Trump Is Right: Silicon Valley Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
huffingtonpost.com
huffingtonpost.com
So we decided to do something about our situation. We started foraying into the immigration systems of other countries and we decided to use the express entry system of Canada. So we all applied for it ourselves, got evaluated for our skills & degrees and now I am happily typing this as a permanent resident from Canada.
Express Entry System -
Disney of Florida had recently replaced 250 US IT workers with foreigners on H1-B. Trump especially spoke out against this move. Clinton was silent.
Clinton accepted $675,000 from Goldman for 3 talks. Wall Street banks like Goldman hire lots of high tech computer programmers and it is in their interest to depress wages as well as those firms in Silicon Valley. Trump was right that Clinton was bought off (she could have donated the $675,000 for charity as President Obama did with his Nobel Peace Prize Award money).
Incidentally, HP head and Republican Meg Whitman came out against Trump and she mentioned other reasons, but her true motivation is that HP would have to start paying market wages for all of its high tech workers if Trump won.
Okay, I get it, Clinton bad etc. But Trump has appointed tons of people from Goldman to his administration[1] and filed an executive order against financial industry regulations[2] - you know the regulations put in place after the last Wall Street crash, to prevent a similar crash?
Can we stop pretending that Trump isn't bought off by Goldman now?
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/trump-adds-goldman-...
[2] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/03/presi... https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/02/03/presi...
If Trump were truly bought off by Goldman, he certainly would not be behind legislation that fixes the broken H1-B Visa system. Goldman, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and other firms will have to start paying market wages instead of depressed wages because of the H1-B Visa reform.
And it's not a zero sum game. One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company. Other H1B hires enabled a contracting firm I worked for to get a large contract that kept 7 other people employed.
> "These engineers will still be part of the labor pool, they'll just be doing work for our foreign competitors"
Well, let them work for Samsung instead of Apple then.
> "One of my H!B hires had unduplicatable skills and created about 20 high paid jobs in our company."
The point of the H1-B visa is precisely for those cases where there are no Americans that can do the job, so your hire follows the law. But then if it such a hard to find job, then the scarcity implies the person should get a higher salary, especially if he/she created "20 high paid jobs for our company."
That type of thing was the original intention, and I think most people would be okay with that.
But a gigantic majority of H1Bs are not used to fill positions that require unique skills. If 99.9% of H1Bs are abusing the system to avoid paying market wages then the system is broken and it needs to be fixed.
Yes. We have higher wages for our higher standard of living. As you said, it's not a zero sum game and all things are not equal.
Can you give details so it can be judged if this is true, and if so how common/relevant it is?
Broken clock is right twice a day...
So what? That is what people with her credentials are worth on the speaking circuit. God forbid someone get paid what they are worth, what do you think this is, a meritocracy?
> she could have donated the $675,000 for charity as President Obama did with his Nobel Peace Prize Award money
The Clinton's donated over $15MM to charity over the course of 2008-2015 and paid over 40% of their income as taxes. I'm pretty sure they've done more to help people than you (the average you, for all I know you're Bill Gates) or I ever will.
> So what? That is what people with her credentials are worth on the speaking circuit. God forbid someone get paid what they are worth, what do you think this is, a meritocracy?
$675,000 for 3 talks to Goldman leaves many with the implication that Clinton was "bought" by Goldman, whether true or not (and how to prove that?). It gave both Sanders (who asked that Clinton dispose the contents of the 3 talks which she never did but which Wikileaks eventually did do) and Trump significant ammunition against Clinton in the campaign.
If you are running for President, esp as a Democrat, it is unwise to accept money like that from Goldman or Wall Street. She could have said when she accepted each payment from Goldman that she was donating that money to charity so as not to leave people, potential voters, with the impression that she was "bought." Perceptions matter and as someone who came from a family that ran multiple times for President (3 times prior to this election) she should have known better.
When? Her proposal, as reported in the media was, "'staple' green cards on STEM grads' diplomas". Was there other proposal she made specifically addressing H-1Bs?
The only way to truly solve the issue is to tie the H1B to the person and let them work freely in the US after a short time.
[1]http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/02/news/india/snapdeal-india-ku...
The whole notion of pay big $$s if the specialized skills are worth so much is wrong because these companies have smaller budgets for personnel than plant.
The tech industry accounts for the vast majority of H1B visas: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp...
I am not assuming that you are in Detroit. I used to work remotely for an Automotive company in Detroit for their telematics unit. Some colleagues I know commute from Windsor.
I don't doubt that many immigrants harbor this impression, but it is wrong. A H1B visa holder can switch companies at any time, by having that company apply to have the visa transferred to them. 99.9% of the time, this doesn't impact your GreenCard wait at all, because your Priority Date can also be transferred to your new Green Card application. I have a friend who has been on a H1B for 8 years, is currently at his 4th job, negotiated a 30% pay bump every time he switched, and still has the same Green-Card priority date that he had from his first application.
The fact that so many H1B workers harbor this misconception, and are afraid to switch jobs, is what gives employers the confidence to abuse their employees. If enough H1B workers start quitting on bad bosses, we'll see some pretty rapid change.
Sure you can switch employers while on an H1B. I did. But that's an extra moving part added to the process. It's extra effort added to both sides, employer and employee. They need to really want to hire you to go through all that. If it's a tiny startup, the amount of work might just be too much (and you wouldn't want to work for a tiny startup anyway, as an H1B worker).
Also, if you somehow lose your job as an H1B holder, you only have a limited time interval to get a new job. There's a lot of pressure to just accept any job that comes along, regardless of all other considerations.
Also, typecasting is very real. The whole H1B / greencard process really, really puts the pressure on you to stay in the same job description for a long time. It's not set in stone, and there are exceptions, but as a rule you're basically forced into a straightjacket.
Basically, if you're caught in this process, there's the freedom & opportunity Big Carrot dangling ahead at the end of many years of wait. Meanwhile, your hands are tied and your actions are to a large extent dictated by a faceless, remote bureaucracy that has the full power to decide your fate. It's extremely frustrating.
All is not well. You are going to have to deal with a significant salary cut around 40~50% not factoring in exchange rates. You also have to deal with small supply, high rent and cost of living. Prepare to commute for hours packed into the Skytrain like sardines in a can and bus. that is provided you don't get "renovicted" where landlord kicks you out to accommodate their relatives. You also have to deal with the isolation, cliquey and outwardly friendly but internally unfriendly and flaky citizens and sleepy eyed nature of No Fun City. You also have to deal with the fact that this is essentially a socialist country with socialist values which means lot of your taxes are going to people who have nothing to do with you or care for.
But hey, our ruling party thinks that's a small price to pay for Living In the Best Place on Earth™
The rest of your post sounds about right.
It's unbelievable that the average entry level's tech worker in Vancouver makes just as much as a barista in Seattle.
You can't compete or create a world class unicorn in Vancouver, period.
I think not.
I do run a consulting company that consults to US companies. That is possible. But at that point, if you consult with startups, you won't be getting options.
Can you explain this? I'm currently waiting for a greencard.
Well, no, but there is a cap on the per-country share of the total quota in each eligible category.
"May the skilled ones win"
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/express-entry/grid-crs.asp
and your documentations are correct, 6 months is the SLA.
I know of one person who will never in her life see Canada because she got the paperwork about a twenty-year-old misdemeanor wrong, even after the $1,000 appeal to the Minister. Definitely get a lawyer. The fetish for American criminality is one thing about Canadian immigration that I would hope to see reformed. Canada is very welcoming unless you've had a taste of American justice, then they make you work very hard to enter. Caring about criminal records is common, of course; having direct access to neighboring criminal records is not, among most world countries.
Given that a number of American states are law-and-order criminal record factories, and given that a criminal record is not necessarily indicative of someone's life (if it were, I'd be selling heroin instead of debugging right now), it seems time for Canadians to revisit this policy. I'm guessing there was a flood of cons to Canada at some point that made them skittish and enshrine a bunch of hoops in legislation. With a lot of Americans now looking for possibilities such as these in the current environment, there is a huge reform opportunity here to make Canada even more welcoming.
https://lofgren.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentI...
Far from "emasculating" it like the article suggests, the "bucketing" system in Lofgren's bill is designed to put upward pressure on all wages, including those of American citizens. The way that it works is that positions paying in the top 2/3 of the average wage for their geographical area will get priority over those that pay only the average wage, regardless of how much they pay their H1Bs. (And within the bucket, they get priority based on how much more than the prevailing wage they pay the H1B worker.) This prevents companies from bidding up the price of their H1B workers only, and forces them to raise wages for all of their American citizens as well in order to take advantage of the market-based allocation of H1Bs.
- F-1 student visa becomes dual-intent. This is huge! Essentially an employer could now sponsor permanent residency directly out of a PhD program (or even college assuming sufficient work experience for employment-based immigration). No need to first get a H-1B.
- It appears that switching employers while on the H-1B becomes easier (the new employer must only submit the Labor Condition Application). This will provide mobility to H-1B workers and therefore not suppress wages.
- 20% of H-1B visas are set aside for startups and small businesses, and to prevent these from becoming subsidiaries of outsourcing firms the H-1B holder may not be working at a 3rd party worksite for more than 30 days.
- H-1B dependent companies (8 H-1Bs if < 26 employees, 11 H-1Bs if 26-50, 15% of workforce if 50+) either must prove that no US citizen is being displaced, or they must pay at least the dependent company exemption minimum salary of $130,000.
Note: I'm a former Math & Comp Sci (double major) international student (F-1 visa) from a top tier school, then H-1B, permanent resident, and this week (!) will become a citizen.
Bill Summary: https://lofgren.house.gov/uploadedfiles/high_skilled_bill_sx...
But I'm prepared [1] for my first day as a citizen tomorrow.
[1]: medium.com/@BerndVerst/preparing-for-my-first-day-as-a-u-s-citizen-2be7e4719317
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/392/...
Most of my personal experience is with J-1 pimps. These "firms" import seasonal labor and directly collect wages from the hiring company. The catch is as old as markets, as they usually debit housing, food, and fees that are grossly outside of true cost, but allow for just enough origin country adjusted income to still make sense for students to keep signing on. I have dealt with these firms from Eastern Europe and South America, with both operating on the razors edge of indentured servitude. These exact same practices dominate the H-1B program.
The most effective change to any of these programs, outside of just volume, would be the direct to employee payment requirement or minimum percentage. That change would force the either higher salaries in order to maintain the labor firms margins, or the labor firms would have to eat the cost to keep the prices down. Enforcement would have to be extreme. As the nature of the relationship between the firm and the visa holder is already indebted, and there would be lots of opportunity for harassment and coercion of the visa holder to fork over more of their paycheck.
Addition: Another solution may be a visa marketplace that the government would run, to connect employers and visa seekers directly and eliminate the middle man.
I have not had to deal with US immigration, but my impression is the H1B process is between the employer and the government. It would probably help to make that between the employee and the government, to give the employee more control.
They would count the price of plane ticket, technical training classes, english classes, etc to a "debt" that you had to pay off. You would get paid a salary, but depending on how much money you made the company each month, this debt would either go up or down, and the company claimed you wouldn't be able to leave the company until you paid off this debt (eventually my dad figure out that this was not true or at least not legal, but this policy still goes on as we speak).
You can imagine most people who worked there struggled for years to pay off said debt.
Economy-wise, the problem is a lot more complex than what you make it appear. You can't just say: economically speaking it makes sense to close the borders...
The net effect for the overall economy is only going to be better under the current H1B system if companies reinvest their profits into productive uses, which they haven't been [1]. And if H1B workers spend their earnings in the US instead of sending that money back home. I don't have solid data on this last point, but having worked with many H1Bs over the years I can at least anecdotally confirm it.
You can also look at our trade deficit with India as another data point here [2]. We are not, in fact, selling more stuff into India than they sell us. There's a pretty strong argument to be made that the current system is more harmful than helpful to the economy as a whole.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/why-are-corporat... [2] https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/south-central-asia/india
And it's not H1B abuse it's what it's intended for. Since we slammed the door on immigration 50 years ago, this program was created to release a tiny amount of the massive pressure of super smart people world wide who want to come to the US and help make it better.
It's funny that engineers don't get the massive benefits of free trade that built this country, and the huge risks (Smoot Hawley) of trade barriers to our economy.
Every dollar we send to India has to be spent in the US to be worth anything. They can save it, store it, send it to other countries, but it's nothing but imaginary paper if no one ever buys something from the US or reinvests it here.
And if you are tired of foreigners buying our T-Bills instead of our goods/services, then stop running such massive budget deficits and fix the corporate income tax system that is taxing reinvested capital so highly that US firms are forced to park their foreign profits overseas to avoid losing nearly half of them to federal and state taxes. It's like a farmer eating their seed corn.
What? They're spending no money on rent, food or taxes? How's that possible?
And what about the Americans who save their money?
I'll answer that for anyone confused: stock buybacks, of course!
US companies and the collection of US voters are different. Their interests do not always coincide.
One might say that higher margins are "good for the US economy", but that doesn't mean they're good for every person participating in the US economy -- which is what the US voter cares more about.
It's important to recognize that US Companies, to a great degree, are owned by shareholders. It is the shareholders who receive the profit.
The fact that Walmart sells goods manufactured overseas, giving it higher margins, has allowed various members of the Walton family to become billionaires. But someone working as a Walmart greeter probably sees very little benefit.
And, of course, the now unemployed US manufacturing workers/voters do benefit a little from Walmart's lower prices as customers. But, it's reasonable to question whether such workers are better off unemployed, even if they are able to buy cheap products from Walmart.
Walmart should not sell higher cost products just to have them made in this country. The ability to specialize is why free trade makes both parties wealthier, if we can't make bicycles as well as the chinese, then let them make the bikes and we'll sell them smartphones and apps.
If you were a lawyer making $300 an hour and could type 200 WPM, would you hire a secretary for $30/hour who could only type 100 WPM to type your filings for you? Of course you would because that means you can bill more $300 hours. Thats the specialization of free trade.
Conservatives usually use the phrase "at best, the impact is nil"
Liberals usually use the phrase "at worst, the impact is nil"
Because the study shows there is negligible impact. Every laborer is also a spender. If the person saves, then every laborer is also an investor.
If you believe in the mainstream economic theory, more jobs are produced for the ones that are "taken."
You might ask where are those jobs, and then people will say they are in new fields and require training etc.
The debate goes on: why aren't tech jobs in short supply? A: They are. Q: I don't see that, where? A: there isn't one "tech", there are many different fields and they are in short supply in the important ones etc.
It is not as straightforward as you make it out to be.
The unhired foreigner would not end up taking taxes.
I wonder how the math works.
If the company has to pay the extra tax hit when laying off the American, that might let the company decide if it is worth it.
And you responded with poverty is bad.
If that was a response to what I said, I don't see how.
What about laborers who send most of their earnings back to family in their home country?
There are two things to be said from the studies:
1. So far that doesn't seem to be significant, although I don't know if, in theory, it could get worse.
2. I wonder if that country consumes a lot of US goods, it might still end up netting a positive. (Not sure about this).
But, since we are talking about political ends, the words 'should be' probably belongs after 'impact'.
I'm not sure what you mean by unregulated labor, but the bigger problem in this specific case is not the foreign worker, but the fact that they don't have freedom of movement once hired. If they could transfer job easily, companies would have to pay closer to market salaries.
These engineers will be working for our foreign competitors if Trump has his way, how is it good for our economy if more apps are sold by foreign firms, that Samsung sells more phones, etc, etc?
I get really frustrated though with most articles on the H1-B visas which either seem to be bashing immigrants or imply that somehow more government regulation will help the situation. In my experience growing up in the US we are incredibly lucky to have such talented people coming here to work and they have contributed incredibly to the tech companies in the US which are really one of the few bright spots in the US economy. Some of the smartest and hardest working colleagues I have grew up in other countries and we are lucky that they have come here to build the US economy.
There is no way SV would have grown to what it is now without foreign talent. So the shortage has been real for the last 30+ years. Not sure why this point is still controversial.
> most Silicon Valley firms sponsor their H-1B workers, who hold a temporary visa, for U.S. permanent residency (green card) [...] sponsorship renders the workers de facto indentured servants; though they have the right to move to another employer, they do not dare do so, as it would mean starting the lengthy green card process all over again.
Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas?
> the H-1B program is an enabler of rampant age discrimination in the tech industry [...] Almost all the H-1Bs are young
Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people.
And this is just from the first page. I feel like the author is just throwing every possible argument against the H1B, instead of making one good coherent point. =/
Is this a fact or a feeling? Economics allows us to directly measure these things and the price of labor hasn't gone up in the last 30 years at rates indicating a shortage with executive pay and corporate profits at all time highs.
> Then the problem might be with how long the gov takes to process these things, and not with the H1B visas?
I think his point was the visa system is designed to take advantage of the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy to the benefit of the employer.
> Younger people are more willing to move to another country. Also, many students apply for an H1b after their F1 runs out, so of course you get younger people.
If the H1B visa didn't exist there wouldn't be as many foreign students.
You should read his blog, he makes repeated coherent arguments against the H1B visa system and its detrimental effects on the employment outlook for older citizens. He is a CS professor at a respected US university and has an interesting perspective.
Real compensation per hour (for workers as a whole) has gone up 40% since 1987. This number is adjusted for inflation.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
Pay in software has been rising more rapidly than pay for the country as a whole. Is this even remotely in doubt?
http://insights.dice.com/2013/01/22/tech-professionals-enjoy...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-i...
http://www.epi.org/publication/pm195-stem-labor-shortages-mi...
>The average hourly wage for college-educated workers in computer and math occupations rose 5.3 percent over 11 years, from $37.27 in 2000 to $39.24 in 2011 (in 2012 dollars), which translates to an average wage increase of less than half a percent per year. If a labor shortage existed in these occupations, one would expect wages to rise sharply as employers try to lure scarce workers to their firms.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...
There are very few clean economic metrics - in this case you can't directly measure the effect because you don't have data from an equivalent system without the effect of H1b wages in it. So in the end, as with most economic arguments, it is more art than science.
It's controversial because a number of people, like me, think many companies in SB have arbitrarily high hiring bars, and that a company who claims to tailor their hiring process to minimize false positives at the expense of false negatives has no moral standing to crow about "talent shortages". The shortage is largely irrational and self-inflicted.
I see a bait and switch conducted here all the time, where thinkpiece writers will count up the number of annual graduates in Computer Science (or sometimes Information Technology in general), subtract the number of new software jobs per year, and conclude that we have massive overproduction of programmers.
This is obviously stupid, but I keep seeing it. It ignores CS graduates who stay in academia or take nonprogramming jobs (e.g. in finance). Often it counts "new software engineering positions", a metric which ranges from insufficient (by excluding Sysadmins and similar) to idiotic (by excluding "programmers" and other job titles the author couldn't be bothered to search for). Shockingly often, it counts new positions but doesn't account for positions vacated by people leaving programming (e.g. to management or retirement). And, of course, it ignores employability, pushing an implication that any CS graduate can fill any software job regardless of specialization, experience, or interest.
It is a relentlessly stupid 'statistic', but I think one reason for this ongoing perception of surplus talent is that people keep rewriting the same silly article.
Your basic calculation is still right although I'd add more numbers to the opposite site. "Potential graduates" with or without CS can potentially enter to any software sector, or even hardware. Though this is just a small factor.
Anyway having said that, good studies check for shortages and overproductions in more complicated ways than just totting up numbers blindly.
My point was that the major sources of the "no shortage" or particularly "surplus" claims are doing shoddy math that over-represents the labor pool and under-represents demand. Also, more importantly, they're conflating all types of programming.
There are certainly skillsets/interests where there's no shortage, and there are certainly spaces where there is a shortage. People who don't differentiate 'programming' any further aren't saying something useful, and people who do only disagree on the details.
(I realize good studies check for those things, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about people saying "but aren't there lots of spare programmers we don't need?" because some hack with an infographic subtracted two numbers and found a surplus. I've seen this error pattern in respectable news on a bunch of occasions.)
Then there are the "Indian Mafias" in places like Microsoft, where over 50% of an organization is Indian because they got into a cultural hiring spiral. And the products from those groups are generally pretty awful, because everyone seems to want to be a manager or see how high the next re-org will take them, and not do good designs or write good code.
H1Bs shouldn't be used for job shops, and they shouldn't be used to bring in cheap labor, but that's largely what they're used for now.
A lot of really good Indian engineers are going to get hurt, and that will suck.
Mainly because we have over 7 million people unemployed. The controversy is why are we bringing in so many foreign workers when we have so many people out of work here?
The argument basically comes down to what would we need to do to get some of these unemployed people here trained to be able to take some of these jobs? and if so, what's that cost compared to these H1-B's were bringing in? Also, at the end of the day, how motivated are those unemployed people to go through the rigorous training in order to be able to take these jobs? If you've spent 20 years putting hubcaps on cars in a factory, are you going to want to take six months to learn basic .Net or Javascript?
I don't have any of the answers, these are just some of the rumblings I've heard from executives I know at various large corporations.
We need to import a better working class to pay for our leisure class since pushing our leisure class into work is considered socially unacceptable.
Here's a great first person account of this: http://www.vox.com/first-person/2016/12/19/13956666/unemploy... "There have been times where I’ve wondered if I should just get a temporary service or manual labor...I would be too humiliated...a neighbor or friend [might]...see me working the cash register or pumping gas. "
See also NPR's expose on disability fraud: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
I would suggest coming up with better arguments for the debunked supply side economics you're trying to push.
This meme that there are hordes of people who would choose poverty because of an unwillingness to work is disgusting.
>they are unwilling to move to places where the jobs are.
How exactly would an unemployed person move? security deposit/down payment, moving costs, etc all cost real money, and without an income, I'm not sure how you would expect someone to move across the country.
Humans are on average risk averse - and certainly no one would advise someone to move out to california on their credit card, in hopes of immediately finding a well paying job.
Its not like someone who has been unemployed for two years is so attractive that theyd be getting offers with relocation included thrown at them.
These two statements are not linked. One can agree that without foreign talent, SV would not have grown to what it is. On the flip side, this doesn't mean their is a shortage of talent.
Simply that their is a shortage of talent that is willing to sell that talent for lower wages and less perks. I can't see how raising the minimum salary will hurt.
If you are correct, and the value of this talent is amazing enough, even $130,000 is a paltry sum considering what they should be capable of doing. If raising the minimum salary on all of H1-B visas to $130,000 is too much, one could easily make the assertion that the talent is simply not there.
In the end, if there is a talent shortage, salaries should be rising, and they aren't.
> Younger people are more willing to move to another country.
And they are willing to work for less, too.
I don't think you can prove this point, because you're arguing a counterfactual without proving the base claim that foreign talent was in fact necessary or that similar development wouldn't have otherwise happened.
You're also confusing what is meant be a labour shortage, which isn't about the absolute number of qualified candidates per se, but the number available at a given price. That is to say that there may be a sufficient pool of workers, but they demand a higher wage than firms would like to pay. As a result firms choose H-1Bs to suppress wages.
And H1B holders can work anywhere. Why do we want them to work overseas for our competitors?
We don't necessarily. As with many aspects of economic policy, it's a bit of a balancing act. You need enough immigration to satisfy demand for talent, but not so much that your drive down wages, and diminish taxable income while also upsetting constituents. You also don't want visa policies that encourage skilled workers to come, stay long enough to learn how to copy American businesses, and leave (sort of IP/business process remittance).
Generally I'm pro skilled immigration but H-1B as implemented is too easy to use for wage suppression vis-a-vis contracting through outsourcing consultancies like TCS or Infosys.
I think the key thing is that there is a shortage of talent at a price they are willing to pay.
Exactly. I know several SV companies that refuse to pay software engineers over 80-100k, and they complain about not being able to hire.
I would say the opposite is true based solely on hiring practices. Look at Google for example, who hire around 1/5000 people that apply.
The shortage is artificially maintained because it works in companies favor. It makes engineers more willing to work for low salaries since they have to work so hard to get an offer, and makes it possible for them to import "talent" which is 95% of the time an excuse to import cheap foreign labor.
Look at what these H1B's are mostly used for. Yeah sometimes it's specialized jobs but usually just generic "developer" or "consultant". Is it really true that you need to hire an H1B because you can't find a "developer"?. The visa process is meant to be used for skills you can't find in the US, and with this in mind it's clearly failed its purpose
Joel Spolsky explains why this does not imply what you think it implies.
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html
tl;dr; Imagine 1 low quality developer who applies to 9 places and gets rejected. There's also 1 high quality developer who applies to 1 place and gets accepted. Look, 90% of applications have been rejected!
I have also hired people that had to pass insane interviews due to the company culture and watched them fail at being a developer. I know many good devs that cannot pass these interviews that would run circles around these super whiteboard problem solvers.
Tying up visas effects only to wage diminution is just a big mistake. But I can't wait to witness the effect of being a lot more selective on visas. We'll see!
At most companies, the hiring manager and interviewers, who are predominantly other engineers, get to decide whether or not to hire a candidate. There simply isn't a mechanism for upper management to manipulate the process in the way you suggest.
If you find yourself reconciling the idea of protecting against wage competition from H-1Bs, but are in favour of continued undocumented immigration from Mexico (or at least opposed to taking any substantial measures against it), in favour of NAFTA remaining in place and in favour of continued trade with China under current conditions, I'd be very interested in understanding how you model that?
(There is also a critique around the specific rules of H-1B being unfair to the worker, mostly around restrictions on changing employers. I agree with most of that and don't think it inherently incompatible with other views on immigration and trade, pro or con.)
I think it was about people becoming upset at seeing their communities change for the worse, seeing signs and publications coming up in spanish, seeing mexican names in headlines about high-profile crime, seeing mexicans use EBT (welfare) cards at the grocery, hearing anecdotal stories about traffic incidents where "a mexican hit me and had no insurance..", and seeing mexican gangs come to their town.
I think a lot of those voters felt unheard and tired of the politically correct excuses used to defend them. And when someone finally stood up and said "I'm going to fight this [ one precursor that enabled these changes] ", they were immediately sold.
(I'm not going to put an "I'm not a racist" disclaimer here, you all should be mature enough to interpret whether or not I actually endorse those stances or whether I am explaining the motivations of others who do)
Zuck building walls and buying islands to live alone and peace, without having slightest idea what is it to live in average neighborhoods who get to taste the immigrations bad (and good!) sides, while preaching no walls, no borders, mass immigration is good.
In other words, would we see the same political fervor from these people if they had a median income of ~150k/yr?
In favor of free trade: Cheaper goods for me.
It all boils down to "which collection of policies help me maximize my stuff?" Most people seem to take a more pragmatic approach, valuing tangible things over intellectual consistency.
With illegal immigration (wall) and H1B, you're describing the creation of a second class of workers within a country that depress wages within that country by having a separate, unequal workforce.
With foreign made goods you're describing a situation where workers from different countries have different protections, but those protections are consistent within the country.
Thats a big distinction to obliterate.
I'm all for actually open borders. Depress wages by allowing brown people access to the job market, fine. Depress wages by exploiting brown people and not giving them access to the same wages as their western counter parts, eh. It's intellectually consistent to be opposed to that.
However, in my observations and experiences, the last few years (i.e. the years when H1-Bs were allocated by lottery), due to the scarcity of H1-B visas, employers started paying a premium for employees who already had an H1-B visa and the skills necessary, because they could switch jobs immediately (as opposed to having wait 1+ year to hire someone from abroad and wait/hope for them to get through the lottery).
What made it even better was that thanks to legislation by the Obama administration, your spot in the Green Card line was now portable, i.e. even if you switch employers, as long as the new employer files a green card application, you still retained your position in the line.
As you can see, the theme has been giving more leverage to H1-B employees as opposed to the employers - and that is what the American immigration system desperately needs. In the end it's only going to protect American workers.
But I also think it's totally wrong to say we don't have a technology labor shortage. The best evidence of this are the salary numbers for people with math and science degrees. It's not because physics and math suddenly got more valuable. It's because tech is so starved for labor it's hiring people from different disciplines to do the job and it's actually brought the average salaries in line with CS and engineering graduates.
Also, even if we had an adequate national labor supply, the job opportunities are not distributed proportional to population density. The density of technology jobs is highly concentrated in a few parts of the country, but we are producing qualified engineers everywhere. And not everyone is willing or able to move.
There is a Ferrari shortage because I want to start a "Uber With Ferraris" business, and I'm unable to buy a Ferrari with the $10 that I have in my pocket.
There is a developer shortage because I want to start a software business and I am unable to buy a developer with the $10 that I have in my pocket.
There are no shortages. There is capitalism and the market. If salaries rise so that My Brilliant Idea Co is unable to hire a software developer, that just means that My Brilliant Idea Co isn't valued by VCs or Angels such that they can afford to hire the necessary people.
My company was unable to hire people. When it increased offers by 40%, suddenly it could hire people.
The wages are making people try, but the field is difficult.
If there are 100 open positions and 80 available software engineers, if 1 of those positions is able to pay twice as much as the next highest, they will get that software engineer - it doesn't change the fact that there are 80 engineers to go around, and no matter how high they offer in pay 20 positions will go unfulfilled.
If there are 10 businesses that each need to hire 10 engineers, but there are only 80 engineers, then the price of the engineers will be determined by which 8 businesses have a business model that can afford those 80 engineers. The other two businesses don't have a viable business model. They can't sell enough X to account for the cost of the engineers.
Likewise, if you have a business that depends on building an electric car, and you can't afford to buy lithium at market price and still make the car cheap enough, then that isn't because there is a shortage of lithium. Its because you don't have a viable business model based on the price of lithium.
In my example above, there is no shortage of Ferraris. There is only a shortage of people willing to sell their Ferrari at $10.
Or stock. There are 100 open positions for AAPL at $129, but only 80 offers at that price. Thats not a shortage of AAPL stock. That just means there's only 80 people willing to sell at that price. However, if you offer $160 for AAPL, suddenly you'll find a lot of sellers.
Only 80 engineers looking for work? Find someone that looks good on LinkedIn and offer them double their salary. Suddenly more than 80 engineers available.
This series of claims is so different from the reality that myself and many others have observed that I don't even know where to begin. Physics graduates are literally jumping off of buildings because of how poor their employment prospects are. Can you provide any sources for the statements you just made?
#11 Physics & Mathematics $56,200 starting, $111,000 mid-career
Compare that to Computer Science
# 5 Computer Science (CS) & Engineering, starting $71,200, mid-career $116,000
Also, I work with and have interviewed many people with physics and math degrees. Granted, there's some sampling bias going on there. But the ones I know didn't really have prospects actually using their degrees in their respective fields unless they got a phd and went into academia. So they all went into tech one way or another.
This issue has nothing to do with joblessness in the Midwest (and is certainly not of the same scale), that is mostly due to the departure of big manufacturing companies to foreign countries. This is what Trump was talking about: blaming immigrants and corporations for the loss of low-skilled jobs. No one in America cares that overpaid software developers loose their jobs to H1B workers...
Maybe the demand for H1B visas would go down if the playing field was leveled but who knows? This doesn't validate his actual ideas whatsoever, many people see this issue as a problem but I would like to see some actual reform instead of just pouring gasoline on the problem and lighting a match.
https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/docs/Performance_Dat...
The companies exploit a loop hole called "Pay Ranges" if you see the excel columns - WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM & WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_TO, rather than a single absolute WAGE, the companies can legally pay any salary in that range.
That's where Mr Trump needs to "patch" the system, raise the minimum WAGE_RATE_OF_PAY_FROM.
Rather than fighting with the legal system to replace one or two of your overpaid employees, you can replace entire divisions. It's certainly an investment of effort but it's well worth it.
Plus if you need foreign talent, as long as you pay $25k/year the visa is more or less guaranteed.
If the US wants to be uncompetitive, leave the US.
[1] Meritocracy is still considered a core value and a great thing. There's a lot less xenophobia - while many in US tech harbor negative feelings about immigrants "who took our jorbs", I've literally never seen the same negativity in the Indian tech scene.
Source: first hand experience working with Indian colleagues while in SF; working with US colleagues while in India; observing hundreds of colleagues over the years, vast majority of whom arrive at work ~8:30-9:30 and leave ~5:30-6:30; frustrations of those having to attend late night / early morning meetings and how that affects personal lives.
My regular meeting time is 1-2am, paring with designers at 5-6am sometimes. Always not sure when to sleep during daylight, eating time messed up. Biological cells never get used to it. Anyway, I love my team.
No it isn't. There is something called "Reservation" which is affirmative action designed to lift up exploited lower castes. It was also setup to reduce the domination of upper castes in white collar (and other) professions.
The results are far from ideal, though things get better each passing day in the younger generations. Upper castes believe merit based college and thus jobs have been stolen from them. All castes are able to circumvent merit with bribes & money.
| There's a lot less xenophobia
Yea, no ..Apart from the religion & caste issues, native Bangaloreans & Kannada are well known for despising & discriminating against "outsiders" from other parts of India for "ruining their city". If it were that legions of Chinese/Koreans/Arabs/Europeans etc were arriving in Bangalore for tech jobs, like they do in SF, there would be riots. Every major Indian city has seen some form of violence, protests against folks from other parts of India.
Bunch of my friends suffer from a chronic cough and throat irritation from being exposed to traffic everyday. Not to mention the psychological fatigue that totally saps you before you even get to work.
There is no way to escape constant air and sound pollution.
I doubt this is because of pollution, noise or dust. Most people are stressed for the same reasons why any millennial traveling between Mountain View and SF is stressed- Rents, High home prices, Home expenses etc etc.
In the last three places (including my current employer) there were huge swaths of H1-B's from India. After some long lunches and happy hours, I found out that a) they're being paid significantly less than I was and b) two of the three companies wouldn't sponsor them to stay at the company and come on as an FTE.
This meant several trips and back and forth between the states and Bangalore to get a new visa, then turn around and try and find a new gig somewhere. For the developers who were single it wasn't a problem. Those workers with families, it was quite stressful to have their families moving back and forth on a regular basis and not having the stability of knowing they had a gig lined up or not.
Toss in the fact getting these visa's are incredibly competitive and I can only imagine the stress involved.
I do wonder if the employees you mention know that an H1B is transferrable between employers. It's a time consuming process, but I'd love to see more people take advantage of those who abuse the visa by getting one, then immediately transferring it to an honest company that pays a fair salary.
Its not easy as it sounds. Being a single that time, I have transferred my H1B myself and it was a nightmare. I had sleepless nights and uncertainty. My GreenCard process was reset. Any H1Bs who knows about the system really well will not risk transferring because of the risks to their green card process.
There is no honest company which pays a fair salary for H1Bs. If you see the data from here:
https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm
I have a huge circle of friends in many companies. We discuss our salaries and issues openly. Not one of them says that they are paid equal to their American colleagues. Moroever the promotions and salary raises goes to American colleagues, while the H1Bs bears it all to support the family with the income where his/her spouse is not allowed to work (H4 visa)
> There is no honest company which pays a fair salary for H1Bs.
..
> I have a huge circle of friends in many companies. We discuss our salaries and issues openly. Not one of them says that they are paid equal to their American colleagues.
I am not your friend, just a random person on internet. But I am on H-1B, and if this offers any solace, I know that I am paid par with my American colleagues. My boss is on H-1B; both he and I have American and H-1B employees reporting to us.
I work in autosector and my salary is definitely equal or higher than my coworkers.
edit: i am on H1B
And I promise you, there are companies that pay a fair amount to H1B workers. I have worked for four of them myself. I don't know what kind of companies you work for or where in the country you are, but they exist.
Considering the growth of tools that facilitate working remotely, and the flexibile schedule pursued by many software engineers, the willingness to ship jobs overseas is hard to merely cast aside.
Visa workers should absolutely be paid a fair wage, and it seems a realistic side-effect that there may be a shift in the type of roles offered to visa employees vs. overseas when the cost of in-house now represents a premium on the foreign employee.
It's like he's inviting Putin to just invade Poland. How is that going to end?
This is like positioning Russia creating a SATO with South American States to defend against 'US aggresiveness' and trying to actively break up the US as a 'defensive action'.
Yet this is the kind of foreign policy routinely adopted by the US and 'the west' and yet it's others that are 'aggressive'.
If a gun manufacturer should be held liable for the results of people misusing a gun, then why shouldn't Airbnb be held liable for harm people may suffer as a result of renting or leasing through Airbnb?
They aren't.
But many say they should be. Simply because they want to drive the gun industry out of existence and outlaw private ownership of guns in the U.S.
And FTR, I normally would not favor regulating Airbnb out of existence. But I've had such a bellyful of Airbnb CEO Brian Chevsky's self-rightousness, that I would love to see him and his investors take a multi-billion dollar haircut.
The Democrats weaponized the federal government against their political enemies. I'd love to see them, and their supporters, get a taste of their own medicine.
Massively increase their market size and profits? It's hard to argue that Obama was the best thing to happen to the gun industry in decades. Fire arm production in the US had DOUBLED since Obama took office.
Stock for Ruger has gone up 4-fold since Obama took office. SWHC was up 50% over its pre-Obama peak, but it dropped after Trump won the election.
> and coal industries
Competition killed the coal industry, so if you want to point a finger, you can blame the oil & natural gas companies that developed and utilized fracking techniques along with the solar and wind-turbine industries that have developed products that can produce electricity much cheaper than coal ever could.
Obama was just trying to get a few good blows in before The Market lands the TKO. He gets to take credit for defeating the coal industry, which looks good on his environmental record. But the writing was already on the wall for the industry.
You want more strongly written letters?
In 2008, candidate Obama remarked, “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired power plant, they can. It’s just that it will bankrupt them. … Under my plan … electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” Four major coal companies have filed for bankruptcy in just the past 15 months.
http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/h-sterling-burnett/obama-d...
http://news.sky.com/story/airbnb-flat-owner-jailed-for-rapin...
http://www.airbnbhell.com/i-was-gang-raped-in-budapest-and-a...
Airbnb needs to be regulated in the interest of public safety.
Okay, the gist of the article is that H1-B should require higher salaries (in the 75th percentile). This would have the effect of cutting off younger and less experienced workers. The problem here is that more experienced and older people are less likely to want to move. In other words, this would mean that the US tech would lose out on the potential talent. Again anecdotally my current tech org is 60-80% foreign born. It is also one of the most selective places around. Would it be like it is without H1-B program? I doubt it.
So perhaps the system needs tweaking, specifically in the area of making the system work faster and being less arcane. I highly doubt this is what's going to happen. Ten years from now we'll be having the same conversation, as we were ten years ago (I have been watching this since '99).
These people could be trained too. Every enterprise client I've had for the past 5 years has H1B's doing minimal coding tasks on enterprise COTS software like PEGA or Informatica. Those skills don't take 4 years to train people for and they pay a liveable wage.
Thought experiment: Imagine if Canada found a cure for cancer but chose to sell it to Canadians only. Would that be fair? Would it be fair to Americans that can't get access to it?
Job protectionism makes some people entitled to jobs based on random circumstances at birth. How can rational people think that _this_ is fair?
Increasing H-1B pay would be a step in the right direction but I think the green card policy is the biggest thing that needs to be fixed. H-1B workers should be fast tracked for green cards instead of having road blocks put in front of them. By definition they are skilled workers that the US doesn't have enough of so why would we ever want them to leave?
i think the most dangerous ideas distorting the software market is the fiction that every team is the best that was ever fielded, and that development takes such unique skills. you're hiring a web dev - stop turning people down because they aren't Guy Steele.
Ignoring all of that, average salary of a senior biomedial engineer is 90k. The rest of the USA doesn't live in the 100k++ bubble that is SV.
If you are a H-1B dependent employer ( 8 H-1B workers if the company is < 26 total employees, 13 if 26-50, and 15% of workforce if 50+) then:
You can either (1) prove that no US citizen is being displaced and no suitable US citizen could be recruited, or (2) pay the dependent employer exempt minimum wage of $130k.
In the case of (1), or if you are not considered H-1B dependent, you still need to pay the prevailing wage for the job (which as you mentioned is likely low for postdocs).
SV dominates the H1Bs: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp...
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcin...
1) H1Bs depressing the prevailing wage (true if you believe in classical supply and demand)
2) overall economic utility; aka the economy does better/worse because of more H1Bs (I don't really care, but I guess someone might)
One thing which gets left out: H1Bs are more compliant employees, because their employers have them over a legal barrel. They have a much harder time leaving their employer than a citizen does, and they're a lot less likely to complain if they're abused. Turnover is hugely expensive to a software company; between that and the "costs" of having an employee with civil rights; well, not all employers are bad actors, but the temptation has to be there. I've certainly seen this at work in various places. It's pretty rotten. I mean, obviously many consider it a good trade, but it isn't exactly humane. Social costs like this are often left out of economic considerations. Who cares if your GDP goes up if we end up living in a dystopia as a result?
The ability to move quickly from company to company is not a bad thing. I don't believe it causes startups to fail, it just accelerates the process for ones that already weren't going to make it. Few people want to jump ship if they believe their startup is going to be successful. If after six months though they feel that it's not going to make it there is no reason to wait to go down with the ship.
It would be a fair deal if employers also agree to let go of employee only with many months of severance payment.
Also, startups using vesting schedules to incentivize people to stay.
Another practice that I have seen happen lately is (atleast common in employers like amazon etc) is that the younglings that get hired on H1B get a fairly low level position like engineer-I. they are then told that they are ineligible for green card processing until they get to next level. so in effect they are either working 60+ hours a week eyeing for that promotion or just burning their early years out of scarce 6 years limit. Honestly I dont know how is this legal. then there is matter of green card processing and prio date regression which is a whole another can of worms. IMHO at the salaries most young indians are coming to valley and given the rise of startup ecosystem in india, its almost not worth it especially if you look at cost of living here.
One more thing, often immigrant managers who themselves have hone through the process or are aware of intricacies are the worst exploiters as they know when employees are most vulnerable. Lastly, Dont even get me started on the 'consulting' micro body shops that do shit thats clearly illegal & would land the employee is fair bit of trouble if detected.
I definitely have to applaud trump for doing something about this even if under the guise of xenofobia. that said 130k limit will definitely have effect on the small body shops that are exploitative as hell.
there is one positive thing that happened in last few years which should be preserved, its the ability for dependent spouse (H4) visa to find employment. the wifes that come over here are fairly well educated & have carriers of there own. they often fall into isolation and get depressed due to lack of social circle & opportunities. I wish that still remains viable.
The US academic system (in STEM) has for too long relied on "free labor" of hard working, poorly treated grad students from countries like India, China, and Iran (paid minimum wage, often not adjusted for high living costs of cities like LA or Seattle). US students often don't go to grad school because as engineers they'd earn a lot of money and are less susceptible to being poorly treated by their boss. The visa is technically non-immigrant, but students often then get H1B jobs (yay for more abuse).
The whole thing is a travesty. This is pretty much exploiting other countries for natural resources, except instead of resources we exploit them for talent.
One example: I hired an engineer who I'm going to anonymously name Bob. Bob was at Yahoo and on an H1-B. Yahoo was his first employer in SV, he had gone to CMU. He interviewed reasonably well, not amazingly, but had experience and interest in a specialty that many people aren't interested in. At the time we were trying to take a team of these people from 2 or 3 engineers to 20, so we were pretty excited. Bob also got an offer from Netflix. Netflix, if you don't know, gives offers that are basically "all-in" -- you can take the entire offer as cash, or you can parse it out and use some of it for health care, stock, etc -- your choice. The end result is that matching Netflix offers is very expensive. We mostly matched the Netflix offer (we felt our stock was going to have more upside -- which ended up being very true). I had to do extra work for this person to get them hired above and beyond what I'd have to do for an American. Then I had to do even more work to get the employer part of the green card process started. I had to help them navigate getting required documentation from Yahoo. Bob got promoted on a similar schedule to other people and as far as I know is still happily employed, now with a green card application that will transfer with them to any other employer they move to.
I would have _happily_ hired locally, and in fact most of the people I hired for that team were US citizens, Bob was one of 3 H1-Bs. He was from India, another was from Singapore, and the third was from France. They were all very talented engineers and any company would hire them in their specialty in a heartbeat.
I find it hard to say the workers in either of the two camps are particularly exploited (at least once they're in the country -- I've read ugly things about how they go into debt to be able to get these positions in the first placed). They are being paid fair market value for the work they are doing. The money they're making is far in excess of what they earn elsewhere -- that's why they go through the lengths they go through to get these jobs in the first place. If they have the ability to get hired at a more traditional tech company, that company will take over sponsorship of their H1-B with very little complication -- demand is effectively infinite for good engineers who are happy to work.
You say "matching Netflix offers is very expensive": again, no, matching Netflix offers is the fair market rate, and without H-1Bs, the rate would be higher. Indeed, unless you are a well known company, you should expect to have to pay more than Netflix, since Netflix's offer also prices in the stability and prestige of working at Netflix.
Which is to say, the "expensive" Netflix wage is actually less than fair market value.
1) We actually did match Netflix's offer in total comp, by offering Bob a mix of base salary and stock that exceeded the total value of their Netflix offer significantly. The difference is that Netflix's offer was all cash. It is very hard to compare a Netflix offer to a pre-IPO Twitter offer except in hindsight. Bob, a market participant, ended up picking the better offer.
2) I truly question whether H1-B's are lowering the fair market value at the tech companies I've worked at, have had offers from, or have had to counter offers from. Via these three means I've gotten a good handle on what people pay at the top tech companies in SV, and as far as I have been able to determine the supply of H1-Bs who can get through an interview process is so greatly outstripped by the demand for such engineers, there is effectively no impact to salaries. H1-Bs are a very small proportion of SV hiring, and are probably even smaller outside SV, _except_ for the companies that I called out in my initial post on this thread who I agree are abusing the system. Engineers working at those firms aren't showing up in my recruiting pipeline, much less getting offers, so they have zero impact on the market for top engineering talent.
If you're trying to say that the addition of even a single qualified candidate into the hiring pool lowers what we pay a developer, you don't understand how engineering hiring works at tech companies.
I'm an engineer and don't think my wages should be artificially increased by keeping smart immigrants that would benefit this country out.
Wage theft in the form of capping competition is the big issue.
Assume the rate of salary change dS(t)/dt is propotional-to/a-function-of (average_labor_demand - average_labor_supply)
Now, if you keep topping up supply from overseas, salary never increases as much as it might, as such it is limited - as such, salary rate increase is also capped; and it's not employees can have any relief from a lack of demand, other than maybe fewer visas, but I doubt there would be many lobbyists for that... complaints about unemployment or lack of jobs falls on deaf ears - ears stuffed full of money by happy employers...
Granted, like many market-based arguments I make a lot of assumptions about how easily people can move around. Immigrating is hard and once you've immigrated successfully you may not be willing to take the risk of ending up back in the repressive regime you came from (hence, a lot of the issues we have right now) and people in the US may not be nearly as willing to leave the US and go elsewhere. But theoretically (if not in reality) more mobility and access to labor is a good thing.
But you did write precisely that case in symbolic form - the technical value of formulas is that they are precise and we write them to be precise, so look at what you assumed there!
Good day :)
I'm also aware (being 53) that my livelihood is directly tied to the number and type of H1-B visas in the U.S. I can't stand Trump, but on this issue he has a valid beef.
It's all a cluster-F and the system should be changed to treat foreign workers well and to make sure U.S. workers have opportunities.
Right now, however, we have an administration that's intent on ratcheting up ethnic tensions, and there's 100% probability that they will use the H1B debate as a pretext for casting aspersions at the entire Indian nation, including Indian-descended natural born Americans.
I'd rather keep on earning my H1-B depressed wage rate for my job than risk yet another hit against my country's credibility thanks to president banana's divide and rule strategy.
Academics with industry funding claim otherwise, but one can see how it makes basic economic sense...
I would have happily given him citizenship, was just glad he didn't end up working for our over-seas competitors.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker...
In both startups finding qualified engineers was the issue always. We did not care if where they came from, just that they could pass the interview process. We would interview 250 and maybe find one person. The goal was top 1%. I once asked the VP of Software if we could make it the top 5% and he said "can you tell me how to tell the difference between the top 1% the top 5% vs the rest? 1% is simple, anything below that you make mistakes."
For the 1st ~250ish people the difference between top 1% and the rest was huge and those top people made a world of difference to the success of the company.
I guess if you are a company with 1000s then the H1-B money game makes more sense. For a small startup, it is the talent that counts, not where they are from.
the visas are abused. seen it first hand.
but it can also be fixed by removing the artificial wait for some nationalities. doesn't he want to repel tons lof laws. here's an opportunity to solve both at the same time.
creating yet more legislation and rules will make the problem worse.
Even if American companies are paying lower wages I don't see the problem. It helps American companies make more profit and lower prices for American consumers. Something that we all must cheer.
Some people argue that it lowers the wages of neo-native people. It is good too. We all would love a cheaper electrician, cheaper plumber, cheaper burger flipper, cheaper doctor what is so wrong with cheaper coder ? It benefits the entire society.
LOL! That is mistaking money for value. If Rajesh sends the money back to Chennai it will very likely increase the value of money for Americans which affects the poorest of poor in a very good way.
I would however worry more about Rajesh maxing out his credit cards and then catching flight to India. :P
I just saw a Unicorn! Wow.
Depends what you mean by “EU”. Western Europe? Sure, Russia maybe isn't a big deal for them. But the Baltic states, which are EU and NATO member states, understandably consider their next-door neighbour a huge threat.
It also depends on what you mean by danger. Are Western European EU countries in jeopardy of being invaded by Russia? Probably not. But considering Russia's position as supplier of most of Europe's natural gas and a big chunk of its oil, danger can have many meanings.
The most plausible explanation I've heard for the situation in Syria involves a proposed pipeline from Qatar that would challenge Russia's position as primary natural gas supplier to Europe. Russia has been propping up Assad, since he's against the pipeline. Western countries, including the US, have wanted him gone so that a more pipeline-friendly regime can be put in place. There's a cold war being fought between Europe/US and Russia in Syria, and ISIS stepping into that power vacuum has been the result. And while that's not an existential danger to Europe, just ask the French how safe they feel. And the refugee crisis hasn't exactly been pleasant for Western Europe either.
Meanwhile, Russia also wants to tap oil reserves in their arctic areas but wants help from Exxon to do it. That requires the US dropping its sanctions. Hence Russia's involvement in getting Putin-friendly Trump elected and Exxon exec Tillerson as Secretary of State.
The reality is that Russia is a petrostate ruled by oligarchs who are intent on exploiting those resources to their fullest. Russia will do everything in its power to thwart transitions to alternative fuels. And it is more than willing to use its military to promote its interests in third-world countries. This isn't unlike what the US does, but to anyone who cares about the environment, it should be a very scary thought, since the Russian agenda means increasing our effect on climate change. Equating Russian danger to military aggression against the West is probably overly simplistic and ignores the primary dangers of Russia. The true dangers are likely more subtle forms of advocating their interests.
You're asking this as if it didn't already happen in Ukraine.
Russia has attacked & occupied the baltics multiple times. Imperial Russia occupied Estonia during 18th - 20th century, and Soviet Russia once again occupied for half of the 20th century. During this time they sent the natives to Siberia, while importing Russians here and imposing other forms of russification [1] to obliterate our culture. It's more than just about land, it's about the survival of our culture which has been under systematic attack by Russia for the overwhelming majority of the last 300 years. The current Russian regime isn't much different and holds a strongly anti-Estonian view, so of course self-preservation is the #1 political issue for us.
Russia still celebrates everything Soviet as the biggest heroes that have ever lived, and have an amazing number of Stalin statues/paintings everywhere. Then they fund & organize attacks on Georgia [2], and annex Crimea [3]. Then, as recently as 2014, the FSB came into Estonia and abducted one of our intelligence agents. [4] This agent was denied contact with anyone, and was given premission to only use a Russian appointed lawyer. In a charade of a trial he was quickly sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was later exchanged for a FSB agent who was sitting in our prison. [5]
Then there's the fact that Russia keeps flying their military planes into baltic airspace on a regular basis. [6] They have been doing this ever since the collapse of USSR and they keep doing this even today when we have NATO fighters patrolling the skies. It might be easy to say "liberal media is pushing propaganda" if you live far from the Russian border, but we are actually living here with regular Russian war plane visits and seeing events like Crimea where they go even further.
So you see, it's not only about precedence, but it's also about the continuation of the theme and actual real events that keep happening.
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eston_Kohver
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksei_Dressen
[6] https://www.google.com/search?q=russian+plane+estonian+airsp...
When he does something you agree with he's still evil, he just did it accidentally?
And this is your chosen approach regarding people who disagree with you?
Not a hugely productive comment, but not worthy of the scorn you gave it.