How to Fix Tech’s H-1B Problem

http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/06/how-to-fix-techs-h-1b-problem

by Garbage • 10 years ago

65 146 10 years ago

techcrunch.com

dominotw11• 10 years ago

clickbait tldr; " try to select the most valuable people?" ( instead of lottery)

apparently, free market is going to determine who is most valuable.

microcolonel• 10 years ago

I would never have guessed.

pj_mukh• 10 years ago

Your options are a) Government bureaucrat b) Free market c) Lottery

Which do you choose?

ryanmarsh• 10 years ago

I don't know what you call the opposite of "right to work" but that's basically the employment situation H1B's find themselves in. My Fortune 500 clients have office building upon office building of H1B developers. These folks will do practically whatever it takes to keep their employer happy. They are afraid to rock the boat and have their family sent back to India. This means bad decisions go unquestioned. You can guess what the result is.

spiralpolitik• 10 years ago

This is true for H-1B's employed by outsourcing companies. It is generally not true for most other H-1B workers who are treated identically to other workers.

Zigurd2• 10 years ago

You have put your finger on a key pathology of software development in general, not just H1-B: Mediocrities with terrible ideas about software love to have their bad ideas implemented without question. This explains why companies can easily end up paying more for H1-B labor. Egos get stroked. Nobody is asked WTF. Bad software is piled on top of bad software.

Not only is this a source of wage depression and age discrimination, it results in the kind of horrible-but-expensive IT that runs banking, health care, government, etc. and makes it much harder than necessary to apply technology to reforming those sectors.

protomyth3• 10 years ago

"That’s right. Facebook and Google brought in 900 and 2,800 H-1B employees, respectively, with salaries of $140,000 and $127,000. Cognizant? 3,300 at $72,000. Tata? A whopping 16,435 for a (relatively) paltry $70,000 – literally less than half what Facebook paid."

I still think a good first step is to require a salary for H-1B workers at 10x single person poverty guidelines for the local area[1]. Another measure of base salary would probably work, but something that requires a salary that discourages the body shops[2]. According to the legislation and goals of the program, the people we accept have the talent to be worth this salary[3].

1) https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-01-25/html/2016-01450....

2) http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2016-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx - the top 10 has a lot of consulting / body shop firms

3) http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm "The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States."

ardit33• 10 years ago

Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well. Right now there is a random lottery choosing who gets the visas, where the Indian body shops are known to "oversubscribe" to it.

Also, after a verification that the Visa recipient is working at the given salary for at least two years, then the they can apply for green card irrelevant to who their current employer is (as long as they are employed and earning at least similar salaries to what they did when they got the visa).

Switching jobs (as long as it is the similar profession/pay), should not reset the Green Card process. This will remove the current defacto "Indentured servitude" state that most H-1B visa holders find themselves in.

There are many ways to improve the current system (without changing the quotas), to benefit the country itself, and not large corporations, but right now there is no direct personal incentive for lawmakers to do that.

vowelless• 10 years ago

Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well.

And it makes sense for the federal government too. Higher salary = higher taxes.

protomyth3• 10 years ago

Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well.

I would rather have a explicit floor to make sure that simply increasing the numbers allowed doesn't put us back in the same situation or tempt companies into collusion.

dominotw11• 10 years ago

Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well.

what abt TCS working around this with paying high salary for the first year and then lowering the wage following year.

serge2k• 10 years ago

The problem with sorting by wage is that it gives a massive advantage of SV companies vs even a place like Seattle. They already have to pay higher wages, so a premium on top doesn't hurt as bad.

If it's a lottery system, why not charge 25k per entry or something? It's affordable even by a smaller company is they really want the person. It's affordable by the big tech companies who are being honest about their H-1B visa requests. It puts some hurt on Tata and the like by making them pay through the nose for trying to game the lottery.

Or you could restrict the number issued per company, at least until others have their share. Say every company gets 1500 max, then you bump that up to 2000 for those interested. keep going like that until you exhaust the quota.

tarikjn• 10 years ago

I have been advocating for just that: awarding visas to the the highest bidder. It is very simple yet effective.

One other thing is necessary: to attribute visas every month instead of once a year.

Here is my paper on the issue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_yEsHOtzN3yZ3JoYXlTdDh0R0k...

anarazel3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure that highest bidder is a good idea. Makes it very hard for smaller companies, e.g. startups, to compete with Google et. al.. Don't really know a good alternative tho. Prevailing wages are pretty easy to game to a significant degree by tuning the job title.

gaius3• 10 years ago

There are moves afoot in the UK for a minimum salary required for a visa.

existencebox2• 10 years ago

A concern I have when I see the suggestion to simply set a higher salary floor. There are foreign workers for many other job types (translation, chef, specialty craftsman) that likely fall far short of what we consider a fair base salary in tech. These are exactly the sort of foreign workers, however, I'd imagine we WANT coming in, since they are by definition specialty and non-replaceable.

Would they still have an avenue into the country, without precluding their use to only those with the money to pay exorbitant salaries? (I don't actually know the visa system well enough; I'm curious if they could use a different visa type or something of that respect)

Otherwise I'd worry about the unintended side effects of such an approach, notably because as mentioned above, the problem seems to be more one of the semantic requirements of visa-ship being abused than just salary requirements at the root of the problem. (the latter is certainly happening, but doesn't seem like the core, better worded.)

protomyth3• 10 years ago

I am speaking only for STEM workers. That is where the biggest conflict lies.

It does seem a bit odd to mix cultural folks in with STEM for expressing a need in the USA. I would rather see them separated.

Terr_• 10 years ago

(translation, chef, specialty craftsman) [...] I'd imagine we WANT coming in, since they are by definition specialty and non-replaceable.

If the ostensible goal of the program is to bring in people for low-supply positions (but short of individual O-1 visas) then isn't salary a reasonable not-too-game-able way to measure that?

DrScump• 10 years ago

Those who missed the thread on the Disney outsourcing may want to see this and its parents. Note the video that proves that firms are deliberately posting phony job ads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10970166

lordnacho4• 10 years ago

I hope one day in the future the idea of a work permit will be considered just as crazy as the idea that only men should be allowed to vote.

It strikes me as ridiculous that it could be illegal for someone to work simply because they were not born near where their employer is based.

petter_byoa2• 10 years ago

You think labour migration has absolutely no downsides at all? No impact on the stability on society at all?

erispoe5• 10 years ago

We have no scientific evidence of the contrary. There are some studies pointing to mass migration being (slightly) detrimental to the wages of low-income natives, but that's pretty much it. You will find a lot of opinions though.

lordnacho4• 10 years ago

Letting women vote had downsides for certain people too. That didn't make it less right.

As for stability, you need to consider the benefits of having the best people from around the world in the jobs where their comparative advantage is greatest.

swozey• 10 years ago

You're combining work permits with citizenship. They're vastly different. Do you want neither to be a requirement? How ethical is it to allow someone to work in a country where they have zero civic participation in its government? Or do you immediately get participation rights because you work for a company based in XYZ? Then you vote for things that affect the future, you move, and you're no longer affected by the votes you put in. Where do your loyalties lie?

dorfsmay• 10 years ago

How ethical is it to allow someone to work in a country where they have zero civic participation in its government?

And yet it happens all the time under NAFTA with contractors and "service" companies.

maxerickson3• 10 years ago

A lot of municipal debt is a result of people who voted for things that affected the future and then left. It's not just a hypothetical problem.

(Basically, pensions. They were offered to make municipal employment more attractive, which made the cities nicer places to live. They were not totally funded at the time the services were provided, even though the benefits of offering the pensions were largely consumed at that time.)

lordnacho4• 10 years ago

I don't see where I mention citizenship. I'm just saying there shouldn't be a restriction on who someone can work for. For instance it's unreasonable that a French guy can just come to the UK and work, but a Brazilian needs to jump through hoops.

As for whether someone can vote, that's a different story. You still have your basic rights such as the right to a fair trial. But the freedom to work shouldn't be restricted.

sratner3• 10 years ago

If you pay taxes, your participation is non-zero.

tosseraccount3• 10 years ago

Countries looking out for their citizens' welfare is not crazy.

H1-B is subsidy for the already rich. These billionaires can afford to train Americans.

Civil rights leader Professor Norm Matloff has a good summary of the issues : http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html

gaius3• 10 years ago

Countries looking out for their citizens' welfare is not crazy

Indeed, it is what a country is for.

IndianAstronaut• 10 years ago

H1-B is subsidy for the already rich

My small 55 person company is survivng thanks to H1Bs. We struggled to find a dba and a critical dev for years, and found a couple of good H1B candidates.

Saying that this program only benefits billionaires is a bit absurd.

thyrsus• 10 years ago

I favor minimal restriction on immigration: let in anyone who has a job or who has immediate family with a job. As a result, there's lots of young people paying into Social Security. Unlike the federal government, the states currently spend more per immigrant than they get in taxes from them, so the states need to raise their taxes, or the feds need to share the revenue.

tosseraccount3• 10 years ago

Use immigration policy to fund government programs?

ZanyProgrammer• 10 years ago

Your idea is bad for many reasons, but on the other hand I'm sure it'd be nice for a lot of Americans with underemployment and liberal arts degrees to be able to move around the Anglosphere.

omegaworks• 10 years ago

Once the wage and labor protections are roughly equivalent around the world, then I'll happily take this position. That is not the world we live in today. If you can get dissappeared[0] by capital in your country for standing up for your right to a decent wage, sorry, I don't want to give capital in my country that kind of leverage.

0.　http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30731-why-did-mexican-pol...

lgieron• 10 years ago

I've seen an estimate that allowing everyone to come to work in the US would result in about 1 billion people moving to States within very short timeframe. I think it could very well be the end of the country (as even the army + the police could have trouble handling the resulting riots and general chaos).

mjevans2• 10 years ago

Require that the job they were /brought/ here for:

* last at least a year

* pay at least 150% of median market rate

* have been open and unfulfilled with at least 10 who are interviewed AND report on their desired compensation for the role

* Eliminated non-hourly work* ('Salaried' would be a contract to buy between X and Y hours of work per year, with limits of hours per day/week etc.)

pkaye• 10 years ago

Enforcement would be the bigger issue.

dominotw11• 10 years ago

Yea, lets cripple thriving american tech industry with bureaucratic/nonsensical rules that you spent 10 mins coming up with.

product50• 10 years ago

Report on desired compensation? Are you serious? What if 2 folks come in and say they want $300k based on their current salaries? What will you do then? You may argue that it is the market salary then but if I were an employer, I wouldn't even invite Google/FB folks for the interview but only inexperienced folks - to game the desired salary requirement.

This is why this requires a more thoughtful approach..

mjevans2• 10 years ago

Monetary compensation data, of course, would be for the /field/ and collected via the tax infrastructure. Median for /that type of work/ not based on those interviewed. The reason for having the interviewees report back is to check on if the expectations for the job match the description for the job.

cjensen• 10 years ago

The solution is easy: convert all H-1B Visas to Green Cards. If an H-1B employee is underpaid, they can jump ship. If we really have a shortage of engineers, then what harm is done? When H-1B expansion was first proposed, this is exactly what the IEEE advocated.

Too many companies, as evidenced in the linked article, claim there is an engineering "shortage" but who really mean that there is a shortage of engineers willing to be underpaid and badly treated.

starving_coder• 10 years ago

This is my 10th year of employment in Bay area and by any reasonable estimates, I am not laying eyes on my Green Card for another half a decade. And no, i am not in the "slow lane". Makes me wonder if employers are lobbying Washington hard for things to be this complicated.

dominotw11• 10 years ago

employers are lobbying Washington hard for things to be this complicated.

There is nothing complicated about the process itself. You just happen to be from India/China.

hebdo3• 10 years ago

You can change jobs while being on an H1B. It is commonly referred to as H1B transfer.

readams• 10 years ago

You can change jobs but it requires going through a bureaucratic obstacle, and if you ever find yourself without a job temporarily, you'd better find a new one _very_ fast or you're deported. Worse, switching jobs can make it a lot harder to get a green card since it resets. H1-B holders seem to find it hard to switch jobs which is why big companies like Cisco are are able to accumulate so many of them. They just park themselves at a big company and try to keep their head down and wait out the green card process.

With more flexibility afforded to H1-B holders to find a real market-rate job, many of the perceived problems of the program would go away in my opinion.

Natural-born US citizen in the tech industy here.

mavelikara2• 10 years ago

In a memo[1] dated 11/20/2014, Jeh Johnson (Secretary of Dept. of Homeland Security) stated:

  As you know, our employment-based immigration system is
  afflicted with extremely long waits for immigrant visas, or 
  "green cards," due to relatively low green card numerical limits 
  established by Congress 24 years ago in 1990.
  ...
  The resulting backlogs for green cards prevent U.S. employers
  from attracting and retaining highly skilled workers critical to
  their businesses. U.S. businesses have historically relied on 
  temporary visas- such as H-1B, L-1B, or 0-1 visas-to retain
  individuals with needed skills as they work their way through 
  these backlogs. But as the backlogs for green cards grow longer, 
  it is increasingly the case that temporary visas fail to fill 
  the gap.
  ...
  To correct this problem, I hereby direct USCIS to take several 
  steps to modernize and improve the immigrant visa process.

DHS' own progress report lists [2]:

  Proposing a draft rule and new guidance to enhance options for 
  high skilled workers to change jobs and accept promotions while 
  they wait for their green cards to become available.

This draft rule is, titled "Retention of EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 Immigrant Workers and Program Improvements Affecting High-Skilled Nonimmigrant Workers" [3], is open for comments until Feb 29, 2016. So you'd think USCIS would have done something to, in Secretary Jeh Johnson's words "correct this problem" - right?! NO!!

Outside of establishing a one-time 60-day grace period for employees with an approved I-140 to find new employment, this rule falls much short of what was originally promised in Nov 2014. Here are the main provisions:

* Clarify and improve longstanding agency policies and procedures implementing sections of the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act (AC21) and the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) related to certain foreign workers, which will enhance USCIS’ consistency in adjudication.

* Better enable U.S. employers to employ and retain certain foreign workers who are beneficiaries of approved employment based immigrant visa petitions (I-140 petitions) while also providing stability and job flexibility to these workers. The proposed rule will increase the ability of such workers to further their careers by accepting promotions, making position changes with current employers, changing employers, and pursuing other employment opportunities.

* Improve job portability for certain beneficiaries of approved I-140 petitions by limiting the grounds for automatic revocation of petition approval.

* Clarify when individuals may keep their priority date to use when applying for adjustment of status to lawful permanent residence, including when USCIS has revoked the approval of their approved I 140 petitions because the employer withdrew the petition or because the employer’s business shut down.

* Allow certain high-skilled individuals in the United States in E-3, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, or O-1 nonimmigrant status to apply for one year of unrestricted employment authorization if they: 1) Are the beneficiaries of an approved I-140 petition, 2) Remain unable to adjust status due to visa unavailability, and 3) Can demonstrate that compelling circumstances exist which justify issuing an employment authorization document. Such employment authorization may only be renewed in limited circumstances.

* Clarify various policies and procedures related to the adjudication of H-1B petitions, including, among other things, extensions of status, determining cap exemptions and counting workers under the H-1B visa cap, H-1B portability, licensure requirements, and protections for whistleblowers.

* Establish a one-time grace period during an authorized validity period of up to 60 days for certain high-skilled nonimmigrant workers whenever their employment ends so that they may more readily pursue new employment and an extension of their nonimmigrant status.

I encourage everyone here to read and comment on this in the next few weeks. You can do it online by going to www.regulations.gov and searching for the eDocket number USCIS-2015-0008 [4].

[1] Executive Action: Support High-skilled Business and Workers - http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_...

[2] One Year Later: DHS Working To Fix Our Broken Immigration System - http://www.dhs.gov/publication/one-year-later-dhs-working-fi...

[3] USCIS Seeks Comments on Proposed Rule Affecting Certain Employment-Based Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Visa Programs - https://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-seeks-comments-proposed-rul...

[4] http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=USCIS-2015-0008

joesmo2• 10 years ago

They could just put a cap on the number of H-1B workers that can go to any one particular company. Say 1k. You can hire whomever you want right now, but after your 1k, you get no more. It'd force companies to prioritize the most important workers they need and limit the damage companies like Tata can do. It's such a simple, elegant solution, no wonder it wasn't implemented by the idiots who wrote these laws.

erispoe5• 10 years ago

That wouldn't work, you can create as many shell companies as you want and outsource employment to these companies.

joesmo2• 10 years ago

You could limit by parent company then.

nopinsight• 10 years ago

It seems like auctioning the visas to the highest bidders is a win-win solution and good for American workers. Why don't they do anything about it? The following is one reason.

Look at who benefits from the system. On the surface, outsourcing companies who can hire cheaper IT labor. Who are their customers which gain from lower IT service costs? Large corporations with influential ties to the powers that be.

kwisatzh• 10 years ago

The US should staple a Greencard to all PhDs and Masters students in the STEM fields. Most grad students have some support of funding (NSF/NIH etc) and it makes sense for these students to work here and pay off the funding instead of letting them leave the country or have them be stuck in a sub-optimal situation, being tethered to one employee.

dominotw11• 10 years ago

The US should staple a Greencard to all PhDs and Masters students in the STEM fields.

No thats horrible. There are tons of "universities" in USA which will give you a masters degree for a given amount of money. I can only imagine how much worse the education scam will get with stuff like greenCards attached to degrees.

yetanotheracc• 10 years ago

Just restrict the scheme to the top n (n <= 50) schools according to, say, ARWU.

jldugger• 10 years ago

You can already buy your way into the US with an HB-5.

sofaofthedamned• 10 years ago

We have the same problem here in the UK. For clarity i've had to give my job over 3 times in my career to Indian outsourced employees, including for Cisco (my last employer before the current one)

The rules are not being applied, but for me it's quite simple. If you want to bring a foreign worker in, you need to advertise it on a government website for a month. These details will include salary, role, skills, the sponsoring company as well as the one they will be ultimately working for.

I spent the last 5 months unemployed, but i'm normally a devops/sysadmin. I know my job went to India. I don't mind if they're better, but most of the time they're not. I didn't claim unemployment benefits as I didn't want the shame and the hassle, including having to spend 20 hours a week looking for work on the governments website. If this website included the details of the jobs that allegedly couldn't be filled by a UK guy i'd be far better equipped to get a job I am good at where a company is trying to cheap it out.

Note - I am not trying to get at Indian employees here - the RF guys at my last place were superb and better than anybody in the UK as we don't train enough of them here - but I am very annoyed where a company can twist the system to avoid paying UK wages for a UK job.

crdoconnor3• 10 years ago

A lot of the time it's not even cheaper, it's costlier. Management just prefers to have a docile, more easily controlled workforce.

Management is also surreptitiously raising its own pay (by increasing coordination costs).

eli_gottlieb3• 10 years ago

A lot of the time it's not even cheaper, it's costlier. Management just prefers to have a docile, more easily controlled workforce.

Reminds me of something David Graeber said:

Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time.

dominotw11• 10 years ago

I don't mind if they're better, but most of the time they're not.

Your employer should make that decision and they seem to think otherwise.

Not everyone wants to shop at whole foods.

pasbesoin• 10 years ago

Nonetheless, it is sometimes blatantly obvious to the person who is assigned the task of training the person or persons in the duties they perform, immediately before they find themselves without a job.

And when you repeatedly get feedback from several/many people in your organization, asking why this or that isn't done yet or continues to be wrong.

If Management really believes that "this is the right decision for us", with full -- or at least competent -- knowledge of what is going on and how it is working out, then they also are deliberately planning to irritate and inconvenience at lot of their other employees and extant work flows.

I've seen it. Repeatedly.

And, like the grand parent, I've worked with some outsourced/overseas people who were good. In my experience, over a number of years, they tended to be the exception rather than the rule.

This speaks to corporate outsourcing, from a U.S. perspective, rather than in general. Plenty of people elsewhere are very good at what they do. A lot of U.S. corporate outsourcing, in my experience, has drawn from a different and significantly less capable labor pool.

Meanwhile, the people structuring and running these transitions tended to collect their short-term consulting fees and bonuses and move on.

an_cap6• 10 years ago

We have the same problem here in apartheid South Africa. For clarity i've had to give my job over 3 times in my career to black South African employees, including for Cisco (my last employer before the current one) The rules are not being applied, but for me it's quite simple. If you want to bring a black worker in, you need to advertise it on a government website for a month. These details will include salary, role, skills, the sponsoring company as well as the one they will be ultimately working for. I spent the last 5 months unemployed, but i'm normally a devops/sysadmin. I know my job went to a black South African. I don't mind if they're better, but most of the time they're not. I didn't claim unemployment benefits as I didn't want the shame and the hassle, including having to spend 20 hours a week looking for work on the governments website. If this website included the details of the jobs that allegedly couldn't be filled by a white South African i'd be far better equipped to get a job I am good at where a company is trying to cheap it out. Note - I am not trying to get at black South Africans here - the RF guys at my last place were superb and better than anybody in white South Africa as we don't train enough of them here - but I am very annoyed where a company can twist the system to avoid paying white South African wages for a white South African job.

lkenflkewnf2• 10 years ago

Oh fuck off. This has nothing to do with civil rights.

It's a bunch of rich corporate board members trying to game the system and further enrich themselves through abuse of foreign indentured servants.

0xcde4c3db• 10 years ago

From what I've heard, the "consultancies" are using H-1B something like this:

1) File H-1B applications for every new hire in the country of origin.

2) Send the lucky winners over to the US for on-the-job training with clients.

3) Once they actually have the necessary skills to do the jobs, bring them back home and pay them the prevailing wage there, while still charging the clients the same amount.

4) Profit!

Under this model (is this even accurate? I've seen several summaries along these lines, but have no direct experience), the bulk of the wage lowering doesn't even occur under an H-1B, so wouldn't they be able to realign things to absorb a higher US salary? Would a "value-based" system be an actual deterrent, or just friction?

tomohawk• 10 years ago

Easy solution: get rid of H1-B, whose main use is to offshore jobs, and change the preferences for getting a green card to prefer people with desired skills who want to become Americans.

yadongwen• 10 years ago

I was just turned down by Facebook probably because they are unable to sponsor H1B for me..alas.

Manishearth3• 10 years ago

I doubt that. Facebook, like many large companies, hires first and worries about H1B later. If you don't make it through the lottery they will put you in one of their offices in some other country. (I don't know if they L1 you later).

pbnjay• 10 years ago

What if each H-1B simply cost the difference between a citizen's average salary and the foreign worker's average salary?

e.g. if a US citizen working at Facebook makes 180k, and the foreign worker makes 150k, that H-1B should cost 30k. Then if there really is a tech shortage then costs are the same, but if there isn't it incentivizes businesses to hire locals.

I'm sure the argument would be that then they'll just pay their US citizens less, but I'd think the competition for the native highly skilled talent would keep rates up.

dominotw11• 10 years ago

if a US citizen working at Facebook makes 180k, and the foreign worker makes 150k, that H-1B should cost 30k

There are already prevailing wage restrictions, you can't pay h1b less than native employee .

sratner3• 10 years ago

Well, more accurately, you can't pay a foreign worker less than some floor set by the DoL for the given job description and location. It is unrelated to how much a given company is paying to any one of their other workers.

USANEEDSHELP• 10 years ago

How to fix it, eliminate it. Not only are the US firms abusing H1-B, the consulting firms from (for example) India are setting up a US footprint & using H1-B to get low cost folks into this country. The quality is not there, but the low cost & quantity is. There are many Americans that can fill these positions, but the US firms don't want to pay a living wage.

EhicsOnImm2• 10 years ago

Widescale utilitarian logic would be a slippery slope to massacres of the homeless.

EhicsOnImm2• 10 years ago

Widescale utilitarian logic would be create a slippery slope towards massacres of the homeless.

All immigrants, regardless of their value, should be treated equal.

Zigurd2• 10 years ago

H1-B is mostly about money, and the best and most robust solution, in terms of being difficult to subvert, is to use money as the measure: To limit H1-B to the talent that's unobtainable locally, to auction the visas to the highest bidder, and have a high reserve price, say $30k. To an R&D company creating enormous value per employee it would be just a speed bump. To a body shop depressing wages by renting out compliant mediocrities to mediocre managers who find it comforting to have their crappy ideas never questioned, it would make continuing that blight painfully expensive.

mathattack• 10 years ago

I very much like the idea of auctioning these off to companies, either explicitly (pay the government for each one) or implicitly (bid up the salaries you'll pay for them). Although I'm not a fan of large taxes, I think the former is slightly less distortionary.

notlisted• 10 years ago

As the numbers indicate, the H1B system is broken. It was broken by allowing the body-shops to apply for what are basically "temp workers". When I got mine, in 1994, such "temp work" (consulting) was explicitly forbidden. The employee had to work for and at the company that applied for you, not at the offices of a company's clients. When and why this changed I don't know.

What I do know, as the founder of a European expat organization with 7k members in the USA, is that H1Bs for highly skilled Europeans have nearly come to a standstill. This is evidenced by the change in demographics of my target audience. Average ages have gone up significantly. Most newcomers now arrive on L1 (inter-company executive transferee) visas, are older, married, and have a family.

The way to fix this is by going back to the old situation and put the body-shops out of business...

phil21• 10 years ago

When and why this changed I don't know

Nothing changed. The only thing that changed were companies pushing the limit as far as they could to what you see today. Regulators sat on their proverbial asses and watched it happen without lifting a finger, so companies lost the fear of the law.

nish1500• 10 years ago

I love the Bay Area, and would have loved to work there, but the draconian immigration laws and the 16-year wait for Green Cards are simply not worth it. I'll get paid half as much in Canada, but at least my future doesn't hang on a lottery, and I can start my own company without waiting to turn 40.

JoeAltmaier• 10 years ago

If its any consolation: I lived and worked there 10 years, and left. It was hot, crowded, full of envious avaricious people who turned over every couple of years. When we realized almost every person we knew had moved, we decided to leave as well.

Settled in Iowa where I've worked at half a dozen Silicon Valley startups remotely since then. With reasonable cost of living, a decent stable group of friends, and a culture of helpfulness and inclusion.

WalterBright• 10 years ago

If the entry requirement is to merely have an accredited degree, the foreign degree system will be promptly gamed. Bureaucratic rules are always gamed, and being bureaucratic, are very slow to adapt.

hemantv• 10 years ago

If you start to give out visa based upon just the salary, indirectly you are saying that small business and town outside of high cost of living are not worthy of hiring people on visas.

So only SF and NYC can employ immigration while Denver and Atlanta cannot.

klipt2• 10 years ago

Well people in SF pay more taxes, so as far as the federal budget is concerned, people working there are worth more.

If an immigrant doesn't want to stay in SF, they only have to work there long enough to get a green card, then they're free to move.

ElComradio• 10 years ago

I'm all for it. Let's have reciprocity though. I should be able to show my resume and get permanent residency complete with local healthcare benefits for any country with which we have the agreement.

GreaterFool• 10 years ago

To me H-1B seems like a bad deal. It gives the employer a lot of leverage over the employee. How do you expect a system like that not to be abused? You can require higher salaries for H-1B employees but that's a half-assed solution.

Besides there's no sensible path to permanent residence or citizenship.

Personally I'd like to spend some time in the States and see the country, work for a year or two and see how it goes. But I have no intention in getting into H-1B mess.

alanwatts• 10 years ago

Which is the greater problem, the H1-B process, or the fact that we have a global economy but still pretend like nationalism isn't completely counter productive?

jeevand• 10 years ago

H1B system is broken. It is especially hard if you are from India or China. Although you can change employers, you need to restart the green card process from scratch which introduces lots of uncertainties. Obama wanted to allow H1Bs to change employers easily by giving them better portability but USCIS came up with a bad rule which i believe is due to lobbying by employers. Australia & Canada have better immigration systems where they give PR quickly.

It is bad for US as well. Immigrants are generally more risk taking than citizens & H1B does not allow them to take risks when they are young because they will be waiting in the line for PR (Green Card). By the time they get green card it will be decade or more and their risk appetite would have reduced due to having family/children.

In general, I don't believe most of the high salaries in tech may not be sustainable. Lots of tech jobs will move to India & China (or any low cost country in future which has a good pool of educated people), that is just capital chasing good enough talent which is cheap. Moving up the value chain is the only option.

jmspring• 10 years ago

The fix is to make things hard for the body shops (Tata, etc) and their like minded counterparts.

I've posted before, but having worked with India, Korea, Japan, and China... There is only one culture that pushes to outsource things when it doesn't make sense... And usually the one doing the pushing is getting a cut or kick back... It's neither Korea, China, or Japan.

I think the solution is to cut off all Indian body shops and visas in bulk and require strict individual vetting. There are great individuals stuck in the morass, but Tata etc are trying to bring in people less qualified than an automotive technician who could get 3-4 months of training...

H1b and outsourcing is all about the bottom quarterly dollar.

How to Fix Tech’s H-1B Problem

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