Trump’s “Hire American” order makes it harder to get H-1B visas

https://www.axios.com/trump-h1b-visa-denials-d7e903ab-1dd6-45d8-9df7-29289cda0076.html

by losvedir • 8 years ago

47 65 8 years ago

losvedir• 8 years ago

Does anyone know what the "request for evidence" means exactly? What sort of evidence is required for an H1-B? Evidence of technical ability?

silveira• 8 years ago

Usually is a request for more documents. A few days ago USCIS published two new rules where they can skip the "request for additional evidence" step completely and already start a deportation (in the case of a H-1B renewal, or even green card process).

bigcostooge2• 8 years ago

Technical ability alone does not qualify one for an H1b visa. You need to be above and beyond what is able to be sourced in America. Specifically, the skills need to be so advanced that you cannot find any American workers to fill the job.

I imagine this test would discredit nearly every H1b software hire.

knuththetruth2• 8 years ago

It will discredit nearly every H1b in industries (like tech) where workers switch jobs often and are more competitively compensated. That’s what the system is intended to curb.

yourapostasy• 8 years ago

You need to be above and beyond what is able to be sourced in America.

One workaround tactic I've read claimed on forums is the requirements stipulate that the candidate must work with offshore business analyst teams in their native language, which is not English. I can't believe it would be that easy, though. If that actually passes muster with federal immigration review, then these more stringent rules are just a paper tiger and political bluster.

belltaco2• 8 years ago

Technical ability alone does not qualify one for an H1b visa. You need to be above and beyond what is able to be sourced in America. Specifically, the skills need to be so advanced that you cannot find any American workers to fill the job.

Can you source that?

TYPE_FASTER• 8 years ago

As others have said, they are looking for reasons why you need somebody with advanced degree/training/experience for the job. How the applicant's degree will be used on a day to day basis. For example, given a transcript, how will the experience from the courses listed be used? Provide details for other employees with the same job title. For example, if the roles and responsibilities include production support, provide ticket counts and some summary info. An example "day in the life" for the job, task by task and hour by hour. The RFE guidance will differ because it is a recommendation from your legal team on what you should provide to get the application through.

belltaco2• 8 years ago

RFE is just a generic term for requesting additional evidence in response to an application. The other possible responses are approval, NOID(notice of intent to deny) and outright rejection.

tbenedetti10• 8 years ago

Good.

dang• 8 years ago

Please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

akshayB• 8 years ago

Companies want low salaried employees to cut down cost and they use H1 for it by giving an excuse that there is no equivalent talent in US and we need to import talent from other countries. When it comes to Tech. it all boils down to $/per hour for getting things done. These tactics may discourage H1 applications but unless they force companies to hire people in US H1 will continue to exist.

jonathankoren4• 8 years ago

While this does happen for certain things, and certain segments, it's definitely not true for specialty areas like machine learning. ML / AI specialists command higher salaries because of simple supply and demand.

In my personal experience, I have never seen a company hire someone on an H1B that wasn't seen as the best person for the job. Immigration status was simply a non issue at the sponsoring companies I've worked at. On the other hand, I've worked at places that rejected out of hand anyone that did need sponsorship because the company simply didn't have scale to hire immigration lawyers.

bdcravens• 8 years ago

I have never seen a company hire someone on an H1B that wasn't seen as the best person for the job

My understanding is that H1B isn't designed to expand the hiring pool but to fill a gap where the local pool is effectively 0.

jdietrich• 8 years ago

If it's purely a matter of cost, surely you'd just outsource it all to Bangalore? An Indian developer in India is a hell of a lot cheaper than an Indian developer in the US.

CompanionCuuube• 8 years ago

It isn't all about cost, it's about having a body in an office chair. Otherwise they would be more open to remote workers vs on-site.

r00fus• 8 years ago

Managing a workforce 11:30 hours shifted is not easy. At best you have a multi-hour latency. Often this results in multi-day delays if requirements are shifting or trust in work output is not established.

steego2• 8 years ago

Companies want low salaried employees to cut down cost and they use H1 for it

I've long argued that one reason H1B workers are low salaried is because H1B visa makes it harder for them to job hop and earn a better salary. Don't get me wrong, I know H1B visas don't prohibit switching jobs, but it does add enough fiction and it limits access to some employers.

I would love to see fair work visas inspired by Singapore's policies that empower foreign workers to earn market wages. It only makes sense to me that we should absorb as many skilled foreign workers as we can provided they earn some minimal threshold of a salary adjusted for the cost of living in their area. It shouldn't be too high as to make it impossible to get a visa, but it also shouldn't be too low.

Importing skilled tax payers is a great way to grow the economy and provide more revenue to the treasury.

Pushing away foreign workers is just bad policy. It will will only encourage outsourcing and offshoring of offices. That means local economies will never benefit from the wages of foreign workers. Offshore wages can't be taxed. You encourage other countries to accelerate the development of their own tech hubs at the expense of your tech hubs.

nutjob24• 8 years ago

There's a simple work around for visa hell in the US: move your (tech) business to Europe. Lots of talent, lower employee costs, liberal immigration laws, choice of legal and tax jurisdictions. Really, it's got it all.

dragontamer• 8 years ago

Wouldn't European tech companies be subject to GPDR and other such regulations in the European market?

I think move to Canada makes the most sense. Similar laws to the USA, close and a similar set of advantages that you've described.

dominotw3• 8 years ago

similar set of advantages that you've described.

low salaries, high taxes/cost of living, less jobs and less dynamic job market.

delecti• 8 years ago

GDPR only applies to data of users who are in the EU. A company with users solely in the US is no more affected by GDPR if their developers are in the EU than they are if their developers are in the US or India. Similarly, a company with users in the EU is already affected by the GDPR even if their developers are not in the EU.

ardfie• 8 years ago

I don’t think it’s useful to describe ‘Europe’ like this. From country to country you can have large differences in availability of candidates, expected salaries, immigration laws, and regulations and customs around running a business.

secfirstmd• 8 years ago

Yeh. Ireland is easy for all of these things compared to say, Hungary.

nutjob24• 8 years ago

That's my point, that's why I said Europe. What is the downside of choice?

samueldavid• 8 years ago

why not hire remote?

ozim• 8 years ago

You have to have good people on site who can work with remote workers first. So you can make clear requirements. They also have to feel secure about their jobs. Otherwise they will not cooperate and blame remote workers.

Just hire remote is not an answer for a lot of companies.

If you think you can just do some programming job in fire and forget you are going to be surprised. You have to actually think about what task to give to remote team and what not. What areas are strong for who and divide work accordingly it is a lot of work in itself.

Last but not least, there is ton of legal stuff, compliance, what type of customers you are tending to. Some big corps own specific parts of code and sending something outside country could get you into trouble.

dominotw3• 8 years ago

liberal immigration laws

Getting a german work visa for Indians is not easy. They don't have "liberal immigration laws" , just less competition than H1B.

tathougies• 8 years ago

Don't most European countries have a point-based immigration system?

craigsmansion• 8 years ago

It might be the OP is referring to immigration from within the EU: setup in Ireland, then hire from lower-wage countries within in the EU.

nutjob24• 8 years ago

Nope.

dominotw3• 8 years ago

Interviews with attorneys and companies, as well as other data, indicate high rates of denials

Not quite clear how exactly this data was collected and how reliable it is. Also what is "other data".

jessaustin2• 8 years ago

That is the intended effect, is it not? Isn't that what he promised to do before he was elected?

Many problems admit no pareto-optimal solution.

ashelmire2• 8 years ago

The H-1B issue is a complicated one. On the one hand, we want the US to have the best talent, and on the other you want American workers to have a better shot at American jobs, and not to have wages suppressed by cheaper foreign labor. H-1Bs are supposed to fill talent gaps, but seem to be overwhelmingly used to pay lower-than-market wages to foreign workers when you could easily hire an American - if you were offering more money. Despite the law stating that they must be offered above average wages for their jobs, studies show they are paid less on average. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Wage_depression

anonymous5133• 8 years ago

It wont help protect american workers though because the company can always just open a remote office in india to get the talent. If americans want the jobs then they need to compete in all levels with the competition which includes wages, skills and so on.

frgtpsswrdlame• 8 years ago

If americans want the jobs then they need to compete in all levels with the competition which includes wages, skills and so on.

Okay but let's also let americans compete on the level that they have an advantage in - Location. If someone wants to outsource, fine, but if they want workers in the states, it shouldn't be foreigners on temporary visas working there.

knuththetruth2• 8 years ago

They won’t open that remote office though because then the execs at these companies wouldn’t have teams that they “manage.”

H1bs were a solution to the problem of having a cheaper, more locked down labor force without correspondingly making the execs themselves obsolete. It’s about bringing back a greater degree of authoritarian control in competitive labor categories where such behavior would otherwise make them unattractive to workers.

ashelmire2• 8 years ago

I believe many of these companies have tried that, and have moved away from it - because it didn't work out, and they found having American developers was better. Hence the insourcing trend lately.

logfromblammo• 8 years ago

Yes, they should do that, if only to learn why that isn't always as simple in practice as it looks in writing.

If companies are willing to open remote offices in Bangalore or Mumbai or Shenzhen, they should also be willing to open remote offices in Chicago, Denver, Austin, Atlanta, Boston, Toronto, London, or Berlin, or to just have remote employees that are not attached to any office building. And yet, many of them still want everyone on site in Silicon Valley.

Those companies won't go anywhere. They want everyone to come to them. It doesn't matter to them if the talent is in Islamabad or Sacramento, if the talent can't (or won't) relocate. SV is by no means the only place where that happens, of course. Some companies have gone all in on a single corporate campus, even when there are no particular economies of scale to be had in doing so. It makes the org chart simpler.

The problem is not in the workers, really. Most companies are completely incompetent at remote management and almost anti-competent at distributed management. Putting together a team that works well without physical proximity is a lot more difficult than periodically counting butts in seats and doing the "manager walk" behind everyone in your open-plan office, to make sure your direct reports at least look like they're working.

ccrush• 8 years ago

Not only are they paid less, but the program created an industry geared toward marketing impossible requirements and terrible wages and bad locations to US citizens in order to make it seem like there is no local talent that fits the bill, and then faked resumes of foreign workers to make them the right candidate. Too many mediocre jobs were taken away from people like that.

rjkennedy98• 8 years ago

Yeah H-1B was supposed to be about filling jobs Americans won't do. It was meant for skilled jobs that too few Americans had the skills for. Unfortunately that role they mostly fill is taking a software development job at 70% of the salary that is deserved. Amazingly Americans don't want to take a senior software engineering job at 65K a year.

tinus_hn• 8 years ago

Don’t worry, Trumps own companies thrive on employing foreign workers using these visas. It’s just more posturing.

These numbers don’t mean there are less workers anyway, more people being denied can also mean the rules are less clear or applied in a more inconsistent way, or it could be that it has become easier or cheaper to apply.

favorited• 8 years ago

In my experience, H-1B holders aren't competing with the idea of hiring Americans – they're competing with offshore.

patrickg_zill• 8 years ago

I have not interacted much with h1b's.

However a friend of mine has, at several different companies and in general has not been impressed. Specifically when a quote for single sign on was made for the customer, that it would take 3 months. He implemented the feature over a weekend...

This is in the "body shop" consulting side of the industry. I have heard similar complaints about H1b's in the cell phone and telecom industry as well.

EDIT to add: specialty cases as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, could well be different...

dmurray• 8 years ago

As I understand it, H1B visas are subject to a lottery system, the number of places available has not changed in years, and there are always more applicants than there are visas available.

Do denied applications count towards the cap? If not, then this change can't be making it meaningfully "harder" to get a visa. If it's harder for one applicant to get a visa, it's easier for another who benefits from the first one being rejected.

Ideally this should benefit the really excellent applicants and disadvantage the body shop outsourcers, which is exactly the H1B reform HN is normally calling for.

jonathankoren4• 8 years ago

The is a strategic blunder. One of the great historical advantages of the United States has been an excellent higher education system, a strong economy. It's an environment that has attracted some of the most talented people from around the globe to come here. Unfortunately, current immigration policy hamstrings that advantage, and this announced policy just further kneecaps it.

The biggest flaw in the H-1B system is that it's a nonimmigration visa. A very common path, is to come to United States on an F-1 student visa, graduate, then get a job on an H-1B. But the H-1B is time limited, and indentures people to a specific employer. Get a crappy job, get low balled, you're screwed, and god help you if you don't start your green card paperwork early enough. Couple this with the limited number of visas, we're simply turning away talented people and encouraging them to go home and compete against the United States on the international stage. It's stupid. Instead, we should create a new visa that's allows anyone that graduated from an American university to stay in the United States, work get a job, change a job. Allow their spouse and children to come, and also work. Essentially, give them a diploma and a green card.

hiram1122• 8 years ago

The worst thing you could do, as a nation state with a (dubious) lack of talent, with a long-term view of being competitive, would be to allow your companies to maximize short-term profits by importing and training foreigners (many who won't stay and who will not spend their wages domestically), depressing salaries, and making the field as unattractive as possible for native citizens.

Do you think smart native students can't see that all the grad students are foreigners, all the entry level jobs are filled with H1Bs and F1 visa-holders, and that salaries aren't really that great compared to finance, or medicine, or dozens of other fields that have barriers to entry, or at least aren't completely overrun with workers from low wage nations?

Instead of letting the market work as it's designed - where demand pushes up wages, we flood the industry with labor and depress wages, then throw a few billion dollars at public school unions to teach kindergartners to program (i.e. buy IPads), and expect things to work out well. :/

jonathankoren4• 8 years ago

I'm sorry but this nationalist rhetoric makes no sense. Are the immigrants being trained and leaving, or are they staying and driving down wages so low that Americans don't want the jobs? If the later, then why not keep bringing in immigrants to do the jobs that Americans turn their noses up at? If they're coming over here, filling our grad schools and taking our jobs in our high wage nation, aren't they now high wage earners? Even your "letting the market work as it's designed" plan doesn't make sense. So if there's no one to do the jobs, you think that American companies are just going to tough it out for a decade, raising wages even higher, until a new crop of people get trained up, and then depress market again? Isn't that horrible because the wages are being depressed? Why would a company do this? Why wouldn't they just leave, thus depressing the economy even more?

Immigrants stay when you encourage them to stay. Not only do they get jobs contributing to the American economy, but they also have kids here.

None of this makes sense through any sort of economic lens. It does make sense, if all you care about is if people from different places, with different languages, different customs, and different looks aren't getting ahead in your society. There's a word for that. In fact, there are several of words for that, but I'll go with the simple one. It's racist. And just, so we're both clear, I'm calling you a racist.

ashwinaj• 8 years ago

Whenever there is a post on H1B, there are two contrarian views:

1. Let everyone in

2. Let no one in

There has to be a middle ground, skewing on either side depending on economic conditions, job availability etc. You have to concede not all foreign workers are good (subjective I know and also I'm saying this as someone who is on H1B). So the idea of giving a green card to someone just because they have a US graduate degree is not wise at all. I believe that it is something that should be earned (I don't know what the definition of "earned" should be) not given away; I bet if the roles were reversed, us foreign workers would expect the same criteria in our home countries.

didibus• 8 years ago

In my opinion, they just need to allow H1B mobility. If H1B workers could easilly switch job once they're here, then they could negotiate higher salaries.

Part of the trick is that an H1B employee cannot complain about poor conditions, or low wages, because they're dependent on the sponsoring company.

If that was true, H1Bs would quickly force wages back up, and employers would once again freely compete for talent.

ProfessorLayton2• 8 years ago

It seems like a better step towards fixing this h1-b mess is to get rid of the lottery system, and just move towards making companies bid for each slot, with the "bid" being a salary that goes 100% towards the employee.

This would be win-win-win:

- Companies that truly need the talent will bid highly for a slot.

- H1-b employees will get paid more as quantities are limited.

- H1-b slots will be better utilized towards jobs that actually need specialization, not lower wage work.

- It'll probably be cheaper to "Hire American"

Downsides: Only FAANG and other large companies could afford such a system, but so what? What entitles companies to hire cheap labor anyway? A fix for this could also be to make it more expensive for each additional h1-b slot the company hires, I suppose.

throwaway375852• 8 years ago

What entitles companies to hire cheap labor anyway?

What entitles you to decide what labor companies hire?

ProfessorLayton2• 8 years ago

Judging by your incendiary comment history on your throwaway account, why should I believe your question is in good faith?

sharpy• 8 years ago

The only downside would be that almost 100% of the visa allocation would go to IT then. I believe medical field also gets quite a few H1B workers.

ap32• 8 years ago

Are medical professionals needed or only at a certain cost?

I don’t see how the bid system wouldn’t work for doctors and nurses

hiram1122• 8 years ago

I voted for Trump in 2016 specifically because of this issue, and am glad to see he is following through on yet another one of his promises.

H1B sounds good in theory, and I'll admit is a valid system for a small percentage of talented employees and companies working on hard problems.

OTOH, big business and the body shops have ruined it for the rest of us. If there is indeed a talent shortage, the most short-sighted thing you could do as a nation is to import foreigners, depress wages, and make the industry as unattractive as possible for current students.

BTW, I've worked in India and seen how the game is played both here and there, so I'm not just the typical xenophobe who's crying about Der took er jerbs (as if that wasn't a valid thing to be angry about).

But I know that people from any other country would NOT tolerate training foreign workers from lower-COL nations as replacements for their own job, and Americans now need to push back, too. Enough is enough.

codeafin2• 8 years ago

If you check the official government reports, you'll see it's actually the other way around.

2016 H-1Bs [1] - 398718 submitted with 53456 denied = 13% denial rate

2017 H-1Bs [2] - 403675 submitted with 37993 denied = 9% denial rate

So it looks like the denial rate has actually decreased.

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...

[2] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/nativedocume...

jessaustin2• 8 years ago

[EDIT] Haha never mind. Attack of dyslexia...

codeafin2• 8 years ago

Where are you seeing that there were more denials than submitted?

On the first table, it shows the total submitted is 398,718. The number approved is 345,262, which leaves at most 53,456 denied (398,718 - 345,262 = 53,456).

Trump’s “Hire American” order makes it harder to get H-1B visas

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