New Evidence USCIS Policies Increased Denials Of H-1B Visas
forbes.com
forbes.com
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them are fraud and legitimately rejected
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...
While I agree that there are many incompetent people who have abused H1B and other such systems, I prefer to judge people on their individual merits and avoid stereotyping. I have worked with both the extremes.
See my longer response to the OP
That is strange. In my experience, H1Bs are let go as quickly as natives if they are not competent. Of course, it could simply be a matter of the type of companies we have worked with. Again, see my (longer) response to the OP. I have mostly worked with Type 1 people I described there and have been fortunate enough to mostly avoid the Type 2. That said, I’ve worked with both extremes.
EDIT: When I say I’ve worked with both the extremes, I mean I have worked with both highly skilled and totally incompetent foreigners as well as natives.
EDIT 2: I’ve also worked with a third category — highly intelligent people (PhD level) who are more interested in spreading their intelligence (i.e. showing off) than getting actual work done. Unfortunately, I haven’t met the other extreme in this case. :-)
When given the opportunity, the learn and perform.
Also they work for whatever salary you offer, do not complain, do overtime and weekends whenever demand and most importantly do not complain.
Learning to write bash scripts isn't that hard. Finding people grateful enough for the opportunity offered, who work to make you and them win is hard.
Spending an evening reading stories reported at thedailywtf.com will help dispel this.
The way H-1B is implemented, it does not distinguish a person with PhDin Computer Science from Stanford from someone who did bachelors in Computer Science from Univ of Timbuktoo. This is the only visa for a top student can get to continue to work in the United States.
Over many years, this caused a lot of grief with body shops abusing these visas. The new administration came in and appointed a bunch of racists to head USCIS, who started denying H-1B indiscriminately. Guess who are the guys getting kicked out now?
Yes, the same Stanford graduates (or other top university graduates) that America taught for many years.
The process also discounts non-linearity of life. A student produced by top American universities is likely a good engineer. If they've worked in top Silicon valley companies for many years, they've gained practical knowledge that many other countries would kill to have. These 28-45 year old people are typically startup founders, top engineers, execs and folks willing to take chances. The US unceremoniously chooses to kick them out brashly? Guess which jobs are going with them?
Also, the real mess of H-1B is the green card process of USA. There are so so so many people on periodic H-1B extensions for 10 years, 15 years etc. These guys have been in the US for the best periods of their lives and should be naturalized. But because of the patchwork laws of US immigration, don't have green cards. With the over zealous deportation machine (aka USCIS) in operation now, these folks are being kicked out with their spouses and kids.
The US under current administration has the world completely backward. If they ever genuinely had the intent to fix the immigration process (which I suspect they don't), they've chosen the worst possible way.
H1B's stated purpose is "Specialty Occupation"s. A lot of these Visas are being used to bring in workers for very generic IT helpdesk jobs. There's still many that are granted for exceptional talents in the field of Information Technology and Computer Science, but there's also a large number granted to companies that are primarily outsourcers, whose appeal is not specialization but simply being cheap.
It's been suggested many times on HN that the regulations on H1Bs be changed to make it a bidding process - Only bring over applicants who are being paid the most. I'm not sure I agree or disagree, but I absolutely think more careful scrutiny of what's considered a "Specialist Occupation" is a step that's reasonable within the current regulations. There's a lot of complaints of Fraud and Abuse related to the program that are also being addressed with more careful scrutiny.
If there was genuinely a shortage of tech workers there would be no ageism (or any other sort of -ism) nor would there be these elaborate multi-day hoop-jumping interviews.
Yes, they do. It's called the H-1B visa. Lawyers, accountants, financial analysts, physicians, surgeons, management consultants, architects, journalists, school teachers, nurses and many other occupations qualify for H-1B visas.
One ref: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/05/09/the-lawyer-bu...
The “bar” is not representative at all of the nature of the work is why. It’s artificially high in order to eliminate a glut of candidates early in the process.
I remember when there was a genuine shortage of tech workers - the dotcom boom. Hiring and compensation reflected that there was high demand and competition to hire. Outside of a very few niches now, the economics (law of supply and demand) simply don’t show it.
Undergrads (not me though) can make $225k out of school now easily, is that not showing it?
Even the decent developers had no special skills that would qualify them for an H1b visa, however.
With a 0% rate of qualified H1b recipients in my own experience, I can imagine that the “conference room” statement would be true.
That being my experience, I don't think the claim made by OP is true. Evidently, we have different understanding of what constitutes specialized skills. Why is a good developer not considered to posses "specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor"?
And too many H1-Bs are just awful. I don't necessarily blame them individually, but it's a perverse suboptimal system.
If I ever run my own business, I'm going to put a 300-800% price hike on any work where I have to interface with Tata or Cognizant, or ATT Global Services, or the other kinds of consulting bodyshops that currently employ the vast majority of H1-Bs. At least for non-repeat business. Find a decent team and giving them normal rates or better would make sense, but there are others you wouldn't touch with a thirty foot pole made of rolled hundred dollar bills.
It is just not worth the headache dealing with that caliber of people, and the cultural impedance. Unless they are willing to pay through the nose.
By your definition, most of the 736 players who played in FIFA 2018 world cup few weeks ago do not posses any special athletic skills - they merely posses skills that are table-stakes for their profession. Yet, most reasonable people would not hesitate to call those players elite athletes.
What I am trying to point out is that H-1B is not about finding that outstanding developer. These are people who have a high level of skill in a specialized occupation.
Edit: you expanded on you original one-liner with anecdote. I am quoting the one-liner I was reponding to here.
You deal with too many sub-par people that tick a certain box, and your estimation of people that tick that box naturally goes down. There are very good people that are chained at companies with H1-B visas, but it is hard to battle what Bayes' Theorem tells you.
In the former case, H1-B visa holders are basically 100% dependent on their employers for continued employment - if they lose it for whatever reason, they get deported. This leads to flagrant abuses on behalf of the employers - demanding overtime & lower wages that they couldn't demand from those employees' domestic counterparts.
In the latter case, I work at one of the various companies that prides themselves on having an extremely high hiring bar. Of course, this doesn't really mean we hire the absolute best, it just means that we toss a lot of applicants in the bin because they weren't able to put on as good of a dog and pony show as expected - our interview process does not even kind of resemble what people at my company do on a day to day basis, or even measure the skills it takes to really succeed. So, of course, when we exhaust the local talent pool through arbitrary pickiness, we just add in the labor pool from abroad, rather than just... you know, reconsider our hiring standards and maybe give people who are already here, qualified, and looking for a good job one of those good jobs. This in turn dilutes the labor market - people who would have gotten that cushy job through merit are pushed down into positions that don't require as much luck to get, and the people who would have gotten those jobs are pushed into the jobs where you pretty much just have to chat up the interviewer, and so on.
This whole inane process is pretty much the cause of the absurdity of the American tech industry, where you either get super lucky and wind up in a lower-mid 6 figure job with crazy benefits, or you wind up in a mid- to low- 5 figure job where your boss both shits on you constantly and simultaneously doesn't really understand what you're doing day to day anyway. There's a middle ground, but like barely if my last job search is anything to go off of.
I don't disagree with you on these points.
My disagreement was to the unsubstantiated assertion by User23 that the number of engineers who qualify for H-1B in spirit and letter would be a handful.
*https://www.fifa.com/mm/document/fifafacts/bcoffsurv/emaga_9...
Are you sure? 5% of the world population plays soccer professionally?
It's coming from the parts about: 1) the employer must try to hire Americans first for the job and needs to be able to show that they haven't been able to hire Americans for the job 2) if the employer laid off people in essentially similar jobs recently before or after the H1-b application, the application is not supposed to go through 3) they need to pay the H1-bs the same wage as similar non-H1-b people at the company, or the prevailing wage of the area (whichever is greater)
I have personally seen all of these violated, would not be surprised if the vast majority of H1-bs are violating at least one of them. It's violated intentionally and everyone is doing it, because they can hire H1-bs cheaper and they have better retention (or less job mobility). Frankly it's a disgrace.
I personally am not anti-immigrant and would prefer the immigration laws to be more efficient, and spread the immigration over a wider range of jobs, instead of disproportionately affecting my profession (software engineering).
#1 - the employer must try to hire Americans first for the job - is not true. The employer need to only attest that the employment of H-1B non-immigrants does not adversely affect working conditions of workers similarly employed.
#2 - if the employer laid off people in essentially similar jobs recently before or after the H1-b application, the application is not supposed to go through - is also not true. Although, it is true that H-1Bs cannot be used to break a strike, lockout etc.
#3 - they need to pay the H1-Bs the same wage as similar non-H1-b people at the company, or the prevailing wage of the area (whichever is greater) - is true
I think you are confusing the employment-based green card with an H-1B visa (the employer must attest to #1 and #2 to apply for EB green cards).
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Employer_attestation...
The Labor Condition Application (LCA) contains basic wage
and location information about the proposed H1B employment.
The LCA contains the rate of pay, period of employment, and
work location.
It also contains four standard attestations that the employer
must make.
Again, are you confusing LCA [2] with labor certification [3]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Employer_attestation...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application
Slightly over half my team have full working status, and about 1/5th of the team is over about 40 years.
Your experience doesn't mean that good engineers on H1B don't exist in large numbers. You just haven't encountered any.
1. Applicants being hired directly by US companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc. These applicants have either worked for a while at one of their offshore subsidiaries or were hired directly after a thorough interview process. They are typically paid on par with their US counterparts. These applicants are usually very good at what they do — regardless of their educational background — which is why they were hired in the first place.
2. Applicants working for outsourcing companies who are being sent to work for their clients. Unfortunately, not all of them are good and are hired mostly to reduce costs.
Most of the stereotypical immigrant engineers fall in the second category. A lot of them moved to the US in late 1990s and throughout the 2000s. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple etc. don’t typically hire incompetent people — barring a few exceptions which may have slipped through the cracks.
Unfortunately, the second category of applicants give all of them a bad name.
I don’t know exactly how this can be solved completely. Perhaps H1Bs should be allowed to stay in the country after quitting their jobs for a certain period of time so they can look for another one — eliminating low employee mobility? Perhaps the minimum H1B wages should be increased — eliminating the low cost H1Bs? Perhaps there should be additional scrutiny for applicants going to work for a third party client? Perhaps there should be subcategories of H1B with different limits for the two types of applicants? Perhaps a combination?
In any case, treating the two categories as one is probably not a great idea.
[1] I know I am generalizing here and that the world is not black and white and that there are exceptions. But in my experience, these are the broad categories.
>> In any case, treating the two categories as one is probably not a great idea.
That is exactly what I said.
One thing I don't understand is why there is no ranking of all the H1-B applications? Score and sort all the applications based on some metrics like education, compensation, work exp, company, etc.
Currently, applications are picked using a lottery. This does not make sense for an employment based visa! I know so many good engineers from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc who did not get their applications selected in the lottery after they studied and worked here and had to be moved to another country.
But even if not faked, how would you compare people from wildly different institutions and countries ?
Yeah, I agree that's a challenge. But I am sure there could be some metric buckets like compensation bucket based on the location, employers market cap bucket( granted this could again be unfair to certain companies).
> But even if not faked, how would you compare people from wildly different institutions and countries ?
US Educational Institutes and immigration agencies of other countries have already solved this problem. There are institutions like WES which do a GPA and educational credentials evaluation.
b)Economists Giovanni Peri, Kevin Shih and Chad Sparber notes “A 1 percentage point increase in the foreign STEM share of a city’s total employment increased the wage growth of native college-educated labor by about 7–8 percentage points and the wage growth of non-college-educated natives by 3–4 percentage points.”
Just 80? LOL, that sounds low to me. I did an MSCS at a U.S. university in 2005, and I was one of two U.S. citizens in the entire _program_. I took multiple courses where I was the only U.S.-born person in the room, including the professor.
I don't doubt this correlation, but I do doubt that the relationship is causal in the direction suggested. More likely higher less supply of naive work to meet the needs of local industry -> both higher native wages and greater effort toward and eligibility for visa sponsorship for foreign workers.
Read the paper he links to there.
Why not set a number of H1B visas (say keep the current of 85k), then rather than do a lottery or check qualifications, simply rank salaries offered to applicants (or total yearly compensation) and let the people with the highest offers get the visas.
This way wages won't be depressed, and companies with labor needs they are truly unable to fulfill with traditional methods will get all the people they need.
Viewing money as a crude measure of qualification it seems this would be the most fair method. Also would be the best for the American worker since it would prevent low cost H1B applicants from lowering local wages.