Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/20/881245867/trump-expected-to-suspend-h-1b-other-visas-until-end-of-year

304 614 6 years ago

The Silicon Valley was built on the backs of H1-B workers. There’s the bay wouldn’t be the technical hub without access to the global workforce.

snovv_crash• 6 years ago

The bay area doesn't vote Trump. This is a natural response to the voting mechanism. Only swing states get pandered to.

exsf0859• 6 years ago

That's simply not true. SV was built in the 60's thru the 80's long before the H1-B visa program started in 1990.

tartoran3• 6 years ago

Maybe the OP means the modern SV aka FAANG and that is not far from the truth or very hard to disprove. Things turned out the way they did for a lot of reasons and none of them can be really discounted.

ojbyrne5• 6 years ago

A little too specific, if you change "H1-B visa" to "immigrants" its most definitely true.

GaryNumanVevo2• 6 years ago

Correct, I meant all immigrants, not just H1-B.

akira2501• 6 years ago

The biggest employers of H1-B workers have almost always been consulting companies, most of them located well outside the valley.

shuckles5• 6 years ago

That claim is no way incompatible with Silicon Valley having a large, prosperous, and essential H1-B workforce.

saltedonion2• 6 years ago

This and eroding section 230. I wonder if tech companies are going to fire back at trump.

godzillabrennus• 6 years ago

If Facebook/twitter/google wanted to play with fire they could use their platformS to basically vanquish the GOP.

Those three companies control a significant amount of what people see online.

saltedonion2• 6 years ago

Certainly. But the risk is incredibly high. If trump gets re-elected he’s going to go after these guys big time. Breaking them up would not be stretching the imagination.

Censoring trump is the nuclear option.

samfisher835• 6 years ago

Trump won the election largely by leveraging Twitter and Facebook.

downerending8• 6 years ago

Pretty sure they've been "weapons free" since election day 2016.

Forgeties792• 6 years ago

This has gotten very old very fast (beyond the obvious cruelty). I have several friends who keep watching their colleagues just have to up and leave over this and it’s causing a ton of issues for businesses that employ folks on work visas in general. It’s just disruptive to be disruptive/feed the base.

Cyclone_• 6 years ago

Seems kind of silly to say without evidence that it's just to feed the base when there's a valid reason as to why it's being done (to prioritize Americans out of work)

iamacyborg• 6 years ago

Ah yes, we can expect restaurant staff to soon be working tech jobs.

mistursinistur• 6 years ago

Silly to say without evidence that preventing some people from doing their jobs somehow creates more jobs for other people. H1-B visa holders aren't competing with workers in the retail services industry!

Sam_Odio• 6 years ago

there's a valid reason as to why it's being done (to prioritize Americans out of work)

The "Fixed pie fallacy" [1] is probably both one of the most important tenants of modern policy-making, yet it's rarely explicitly discussed or debated.

Cyclone_, your thinking relies on this fallacy, namely that if one person is working a job, that's one less job available. [2]

In reality, there is quite a bit of empirical research that indicates when people work (especially highly skilled jobs like in tech), it does not reduce (and may even increase) the jobs available to others [3].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/opinion/lumps-of-labor.ht... 3. https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/...

awillen• 6 years ago

It's just silly... even if you're a nationalist, isn't the prospect of bringing over talented people from foreign countries to work in America and help our companies profit plus deprive their home countries of their skills a really, really good thing?

vsareto• 6 years ago

Those people don't think foreigners are as skilled as their own. This is hard to unwind after decades of American Dream and USA #1 propaganda

kthxbye123• 6 years ago

Not if your conception of the nation only includes white people...

MisterBastahrd3• 6 years ago

The type of nationalism that is currently a component of the Republican platform can better be described as xenophobic nativism. The nationalist counterargument is going to be that US companies have gotten away with not investing in employee training and instead ship trained workers from overseas to do jobs that could have been held by trained Americans.

gorbachev154• 6 years ago

As a nationalist, I think it would be better for those other countries to keep their skilled workers and so benefit. I think every nation has a right to its own existence, space, and policies. And they also get to decide what's right for them 'as a people'. Always optimizing for performance of 'the economy' is not in the best interest of the actual citizens of this country.

dx872• 6 years ago

If H-1B visas were being used how they were intended, they would be a good thing, but we often see them used as a way to get cheap labor, or even directly replace American workers. The company I work at has H-1B junior web developers, hardly "very niche, hard to fill" positions that they can't find any qualified Americans to do.

treis• 6 years ago

If that's what we were doing then it would be a good thing. But what companies are mostly doing is bringing over average people so that they can pay them less than Americans.

P_I_Staker2• 6 years ago

No, it's just a way to bring in cheap labor, and bring salaries down. That's it. It's very rarely the case that there's genuinely no one here that can do the jobs. It's widely know that companies are making no legitimate attempt to hire a citizen. I'm not saying this is a good move, and I'm not commenting on the morality of it (ie. who says someone from another country shouldn't be competing for your job)

hyper0perator2• 6 years ago

Companies profit but citizens lose out. Those two entities should not be conflated. This is akin to the outsourcing of many industries such as pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to countries that do not have the same worker or health regulations as the US.

The visa workers are second-class citizens and exploited by companies to keep cost low. It undermines all workers and in the long run undermines all nations involved. Take the US's relationship with China manufacturing where China has some of the worst pollution and is one of the largest world polluters as they do not adhere to any of the same regulations that nations of the west adhere to.

Currently there is the narrative that the US has a shortage of talented STEM. This is untrue. The shortage is due to a skewed labor market that suppresses opportunity for US citizens in the same way that a US manufacturer wouldn't be able to compete against a Chinese manufacturer not because we don't have the technology, demand, or resources, but that the difference in regulations makes it more costly.

akhilcacharya4• 6 years ago

companies profit plus deprive their home countries of their skills a really, really good thing?

These are the same people who claim that people should immigrate legally, but then close all legal avenues of immigrating.

Thorentis3• 6 years ago

Profit isn't the only important thing in life. If there are skills lacking in the market, they will eventually be learnt. Filling demand for CRUD app creation engineers instantly, is just another example of our instant-gratification culture manifest in business.

tomohawk• 6 years ago

Instead of H1B, we should be issuing green cards and limiting the amount of leverage that companies have over workers.

Eliminate H1B and expand green cards for skilled people who want to live here.

theflork• 6 years ago

That’s honestly a great market based idea and more in spirit of what h1-b is meant to do.

hckr_news2• 6 years ago

Agreed. H1B is just a front for immigration anyway. US Companies and the government should probably stop lying to themselves. If they want to bring over talented workers, give them rights too.

lollipop90• 6 years ago

I'm here on an L1 (intra-company transferee). I was initially supposed to come on an H1b, however, lost the lottery twice.

(Lottery is difficult to win due to rampant abuse by certain Indian-US outsourcing companies)

For H1b, you can at least change jobs. An L1 cannot change jobs at all. So, you are completely at the mercy of your employer. Fortunately my employer is benign, but that is not the case for everyone.

Having a proper points system (not one that is easily gamed) and giving people a greencard to enable them to change jobs would be a much better system. This would prevent low-skilled workers and the suppression of US salaries. And if there is a high demand, the US can just take those with the highest points (as the Australian system does).

There are two very good systems: 1. Australian 189 permanent resident system. Example of points:

https://www.am22tech.com/au/australia-points-calculator-for-...

There is limited positions, so only those with the highest points are selected.

(Compared to H1b where the bar is low and people are selected via lottery. This incentivises outsourcing companies to have 4 people apply for every one true position).

2. Japan's point-based high skill visa (Technical stream)

http://www.immi-moj.go.jp/newimmiact_3/en/system/index.html

Processing time for this is 5 days guaranteed and very easy to apply for (I got mine in 4 days).

This is not permanent residence, but you can apply for permanent residence after 1 year.

newsclues• 6 years ago

The system was abused, and now there are consequences.

xenocyon• 6 years ago

A common thing one hears from some Americans is "I'm not opposed to immigration; I'm opposed to illegal immigration". I have come to learn that this is almost always a lie; often these same folks will jump at any chance to hurt legal immigration as well.

michaelmrose7• 6 years ago

Literally everyone who is for "legal immigration" belongs to 2 camps.

One means they want to limit immigration of brown people to as close to zero as possible while allowing white people from Europe with money to move here. Where they can't outright forbid anyone except white Europeans they want to increase the difficulty and bureaucracy to the point where virtually nobody gets through. If it takes 10 years to become a citizen great. If it takes 30 better. Let em die waiting.

Two lives in a fantasy land of law and order where the non criminal types could just queue up and prove that they are the right type of people and follow the law. In this fantasy land type one doesn't exist and the people sneaking in are proven to be bad people by the act of breaking the law. These people live in a world where the law exists to protect and privilege them and anyone not following it is clearly transgressing.

Virtually nobody whom we citizens are descended from waited 10 years, hired a lawyer, and filled out paperwork in triplicate and both types are hypocrites who are themselves a disease on the body politic. If you hear someone talking about how they are for "legal immigration" unfriend them, block them, don't hire them, don't associate. You can't fix them so contain the cancer.

president4• 6 years ago

But you don't consider that maybe it's still a net positive that they were able to come to the US to get decent working experience for a number of years? At the same time, an unemployed American worker may now have a chance for the same job. How is this a bad thing?

tinyhouse7• 6 years ago

Not clear from the article what this means. Would it impact existing visa holders already in the US? What about those who got an H-1B in this year's lottery? Is their visa canceled or postponed to a later date not known yet? (normally for a given year October is the earliest people can start working on H-1B)

bradleyjg• 6 years ago

It hasn’t been issued yet, so no way to know for sure but the rumor is that no one will be able to enter (including re-enter) if they fall under the executive order but those in the country in status will not be immediately impacted.

tinyhouse7• 6 years ago

My educated guess is that the majority of this year's H-1B are already in the US. I wonder what it would mean for them.

dilyevsky• 6 years ago

The rumor is even opt will be canned which is fucking crazy. Wont surprise me if PERM or even N400 are next...

dx872• 6 years ago

From the article:

The order is not expected to immediately affect anyone already in the United States.

armada6516• 6 years ago

Visa holders already in the US still need to renew their Visa. If this order also suspends renewals then people are going to get kicked out of the country.

blntechie7• 6 years ago

No official details yet but apparently 1) all issue of new visas will be delayed 2) current visa holders won’t be allowed at port of entry

So it doesn’t affect current visa holders in the country unless they travel outside the country and have to enter back.

Need to see what are the broad exceptions.

tinyhouse7• 6 years ago

Not letting people in status travel and come back is crazy. It just shows the lack of common sense of the US government. It's the same lack of common sense of the US police and why it's such a mess (besides the systematic racism). Those people wouldn't leave the country as a result - all it means is that you prevent them from visiting their family, sometimes even in emergency situations. It has nothing to do with jobs, just pure stupidity.

nathanvanfleet• 6 years ago

I guess you didn't read it? It says that it shouldn't affect existing holders.

untog2• 6 years ago

I guess you didn't read close enough? It says that it is "not expected to immediately affect anyone already in the United States". If that means existing visa holders currently outside of the US won't be allowed to return, or that those inside the country can't leave then that's a huge effect on their lives.

coreai• 6 years ago

If this is true then next year the chances of getting an H1B would become less than half while the applications would double.

andrewgodwin• 6 years ago

I'm (worriedly) curious how this will affect people trying to change jobs on a H1-B, as technically you need to file a new petition each time, and I can see them somehow denying those too.

tartoran3• 6 years ago

Thats probably nightmare as H1-B holders are kept on a tight leash already

ra72• 6 years ago

Extremely risky, I’d say. There would be people who have already changed jobs pending H1B transfer authorization (since premium processing was suspending earlier), also called joining “on receipt”. Normal processing takes weeks to months and if their transfer applications end up getting rejected now, they lose visa status.

cylinder4• 6 years ago

the entry ban will be for visa issuance at Consulates and entry into the US from abroad.

what you are talking about would require a rule-making process and/or statutory change. they are going to try that, but it will take longer and will be subject to judicial review.

AC21 lets you change employers without waiting for the petition to be approved. that's statutory. much harder to change as it would require Congress.

eventually, your visa label will expire. after that, if you need to travel overseas, you will need a new visa label and under this proposed exec order, if it's still active you will not be able to return. so you will have to avoid overseas travel entirely until the ban is lifted.

crispyporkbites• 6 years ago

All my friends in the US are staying put now, they can’t go see their families after covid because they have no idea if they’ll be allowed back in.

Bad for america, good for the rest of the world though- maybe by restricting American foreign policy we’ll see more competition for SV open up globally.

bebc• 6 years ago

2020 is the election year.

iaw• 6 years ago

So highly paid permanent resident tech professionals even more highly paid and a lot of non-permanent residents get even more harmed because of their country of birth....

I personally feel that the H1-B system needs to be rethought to encourage a healthier but not at the expense of bringing hard working immigrants into this country.

nine_zeros• 6 years ago

Erratic government decisions can have severe consequences on businesses.

About time US companies realize that they need to have more fault tolerance to support their employees by open more global offices. This is especially true because the world outside is becoming more competitive and erratic business decisions like this will destroy product competitiveness.

As for foreign companies/entrepreneurs/would be business owners with capital, the US is shut. There is no need to do business here.

tathougies3• 6 years ago

Most countries have suspended immigration at this point havent they? Hard to argue against such a thing amid covid.

joelbluminator7• 6 years ago

I don't know that that's true, any source for that? If countries are opening up for tourists (!) I don't see why not for immigration.

infamouscow• 6 years ago

Name one country that has opened for tourists or has recently (as in the last week or two) said they will open for tourists.

zomglings2• 6 years ago

I wonder if they can make an exemption for the tech industry.

Feels like this is just going to accelerate the moves we've seen in the Bay Area towards companies going fully remote.

If this happens, the administration could see a lot of that money just leave the country altogether.

raverbashing• 6 years ago

Tech is what? 90% of H1-Bs?

No way they're going to make an exception for that

ixtli2• 6 years ago

The point is, in part, to attack tech.

zomglings2• 6 years ago

Around 68.7% in 2017.

Going by these numbers (WARNING: PDF download): https://immigrationhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/h-...

That shows what a short-sighted move this is on the part of the administration - just re-election theater, I guess.

joelbluminator7• 6 years ago

And yet everyone and their mother wanna move there no matter the price paid in uncertainty, pressure and mental health. They could try go to a country with a straight forward immigration process like Canada, but money is more important than anything else to some people.

SV_BubbleTime3• 6 years ago

The immigration restrictions to Canada are more strict aren’t they?

Is there a minimum asset requirement? Is there a requirement that to apply have have to have been there for 3-5 years? An English language test? I don’t know for sure; asking.

joelbluminator7• 6 years ago

I don't think Canada is more strict, not at all, but would like to hear from commenters who moved to Canada. Especially draconian is the fact that the spouse of a h1b holder can't work (last I checked). As an immigrant in the Netherlands that's not the case there and it's a huge deal breaker for me to ever think of the U.S.

toast0• 6 years ago

If you're immigrating for economic opportunity, it would make sense to try to make the most of it.

A lot of people have a plan to make a bunch of money for 10-20 years and then go back and be entreprenerial in their home countries etc. Canada may (or may not) be a better permanent home, but if the goal is to make a bunch of money, that's not the best place to do it.

joelbluminator7• 6 years ago

That's fine, as long as they realise there's a big price to pay.

triceratops14• 6 years ago

Do you think that's not already happening?

MintelIE• 6 years ago

Tech hiring and salary suppression cartel's going to have a rough time.

ceo_tim_crook2• 6 years ago

thank god, I've seen a lot of americans rejected especially POC of varied backgrounds turned down in favor of some H1B nonsense to often it really impacts the ability for folks to rise up and move to new industries

fsociety2• 6 years ago

Please explain more, your comment is suspicious given your sign-up time.

ceo_tim_crook2• 6 years ago

what's to explain? h1bs are widely used to gain access to bodies instead of training/developing local talent it's a joke every interview template i've been given seems like it was made to exclude many people who would otherwise be fine

it's not like immigration is bad or anything but the balance is screwed up and and it's causing long term damage it's bad for immigrants and bad for americans

belltaco4• 6 years ago

This is great news for Canada. Once the Covid situation resolves, if Trudeau doesn't give a lot of incentives for tech companies to build offices there Canada will miss out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Canada has already been benefiting from the recent restrictions on work visas and rejecting visas for no reason, for example by saying a forensic pathologist isn't a specialty occupation.

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/27/799402801/canada-wins-u-s-los...

https://insights.dice.com/2020/02/11/canada-continues-benefi...

cheez• 6 years ago

Not happening.

dpbriggs• 6 years ago

Wouldn't TN visas be a workaround?

derptacos• 6 years ago

How does the TN circumvent in this situation legally ?

cylinder4• 6 years ago

TN is for Canadian citizens working in the US. The opportunity for Canada is about (mostly Indian but other nationalities too) offering easy visas to skilled professionals so US tech companies can relocate them (or they can move independently) to Canada and not have to deal with the broken US system.

samfisher835• 6 years ago

People in Canada aren't making US salaries. Most people want to go to the US for the money.

vsskanth4• 6 years ago

Well it looks like US is not an option anymore.

Canada on the other hand gives you PR on entry if you're skilled enough.

Money doesn't matter if it becomes an eternal struggle or impossible to maintain legal status.

hocuspocus• 6 years ago

A lot of immigrants want career opportunities, a reasonable path to permanent residence and/or citizenship, and a good environment for their family.

#1 could change, some tech companies have started to realize they can offer more remote jobs and save money while offering salaries that are still very competitive to anyone not living in the Bay Area. #2 was already problematic before Trump. #3 is often better outside the US.

belltaco4• 6 years ago

That makes Canada even more attractive to tech companies because they can save money. Canadian salaries and living standards are still better than many other countries'.

grad_ml4• 6 years ago

One have to put things in prerspective. It took 40-50 years for the silicon valley to become what is is today. Once there are enough tech presence in Canada, tech situation would improve. There would be ample amount of tech folks, and new innovations would come along. New companies would be founded and things would be at par, or even better. Anyhow I see, US heading towards political turmoil/instability.

OzzyB5• 6 years ago

Can you take some of the Bay Area homeless as well, or is it only acceptable to place economic externalities Stateside?

curuinor• 6 years ago

Parent commenter's never been to the skid row of Vancouver. Land prices is the fucked thing, and they're plenty fucked in Canada, too.

joelbluminator7• 6 years ago

I hope it does. But I wonder if a very bad economic crisis (that some say started in 2008 and we never truly recovered from) may cause a similar wave of xenophobia and civil unrest in Canada as we now see happening in the U.S. I know Canada is a very different country than the U.S and much less prone to massive civil unrest, but all and all it's not that much different than countries like UK, Germany, France etc - who are experiencing their own brand of populism and growing xenophobia now.

grad_ml4• 6 years ago

I don't think same would happen in Canada. What US lawmakers have done, is to put a tap on green card basis on the country of origin. Indians on H1B wouldn't get their green card, in their life time, period. If there were no Indians waiting for green card, it wouldn't have been a big issue. It is by design. Indians are new B

SomeoneFromCA15• 6 years ago

Yeah, right, you apparently do not remember Quebec unrests, when they wanted to secede.

ycombonator2• 6 years ago

They all eventually come back to USA after gaining a foothold in Canada. TN Visas. Majority of TN Visa users are immigrants into Canada.

smnrchrds2• 6 years ago

This sounds like a massive exaggeration to me. Do you have any citation to back up these claims?

Element_• 6 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_plant_economy

latenightcoding• 6 years ago

Tech salaries are not even close. Only Toronto and Vancouver would be attractive options for tech workers, both cities have a housing problem.

Apocryphon2• 6 years ago

Montreal needs to step up with their salaries.

GhostVII2• 6 years ago

I think most Canadians working in the US for tech companies would be on a TN visa, which is not being suspended according to the Globe and Mail [0]. Internships would be significantly affected though, since they go on a J1 visa so it could help the new grad pipeline for Canadian tech companies.

[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/us-politics/article-tr...

paulgb2• 6 years ago

I think the implication of OP is not that fewer Canadians would be in the US (though I'd point out that a lot of us Canadians are on H-1Bs too), but that immigrants from other countries could go to Canada and work from a satellite office in the same time zone.

jdsully• 6 years ago

TN allows for no immigration intent and can be rescinded any time you cross at the whims of the border guard. Most US companies will transition a Canadian to an H1-B and then a green card as quickly as feasible.

m0zg2• 6 years ago

As a former H1-B: makes sense. H1-B is abused a lot, and importing new entry-level workers when unemployment is at record highs after COVID makes zero sense. Although I'm sure Hawaiian judge will disagree.

ixtli2• 6 years ago

Stopping workers coming in from one place isn’t about making sure Americans have jobs tho. It doesn’t magically change the cost of rent. It doesn’t magically educate the uneducated. Nor should it. This is about being able to report to middle class white people that ‘immigration stopped’.

pelasaco• 6 years ago

I'm not sure if you are right: https://www.blackenterprise.com/will-limiting-h1b-visas-help...

BTW 500k people on the H1B1 visa is a hell lot of "skilled people": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/us/foreign-workers-visas-...

vsskanth4• 6 years ago

This is going to have a chilling effect on international students thinking of coming to the United States.

Many people who do end up getting kicked out will probably take their jobs with them back home, especially in tech.

theduder993• 6 years ago

Many international students come to the US to get a world class education. That won't change.

kondu• 6 years ago

Not at all. For most of the universities, grad schools are absolute cash cows. International students come here for grad school largely because of the associated 3 year(2 for non-STEM) OPT period and ease of getting a H1B during it.

boruto3• 6 years ago

They take loans to pay for the world class education. If they have no option to repay those loans would they come to US?

retortio3• 6 years ago

H1-B was intended for highly skilled workers that the US had a real shortage of. But now it's just being abused to bring in captive workers that are willing to accept lower wages and worse working conditions than otherwise while crowding out US workers.

What if, instead of bowing to corporate greed which cares not a bit for our country or our people, we actually invested in our own population and trained them to do the jobs H1-B workers currently do.

Scaling back H1-B in this way is the common sense approach. And it benefits other countries too by reducing brain drain.

It's a win-win.

samfisher835• 6 years ago

You can look at the data, SV companies aren't paying H1B people low wages. Unless you think 200-300k is low wages.

noobermin7• 6 years ago

Is this true? The argument I've seen is that H1B's are liked by SV because they can be paid less.

retortio3• 6 years ago

One thing to remember is that in many cases H1-B workers are brought over by sponsoring companies which take a huge cut (I know cases of 40% or more) out of their salaries for the service of securing them the Visa. So those salaries might appear to be a certain number but the workers themselves may actually receive significantly less while some rent seeking company stashes the differences.

I know for a fact that in my industry (not in SV) H1-B wages are lower, going off both public data and conversations I've had with H1-B coworkers, many who I consider my friends.

As a side note, I don't blame H1-B workers at all for coming here. They're generally great developers and great people.

ntsplnkv2• 6 years ago

Honestly it's not the SV companies. It's the body shop consulting firms.

damnyou• 6 years ago

I know people on H1s who make 500k to a million dollars per year at FAANG.

tracer42013• 6 years ago

I’d love to see comprehensive data on this. I worked at a fortune 10 oil and gas company in Houston. We had onshore contractors across a range, but I know a few of them made less than $18 an hour. The rest that we paid went to two different contracting companies.

tinyhouse7• 6 years ago

Salary is not even the issue. The main issue is the employment restrictions. Instead of making H1-B a visa that lets an individual full freedom (like green card), it's tied to an employer and moving jobs is not that easy, and many employers also sponsor for green card, which is another process that can take years and make it harder to move. During this time the employee has little leverage asking for promo or raises. (promo and raises usually appear after the green card..)

Once you let employees freedom, the market will take care of the salary. I also understand that employers invest in the visa application and relocation of people, so it should be fair to them as well. This can solved by having a period (1-year is pretty reasonable) that prohibits new visa holders from moving companies.

hourislate2• 6 years ago

SV isn't the only place you find H1B's. Everyone from Toyota, AA, Sabre, etc in the DFW area has hired what seems like 1000's. There is hardly anyone but H1B's at Toyota in Plano from what I understand. I have heard some companies are laying of permanent staff and keeping H1B's because they're less expensive.

Personal experience in my part of the world seems to suggest that it is cost. Permanent employees are expensive and H1B's are so terrified of losing employment they are willing to work around the clock and for less.

I would like to see the whole program gone. I don't believe it is being used as it was intended.

saradhi• 6 years ago

Your presumption is either (if you not a h1 candidate) far away from the fact or don't want to accept the truth.

You are looking at the top 100 companies and their full-time employees but not at the 1000s of vendor-employer ponzi scheme/scams that happen every day in the form of contractors who apply with fake resumes, take proxy interviews and outsource the assigned work to someone in India. Doesn't stop there, the dependents of those do a unlicensed food selling, baby sitting, work in local stores, what not. The hard to digest fact is the student who comes on F1 visa, succumbs to the pressure of 90 days period to get into a job to maintain the visa status joins a consultancy company, which starts the game. These consultancies market the candidate with high experience fake resume, arranges proxy candidate to take interviews, even Falsify the requirement of GC/citizenship candidate requirement - all these to charge the client a 100$/hr and pay a mere 40$/hr to the candidate through their sister companies acting as layers. A honest try from USCIS to do a quick scan in containing these will drop at least 50% of H1B lottery applications, void 30% of the consulting company licenses and also help the right talent to get an opportunity. If you are a gov/USCIS rep, drop me an email I'll be more than happy to provide more details, and possible ways of catching the wrong ones.

SV_BubbleTime3• 6 years ago

I was very surprised to learn 70% of Apple engineers are H1B hires - but i don’t know if this is the case currently.

Agree that domestic training should be invested.

Edit: sorry, clarified Apple not SV as a whole - and it was a Vice Or Vox article, so I should probably know better.

carapace• 6 years ago

70%? Do you have a citation for that? (I'm not pro/con just want to nail down the number.)

bbatha• 6 years ago

Source?

conanbatt5• 6 years ago

I recommend the opposite: educating is very expensive in the US. When a foreigner comes to the US, the US gets the value of that education for free.

Who doesn't like free things?

ckaygusu6• 6 years ago

You can easily achieve this by raising wage requirements, instead of essentially having nothing changed and making the whole US a big open air prison for foreign skilled workers.

zozbot234• 6 years ago

Make it easier for H1B's to transfer to another, better-paying job without losing their privilege of staying and working in the country. Then it's a real win-win, for both guest workers and citizens. The only actors who would lose are those seeking to abuse the system in the first place.

masklinn• 6 years ago

You can easily achieve this by raising wage requirements, instead of essentially having nothing changed and making the whole US a big open air for foreign skilled workers.

Also stronger labor laws instead of gutting them, actually enforcing them instead of shanking the agencies responsible for them, and actually hitting guilty corporations where it hurts instead of handing out "cost of doing business" jokes.

And prosecuting guilty management as well. Middle manager 8374 might be less eager to ask for bullshit job requirements designed to only fit a specific H1B if their n+1 to 6 have just gotten years in the slammer for labor fraud.

idrios• 6 years ago

Raising wage requirements just means companies will pay whatever the new minimum is for H-1B workers. Once employed, those workers are still locked into their job without freedom to jump to anther with better working conditions or a better salary (which makes them more appealing hires for companies than US workers).

If you want to see a more fair and competitive workforce, give H1-B visa holders more freedom to switch jobs without risk of losing their visa.

jeremiahhs• 6 years ago

Yes. I've seen first hand abuse of the visas to import cheap labor in academia to avoid paying citizen-level wages.

belltaco4• 6 years ago

Unemployment in tech is down from Jan to May this year.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/06/11/unemp...

drocer88• 6 years ago

Unemployment is up from 3% to 11% YOY in information sector: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm

These number are said to underestimate the true unemployment numbers.

U.S. should focus on American unemployment numbers.

oneplane4• 6 years ago

Instead of fighting the symptom you can also fight the cause. If you make the abuse not legal, and detect and enforce that, you solve the problem either way. You'll still need to educate the native citizens of course, otherwise nothing really changes. But you'll need to do both.

I don't know what local laws would apply, but I imagine that the same laws that have to do with equal pay can be made generic so that it applies to everyone for a position. In the end you should be paid for your value, not for your gender, color of your skin or the place you were born.

rconti• 6 years ago

What's the mechanism you suggest for funding education and training in our country? It doesn't seem to be popular.

pmoriarty• 6 years ago

"What if, instead of bowing to corporate greed which cares not a bit for our country or our people, we actually invested in our own population and trained them to do the jobs H1-B workers currently do."

Who's this "our people" you're talking about?

As a US citizen, I consider every person in the world as part of my people, and I don't begrudge any individual coming and working or training in the US.

The more people, from whichever country, have access to good education and good jobs, the better.

Good education and jobs should not be reserved for people who happen to live or be born in a particular place, be descended from particular people, nor just those who managed to get certain bureaucratic paperwork.

hcurtiss• 6 years ago

All else being equal, I think most people prioritize their own country and countrymen over others', and would not sacrifice their own countrymen to benefit others'. You may not share this view, but I think most people do. Most people consider themselves a part of a national team, and they feel some loyalty to their teammates.

gorbachev154• 6 years ago

But we're not talking about your decision or his, we're talking about the decision made by the government whose literal job description is to make rules for this country alone!

tallon• 6 years ago

You can take the high approach and give up your job for someone else, then. Are you going to welcome strangers into your family and your home as well? Resources are limited, that is a fact. If you've never experienced that, consider yourself very lucky and privileged, and work to deserve that good fortune and privilege.

on_and_off6• 6 years ago

I came to the USA on an H1B visa 2 years ago.

On a high salary and with the promise of being sponsored for a green card.

I got my green card just before covid impacted the USA and still have a pretty high salary (in the same range of my US born colleagues).

I already had a great job in my home country, I was not going to come to the USA to be paid a pittance.

Yeah, there is abuse of the green card system but it is in place because there aren't enough skilled workers in the USA.

vbtemp2• 6 years ago

Couple important points:

1. SV/FAANGs, like elite colleges, only hire some very small percentage of people who apply. Many people who are perfectly well qualified and have successful careers otherwise get denied employment.

2. The market cap of these FAANGs is in the trillions. Between talent and capital, there's literally no problem they can't solve (they can solve problems about cyber bullying, trolling, etc but their business relies on it.. so it's not really a "problem" per se).

3. There are SO MANY underprivileged and/or poor kids in SV, LA, Pittsburgh, all the places where tech companies reside. Saying there aren't enough skilled workers in the US is kind of dishonestly true, as they have tons of applications from many qualified people.. many of whom with some training and support may very well become highly qualified....

4. ...They could literally invest some of those trillions to build a pipeline from these areas, develop talent locally - or at least domestically.

So much of tech is about solving problems with the resources you have. Opening up broadly to a global labor supply removes the constraint on that resource, and therefore don't need to innovate or find clever ways to make it work. Now, they are companies that have only one duty - deliver profit to shareholders - and that's fine and how companies should be run. But public policy needs to exist to serve the interest of the people, and for the most part - not entirely - H1B has been to serve the interest of executives in Big Tech.

Also, finally, Trump is absolutely awful, horrid, all that. A broken clock is right twice a day though, and this is one of the few possibly accidental things he's done that isn't a complete self-shot to the head.

pnako• 6 years ago

There is an issue with 'diversity in tech' and, among other things, under-representation of African-Americans in STEM.

So why are the big tech corporations that are constantly virtue signalling about Black Lives Matter and social justice not simply training American engineers (not specifically black, but people coming from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, which would definitely include many African-Americans). Why do they bring Indian or Chinese engineers?

America does not lack people, it has good universities. It could certainly train a local workforce. Providing good jobs to those communities would do wonders to reduce criminality, drug abuse and various issues.

vsskanth4• 6 years ago

Reposting my response from a different thread:

Every time you file an H1B Visa, you pay something called a ACWIA Fee (“American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act of 1998”). For employers who have between 1-25 full-time workers, the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act fee is $750. For employers with 26 or more full-time employees, the fee is $1,500. [1] This fee was established to fund training and education programs administered by the Department of Labor.

As of 2018, there were 420K active H1B visas in the USA. These people need to renew their visas every 3 years (most are Indians and they can never become PR in their lifetime). So that means 300-630 million USD is being added to this fund on a recurring basis over a 3 year period.

I wonder where all that money went.

[1] https://www.immi-usa.com/h1b-visa-processing-fees-2016/

runawaybottle7• 6 years ago

Free college I guess.

Oh wait...

That’s a very interesting thing, I had no idea. So a sensible thing to do would be to increase that fee substantially and have it go straight to subsidizing degree programs that aren’t creating enough home grown talent.

In other words, the company should expect to pay close to market rate per H1B plus the fee.

We remove the incentives to abuse the program for cost reduction, and straight up use the fees to fund college.

That brings me to some weird job posts that I keep seeing for some large bank. The role was for ‘Specialist’ developer, and I wonder if it really is some specialist role that they can’t fill in a major city (seemed like typical web developer stuff).

Shrugs, say it ain’t so, would hate to know that’s how it’s being gamed.

pstrateman2• 6 years ago

That's 1-2 USD per person in the US.

The couch cushions maybe?

asdjlkadsjklads• 6 years ago

What if, instead of bowing to corporate greed which cares not a bit for our country or our people, we actually invested in our own population and trained them to do the jobs H1-B workers currently do.

Wishful thinking under the current administration.

buttersbrian• 6 years ago

Yes, chop shops out there abuse the system, and have become substantial factor in some industries.

Much of the H1B candidates out there are graduates of american universities that are trying to take the next step to be in America. We should be embracing these people where possible, not villanizing them. Make it so the chop shops can be weeded out, not the good people that are forced to work under them due to a broken system.

Also, many jobs require base salaries that are VERY in line with the market, if not higher, as a financial check to the Employer to make sure they want said (H1B) candidate. We had trouble finding a JR DevOps person, basically forced to go H1B, and a JR in the midwest was going to cost us 95K with little experience. That was widly out of line for a JR devops candidate

conanbatt5• 6 years ago

As solid reasoning as using tariffs to promote American industry.

xtreme• 6 years ago

It's a win-win.

Except for the individuals. US educated students who want to remain in the US, work, and raise a family are now basically being told to go back. Or people who prefer the US for non-monetary reasons (crazy thought, I know).

But what I find interesting is that programs like the diversity visa (DV) lottery with even more relaxed requirements or even illegal immigration don't get scrutinized as much as H1-B. I wonder if it's because H1-B workers primarily compete for well-paying white collar jobs while most DV winners and illegal immigrants go for blue-collar jobs.

weyland1086• 6 years ago

I came to USA for education in 2008-09. Payed for my own education thanks to my parents and their sacrifice of lifetime savings. Did not take any govt funds for education. I graduated with a masters degree with Perfect 4.0 gpa . I worked my way up from financial crisis to working SV today. I have family, kids going to public school and also own a home. I don’t remember anytime taking a pay cut to stay in the country. It’s been more than 10years that I was legally here and always followed the law and I am still 5 years out at minimum from getting a green card. I rely on h1b renewals to keep going.... so it’s not exactly easy for me to pickup and go back to my home country where I haven’t stayed for 10+ years now to “fix” this problem.

There huge nuance which is missed when talking about H1bs ... there are body shops which do cut wages and should be stopped. However the immigration system in USA needs significant reform as well. It’s hard already to build a life for your family with a normal 3 year lease ( h1b duration) for this kind of misinformed political rhetoric to have unintended consequences.

downvoteme12• 6 years ago

Unless your priority date is earlier than 2012, you are a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 30 years away from your green card. The backlog between 2009 and 2012 is around 40k people or 80k green cars so around 15 to 30 years

tibbydudeza• 6 years ago

I think it is a very good idea ... poaching of the best and brightest talent from less developed countries who invested in the education of these people is a form of robbery.

If you need them , then let them work remotely and pay them fair wages as they would have received in the US and let them contribute their tax to their own country.

SV_BubbleTime3• 6 years ago

I look at it the other way. FAANG has more than enough money to invest in domestic training.

Either way it’s a win.

stickfigure• 6 years ago

Robbery? I'm guessing you also feel that the people who escaped across the Berlin Wall were "robbing" the Soviet Union of their labor? I don't suppose the actual humans involved get a say in this, do they?

fredfoobar22• 6 years ago

My dude, the people who came here to work and make their living are individuals, they have desires of their own to trade their services for a good life. Countries don't own their citizens, they are entities organized by people interested in living there.

SomeoneFromCA15• 6 years ago

Of course they do not own their citizen, that is why you can take them to the US or other developed countries. However yes you do rob these countries of skilled workforce, and yes you do create an environment, which stuntnts the growth of these countries and yes you do increase the misery of the other citizen who is left in that countries. You just have to be honest, and say that benefit for US outweighs the loss for say India or Ukraine.

noobermin7• 6 years ago

Some of these make no real sense, like L1 and J1 visas, which are so few and uncommon and are often granted to individuals. J1's for example are for researchers coming abroad to collaborate with scientists here, there isn't a real argument that J1's are taking jobs from anyone else that I can tell. Not that anyone should be travelling at all this year but one would have to see if they get extended after covid dies down.

L1s also look like they're geared towards essentially overseas managers moving to the US, particularly in the case of a single international company moving their executives around physically.

GhostVII2• 6 years ago

J1 visas are what all the tech companies use for interns from Canada. Technically you aren't allowed to work under a J1 visa, but everyone seems to be doing that anyways - tech companies will always say that you are going to be treated just like a full-time employee during the interview, and then say you are only in the US for training when applying for the visa.

noobermin7• 6 years ago

So may be I'm showing my ass here but I'm an academic. Our group was planning on collaborating with a French group who regularly performs nature-tier scientific work and we were planning on exchanging a graduate student and having them get their degree here, but if this holds it looks like they won't be able to do that. I don't doubt there are abuses (look up the thread, I see some iffyness around H1B's but the program itself being corrupt I don't think is true) but they're going to hurt everyone to score political hits for right wing xenophobes.

Look, my honest opinion is the abuses are generally bad, especially for immigrants who are being put in bad situations which because yet another thing the companies have as leverage over them, but then the people who should be targeted are the companies who are abusing the system, not the programs themselves which hurts everyone, especially the immigrants.

Jommi• 6 years ago

Well you're not completely truthful here. Yes you can work under J1, its an internship or traineeship visa. J-1 in general is related to learning tho. But there is nothing against doing something for money.

kache_• 6 years ago

This is great news for Canadians who would like to move and work in America. A lot less competition

noncoml7• 6 years ago

Xenophobia is a bitch. A few years ago I experienced an atrial fibrillation while exercising, so I called an ambulance, as I didn't know what was happening to me and thought that that was the end.

Once in the ambulance the paramedic started asking me where I am from and if I came in on one of "those visas".

I was afraid I was about to die, and this fucker was being xenophobic.

rantwasp6• 6 years ago

this is a textbook example of when someone should lose their job on the spot

2ion2• 6 years ago

Because somebody's feelings were hurt? That's a useless argument to make against a professional who's basically effective at his job and very useful to society. The US is useless at civil rights these days precisely because it's all between "my feels" and straight out looting. Conditioned knee jerking all over the place.

buildbot• 6 years ago

Hey that’s awful, I’m sorry you experienced that.

noncoml7• 6 years ago

Thank you. Not everyone is like this however. I can't even begin to tell you how amazing, friendly and compassionate were the staff at the hospital(Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara). They definitely made up for the awful ride there.

downerending8• 6 years ago

I wasn't there, but this sounds more like cluelessness than anything else. I could imagine making small talk like this to keep someone's mind off of their pain or anxieties. Did it really seem like the gal or guy was hating on you?

noncoml7• 6 years ago

I get asked where I am from all the time, because of my strange accent. However I've never before been asked about what visa I came in on.

The way he talked about the Visas, gave me the impression of someone who has been conditioned to believe that "those Visas" are evil.

Or maybe I completely misread it, and he was just trying to make conversation as you said, to calm me down. But choosing the Visa subject seemed quite odd. Usually when I mention my home country people chose a subject like history, mythology, holidays or current affairs.

victor106• 6 years ago

I am not exactly sure how this would help people working in tech (and other tech related areas like business analysts, PM's etc.,)

This makes it easy for companies to outsource work.

When all employees are remote what's the value in bringing someone onshore? And once jobs are outsourced I don't think they will come back.

So this could be marginally beneficial for onshore workers or it could be very bad.

remote_phone4• 6 years ago

Anyone who thinks this is good for the US is stupid. In the era of remote working, all this will do it hasten the retreat of software engineering from the US. Facebook and Google do not care where their employees live, they want the best in the world. This will just mean that jobs will truly flee the US.

Right now the US is winning because of such a high concentration of talented software engineers compared to the rest of the world. It’s the same reason why there is only one Hollywood, the same goes for Silicon Valley. If you prevent people from coming here, the top companies will find them in their own countries and then those are jobs lost forever. And then the drain begins. This is a stupid self-defeating move by a self-defeating president.

theduder993• 6 years ago

Facebook and Google could have converted their entire software dev workforce to Indians in India any time they wanted. But they didn't, I wonder why hmmmmm.

remote_phone4• 6 years ago

Because all the best Indian software engineers went to US grad schools and then went to Silicon Valley. It sounds like you don’t live in Silicon Valley.

juskrey• 6 years ago

BTW any horror stories about H1B people stealing good jobs from locals?

somurzakov2• 6 years ago

if US bans H-1Bs these jobs wont go to americans, these jobs will just be offshored. Large american enterprises already have gigantic offices outside US to manage IT/midoffice/backoffice or have relationships with contractor firms like Cognizant.

It is so much easier to send one/two americans as expats to India/East Europe to manage outsourced staff and the trend will just accelerate.

seibelj• 6 years ago

Simple solution - auction off the H1B visas. This will ensure only the most needed, highest-value employees get it. Works with any number of visas. I fail to see why this easy, simple fix that also earns money for the government is not applied.

bguillet• 6 years ago

Because then no small company can compete with the big ones in the auction...

QuixoticQuibit• 6 years ago

Reserve an allotment for smaller companies using the existing lottery system.

rhexs3• 6 years ago

If your small company needs H1bs to survive, it doesn’t sound like a very sound business in the first place.

dzink• 6 years ago

This could be a knock-out punch for many US universities. H1B is the visa International students pursue after paying full out of state tuition to colleges here.

boruto3• 6 years ago

Hasn't covid already done that. I think we are going to see a high upsurge in competition for masters in my home country. Which is very good.

licebmi__at__• 6 years ago

With all the push for remote work, won't that also accelerate these jobs leaving US? Well, good for us outside the US.

MangoCoffee• 6 years ago

i have no dog in this fight but the comments in this thread...

the amount of layoffs and unemployment since covid 19. this move is not to please you. it is to please the American people. only employers will care. the middle/working class American won't care (this is the biggest voting bloc that Trump needs)

this is a persuasion for Nov.

austincheney5• 6 years ago

My common sense frustration here is how can the US possibly have a critical shortage of developers on languages that are 20 to 50 years old? We have the third highest population in the world and claim to have excellent education, and these are high paying jobs at 2x-3x the national average yearly income.

So what qualifies the shortage? Is it like agriculture where Americans are too entitled for the work? Are Americans viewed as generally too low quality?

joubert2• 6 years ago

“Foreign nationals account for 81 percent of the full-time graduate students in electrical engineering, 79 percent in computer science, 75 percent in industrial engineering, 69 percent in statistics, 63 percent in mechanical engineering, 59 percent in civil engineering, and 57 percent in chemical engineering.”

— https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/02/americas-stem-cri...

noobermin7• 6 years ago

College courses aren't necessarily zero sum if SV would considering hiring from state universities.

rootsudo• 6 years ago

1. Developers dying, aging out, retiring.

2. No real investment/push into learning legacy langauges.

3. Philippines/Indian BPO encourage and actually train on the job. If you look at accenture/whatever agency, even IBM, they'll guarantee a job in that country if they stick with the on the job training. In those countries, entry level, know nothing developers make $500/$1000 a month, best, vs being experienced in the USA and making a minimum of $5000. 6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr. I feel like it's employer idea of infinite monkey theorem.

It's not entitlement, it's that in the USA, employers have to compete and everyone can easily get a job in IT that isn't even programming for $40-50k, think of help desk. All you have to do is show up, restart a few computers, and be relatable.

austincheney5• 6 years ago

6-12K/yr is waaayyy cheaper then, 70K/yr.

Isn’t that irrelevant? People working in the US on an H1B are not earning such low foreign wages.

hogFeast2• 6 years ago

It isn't that easy to get a job in IT. It is easy if you have the right background.

I knew a kid who could program reasonably, was pretty smart but didn't go to college. Got "hired" somewhere on help desk, was on a training contract for 3 months (he was just doing normal work, no pay), offered minimum wage job at end, didn't get paid for overtime, and got fired when he wanted to leave work at 6 because he had arranged to meet family for his birthday.

I think many people significantly understate how bad the US job market is for a very significant minority of people.

Also, you are massively overstating how good development is in the Phillippines or India. India churns out masses of CS grads who have never seen a computer. The economics of training are different US/India but the incentive there is the low wage. Remove that low wage incentive, and companies I think there will be investment into US citizens.

(Btw, where I am there are for-profit companies that train ex-army people to do software development...it works pretty well...but no-one asks: why aren't tech companies doing this? Like these companies employ people on very exploitative contracts, why don't companies just do this themselves? There is something wrong with how tech companies are run).

hyper0perator2• 6 years ago

The shortage is false, a form of gaslighting, artificially created so that corporations and academic institutions can keep costs low and suppress wages by flooding the US market with cheap labor that also bypasses usual employment standards available to US citizens. Eric Weinstein has done some really good research into this.

'How and Why Government, Universities, and Industry Create Domestic Labor Shortages of Scientists and High-Tech Workers'

https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/Weinstein-GUI_N...

NotSammyHagar5• 6 years ago

Are you talking dev or academia? I read the paper and I'll give you my dev focused response. The paper is focused on phd supply in academia and the most recent dates referenced are the last 1990s. It has brief discussion of knowledge workers but not really devs. It's not relevant for devs in the us at least since the dot com boom until now.

There's a giant shortage of capable devs. i'm from the us in case it matters to you but in my 25+ years as a professional engineer across a few fangs, midsize and several startups all those companies wanted to hire every capable dev they could find. Microsoft used to have 5k plus openings when I was there and the other fang had similar. We hired all over the world and the us. We never hired as many as we wanted. New college students grads could make over 100k and we still couldn't hire all we wanted.

I worked on creative, original software. I think there is a hiring area that could be impacted by large number of immigrants in tech and that is more IT like positions. There's an oversupply in my experience of people that put software packages together, keep the it infrastructure of a company running - those are crucial jobs too, just like devs writing original software, but there's a lot fewer people in it support and maybe that's part of the issue.

austincheney5• 6 years ago

I read the paper but I did not see any indication of wage depression.

Here are the trends I am observing from the comments of this thread:

* Immigrants in the US on visas earn less than US citizens. I have seen no data on this. How much less do immigrant software engineers earn as a percentage?

* Any evidence discrediting knowledge worker shortage is centered on academics. I am a senior software developer with 20 years experience at one of the largest and wealthiest employers in the US. Despite that I have no formal education in the subject matter. I am either entirely self taught or in some other disciplines trained by the military. So it seems, from my perspective, centering the discussion to academics is just a distraction.

hogFeast2• 6 years ago

I think the issue is some combination of: cheap alternative, unwillingness to train, unwillingness to consider a certain type of person, and unwillingness to take a risk (even if the alternative only secures you mediocre product).

Companies just have lots of choices. It is too hard to employ an American, maybe they need to get up to speed, they need to be paid more. Immigrants will live 10 to an apartment, they can be disposed of quickly, they do anything to keep their job because they don't want to get deported...I mean...who would you rather employ?

I have seen this in other countries. I remember reading about a Greek charity teaching computer science to illegal immigrants...most of those people were leaving countries where youth unemployment was actually LOWER than Greece. Another good example is Monzo (although a terribly managed company), they grew by just hiring all the CS wizards couldn't have done the job.

Call it nativist or whatever...it is a tragedy when people or companies are allowed to shed their responsibilities to the societies in which they live. It is very possible, it is just most tech companies are very bad at hiring/employee development (and why do they have to be good when you have H1B).

proc0• 6 years ago

It's a tough job no one really likes. I've tried to make programmers of almost everyone I know, almost nobody wants to even try it out.

austincheney5• 6 years ago

This is my experience as well. High pay, accommodating working conditions, and great benefits are clearly not the right motivators.

I suspect, contrary to many people’s desires, this is ultimately not a conversation about economics but a conversation on absent discipline and self motivation.

NotSammyHagar5• 6 years ago

There are just too many jobs and not enough qualified devs. Even in the pandemic. It's worse if you block our international people by limiting visas.

There's already a shortage of devs of course in he US. Plenty of companies have thousands of openings even in the pandemic - of course there are places that stopped hiring or even shutdown and people lost jobs.

If you lower the labor pool size, pay should go up, ease of employment should go up for those who can work here. There's already a shortage of engineers in those special fields like cobol. So it will be even harder for banks for hire for them if you can't get say people from India to move here and work on that. If you are working on a modern language with modern tools, libs etc (c++ or java) why would you want to go back to that old world where there were probably not tests, automation like we have today? If you have 10 years exp in one of the say top 10 tech cities in the us you are probably making at least 300k. I just don't see banks hiring someone like me and paying me enough more to match that far less desirable job. So that leads to banks only having a hiring pool of people who will work for less for various reasons (location, less exp, not interested or trained on c++).

I think this will just lead to more outsourcing to other countries, even though that has its own +/-, and imagine a world where some large us banks lost so much tech ability they are dependent on people in other countries (maybe already happened).

austincheney5• 6 years ago

You are replying to something not stated.

Why is there such a shortage given the high wages, population size, access to education, and so forth?

fsociety2• 6 years ago

Honestly I’m so tired of this shit. I can’t leave the US without the risk of not being able to come back, and my Mom is in a different country in a high risk category for COVID-19.

If she is infected and hospitalized, I have to quit my job and leave my home to spend last moments with her. Fuck Trump.

x87678r3• 6 years ago

Reminder of the top H1B employers. Its not about high tech workers in SV.

https://www.h1bdata.org/employers

Employer Name Employees Hired (All Years) Infosys Limited 182,945 Tata Consultancy Services Limited 102,722 Deloitte Consulting Llp 65,976 Wipro Limited 63,354 Accenture Llp 51,360 Ibm India Private Limited 47,839 Capgemini America Inc 40,954 Microsoft Corporation 40,828 Ernst Young Us Llp 38,631 Cognizant Technology Solutions Us Corp 34,138

fredfoobar22• 6 years ago

Shut them down.

progers7• 6 years ago

This is for all years, but the numbers for 2019 seem to indicate SV will be affected: https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp... Google is #8. Amazon, Facebook, Apple are in the top 20. I don't know how accurate this list is, but I am worried for my colleagues.

x87678r3• 6 years ago

Actually that site is interesting, if you add up the Bay Area it would be the #1 region. https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2019-H1B-Visa-Category.as...

shuckles5• 6 years ago

Your argument would be more convincing if Microsoft wasn't on the list. Even by the evidence you present, _both_ high tech employers are large H1-B consulting firms would be impacted.

greatwhitenorth2• 6 years ago

In this thread, people who have no clue about how H1B works are making dumb comments (both for and against) with such confidence. Before some one asks me, I was a H1B visa holder and know how the system works. It makes me think how many such people are commenting in other threads that they've no clue about. Never ever follow any advice from a HN thread is a good rule to follow.

noncoml7• 6 years ago

Maybe, but your comment doesn't help much either.

If you think someone made an erroneous comment, it would be good to correct them by replying to it, or just summarize the common misconceptions and share your expertise in a top level comment.

Saying that people are making dumb comments, I know how it works, but then not following up, is not in the spirit of HN

greatwhitenorth2• 6 years ago

My point was to make people go do their own research and not believe what some random person writes (including me). If some one doesn't want to know the truth and here only for spicy half-truths/lies, it's up to them. Don't give me the spirit of HN crap, this is just another website.

AndrewKemendo• 6 years ago

All data indicate there is no shortage of US Citizens that could fill STEM positions and that H1-B holders on average make well below market rate. Outright ban is the wrong tool and I can't imagine that this is a reasoned policy response to a well understood abuse of wage-arbitrage. The right answer would be to mandate comparable wages for H1-B immigrants as for median employee with the same experience/tenure etc...

"A comprehensive literature review, in conjunction with employment statistics, newspaper articles, and our own interviews with company recruiters, reveals a significant heterogeneity in the STEM labor market: the academic sector is generally oversupplied, while the government sector and private industry have shortages in specific areas."

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2015/article/stem-crisis-or-ste...

"Our examination shows that the STEM shortage in the United States is largely overblown. Guestworker programs are in need of reform, but any changes should make sure that guestworkers are not lower-paid substitutes for domestic workers."

https://bloustein.rutgers.edu/new-analysis-finds-no-shortage...

"Sixty percent of H-1B positions certified by the U.S. Department of Labor are assigned wage levels well below the local median wage for the occupation."

https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...

michaelmrose7• 6 years ago

Your thoughts are right on but the right thing to do is make it trivial for people with sought after skills to become citizens so we can benefit from their expertise at the same time as eliminating H1-B exploitation instead of trying to fix said exploitation in some complex fashion that itself is likely to be gamed.

If you make the knowledge worker that any country ought to want a citizen he will naturally demand a market wage.

addicted6• 6 years ago

So 60% draw salaries that are lower than the 50%th earner in that occupation. In other words, they draw salaries that are largely in line with the occupation, although slightly on the lower end.

I suspect if you now do the calculation after adding the fees companies are required to pay the government, along with the lawyers fees most companies have to pay for an H1B visa holder, both of which in most cases will be closer to $10k per year, the H1B earners will be completely in line with the occupation they are employed in.

Thorentis3• 6 years ago

If there is no shortage of US citizens that can fill STEM roles, then the H1-B program has no reason to take in STEM workers. Its purpose is to fill skill shortages. There is clearly no skills shortage, therefore the ban, while perhaps overkill, is not unjustified. Companies simply use it to get cheap labor.

fredfoobar22• 6 years ago

When was the last time you hired to grow a team in SV?

president4• 6 years ago

Yes, you are stating the obvious, however, you neglect to understand that much of the policies that support H1-B labor are lobbied by corporations who want cheap slave labor and Indian consulting companies who want to ensure the H1-B pipeline stays alive. They will say anything including lie about "skill shortages" to enact these policies.

vishakh82• 6 years ago

So many people here are celebrating this order due to its supposed abstract benefits but are somehow unaware of the its cruelty. So many visa holders in this country will be unable to leave and enter the country for the foreseeable future. If they have sick parents abroad they will not be able to visit them or, in the most tragic circumstances, say goodbye in person. It won't matter whether someone is a world-class researcher with extremely niche skills or database administrator using commodity technology. They will live in anxiety, fear and uncertainty. One wonders how many proponents of these measures would be willing to uproot their lives and leave the place they call home at a moment's notice. Life is about get a lot worse for hundreds of thousands of hard-working, highly-educated immigrants and there are comparatively few who will shed a tear for them.

koolba• 6 years ago

So many people here are celebrating this order due to its supposed abstract benefits but are somehow unaware of the its cruelty.

To be blunt, a nation's citizens and permanent residents' rights to economic prosperity outweigh any temporary worker's right to continued employment. Yes it may be viewed as cruel in the individual case, but the point of these visas are not to provide a vehicle for those workers to come live in the USA. They're meant to fill a need for companies that cannot find qualified workers.

In a country facing a staggering unemployment rate, continued job losses, and possible long term recession, it'd be malfeasance on the part of any public official to magnify the problem by allowing more workers to enter and compete against its own permanent residents.

It's not pretty. It's reality.

michaelmrose7• 6 years ago

I think this is called the single lump of labor fallacy where there is a fixed number of jobs to compete for and by allowing immigrants to come in and take some of them the citizens are collectively poorer for it.

In actuality additional workers demand lots of things themselves that create net jobs. If more people within the carrying capacity of the environment/structures decreased economic prosperity every country in the world would be looking to shrink their birthrate as much as possible so that the decreasing population could have an increasingly large share of the fixed prosperity. We know of course that the reverse is true.

freehunter2• 6 years ago

Why do these programs always seem to target the worker, but not the employer? Enforcement of illegal immigration always seems to have the immigrants arrested and deported, but what about the people who hired the illegal workers? H-1B visa holders get blamed for "competing against permanent residents" but where's the blame for companies who hire H-1B workers over American citizens?

We live in a capitalist economy which follows pretty simple supply and demand curves. Where there is a demand (cheap labor) there will always be a supply (even if it's the black market). Arresting sex workers doesn't stop people from hiring them, and arresting drug users doesn't stop the dealers.

Immigrants don't come to the US because it's fun or easy, there come here because there are companies willing to hire them, legally or not. So if there are too many H-1B holders competing with Americans, why not make it harder for companies to hire them over an equally qualified American, or punish the company for abusing the visa system just to get cheaper labor? Same with illegal immigration, why not fine or shut down businesses that hire illegal immigrants?

You say it's not pretty it's just reality and I accept that reality... but it's also needlessly cruel to punish job seekers and not the companies who are enticing them to come here.

baddox2• 6 years ago

How does preventing a legal employee from visiting home and returning to the US help anyone who happened to be born in the US? It serves absolutely no purpose except to be cruel and to satisfy people in this country who enjoy cruelty towards immigrants.

fzeroracer2• 6 years ago

Oh come on. Part of the reason why we're facing these job losses and high unemployment rate is because our administration fucked up hard managing the coronavirus and now they're looking for easy wins and scapegoats so people can blame the big bad other rather than the people responsible.

The fact that you're defending their cruelty because of the economy (that they fucked up!) is immensely disappointing.

diegof79• 6 years ago

I know this is a politically sensitive topic, so full disclaimer: I live outside the US but I work (and worked) for a company whose headquarters are in the US. So I know people in different visa situations.

I see this type of measure as something that has a xenophobic base. The economic problem can be approached by applying sanctions to companies that use visas for cheap labor, not to the immigrants. But that type of action will be seen from a part of the US society as anti-capitalist because it attacks companies and businesses. So a big chunk of the society prefers the xenophobic idea of blaming the immigrants because they "steal" the job positions, but very little is said about the companies that abuse from cheap labor to be competitive.

hintymad9• 6 years ago

I don't know. What would happen if we apply the same line of logic to undocumented residents? Should the X-word be waiting for you?

akhilcacharya4• 6 years ago

but are somehow unaware of the its cruelty

Maybe not all, but I think many of them are. The "cruelty is the point" to quote Adam Serwer.

vkat• 6 years ago

They will live in anxiety, fear and uncertainty.

This. All my adult life(15 years) I have worked and lived here and my parents are old and you never know what can happen with current pandemic. Being from India the green card wait is over 11 years and increasing so I keep waiting. There needs to be a distinction between legit employers and ones who abuse the system.

pascalxus6• 6 years ago

I agree, this aspect absolutely sucks. I really feel, the people that have already been here for a long time should be eligible for citizenship to give them stability.

But, for the long term, this country really needs to start preventing "new" immigrants from coming because the US can't house enough people. Enough housing is not allowed to be built, so it doesn't make sense to keep having an expanding population in that type of situation.

president4• 6 years ago

Tell that to the majority of displaced American workers who lost their jobs and whose lives spiraled into homelessness and drug addiction because their jobs and dignity were lost to imported labor.

pramttl• 6 years ago

I can see how some people see this as positive but the premise that a talented and hard working foreign worker takes a job away from a citizen is short-sighted. Zoom out a little and instead of a talented and hardworking foreign employee taking a job you will see (on an average) that they help grow or expand projects and companies that opens door to hiring more people. Not only do they pay tax here and support social security benefits that many enjoy, they also help businesses survive and grow and help them stay competitive in a global market.

I'm not calling for open doors to everyone, this certainly needs a balanced approach. However, with such suspensions I think we seem to be going one extreme path. Global talent has helped develop industries and businesses here. Increasing restrictions to this extent and suspending these visas is going to push this talent out and promising businesses who want to get the best talent to work with them, will not-immediately but definitely follow their way out too. I hope the people who are celebrating this, at-least for a few minutes, come out of the myopic view and look at the long term economic consequences.

hysan2• 6 years ago

If you step out of the tech (STEM) bubble, you’ll see that this is going to have a lot of collateral damage. There are niche industries where H-1B is an actual necessity. I know that what people complain about, especially on a tech centric site like HN, is how it’s used in the development industry, but I hope that people remember that there is a world outside of tech that this negatively impacts.

rhexs3• 6 years ago

And what are these niche industries?

hysan2• 6 years ago

Social work organizations that require multilingual speakers is one that I know of.

codelord3• 6 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm an immigrant.

There are companies like Cognizant/InfoSys/Tata/... whose business model is based on abusing the H1B system, and that's obviously wrong and I'm quite surprised they get away with it. I'm not defending that.

To those who broadly argue against skilled visas, consider this: Most H1B immigrants are between 20-30 age range. The prime age to join the workforce. Think how much investment you have to make on a child's health care and education to make them into a highly skilled workforce. It would at least cost you 1$M and probably much more. Now all these immigrants have learned your language, passed job interviews, and are competing to come to your country to give you 1$M and help your economy. Why would you not want that? People seem to think that number of jobs is a limited constant and if you stop immigrants that will have a positive effect on the economy. But in reality companies can simply just scale. If they have more workforce they can do more. Things get done faster and they just make more profit. Stopping immigration obviously would dent the economical growth. Never mind that many top tech companies in the US were founded by immigrants or children of immigrants.

To those who say we must invest in local workforce, I wonder why would you have to stop immigration to start investing in local workforce? As if allowing immigration would reduce the amount of money for investment, while in reality immigrants pay taxes. I personally have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes so far. I'd be happy if this money was used to educate the American workforce. However I know that it doesn't. I would like to see that change.

SomeoneFromCA15• 6 years ago

It is very strange that people in this comment section shout "nationalism, BAD" when someone says that skilled people should stay in their own country and potentially help these countries to grow out of poverty, and statements like the one you just made - essentially rob these country of talented people and bring them into US - is somehow not nationalistic and good.

codelord3• 6 years ago

I left my country to escape a totalitarian regime. I think just because you are born in a place doesn't mean you have the responsibility to completely sacrifice your life. Humans collectively have an obligation to help lift poor countries out of poverty. The question is are you against immigration because you genuinely care about the poverty in my country?

shuckles5• 6 years ago

By the very nature of a highly skilled worker, they likely cannot realize the full value of those skills without a certain economic and commercial context. It is definitely not the case that for most H1-B employees the counterfactual is "growing their own countries out of poverty." Most likely, the counterfactual is being another 75th percentile wage worker in a low income country.

In addition, this line of reasoning totally discounts the very real benefit of foreign transfer payments from workers in the United States to their international families, often supporting large extended families.

pbhjpbhj3• 6 years ago

Can you see how someone emigrating of their own volition and bringing their skills is different to a country purposefully trying to encourage immigration of skilled workers from [poorer] countries where there is a skills shortage.

The end result looks similar but motivation matters.

zerr• 6 years ago

What we forget is actually an individual - relocation is a basic human right. There should be no lottery of birth.

gizmondo• 6 years ago

Why don't you go to one of those countries and help it to grow out of poverty? It's pretty easy to be generous at the expense of others.

yibg2• 6 years ago

Also (if we leave aside the abusers like InfoSys etc), employers pay an additional cost for H1B visa workers (comparable salary + the cost of sponsoring the visa itself). Presumably this means there is a net benefit to the American company doing the hiring to be hiring these H1B workers. Seems like a win-win situation here all around.

If the concern is with abuse, then let's crack down on that.

amznthrowaway53• 6 years ago

HN needs to stop pretending only companies like Infosys and Tata abuse the h1b.

Even big tech companies like Amazon and Facebook hire h1b workers so they can create sweatshop environments. H1b workers are afraid of being deported if they do not perform well, and a certain percentage of workers are forced to be on the PIP plan every year in the stack ranking.

Can even lead to suicides or suicide attempts. Ex:

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/15/facebook-employee-i-was-fire... https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-share-thoug...

tekknik16• 6 years ago

What about the increased cost associated with an American not taking the same position? We have to pay their unemployment

okapple• 6 years ago

H1B Employee with 100k Salary contributes $12,400 to Social Security and $2,900 Medicare every year. (Total:$15,300 per year).

Majority H1B from India and China are stuck in green card backlog; with the current immigration system, they will never get the green card. Option for them is to stay in the USA on H1B in green card waiting queue or return home. (I do not think this is right or wrong people who are stuck in the queue, they chose to come to the USA and work here, it is up to that person to decide if they want to stay or go back or go to another country). After returning to home country from the USA, Social Security and Medicare deducted is a contribution to the USA (I am not saying this is right or wrong, just a fact).

cromka2• 6 years ago

Social Security contributions are not forfeited, they're your for life.

winter_blue4• 6 years ago

Just wanted to say that Social Security's Old-Age Income program is available to all non-citizens, regardless of immigration status. It is a good thing to be aware of.

The only requirements to meet is 10 years of work in the US (i.e. "40 quarters of coverage (QC's)"). I spoke to someone from India sometime ago, who had come to the US in their late 40s or early 50s. They were planning on going back to India after they had accrued 10 years of tax-paying years in the US, so they could collect on Social Security Old-Age when they retired in India.

With the exception of a few countries,the US government will in fact directly deposit money in your foreign bank account. [a] You don't need to have any ties to the US. The whole thing is actually quite profitable, if you've only worked in the US for 10 years. Per the formula [b], if they earned $130k per year, in 10 years they made $1.3 million (and contributed $198,900 at 15.3% in FICA taxes), which divided by 420 yields $3,095 - the AIME (Average Indexed Monthly Earnings). The benefits payable for it is: 960 x 0.9 + (3095-960) x 0.32 = $1,547. They can get $1,547 from age 67. If they live until 87, that's 20 years. And 20 * 12 * 1547 = $371,280.

All other federal benefits, plus the other programs funded by FICA taxes (ie OADSI / SSI + Medicare taxes) including SSI, the other parts of OADSI, and of course Medicare, are not available to non-resident non-citizens (with a few exceptions).

[a] https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10137.pdf

[b] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/COLA/piaformula.html

bdcravens3• 6 years ago

Much of what you say is true, but it's important to realize the H1-B is not designed with any of those benefits in mind. Its only purpose is to fill roles where there is no local talent.

ReticentVole• 6 years ago

The H1B is also not designed to support diversity or equality, which is crucial if we consider it a stepping-stone to long-term immigration (which many people want).

It would seem reasonable to place an intake limit of 10% from any one country, and limiting males to a maximum of 49%.

Right now, lets be honest, the H1B is giant immigration scheme for Indian males to get into the USA: 75% of applicants are Indian, and roughly 70% of applicants are male.

https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/people/three-...

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3050365/how-many-h-1b-...

With these kind of diversity requirements, it would also be much harder for crooked companies like Infosys to racially discriminate against non-Indians:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/infosys-faces...

The green card lottery visa has diversity metrics built into it explicitly, which is probably why it receives minimal negative attention.

artificial• 6 years ago

O type Visas have no quota [0]. This is what the H1B are represented as though in practice suppress wages[1][2]. This issue is decades in the making and companies exploiting these programs earned their scrutiny. Especially when there's massive unemployment companies importing labor under these auspices need to be called out.

[0] https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker... [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-look-at-the-h-1b-visa-pro... [2] https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-v...

peripitea2• 6 years ago

O visas are much harder to get than H-1B. I've hired a bunch of people via H-1B that we could not have hired via O. None of them were displacing American workers -- we would have hired just as many (or more) qualified American workers if they had been available too. So it seems disingenuous to imply that O covers the intended purpose of H-1B. (For the record, I agree that companies like Tata abuse H-1B and that sort of situation should be banned.)

pascalxus6• 6 years ago

I can understand how this might seem unfair to immigrants.

this part is completely wrong: "If they have more workforce they can do more".

The demand for labor is not determined by the supply of labor, it's determined by the demand for those products. When companies higher engineers for example, they don't just go, "hey, we just had two brilliant engineers interview, so instead of highering 1, we'll higher 2." It never works that way. Companies need the amount of labor they need, and not one person more.

The reality is there's a vast oversupply of labor right now in most fields. Wages have been stagnant for a long time. And even in the bay area, average engineering salaries lag behind the local COL.

Furthermore, the US simply won't allow for enough housing to be built. Even with the population we currently have, there's no where near enough housing. this problem is only getting worse. Sure, it's just politics, it's a choice voters have made, but we're stuck with that choice. And, having more immigrants/increasing population makes it worse.

winter_blue4• 6 years ago

Let's talk about immigrants that are being paid well, for a moment -- since Trump is seeking ban those people as well. (Also since I myself am one such immigrant, and I know several immigrants who were being paid extremely well, whose H-1B cases were denied by the US government under the guise of software engineering not being a "specialty occupation"[1]).

A friend of mine last year got a job as a L5 at Google, for around $380k a year in total ($190k base + $28.5k bonus + approx $160k stock). Plus a sign-on of $50k. First year pay is $430k. He's not doing rocket science, or managing. He's an individual contributor writing back end code.

Meanwhile, there are folks doing a similar jobs in Canada, who are making 100k CAD (on the high end), which is $73k USD. And the cost of living in big cities in Canada is shockingly high.

Now, you were saying something about bay area salaries being low? The salaries are, if anything, over the top insanely high.

Also, I'm trying to understand why companies go through all the processing delays, legal costs, frequent unjust denials since 2017, to hire someone who is not a citizen, while paying them well above the median for the job, if there is a supposed oversupply of talented top-tier skilled people who are looking for a job. The truth i that oversupply myth is just a lie, spun by people with anti-immigrant animus, plain and simple.

I can't fathom the head space you would have to be in to think that salaries are low. Incredible arrogance and entitlement, combined with a generous dose of xenophobia probably. Instead of being thankful, there are people who want to cut off / deport / exclude people from working in the US (and I mean people making these high salaries).

Also, I know a lot of H-1B holders with high salaries. I myself am one of them. (In fact I don't know any low-paid H-1B holders, but my social circles are all folks working at top companies or friends from other social groups.) The intense amount of hatred for immigrants on HN always continues to appall and amaze me.

I usually tend to refrain from commenting on these threads, because the toxic amount of contempt and hatred for immigrants that I come across in these threads is extremely upsetting, but sometimes it's better to speak up, than be silent.

[1] See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20671424

triceratops14• 6 years ago

And even in the bay area, average engineering salaries lag behind the local COL.
the US simply won't allow for enough housing to be built

You don't see the connection here? Why do you think there will be enough housing even with less immigration? The "housing must increase value at all costs" mantra is responsible for this.

c22• 6 years ago

There are 17 million vacant homes in the US[0]. With the exception of the half a million of us that are homeless at any given time[1] we all live in one of the other 121,520,180 homes that currently exist in the country. How much housing is enough? What if instead of focusing on how much of the population we can cram into the fewest (constantly under construction) places we figured out ways to incentivize commercial development and rehabilitation of derelict communities?

[0] https://247wallst.com/housing/2019/09/30/there-are-over-17-m...

[1] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homeless...

downerending8• 6 years ago

Here's a frank answer. I've worked with various foreigners and H1Bs over a long career and always enjoyed it. I worry sometimes that they're being seriously abused by their employers, but I figure that's for them to decide.

I feel less positive about the program these days given that a number of companies have made it a point of pride to emphasize hiring of "diverse" employees, which seems in reality to be a pretext for H1B hiring that would not otherwise happen. This stings a little bit for me personally, as it's become clear that I'm losing some jobs to H1Bs. And I'm sure it really stings for native techies that can't find work during this incipient economic depression. (I'm old enough that being whacked by H1Bs just means unexpected early retirement.)

For whatever reasons, I suspect the American base will continue to hollow out and turn into something different. It's a bit like British cuisine, which has (in my impression) been essentially overrun by Indian cuisine and that of other countries. Is that bad? I guess it depends on your point of view.

Anyway, as long as the hiring is legal, I'm good with it. Certainly I've never met a colleague from another country that I didn't enjoy working with.

FuckButtons• 6 years ago

I’m English, there was no English cuisine before Indian food. The closest thing we had to a national dish was fish and chips, which frankly, is fucking awful. About all you can say for English food is that we make nice beer.

hintymad9• 6 years ago

I know this will probably be flagged or voted down, but at least please understand that I truly want to see people in the US get better and more equal. Here it goes: if the US wants to invest in local talent, the US had better invest heavily in education. And I'm not talking about an-iPad-per-kid kind of investment, but investment to hire great teachers, lots of them, to public schools to the point that tutoring schools become a joke, investment to set up a system that can fire bad teachers -- the kinds who ask students in grade 9 physics class "which is heavier, pound or kilogram". Investment to ensure that even the poorest area can have public schools that are at least as good as KIPP. Investment to really keep students in their discomfort zone so they can learn every day. Investment that builds a system that really pushes the limit of every student instead of being complacent with the craps like "Kids can discover most math by themselves" or "left no kids behind" or "challenging math is systemic bias against the poor" or "math is racism" -- maybe they are, but then they are because our governments offer such low-quality education that family with means can get ahead by going to soul-sucking tutoring schools.

Education is the key to local talent, and is the key to equality. Yet, what has the US done to make our education better?

pps43• 6 years ago

the US had better invest heavily in education

At this point, more money is not going to help. Education in the US is fundamentally broken. Combination of "no child is left behind" and standardized testing (because everything else will be called discrimination) ensures uniformly bad results. If you pour more money in, it's just going to be wasted on bureaucracy and busywork.

So H1-B is actually a great idea. If we can't educate, let's attract well-educated people from elsewhere. They want to live here, so we can choose.

We don't mind buying electronics made in China because they can do it better and cheaper, why not do the same with people. Finland seems to be doing just fine with education at a fraction of US cost, let the market do its thing and flex the comparative advantage.

john_moscow• 6 years ago

This comment is the reason why we need to rethink our current culture of censorship and social media outrage.

It explains a non-trivial logical connection, showing how something that could look unpopular from the surface, would pay off in the long run. Except you cannot make comments like this in public anymore. Because all it takes is an angry mob leader shouting "%USERNAME% is %CLICHE%ist" and that's it. Your employer fires you, your friends abandon you, you are socially bankrupt in an instant.

There are many bright people our there with great perspectives to share. Except they have to maintain radio silence, because they are not willing to take that risk. So the only voices to be heard are the most extreme ones that have nothing to lose.

I sincerely hope we can overcome this and get people to discuss problems and work together on solving them before our civilization sinks into medieval barbarism.

perfmode3• 6 years ago

please lend your support to the ongoing movement to shift investment from the prison-industrial complex into health and education.

kamaal• 6 years ago

>Here it goes: if the US wants to invest in local talent, the US had better invest heavily in education.

As some one who worked in US and returned to India. Let me tell you immigrants will support this as soon as they get their US passports and Green Cards.

It's just which side of the fence you sit on. Once these people have a stake in your country, they magically shift their loyalties to the exact opposite position to what they had before.

In India itself, many of these elites oppose policies like Right to Education Act. knowing well they can fund their kids higher education in foreign countries, and eventually their kids getting settled in US. They don't want poor people to have literacy or any edge in education. Meaning, less competition the better. Why work for Right to Education, when your kids go to expensive private schools, tuitions, coaching classes and then foreign universities, with jobs and citizenships overseas. You want less competition and lesser poor people and underprivileged people studying so that more opportunities are freed up for your kids.

People are deeply selfish at a personal level and unless they have a stake they feel no need to change. I honestly feel things in India will improve with fewer visas. People will work for good domestic education facilities once they realize they are trapped in their own country.

x87678r3• 6 years ago

It already invests heavily in education. USA already spends ones of the highest level of funding per school pupil in the world and for college its by far the highest spender.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/pdf/coe_cmd.pdf

scarface743• 6 years ago

I’m going to go off the rails more. You can’t reform the education system in a vacuum without dealing with larger societal problems that affect the US.

The war on drugs - have unfairly targeted minorities breaking up families and when they get out of jail, its harder to get a job because of their criminal record. No matter how good the education system is, if the students home life is unstable, education suffers.

Government funding through court ordered fines and tickets that also cause people to enter the criminal justice system when they can’t afford to pay. They end up in jail and lose their jobs. Again an unstable home life.

Lack of affordable higher education. Also, colleges love to give spots to non US citizens because they pay the full tuition costs.

Education funding is based on local property taxes. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

wiseleo• 6 years ago

There are not enough such teachers to teach 1:1. There are not enough people who could be drafted to be such teachers either. It would require a lot of altruism to work as a teacher whereas there are much higher paying positions in the private sector.

We have the technology to amplify a great teacher's lecture to millions. However, the education system relies on the model of interactive lectures given to a class of people of whom many are not acutely interested in the subject. Following that lecture, parents are drafted as involuntary teachers to help their kids with homework. If the student's parents have sufficient background, this works. Else, we end up with the situation where students continue to fall behind as their parents are unable to teach them.

We need to bootstrap our students' learning to the minimally accepted level that sustains self-directed learning. I would define that as mastery of arithmetics as first phase and algebra as second phase. However, we are talking about mastery that does not require a review, which means spending more time on in-depth training without jumping ahead.

Such classes should be separate from mainstream math classes so as to not to bore those of us who already have achieved that mastery.

I am working on this.

pascalxus6• 6 years ago

Why are people so quick to always blame teachers? What makes you think throwing even more money at the problem will make things better?

Growing up in a poor area, I went to some of the "worst" schools you can imagine (one even had to get shut down) and I had one of the most inspiring history teachers there, that I still remember to this day. And all the other teachers were great too. It's not the fault of the teachers when students are too busy pencil fighting and throwing basketballs at the teacher's head, rather than studying.

What on earth do you mean with "low quality education"? I certainly didn't see that in the worse schools I went to. I think people misunderstand term "bad schools" and take it literally to mean that the schools are bad. this is completely incorrect. When people say "bad schools" it means the students who went to the school performed bad on standardized tests. It's not a reflection of teachers, or schools or funding. I went to such schools and still did just fine, so did many others.

david38• 6 years ago

Yes, put money into edu but that’s very different from giving teachers more money. Teachers do relatively little. The major influence is parents.

You need to change the cultural mindset. You need to build more colleges. Computer science programs are already maxed out. You need more professors.

somurzakov2• 6 years ago

problem is not in teachers. Problem is parents. Yeah parents.

Good parents with good parenting skills raise good kids. Bad parents/single parents - it is much harder to raise kids and give them good education.

if you want reforms - you need to adopt Scandinavian policies in America (high taxes, universal healthcare, universal childare, universal K-12, universal college system) - that way it will be easier to raise well educated kids

foogazi• 6 years ago

Look, the people coming over on H1B are the top picks from other countries in terms of motivation and willingness to work - people that see tech as their golden ticket

What you are saying is how can the US turn their bottom tier performers to match this

Nothing lights a fire under your ass as realizing you are a layoff away from leaving the country and having to start over

neximo64• 6 years ago

Your description lacks the implications of being a market participant in the labour market.

raj_khare• 6 years ago

Exactly. H1B is great. Most people don't come to SV just for money. They are seeking interesting applications of technology, researching on breakthroughs, climbing corporate ladder etc. Whether you like it or not, most tech companies are run by immigrants. If someone is against that, I don't know whether you're afraid of competition or think that only natives have the sacred right to work on interesting stuff.

I'm not saying I'm not against people who are abusing H1B. That should be banned NOW.

dragonwriter4• 6 years ago

Most H1B immigrants

There are no H-1B immigrants.

There may be H-1B holders who plan to become immigrants, but H-1B is a nonimmigrant work visa.

Now all these immigrants have learned your language, passed job interviews, and are competing to come to your country to give you 1$M and help your economy.

No, they are competing to come and reduce the market clearing cost of labor and increase the returns to capital in our economy. Which is good for you if you are (1) one of the incoming laborers, or (2) a person whose main interaction with the US economy is via capital investment, not labor income.

To those who say we must invest in local workforce, I wonder why would you have to stop immigration to start investing in local workforce?

You don't have to stop immigration.

You do, on the other hand, need to stop importing labor in a manner specifically and selectively designed to avoid upward pressure on wages (and thereby, stop the incentive to develop domestic supply) for high-skill, high-demand positions and to terminate temporary residency when it no longer serves that purpose.

Or, you need to better capture the returns produced by those means and direct them to domestic workforce development.

I'm one of the most pro-immigrant and pro-immigration and anti-Trump, people you’ll find, and I would shed not a single tear if Trump managed to permanently kill, rather than merely temporarily suspend, the H-1B program.

president4• 6 years ago

People seem to think that number of jobs is a limited constant and if you stop immigrants that will have a positive effect on the economy. But in reality companies can simply just scale.

This is completely wrong. Jobs are zero-sum. One H1-B worker hired is one lost American job opportunity. It's not that hard to understand and taxes have nothing to do with this. Yes, companies can scale jobs but how often are they doing this and how does it help if they are also scaling up the number of H1-B workers?

bJGVygG7MQVF8c• 6 years ago

Think how much investment you have to make on a child's health care and education to make them into a highly skilled workforce.

Let me fix that for you:

Think how much investment you miss out on — investment in a child's education to make them into a citizen who will carry your country's patrimony into the following generation.

aparsons• 6 years ago

Terrible idea. Upping the salary requirement for H1-B achieves the goal of using it only for highly-skilled workers. Instead, now employers have to make do with bootcamp grads instead of foreign engineers at lower level positions, hurting businesses.

NotSammyHagar5• 6 years ago

Yes, thanks, that summarizes the whole situation. Just make min salaries 200k, it could push up us salaries a little, but would mean many or most of those people like those laid off from us universities working in it would not have lost their jobs.

downerending8• 6 years ago

It does seem like the main point of H1Bs would be to make use of highly-skilled workers. We have plenty of low-skill workers already--we don't need more.

cylinder4• 6 years ago

is this satirical? that's entirely the point, they have to train Americans rather than hiring foreigners. the entire point is to benefit WORKERS, not businesses.

jdean677• 6 years ago

This will definitely expedite tech jobs moving to India. At current market rates, companies can afford to hire 3-5 engineers in India compared to 1 engineer in US with equivalent interview standards. I already see this happening with Amazon(with new hyderabad campus), Google & Uber.

addicted6• 6 years ago

I’m curious. HN has largely agreed that the current pandemic showed that remote work is absolutely doable. At the same time, people are claiming that the H1B visa, which allows immigrants to work in the US at largely American salaries, are taking away American jobs.

So the stated solution is to do away with the visa and send those people back to their home countries.

So why does anyone believe that when those people go back to their home countries, their employers would choose to hire someone else instead of keeping the same people hired at a fraction of the cost?

I mean, people seem to think that companies would be unhappy about paying someone 75k/yr who was costing them over 200k/yr (salary + payroll taxes, etc) in the US.

It makes absolutely no sense that the job would go to an American. The likelihood is that the job would remain with the same person but now they would pay taxes and spend dollars in their home countries at a fraction of the cost.

satya712• 6 years ago

Yep. This is already happening. As US becomes a less inviting destination for the best talent, the talent will find home elsewhere. This might be beginning of the end of US tech dominance.

2ion2• 6 years ago

That's a long road. Very few tech firms generate the kind of money from tech abroad like many US firms do. You won't be earning 300k in a non-US company in Germany very very likely when looking at similarly-levelled roles (to exclude high-powered roles) compared to the US. You'll be looking at 1/3rd the total comp max in many cases and that'll already be a very good salary in the field. And possibly higher taxes, no effective investment-based retirement schemes, and other disadvantages.

US firms have a very long way to fall before they get even the least unattractive, relatively. A young person emigrating from Germany to the US working in a (now) good tech job there making 150,000 plus benefits will be out-earning their age cohort back in Germany 2-3x at the start of their career. Heck even at 120,000 that's likely 2-3x what a somebody with a Bachelor's here would get. That's a tremendous difference no career-focussed person would shy away from wanting.

downerending8• 6 years ago

Flipping that around, if a company can hire someone for less in a foreign country and get the same result, why bother going through the H1B process? Why the drama? Just do it.

grad_ml4• 6 years ago

No one knew about pandemic. No one knew we all can work remote. It's a mix day for folks who are cheering up ban. It proves work can be done be remotely. But how remote we be, is yet to be determined.

SomeoneFromCA15• 6 years ago

Because:

a) Outsourcing generally produces lower quality result

b) You do not have an H1B leverage.

dk8996• 6 years ago

I worked in the finance industry, IT side. I can say that these work Visas are abused in that industry. Less so in tech and startup space. I think having a min salary that's 2x average for the job would also solve this. I'm will to see what type of data this pause provides.

ojbyrne5• 6 years ago

Most tech companies are WFH right now, so if the government does this, there'll probably be lots of work for foreign lawyers setting up subsidiaries in other countries so that all the people affected can literally work from Home.

supercanuck• 6 years ago

Here are the top 10 employers of H1-B.

With the exception of MSFT, all of these are "consulting firms" or "service" providers.

So while everyone is having "ideological, values" based discussions, here is what is really happening

Employer Name Employees Hired (All Years)

Infosys Limited 182,945

Tata Consultancy Services Limited 102,722

Deloitte Consulting Llp 65,976

Wipro Limited 63,354

Accenture Llp 51,360

Ibm India Private Limited 47,839

Capgemini America Inc 40,954

Microsoft Corporation 40,828

Ernst Young Us Llp 38,631

Cognizant Technology Solutions Us Corp 34,138

bdcravens3• 6 years ago

To directly turn labor costs into a profit center, you need a business model that allows you to bill per unit of work.

Perhaps this is where H1-B restrictions need to be focused. No third-party employment.

bdcravens3• 6 years ago

It won't happen, but it would nice to see a comprehensive plan to address the talent shortage that the H-1B is designed to address. Disadvantages faced by people of color is front of the mind right now; it's the perfect time to announce a detailed plan of training and education that would accomplish 2 purposes.

grad_ml4• 6 years ago

I guess there won't be any protests like muslim ban, this time.

tra1122332• 6 years ago

I am on H1B visa currently, one of those with high paying jobs in my current geographic area. I did my Masters in EE and have been on H1B since 2008, waiting for my GC, which may or may not happen.

I want to ask a question to those who feel that I should not be here. Why is it wrong for someone like me to move from my home country legally as a student, then decide to work and live here, since it is legal and that option is provided by the government. My employer is also willing to bear all costs of making that happen. Of course, USA is a great country, maybe the greatest, and people want to live and work here. Is it wrong to have such a desire, and go about fulfilling it in a legal way? I am genuinely interested to know, since I get the feeling that folks like me aren't exactly welcome, and would like to understand why that is.

On the ethical side of things, I have wondered if I have denied an American citizen a good life.I get the feeling that maybe I have, by the mere fact of me existing and being present in this country, since I haven't misrepresented, lied or cheated anyone to get my job. I have no doubt that given enough time, my company will find someone like me, but how long it will take is anyone's guess.

Ghjklov2• 6 years ago

I don't have a strong opinion on whether you should or shouldn't be here, but I wanted to give a different perspective. It's really only tangentially related to this whole discussion.

A lot of Americans have been taught that the U.S is the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can come and through hard work can make something out of themselves. What people probably imagine when they think about this is poor immigrants coming and starting from the bottom, starting in food service jobs or doing janitorial work or something and working their way up. That's the American dream they were told about. None of them would imagine that through an H1B visa, we'd be allowing some of the most highly educated immigrants from other countries to come and immediately work in high level positions with salaries of 6 or even 7 figures.

I find it understandable that some amount of Americans feel that this is wrong and that they were told a lie.

tra1122332• 6 years ago

Thanks for that perspective. I understand that it can appear unfair for someone whose ancestors had to build everything from scratch, to watch folks start leading a luxurious life, right from the moment they land here.

black_13• 6 years ago

If you really need ppl to do the work make them here. Lots of ppl are available currently.

sys_64738• 6 years ago

You need highly skilled immigrants to pay for taxes and healthcare+SSA for the economy and those retired. If you don't fund retirement programmes then you're in trouble.

femiagbabiaka3• 6 years ago

we need to get rid of the executive order or at least severely limit its scope. both Obama and Trump have abused it -- presidents should not be able to hand down sweeping regulatory change like this at the drop of a hat without going through the legislature.

jakeogh2• 6 years ago

By abuse do you mean use? If not, O admitted he was doing something unconstutional with it, numerious times. Which T example are you thinking of?

Many laws are written to deligate rule making authority to the executive branch, clearly the president has ultimate authority there. Perhaps you want the legslative branch to write more specific language?

femiagbabiaka3• 6 years ago

The constitution is not the end all be all —- I’m saying that the use of executive orders to accomplish partisan policy objectives is overreach by the executive branch and should be curtailed. I don’t care much if it’s the legislative or judicial branch that does it.

noip2• 6 years ago

I think H1B visas should be obliterated. One of the justifications is that they bring in international talent to fill in "shortages" in America. However, according this article by the Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2017/05/the-h-1b-visa-debate-explained

- There is mixed evidence that there are actually shortages in STEM - People are graduating from STEM fields at a rather high rate than in the past, but only half of them end up utilizing their degree; in sectors such as IT, one reason being why graduates aren't entering the field is due to a lack of job openings - Despite all the clamor about "shortages," some STEM fields pay embarrassingly low, and in fact pay STEM workers less than they have in the past - There is no requirement that entities show proof of workforce shortage before hiring workers on H-1B visas - Some workplaces have already had American workers train in their H1-B visa replacements and then were out of a job

Not in the article, but some of my own experiences having been in the STEM field - Many internationals seeking to get hired in the US STEM force don't actually have the "everyday technology" that the US uses, such as in molecular biology labs; this means quite a lot goes into training H1-B visa holders. Couple that with poor English-speaking skills. I found myself having to explain to an H1-B visa holder what a "pen" was, or a "shelf." Granted, some H1-B visa holders underwent formal education in the US, obtaining PhDs and whatnot, so you'd imagine their English would be better, however... - Many countries look down on the US. I have worked for many foreign employers in STEM, and have been insulted just for being an American, and their views of America are largely stereotyped (Americans love guns, they eat hamburgers and pizza and are fat, etc.) - It changes the workplace culture; I've worked in a variety of STEM environments that had a lot of internationals, and more than once I was out-grouped for being an American. I have had opportunities closed off to me simply because my group's sense of belonging was rooted in being "non-American." This was detrimental to my aspirations in entering the STEM field as an American.

I don't believe there is a shortage in STEM. The fact that it's hard to even get a well-paying job in STEM, especially tenure positions in STEM, and that once you do land a STEM position you can face discrimination for being an American in AMERICA, H1B visas should be obsolete.

Get rid of the internationals. Focus on your American workforce and create incentives to enter STEM. Create a better system for learning math, and inspiring aspirations in science Create environments that will nurture American students instead of block their opportunities. Give Americans a chance to contribute to their economy instead of shoveling money down the pockets of people who don't even like America or Americans and would go back home if they could.

known• 6 years ago

Indians are running an Organized Mafia in America https://archive.vn/XTZ5f

stunt2• 6 years ago

There are solutions to the problems we discuss these days. We have experts and researchers who are dedicated to find better solutions.

But sadly, Politics are focused to win the election and next elections. Populism and non-populism, left and right, social-networks and media, we all made it so hard for experts and scientist to be heard and to be trusted. We are so loud that we are only hearing ourselves. We can talk non-sense with insufficient knowledge and call it open discussion.

amaajemyfren• 6 years ago

In the last few weeks many technology companies have been able to have their staff work remotely.

I wonder what suspending Visas means in so far as remote working is a thing.

Executive order expected to suspend H-1B, other visas until end of year

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