USCIS is challenging an unusually large number of H-1B applications
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
In my mind, however, it boils down to two pretty simple points:
Given that (1) the US is lagging far behind every developed nation in education, and higher education in the US is prohibitively expensive compared to other developed nations, (2) the only way for the US to remain on the R&D playing field is to attract already educated/trained people from other nations with the lure of misc benefits of living in the US (culture, safety, stability, philly cheese steaks). Take away our ability to import talent and there goes the last leg of American dominance in technology.
No more American students that can compete with Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, or German ones, leading to less innovation in a generation. No more immigrant students making their money and starting their businesses here (or working for American R&D departments) because they can't get a visa - and possibly even worse, well-trained highly educated Americans leaving because of the obvious end-game (reduced GDP causing all sorts of ripple effects in local economies, safety, etc).
I just don't understand why we wouldn't want to make it as easy as possible to steal talent that another country invested in. We take a 23yo Chinese engineering graduate as he's going to begin peak productivity - the USA didn't have to invest in his k-12, scholarship his university, clean the water he drank for 24 years, etc. Instantaneous social profit. He joins Chevron and is turning a profit for them within the year, pumping out research and getting taxed on his 100k/year salary, spending his money in-country and oh well, maybe he sends a bit (already taxed) home.
Am I being reductive? Seems to be a very poor investment to make it harder for the highly educated to come into this country, without at the very least making a massive push for higher education across the board for our own citizens (which we are not seeing).
EDIT: To clarify my points: There are 2 ways for a country to be technologically advanced - train their own citizens, or steal other trained citizens. Have neither of those and obviously, you will fall behind.
The issue most people have is that the program seems to be rampantly abused. Companies are replacing US workers with H1-B's sourced from companies like Tata and Infosys at much lower salaries than US employees would normally command. In some cases, they're just bringing in foreign workers for the time it takes to train them, then having them work remotely and paying them even less still.
Disney even made their US employees train their replacements before laying them off: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
Southern California Edison was another company that did the same: https://www.computerworld.com/article/2879083/it-outsourcing...
It's this type of abuse where US companies are simply looking to fire US citizens so they can pay slave wages to foreign contractors for the same work that people are up in arms about.
This canard keeps getting repeated in HN threads. This is WRONG. 100% absolutely completely WRONG. The only stated purpose of the H-1B program is to allow foreigners with degrees (or equivalent experience) to perform skilled work in the US. Here are the DOL requirements: https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/elg/h1b.htm
The only one that affects US workers is to "[p]rovide working conditions for H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3 workers that will not adversely affect the working conditions of workers similarly employed." (There are additional requirements on H-1B dependent companies, but those don't apply to most companies.)
Here's a fact sheet from the DOL specifically about this matter: https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/FactSheet62/whdfs62O...
What you're talking about is requirements for an EB-2 or EB-3 green card.
While it may not be the sole purposes as outlined in the link [0] you provided, it does mean that the rules state this very fact that precedence is to be given to US workers. So saying it's 100% wrong is... wrong as well.
Seriously. Who in the world would consider being fired and replaced with cheap labor an adverse effect?
That's laughable unless you take the legalistic view that, unless it's been litigated not to be in good faith, that's good (faith) enough. Companies like Tata exist only to import cheaper workers. Saying otherwise amounts to claiming you might just want to hold hands with that person from the escort service.
It's also insulting to those who can see the difference between an R&D organization doing a worldwide search for a CTO and a "body shop."
The alternative of an H1B is not an American. It's off shoring the entire project to a team that doesn't live in the US in the first place.
http://www.livemint.com/Industry/pHkRcTtIoKd8MkTkBNdtSN/Info...
In a country as large as the US, that two consulting companies picked up nearly 10% of the country's visa allotment for a certain category of worker is part of the problem in itself.
http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
Because that's not what the H1-B is. The majority of H1-B holders are the IT body shops: Cognizant, Infosys, and Tata are the top 3 by a wide margin [1]. I agree with you in principle but I think the H1-B system is not a good implementation of those ideals. I have a hard time believing it does much more than depress the wages of American white collar workers.
1. http://fortune.com/2017/08/03/companies-h1b-visa-holders/
It makes it viable to keep white collar jobs in the midwest.
The company I work for announced they are no longer using these "IT body shops," as you put it. The local pool of workers is totally exhausted, so they can't find enough people to hire, and have decided to close up shop in the midwest and will be moving development to an ultra-high COL tech hub.
Officially, only developers are getting the ax. But I have to assume the rest of the staff are in line. The developers managers should probably be co-located, and if all the dev and managers are co-located, then so should the product managers and their teams. PMs and sales work pretty closely, so it's not hard to imagine those positions will move, etc, etc.
People love to throw out econ 101 supply/demand stuff here, and claim that obviously more tech workers = lower tech worker salaries. But that does not appear to be the case. Regions with more tech workers also pay higher salaries; there's a clear inverse relationship going on.
So, in my interpretation of the empirical evidence we have, suggests that more H1-Bs would raise developer/engineer wages, not suppress them.
P.S. It's clear that IT staff do face downward wage pressure from offshoring. But they also face the same from automation of their jobs (cloud services, SaaS, etc).
That's not what the data says in the article you linked.
It also lists companies such as Apple, Google, IBM, JP Morgan, etc. as part of the majority. Consultancies like Cognizant, Infosys, and Tata are not even close to the majority of H1B holders.
http://www.livemint.com/Industry/pHkRcTtIoKd8MkTkBNdtSN/Info...
I do agree that I think those outsourcing talent shop should be limited. You shouldn't have majority of your workforce on h1b.
As a counter point I don't think Google, Apple, Microsoft etc are not out of line. Also many startups that are founded by immigrants (50%) and often also hire international talent (since there isn't enough local one). Also startups are not able to compete on salaries like larger companies. If the article is beloved, 63% h1bs go to other than these top companies.
The OP comment still holds that I think startups and hiring international talent does contribute to the US economy and it's just not for "depressing white collar wages".
Trump is not gutting the H1-B system (currently). All they did was start asking companies to prove that the H1-B was going to an applicant who actually meets the requirements of the visa. If companies are worried about the change that's pretty clear evidence the program is being abused.
A sizeable portion of Trump's base believes that they are in danger of becoming a minority in "their own" country and will sidestep the economic benefits of immigration to retain a demographic majority. To these voters, power and influence is a zero-sum game where the many exercise absolute reign over the few (constitutional equality be damned), and sharing the pie with immigrants puts them at risk of becoming the few.
So there's a pragmatic question of how to avoid putting yourself at a disadvantage by being comparatively overgenerous that you don't have to be a "paleoconservative" or Trump supporter, or even Republican, to be concerned about.
A disadvantage or an advantage? It's always seemed to me that people from other countries and cultures contributed very positively to what the US is today.
One thing that gets somewhat ignored for political reasons is assimilation/integration. Of course there was never a purely smooth, even, perfect melting pot, and there's a large history of enclaves in America, but today there are parties taking that to a prescriptive rule of "don't culturally appropriate" that feels self-defeating (and just dumb, frankly).
There's also room for a discussion of what good qualities to explicitly promote adoption of for shared values, etc.
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.8408304,-79.398378,3a,53.5y,...
Why did you put scare quotes around "their own"? Is it not their own country?
Culture changes over time no matter what you do, but is it completely unreasonable to want your culture to change slowly enough that you can still function in your dotage?
The point of linking that is only to question whether there are people who want their culture to change more slowly for reasons other than prejudice. Should "obviously wrong" dramatic cultural shifts like gay marriage somehow be slowed so people can get used to the idea? Even in the linked example, there are clearly other forces at work (anti-Muslim propaganda) which seem to exist purely to make it appear that the culture itself is changing entirely, when in reality it's just becoming more mixed race.
[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/600/...
I think the quotes are to suggest that those voters habitually overestimate their share of ownership, compared to everyone else in the country.
For clearer and not-political example, consider the average cat and "their house". It is true that they are a legitimate and valued member of the household... But the quotes suggest something about the way the cat sees the world.
A great deal of anger seems to be conservatives wanting to engineer the outcome rather than allowing culture to become more inclusive to people not like them e.g. more companies voluntarily saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. This voluntary push to accomidate more non-christian customers is viewed as the "war" on Christmas, with the proposed "solution" being fewer non-christians in the country.
This is absolutely incorrect, Americans do not have freedom of association, so people of other cultures can always live with you, work with you, buy from you, etc - by law. Whether you think that's a good thing or not, that is a fact: you can't have an enclave in any meaningful sense.
Yes, our society. The people already here. People seem to have a hard time grasping that the culture who founded the modern US gov't are indeed those people, or it's somehow become offensive. Even a 1st generation immigrant would agree with that, but not some revisionist who brings up the American Indians as if fair amends haven't been made there or somehow a new government completely void of their influence is somehow not the founding of the country.
I hope these same people go around the internet beating the drum on east Asian immigration policies and immigrant acceptance along with Israel. You'd think this country is evil and I completely disagree we're as bad as these finger-wagging liberals insist we are with their scare quotes.
Because these arguments just condense to 'We got here first' talk?
Actually they are simply pissed at that fact- since the end of slavery and colonialism, life has gotten simply too hard.
Also you have to live in the situation now where you are continually reminded you are no racial superman, and some one you thought was way beneath your station is now routinely beating you in highly intellectual activities.
This is not new to the US. Bulk of Indias current social friction problems happen because the previously lower caste people are doing well off in life now. Now economy might be a growing pie on the longer run, but on the shorter run, its just competition for limited resources at the end. If you previously were a upper caste person albeit not very capable, you could still succeed easily, given only your castes were allowed to study and prosper. Today with more people having an opportunity to compete, you just don't stand a chance. Now imagine being a upper caste person who only until recently had to merely exist to succeed to now having to compete and routinely be beaten by people whom you think are beneath you.
Things don't work well.
To those seasoned to privilege, equality feels like oppression - Internet Quote
The key question is: are they right?
Why would you hand over the keys to your kingdom to people who will displace you and rule against you?
I'd like to hear the list of places doing far better than MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley, etc. in STEM fields. I mean I know there are pretty good schools around, but can you really say MIT is "lagging far behind" them?
> higher education in the US is prohibitively expensive
That's because when you buy "higher education" in US you buy something entirely different from what is understood by "education" in other countries. But if you want to, you have options to buy the actual education too. It won't be brand-name, but that's the cost of brand names. Here's contradiction with the first propositions - if US brands were so bad, they won't be that much in demand, would they?
> No more American students that can compete with Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, or German ones
There is a subtle fallacy here. You're comparing average US student with top-of-the crop students with the rest of the world. Not every Japanese student competes with US ones - the mediocre ones stay in Japan, the excellent ones go to compete in the US. Of course, mediocre US student would not look that excellent compared to top of the crop from 7bln pool. But that is excellent for the US that they are able to become the concentration point for the top talent. This needs to be guarded and preserved.
> I just don't understand why we wouldn't want to make it as easy as possible to steal talent that another country invested in
This is another side of what I mentioned before. It is good for the nation, but being mediocre student in that environment sucks. Mediocre Japanese student can remain in Japan and be relatively OK. Mediocre student somewhere in talent concentration point is screwed - he's where the top talent of the world is, and has to compete with them for any nice opportunities. It is hard. And they can't just go to Japan and take the place of those top Japanese students that left for the US (well, some small number can, but in general it's not easy). It is a real problem, and so far we don't have very good solution for it. Until we do, we'll have to deal with this kind of resentment, and telling people "well, it's good for the nation" won't help them much.
I have zero doubt that the average Japanese student blows the average American student out of the water. But the US produces both a greater number and a greater degree of ridiculously talented and driven students.
Asian countries generally have a high average and low variance distribution in students. The US has a lower average but a much higher variance and thus has more outlier students on both ends of the spectrum. Whether this is good or bad would depend on your perspective.
This is certainly not my experience of the US public school system, either as a student or a parent. The typical US school has always cared more about getting 20th-percentile students to meet a minimum standard. And if the student makes an effort to work with the school, the school is very good at it. Public schools are evaluated based on how many students meet that minimum standard ("No Child Left Behind"), and they respond to that incentive.
The 80th to 90th percentile students, well, they're kind of an afterthought. I mean, they're going to ace all the standardized exams anyway. Now, some public schools will make an effort to help high-performing students, because teachers do care, but it's not incentivized.
Private schools, on the other hand, are evaluated on a very different metric—how many students get into Harvard/Yale/Stanford/etc.? They game this metric by offering generous scholarships to top-notch students, and by charging stiff tuition to rich parents.
Given the lower salaries and longer working hours in Japan, I'm not convinced that the mediocre Japanese student is better of than the mediocre US student. Even if the Japanese student scores a "better" job (in relation to the opportunities available locally) than the US student, the absolute differences between job markets can make his job worse.
Overall it's not too bad a deal compared to the bifurcating job outcomes we see in the States.
The most significant research happens at the graduate level and beyond. US students are disproportionately under represented at the graduate level. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/education/edlife/american...
The high cost for US students in undergrad is one reason for this. These schools haven't been lagging behind because grad students found a to H1->GC->Citizen. If that path becomes difficult, then these students will just stay in their home countries.
This is why its never a nice idea for most people to work at a place like Google.
Why is it that we cannot compete with foreign companies with native workers? Why should those countries be okay with losing their top talent?
Shoudnt we solve the problem of native workers not having the right skills before we open the borders to everyone else?
The other argument I understand is cultural. How much immigration can a society take before it is unrecognizable to the people that live there. You can't say that if you moved 100 million indians to the US ( A fairly small number of the population) it wouldn't look and feel completely different.
Note that this isn't new. During and after WWII the US worked hard to bring scientists to the US to prevent them working for the enemy. Just one example:
What sort of thinking is this? People stopped being subjects of their countries a while ago. Countries should compete for people, not trap them. If a country isn't OK with losing its top talent it should fix its institutions to make itself competitive.
You know what country doesn't allow its citizens to leave? North Korea.
Besides, remittances are a thing.
But why is it "making it" in some countries to leave and go to America? Why not build up your own country and affect their living standards in a positive way?
Personally I have no desire to leave my country because I like it and want to make it better. I think that is a healthy way to think about your identity.
They are not. But the people there have no options. In my country(India), despite a level of free market reforms, there is still a huge cancer of socialism at large.
Socialist spending, affirmative action policies and corruption are extremely rampant. Public apathy is at peak. Almost anybody smart enough to make genuine difference has only one life style, where he/she has to earn all life to pay nearly 50% of all earned money in taxes and yet live a third world quality life.
So there is only one option. Just immigrate and save yourself the trouble.
>>How much immigration can a society take before it is unrecognizable to the people that live there.
You might want to take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus
To your point though, I suspect a lot of older voters grew up with much lower immigration (due to the Immigration Act of 1924) and so this level feels really high to them even though it was common for a large part of US history.
There is an argument that there is enough of a cultural difference for it to affect the country one way or another.
I completely 100% agree that the US is losing its edge in many ways. And a real visa program would help. But at the moment the H1B program is bad for almost everyone involved, unless you own stock in Infosys/Tata etc.
http://fortune.com/2017/08/03/companies-h1b-visa-holders/
We need to replace it with a real immigration program that weeds out the crap and brings in the best. As it stands super smart people are getting their visas denied while offshoring firms depress wages and take American jobs while producing sub-par products.
The thing to remember about US education is that it's highly different between the haves and have-nots. That's a problem in itself, but it's a giant oversimplification to jump to "US educations are generally poor." (One of the other high school and college cost-drivers/arms-race-drivers is competing to attract foreign students.)
There's a gap in China as well but it's made up for by a massive population. Lord forbid they close their gap, that'll be the end of any other country's ability to compete as China and India just throw five hundred million engineers each at their technology sector.
The bottom 50% has gotten fucked by loss of jobs/industries/career paths/debt, but H1Bs aren't helping with that.
So if your contention is "we need to figure out how to better invest in the whole population" I agree, but I don't see the other half of the equation being an overly large limiting point.
If anything, if we're in the lead industry-wise, does importing young talent, teaching them these things, and making it easier for that experience to be taken elsewhere really help long-run? Almost sounds more like a case for paranoid isolationism immigration-wise.
We're never gonna have a billion people in the US in my lifetime, but I don't think that's necessary for there to be enough US self-driven industry to have a nice, happy, productive life.
It's not as a whole. Parts of it are, Education here is local, and there are states the size of Finland that compare with Finland in education outcomes.
>2 and higher education in the US is prohibitively expensive compared to other developed nations
Income based repayment ensures that you will never pay more than 10% of your disposable income (income over 1.5x the federal poverty level), and loans are forgiven if you make payments for 20 years. This assumes you only take out federal loans (90% of loan disbursements are federal and are enough to pay for public universities).
This is very similar to the system Australia has.
Additionally, the US ranks 7th in number of adults with college degree--higher than every European country except Luxembourg.
And the US has 1/3 of the top 500 ranked colleges in the world, and nearly 1/4 of the top 5000.
I doubt many families have 10% of income to spare.
>I doubt many families have 10% of income to spare.
For a family of 4, it's 10% of income over $37k, not 10% of income.
If that family made the median household income of $59k, they'd be paying about $180 a month in loan repayments.
An alternate way to look at this is that the economy and society of the USA is failing its own citizens by either giving them an inadequate education or not providing them opportunities to succeed. And your proposal is to simply write everyone who's already here off, declare them to be rejects, and import new people over the top of them to be worker bees for the elite.
I can say that I'm not really personally concerned with how many billionaires we have in the US, or how many multinational corporations are headquartered here. I'd be fine if that all went to China, so long as the USA stayed the land of fairness and justice.
US millennials are a bunch of people with most privilege, comfort, opportunities, freedom and other nation level perks(like infrastructure, mobility etc) compared to may be all the humans combined in all of history.
There is a reason why you can't get more out of this scheme. The reason is you can only make incremental progress in systems that are this advanced. And after that its usually a bit of Math called 'Central limit theorem'. It just means the progress will only be around the mean.
That ship sailed a while ago.
Yes, and I have completely lost faith in the US's ability, on a federal level, to staunch that failure, as long as the Republican party continues to exist.
>write off everyone who's already here
I agree that I'm being pessimistic, but I feel that's what the government is aggressively trying to do (by, for example, putting a person hostile to education in charge of the agency that runs education at a federal level).
The democrats have had control over the house or the senate for 62 out of the past 84 years, and both of them for 52 years (in total, not contiguously). There has also been a Democratic president for 48 of those years. If you're mad at the way things are, I don't think it makes sense to be mad at the Republican party, unless it's for constantly losing.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Combined...
However, do economic gains flow to Americans? No, not really because we don't have socialist systems in place to distribute the wealth gained from "stealing talent". So yes stealing talent is good, but it really only benefits corporate shareholders and upper class Americans. The unhappy Americans who are voting for "America First" don't see the gains from startups and tech companies; they are geographically isolated from these companies and even if they lived in California (or any other tech center) they lack the skills to be employed.
So essentially in my view you have a conflict of interest. It is in the best economic interest of the country to be able to attract talent. However, the US is a democracy and unless the economic gains are spread across the entire population, this will not satisfy, "we the people"
So we have really two options in response 1) implement socialist systems to spread wealth to the population or 2) go isolationist to insist that wealth only flows inward
It's embedded in American culture that socialism is bad which is why #2 has been the chose solution.
But that's not the typical H1B. There are "Manager Trainees" at slaughterhouses making 35k.
http://h1bdata.info/index.php?job=MANAGER+TRAINEE
Developers making between 30k - 70k are quite common.
Putting in an 80k or so wage floor would be a huge improvement to the current system.
If someone is living on sub 60k in the US, their job is certainly not one that requires an H1B.
I wouldn't say that for college level education. Why is then the US the top study abroad destination in the world?
This just isn't true at all.
Average state schools that are affordable to the vast majority of students through income based student loan repayments are far better than mediocre.
The US has 1/3 of the top 500 ranked colleges in the world, and nearly 1/4 of the top 5000.
http://www.webometrics.info/en/node/54
There's a reason that international students flock to even low ranked state schools in the US.
- The USA is massive compared to every first-world nation (in the West) in terms of size / population / schools. I'd be shocked if a place like Sweden were somehow the top, statistically.
- I know a few people who came from India to study here because it put them on a fast track for a visa (or whatever they're using to work here after graduating). So they based it on post-grad opportunities, not the education itself.
But assuming you can't get into those schools, any middle ranked US state school is a better bet.
Zero sum thinking and all that.
China: + Cultural familiarity, closeness to family. + High pay for engineering. - Pollution - Lack of work/life balance culture.
US: - Lack of safety. - Culturally lost. + Higher pay + Better natural environment. + Better future for kids. Schools & stuff.
Censorship is a minor concern for the most part except for political activists. It's arguable that that the US is becoming more draconian in this regard, especially due to police being able to do whatever they want once they decide you're guilty of something.
This is known almost forever now. Even the hard core immigrant hating racists know that their social security checks are coming in because of some one generated more than proportionate share of economic value, and by that definition taxes. And that someone is mostly likely a non-white immigrant.
They just don't like to be reminded of this fact everyday that their bread comes from the very source they hate.
That's only the half of it. The US gives out far more F-1 student visas than H-1Bs (roughly 3x). That means that US infrastructure trains the student, but then the US doesn't get to take advantage of his or her output. Its really a lose-lose for the US.
Now that national unemployment has plummeted to remarkably low levels, we may again truly find ourselves needing to import workers.
https://www.thebalance.com/unemployment-rate-by-year-3305506
Peak unemployment during that period just after the 2008 financial crisis was still just under 10%, and it has been steadily decreasing since then.
It's not exactly nothing and it sucks if you are one of the unemployed but an unemployment ratio between 5 and 10% is actually not all that bad.
Significant unemployment were 2009, 2010 and before that 1982. By 2013 unemployment in the US was already back down below 7%, historically speaking nothing special, somewhere between 3 and 7% is fairly normal.
The process should be onerous enough that the body shop business that places cheap candidates with marginal skills shouldn’t be a good business, but not too onerous for the high talent individuals for whom it is intended for.
Are those the people we're bringing in with H1-Bs?
I highly recommend a tour around your local university's Chemistry department, as a stark example.
I mean, arguably neither did the Chinese, depending on where you are and how much they've let pollution occur in that area.
I think you are grossly overestimating both the value of these immigrants (it isn't hard to see how much garbage science gets published abroad and how useless a good chunk of international students are) and the entire mechanism for technological improvement and innovation (most of which is market, not PhD, driven).
You also don't cite any sources for your claims; this information would be helpful to anybody seeking to agree or argue with you.
That statement is true of any group of students, international or local. On the other hand, there are good international students (and there are good local students). Is there any reason why you think the ratio isn't the same (in fact, you'd think that the ratio of good international students would be higher because they have to go through far more rigorous testing than the average local student).
And while you might argue they're mostly useless, usually international students make up a large amount of the funding for universities since their fees are usually 5x or sometimes even 10x "local" student fees[1]. So if you like having well-funded universities throwing out international students is a good way to stop that from working.
[1]: My data is from Australia (since that's where I am). In 2017, ~1.3 million students enrolled in higher education -- and ~350k were international students. Most universities have a multiplier of _at least_ 4x for international students taking the same courses as a local student. By simple arithmetic, international students make up more than half of the funding-through-fees of Australian universities.
The author I was replying though doesn't seem to differentiate though, for example, between graduate students coming here to do research and learn cutting-edge things and undergraduates who have wealthy families that export them abroad because of course that's what one does.
You've also kind of nailed another issue on the head: it is more profitable, per student, for universities to bring in international students than to teach local ones. This in turn leads to an increase in pricing for everybody (though probably not as much as due to student loan availability, but that's a different thing) and weird campus behavior to accommodate valued country officials (local school of Rice University, for example, hiding Taiwanese flags during a visit by mainlanders).
Seriously doubt the USA is making the acquisition of world level talent any harder.
This is definitely a thing, not only in the US but also from thinkers like Alexandr Dugin in Russia. I believe such reactionary political stances are ultimately doomed, though; we are simply not going to un-invent the internet, air travel, containerization and other things that have made the world smaller and allowed a single planetary scale logistical chain to exist, short of nuclear catastrophe or its equivalent.
Skimming the cream from other countries doesn’t really ameliorate those problems.
> For Centro, a company in Chicago that makes technology for ad agencies [...] applied for visas for three young employees who already had the legal right to work for a limited time after graduating from college.
> To Clark's eyes, the position — which consisted of writing algorithms and required knowledge of multiple programming languages as well as a solid understanding of relational data storage systems — wasn’t a borderline case.
I dunno, that sounds a hell of a lot like a fluffed-up description of an entry-level junior web-dev.
A server-side language + JavaScript + SQL queries. Not exactly the skill set that requires you to go head-hunting overseas.
So what you do is your write a tailored job description, which apparently requires exactly the same skill set the person you want to hire has, up to specific versions of the database system, you "publish" it, go through the motions (without really making an effort to hire anybody - it's usually not very hard for a knowledgeable HR person to do) and in a while you can get your H1B.
Pretty much everybody knows it's a game - the pretense that the only reason foreign people are hired is because there is absolutely not a single matching candidate anywhere in the US is false, but it is impossible to prove. But the game continues because the industry does need the influx of foreign talent, and the only politically viable excuse is the one we have. So we have this game.
Why did they not ask the company what the wage for that position is. How many people in Chicago did they interview. Did they interview anyone over 50 who has that exact experience? Did they approach anyone currently working in similar jobs and offer them raises and other benefits to entice them over?
Truth is the Company did none of those things so the good loyal journalist won't ask those questions.
You might still think that the workers have the strongest claim. But as with most protectionism, there's more to consider.
This is especially true when you're talking about the non-institutional "poor consumer", as opposed to a company having customized or proprietary software made just for them.
probably not. Why would they interview that person for what sounds like an entry level position?
I'm just assuming that somebody in the chain that produced this article deliberately sought to make the job sound more selective and prestigious than it really is.
Learning one is super hard, learning two is almost impossible.
Here are the real reasons they probably wanted to hire him: He's smart enough to do well on his SATs/GREs and go to a good university. He's hard working and conscientious enough to get a good GPA while in University. He's got great recommendations from his classmates, former employers and/or professors. He knows his stuff well enough to get through an interview pipeline that most others fail to get through.
There's one problem though. None of the above are considered valid reasons to hire someone on a H1B. The Stanford grad who knows Java inside and out, has a 4.0 GPA, a perfect SAT score, and amazing side-projects and recommendations... according to the law, he's just a cog, perfectly interchangeable with any CS graduate who manages to graduate with a C+ average.
Hence why companies have to come up with other ridiculous reasons for wanting to hire this guy. Because the real metrics that any rational person would take into consideration, are all considered inadmissible. If you start fighting with a guy who has one hand tied behind his back, don't be surprised if he doesn't follow proper boxing decorum.
What you have described is not an employer who is just violating letter of the law in some harmless defiance of red tape... No, that employer is deliberately breaking the spirit of the law too.
The H1-B exemption is intended to allow for immigrant workers when domestic supply doesn't exist. Not "when you really really like a dude."
And from what I get in the article - which is not very rich on details - the "living hell" is that the government occasionally asks for proof of what is supposed to be already proven in the visa app - that there's no possibility of hiring the same talent in the US - and which everybody who dealt with it knows is kind of sham and not how it actually works.
1) Given that the numbers did indeed end up proving that wage arbitrageurs like Accenture were dominating the H1B lottery [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcin...], reform would seem to be necessary.
2) Trump has repeatedly called for a Canadian or Australian style skills-based immigration system to replace chain and quota-based immigration. One would think HN would generally support this?
Is Trump even the one doing it? I thought this was the job of congress?... this seems well out of the scope of an executive order.
Hopefully they do end up copying Canada/Australia directly because they've both performed really well and there is plenty of data there to support it. Instead of the usual series of minor bandaids on top of the old broken system, ala the US healthcare system.
At any rate, the president is entirely free to propose a bill, and assuming he can find a congress person to back it (I'm guessing he knows a guy who knows a guy...), can have introduced in Congress. Even if Trump's team doesn't draft a new bill, the lobbying power of the Whitehouse alone on legislation in congress is huge - the threat of a veto alone is a compelling stick.
I think its absurd to think Trump/the executive wouldn't influence the shape of any proposed legislation in this area, when its been such a public part of his campaign.
That said, I never said he had zero influence, but having influence on a congressional bill is a far cry from implying he wrote and proposed it himself.
I think most people are capable of understanding that when we talk about "Trump" performing a legislative act, we almost never mean he literally picks up pen and paper and writes the bill himself, or even directly proposes it.
coupled with slashing immigration in general.
The bill would change the system to be more about skill/merit rather than the fact you are related by blood to someone who has skill.
The reduction in numbers is a side effect of the current ratios of the existing system. So ideally they will boost the maximum number on the other end to increase the total number of skilled visas, instead of just cutting the relatives portion (as the bill proposed in August). To me that's the best of both worlds. It's possible it will may be tweaked as it goes through congress or it may have to wait for a future bill, but at least the basic framework is being laid out for a better system similar to Canada/Australia.
Plenty of republicans and democrats criticized the "50% reduction by 2028" projection when the original bill was announced a few months ago, so it's not entirely wishful thinking it may change in the future for the better.
Sounds like they are exactly the type of consulting firm the administration is attempting to crack down on.
> USCIS challenged the application in August, which irked Narayanan because he had provided everything the agency had asked for. Narayanan was doubly annoyed because, without someone else to handle the new contract, it fell to him directly. For the last month, Narayanan has been spending four or five hours each morning doing the work himself, forgoing his own primary responsibility, which is to bring in new clients. “We might not make the profit we were expecting because of these issues,” he said. “We are afraid of on-boarding new H-1B employees, because of the unknown world.”
My heart weeps for him. If he could do the work himself, is it really so specialized he required H1B for it? Or was it more he just didn't want to pay the local rates?
That said, having hired through the H1B program I sure hope it remains viable. Reforms based on salary instead of lottery seem like a good compromise, reducing outsourcing and low salaries endemic with H1B mills. I'd much prefer a floating high salary floor (say top 25%) and uncapping H1B entirely.
Take a look for example at Wayfair in Boston. Majority of their H1B Developers make around $50k-$70k. This is significantly less than the prevailing wages around Boston, so it is quite clear that they are using H1Bs as cheap labor source.
http://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=Wayfair+Llc&job=Software+En...
Any while we're at it, why don't we pull the prevailing wage data?
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=71654...
Level 1 Software Engineers are paid on average $67k in that area, so by paying them $68k, Wayfair is still paying more than the average wage for U.S. citizens working the same position.
Wayfair is not driving down wages.
This is a joke as it is currently implemented.
That's not the bar for the visa and never has been.
> He’d received a letter from USCIS saying it would reject his application unless Centro proved the position required someone with specialized skills
> The position — which consisted of writing algorithms and required knowledge of multiple programming languages as well as a solid understanding of relational data storage systems — wasn’t a borderline case.
I'm going to disagree here. It sounds to me like a textbook example of a company hiring a young, inexperienced worker because they're cheaper than experienced ones.
To those getting old in the valley, it seems this type of action is good news.
If I have a bunch of people to keep them on track then hiring the cheapest workers who can do the job sounds like good business.
Still not seeing why it's wrong.
For example, you could be working at Google / Facebook earning top $$$$ every year and you paperwork could be spotless. But the stress of having to go through an uncertain renewal process every 3 years prevents you from investing in big things like buying a house or having kids. You are always worried about being able to return back to your stuff when you leave for a trip overseas.
Even though most top companies immediately apply for Green CArds, the "country of birth" based green limits ensure that you have to remain in H1-B status for 15 - 20 years (if you happen to be born in India).
TL;DR: It's not the increased vetting that we fear, its the uncertainty and complicated appeal procedures that can affect genuine H1-B cases.
But Indians have to wait at least 5years for a green card(EB-2). And this was before the current admin.
I’m now in Canada. Permanent Resident (took 8 months), $180k+ salary, big tech company. Going to buy a house in the summer.
1. I took a pay cut. I went from 190K+ USD (~250k+ CAD) to 180k CAD (this includes my bonus. My base is lower, say around ~150k CAD). Numbers are fuzzed but close enough to reality.
This is a significant drop, but of course it's still a very good salary for Canada. I'm satisfied with my decision.
2. I'm in Marketing, reasonably senior. Couple levels down from the CMO.
3. Same company. Essentially got transferred with a pay cut. This made it easy for the company as well. It helped that I've been here for a longish time and have built relationships within the company. They were very supportive.
The silly thing is, there is bipartisan bill in congress and Senate to fix it (HR 392). But it is stuck is legislative limbo.
Same big tech company or other?
You don't wait in H1B status, you get advanced parole which means you can stay and work until you green card has been processed.
So, sell your house, all your belongings, take the kids out of school, move all investments... uproot your whole life in 2 months, maybe 1 month. That's not an easy thing to do, especially with children. It's not fair to my family - the kids would hate moving from the US back to India. Canada is much closer, culturally, and it's easier to adjust.
We decided to move as a family, and planned everything for more than a year.
This is personal, of course. Everyone has to make their own decision.
However, I do agree the uncertainty can be stressful. I went through a layoff when on H1B and it's not fun!
It seems a bit deceitful to paint this story solely through the lens of "immigrants" while lots of Americans are being directly replaced by H-1B workers.
I do not expect to go to another country and displace local workers. I do not expect to be granted a work visa in a place that I do not belong. If I go to another country to work, I expect to be providing a skill or talent that is not present in the local economy. Further more, I expect that I'd be teaching that skill to others. Or at the very least, be in the position to lead the growth and development of a team until a local worker can do my role.
Why should we expect any different from the H-1B's that the US grants?
Frankly, over time the average white American family is going to find it more and more difficult to afford higher education, as if by design, to push them out of the middle class. Meanwhile, poor non-whites will be granted scholarships based on non-whiteness.
No they wont. White females are still eligible for many of the same (gender based) diversity advantages. The majority of college students in the US are female.
Besides that, most of the wealth in this country is controlled by white families. Which makes your assertion truly pointless: unless there is some major cataclysm, white families will continue to pass on their advantages to their offspring for generations to come.
Most of the wealth is controlled by white families. This does not imply that all white families control wealth. Those white families that do control the wealth aren't exactly sharing it around with all their 8th cousins. They sure do share it with their direct descendants, and pass on advantages that way, but if any non-rich white person is advantaged, it is likely only because the rich white people are observably racist when delegating their authority and managing their assets. Imagine for a moment someone so racist that their toilets may only be cleaned by a white person, and realize that people like that do exist. So yes, I guess that white loo-scrubber is advantaged, by not having to compete quite as much, in a very minor way.
There are plenty of white families out there who know that no-one is on their side, who believe that the illusion of equality is being pursued by cutting them down rather than raising everyone else up. And they believe that immigration is diluting their family's voice, rather than augmenting it. And many of them are "checking out". They turn to a bullet or a syringe, or blindly follow any person that tells the lies they most want to hear.
The rich and powerful are free at any time to erase the echo of privilege enjoyed by middle class white people simply by not hiring them preferentially over darker people. Which is what is happening. And while that is happening, the reactive measures to prior institutionalized racism remain in place. The problem is not with affirmative action or feminism or egalitarian movements, but that the old money is far too powerful politically, and that the rich kids are not as disgustingly racist as their parents. So there will likely be a generation at some point where middle class white families have zero advantages, non-white families will have some preferences stemming from ongoing racial equality movements from the 1960s to the present, and the data that show they are no longer needed have not yet been collected and published.
And that generation is going to have a lot of neo-Nazis and white supremacists in it, because people will still be telling them about white privilege when they remember growing up in a manufactured home, eating cold Spaghetti-Os and Spam, watching other people get things that they were never offered. I don't quite know if it is already here, or if it is still coming and will be even worse than what we have already seen. But I do know that part of the problem is attributing the source of privilege to any color other than green.
Ok, great, just not white males. Half of the white population. Also, this shows contempt and disregard for the concept of a stay-at-home mother. Women in the workplace are great - but this entire scheme/system destroys values the West was built upon.
> most of the wealth in this country is controlled by white families
I doubt this is true anymore, and even if there are wealthy white families, your sentiment is utter disregard for those who are merely average or low-income. An average-income white father earning a modest living will have a hell of a time raising a family - meanwhile low-income blacks are paid to reproduce and get shoved into the finest institutions at tax payer expense at comparative advantage with padded SAT scores. Do you not see the hypocrisy? That isn't equal opportunity, it's an attempt at forcing an equal outcome.
Even though Silicon Valley sees the H-1B program as one of
its top political priorities, this campaign of reform by
red tape has avoided the frantic political fights
surrounding other aspects of immigration, like the proposed
travel ban or the cancellation of DACA, a program for those
who came to the country as undocumented children.
The H1-B cap is surely a far more pressing concern for most technology firms than the GC backlog. The H1-B cap and delays are making it significantly harder to hire foreign workers. I don't think the big tech firms care nearly as much about GC backlogs - if anything they probably like this, as it arguably aids in staff retention if your workforce is less able to easily switch job.
Also, the GC backlogs are more relevant to SV than the two other issues mentioned - travel ban and DACA. Yet SV leadership is way more vocal on travel ban and DACA than they are about GC backlogs.
Of course not. If workers were not held hostage by one company, and were free to go to any company they wanted without worrying about their immigration status, the companies would have to pay higher wages to keep their workers.
Companies hate employees having this kind of flexibility. Just on some other thread on HN, there was talk of how foreign grad students were not treated well compared to citizens, since the foreigners were tied to a visa.
The H-1B is not about guest workers, which are an altogther separate set of programs/visas. The H-1B is a dual-intent visa, so it supports both people who intend to obtain a green card or citizenship eventually as well as people who only intend to work in the US for a period of time before returning home. (Even in the latter case, this doesn't qualify it as a guest worker program, which is a third category altogether).
An easy heuristic you can use to remember why the H-1B visa isn't a guest worker program is that many people who obtain H-1B visas enter the country without any plan for the date that they will return home. (Whether or not they ultimately stay and immigrate is a separate matter, but guest workers by definition know their expected departure date when they enter, because the terms of their employment and entry are inherently temporary.)
Some critics of the H-1B visa refer to it as a guest worker program, in an attempt to conflate it pejoratively with the latter (which are generally for low-skilled labor, and therefore viewed less favorably than specialty visas like the H-1B).
I am in charge of production systems which, if they go down for any significant amount of time, can represent hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. This is a very niche system(networking-related), not your usual run of the mill web app. My salary is in the 6 digit range (and I have got multiple raises since then). I have got awards from my company for work I have and am doing.
Still got an RFE. Now, I'll have to dig into payslips from my home country, get letters from former managers overseas, justify one more time all the skills (which I already did multiple times), provide org charts(from the current and previous position), and so on. I believe I have a pretty strong case, but it's a very stressful process. All this to be allowed to continue doing the stuff that was previously approved. And, unless I apply for a green card, I can stay for 5 years max. So why make it even harder? There's already an expiration date.
And I can't drive while this is going on (DMV wants the approved extension). Fun times.
The US is a great country; I feel that some "natives" have no idea how great it is, despite all its quirks. And, for engineers, the allure of Silicon Valley is too great – everything of notice is happening here. I have chosen to come here, and I knew that I need to jump through some hoops and prove my worth, to both the country and the company. But at some point, you start questioning if it is worth it.
Can an American do my job? Absolutely – if you can find one with the right skillset that's willing to join. This position was open for MONTHS before the company even considered hiring from outside the country. They tried increasing the offers too, no takers, at least not qualified ones. The problem is that at some point all the companies can do is to poach from one another.
Can you improve things with education? Yes. Do you want to avoid immigration altogether? Why would you, when you can hire the best brains from anywhere in the planet?
The problem is that there are companies heavily abusing the system. But they are a handful, and they should get the hammer. That's from a rational perspective though, not a politically motivated one.
Ultimately though, my predicament does not matter. What matters is, if they are doing an immigration reform, that it is done for the right reasons, in a humane way, and with measures supported by actual data. Bonus points for a sane process.
Now that Americans have made up their mind that they dont want immigrants, companies will spend more money on opening engineering centers in immigration friendly countries (Canada\west Europe\Australia(maybe),etc) which from a personal perspective are great countries for me to immigrate to. And this time I might would be able to catch the first wave of immigrants (who get to convert to citizens) if there is a genuine boom in jobs in such countries (unlike US where its near impossible for an EB2 immigrant to get citizenship if moving today)
For those who dont know the process here's how and when one can get an RFE:
1) Missed a key point in the application or Immigration attorney goofed up (this happens way often)
2) Position doesn't look like it needs a high skilled engineer with skills mentioned in application
3) Grossly underpaying the H1b employee
Getting an RFE by itself is not the nightmare scenario. Its a problem if the employer is doing things using shady loopholes.
What needs to be seen is by what %age RFEs have increased at companies like Apple, Facebook, Intel, Google etc. The bigger companies use boutique immigration law firms and its rare but not impossible for them to mess up on the immigration application process.
I'm not sure what has Trump's administration done to reform the H1b system, its still as crappy as it has been. If anything certain employers were abusing the loopholes. Now its going to get tougher to abuse the loopholes.
In addition, whistle-blower protection with automatic Green cards for anyone who reports employer abuse, with prison sentences for the entire company C-suite if a company abuses this process.
However, it can be curbed with some rough (80/20) cost-of-living adjustments to the applications before they're all put together for ranking.
Even without that adjustment, I think the "bidding" system would probably represent a significant improvement over what we have now.
Which they do when they arrive here on the H-1B. It takes decades and they now have to go through even more stress about it because of this.
I've worked with hundreds of h1b visa, 90% of them were just java programmers with a low bill rate. But there were also a few with really rare skills. I'd like to see more of the latter and less of the former. Especially since the number of h1b visa is capped.
Four years, and this is the first time she's seen the government even try to see if the law should be enforced. Really says it all.
The H-1B program hasn't ever been a way to get solid talent from other countries to come to the United States because equivalent talent can't be found here. It's ALWAYS been a way to expand the pool of cheap technology labor so that companies dependent on expensive skills can grow faster.
Economics is economics. Companies have an incentive to fight wage inflation when they experience it due to a reliance on high-skill individuals.
I remember going to the offices of a well-known bank and finding nearly the entire development staff comprised of foreign workers on H-1B. Most of them were from India.
That can't be an accident and it's certainly not an indicator that talent is in short supply. What's in short supply is CHEAP TALENT. H-1B workers are cheap and don't have any ability to complain about their working conditions because they can't move to another company as easily as a permanent resident can. That alone is worth the legal hassle a company assumes when bringing in these workers.
SO, word to the wise....make sure you stay one step ahead of the skill levels of the Indian outsourcing companies or your days are numbered.
In the meantime, support candidates that are willing to rein in this amazing abuse of our immigration policy.
My H1B got picked in the lotery but I received an RFE early august. I had to write a ton of technical doc about my job and the system I work on. The documents were submitted mid-october. I received my approval last week.
I guess if your application is legit you don't have much to fear about getting an RFE.
> The skeptical eye the government is taking to applications has extended to all types of employers, according to immigration lawyers. Many are rethinking their own use of H-1B as a result.
This is absolutely disastrous. I personally know families on H1B from well-known American companies are afraid to leave the country because of this.
1. it's a lottery system, regardless of background and academic accomplishment.
2. it's been abused by outsourcing companies. Practices such as multiple-filing for one person are so shady that it baffles me how loose the inspection towards H1B application is.
I totally agree that American citizens should be prioritized when it comes to hiring and my country would do the same for its citizens. I also know that immigration service is a booming business for many American law firms and they have their own agenda to go against any further regulations towards H1B. However, in a long run, if done properly, a more merit-based/restricted H1B visa could actually be beneficial to outstanding individuals who follow the rules.
As someone that love American culture but also have pride in his academic/career accomplishment, I stay in the US because I like this place, not that I have to, and I am more than happy to go back to my homeland or somewhere welcoming if I am not welcomed here anymore. H1B has never been the last straw of my life and it's true for many folks I know. I am all for making H1B more accessible for accomplished individuals and more restrictive towards those who cheat the game, but do it properly so that America doesn't give an image of Xenophobia to the world.
Even many non CS graduates faking their resumes as CS ones and applying for "specialized" positions in IT. I had enough of this and left US and immigrated to Canada for good because I am pretty sure that my future will be affected by these bad apples gaming the system. I do not like Trump personally, but he is right about the H1B immigration system.
If H1B system is a lottery, then why is it called a "skilled visa" ? H1B should be merit based so as to weed out the bad apples and body shops gaming the system.
Probably I should write a book on "How to game the H1B system and get away with it". The book will be an eye opener for this broken skilled visa system and its loopholes.
For people, we should have one clear policy and apply it, if they can't come, so be it, but tell them clearly what they can get and what they cannot. And allow some transparency of the income and rates so that it can't be abused as much.
Set clear standards and expectations. I know that for a lot of people stuck in green card queues, Canada is looking mighty attractive right now. Instant PR.
For people, we should have one clear policy and apply it,
if they can't come, so be it, but tell them clearly what
they can get and what they cannot.
Cheap labor would be priced out unless American really cant substitute the imported labor. Employers would encourage employees to get a green card (as opposed to doing everything in their power to keep them chained to the H1B)
What are the negatives (except for the obvious problems of taxes, of course)
From the article: "It’s unclear whether the Trump Organization had made an extra effort to try to fill the jobs.
In July, the club placed an ad on Page C8 of the Palm Beach Post: “3 mos recent & verifiable exp in fine dining/country club,” the ad said. “No tips,” Fahrenthold reported.
The ad, which ran twice, gave no email address, mailing address or phone number and instructed applicants to “Apply by fax.”"
Hypocrites.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/11/05/...
http://realtime.blog.palmbeachpost.com/2017/08/07/want-a-sea...
For instance, statements like this one below are suppose to make the reader think something is deeply wrong:
> She said in past years she's counted on 90 percent of her petitions being approved by Oct. 1 in years past. This year, only 20 percent of the applications have been processed.
But, this year Premium processing was disabled for most of the year so that would explain this, wouldn't it? For those unaware, Premium processing is where the petitioner can pay an extra $1225 on top of all the existing fees, to have its case processed in at most 14 days. Without premium processing it can take months & months instead. Also, without the fees for premium processing, I wouldn't be surprised if USCIS have less employees able to work the cases. It was disabled specifically because the Regular processing cases backlog was getting too big. So if last year 90% of her cases used Premium Processing, the quote isn't shocking at all.
The same lawyer maintains her personal blog, where she isn't as dramatic, and gives more useful facts: http://immigrationgirl.com/
Premium processing is now back[1], it'd be interesting to see if the statement still holds true.
[1] http://immigrationgirl.com/premium-processing-is-back-for-al...
Again, create new positions in the US like a "Remote Office Manager" and build kick ass campuses in India, China, Europe, etc.
The whole immigration thing would be totally obsolete... I mean, we will be able to travel to Mars soon... why can't we even manage remote employees in 2017?
I also find it hilarious that the same people who are always going on about the "evil rich" and the wage gap are the most likely to be against culling one of the biggest loopholes out there.
TL;DR: A work authorization document issued by one agency allows a person to maintain legal presence in the US. This is different from a visa -- a visa allows one to enter the country and is issued by another agency. The visa doesn't clearly specify what one can and cannot do while in the country.
) 65k Visas + 20k (for US educated MS degree holders) = 85k total every year. Lets say each one gets a 130k salary (Senator Chuck Grassley's recommendation) = ~$12 billion
) $12 billion Income. Lets say all these H1Bs send 25% back to their home countries = $3 billion gone out of USA, $9 billion spent in USA
) India's Software exports to USA in 2016 - (61+24.4+22.4 = $107.8 billion) source : https://www.statista.com/statistics/320753/indian-it-softwar...
) Majority of these exports are to US. If we assume, the cost of getting software work done in India/China is probably 1/3rd of its cost in US, means, India, which exported ~$100+ billion worth of software, would have equalled $300 billion if the work was done in USA (thus creating jobs in USA).
*) India, through its software exports sucked $300 billion out of USA and hence took away jobs in USA.
Bottom line is, the rise of India's, China's software industries will suck the money out of USA. So, these numbers mean : H1B don't take jobs, Software engineers in India, China and rest of the world are taking them at an order of magnitude faster !
Our town has a state university and a modest tech employment market. Every H-1B holder I've met a) went to the local university, b) works at a hospital or law office, c) writes CRUD apps in Java or C#.
They're good dudes, but hard to imagine that any of them are the kind of alpha-double-plus-good talent that couldn't be locally sourced.
https://journal.dedasys.com/2014/12/29/people-places-and-job...
Here's a radical proposal: give anyone with a clean criminal record and a job offer a green card. No limits, no $100k minimum wage, no protectionism. If you, with all the advantages that natives get (networks, language, NETWORKS), can be beat by an immigrant with zero social connections, you probably are worth less than you think you are. Time to compete, pal.
Anything less is opportunity hoarding based on the patch of dirt you were born on.
+1. that and sheer ignorance mixed with some American-grade entitlement. being anti-h1b is just socially acceptable (among 'liberals') way of being xenophobic.
Americans will end up losing on money in such a system, cause they will want to maintain their quality of life, say living in independent studios with central climate control even in high CoL areas, and they need to pay back education loans which are much lower for people from India
"What exactly is the point of having the white race at all, if not to accrue unfair advantages to its members?"
Countries should effectively be large organizations competing for people based on tax rates, laws, efficiency, and productivity.
> And I assume you have a problem with all other countries unfairly "opportunity hoarding" for their own people too, not just the US?
Obviously. But this is not a Nash equilibrium. Even unilaterally opening up your borders will result in better Pareto outcomes.
I don't think your radical proposal makes much sense. What's the benefit to a country to basically throw its borders wide open?
More people means a bigger economy. Immigrants -- at least the ones that choose to immigrate -- are by definition risk-takers. Risk-taking is core to entrepreneurship. I hope I don't have to defend the value of entrepreneurship on this site.
We've known for thousands of years that free trade is a net positive for everyone involved. Why would free immigration be any different?
The US had open borders for centuries. It became the most powerful country in the world because of open borders.
Here's an economist far more literate than me making the case: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
(We should also welcome all the refugees we can get, of course.)
> (We should also welcome all the refugees we can get, of course.)
What trolling nonsense. We must control who comes and who gets turned away, it's the only fair and equitable option for the citizens and resident aliens who already live here. Because priorities.
Of course, that will never happen, because the point of the system is to get people here, have a sword of deportation hanging over their heads, and thus keep 'em quiet and get 'em cheap.
So unless you think that lowly-paid immigrants with limited access to social services is the best path forward, I'd advocate for some protections. I agree with no limits. If a company can provide for the workers, then go for it. Otherwise, the US barely has enough financial support/ safety net for the existing population. Opening the doors wide open would put stress on that already poor situation.
I said no protectionism (in the form of visa caps), not no protections.
> Instant green card = Increased competition for Housing/public services.
Sounds like a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to provide those services and make lots of money.
I wonder why the otherwise enterprising Hacker News crowd is blind to the incredible market opportunities open borders would provide. I truly, deeply wonder why.
I believe these were called slums and the entrepreneurs slumlords.
I went to a pretty meh public university. Didn't hold me back.
1) "We" have built something great and unique, and we want others to be able to partake of and contribute to it, but the greatness and uniqueness of it is special and we want to preserve that. This is the more conservative view.
2) "We" have an environment where great things can happen, and so we want to bring people into it and add their greatness to it to make it even greater. There is nothing special about what we have, nothing that warrants preserving, and in fact change - constant, disruptive change - is naturally good. This is the more liberal view.
It bothers me that (1) is often conflated with racism, admittedly (the bothering part) because it's something I happen to agree with despite being mostly liberal on other issues. I DO think we here in America have a culture worth preserving, and while I want to open it up as much as possible to the world, I won't support doing so to the detriment and/or dissolution of what we have. I don't think constant disruption is naturally good; I didn't when I was younger and I don't think it is now.
But anything even approaching a whiff of something like "preservation" is immediately labeled racist dog-whistling (which seems insane to me). Any kind of "hey, maybe non-Americans are trying to exploit this and that's not good" is racism. Saying that perhaps as much diversity as possible even if just for diversity's sake in all things is maybe not the best thing - again, racism.
We need to recognize that there are real, non-racist and completely rational and informed reasons why people are uncomfortable with things like H1-B abuse, and that we don't all agree on what immigration should be or accomplish.
I largely see immigration issues as capitalist vs. socialist spectrum. The capitalist wants little control over the flow of resources for a more efficient distribution of resources. The socialist wants to control the flow allocation of resources for a fair distribution of resources.
So when you state the conservative position, I see that you want to control the flow of labor. What threats do you see from the flow of labor posing to the greatness and uniqueness of the US? Currently I see it as the opposite of imposing socialist tendencies impairing US companies from being able to compete with other countries that don't have the similar controls. Maybe we disagree on what makes the US culture unique.
With the liberal point of view stated, I can understand the parts about disruption and change as the capitalist point of view except for the claim about "there is nothing special about what we have, nothing that warrants preserving". I don't see how immigration jeopardizes 'specialness' nor how it harms the preservation of things. We already have a wide dirth of cultural diversity dating back over many centuries, my guess is there is something in particular you value.
I could look at things like Cinco de Mayo or St Patrick's day as examples of immigration both preserving special things as well as harming these through dilution and cultural appropriation.
Maybe what your trying to say in many words is liberals are pro-change and conservatives are anti-change? Which is kind of the dictionary definition of the words, but I digress...
I have more thoughts on how quick people are to throw 'racist' around, but that'll have to wait for another time. All I can say is that we're probably trying to preserve different things we consider great about our country.
Neither the Republicans or Democrats are addressing the systematic issues with wage growth in America.
The Aegis Company listed in the article is paying devs 55k a year in the seattle area.
I'm wondering if this is targeted at the places that seem to pay well under market rate.
http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=53000...
and cut in half. and a visa which requires in demand skills needs to be curbed.
The H1B situation could be fixed overnight by declaring the minimum wage to be... one million dollars. Then we'll see it genuinely only used for rare talent.
Not the purpose of the visa.