US govt ups minimum H-1B tech salaries to $208,000 a year

https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/03/h1b_wage_hike/

by fhrow4484 • 6 years ago

88 59 6 years ago

silexia2• 6 years ago

What are the implications of this should Trump be reelected tomorrow?

ksaho• 6 years ago

I think you meant to say "Trump NOT be re-elected tomorrow". If Biden comes in would he cow-tow to the tech companies and undo this?

lizardking• 6 years ago

Almost certainly

innagadadavida2• 6 years ago

What makes you think the big tech companies didn't lobby for this? It conveniently kills many of the startups that can challenge big tech. It will continue no matter who's elected.

steego• 6 years ago

It’s likely. $200k goes well above market rate so it wouldn’t be that politically unpopular.

Also, one usually doesn’t involve cows when kowtowing.

ycombonator2• 6 years ago

Basically the administration turned the tables on Big Tech. They primarily import H1Bs to dilute the employment pool to let the market take care of wage depression. There is plenty of tech talent pipeline inside the country. Just look at the eager undergrads looking for employment and other US citizens looking to step into tech field via boot camps. Increasing the threshold for the wages to paid for “specialty occupation for which several attempts have been made to hire US Citizens” aka H1B makes the test true to the spirit of the law.

ycombonator2• 6 years ago

Adding additional context from the article. It primarily impacts Indian outsourcing companies registered as US companies such as Infosys, Cognizant, TCS, HCL, Tech Mahindra, Wipro etc. These companies have been gaming the system and making billions by underpaying their imported staff.

An analysis [PDF] of the new rules by non-partisan National Foundation for American Policy noted that the H-1B wage minimums will require foreigners to be paid much more than American citizens on market rates. That's not a problem for the likes of Facebook and Apple, though it will be disastrous for organizations like Infosys, that import immigrant workers, as well as small and medium-sized businesses.

tracer42012• 6 years ago

Is there data or research to suggest H1B actively dilutes the talent pool? There’s no doubt the system is abused — not too long ago, I was at an oil and gas company who contracted out to a company that brought in H1Bs. Many of the guys spoke zero English and couldn’t write code at all. Yes - that kind of indefensible abusive. But how rampant is this stuff?

knaq• 6 years ago

Basic economics would predict that H1B visas drive wages down. Anything different would be surprising, and would require extraordinary evidence.

stone-monkey• 6 years ago

yeah - you could see in prior years how most h1bs were allocated to WITCH companies.

https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...

Since h1b is a lottery system, these companies flooding the system with their applicants at lower salaries was directly impacting the chances of employees at other companies. I anecdotally knew a coworker at a FAANG who failed to get his h1b consecutively for two years in a row, with his OPT expiring the next. Looking at the data from the latest year though, it seemed as if they had already started addressing the problem.

nodamage• 6 years ago

Basically the administration turned the tables on Big Tech. They primarily import H1Bs to dilute the employment pool to let the market take care of wage depression.

Not really, Big Tech pays H1Bs competitive salaries (https://insights.dice.com/2020/05/19/google-apple-amazon-oth...). What this mostly affects is IT consulting firms like Tata and Infosys.

runawaybottle4• 6 years ago

Does it though? Prior discussions on this made me aware that H1B is mostly not profitable for the consulting firms. It’s the offshore work where they can severely underpay. So long as a US company can get offshore workers via the consulting firms (their preferred business model), all is well.

But ya, we don’t need to import someone doing JavaScript over to America anymore (which, believe it or not, is what I’ve witnessed). There’s no rhyme or reason to it, we have a solid home grown talent pool for that.

A lot of full stack web dev work can be saturated by Americans because there’s enough people crossing industries to take it on.

I’ll let the other types of developers chime in on what kind of shortage they are seeing, because I see zero in web development. It’s nothing personal to my immigrant friends, but believe it or not our industry is pretty crowded at the moment to justify opening up to foreign workers. We can easily drive prices down amongst ourselves at the rate we’re going at.

I support this policy through and through, and I’m a Democrat.

biggermike• 6 years ago

Not really, Big Tech pays H1Bs competitive salaries

That doesn't challenge the argument. Wages are set by supply and demand, expand the supply and wages fall. It doesn't matter if H1B wages are similar to a U.S. residents; wages as a whole are depressed.

As a personal example, the entry level of my field is almost completely composed of freshly graduated H1B Visa holders. The market rate is dictated by whatever their wages are, which actually isn't too far below the $200K headline number.

innagadadavida2• 6 years ago

It looks like this does nothing to mandate increase in pay of existing H1-B workers. Only new applicants are affected.

olliej3• 6 years ago

H1Bs are only valid for 3 years - if this also applies to renewal applications then there's a 3 year lag.

dmode• 6 years ago

This is such a terrible idea. Ensures only people on H1 are techies in FAANG in the Bay Area. Forget about doctors and nurses in rural areas

yhoneycomb• 6 years ago

Not a matter of rural vs urban for doctors. It's a matter of resident vs. attending doctor.

Resident doctors gets paid 50k/yr to work 80 hr weeks.

runawaybottle4• 6 years ago

What’s terrible about it? Who needs to import world class talent other than world class companies, working on world class problems?

Let’s take the narrative for the full ride, the mythical unparalleled skilled developer that only exists in these other mystical countries and absolutely could never be found locally, even with remote work within the US being validated. The god-like programmer that must be flown here immediately, for how else will this software be built?

Pay the unicorns, unicorn prices. What’s the issue?

mucholove• 6 years ago

There are other incentives and programs for Doctors. In DR, Dominicans are getting visas to go treat COVID in USA and Spain.

Moreover, I think this is great for the job market and US immigration in general. Hopefully it motivates Americans to pursue these markets.

For those of us who would have considered H1-B previously, this is a great change. You now get to compete without the racket.

curryst• 6 years ago

Forget about doctors and nurses in rural areas

Actually, you need to invert that. Doctors, at least, make more in rural areas than they do in urban areas. The estimations vary, but they're in the 5-30% more than their urban counterparts range.

The average wage for internal medicine doctors in urban areas (as an aggregate) is still above $208,000. It's actually roughly right, imo, to prevent depressing doctors' wages. It's right around the average, so you're paying above average rates to get an H1B, which is the intended purpose of the program isn't it? The idea being that it drives up salaries for those jobs, encouraging more people to train to do them.

aviraldg• 6 years ago

Please forgive me for my lacking knowledge of the US immigration system, but does this mean that folks on H-1B currently waiting for a green card must withdraw their applications the next time their H-1B expires unless their salaries are greater than this threshold? Are there any publicly available numbers on how much of the insane GC backlog (greater than a 100 years for Indian nationals) this might affect?

microtherion• 6 years ago

[Not a lawyer, but a former H1-B and Green Card holder]

1) Under current law, that seems unlikely. The hurdles are mostly to get the first H1-B, renewal is practically automatic.

2) If Trump gets re-elected… well, you may have noticed that he, and some of his closest advisors on immigration, e.g. Stephen Miller, consider capriciousness in immigration policy setting a feature, rather than a bug, so who knows?

3) On the other hand, the US has a somewhat functional legal system, and legal immigrants, once admitted, enjoy the presumption to certain rights, so any action is likely to be tied up in legal proceedings for several years.

4) And let's see what happens today.

perryizgr8• 6 years ago

The reality is that some H-1B workers such as an IT analyst would need a starting salary of $208,000 to be eligible – a massive jump over the previous requirement.
An entry-level programmer would need to make $111,946 instead of the previous $78,125.

The title is kind of misleading and inaccurate.

sjg0072• 6 years ago

I am no fan of Trump but this is an interesting experiment. It seems like a last minute grab bag for votes and it would have been more interesting if it happened 2 years ago.

olliej3• 6 years ago

Seems like this would be a problem for smaller companies (not much cash) and startups (remuneration is stock based).

Large companies can absorb the cost if someone is that important. They can also just employ remotely and do an internal company transfer later (L-something visa).

I mean the big people it screws are those companies that abuse the system - the IT "consulting" companies, that are functionally a market undercutting scam.

prepend• 6 years ago

Why should small companies get subsidized, below market rate programmers?

It’s already pretty expensive in legal fees to sponsor an h1b, so really small companies are already suffering due to big firms.

Software is an industry where size isn’t as important as other industries. A five dev company can do great things and as such can afford market salaries.

GoblinSlayer2• 6 years ago

Do remote workers need visas?

olliej3• 6 years ago

nope. But against all rationality big tech firms still seem to want people working locally, despite ample evidence from the last 9? months that it isn't necessary for most.

gbronner• 6 years ago

Allocating the h1bs by how much the receiving companies are willing to pay is solid.

The real issue is decent the number of h1bs, and thus the cutoff

beisner• 6 years ago

One demographic this policy seems to unintentionally trample is international students. There’s a pretty well-trod path of F1 Visa -> OPT -> (OPT STEM Extension) -> H1B -> (green card, if you’re from the right country). It’s a tall order to expect that all new grads from this path will be able to command such high salaries, and there’s an existing set of international students who have planned their lives on being able to get the H1B before OPT runs out.

In my opinion, we should encourage immigration through our higher-education system (and we have been doing so for decades). I generally agree that the loopholes allowing for below-market H1B roles should be closed, but I think that students/recent graduates should be treated differently. There’s a big difference between sourcing lower-wage foreign workers who don’t already have roots in the USA, and paying entry-level salaries to recent graduates who’ve been living in the US for years already.

Of course, some may take issue with the premise here, and might say that the F1 shouldn’t be issued with intent to immigrate. But I think that’s terrible policy; nearly all of my (uniformly brilliant, top-shelf) friends who came here on F1 had horrendous, soul-crushing experiences with work authorization, even though they provide tremendous value to companies and the country by being here.

legolas2412• 6 years ago

we should encourage immigration through our higher-education system (and we have been doing so for decades)

Having gone through the numbers just yesterday, I was very surprised. So, here's the correction for you. No, america does not encourage immigration through education and subsequent employment. Out of roughly 550k green cards per year, only around 15k are for educated immigrants coming through employment categories (eb1,2,3).

For comparison, there are around 50k diversity visas given in lotteries, and 8k investors visas given out to anyone willing to buy a green card.

unishark2• 6 years ago

Perhaps they should do a better job of taking ties into account somehow. But when there's a line a million people long, the rules need to be very clear and fair, else it's just up to the mood of the agent you end up dealing with that day.

And a problem with any path being a sure thing is that it turns into a route to buy residency. People will line up to hack it. There's a lot of low-tier colleges in the US. And are you including MS degrees? Apparently some can be done in a year, plus internships (CPT) which is yet more work visa.

TheCoelacanth• 6 years ago

You're correct on the impact, but I don't think it's unintentional. This administration is clearly trying to cut down on immigration in general.

triceratops• 6 years ago

What makes you think it's unintentional? In addition to depressing educated, skilled immigration, it has the desirable side-effect of depressing revenues for "lefty, liberal, coastal, elitist" universities, who admit those international students and charge them full non-resident tuition.

b20000• 6 years ago

there is nothing high about this salary, the bay area and west/east coasts are insanely expensive places to live.

angry_octet• 6 years ago

This is actually a fantastic experiment to evaluate whether people are employed on H1-Bs because of a shortage which can't be met locally, or because indentured workers are cheaper. Ideally there would be another cohort, allocated randomly, where the employee is not tied to any one employer, like a temporary green card.

It is fallacious to say that with decreased supply, demand will dictate wages will go up. It is quite possible that demand is elastic at a particular price point, but at higher prices demand falls to zero (aka set up an office in Canada). There is no reason to assume linearity in any of this.

What's missing is that, even with the potential for high wages after graduation, it is still a big risk for an individual to borrow for a college education. These employers should be taxed, perhaps 10% of their H1-B expenditure, with that tax subsidising education in that field.

_aleph2c_• 6 years ago

I was planning on going down to the states (I'm living in BC Canada), the salaries down there are more than 2x what you can get here. It doesn't look like I'll be able to do that now. With this said, this move by your current administration makes a lot of sense to me, there is an opportunity to grow the American middle class around knowledge work. The United States has the best training institutions and capital structures in the world. They have a healthy demographic profile (they are maintaining their population), there is no reason for them to spoil their own job market with injections of foreign labour. I see no reason for them not to train and hire their own citizens.

jjeaff3• 6 years ago

I see some reasons.

One is that foreign labor allows lower wages which can make american companies more competitive over foreign ones.

Second, allowing foreign workers encourages jobs to stay here in the US where at least the wages will be taxed and a large portion of those salaries will be spent here in the U.S., thus further stimulating the economy. Alternatively,if those same jobs move overseas, we see none of the tax revenue and none of it being spent here.

runawaybottle4• 6 years ago

Let’s see.

We did the first experiment. I want to do this one too. We can’t just do one experiment and warn of other experiments.

If we get a bigger home grown tech sector, then experiment two wins.

Let’s get those Java oracle enterprise bootcamps going, I think we have enough need right here in America to fill those jobs. Plenty of Classic Lit majors ready to switch up.

Oh, and for who pays the most taxes and contributes the most to the American economy, I just googled it, it turns out it’s Americans. So ya, let’s get them into these jobs.

We can import the finest Java people to teach the bootcamps if necessary.

chillacy• 6 years ago

Last I checked we’re partly growing our population with immigration, the birth rate is 1.7, below a replacement level of 2.1.

econcon• 6 years ago

This is good atleast now Indians will stay in India and develop our country instead of going to the US and contributing to a country which is already ahead in everyway.

whoomp12342• 6 years ago

so instead of on-shoring, they will just hire the same talent cross coast?

jjeaff3• 6 years ago

Pre-pandemic I would have said that if they were willing to off-shore, they would have already been doing it for those jobs. But the timing for this change is pretty bad because so many companies are learning to work remote anyway.

US govt ups minimum H-1B tech salaries to $208,000 a year

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