Misuse must definitely stop. But wouldn't this force businesses to outsource to offshore offices... Losing talent, losing jobs to other country and losing out on taxes. And the jobs that cannot be offshored would require higher/complex skillset
Offshoring introduces additional challenges to management -- it's simply easier to manage a workforce who rolls into the office and is locally present, though yes, remote (or occasional from-home) management is possible.
If a company wants to pay offshore-wages, then it can employ offshore talent, offshore, and incur the offshore management and logistics hassles. If it wants to hire domestic labour, it should do so at local labour rates.
If foreign workers are brought to domestic markets, allow them full mobility between employers.
Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program is to use one class of restricted-rights workers (the visa holders) to depress domestic wages through threat of a cheaper, effectively indentured workforce.
This has been clearly evident for years, and eloquently argued by Norman Matloff of UC Davis:
As an employee with years of experience working remotely and employer myself now I disagree.
In my opinion it is easier to manage people remotely now, at least in the areas I work(IT). You can focus on the output someone produces without the interference of distractions.
As an example if someone goes and checks early in the morning in the Office, goes home late, it can distract employer opinion on this person being a great value to the company, while in reality her productivity is low.
Another example is having someone that talks a lot(extroverts)(high profile people). People that talk little externally look as they do not exist, but on jobs like programming they can run circles around the extroverts.
While you do remote work you don't care someone spends all day having sex in her house(good for them) if it provides great value for the company, value that is very easy to measure, as the only thing you get is the output work you get from your workers.
Do you like to work at 3 o'clock in the morning? I don't care. You are in pajamas in your house? I don't care. You like tattoos? I don't care. Do you have children? I don't care.
Are you productive? I care.
The main problem with remote working is that is it rare and we don't have all the experience of recent century of factories and offices history to learn from. But if you go even farther in time you will realize working from home was the normal thing to do before industrialization.
Cut the salaries involved to 20% of what they are now, change the legal framework from "H1-B" to "no visa at all," and you've just described a stereotypical Donald Trump voter. AND YET I cannot help but imagine that those who would support this proposed legislation would be shocked at the comparison to those horrible terrible racist people.
But paying full costs for labour is long-term necessary. Again, Smith, in one of his less-frequently cited passages.
However, it's also by far the most attractive visa type for people from many countries. If I'm an e.g. German dev, what other options do I have if I wanted to work in the US long term? L-1?
> Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program
Obviously misuse isn't okay, but I'm sure they'd be chilling effects worth thinking about. I've always wondered why there aren't visa swap programs, i.e. if a Dutch and an American citizen wanted to live in the US/Netherlands respectively, why not swap (as long as some basic criteria are met)?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT
I don't know about using it to go to the US, but for a Dutch Visa it wasn't so painful.
I work with customers every day that decided to axe their internal IT staffs and outsource it to the big consulting and services firms. It may have made Bill Lumbergh's stock go up a quarter of a point in the short term, but the reduced efficiency, red tape and typically less-than-stellar competence drags on the whole organization.
There are success stories, but those success stories of H1B aren't the ones that pay bare minimum. Companies who pay top dollar for H1B get the great ones. The companies who pay bottom dollar get shut down in 5 years.
You'd figure after 20+ years of this, executives would learn, but they don't care to. They are incentivized for precisely what they do.
This exists because not every product carries same gross profit margin.
Apple launched iWatch, but it fails miserably, so Apple in an attempt to recuperate some costs, wants to produce the watch cheaply. Enter the people who can produce it cheaply. Of course the quality won't be the same, but apparently there isn't a market for high quality steel smart watches, but for lower quality plasticky smart watches.
When Blue Apron built their product, they had to spend on the development time for it. If people are willing to subscribe to Blue Apron for $175 per week, then Blue Apron can build the product by hiring the best individuals, in the shortest amount of time.
But if Blue Apron's customers are only willing to use a service like that for $60 per month, then BA must hire and deliver accordingly.
The issue is really two fold:
1. Execs think that programmers are cogs and one is just as good as the other. 2. Many companies can't keep good developers because they are hell holes and the culture doesn't even know how to promote creativity.
Actually from what I've seen a lot of the bodyshops use H1B to facilitate outsourcing. They bring in smaller numbers of people on H1Bs to act as go-betweens for the much larger team offshore.
That may not necessarily be true. People may find other jobs; and the profits from outsourcing would be spent possibly resulting in job creation.