pay for the H1B which is illegal (but gets to the grey area if they get the payment in India before the employee travels to the US).
There is very less demand today in the first category. The second category is not much related to demand. Most of the “abuse” happens in the third (by volume) and fourth (by severity). Abuse in quotes because a lot of this is in the gray areas of legality and sometimes outrightly legal but not “right”.
People in the F1 + OPT category (second category from above) are really the most unjustly treated by the current process.
Oftentimes, these are people who have come to the US aged 18, lived here through a four-year college degree, maybe a masters; have subsequently been employed for up to two years (for STEM grads) for their OPT; and then have to compete on a like-for-like basis with candidates who are living abroad.
It's ridiculous. You've spent your entire adult life in the US and you have to participate in a lottery to keep your job.
I did not realize about the 3 year college graduate category.
But does the law make these buckets? Or is there one H1-B bucket and you are categorizing the buckets by industry and types of companies that hire H1-B.
Don't you think that the 3 year college student bucket, and the generally other buckets, would suppress jobs/salary of the local US population?
They would be competing against US students graduating.
I am wondering about the supply/demand analysis. Do you think that the jobs in bucket 3 and 4, the outsourcing companies and smaller body shops, don't impact US based SW/CompSci employees? I'm just thinking with the current glut of US based people looking for jobs, and new US graduates, that they might also be applying to these companies, and be competing against the H1-B employees.
> Don't you think that the 3 year college student bucket, and the generally other buckets, would suppress jobs/salary of the local US population?
Only if you can find somebody to hire--because it's important to realize that H-1B applies to more than just computer touchers.
Before we got married, my wife was on an OPT. Her employer was not used to hiring foreign nationals, but they literally couldn't find somebody who would be willing to do the job. My wife is a special-education teacher at a school for very difficult kids, and not a programmer. That's not a common skillset and it's a very stressful job that almost nobody wants. (Turnover at her job is close to 100% per year, and is over 100% per year in some roles.)
The school isn't going to pay more for a probably-mythical candidate; the money doesn't exist. But kids need teachers.
Tech workers are absolutely a different story and causing some impact on the local tech-worker economy (but probably less than most people think; my employer just hires in India when it can now, instead, so no local businesses get paid by people working here), but every road that seems to be currently on the table seems to indicate that the overwhelming desire in the louder quarters isn't "fix tech-worker H-1B", it's "they terk er jerbs, kill H-1B". Which scans, given that when we get really honest about it; the spiciest reaction to H-1B, in my experience, is that it's dual-intent.
So even with the best of intentions (not those ones), touching the system is hard. The political valence is fraught, the system itself is complex and has a lot of moving parts, and the core assumptions being bandied around about job availability and supply curves are just not proven--or, probably, provable.
> I'd think with all the outcry over 'taking jobs'. That maybe the law should be adapted to have different quotas and rules for different industries.
Probably should, but you would have to have the votes. In an environment where approximately half of the House and the Senate needs right-wing, nativist "heartland" votes to exist, it's unlikely to shift the calculus in favor of delivering benefits to American software developers: a demographic generally perceived as generally centrist to liberal (so why would they vote for Republicans if they helped improve this?), already well-off (so why do they need the help?), and chiefly coastal (so are they even in these votes' jurisdiction?).
I am categorizing them because each have their own background. For the law it is one big bucket.
The theory is that there is enough demand and not enough supply of people to fill this demand. In practice there is a lot of nuance. It is a messy outdated system that is being stretched and abused.
Some of them are: US colleges like foreign students due to the money they bring in. This is not going to stop. H1B employees in the third and fourth categories are paid less compared to the US employees and even compared to the first category. So there is an intrinsic demand. These companies also don’t intend to hire US workers. They “prefer” foreign workers due to a variety of reasons, some in the legal grey area, some not legal. Some are: These employees are there to help run the offshore workforce so they want someone who understands the culture and work with them, even better if this is somewhere who was actually offshore and can come to the US and act as a bridge. They also use this as an incentive for the employees in India and elsewhere. They don’t want to pay more. Like I said some are in the legal grey area and use loopholes. There is a recent lawsuit against TCS related to this. These jobs are not going to stop unless US companies stop outsourcing because these jobs (and they being fulfilled by foreign workers) are fundamental to how the outsourcing model is run by these companies.
My personal opinion is the first and second categories do not suppress jobs and salaries of US workers. These companies pay the same for both and a lot of times actually spend a net higher amount of money on the foreign workers due to the H1B overhead and fees involved (a fee when applying, renewals every 3 years, applying for green card etc). These employees also tend to be good at what they do.
The third is where the vast majority of suppression comes from. And the fourth is where the vast majority of skirting the law happens.
There are lot of people in the second group who got fired during the layoffs of 2023. They are very much subjected to the same supply demand curve. In fact they are subjected more to it than the experienced developers.
After the layoffs, the market seems to have taken a K shape. Experienced developers are very much in demand and inexperienced ones are not in demand. Most of the college grads and even masters students are part of the inexperienced developers group.
I personally know masters students who got layed off while the folks with bachelors and higher work experience are still working.
The first bucket in your answer is barely affected in last layoffs as most of them are experienced developers. The second is the most affected.
I recently hired for an entry level position, blind to VISA status. We received an enormous number of applications. We received very few applications that were from US residents, I’d estimate only 5%. By the end of the drawn out process of filtering people based on cover letters, resumes, majors, GPA, work experience, portfolios, papers published, etc. There were 2 Americans left, who didn’t respond to the interview request.
American Colleges are full of foreign students, who are often at the top of their class and have made it through several ability filters to get here. If you’re hiring with meritocracy in mind, you’ll end up interviewing foreign students.
Software consulting can be abused because these type of contracts are often awarded based on cost. By driving down salary costs compared to other consultancies, the Indian firms are able to win jobs. These firms aren’t interested in hiring Americans because of the power dynamic that they’ve established with their staff.
Before the H1B really started to ramp up, you used to see foreigners working in IT that truly were some of the best and the brightest because there was a lot of competition and very few spots. These days, that is the exception, not the rule, because it was primarily designed to drive down wages so that CEO's can make larger salaries. The fact that they were able to convince people that reducing your own earning potential by giving the jobs to foreigners is the right thing to do morally shows how gullible/naive many in our industry are.
The H1B guys may undercut US talent, but not by nearly as much as they undercut us when they're still living overseas!
Countries like India are developing a lot of talent and most companies are building strategies to hire there. If we can bring the best talent over consistently, than they can help us to keep the standards highest in the US, and justify our salaries.
Yup and that is why people like Narayan Murthy are the greatest criminals in the history of India. Ruined an entire generation of Indians by teaching them to do second hand work and stopped any original thinking from happening. That is why they are so behind China.
I think you're getting the order of causation reversed. The alternative to Infosys in the 90s would be to move abroad or work in a government job. You can't build a Porsche on day 1 - you have to start with the 10k car.
The consulting companies kick started the engineering base that eventually led to MNCs/big tech setting up offices in India, and the broader startup ecosystem today.
In an ironic twist, cheaper white collar workers should make services on the whole cheaper. Something that would be good for blue collar/hourly workers. In the same way that lax borders are beneficial to white collar workers by making goods cheaper.
In Germany visa applicants are evaluated based on merit without a lottery for decade and it's working well. US could do something similar instead of using a hole in the fence but it doesn't look like the decision making system is capable of making hard decisions like that.
The US system combines both merit and lottery. The lottery is maintained because it's an effective bottleneck on the volume of applications, which is substantially higher than what Germany is receiving.
When companies only have a 25% chance of approval they'd just submit 4 applicants per position. Most of this volume wouldn't be present if there was no limit.
Decisions in the US are made by big tech lobbyists, who want the supply of semi-indentured labor who can't jump jobs at a moment notice to continue as usual.
Did you know that you could have 15 years of working in the Bay Area experience and still be refused a German blue card because you majored in Physics or EE instead of CS? But mere work visas were easily obtainable a couple years ago with a signed contract.
There are two options to get Blue Card. One is education, but second is professional work for I think 10 years above certain threshold salary (very low threshold for IT, even by EU means). So that 15 YOE IT engineer can certainly apply and get Blue Card. The only nuance is that it needs to be full employment, self employment doesn't count or is problematic iirc.
EU citizens always had an option to come and work so work visas only apply for non-EU. Also, the debate in Germany is mostly about asylum seekers and not skilled migration. I haven't heard the thesis "less people, more pay" but instead "more workers, more taxes". https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAGerman/comments/178iy0w/questio...
As per by neighbor: "Not the semiconductor industry. We are looking for qualified engineers everywhere. I don't see this having any impact on salaries."
I read this a few times and am really struggling to see how this scam works out.
Crudely speaking, are these agencies just finding existing green card holders and American citizens with names that they can use to put down on paperwork…then hire the foreign worker who happens to have have the same name…and this somehow bypasses some sort of legal checks somewhere? What’s the point of a SSN?
Yeah, I was thinking the same. This is just wrong on so many levels. This is what leads to identity fraud.
I am reaching out to my congressman and senators office to let them know that several elements of this program are abused so much they should take a fresh look at this. I suggest you do the same.
I truly believe that immigration is what keeps America the greatest country in the world. But this kind of abuse needs to stop.
> “Easiest” way is probably getting married to a citizen.
I don't think that's the case, anymore.
I remember a notorious case, around here, where a guy had a Russian wife (I have no idea of the background -but they were married for many years), he was dying of leukemia, and required her around-the-clock care, and they deported her.
I mean you probably are missing a bunch of details.
Being married doesn't automatically grant you citizenship. It does give a way to apply for a green card (IIRC, no caps on this path so it's "easy") which then gives a path to citizenship (naturalization).
So; no-duh if the guy's wife is russian she can be deported; she's probably overstayed her visa while caring for the guy.
Dude, there must be something incredibly specific about this case for this to be a thing. Like the wife just said she was a tourist and never left instead of applying for a green card.
If you just do the paperwork - enter the US under a K1 Visa (fiancé(e) visa), get married, and then apply for a green card once you're married - you won't be randomly deported when your spouse gets leukemia.
It is actually is very easy (multiple people in my family have done this - one guy has even sponsored multiple foreign wives because they keep leaving him cuz he's an asshole). But you do have to do the paperwork if you don't wanna get deported.
My family both won Green Card Lottery which and then got a refugee status. I am pretty sure that double thing is quite rare. Anyhow, either of those programs provide far more support than h1-b or spousal visa, like both allow right to work right away, the refugee had some help with health and income benefits during your first year. I also have known quite a few couples with an "imported" wife, and at least one with an "imported" husband. So yeah, ranking of the programs is refugee->green card lottery->spouse->h1-b with student on the side.
Why do they all keep saying H1-B workers are underpaid? The government determines minimum pay for each application. My experience has been that this number is quite high.
The government sets payscale 'tiers' based on qualifications / roles, and these tiers determine the minimum you're able to earn once you obtain an H-1B or PERM. the employer is still able to work w/ the lawyers to get you to fall at a lesser paying tier, and also offer no further growth/compensation as they have no incentive to-- regardless of performance or structure.
Source: My exact role and bulk of responsibilities are valued at at least 2x; but given how difficult it is (for me, at least) to transition out given the job market, I have no other option but to stay or simply leave the country.
Even if the pay by salary amount is fair, these workers can be exploited to work more hours than their non-H1B colleagues such that if their pay was broken down hourly it would be comparatively lower.
Back in their home country they are probably expected to work those same hours (or more!) for a lot less money. By our standards it is exploit, but often for them it is better.
I understand their incentives. But the fact that they are exploited here, just less so still, makes the exploitation wrong. The H1B program needs to end.
The worst part about H1B and subsequent immigration policies is that it doesn't value your contribution to the country. Someone doing a PhD in the US is usually on an NSF/NIH/DARPA/<Govt agency> grant, and contributing to critical research here. If they choose to to go into industry (academia has uncapped H1B), then they go into the same pool as someone from India working some basic task with some IT Consulting company.
Eventually, the PhD would need to leave despite the government spending close to half a million for their education. This is a huge waste of government resources, close to a billion plus dollars in a lot of cases.
There are multiple factors. Some H-1B are very skilled and in need. But there are consultancies who make money off these workers and don't care about the skill, they'll do whatever they can to make money. Also another factor is suppressing salaries as people need to compete these lowly paid workers...
Never understood why I have worked with H1B at past companies where a local person would suffice. We were just making basic web services. H1B is so abused it's not even funny.
> EPI, for example, notes that American employers do not have to recruit US residents before hiring foreign H-1B workers, that it's legal for US employers to underpay H-1B workers, relatively speaking, and that H-1B workers are often exploited and lack job protection and mobility, among other issues.
I think that, in the modern, immigrant-averse west, that's exactly how a worker visa system is supposed to work.
* We don't have enough skilled workers, and employers think the ones we have are too expensive
* Foreign countries have a glut of skilled workers, and are competing with our companies
* So let's allow in a quota of foreign skilled workers, and let's let companies take the piss and underpay them.
Profit! From the POV of the government (they can screw the quota down to placate nativists, and point to the fact that the visa workers are earning a lot less than the natives), and from the POV of the employers (they get a cheapo workforce).
A better solution is to improve the education standard of the natives; but that would involve public expenditure, which is anathema to conservatives, to the press, and apparently (in the UK) it's also anathema to the Labour Party.
I'm not an open borders wingnut; but I think expenditure on high-quality education is a vital investment in a country's future. We have some world-beating universities in the UK; but government policies have resulted in those institutions giving many of their places to overseas students, who pay a lot more. So we educate lots of foreigners, who then go back to where they came from, and then get hired on worker visas to come back and work here, e.g. as doctors and nurses, of which we have a dire shortage.
Then we tighten the rules on worker visas, like banning them from bringing their kids with them.
H1b program itself needs to be overhauled. It's entirely possible this might get addressed with change in the presidential administration starting next January 19th.
It’s not called fraud and abuse because “immigrants are taking our jobs”. It’s called fraud and abuse because it’s fraud and abuse. It’s been prevalent in the H1B process for years.
Personally, I’m all for America bringing in talented foreign nationals. But the H1B process is bad for foreigners looking to work in the US who get way underpaid and don’t have easy options to work at a different firm. And bad for American workers who have to compete against underpaid wages.
Given that the point of the program is to bring in talent unavailable, it’s become a farce. I think companies hiring H1B’s at below market wages probably think they’re getting a bargain. But I doubt that most of them - maybe other than FAANG - are getting good talent at lowball wages.
It seems that you didn't read the article.
I'll help you with the fraud part:
> When I was at USCIS," explained Law, "you would have registrations or petitions with very common names. The belief from some of the fraud folks was that some of the common names were inserted in there and then these businesses, after they won the lottery, would then go out and actually find somebody [with that name] as opposed to having a real candidate in place."
> One form of H-1B fraud involves companies colluding to file multiple petitions on behalf of the same foreign worker. This serves to give the IT consultancies involved in trying to bring this worker to the US a greater chance of having their applicant selected, and of collecting a commission. As above, that's supposed to be more difficult under the new system.
