Comment by bondolo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bondolo | Hacker News Reader

I am a former Oracle employee, white male from Canada, who was underpaid based on my immigration status and that continued after I became a permanent resident. This seemed routine–Oracle tries to underpay everyone and will use whatever advantages they have to do so. If you've worked at Oracle for any length of time you are probably not being competitively compensated unless you make a regular fuss. Even if you make a fuss they may still do nothing betting that you won't leave.

That said, I don't think it is entirely fair to pile on Oracle for this problem. Oracle doesn't seem especially atypical of the rest of the industry or even the bottom of the barrel. I saw much worse treatment at my first US employer for myself and others. Mid-tier employers and body-shop consultancy companies use underpaying people as a strategic core component of their profitability.

I had prospective employers directly say that they were pleased they could use my immigration status to pay me less, specifically that they would offer employer sponsored permanent residency application instead of paying me competitive rates, bonuses, promotions.

If you want to end the abuses decouple visas and permanent resident applications from the employer or make it much easier to maintain or continue status and applications when moving between employers.

Former H1B here. I'm convinced that this is the sole reason why H1B exists in its present form. Hire an experienced employee into an entry level position (based on level: you see, you can't hire someone into a job unless there are no local candidates, so lower the level, and therefore the offered wage, and triple the list of requirements to make sure local folks don't apply). Have them do the job that would otherwise call for a senior employee. Offer very little in the way of raises or stock in the company until they get a green card and dump your company for another one that's less abusive. Lather, rinse, repeat. That's how it works, folks, don't let anyone try to convince you otherwise.

My first job out of college was working at an immigration firm. You're spot on. It's all a scam between the company and the lawyers to string along the H-1 or L-1 holder. They need to get rid of the entire prevailing wage system and set the minimum wage to $150k, then they'd really only be bringing over individuals with specialized knowledge instead of what they are doing now (as you accurately describe above).

They need to do what Trump told them to do: have a fixed pool of H1B visas, and distribute them to the eligible applicants with the highest paying jobs here in the US. That's the only sensible solution that auto-regulates and stops all kinds of abuse. Moreover, to reduce abuse further, H1B workers who are already in the country should get greater mobility between companies and 1 year grace period if they leave the company that sponsored them for H1B. Currently if you get fired in retaliation (or otherwise lose employment), you're fucked and you have to leave the country in 2 weeks. There's absolutely no good reason for this to be immediate other than to foster abuse by employers. It's also non-trivial and dangerous to attempt to change employers.

Didn't President Trump also say he wanted to mandate paying H1B's the same you would an American? Seems like that would get rid of a lot of the abuse.

The current system causes trouble for a lot of people in many fields not limited to tech. Some friends have had trouble getting a residency while Indian nationals who come in on H1B are favored by the Indian doctors who deal with hiring at the hospitals they did their clinicals at in NY.

That is already the case, but only nominally. You can't hire someone into the job from abroad and pay them less. Hence the futzing with levels and job requirements and hiring "junior" employees who aren't junior at all.

> That said, I don't think it is entirely fair to pile on Oracle for this problem.

What? No, it's entirely fair to sue them for being exploitative. It wouldn't be fair to blame the entirety of the industry's problems on Oracle, but it is fair to attack each and every company who operates in this way.

> they could use my immigration status to pay me less, specifically that they would offer employer sponsored permanent residency application instead of paying me competitive rates, bonuses, promotions.

Offering that sponsorship has very real costs to the company, well into the thousands of dollars per year. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for the employer to deduct that cost relative to what another employee who doesn’t bring those additional costs.

It would be expected that employers would quantify the costs and adjust compensation to factor that in. However, many (most?) employers use employer sponsored permanent residency as effectively an indentured servitude program and their gains from undercompensation of the sponsored employees greatly exceed their actual costs. In particular the longer the process takes the more the employee has to lose by complaining or leaving.

If the company was just deducting costs they wouldn't be pleased to pay him less.

> Offering that sponsorship has very real costs to the company, well into the thousands of dollars per year. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for the employer to deduct that cost relative to what another employee who doesn’t bring those additional costs.

Let me fix that for you:

"Purchasing that slave has very real costs to the company, well into the thousands of dollars per year. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for the owner to deduct that cost relative to what another freeman who doesn’t bring those additional costs."

Remember the immigrant suffers additional liabilities and risks a citizen wouldn't. The employer in this case is in a much more powerful position to keep the employee in line.

Slaves don't choose their job, work visa immigrants do. They know exactly what they are signing for and can always decline the offer.

They get taken hostage by seemingly attractive offers. Call it what you want but you're basically a slave to the corporation for the opportunity to get a VISA

> Slaves don't choose their job, work visa immigrants do.

Some slaves absolutely sell themselves into it, in other to escape poverty, debt, or war[1]. It doesn't change the fact that they do have less rights, less options, and their employer can and will abuse this as evidenced by this thread and a shitload of other HN threads. (and yes, I understand this is unpopular sentiment because the citizens want to believe they are doing a good thing and providing upward mobility and the immigrants don't want to consider themselves slaves)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_slavery

And the early colonisation of north America made use of indentured colonists who where early on preferred to slaves in some cases.

The slavery rhetoric is very commonly used to dehumanize immigrants. This makes it morally easier to justify treating then like an outgroup.

Many, many people cannot afford to lose their jobs because they live paycheck to paycheck. Funny how they're never called slaves or referred to as having owners.

It cost nothing in Canada, at most $700 CAD.

I don’t think I could get our mobility team to fill out an immigration application for only $700. That’s only about 1 day’s work for an employee on the team. I’d imagine most cases take way more than that and probably takes some work time from the employee as well.

> Offering that sponsorship has very real costs to the company, well into the thousands of dollars per year. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for the employer to deduct that cost relative to what another employee who doesn’t bring those additional costs.

How much? I have a friend who just got their green card after 10 years of working at the same company. Based on the experience of others in the same situation, they estimated the company would require them to repay 10-15k in expenses if they leave immediately (they're required to stay for two more years before the company will waive the full cost). I take that to be the employer's actual immigration sponsorship cost.

If the employer were to deduct that cost from their salary (ignoring the fact the employer could be repayed in other ways), it would have amounted to about $1,000-2,000/year, which is not a level of underpayment I think many people would make much noise about at software developer salaries.

I think using sponsorship costs to justify underpaying immigrants is just a convenient excuse.

Isn’t that illegal?

Yes.

I was in a similar position. It’s not really enforceable because if you threaten to take legal action you get fired, and if you stop getting paid you can’t afford lawyer fees, and if you stop working you’re in violation and have to leave the country, and even if you win it’s unclear what you will gain. If you have a family or partner you’re especially in a bind.

I believe you are supposed to register a complaint with the EEOC, after which any adverse actions taken against you including firing without cause could count as illegal retaliation (which isn't the case for just threatening legal action), but I am not a labor attorney (or any sort of lawyer).

USCIS doesn't care about EEOC. And you try fighting your case from abroad. Impossible. No one is going to do it.

Companies will underpay by an amount related not to the cost of the immigration paperwork (which is low) but to the perceived value of the outcome for the employee (which for professionals from many countries may be closer to $300k than $10k).

The government might as well collect that surplus as tax.

I've seen companies low-ball employees on the order of tens of thousands of dollars. It's basically ancient news now (and the laws in Canada have changed, thank goodness), but when I worked at Corel 20 years ago they would regularly hold people hostage based on visa status (at the time if they were sponsoring the visa, the person couldn't change jobs without losing their visa). Back then, we were all making less than $100K, but educated, experienced immigrants on visa status would often be making less than $50K. As soon as they got permanent residence status, they would be gone -- finally able to negotiate properly. Like I said, Canadian laws have changed and so has Corel management -- I doubt they are doing it now.

We can argue that perhaps the visa was worth the extra money (and for those people, it certainly was), but it's still pretty crap. I'm sure wherever the rules allow it you will find companies (even well known ones) trying to save money in this way.

Yeah, immigration is now a breeze in Canada if you graduated from a Canadian university/college (given that you manage to find work in related field.)

Not sure why there are so many on here and other forums that are always so quick to take the employers side.

Because freedom is slavery. And we thought that 1984 was fiction, but in fact it's accurate prophecy.

Except in theory the Visa is for people you couldn’t hire otherwise in the US.

Anyone who ever filed for green card will confirm that an immigration attorney charges a few thousands for the green card process, not more. The cost to a large company, who has one on retainer anyway for H1-B, is obviously less. Something tells me that foreign employees were underpaid much more than the cost of the green card.

For the employee the situation looks more like this: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/09/08/visa/

there are N spots per year, and they mostly go on the minute the window opens. mostly for companies requesting blanket forms

I have no doubt that what you say is very common, but it's as illegal as it is hard to stop. I view it as immoral too but that's a far more subjective conversation than legality.

Edit: to clarify, I've checked and either the employer and the employee can bear the financial burden of the I-140 and I-485 filings, depending on the agreement. But the PERM labor certification costs must be borne by the employer and cannot be recovered from the employee, nor can immigration status be a basis to underpay them aside from recovering the permissible costs on a one-time basis.

> That said, I don't think it is entirely fair to pile on Oracle for this problem

Excuse me? It is perfectly fair to “pile on” Oracle for widespread illegal discrimination in their labor practices.

I believe parent meant it's not fair to single them out.

Anyone who has worked for one of the immigration firms that Oracle uses could tell you horror stories. They work with lawyers to systematically string along their employees and then use fake work locations to drive salaries down for the prevailing wages. It’s a sick industry and most of the immigration law firms working for big tech are part of the problem.

> That said, I don't think it is entirely fair to pile on Oracle for this problem

This right here is why they treated you like that. Capitalist alpha types dump on less aggressive types to line their own pockets. If people valued themselves more and held others to account for their bad behaviour stuff like this would rarely happen.

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