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.
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.
H1B/greencard often acquires the very best mind of foreign countries. More is good.
At the current state, we try hard to get less the best and the brightest and more refugees.
I understand there's a humanity reason for the refugees. But why can't we do both?