The entire situation is a shitshow. I know multiple families who immigrated to the US on H-1B for tech jobs 20 years ago but are still waiting for residency. Green cards are legally available but USCIS just won't process their applications, citing lack of resources. Now as their kids – who were as young as one year old when they came here – turn 21 they are being deported to their "home country", that they have zero connection with.
There is no DACA/DREAM equivalent for these people even though they did everything 100% legally and have greatly contributed to the US economy. There are estimated to be >960,000 people currently stuck in this limbo, mostly Asian and mostly in tech (https://www.fwd.us/news/per-country-cap-reform-priority-bill...).
This is a terrible situation. As the kid of an H1-B I can’t imagine being in that predicament.
At the same time, this is what happens when the basis of your immigration system is “legislation by hostage taking.” Ever wonder why the H1B says “temporary” status on paper, and you have to pretend like you plan to go back home at some point? (“Dual intent?”) That’s because it’s because it was never designed to be a permanent immigration system. No permanent immigration system designed for that purpose would let you build your life in the country first and then decide only a decade later whether you’ll be allowed to stay. It’s absurd.
Since the 1960s the executive branch has been doing with fragile regulation or executive action things that it can’t achieve consensus to do through Congress. The 1990s reforms that created the H1B did nothing more than paper over the most egregious shortcomings of using a temporary worker visa as the main vehicle for permanent immigration. DACA is a prime example of what happens when your political system is so broken that you have to use executive action because you can’t get concensus in Congress. And it shows how fragile that can be.
Folks considering immigrating to America should understand: H1B is not meant for permanent immigration. Proceed at your own risk. Maybe try the more sensible immigration regimes in Australia or Canada.
> Ever wonder why the H1B says “temporary” status on paper, and you have to pretend like you plan to go back home at some point? (“Dual intent?”)
As I understand it the "dual intent" means you don't have to pretend you plan to go back home at some point. After I switched to an O-1 from an H-1B for a new job I was advised not to leave the country while my green card application was in progress because applying for a green card could potentially be grounds for denying entry at the border on a visa like the O-1 without the dual intent.
No, dual intent means that you can have the non-immigrant intent required for the H1B while doing something that would cause the government to infer immigrant intent, like applying for a green card: https://www.dekirby.net/library/dual-intent-article.cfm
> The concept of dual intent is a legal fiction that allows an immigration officer to grant a nonimmigrant visa or admit a foreign national into the United States even though the visa may allow for the holder to seek permanent residency status. This means that a foreign national may enter the United States on a nonimmigrant visa that may allow him to seek a green card in the future or, alternatively, he has already filed a petition for a green card but is seeking to enter the United States on a nonimmigrant visa.
The distinction is critical. At all times when you hold an H1B, you’re saying “I intend to go back when my H1B expires,” because that’s required by the visa. All you have with “dual intent” is the government’s executive grace that they won’t consider it to be a signal of immigrant intent when you apply for a Green card.
> and you have to pretend like you plan to go back home at some point? (“Dual intent?”)
This is backwards. Dual intent means that you do not have to "pretend"; having an immigrant-intent, expressed by things like applying for permanent residency (marrying a US citizen), does not invalidate an H1-B in the same way that it invalidates an O-1, TN, etc.
Anecdotally, many emigrants (a dozen or so) that I know are now choosing to go to Canada. The US has lost a significant amount of its shine over the last few years for them, and their skilled labor is going elsewhere.
It is easier to deal when one considers alternative of returning to India. One can get a job in IT in some tech hub back home in India, However everything that people find commonly available in US/Canada for middle class or sometimes even lower than middle class is either not available or just reserved for 0.1 percent of ultra rich.
I have had distant relatives earning in tune of million dollars a year dying for a need of hospital bed. Plenty of people in India who are not Chinese level rich but still well-off and looking to move to Canada from India. They are not in hope of better earning but just better living standard with the money they earned in India.
Having said that there is thin slice of situations where one can be better off in India. One of which is having lot of domestic staff. So someone can have a full time worker at home who can cook, clean, and take care of kids for about same money that will get you a weekly maid service in USA in a month.
Yeah, it's really unconscientious to have a system where the stakes are so high behave so unpredictably. People make important decisions based on how things are supposed to work. Whatever the "correct" parameters for immigration are, the system really should behave predictably.
What bothers me about this sentiment is that many people will interpret it as a call to make illegal immigration harder rather than a call to make legal immigration easier.
> This is even more sad when contrasted with the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border.
There's no illegal immigration crisis at the southern border. There are occasional refugee crises and most critically a mistreatment crisis (the latter exacerbated by the people that have, for political purposes, also invented the myth of an illegal immigration crisis), but actual illegal immigration has been low, not a crisis, for some time.
> We are rewarding criminal entry into the country
Uh, no, there are lots of things you can make colorable arguments about about no-visa entry on the southern border, but that it is being rewarded right now is not one of them.
The wait times at the border service centers are lower than the west coast USCIS service centers for green cards, so I don’t think you can say that is the issue here. In addition, there’s a complex system with many centers over the US that deal with immigration and visas (and embassies in particular for the latter), which depend on what you are doing and where you are filing from.
Why raid other kingdoms for their most productive subjects, when you can use your economic and cultural might to make them want to come and work for you?
The problem with your statement is that the people being discussed here are ones who have applied for a green card, and already been approved. Their application has been vetted, they've proven that they serve a need in the economy, and background checks have been completed. However, the number of annual green cards have been capped, so even though it's approved, it cannot be given to them yet.
The fact that they are working on an H-1B visa is an embarrassing hack to make up for the fact that the US has made a promise to these families that they haven't been able to keep for decades.
Actually, the "background check shows they are not a terrorist" is the step that hasn't been done yet. That happens during the final step prior to receiving the green card.
If that was the intent of the law then why does the law allow people past the 6 year cap to keep renewing H1B forever if they're waiting for a green card?
Aside from some unusual visa rules, the only permanent immigration route Congress has created is family reunification. Congress has never created a skilled worker system for people intended to immigrate permanently. H1B is a temporary worker visa that has been abused to serve that role, but that wasn’t the intent: https://www.salisbury.edu/administration/academic-affairs/fa...
> The H1B is a temporary visa. The alien must be coming to temporarily fill a position that may, or may not in itself be temporary. The employer must attest that the alien's services are needed temporarily. The letter of appointment and other documents must stipulate the temporary nature of the appointment.
There are EB green cards, created by Congress, and intended for skilled workers to immigrate.[1]
Yes, you can apply (or be sponsored for ones that require a sponsor) for one without having an H1B or even being in the country. These are completely orthogonal to non-immigrant visas.
Yes, but the problem is that not the EBGC per se but the fact that many companies do not sponsor them for foreign workers but only for the workers who are already in the country and on a nonimmigrant work visa.
EBGC, not H1B is a pathway for immigration for a skilled worker yet, because of the unethical practice of many tech companies, many people even on HN honestly believe that one cannot possibly get an EBGC without working some period of time on H1B by law.
> many companies do not sponsor them for foreign workers but only for the workers who are already in the country and on a nonimmigrant work visa
Yeah, because the immigrant visas take time - at least a year if you aren't Indian or Chinese, far longer if you are. What's a company to do with that employee in the meanwhile? What if the company doesn't have offices and/or isn't set up to hire in that employee's home country? What if the employee's team is all US-based and they don't want to deal with the timezone differences? And if you're suggesting "sponsor, get the green card, then hire" why would a company spend all that time and money for someone who doesn't even currently work for them? What's the benefit?
Pre-Covid, most companies simply didn't do remote work on any meaningful scale. And some jobs, even highly paid ones, can't be done remote - doctors or surgeons, for instance. Of course companies were going to want that employee working at their US office until their permanent residence was approved. And if not a work visa, how else was that going to happen?
Companies have no problem hiring people with degrees even though getting a degree takes more time than an immigrant visa so I don't buy the time explanation. Some companies don't even have a problem with sponsoring an H1B visa for foreigners, which takes time too.
As to your question about benefit: for every I140 petition the company claims that the immigrant worker is the only one available, there are no Americans that can possibly do this job so, if they are not lying, it's the obvious benefit as they get someone to do the job nobody else can.
> Companies have no problem hiring people with degrees even though getting a degree takes more time than an immigrant visa so I don't buy the time explanation
Unless you're suggesting that companies give offer letters to freshmen and then hire them upon graduation 4 years later (which I don't think is very common) this bears no comparison to what we're discussing. Next you'll be telling me companies are happy to wait for employees to be conceived, born, and go through primary and secondary school too, so why can't they wait for an EB green card?
> which takes time too
But far less time - O(months) rather than O(years). If the worker is already in the country working on another visa, then it's even less time. And there are no per-country caps to throw a wrench in the works.
> it's the obvious benefit as they get someone to do the job nobody else can.
That's useless if it'll take 1-20 years (depending on the country of birth of the employee) for them to actually be able to work for you. If they relied solely on the EB system they would have 1) no American to do the work and 2) the person they found not allowed to do the work in a reasonable amount of time (and no, 1+ year is not reasonable for a new hire to start).
Well, you did not explain how the time to obtain visa matters so I don't know what to say. Companies do give offers to interns to return in a year or two routinely, the very same companies engage in the H1B. You can get a GC in a year easily, how is this different?
>But far less time - O(months) rather than O(years).
Did you mean it takes years to get a green card and months to get an H1B? (your O notation makes no sense, O(x) means that lim O(x)/x -> const when x->inf). Say you want to hire an H1B from abroad right now. In the best case he or she can start on October 1st 2022, a year from now. Or lose the 2022 lottery and then the next date is October 1st 2023, two years, and the 2023 lottery is not guaranteed too so it can take multiple years. On opposite with the green card you have fixed timeframes, it takes about a year to get a EBGC even through AOS, it's faster through CP as a foreigner would go and it used to be even faster before the whole covid disfunction.
>That's useless if it'll take 1-20 years (depending on the country of birth of the employee) for them to actually be able to work for you.
Then they should not lie on their application, because they literally affirm that it's immensely useful for them to get an immigration visa for the foreign worker they petitioned for. I think the DOJ is actually investigating FB right now for exactly this.
> you did not explain how the time to obtain visa matters so I don't know what to say
If I hire someone I'd like them to start working sooner rather than later. I don't understand why that needs to be explained.
> it takes about a year to get a EBGC even through AOS,
If you aren't born in India or China. That rules out a good 1/3rd of the world's population. And even a year is a really long time to wait for a new hire to start.
Fair point about the H-1B lottery. A smart company would do both simultaneously for a non-India/China born employee - EB GC and H-1B (in case the GC is delayed for some reason) - they're hiring from abroad.
> Then they should not lie on their application, because they literally affirm that it's immensely useful for them to get an immigration visa for the foreign worker they petitioned for.
Where's the lie? An Indian or Chinese-born worker sponsored for an EB green card today isn't going to get it for years. If they don't have a GC or work visa, they can't work for you.
>If I hire someone I'd like them to start working sooner rather than later. I don't understand why that needs to be explained.
Everyone would sure love to have immediately available workforce but I don't see how it's an insurmountable obstacle. Apart from the intern return offer, it's pretty common in some industries to have non-competes and many businesses wait for a year for almost every employer they hire to be able to start working. You just need to organize your business for the labor market realities and not your wants. Skilled labor market is rarely so liquid as to get workers without significant waits. In every firm where I worked there had been vacancies opened for years. Look at any FAANG, they have hundreds and thousands vacancies open permanently.
>If you aren't born in India or China. That rules out a good 1/3rd of the world's population. And even a year is a really long time to wait for a new hire to start.
Yes, it's because there are many people from China and India going through the F1->OPT->H1->GC pipeline. Nobody forces you to hire from China and India, plenty of people in Europe and the rest of Asia would love to move to America for work, experienced people too, not fresh grads.
>Where's the lie?
You said it's useless if the GC takes "1-20" years, most GCs take at least 1 year so they are lying when they say it's useful. Alternatively, your assertion of usefulness might not be realistic.
Yes, I was referring to that as “unusual.” But the EB green card is a good template for what a skilled worker immigration pathway would look like if we had one.
"Non-immigrant visa" means "getting this visa doesn't make you an immigrant". Which is true for the B2 (it makes you a tourist) and the H-1B (it makes you a temporary worker).
It shouldn't be confused with "intent". If you show intent to immigrate when applying for a B2, you can be denied. That's not the case for an H-1B.
I don’t read it as realistic. H1B is clearly spelled out in the law books as a “temporary worker visa,” but people have treated it as a path to permanent residency. What was offered on paper was an inch, and the expectations were built into a mile. (And to be fair, that is the fault of everyone involved, from the government to employers, but also immigrants who didn’t read the fine print.)
“Dual intent” is a legal fiction that was created to allow people apply for green cards while still pretending they have the non-immigrant intent required for the H1B visa. Dual intent allows the H1B visa to be used as a first step to permanent immigration in practice, but it’s still a “no guarantees” temporary worker visa according to the letter of the law. Congress never actually created a true permanent immigration visa for skilled workers.
As someone who has gone through this process let me summarize some of the issues this always raises:
1. Green cards have a per-country cap (of 7%) but there is no per-country cap for work visas. This creates a bottleneck since India has the same quota as French Polynesia;
2. Applications for work visas and green cards from low-value employers, specifically IT body shops (eg Tata) are clogging up the system. Relatively few of both of these categories are actually being given to high0-value employers like the Big Tech companies;
3. H1B visas are for 3 years and can be renewed once, for a total of 6 years. After this there needs to be a gap of a year. But if you have a pending green card application you can stay indefinitely;
4. Demand exceeds supply (being the annual quota), which leads to a lottery situation. One of the few things the previous disastrous administration proposed that I actually agree with was the proposal to prioritize work visas based on compensation rather than handing them out randomly. This would help combat the body shops in (2);
5. The bottleneck in (1) means people from certain countries, most notably India, means employees may be in the queue for decades. This is actually an advantage for those aforementioned body shops. it is a modern form of indentured servitude. The employee can't leave nor complain about conditions because then they lose their application and have to return home;
6. This can go on so long that children of said employees age out of the system before their parents are granted a green card. If when granted a green card you have children under the age of 18 they automatically become permanent residents. After that, they don't. This can mean that children who turn 18 may need to leave the US and return to a country they have possibly never known. This is barbaric and inhumane;
7. Before the pandemic there were proposals to alleviate this situation by removing the per-country cap. The pandemic stalled this and it seems to be dead. I personally think this was the wrong solution as it means we would spend the next 3-10 years where only backlog applications would get processed. As such, it's likely to be met with resistance from other immigrant groups. We need a better solution; and
8. If a person is granted a green card and has a spouse and 2 children that counts as 4 in terms of the quota for employment-based green cards, both in total and per country of birth. This too is problematic.
Re: 4 – the problem with compensation-based H-1B prioritization is that the skills gap in the country doesn't correlate very well with salaries. A hospital in rural Kentucky that needs immigrant doctors and nurses to serve a critical need to the community isn't going to be able to compete with a Silicon Valley startup that is burning through VC dollars and offering new grads mid-six figure salaries.
This is a solvable problem. There are already categories for different occupations. You could put nurses (for example) in their own category with their own quota.
Rand Paul, of all people, actually had a pretty reasonable alternative to the 2019 bill [1] that took a different approach: nurses were simply excluded from the annual quota.
That is a band-aid fix, not a solution. Sure Congress can pass a bill to exclude nurses from the quota. Then do they pass another bill when the shortage is over, to prevent abuse? What if the year after there is a shortage of welders? Should companies rely on Congressional action every few months and for every profession?
That's not necessarily true. In determining priority categories, Congress is free to delegate that power to USCIS, the Secretary of Labor or another official or agency.
It's worth nothing that all H1Bs are technically priority occupations. Part of the process is to receive a labor certification that demonstrates you, as an employer, were unable to fill the position with a US citizen or permanent resident.
That itself is a whole can of worms because the system is heavily gamed to ensure that many such positions remain technically unfulfillable locally. For example, advertising such jobs where people are unlikely to find them and apply for them (eg in newspapers).
Now for big tech jobs, that need is genuine. For the body shops, it isn't. Despite attempts in the system to ensure such jobs are paid a fair market wage, they are not. The only people who take them are those Indian nationals who are so desperate to emigrate to the United States that they are willing to endure pseudo-indentured servitude for possibly decades if they and their family can have a better life.
That's a noble goal to be sure but we shouldn't enable employers to take advantage of them so. Even worse, in doing so, they're costing genuinely good jobs in big tech because of the lottery system.
You're right, and since the H1-B has effectively been "captured" by west coast tech companies, there are only a small handful of Senators that care to really fix it.
Perhaps the best band-aid fix is to add H1-B quotas by state, because then you might end up getting enough support throughout the nation for an actual solution. The military industrial complex has a lesson for us to learn?
If there are more prospective immigrants each year who are qualified for US jobs paying (say) $250k+ than the total number of available slots, that’s a pretty clear and unambiguous signal that the cap should be raised. Really I don’t see a reason to have any cap whatsoever on immigrants with that level of earning potential as long as appropriate anti-abuse measures are put in place.
I personally don't see this as a problem. If you cannot afford to pay for the workers you need then something is wrong with your business model and you need to fix it or the community (read:voters) need to deal with not having your service. In the case of a rural hospital it's a combination of several things within the US healthcare system being completely messed up, but shoving H-1B workers in to plaster over the problems is not the solution we need.
The hospital in rural Kentucky needs a physical person in KY
Silicon Valley does not, I am not sure why SV would not just hire the programmer in India, instead of bringing them to Silicon Valley, infact I am pretty sure we are going to see that more and more in the next few years
As far as 4 goes, ratios are a better solution to the body shop problem. There’s no need to even limit the number of work visas granted so long as the companies that are able to hire foreigners also hire the requisite number of Americans in similar positions.
There are a number of other advantages to this too. For one, it helps immigrants integrate better the more Americans they end up working with. The current system can result in silos where immigrants mostly work with other immigrants. And it helps Americans to work alongside skilled workers by giving them increased learning opportunities. It also works better for lower-paid skilled positions like nurses and scientists who don’t have to compete with higher-paid tech workers for visas.
I’m okay with giving an unlimited number of visas (background checks required) to any company that employs at least 70% Americans in each salary band. At worst, it creates an incentive to hire unqualified Americans just to get access to foreign talent, which is still a win for this country.
> This can mean that children who turn 18 may need to leave the US and return to a country they have possibly never known. This is barbaric and inhumane;
I would rather suggest to change
> 3. H1B visas are for 3 years and can be renewed once, for a total of 6 years. [...] But if you have a pending green card application you can stay indefinitely;
to "You didn't get a green card in this timeframe? Bad luck - go home." This would solve the mentioned problem with children and also the mentioned problem
> 5. [...] it is a modern form of indentured servitude. The employee can't leave nor complain about conditions because then they lose their application and have to return home;
I know. I am criticizing OP on suggesting that it is not hard to immigrate to the USA. As if it is even a worthwhile option to suggest that people leave their families and marry Americans.
H1B visas should also have a per-country cap. Having a within-country male gender cap would also be useful, to encouraging overall equality and diversity in the immigration intake.
And yet, somehow, you seem to be saying that inflicting foreign immigrants who may or may not choose to make any effort to assimilate at all is somehow not "barbaric and inhumane" treatment to the millions of existing US citizens (and workers) who aren't particularly thrilled with having their cultures "fundamentally transformed"... Only natives born of at least one legal US citizen parent have a right to be here, no one else does.
> They're free to return home at any time, they abused this visa system and are now expecting to be rewarded for it.
The system allows them to apply for permanent residency while on H1B and stay indefinitely while the application is pending. How is doing what the system specifically allows abusing the system? If this was actually intended as a 3-6 year visa program, you wouldn't be allowed to apply for permanent residency and stay indefinitely.
That the backlog is so long that it's essentially impossible to know if you'll be able to get permanent residency for you and your children before they become old enough that they can no longer stay because of your status is kind of crazy. It depends on how many people die or otherwise abandon their applications before you (if there's a deep enough recession and you can keep your job, you might shave a lot of years off the wait). It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that if your parents applied for permanent residency when you were 5 and it took 15 years, you'll have status, but if it takes 16 years (i think the actual relevant age is 21, but adjust in case it's 18), you won't. There really should be some transfer of status to these children, at least if they've been in the process for at least 5 years.
One set of my grand parents immigrated here in the mid 1900s, but it was easier then, you showed up at Ellis/Angel Island and weren't in an excluded group and that was it. There wasn't a decade+ long wait if you happen to come from a country with lots of people who want to be here. For many of the family residencies, if you were born in Mexico, current priority dates are from the 1990s. I can't imagine asking a sibling to move to be closer to me and them saying OK, I'll move in 25 years or so.
If the H1-B is not meant to be a path to citizenship, why are people on H1-Bs allowed to apply for green cards? Other ‘temporary’ work visas do not allow for this
You are wrong. "Dual intent" of H1B means that you can get it while having an application for a green card on your behalf (thus expressing an immigration intent). In general nonimmigrant visas are denied with such an intent but H1B and few others can still be issued.
But you can apply for a green card with any visa or no visa at all, there is no visa requirements on a green card application (I140 if we are talking about EBGC specifically) what so ever.
> This can mean that children who turn 18 may need to leave the US and return to a country they have possibly never known. This is barbaric and inhumane;
Why don’t the parents move back with their 18 year old so they are not alone?
People move to countries they do not know all the time.
If you come to the US on an H1B and a teenager it will also happen
Was it inhumane to bring the teenager to a country they did not know?
> If when granted a green card you have children under the age of 18 they automatically become permanent residents. After that, they don't. This can mean that children who turn 18 may need to leave the US and return to a country they have possibly never known. This is barbaric and inhumane;
I disagree with you, it put the young adult (it’s 21 and not a 18 I think) in a complicated situation. However H1–B was never voted to be a path towards permanent residency but as a three-years work visa, the parents should take this into account from the beginning
First, the H1B visa in particular is classified by law and by USCIS as an immigrant intent visa. That is to say that it's not incompatible with having intention to immigrate to the United States. Put another way: this specific case was thought about and included in the visa system so you can't argue it wasn't the intent. It explicitly was.
Second, there's no reason why someone should be in work visa limbo for 20 years. That's by choice (of the US government). Having made that choice, you're somewhat responsible for the consequences. That includes not deporting people to a country they may have no memory of and may not even speak the language.
This same issue is relevant to DACA recipients (aka "Dreamers") who are typically children who through no choice of their own were brought to the United States as young children and know nowhere else as their home. It is cruel and unreasonable to deport such people to countries they have never known.
As an immigrant (first in the UK after than in the US, followed by return to the UK), I can say the annoying things about different systems are unpredictability and long delays. I agree that it is up to every country to set up the rules who gets to stay and under what conditions, but they need to be clear and predictable. I have found the UK system reasonable (although expensive) with a standard path of 5 years of working visa, followed by the indefinite leave to remain (green card) and then citizenship application (after another year). My impression of the US process was much worse with year long queues depending on nationality, quotas that are taken in first few days etc, and rules being changed on the hoof (in the last administration). I think that creates a really bad climate for people. And I do think the countries are responsible for making sure that migrants are treated fairly with clear well understood rules that are not changed unpredictably. For me this was one of the reason to go back to the UK as I didn't want to jump again through all the immigration hoops in the USA.
Tech firms have "adapted"(*) to capital gains taxes through using tax havens and they will surely adopt to declining green cards.
As I am applying to US software consultancy firms as a remote dev I see more or less 80% of them will explicitly mention that they have an office in Eastern Europe or in India. I have heard stories of managers on H1b asked to open and manage offices back in their home countries.
Industrial production has successfully left United States for bad policies and better opportunities. So will the tech scene.
This is directly contrary to my experience. I see no evidence of a shift towards international talent, even with remote work, if anything I’ve seen the exact opposite.
Walking around Sunnyvale over 20 years ago, I expected Silicon Valley to diffuse, at least across the US. If anything, tech is more centralized in the Bay than ever. Tech isn't even diffuse across the US or California, never mind people who speak another language 10 time zones away.
We'll see post-covid, the push towards remote among line level workers is very strong, but the most "diffuse" possibility I see is that each region ends up with its own tech hub. Denver, Austin, New York, etc. There is very little chance that these will ever fully replace SV though, but they let tech hire people who would refuse to move to SV.
The time zone issue you mentioned is the real killer. Working across time zones is hard. It's easy to dismiss them until you've had to work with a Ukrainian team who is a solid 9 hours off phase with you.
You have more first hands experience than I have as an offshore remote dev.
My experience is that to immigrate to America you have to study there first or be incredibly talented so that businesses have confidence to bring you there. After hundreds of applications to American companies that hires for fully remote roles, I got 3-4 replies on my application.
One of them asked me to reach out to their offshore offices rather than HQ at states. And that is from a funded startup with a 7 figure investment.
Job 1: Knowing a very niche domain (that I happened to work on as a serious hobby for a couple of years) and lucking into a startup that works in that very domain (not really replicable).
Job 2: Applying to a startup which interviewed solely based on algorithmic puzzles, and apparently acing all of them.
Job 3: Knowing a fairly uncommon technology (Scala) and getting into a startup which had a super-hard time hiring Scala devs in Bay Area.
None of which is directly replicable, but I guess the more you develop your skills, the more likely you're to get in one way or another. I didn't even have a github account back then FWIW.
I work in a niche that is so niche that I couldn't find a full time job. So I work on a per project basis of automation, data analytics (pandas) and general purpose programming & API development (Python). So, trying to pivot to a more full service role of Data Analytics or SQL/Python Developer.
I have been doing freelancing for 5 years now. Not sure how can I develop my skills any further, unless I just study statistics for data modeling and build various projects which I am already doing right now.
Project building has its limitations. My hobby projects wouldn't scale up to a position where I have to learn and apply anything that is intermediate-ish. I can look into learning cloud services but I will never get good at it as I don't have a product based on that.
Edit: I might sound I am making up problems and I am a defeatist person but I am working on web applications as I have nothing else to do. But those projects have very little chances to be a showcase of my skillset as they are not scaled to use cloud services effectively and complicated SQL db.
> So, trying to pivot to a more full service role of Data Analytics or SQL/Python Developer.
I'm not sure if any of those fields are in enough demand for US companies to look for people overseas. Perhaps one exception (that I know of) is Data Engineers - there's a huge move in Data Engineering to use Python. Perhaps you could try specializing in that area.
Holy cow, that makes so much sense now. This is exactly what happened. I posted on whowantstoget hired in YC. I got 4 emails are 2 of them are wanting get data engineers.
Can you give me some pointers though? My response emails was pretty bad. I assumed -
1. Data engineering roles are mid level roles
2. Those roles require extensive hands on experience
3. There isn't junior data engineering role
4. They don't often any hire remotely
5. You can't reasonbly self teach yourself
6. It is one of the those roles where you NEED atleast CS bachelors.
I saw in DE subreddit those who are struggling to hire DEs should hire a python/sql dev than teach them DE on the job. But I am not sure how it would work out.
> Industrial production has successfully left United States for bad policies
Industrial production is a Chinese farmer screwing bolts on an assembly line for $3 an hour after the harvest is done. Software is (among other things) soliciting and reviewing specifications and then coding it up with dependency injection, unit/e2e/integration testing, interface contracts and so forth.
An assembly line is the same thing over and over, software is different for each spec.
I think this is just a stupid description of industrial production (as well as software development.) I think silly to assume that assembly-line workers in China are somehow more stupid than their counterparts in the U.S. (which I think is what you were hinting at by describing a Chinese farmer, though I’m also confused as to why you think farmers are particularly stupid too.) Indeed in the U.S. most more educated people have more opportunities whereas in China factory work can be a better choice leading to certain higher qualities of workers. Though obviously the average education standard in China is lower.
Industrial production involves expensive inputs, energy, the procurement and maintenance of large, very expensive machines, and some skilled and unskilled labour. Many of those do better with scale and within the borders of a single country. Perhaps it was once true that the only advantage of Chinese manufacturing was cheaper labour, but I don’t think that is true anymore. Why would so many hi-tech devices be manufactured in China? The margins are often large so they could be produced in richer countries, and labour is cheaper in other countries too so perhaps costs could be reduced elsewhere too. I think the answer lies in all the existing expertise in, and production of high tech goods and components in (certain parts of) China.
> Though obviously the average education standard in China is lower.
It is higher that in the most of the West, US included. I have not yet seen a single worker struggling with basic arithmetics the way even university grads in the US do.
> The margins are often large so they could be produced in richer countries, and labour is cheaper in other countries too so perhaps costs could be reduced elsewhere too.
In fact, skilled assembly labour in South China was hovering in between 10000 and 15000 CNY (without pension/insurance/provident fund payments,) the later is higher than the price of factory labour in the US in flyover states.
Skilled assemblers are becoming an increasingly scarce resource. People work for 5-10 years on such job, and then leave for something (or increasingly somewhere) better.
Indians, and Bengalis are importing Chinese engineers in droves these days. Guangzhou-Dhaka flight was booked full through the whole pandemic period. It was one of very few such flights in entire China.
One of thing that is not discussed a lot in these discussion of 20-100 year wait times for India origin H1B people is that one of the big abuser of Employment based GC are India based WITCH (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL) companies via EB1C visa.
So who get these EB1C visa? Well technically International managers but over a decade and half these WITCHs have brought hundreds of thousand mid level, non-technical account managers on L1 visa and filed for their green cards which are processed in say six months as opposed to decades for H1B folks. Due to this rampant misuse, the availability of employment based green cards is reduced drastically for H1B folks around same time.
EB1C abuse is one of the biggest source of green card delays for H1B folks. And since it is legal in letter of law all this abuse go unnoticed.
As someone who jumped from the US to Canada for precisely these reasons - do it! I got a PR (i.e Green Card) before even landing and from there you have a guaranteed path to citizenship in 3 years if you like. No amount of money can replace the security/flexibility of a PR instead of being shacked to an employer. Canada's immigration makes you actually feel wanted & welcomed by the country instead of being treated like a half-way criminal by border agents and immigration agencies. Salaries won't match FAANG SV but they're pretty good and they get better every year as more companies hire here and the marketplace heats up.
Canada's immigration system is built around the immigrant as a person. The US immigration system is built in the colonialism mindset, where the immigrant must fill a need of a US actor - a company (Employment-based), or a US citizen (family-based).
What?! You literally cannot emigrate to Canada if you don't either go through the super harsh pointing system or fill a specific labor need. In both cases, the intent is very clearly to only allow in people who will be economically productive for Canadian companies. Good luck immigrating without a degree or without a contract.
Even sponsorship/spousal immigration is super unforgiving, since you are on the hook for any money the state ends up spending on the people you bring in, especially if it's social spending.
The only real exception is refugees but we send tons of them back and don't take anywhere close to the same amount of illegal immigrants as the US does. We also have agricultural labor immigration but again, it's nothing but Canada wanting cheap labor since they have to go back at the end of the summer with almost 0 exceptions.
But your feeling is pretty widespread here, Canadians really like to think way way too highly of ourselves especially on immigration. When keep in mind, if your refugee status gets denied here you are almost assured to be deported, which is not the case in the US. In that regards the Canadian immigration policy is much more colonial and centered around a transactional relationship, which is also somewhat the case in the US but at least they have the very humane lottery system, DACA, etc.
The points system for immigration is intended to allow in people who will be economically productive. Not for specific companies. This applies in Australia as well.
That's the difference. The focus is on the community contribution, not a specific company's requirements.
In Australia we have the equivalent of H1B (457) visas that are "sponsored" by an employer. That's separate to individual immigration visas.
It's either you can get picked by an employer outright or go through the point system. Still, the point system is very very heavily skewed towards the theoretical economic output you have so I'm not sure if it's about maximum community contribution, unless we only judge that contribution according to how much an immigrant will work. In that sense the immigrants are still accepted mostly because they are beneficial economically, so our main immigration policy really isn't centered on any "humane" principle.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, my point was mostly that thinking of Canada as being less strict/picky/transactional with regards to how it treats it's immigrants is just classic Canadian soft self-delusion[1]. Even the US lottery system is wildly more "progressive", and opens opportunities that just wouldn't exist otherwise if you cant meet the more stringeant requirements most of the other Western countries require.
[1]. I mean 18 years ago my dad was about to get denied at the very end of the whole process because an x ray showed a small shadow in his lungs that could've meant he may have had tuberculosis at some point in his life (it thankfully turned out that he didn't) . That would've meant that my mother, my sister and I would've been just flat out dropped too. After years of waiting! Though I understand that the system needs to filter these things out, but imo there's still nothing humane about that, it's just a transaction
The issue is also bleeding into academia. International students have been struggling to get updated passports during the pandemic, which then blocks them from other things like driver's licenses.
I have never understood why drivers' licences tie into immigration. It is easy to see the rationale from the federal government's standpoint, but licenses are an entirely state run affair (not counting for things like REAL id). So, did all the states just agree to do this, or is there a law that mandates this ?
They don’t. At least in western states like Washington. The standard license they will hand out to anyone since there are state laws protecting someone’s immigration status. Now if you want an enhanced license , you’ll need to prove your citizenship
According to VisaJourney, SF, Seattle, San Jose, Sacramento, etc… times are averaging more than 500 days between filing and decision, with Seattle over 700.
My family-based AOS is at 385 days with no scheduled interview yet (SF field office, Biometrics were done in December)
I'd say it's infeasible to improve US education that can produce population as good as importing the best and brightest mind from foreign countries.
Please note that I'm not against improving US education, but to think that we can improve it to the point that it can compete with importing the best mind from other countries is delusional.
US has such a huge advantage on this part that an absurd green card system seems like a noise.
It's really a numbers game. Just China and India combined have 2.8 billion people, 10x more than USA. A lot of them are going to be geniuses.
Since the 90s the USA has "won" by attracting the top talent of India, China and most of the rest of the world, resulting in a booming tech sector directly at the expense of those countries. Now in recent years immigration rules, politics and bureaucracy are making this less and less feasible, and you are already seeing the results. The next generation of teenagers worldwide are using TikTok, not Facebook or Instagram. Freshworks just had a $15B IPO and is shaking up the CRM market. There are countless other examples.
The US education system already produces people as good as the best minds from foreign countries. That has been the case for well over a century. It doesn't produce all the best minds, of course, no nation can do such a thing and that's why high-skill immigration is valuable whenever you can get it. The argument for the US taking in the best from around the world, is that more is better when it comes to that.
The US is a massive, diverse place, filled with good and bad outcomes. Just as Europe or the EU are, just as Asia is. There is enormous poverty and tens of millions of poor education outcomes across Europe. There are literally over a billion very bad outcomes spread across Asia, Africa and Latin America in terms of poverty and education. Asia still has a billion people trapped in third world outcomes.
The top quarter in the US will match up very well against the top quarter from most peer nations. There may be a few exceptions among tiny elite nations, like Switzerland, just due to the fact that 1/4 = 80+ million people in the US.
> The argument for the US taking in the best from around the world, is that more is better when it comes to that.
Yes, that is better for US, no?
This is also why US tech industry is absolutely eclipsing every other country's tech company combined.
They have the best mind from all over the world working for them.
My main point is that you cannot improve education that your average citizen is better than the best and brightest from other countries. It is infeasible.
Now my main question for US is: why do we want to import fewer brightest mind from other countries?
This is a curiously US-centric view to take that simultaneously also doesn't acknowledge the U.S.' advantages and history.
The U.S. population is under 5% of the world population — our competitive advantage has always been our ability to poach the best and brightest from across the world by rewarding them appropriately.
It's very reasonable to say that our population alone can't compete with the best and brightest of every other country in the world, and that it's more important to continue being a place that attracts immigration.
Because the majority of US citizens of school age are from historically disadvantaged minorities and you're saying they're just not good enough to compete with the East Asian global majority even with better education. In fact, you appear to be saying we shouldn't even bother to try and that people from wherever it is exactly you're from are innately superior. That's why it's racist and offensive.
There are almost 8 billion people in the world and 320 million in the US. Of course most talent is foreign. No one who wants green cards for engineers is arguing for a decrease in education funding
The requirement for H-1Bs are: 1) bachelor's degree or equivalent from any institution on the planet, 2) an employment offer.
While there are many brilliant people working on H-1B visas, H-1Bs are people with bachelor's degrees, not necessarily "the best minds".
The advantages provided by the H-1B system are:
- As a country, get the benefits of educated people without the economic cost of having to raise and educate them.
- As a company, more leverage over employees, and in many cases, you get employees with lower compensation expectations.
- The visa last 3 years and it can be renewed once, giving you 6 years before a green card is required. In this way, you get the most productive years of an educated adult.
The disadvantages are:
- Wage depression.
- More competition for local workers.
- The process of degree certification is done by attorneys not educational institutions. Most 4-year programs are eligible for H-1B, but not all foreign 4-year programs are equivalent to an American Bachelor's degree.
I suggest you look into the companies that are actually hiring and getting the bulk of the H1B visas. Because it may surprise you, it's not top tier tech engineers at Facebook, Apple, etc. It's companies like InfoSys and Cognizant. [1]
The business model of these companies is to provide workers at a cost below what it costs in the US. This business model is a big reason why they are so successful. At scale these companies drive cost, and wages down. US workers then need to accept lower paying jobs. The worst thing about it is the wage depression here is most felt by the low-tier tech workers, not the well paid SV engineers.
And they don't always follow the rules either. Infosys and Cognizant have been caught up in legal trouble for visa fraud. [2]
TCS and Infosys should had been kicked out of the H-1B system long ago.
They are fraudulent as fuck.
- They realized the quota system is based on the physical action of taking random entries from the mail. So what they did was submit the same application multiple times, so that their H-1B applicants had a higher chance, to the detriment of other applicants.
- They forced their employees to sign a power of attorney and kept all money from the employee tax returns.
They suck. They should be sued to oblivion until bankruptcy.
You have to go through and pass an employment interview for a job 3x the average American wage at the minimum. That’s a hefty requirement already and probably better than any standardized test for gauging ability.
Sure. The employer has to advertise the position openly and give time for domestic employees to apply. Offers, including salaries, have to be published. There's a lot of paperwork included, LCAs, etc... The quota system.
I oversimplified it too much, but effectively for an employee the most important requirement is a bachelor's degree or equivalent.
H1B visa is an abusive system that lowers the wages for high skilled positions, while allowing employers to hold an employee's immigration status over their head as an extortion tactic to abuse said employee.
Many people myself included fully support increased immigration but oppose the H1B visa program unless serious reforms are made to it.
This could be viewed in a lot of ways. In theory a severe labor shortage in an industry could cause a massive increase in wages. However that may not be sustainable long term and could lead to industry collapse if it can't compete with other countries who are
not experiencing such severe shortage, or if the market demand drops significantly due to increased prices.
IIRC the H1 permitted under the proviso of "Aliens of Distinguished Merit and Ability" was changed to H1B in the 1990 Immigration and Nationality Act to jobs falling under the name "Specialty Occupations" and "Fashion Models", so it was changed from getting the best and the brightest to something else. It could be used for getting the best and brightest, but that is not the only purpose.
> I'm not sure why US is so against getting more of the best and the brightest
Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs.
> H1B/greencard often acquires the very best mind of foreign countries.
Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies.
It's also responsible for the lack of job training by companies. Why have an employee learn new skills on your dime when you can find a foreigner who got experience at some other company, or perhaps just with the good sense to exaggerate their resumes...
> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs.
Knowledge workers create jobs. Software begets more software.
> Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies.
A lot of people desperately want this, but it is tricky to make improvements since any federal discussion of immigration immediately widens to include all forms of immigration.
Canada and Australia have point-based systems that roll out the welcome mat for skilled workers. Unlike the H-1B, these systems are not set up as indentured servitude for wealthy tech companies.
Too bad the US can't have the same... because of corporate lobbyists as well as anti-meritocracy factions on both right and left, who serve as patsies to the rich by protesting any change to the current system.
H1b pulls in lots of people. The majority get "chewed up and spat out" and go back to their home country. A minority indeed can make it, going to consultant/entrepreneur etc.
There's no reason for a high tech American worker to view this situation as remotely in their particular interests. No only does it lower but it allows companies to maintain their grueling coding schedule, a system that burns out a whole lot of people.
There are approximately 4million software developer jobs in the US.
There are only 65k H-1B visas given out every year. And not all of them even go to software engineers (doctors, finance professionals, etc. all enter through the H-1B route).
And the H-1B visa lasts a maximum of 6 years.
Let's be generous and assume all 65k visas are going to software professionals. That means at any point of time, you only have 390k H-1B visa holders (this is not correct, but I will get to that a little later). So your claim is that 390k visa holders are driving down the wages for the 4 million software professionals?
More damning is the fact that we are talking about an industry where people can and did work remote and offshore, and there are over 20million software professionals in the world. A software engineer working in Kiev is far more likely to have an impact on US software engineer wages than the 10% who may be on an H-1B in the US. Furthermore, the US software engineer's wage is kept higher by the fact that the same engineer is working for Microsoft for 125k minimum in Seattle, than they are working for Microsoft for closer to 50-60k in Microsoft's massive Hyderabad campus.
I did mention the exceptions.
1) Visa abuse. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a lot of visa abuse. However, by the mid 2010s both the Obama and Trump administrations cracked down on this, and it's fairly trivial at this point.
2) EB1 visa holders. Due to the fact that the US immigration system was last updated in 1990, you have a situation where Chinese and Indians are singled out when they have an approved green card petition and forced to wait years and decades. As a hack, on the backs of the approved green card, which the US is unable to actually give them, they are given a much worse offering of an H-1B which has inflated H-1B numbers. But these are not a reflection of the H-1B visa, and more a reflection of the failure of Congress to fix the green card process. This does inflate H-1B numbers quite a bit, but the article is talking about how the administration is missing an opportunity to greatly resolve precisely this issue.
The 100k green cards that the administration is wasting instead of giving to already approved green card applicants, would almost certainly reduce the number of H-1B holders by an almost 1:1 relationship almost immediately.
Your statement above is either confused or intentionally deceptive [this post edited as I tried to parse your claim]:
"US has just over 580,000 H-1B visa holders, says USCIS" [1]
The figure you quote, 65K, is, (as you do say) the number of H-1bs issued per year. But that's not comparable to 4+ million statically existing software jobs and contrasting the two figures gives the wrong impression - the impression that H-1bs don't impact software job market where clearly they do.
-- Could 500K influence a job market of 4 million? Obviously, notably when they are concentrated in certain area but just generally, you don't need another 4 million to change a supply and demand equation.
Given this, I'd say the rest of your argument falls apart.
I'd note that I'm not "anti-H1b", I'm anti the entire sweat shop system I describe above. I'd agree with other posters who suggest H1b holders should be able to choose the employer as soon as they enter the country.
Uhh, yes... What you said is certainly absurd. It has no relation to my comment, however.
H1-B visas are being used very directly to drive down wages. US workers are fired from their jobs, replaced by H1-B visa "contractors" and left to go find other jobs, or sometimes offered the option to apply for their old jobs, at reduced wages.
One of the stated requirements for H1-B visas is that they will not replace a US worker, but that is being quite flagrantly violated. The program is constantly abused and needs to be completely ended and replaced.
H-1s are being used to drive down tech wages, and are also used as a way to create indentured servitude in that the worker leaves or is fired they lose their visa.
At the same time tech is and has been vastly overpaid, WFH is bringing wages down too.
The overpaid tech argument was always 'well you need engineers and you'need to be in SV so you need to pay whatever FAANGs are. But that bubble is bursting before our eyes, and just like last pop, they simply can't believe it until the end.
Quite. As soon as the big companies started switching to WFH and employees left for places with lower COL, said businesses began lowering waged based on physical location.
This immediately proved the wages were artificially inflated, and were the effect of SV madness.
With location being of less importance, the need to hire only the best seemes to have waned (not really it was always a bs rhetoric).
I've said repeatedly that programming is to this bubble what web designers were to the last.
I've also said it's not some magic language like some pretend it is, I made sure all three of my children picked up various programming languages from a young age.
As always, I could be wrong, I just call it how I see it.
> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs.
America controls something like 80% of the world software market (depending how you measure it) with ~5% of the population. I’m very skeptical that this would remain true if domestic companies were restricted from hiring the top talent in the world.
There are arguments for and against immigration (full disclosure, I’m an immigrant), but the “steal our jobs” rhetoric is based on the false counterfactual that you could get rid of immigrants but keep their jobs.
This is the wording of H1b visas as well - hiring for talent with special skills that can't be found by workers in the US.
Studies by Norm Matloff detail, and anyone with experience with Cognizant coders know that these are not visas which are only going to "top talent". It is going to imported coolies in order to undermine wages, and have a captive workforce tied to the company, effectively unable to leave.
> the “steal our jobs” rhetoric is based on the false counterfactual
I didn't say "steal", but it's absolutely happening all the time:
"Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs."
Sure, but my point is that cases like this are possible for the same reason that the US is able to own 80% of the software market. You can’t expect to have one without the other.
> the US is able to own 80% of the software market.
So what you’re saying is that H1B visa abuse allows the small handful of people who own massive software companies to benefit at the expense of the citizenry of the United States?
Cost cutting is good when it happens in other industries and helps software engineers by driving down costs, like tech hardware. But once it comes to their own, suddenly 100 to 400K salaries are not enough.
>The unemployment rate for tech occupations dropped to 1.5% in July, according to the "Employment Situation" report released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals. (#JobsReport). That's the lowest level since August 2019 and is close to the historic low of 1.3%. Aug 6, 2021
I think H1Bs and green cards are two separate issues.
It's incredibly dumb how many smart people the US turns away — especially those who have gone to US schools (which are partially federally funded).
H1B visas are toxic, because it's easy for companies to abuse H1B workers since their visa is tied to their employment with that company. But green cards — we should be handing those out to educated foreign nationals like candy.
I think L-1 visas are more employer bound. Changing jobs on an H1-B is possible, it's just more paperwork and annoyance. In tech although, most employers are willing to go through that paperwork, so for certain industries that isn't really a barrier in practice as you sit and wait for some lawyers to do some paperwork for you. Getting rid of leetcode would probably do more for people's job liquidity.
It's possible now (it previously was not), but it resets the H1-B worker's immigration process back to the start as well, leaving them in limbo for years longer. And they are taking a risk that the new job might not work out and if they don't find another quickly, they'll be expelled from the country.
No it doesn't, once you have a priority number it adds you 'to the line' and might set you back about a year-ish if you change jobs once its your turn to get a green card. It's the priority number waiting period that makes it suck a lot, not the 1.5yrs it take to get a green card from H1B if you don't have any priority number queue waiting.
You just need to get that priority number ASAP from the first job, which might take a year or less, and then wait X number of years for it to be 'your turn' and then stay at last the job where you'd actually get your green card for a year or two, which is already pretty typical job behavior already. Most people stay at a job for a year minimum, and once you get promoted up the ranks, they stay at places multiple years.
In those X in-between waiting years you can change jobs without it materially effecting your immigration timeline in any serious way. Even then, if you get a good opportunity you can change jobs in exchange for waiting a year or two longer for your green card, which is a choice you can make.
It's far from 'indentured servitude', just some annoying paperwork barriers that makes it more expensive for firms to hire you, because it costs money and time to hire an H1B than a person with a green card or citizenship already. And yes, you cannot go work with risky employers, which limits you to big tech and startups at the series B+ stage of funding. There are even cases of successful people who have founded startups with H1-Bs or some other immigration visa with a lot of hassle. Which in the scheme of things as history has shown, has ended up not to be that bad :D
> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs.
That is a myth. Every single study done in this area shows very clearly that skilled immigration helps the economy and creates jobs/increases wages. It's weird that tech employees who make six figure salaries the day they graduate are the ones blaming H-1B visas. Chances are you wouldn't have a job (or at least a much more shitty job) if these immigrants weren't here building the entire US tech industry for the last 40 years.
You emigrate from a country and immigrate to another. When speaking of people becoming new residents somewhere they are immigrants who have immigrated.
When speaking of people who have moved out of your country and into another, they're emmigrants. If they've moved into your country, they're immigrants. To their own perspective, they're migrants.
That's simply one case where it worked out, out of the how many that are issued?
I'd argue only ever hearing about one who made it, as opposed to personally knowing several for whom it did not, further drives the point that it's a broken system.
Put simply - anything a business wants is to increase profit and power, never not once have they made a decision to help their employees.
The reason it won’t work is exactly because you want “both”.
Everybody with a reasonable mind knows many southern border crossers are not refugees but illegal economic immigrants. And we don’t have a national policy to import unlimited low skill workers.
Right now the situation is as simple as this: legal immigrants are held hostage for illegal immigrants.
I am an H1B to GC, and the above comment is correct! I am not sure why it is being downvoted.
H. Clinton (when she was at state departmet) and Obama had a chance to make a sweeping change to the H1B program, and make it easier for smart people to immigrate and get their GC. Many Republicans were on board on this.
The democratic party denied this, they wanted a more 'comprehensive' reform, and tied H1B with the 'low skilled' and illegal immigrant reform as well. The republicans were not on board with that, even though they were willing to reform the H1B.
They basically held the H1B suferes/intenured servants, hostage to advance their agenda. (they thought they will be winning the 2016 election). That didn't happen, and Trump got elected, and the rest is story.
It is reasonable. Refugee means people fleeing conflict and persecution - not economic hardship. Our elite circles have very recently redefined refugee in quite a revolutionary way.
Asylum law is very clear about who qualifies and who does not. It narrowly allows people suffering from persecution in their home country, on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership in a certain social group, or political opinion.[1]
It does not apply to anyone and everyone seeking work, or those who want to live in a more wealthy nation.
>>>I'm not sure why US is so against getting more of the best and the brightest, meanwhile we are pushing to get more refugees instead.
It's easier to grow the underclass of economically-distraught refugees and keep them on the "Democrat plantation", just like they've kept black Americans for decades. Legally-immigrating, high-income naturalized citizens are probably more politically right-leaning than people assume[1]. That is counter to the objectives of the Democratic Party, who have been trying to create a de facto uni-party system at the national level via demographic manipulation[2].
Humanity reasons? The US is getting old and it brings two problems: old people need tons of cheap service workers who would work for food; and old people tend to be very conservative and vote red. Importing hoards of refugees solves both problems. This is also why we see this counterintuitive drive to fast track those refugees to green card status and to give them voting rights.
Then we should extend help to the entire Mexico. If Mexico is good enough place to live, then migrants should stay there. If it's not good enough, because "political reasons", then we should extend our "humanity reasons" to the entire Mexico.
Rather open offices in canada and latin american and import workers there than deal with that timezone difference tbh. It's a super sucky work style and vast majority on both sides hates it.
Tough. I have litte sympathy for companies that have been abusing the H1B system to import indentured servants at substandard wages for decades. The list of top H1B sponsors is a murderers row of the most awful bodyshops.
Quick point about the formatting and not the content: I love this style of news and journalism. Quick bullet points with a bold title so one can choose to skim or read the whole of it. Love it
People argue a lot about governments making decisions they disagree with, but something that I think is under-appreciated is the damage from unpredictable decisions. If you know how the government is going to act on some issue, for better or for worse, then you can make plans around that. What do you do if their future actions are an ever-shifting mystery? A few examples come to mind:
1. The Keystone XL oil pipeline was proposed in 2008. Construction was blocked by the Obama administration, unblocked by the Trump administration, and then re-blocked by the Biden administration, at which point the company trying to construct it gave up. In total, this process took 13 years and huge amounts of money, and nothing came of it. If there had been clarity and consistency in the government's policy here, the thing would either have been approved or rejected much sooner -- and either would have been a big improvement on what actually happened.
2. Covid-related rules have had much more harmful side-effects than they would have had if they were easier to predict. Rules surrounding masks, distancing, indoor and outdoor dining, and so on, all seemed to change a lot more frequently and arbitrarily than necessary in most places. To change the rules when the evidence and situation changes is one thing; changing them in seemingly random ways for dubious reasons is another. Even if the reasoning behind the decisions were consistent and well-thought-out, which is doubtful, there are advantages to having a predictable but sub-optimal policy rather than jerking everyone around in pursuit of perfection.
3. There are some federal student loan debt forgiveness proposals currently being considered in the US. I don't know how much, if any, will pass. If I were still in college, this would make me wonder: should I use money from a job to help pay my tuition, or just keep it? If I just take out more loans instead, and those loans get forgiven through a stroke of political luck a few years later, that's free money in my pocket -- but if that doesn't pan out, I'd end up paying a lot more interest. Whichever way Congress decides, I'd be better off knowing in advance -- but probably won't have that option, since the proposals seem to be (mostly?) retroactive in their design.
4. Finally, today's topic. If you apply for a green card, what are the odds that the paperwork just doesn't get processed? This is the kind of thing that would be really nice to know in advance, one way or the other.
Without expressing an opinion on what the decisions should be in any of these cases, I'll say: there's no decision so bad that unpredictability can't make it worse.
On 1) they refused to "give up" when it was blocked by the Obama administration. It was a dumb idea then and it's even dumber now. That's on the company, not the administration.
On 2) agreed, except we're working through a 1-in-100 year pandemic with idiots denying reality on one "side" of the debate about rules. The science advances, so that the advice changes, but it hasn't changed much. Get vaccinated, wear a mask, socially distance, wash your hands.
On 3) student debt is the dumbest own goal in US history. Provide funding for college, but do it as a loan, charge exorbitant interest rates and perverse incentives for colleges to charge more. The Federal government could start by reducing the interest rate to zero. Then reduce outstanding balances by a fixed percentage per year. People would redirect their available money into housing and consumables instead of paying back stupid loans.
On 4) the US immigration bureaucracy has been stupid for years. When I was doing some work in the US back in 99/00, we were on 90 day business visas. Each time we applied, it took more than 90 days to get approval. The last time, I received a letter saying that it would be a year before they would approve the visa.
I received the letter 6 months after I had left the US.
Maybe if the American education system wasn't horrible and getting worse, there would be a chance that the millions of unhappy American workers could get in on these job openings. Too many feelings and coddling, no rigor at all.
People say this a lot, but it isn't true. What Americans schools are is inconsistent. There's ~14,000 different public school systems that vary wildly from place to place.
Claims about American schools, good or bad, are almost always either about a specific place or kind of place.
There are so many free or low cost resources to learn tech skills. Time is the only investment needed.
I'd argue that some of the best software engineers slash developers I have worked with came from non-cs backgrounds like engineering or business. They learned on the job, after hours on their own time, or in a bootcamp program.
And it's more pleasant to work with people that have a sense of humility and some empathy so I'm all for the feelings education.
Here are a couple examples of free resources. Google "{my city or state} free coding bootcamp" and there are tons more.
How do you identify which courses/bootcamps are worth the time and a good fit if you don't already have skills that obviate the need for the training? It's a catch-22. Sifting through reviews is a skillset on its own, so that's no help. The abundance of options only compounds the problem.
Just like anything else in life.
Ask around, pick up the phone, send an email requesting more info, ask for references.
And if you are in a position to share time or money, find and organization that provides these services and help them with outreach or mentorship. It's something within reach for a lot of folks already in tech.
In minority communities with first generation immigrants they may not know that services like these exist. Try to spread the word within those communities too through local community groups.
There is too much coddling of children in kindergarten in American schools. They should be learning the basis of non-abelian groups and wave function collapse, not finger painting and talking about their feelings. Other states should be like Mississippi and bring back corporal punishment for naughty students.
Physical punishment worsens behavior in children, and overwhelmingly harms children.
> Physical punishment is increasingly viewed as a form of violence that harms children. This narrative review summarises the findings of 69 prospective longitudinal studies to inform practitioners and policy makers about physical punishment's outcomes. Our review identified seven key themes. First, physical punishment consistently predicts increases in child behaviour problems over time. Second, physical punishment is not associated with positive outcomes over time. Third, physical punishment increases the risk of involvement with child protective services. Fourth, the only evidence of children eliciting physical punishment is for externalising behaviour. Fifth, physical punishment predicts worsening behaviour over time in quasi-experimental studies. Sixth, associations between physical punishment and detrimental child outcomes are robust across child and parent characteristics. Finally, there is some evidence of a dose–response relationship. The consistency of these findings indicates that physical punishment is harmful to children and that policy remedies are warranted.
If I have to Google to understand what type of elementary school education you are selling, you are clearly not qualified to know what kindergartners should or shouldn't be learning about.
America has a small population relative to China, India, and the whole EU.
America has giant tech and science industries and needs lots of workers to remain competitive.
We're feeding these industries with lots of talent that is born here, but raising children has become increasingly complicated with the eroding middle class and desire to have fewer babies.
Parents don't have support. It's not a fun or rewarding job, especially in a world where you can turn Netflix or TikTok on for a quick dopamine hit and plan on being childless.
We can fill this need with immigration. We don't need less of it, we need more. These positions will be filled anyway, and if it happens abroad that will lower American competitiveness. Not bad for the world. Just stating this from America's perspective.
But you also pointed to a problem that we should address domestically: making child rearing easier and desirable. We could provide assistance (time off, early childhood caregiving) and tax incentives.
I also think a pragmatic, though inequitable, approach to developmental incentives would help. Tax breaks for parents or "fun money" for children who are involved in extracurriculars: STEM, music/arts, clubs, "leadership", etc.
Kids would love to earn a salary to buy toys and games. Pay them a small stipend to follow an academic or artistic interest. Or be involved in a club of some kind. It doesn't have to be much of a monetary reward: $50/month or even less. It won't matter for rich kids, but will make a world of difference for the underprivileged.
>but raising children has become increasingly complicated with the eroding middle class and desire to have fewer babies.
False premise. Lots of Americans want to have kids, they just can't afford it [0]. This reality hits immigrant families too. Unless housing, childcare, healthcare, and higher education are once again made affordable to the middle class, mass immigation is and will remain an economic Ponzi scheme.
I agree with a lot of your points, but I think a good education system would be able to train huge amounts of Americans to do whatever work was needed. Along with the parenting incentives you mention. We don't need more immigrants, we don't need a much larger population. There's a lot of room in this country, and that's a good thing. Some people want to densify everything.
You cant train huge amounts of people to do serious intellectual work you have to be born with that ability. Most people born that way arent american since most people arent american
>>We're feeding these industries with lots of talent that is born here
Are we though? I am not seeing it. The education system, even universities are still often behind the times, and getting a CS degree or CIT degree is not going to help you much in a modern company (or even a legacy company)
the skills gap for recent graduates is huge, though personally I am somewhat glad for this because we need to get away from the system of credentials, at least university credentials.
As somebody with an immediate relative in the immigration pipeline, it’s not much better for us either. Biden admin cancelled all the Trump green card bans yet added no capacity above what was running in the peaks of the pandemic so now things move at a glacial pace for everybody from spouses to parents too.
I would imagine American companies can easily outpay anyone on the global market of remote workers. No GC really just sounds like a problem for the non-american companies who are now competing for their local talent with tech giants.
Incorrect if you are a US citizen. By default, on global income, a US citizen owes both US taxes and whatever taxes the country of residence charges. Thankfully many countries have tax treaties with the USA that avoid at least some of this double taxation.
The H1B visa is a visa created by tech companies that allows them to run a shadow, parallel immigration system where they get to decide who is allowed to live and work in the US, what they are allowed to have studied, what jobs they are allowed to work, and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain. They have been partially successful in convincing people that opposition to this is xenophobic.
I'm not sure how much support there has been for a points based system like Australia or Canada has, where tech is one of many fields of study and work that is considered worthy of skilled immigration, and each field gets a determined number of points (plumbers get top points, as do many high educated fields outside tech). I do recall a debate where a spokesman from Oracle called a system like this "communistic" because it would allow the government - not business - to decide who to hire.
That's the kind of toxic bullshit we've gotten in this debate in roughly forever. I don't hold participation in the H1B against anyone (really, truly, I absolutely do. not). The US immigration system is bizarre, and if you don't have relatives in the US, it's hard to immigrate. Tech immigration is one of the ways you can get access to one of the most lucrative job markets in existence. And the US closes off many other avenues - I've had international students explain to me how much harder it is to get into a US law or medical school and remain here, or what it means to graduate from a program with a STEM designation vs one without.
But I do hold it against the tech firms, the people who claimed that there was a labor shortage while conspiring to fix and suppress wages. I think tech firms' real nightmare is a workforce, immigrant and otherwise, that is free to choose a career path according to how their own life interests align with market signals.
If we fix the issue with the H1-B system by letting them become permanent residents quicker, wouldn't that fix the problem faster?. The consequences would be that there is no longer a motivation to only hire H1-B workers.
There is no DACA/DREAM equivalent for these people even though they did everything 100% legally and have greatly contributed to the US economy. There are estimated to be >960,000 people currently stuck in this limbo, mostly Asian and mostly in tech (https://www.fwd.us/news/per-country-cap-reform-priority-bill...).