Andrew Ng: The suspension of H1B is bad for the US and bad for innovation
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They also fake looking for Americans- in practice, many of the jobs are earmarked for a specific person, and you are wasting your time applying for it.
Losing your job as an h1b requires you to leave almost immediately, which isn't great for anyone.
Hopefully they'll reform the process to focus on bringing talent into the country without chaining it to a specific company
I'm sure most people understand that it's a transactional relationship, I.e. you get to live in the country while you work and that's it, but if you live in a city for several years and settle in, form friendships, hobbies, and maybe relationships, it's very difficult to put all of that at risk for any reason.
I agree the terms are not good, but isn’t it 60 days?
https://cilawgroup.com/news/2017/02/24/uscis-creates-60-day-...
I suddenly find myself wondering if the path to reform for H1B could be short duration combine with some kind of fast-track naturalization. Does it even make sense for the transactional H1B to be so long term?
If the H1B led to rapid naturalization, it would naturally curtail use of H1B over time, as the US population of individuals suited for the job would be growing ipso facto.
Do we really want to bring skilled workers to the US, give them work experience and training that raises their skill level even higher, and then kick them out of the country?
That seems like an unimaginably stupid idea. We should be seeking to retain highly skilled immigrants, not flushing them out of the country.
I agree, but I think you mean permanent residency. Naturalization is the step after that.
The H1B should really be a kind of temporary defined-term green card that can be used with any employer (or none), with a quick path to a green card for anyone who can prove consistent employability.
I think an initial sponsorship is fine, but tying the visa to the sponsorship is really only beneficial to the employer. If they have a true need to sponsor an immigrant, they shouldn't have any problem keeping their offer attractive enough that retention shouldn't be a problem.
I wonder sometimes if the hiring manager was incompetent or was just using me as justification that no Americans could do the job
They're underpaid for their positions, tremendously overworked, and when they don't win the H1B lottery for their renewal, they're simply swapped out with people who did. Tying one's ability to legally reside in a country to their employment is cruel at best, and damaging to the broader economy at worst. This doesn't benefit ANY workers - if these workers had some basic rights, or an actual decent pathway to legal residency (not tied to their employer), they'd be better able to demand market wages, and wouldn't depress the wages of their American peers.
The only people benefiting from this nonsensical immigration scheme are the shareholders of the companies who exploit it.
I have noticed that people of Indian heritage are encouraged to get a master's degree. Most of the Indians I've met have one.
Anyone else care to share their understanding on the Indian H1B US Master's degree route to coming to the US, am I missing something here?
But that is not the only reason they go for a master's degree. Many do not need it for immigration purposes yet they obtain one regardless.
Using statistics from the general population is not relevant here.
Why is this flagged? because I supposedly misinterpreted a "fake job interview"?
The only ones who are interested in a visa like this would be foreign-born skilled workers looking to immigrate, and they are going to lose the fight over who gets the visas with people who have no specific skills but family in country since that family can vote.
There is no constituency for such a visa, so it is never going to happen.
Why should they hire someone who can walk to a competitor at the drop of a hat when they can hire someone that will probably be deported if they step out of line or demand market-rate compensation?
(Also, many of my friends have/had H-1B’s...)
Because free markets are better ? or so has been the message by US towards other countries
I’m not sure it’s that simple: lots of workers know they’re competing at their current employer with H1-B’s who are underpaid and mistreated. If they’re paid more that dynamic softens a lot and there’s still a cap on the total number.
Mine was slower but still faster than a lot of immigrant experiences to the US, and I did it from outside Canada and without an employer involved at all.
The skilled worker visas don't need family in country, though it can be a minor help in the points systems they use. My CS degree and work experience mattered far more.
As to why it's hard in the US, I'd attribute that more to attitudes among the population and media than to the inherent nature of having to make policy that appeals to voters: Canada is (at least) as much of a democracy as the US, and even the Conservative Party of Canada isn't proposing to eliminate fast skilled worker processing - they're in fact the party that introduced the quick program I alluded to above. Certainly the other two major national parties are even more friendly to immigration. There are xenophobes in Canada, but firmly in the minority when examined at the national level.
Canada also has fast sponsorship programs for spouses and kids.
63% of Green Cards are awarded based on family connection [0] not employment based sponsorship vs 26% in Canada [1].
The US is an outlier in this regard. Not many countries allow you to sponsor a sibling for Permanent Residency.
[0] https://www.boundless.com/blog/dhs-data-2018/
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...
I usually lean hard left, and I know I'd personally support a proposal that cut back on granting 1 unskilled visa per year, in exchange for fast-tracking 3 skilled visa-holders to getting their green card, and I have conservative-leaning friends who would support such a deal as well.
What's the right ratio, though? They've been trying to strike a major immigration reform deal since the 90s, but neither side has been willing to make concessions, so we've just been just stuck with a broken system and its ill effects.
The only point is to make life more difficult for people that need a J1, H1-B, or anything else to continue their career plans now.
It's also to make it seem like these positions are taking jobs away from current US residents, and stoke anti-immigrant sentiment.
There are undoubtedly flaws with the H1-B process, but this move makes it less likely for reform to happen, not more.
It’s not quite as easy as it seems, believe me software companies have been trying to pull this off for decades. I’ve been around situations where a US team was offshored and returned again because the results were so dreadful.
What people forget is that the folks who actually make it here are the absolute cream of the crop. There are not a billion Indians just like the super talented one you’ve worked with at your office. And that’s not even getting into timezone and communication problems.
>What people forget is that the folks who actually make it here are the absolute cream of the crop.
You know a good way to reverse this trend, though? Force all those people to take all the skills they've learned back to their home countries.
I work at a Big-N and there are many teams that are majority non-citiens. If they're forced to leave the US, do you think the company will try to replace them with Americans, or just move the team?
Americans couldn't comprehend the perfect English spoken in these countries?
(Sorry - couldn't resist!)
Edit: In case people don't get it, it used to be a common joke that Americans had poorer English than well educated foreigners. Definitely for written, but even occasionally spoken English. I've worked with at least 3 people who were either from Singapore or from Malaysia but educated in Singapore. All had great English, and with 2 of them you'd never know you weren't speaking to a native English speaker - you'd think you were speaking to a British person.
I wonder why more companies don’t outsource to Canada and South America (or the Midwest, for that matter.)
Disagree with this, agree with the rest.
I've hired (and fired) folks for teams and this is not true at all. The wages in SV are very competitive. At one point we were desperate to get ANYONE who could pass the interview, including dropping the bar for the interview. H1B employees are technically more expensive for us, because the overhead for H1B fees/lawyers etc.
edit: I forgot to mention that H1Bs routinely negotiate their pay to be higher, since they get multiple offers as well.
In my case the context was my firm had done a true search for filling the position, where the H1B holder was found as the best available applicant. But then we had to do another fake job search for that already-filled position for the purposes of getting our employee a green card.
The hallmarks of a fake job posting, from that experience: (1) there will be only basic advertising of the role, with a strict "no recruiters" rule (2) there will be only one round of phone interview, focusing on a checklist of specific knowledge and experience points and acceptable salary levels
I'm sure I could wait a year and finally find an American born candidate who will pass the interview, but that would mean my projects and timelines are hosed.
We've tried to go the intern route and hire American undergrads as interns and then convert them to full time by offering them, the conversion rate isn't as good as you think, and they have a LOT of options in the valley.
Let me assure you, the biggest problem faced by any company, startup or otherwise is talent, it's extremely hard to find good talent, We could tweak our tech-stacks to be most open to a wide range of people and bring the bar down. But the bottleneck is still talent.
This affects everyone who works with H1B employees. As others have noted it puts them in a very unfair side of the negotiations on employment (as in you don't get a voice).
If your residency is hinged on your job, then it's you vs everyone else there. This drives unnatural competition between teams and coworkers under the same manager. It's bad for work relations. It leads people to be bad actors and make immoral judgements.
H1B needs serious reform to give people an actual voice at the table.
If it needs to be temporary response to a shortage, it should be tied to a job category in which the shortage is certified to exist, not an employer. There should be no special restriction within the category within which the shortage is certified to exist, so long as it exists, since employer restrictions within that category will obviously exacerbate a real shortage, though they benefit the particular employer.
But H-1B doesn't exist to deal with real shortages, it exists to leverage the pretext of contrived shortages to mitigate wage pressure in highly skilled industries via captive labor.
Whatever you feel about the problems with the current system, it is a net positive for the US. It has some pernicious negative effects, but ultimately our economy benefits more by being able to draw and integrate top talent from all over the world. To put this in a context that might be more familiar to readers here, it would be like Google or Facebook putting a moratorium on aquihires, or implementing some other policy that hurts their ability to recruit.
Please do not buy into the hype that this is the first step toward reform. The current administration has had 3.5 years to overhaul the H1B system and has done nothing to date.
This is horribly short sighted and a strategic blunder. It will hurt American innovation and the American economy. It’s the type of move made Yahoo and AOL in the mid aughts that ultimately led to their stagnation and demise 10 years later.
Where in the official proclamation does it say that it's a first step towards reform?
Answer: It doesn't. Rather it lays out exactly _why_ they're doing it to address unprecedented surge in unemployment.
"American workers compete against foreign nationals for jobs in every sector of our economy, including against millions of aliens who enter the United States to perform temporary work. Temporary workers are often accompanied by their spouses and children, many of whom also compete against American workers. Under ordinary circumstances, properly administered temporary worker programs can provide benefits to the economy. But under the extraordinary circumstances of the economic contraction resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak, certain nonimmigrant visa programs authorizing such employment pose an unusual threat to the employment of American workers.
For example, between February and April of 2020, more than 17 million United States jobs were lost in industries in which employers are seeking to fill worker positions tied to H-2B nonimmigrant visas. During this same period, more than 20 million United States workers lost their jobs in key industries where employers are currently requesting H-1B and L workers to fill positions. Also, the May unemployment rate for young Americans, who compete with certain J nonimmigrant visa applicants, has been particularly high — 29.9 percent for 16 19 year olds, and 23.2 percent for the 20-24 year old group. The entry of additional workers through the H-1B, H-2B, J, and L nonimmigrant visa programs, therefore, presents a significant threat to employment opportunities for Americans affected by the extraordinary economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 outbreak."
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...
Agreed.
> it’s about having another bullet point on some stupid list to please the voters
Agreed.
> some of the same voters that were so disoriented to understand that obamacare is aca.
Disagreed.
The H1B system as it exists is not easily defensible, so Trump is basically unconstrained. It's easier to defend a system against executive abuse when the system is working as intended. There are things that Trump would like to kill by XO but which he will not kill because their popularity constrains his political capital. The less popular/functional a program is, the easier it is to justify screwing with it.
You're saying that other commenters don't realize this is a political issue. I think it's exactly the other way around: you don't realize how much political support for skilled immigration H1B abuse has burned in the past 10ish years.
setting this aside, I don’t think anyone is saying that H1B was a perfect system, but IMHO the benefits from it greatly outweigh the downsides. We’ll see how this unfolds and what the medium and long term impact is (spoiler: people will think twice about coming to work/live in the US)
My favorite example when it comes to what’s going on in the US is the Roman Empire. It lasted for 1000+ years but it did disintegrate when the people in power lost track of what made the Roman Empire great. I am not saying this is going to happen in the next 5, 10 or 15 years, but things are definitely shifting and the world your grand grand kids are going to live in is going to be radically different from what we call normal right now.
I think it's politically disastrous to go on using H1B how it's currently used.
We need to admit that there's a lot of low/midskill immigration happening using H1B and then fix it. If we don't, then we'll lose the H1B entirely. Already you see that the H1B is wildly unpopular because of a few large bad actors. So, we'll lose the baby with the bathwater. As we are now. If H1B were used how it's supposed to be used, then it'd be a lot easier to say "hey why are we kicking out our best scientists, our tippy-top engineers, and our surgeons? It's not like anyone loses by having these people here -- clearly none of us can even quality for those jobs". Right now, that's just not an argument I can use to convince my uncle or grandfather to support H1B visas. That's a problem. Now we're going to lose even skilled immigration because of a few big abusers.
Because of those politics, I would rather restrict H1B to its original intent and then have the debate about low/midskill immigration on its own terms.
My argument is that your political strategy is bad, not that your policy imperatives are wrong :)
There are ways to meet the very real need to import the best brains from around the world. But H1B isn't set up to do this very effectively.
Off the top of my head, a better option would be to allow immigration with a $60k bond to the government that has to be paid down at $1k/month by the current employer. With the employee in question able to transfer jobs at any time with the bond transferring to the new employer.
1. Companies that import labor when they had a perfectly acceptable local candidate should face severe fines, and Justice should be given a real budget for running these investigations as a matter of course. And the burden of proof to demonstrate you needed to import labor should be pretty high. If you don't do this, then H1B abuse will happen.
2. Companies should be forced to pay H1Bs significantly above prevailing wage, where "prevailing wage" is interpreted liberally instead of conservatively. H1Bs for software engineers making less than $200K (maybe 150K) in a major metro area is a pretty obvious violation of the intent of the H1B, imo.
NB: this will have the effect of making H1Bs a lot harder to get and keep. But I think this is the least evil of all possible worlds. In addition, we could also independently argue for increased immigration in general. But midskill immigration to fill jobs for which local qualified candidates exist should not be done through the H1B program. That's not what it's designed for, and that mismatch between program design and actual use is the source of a lot of H1B mistreatment.
I actually don't believe that ending the tie to an employer will help. I mean, we should do it anyway, but the abuse will continue.
Who defines acceptable local candidate?
Anyone who has interviewed candidates knows that are always a lot of local candidates who think that they are qualified for the job who you don't want for any of a variety of reasons. I don't want the government telling me that I can't hire the sysadmin I want because there is a Java programmer who thinks he can administer Unix systems. Because computers are computers, right?
Alternately I don't want to be told that I have to hire someone with a particular degree rather than the high school dropout who is self-taught and whose open source projects demonstrate ability to me. Government tends to be very impressed by certificates that industry insiders know well don't mean squat.
Companies should be forced to pay H1Bs significantly above prevailing wage, where "prevailing wage" is interpreted liberally instead of conservatively.
A modest proposal. If H1Bs are at the quota and someone else wants to hire an H1B worker and pay more than you're paying, you should get the choice between giving up your worker's spot (they can continue working for you remotely) or upping their pay. Without setting any particular dollar figure this would create salary competition among H1Bs that would take spots away from the worst of the sweatshops.
I don't think that would be much of a fix. But it would be an improvement.
I actually don't believe that ending the tie to an employer will help. I mean, we should do it anyway, but the abuse will continue.
I both believe that it would help, and that the abuse would continue. I see value in limiting how much abuse employers can get away with.
I think your question already demonstrates the deviation of the H1B from its original intent.
Bringing in a generic sys admin or generic java programmers on an H1B is visa abuse. Sorry, but neither of those is a special skill and neither of those jobs is an appropriate use of the H1B. There are more than enough sys admin and java programmer candidates in the USA above a certain (quite low) price tag.
When it comes to H1B's intended purpose, I would expect something like: "we need someone who is expert in this aspect of the Java garbage collector and knows the internals of the X framework. Our candidate has made significant open source contributions to both. There is no one in this country with expertise in both who is currently looking for a position." Or, "we need someone who has extensive experience working in the insurance sector and also has experience being the senior developer on a large project written in Haskell. We can't find anyone who has passed the first actuarial exam and who has also been a senior engineer at a firm using Haskell". That sort of thing. The H1B was designed for __skilled immigration__. Not warm body java school kids.
I get your point that this is difficult to evaluate. That's why one of my proposals was to provide Justice with plenty of funding so that they have the resources to spot-check cases with high accuracy.
NB: I absolutely would support a new midskill immigration program for things like sys admins and generic java app developers. But the H1B program was never really meant for those sorts of jobs. The H1B program has radically diverged from its initial intent, and that is why the abuse of H1B workers happens. And, in fact, this is why even within H1B you don't see nearly as much of the abuse that happens in tech within other sectors (academia, medicine). CS has been democratized over the past 20 years and our H1B criteria in CS needs to catch up.
Oh, and BTW, H1B abuse also fucks over actually skilled immigrants. I've been trying to hire a PhD with huge amounts of high-quality open source contributions, a bunch of publications, and there's a whole class of very particular algorithms that literally no one except him understands. He's literally the only person in the world who is qualified from day 1 to lead this heavy-R R&D project. This is what the H1B is for. But apparently his qualifications are equivalent to low-level Accenture drones doing sys admin and java app dev. I just don't buy that a properly equipped Justice wouldn't be able to hire someone who knows the difference...
If we want a midskill immigration program, we should just create it from scratch. That'll be easier than morphing the H1B into 80% of what a midskill program should look like.
But there are some that..aren't.
That said, the person that you describe sounds like a better fit for an E2 visa than an H1B. See https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat... for a description. Have you tried that option?
TBH I would support throwing away H1B entirely and creating a much more permissive midskill/lowskill immigration visa whose intent is more in-line with the actual use of the H1B. But if you try to get there by reforming H1B, it's never going to work well. So, if we keep H1B, we need to start using it as intended. And then fight for another visa class. I'm just fundamentally skeptical that the H1B will ever not be abusive until we align the original intent and practice of the policy.
We do! The US takes about 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year, and they are welcome to become software engineers.
Now, if you ask "so what if we create a visa so that high tech employers can bestow, control, and revoke the US residency rights of people who work in a few narrow fields, including software engineering", I can take a crack at explaining how this can lead to harmful market distortions, to say nothing of labor and basic human rights abuses.
By being born to an area you have done something special. You have received the special benefit of local education and infrastructure, you have familial and social connections to the people of that local area. You may even have a shared sense of local obligation to uplift the people you live near.
The problem with importing foreign labor isn't that they can't develop feelings of community or form social ties to an area. It's that someone local is harmed or excluded (after significant investment in them) while a foreign worker is underpaid and overworked in a job that exists because of the local's tax dollars.
We're allowing greed to create a permanent underclass of locals who can not climb the social hierarchy while also importing highly-educated quasi-slaves into the country. The whole thing reeks of economic opportunism and, to me, represents the very worst of capitalism.
Like honestly don’t see the point. Just give the smart person a job.
You can’t see where the discussion lives?
In the case of a long-term, widespread shortage, rising salaries would lead to a widespread increase in people training to enter the industry. This is exactly what's been happening with software the past several years.
I don't know about the specific case of Arabic translators, but that's far from the only possible outcome. It's also likely that you won't find one at any price that your poor Arabic-speaking parents can possibly afford to pay to attend your parent-teacher conference meetings, and you end up with no translator at all.
If you have static demand and it is possible to train to meet the need, you shouldn't have long-term shortages, but dynamically increasing needs can produce a long-term gap, where you are continuously playing catch up.
If H-1B was well adapted to real shortages, the continuous use in tech would indicate such a persistent dynamic shortage. I don't think that's the real condition, and I don't think H-1B is well adapted to serve only real shortages, but the idea of real, including persistent, shortages that price signalling alone doesn’t suffice to close is not to be dismissed.
May be grouping by job-type, location(cost of living concern) and then stack ranked might be better solution.
Although, who’s to then decide how many software engineers or artists to be allowed? Not an easy answer for sure.
I want no part of it.
Actually, no one one wants any part of it. The ones that take part in it are desperate.
I want no part in the desperation, it’s never good.
The first purpose is to pay for background checks and any costs that the immigrant might incur in the USA. (For example it would pay for deportation if the immigrant broke the law.)
The second is to serve as proof that the immigrant is enough in demand that the government should believe we get a net positive from their admission to the USA. And not exactly onerous proof - it is only a fraction of what has to be paid in salary and benefits.
Also note that this is only a partially baked proposal. I am sure that there are much better options than this, just as this is would be likely to work better than the current H1B program does.
Predictably, some people are going to claim racism for this move by Trump, but I think it's a big problem that needs to be addressed.
H1s benefit the immigrants the most, and any analysis that centers anything other than the immigrants is deeply inhuman.
H1B, in its current state combined with green card laws have led to a massive group (600K+) of permanent non-immigrants in the US. This leads to a lot of pain and heartbreak for people who follow all the laws, pay all taxes and looking to establish a stable life. Many of these folks have US citizen kids.
Many don't realize how difficult it is to keep up with all the paperwork just to ensure you are in legal status in the US. The level of arbitrary regulation by USCIS is only making everyone's life painful while not solving the root cause (H1B abuse).
This is a pretty obvious move by the administration to discourage immigration, in any form. Could the H1B system be more equitable to workers, more efficient, less confusing, etc? Absolutely. But suspending H1Bs and green card applications like this does the opposite of all of that and throws thousands of families into limbo.
I have many immigrant friends and families who want this to happen. The admin has said it many times - "legal immigration is good, illegal immigration is bad". Yet people believe whatever lies media tells them. At a time when 40 million are unemployed, importing more H1Bs is asinine.
Do you disagree that there are consequences and externalities to the H1B suspension that go beyond our best guess at the motivations of the White House? That's what I suggest in my comment, but you haven't addressed that at all.
I think that regardless of how anyone felt about the H1B program that this change is bad for America and was done for the wrong reasons. If this was about the H1B program then why suspend L1 visas, student visas and green cards? What does suspending au pairs have to do with H1B issues?
The unemployment rate for university graduates in the US is 7.4%, which is not great, but is considerably lower than the civilian unemployment rate of 13.3% in that same report. In past reports the unemployment rate in IT fields is even lower than that of university graduates. US university graduates have been hit the least in the covid economic downturn.
Please explain how suspending L1 visas is going to help this same set of debt-burdened American graduates. Or perhaps these people are all expected to become au pairs now that those visas have been suspended as well?
1 year requirement is not a big deal: everyone using these has already offices all over the world so they hire somebody in a foreign office, wait one year and transfer to the US, considering that H1-B is a lottery it's faster than getting an H1-B from abroad on average. And, bonus, unlike H1-B, the L1 workers cannot easily jump to another employer: for a new job with a different employer they need to get some other visa, likely H1B, and, unlike a worker who already has an H1B, go through lottery. And if you fire them they will have much more trouble staying in the country: a new H1B application will take at least 6 months (file on April 1st, get the status on October 1st, if you won the lottery and did not get any RFEs) so they likely will run over 180 days out of status and get banned from the US for 3 years unless they find some other status like F (student), which won't let them work anyways so they will have to live off the savings they've made from their lavish L1 compensation.
Essentially it has all problems of H1 plus its own: less scrutiny, no salary requirements, stronger bond with the employer.
Hope this explanation helps.
And when the time comes to recruit during your MBA, please hit me up if you think you'd be a good candidate at a top boutique in NY
Why did you not do that in the first place? I'm legitimately asking because I want to leave the US for Europe or Australia / New Zealand. I'm a US citizen having immigrated here at an early age. I've dreamed of leaving the US for years now, so I like to understand what draws so many people here still compared to the other options?
Avoid any business, education or employment in the US.
As Victor Hwang put it [1]:
"While other countries fight a global war for top talent, America just packs up the tent.
Facts: - Immigrants start new businesses at twice the rate of native-born Americans. - Immigrants founded 44 of the 100 largest companies in America."
[1]: https://twitter.com/rainforestbook/status/127517996429236633...
A few key differences versus the H1B (correct me if I’m wrong - my understanding of H1B features are basis discussions I have seen here):
1. Not tied to a specific employer. At least theoretically this is the case though your residence permit clearly specifies your employer.
2. Family-friendly options where your family can join you with the initial visa application. Spouses/Partners are immediately eligible to work.
3. Integration courses for language and culture, offered for free usually, and for the entire family.
4. After 2 years, you can switch jobs and after an another year, you can apply for permanent residence. The steps and guidelines are clearly specified and all the laws side with the employer to ensure no exploitation or harassment.
1 - https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/aamt/zugastimaa/buergerse...
The Wikipedia article for the H1B outlines most of the problems, but I'll talk about my experience.
When I moved from Canada to the US (for a software engineering role), I thought I getting a huge raise. It was about twice what I was earning in Canada prior, so for me personally it was a big step up, but what I didn't realize at the time is that they were actually paying me about 50% below the market rate in the US. At the time I was making about $56k/year in Canada (in CAD, about $40k USD), and I was hired at around $85k/year in the US. This was in 2009. What I realized soon after, was that someone with my experience was making about twice that much in the US.
It wasn't until I got a green card (which took 5 years) that my salary adjusted upward to the market rate. The company that helped me get my green card was Airbnb, but even back then they hired me (while I was still on a TN) well below the market rate. I managed to negotiate my salary up, but I was still anchored near the bottom of my cohort.
While working at these companies (including Airbnb), I felt trapped because I could not easily quit or search for a better paying job. My employers knew this, since according to the rules I'm required to leave the country if I lose or quit my job. Many companies also don't want to deal with H1Bs or TNs because they don't want the fuss of dealing with immigration problems.
While waiting for my green card to arrive, I was trapped at Airbnb for about 2 years. They actually fired me from my job before my green card arrived, and were kind enough to let me wait a few more months until I had the card in hand before I officially left the company. In those months I pretty much just sat around, enjoyed the nice lunches and dinners, and hung out with coworkers.
I think immigration is great, but I think these employment based visas only work well for employers. They make it easy to hire cheap workers at below market rates, and have them stick around because they can't leave. I think we need real immigration reform, or, better yet, allow companies to hire the best people and make it illegal to discriminate based on nationality. The TN/H1B system is just legalized discrimination.
That is probably the biggest issue with the visa. It's meant to do one thing but abused to be solve many other needs, some of which are needs society really doesn't want to solve (hiring cheaper labor for positions Americans could easily fill)
Attempts to solve this problem should start by shining a light on the many current uses of the visa, figuring out which are worth safeguarding and which are worth eliminating and then discussing how to reform this particular visa (and possibly create others) to address the worthwhile needs.
The US has a giant net influx of inventors (some of whom arrive on a H1B), which presumably creates wealth, jobs, etc.
Isn't this the key part, isn't that graph rather irrelevant to the H1B discussion if it doesn't specifically point out the H1B numbers?
As an aside the H1B is an abusive system that depresses technical wages and oppresses the visa holders who can lose their residency on the whims of large corporations.
I am researching on brain function and mental health. As a grad student I make less than what many Americans get in unemployed benefits. I think you'll be hard pressed to find any American willing to do my job. My mom was denied US visitor Visa several times, I need to travel abroad to see her and this suspension will force me to rethink my future in the USA.
It's basically "I've once worked for a company with H1B, and it was a scam. Ergo all H1Bs are scam, should be eliminated ASAP, and they should go back to their own country!". Sadly, progressives and tolerance ends when it's touching your wallet.
Congress has given way too much power over to the executive, and having the most corrupt real estate developer in a city frankly renowned for the corruption of its real estate developers in charge of the executive should be teaching Congress that they need to actually exercise power rather than just handing it over to whoever is sitting at that desk.
And you think this suspension will help them?
2/ No, there is no systemic difference in compensation for non-U.S. citizens at FAANG and equivalent. Compensation packages are formulaic. No one gets +/- X% just because they are a citizen or immigrant. If Google one day decides to pay H-1B 20% lower, they would lose out on a ton of qualified candidates to, say, Facebook. It'd require the entire conglomerate of FAANG, and whom they consider "peer" companies, to agree to suppress compensation for this to work [1]. It would also require everyone involved in the hiring process, many of whom were immigrants, to be onboard. I simple don't believe companies who compete for top talents would find this tradeoff worth it. I might just be living in a bubble, and am willing to be proven wrong. Just show me the data.
3/ Many successful companies are founded or led by immigrants who now happily call the U.S. their home. These are success stories that the country should celebrate, not chastise. You might think that Larry Page could've founded Google without Sergey Brin. You might be right, or wrong. The fact is we only have reality to observe. We don't have counterfactuals to compare against.
[1] I know about the Steve Jobs no-poach email. That was also 13 years ago.
It's true. People get +X% because they negotiate. I believe citizens/LPRs have much stronger negotiation position: they can apply to companies, which do not consider H1B and they can walk away from any offer without catastrophic consequences even if they are between jobs so they can do "give me a raise or I walk" move at any time and not just when they have a next job lined up. I do not even mention supply and demand effects on the compensation for everyone here because it seems to be a very controversial concept.
> Many successful companies are founded or led by immigrants who now happily call the U.S. their home.
Can you give an example of such a company founded by somebody on one of the visas being discussed here?
Who is happy about H1B Visa suspension? Who was advocating for it?
There's a hell of a lot of problems with hiring practices worldwide, but qualified software engineers are not abundant.
Supply and demand isn't just about what's out there right now, it's about elasticity of both curves. When prices rise, supply increases, and demand decreases.
What you've said indicates that prices are so low that demand is very high, and supply is very low.
Yes, it does take a while, in some fields, for supply to ramp up - but bidding wars for the existing supply are part of the mechanism that increases the prices and signals to people with choice that software engineering (as opposed to, say, finance or corporate law) is the way to go.
There's a pretty strong case to be made the the H1B is specifically designed to create a population of software engineers who are not allowed to respond to market signals that would cause them to stop being software engineers in order to do something else (or perhaps not become a software engineer in the first place).
So back the the original question - compensation. What compensation package were you offering to compete for those rare and highly valuable software engineers you wanted to hire?
Is not this the problem? The vast majority of vacancies I see as well as recruiters offers do not have salary. So I just ignore them. This is also why FAANG has no problem getting candidates and can haze them to their heart's content. Even though they do not list salary too, people have high expectations and apply in huge numbers.
Also, they are not banning H2-A seasonal worker visas, i.e. temporary farm workers, furthering in the fact that this administration does not care about unemployment, given that most jobs lost because COVID-19 are blue collar and lower wage service jobs.
In short, this is a move that appeals to the "America first" supporters, but has little productive value.
You are already contributing to someone's near poverty living if you pay taxes. See social security and unemployment insurance as examples.
For places like these, it's the market's demand for cheap ramen (or whatever) that means the difference between someone living at poverty level and having no livleyhood at all.
H1Bs aren't stupid are they're not exactly desperate for work opportunities either.
FAANG companies are not hiring H1-B's because it's cheaper. I have been a hiring manager at a couple of FAANG companies, and I can tell you it's just not something we cared about.
The only thing I cared about was finding the most qualified people for the team. I had headcount to fill, and it wasn't like that headcount had one salary band marked "For Citizens" and another marked "For H1-Bs". The compensation systems at FAANGs are for the most part formulaic.
If FAANG want cheap engineering labor they outsource and use contractors, simple as. And it's those companies - the Infosys and Wipros of the world - that are arguably are the biggest abusers of H1-B.
Mostly, hard-right Republicans have been advocating for it, but I suspect a lot of labor (who has been raging against H-1B for a while) is happy with the policy of suspending H-1B visas, though quite dissatisfied with the politics, which is why you want hear any public support from them on it. (I favor abolition of H-1B as part of wider immigration reforms, but think that both the immigration suspension in general and the addition of various economic non-immigrant visas, including H-1B, to it in particular are bad policy, in the interest of disclosure.)
I am anti these anti these "skilled/shortage" programs so I can play devil's advocate if you want to understand the position?
My plumber is protected from immigrants trying to "steal" "his" job and I gave to pay him more as a result. But I am a high skilled worker. So my employer can get a skilled visa to replace me. That means my wages etc are depressed. So I am being punished for working hard to upskill and investing and taking the time to find and master a shortage subject. Meanwhile the guys too busy drinking to finish high-school get a monopoly on low skilled positions. What sort of logic is that?
Also, is it morally right to tempt over skilled workers from less developed countries? One reason there are so few doctors in Africa is because they can come here with a bit of work once they graduate. So we generate a perpetual brain drain. A doctor who saves lives in a poor country will come here to do boob jobs and tummy tucks because its nicer here and who doesn't want 100k a year for a 9-5?
I personally don't think there is a "right" answer to how to run an immigration system. But the current system (these visas included) is very corrupt as far as I can tell. So a hit from the (stupid dumb) trump hammer isn't the worst thing, the machine doesnt work anyway imho.
https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/aafs/2013....
I am sympathetic to both sides, but I have no easy solution to propose.
End the damn thing and let's see what happens.
Having been through the gauntlet a few years ago, this might seem like pulling the ladder up behind me. But, I would really like to see the Indian education/employment system diversify out of body-shopping or emigration and into more local innovation and progress. Maybe it won't happen, but something needs to change.
The original purpose was to bring in talent where it could not be found in the US.
I believe this would be great for H1B visa employees and regular employees.
If companies want to offshore they still can and they still do. Companies that currently abuse the system would hate it.
What say you Musk? You already have Canadian citizenship, with the ice caps melting, it's not even that cold up here anymore.
A large proportion of the workforce is east European college students, working 2, maybe 3 jobs, over the summer.
Middle income emigrants nowadays have a choice of multiple countries with a high standard of living and job opportunities, in addition to the many new opportunities that have been created by offshoring and satellite offices.
In the past 4 years I have seen all my software engineer and PhD friends choosing Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Denmark to emigrate. I have discarded the US for potential MBA studies since then too.
Desperate poor refugees will just take whatever country takes them as anything is better than war or genocide, so ironically this does very little to dissuade the most desperate, which I would assume would be one of the primary targets of these xenophobic policies.
It is incredibly ironic that anyone views these moves to restrict freedom as beneficial to "America". They simply create small advantages for some at the expense of everyone else.
AMA (American Medical Association) has successfully lobbied congress to cap residencies at 100K a year, essentially restricting supply. Foreign doctors have to go through a gauntlet of exams, tests, and licenses that keeps market from being flooded with cheaper talent and diluting local doctor salaries.
Software Engineers have failed to unite like this, so the MS+FAANGs and consulting companies have lobbied for free flow of cheap labor under the guise of innovation. There are no board certifications, no licensing exams, and no restrictions on supply. This is why software salaries have been artificially suppressed for two decades.
The AMA is opposed to the current cap, and has been active in both lobbying for increasing Medicare funding for residencies and in building up alternative sources of funding residencies: https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-con...
This seems to be a persistent myth on HN. Do people just assume the AMA's position hasn't changed in 23 years?
Actually, this is a great example. By restricting medical professionals, medical wages went high. Great for them!
But for the rest of America, this SUCKS. Medical expenses are through the roof, care cannot be had without selling all your money and often, specialist shortages mean appointments can be had only 3 months later. The lack of liquidity of healthcare professionals has made American healthcare the WORST in the developed world.
And this is in cities. Healthcare in rural America is pathetic.
Thanks for bringing to the fore how America has forever destroyed lives for the rest by trying to advantage the few.
Software development is not as physically constrained, any moves to restrict supply will automatically lead to offshoring similar to manufacturing.
Licensing does not limit offshoring. Accounting is the best example of this. There are many licensed CFAs in India and Philippines doing outsourced accounting work.
A lot of companies are hiring in Vancouver, Canada for example [1]. If you are a software engineer you want the software industry to grow where you live. Restricting immigration is not how you do that!
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/prope...
Factory workers in 80s and 90s said the same thing. All it did was price American factory workers out of the labor pool completely, moving jobs elsewhere.
American greed and I-got-mine-fuck-you attitude is exactly why US will not remain a global superpower country anymore.
Trump got elected in part on a platform of ending the globalist war machine and reducing the superpower footprint (and the machine has been fighting him on that every step of the way, see: Bolton's new book, where he says the craziest thing Trump did was not attack Iran). Americans overwhelmingly want that reduction. He's going to be the first President since Jimmy Carter four decades prior, to not get the US into a new war. There were only a few aspects of Trump's campaign that were widely popular, one of which was stepping back from being the world's everywhere superpower. Why would Americans want that if their ego is so tied up in it? Because it's not. The US economy is what makes it powerful (going all the way back to the Civil War era), not going around the world playing superpower. Regular Americans are focused on their own lives, making ends meet, not worrying about Libya-Egypt-Turkey-Syria-Russia.
Americans are very clearly sick of policing the world and how much it costs; they're sick of the cost of being spread around the world and involved in every conflict.
Moreover, the current restriction has barely any bite. It only restricts workers who are not in the US from getting a visa until December 2020.
There are structural inequality issues and problems with upward mobility in the US which we urgently need to work on, but those problems are not caused by high skilled immigration, and economic stagnation would just make them worse. Telling the smartest people in the world that America doesn’t want them coming here any more (which is a side-effect of how the Trump administration has handled immigration issues so far, whether or not the intent), makes them a lot less likely to try and come here, and robs our future of the many incredible contributions those people would make in our communities.
I understand the economic fear that many in the US feel. I spent years unemployed and then underemployed after 2007-2008, and it was brutal. But I fear the US turning it’s back on it’s own history as a nation of immigrants, and it’s role as the aspirational “best place in the world” for the ambitious to come live and work, leaves us even poorer.
also a lot veiled xenophobia re: developers from poorer countries which is absolutely disgusting (and it's something that hits me particularly).
Moreover, an individual can collaborate constructively with immigrant coworkers on a personal level, while also advocating politically for a more restrictive immigration system.
There is nothing unethical about that. The role of government is to protect the natural rights and interests of its own constituents.
Educated immigrants grow the US economy and increate the total employment of the country in the long run. That's who is being kept out here.
This isn't an action that's being taken to help fix issues with the H1B visa system. It's simply to stop immigration to the US.
I'm saying we shouldn't hurl epithets at people for commenting on political concerns that affect them, just because we don't like their point of view. There's a difference between "anti-immigrant" and "anti-H1B."
Look up the definition of "bigotry." People on both sides of the issue should be tolerant of reasonable commentary from the other side.
But that said, blanket bans on immigration by the white supremacists and nationalists currently running our government and deciding our immigration are probably not designed to help America or innovation either.
The whole H1-B ban feels like something the admin could throw to their supporters without making too much noise in the press, because it affects very few voters and we have more pressing economic problems than the tech labor shortage.
> Amazon, which received more H-1B visas than any other company in 2019, described the move as “short-sighted” in a statement.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/23/google-amazon-tesla-trump-im...
"For almost three decades, Jared Taylor has been publishing his ideas about race at the American Renaissance magazine and now at a website called AmRen, which is considered a mouthpiece for white supremacist ideology. ... The website is not well-known outside white nationalist circles — but it found an audience in White House adviser Stephen Miller."
Look at the out-of-context quotes given in the first link and decide for yourself whether this is enough to justify a charge of being a white supremecist, even given that the article is explicitly dedicated to working towards that conclusion. Don't just take their word for it. I'll gladly concede that Miller is anti-immigration to the point of being xenophobic, but white supremecist is a huge stretch.
[1] https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/12/stephen-mille...
[2] https://www.splcenter.org/stephen-miller-breitbart-emails
In academics, white supremacy is a term to denote a system of structural racism which privileges white people over others, whether or not there's racial hatred.
You do not have to be white to be a white supremacist.
We can then critically evaluate what the current presidency and their network of advisers and influencers say and do. Some of the rhetoric and actions fall along lines other than white supremacy (e.g. xenophobia, nationalism, etc.), while others are less veiled.
Let's open our eyes, turn a mirror, and ask ourselves some hard questions: do I believe white people are superior? Do I benefit from a system that does and do I think anything should be done about it?
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/16/politics/white-supremacists-c...
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/23/735191317/white-supremacy-and...
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/01/trump-e...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/opinion/trump-white-supre...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/11/el-paso-shoo...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/06/donald-trump-jr-rifle-magazi...
of course. Those are the B2B ugliest enterprise software jobs that not many people really want to do, yet those are necessary jobs. Bad as it is, when/if those jobs move overseas due to the factors like those visa restrictions, i don't think it would make that software and its support for US customers better as overseas situation adds additional complexity and cost, and that in turn may get reflected in the performance of those US customers.
Note: i did almost 8 years on H1B in the previous decade (and before that few years as a remote in 199x), and i think the greatest threat to our cushy jobs here isn't small (85K/year) inflow of immigrants, it is full fledged remote work to which the companies have been pushed by factors like covid and now the work visa restrictions which can as well result in tech jobs leaving the country like manufacturing jobs left it in the past. The work visa program is like a safety pressure valve - shutting it off brings the risk of the thing blowing out, ie. the jobs just going away.
This type of baseless rhetoric is rooted in identity politics and underlies the current division in the US.
Directly from the Whitehouse Proclamation[0]:
"American workers compete against foreign nationals for jobs in every sector of our economy, including against millions of aliens who enter the United States to perform temporary work. Temporary workers are often accompanied by their spouses and children, many of whom also compete against American workers. Under ordinary circumstances, properly administered temporary worker programs can provide benefits to the economy. But under the extraordinary circumstances of the economic contraction resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak, certain nonimmigrant visa programs authorizing such employment pose an unusual threat to the employment of American workers."
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...
If we can't do the job ourselves, we shouldn't have the job.
It can be frustrating/demoralizing to American software developers as well, when they go to interview for a job, to see they are competing with an absolute flood of Indian and Chinese H1Bs. Then, when all of your interviewers are Chinese and Indian as well and you don't get the job, you sort of feel like the victim of favoritism and that you've been pushed out of your own country's industry by foreign nationals.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23615984.
A lot of non-H1Bs feel that they are getting shafted by the H1B program as well. How can those frustrations be articulated without it being considered "racial flamebait"?
No matter how you phrase it, if you as a non-H1B articulate frustrations with H1Bs and/or the H1B program, someone replying is going to mention the country/race that comprises 3/4ths of all H1Bs.
These Indians, Chinese, Russians, Brazilian developers are more willing to grind Leetcode and study until insanity (solving 300 Leetcode problems is not uncommon) and will kill majority of interviews out there.
They came here to study hard, from 3rd world countries, and they did it.
Study hard, work hard, be smart, and we welcome you to the arena.
Oh and by the way, this is not about race, because I've found plenty US born Chinese devs that suck and lazy.
Somehow, private companies have convinced a large share of the US public that a person who opposes corporate control over the immigration system (and an immigrant's life)is somehow "anti-immigrant". It is one of the great PR coups of our era - though, like many campaigns of disinformation and slander, it did get an assist from a number of genuinely anti-immigrant jackasses who vocally criticized the program.
It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
But even if not. Solution is simple: you reapply.
Then apply again then again and again. One of those days you’ll hit non broken English interviewer, and you’ll realize whether you are actually good enough or you still need to work and study harder.
- jealous American student
Also note that most interviews are known to be more extreme than the actual job needs: e.g. leetcode is the interview; random CSS manipulation is the actual job. I wonder how hard would it be to teach a top 15% high schooler in America to do that stuff.
NB I'm pro-mid/low skill immigration. But these H1B conversations are intractable without first pointing out that, if the goal is low/mid skill immigration, then we need to fight for a new visa class aside from the H1B.
> the real origins of the Immigration Act of 1990s and the H1-B visa classification [...] American industry and Big Science convinced official Washington to put in place a series of policies that had little to do with any demographic concerns. Their aims instead were to keep American scientific employers from having to pay the full US market price of high skilled labor. They hoped to keep the US research system staffed with employees classified as “trainees,” “students,” and “post-docs” for the benefit of employers. The result would be to render the US scientific workforce more docile and pliable to authority and senior researchers by attempting to ensure this labor market sector is always flooded largely by employer-friendly visa holders who lack full rights to respond to wage signals in the US labor market.
> The correlate of these objectives were shifts in orientation toward building bridges to Asia and especially China, so that senior scientists, technologists, and educators could capitalize on technological, employment, and business opportunities from Asian (and particularly Chinese) expansion. This, in turn, would give US scientific employers and researchers access to the products of Asian educational systems which stress drill, rote learning, obedience, and test driven competition while giving them relief from US models which comparatively stress greater creativity, questioning,independence, and irreverence for authority.
Unless there's an effort that's made to ensure there's a more diverse representation, groups tend to hire people similar to themselves. Unchecked, that can lead to some teams all having the same national origin.
That's an appropriate use of was. The US hasn't been a Capitalist nation in nearly a century.
It's a heavily regulated mixed economic system. That transition largely occurred from roughly 1930 to 1980, and the tsunami of unnecessary regulations have continued to rapidly pile up by the thousands ever since.
Free market? Ha. Sweden is more of a free market than the US. The US has a very large market with some free market remnants; the big economic outcomes that enables is what confuses people into thinking the US is still a bastion of Capitalism (while it rapidly speeds toward the French model of economic stagnation with persistently falling growth rates).
EDIT: Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a situation where many engineers on HN are H1B workers themselves or start-up owners/affiliates who benefit and profit off of H1B workers so it's obvious that I'm against the tide here. For all the haters, tell me why my company needed to hire a large group of QA engineers to do manual GUI testing when this does not really require much more than a high school GED, if even. Honestly, look deeply past the corporate lobbyist agendas and your own personal biases and tell me H1B policies are not effectively a ploy to get around cheap labor. Yes, they are great when used properly to find rare and top talent but anybody who has worked in the industry knows this is rarely the case.
And the H1B will also take their monetary capital (above average) and work potential somewhere else.
Which means, one lesser person paying rent, one lesser person buying local produce, one lesser person buying American cars, one lesser person paying taxes, one lesser internet connection, one lesser cellphone connection, one lesser purchaser of iphone.
Not to mention, the loss of productive work done, years worth of training that makes up that individual all lost.
How many jobs do you gather were lost by removing a productive individual now?
Job demand is elastic. If tomorrow X of all immigrants who held a job in the US left, that doesn't mean X jobs open up. You're losing X customers and Y investors where Y is a subset of X. Jobs are not a zero-sum game and H1B does not exist just to take away jobs because inevitably some of those people will go on to create more jobs and companies in the US.
Again, I will repeat: The lump of labor fallacy is a fallacy for a reason.
You realize that just because something is named a "fallacy" doesn't mean it is one. Economists have bias too and are often employed/used by lobbyists to sway analysis.
All that aside, that's a one-time cost. H1B workers can be kept in limbo for years, since employers can apply for their green cards (or not) at their discretion.
> The salary has to be in the same range as the other workers in the same position
What constitutes "the same position"? Call the H1B a "systems analyst" instead of a "software engineer", and voila, you've got a much lower paid position, even if the job duties are the same in practice.
> why would big tech so this if average Joe is qualified and could do the Job?
I'm not a fan of arguments of the form "why did X do Y if Z?" because answering them requires knowing unknowable motives and other factors that your opponent couldn't possibly be privy to. But since we're using those arguments, I've got one for you: If H1Bs are more expensive, why did Disney famously lay off huge numbers of IT workers and make them train their H1B replacements in the process? Kind of hard to argue that they couldn't find suitable American workers when they were already working there.
I am highly skeptical of this claim as well as the fact that relocation is paid for average H1B worker. Your experience might be typical for top paying SV tech companies but not the local municipal state government that is hiring H1Bs for manual GUI testing.
In any case, most H1B workers are hired multiple levels below their experience level so companies are paying less for more experience. And given that your average Indian H1B cannot jump to another job for many years due to the GC/EAD queue, they are typically coerced into putting way more hours than Americans workers that understand labor laws so companies are still profiting off of the wage/hr imbalance after the initial fixed relocation cost.
1. The H1B is unethical because it intentionally brain-drains countries.
Why is it good for the U.S. to take the most educated (and wealthy) foreigners from their countries? Doesn't this hurt these countries?
2. The H1B is unethical because it advantages large corporations and rich immigrants over small businesses and locals.
Small companies can't generally hire using H1B, so they lose out on the scam. The immigrants are disproportionately the wealthiest people from their countries. By buying expensive educations, their parents are buying them access to the U.S. Rich corporations helping rich people by exploiting others.
3. The H1B is unethical because companies commit fraud using it without consequence.
It's an open secret in the tech world that the H1B (and other visas) are being used to lower costs (through lower salaries, increasing supply, and coerced retention) and not to hire for roles that could not otherwise be filled by locals. This is fraud and yet there is little to no enforcement.
99% of the H1B jobs could all be filled locally. It would just drive up costs for large corporations like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tesla.
that’s a bold claim. do you have a any sources to back that up?
also, just because someone that is only interested in the financial aspect does a bootcamp, does not mean that they can immediately ramp up and do the work someone else has a formal education in and has been doing for 10 years. that’s not how life works.
i'd rather advocate "innovation first", and the "america first" part will follow, but without the discriminatory baggage.
personally, i think we should abolish h1b's in favor of wider, streamlined immigration. bring all the innovators here, up and down the income spectrum. open labor markets and let them work to sort out value and allocation, rather than restricting them through political means and effectively only allowing large companies to take advantage of the arbitrage of all that.
that would actually make america great again.