It seems like it would be so easy to fix the H1-B program but no one wants to and I feel like I must be missing something. The purpose of the H1-B is to allow companies to hire foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens.
So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?
Let any company apply and list a salary which they have to agree to pay for at least two years, and then just issue them highest salary first until they hit the quota for the year. No country based quotas or any other kind. Just straight up salary. And make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.
If people are so skilled then they must be valuable, right? This would be good for both the employee and the country, bringing in the most highly paid people.
The only ones that would get hurt in this process are the companies that abuse the system to underpay people and then get them beholden to the company.
> foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens
This is honestly rare, unless you couple it with a wage level that is lower than the domestic market will bear. Some individuals involved in R&D, but outside of that there are few skills that are not found in the US. I believe the condition isn't not found, but rather, in low supply?
> make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.
In my experience, the special skills that many foreigners tend to have that many Americans do not is the ability to tolerate absolute and utter bullshit. I'm not kidding.
I am not satisfied with my job/employer -- bad environment, bad culture, etc.. I have coworkers from all over. Of the non-US native ones that I interact with, they all absolutely love our job and/or employer.
I've asked them about it, and I generally get the sense that I could not survive in the conditions from which they originally came -- both at work and outside of work.
If a dumb drone like me could figure that out, then I am sure plenty of employers found out long before me.
The foreigners with special skills for which it's really hard to hire someone in the US, even for a lot of money. Maybe if you agree to pay $1M / mo, you'll have them leave their current jobs and flock to you, but will your business still stay profitable?
Hence the idea of prevailing wage, and paying somehow above that.
This of course creates an avenue to game the system, because prevailing wage for basically any work in SF or NYC is likely higher than on average over the entire US. You can undercut local markets a bit by bringing in smart people from abroad, and paying them less than they would make in SF or NYC if hired as locals, but more that the country-wide average.
(Smart, hard-working, educated people from underprivileged places get a chance of having a better life while working to improve the US economy! What's not to like?)
The thing you're "missing" is that it absolutely is, in practice, about laundering low-wage foreign labor. It's not actually complicated. It's obfuscation of exploitation. Same as it ever was. You're just not supposed to believe that your country is doing that.
A lion's share of H-1Bs go to big tech companies where people make $250k a year or more. And where total comp of $400k+ is common for senior roles, with no regard for visa status.
Yes, it alters market dynamics and the whole reason it's done is that the same skills are not available domestically for that price (or at all) - but talking about "low-wage labor" and "exploitation" as the whole point of the program is pretty rich.
Because then the agricultural company in Alabama wanting to hire the brightest chemist will be at a disadvantage compared to the IT firm in California. Forgetting about the cost of living adjustments for each area the industry wide disruption alone may not be worth it
A disadvantage in what way? Unless I'm missing something this just sounds like markets being markets. As a worker, why would I accept a job that pays less and requires me to live in Alabama if I can do better?
> So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?
As others have pointed out, you're assuming highest salary == most valuable, but what your idea will lead to is a bunch of talented people working on new ways to get people to click ads or write yet-another trading algorithm.
IMHO, you'd fix the H1-B program by doing two things:
1. Eliminate the requirement that the visa-holder have a sponsor past the start date, so the they can quit immediately and take a different job if they are underpaid or the working conditions are poor. That will eliminate any potential exploitation enforced by the program.
2. Limit the sponsors to legitimate US-based companies who will employ the workers for in-house work. Working out a precise definition may be hard, but it should be possible because it's pretty clear when we see it. Basically, something to prevent foreign contracting/outsourcing companies from even using the program.
I have the opposite experience, I guess, as a US citizen who immigrated to Ireland, but after putting in my two years with the company that sponsored me and getting the right to work without sponsorship I left within a month for a 50% raise (actually more like 150% but I got lucky on stock) and full remote (before full remote was normal).
A lot of the appeal of an immigrant is that they can't quit or take a better deal.
Another goal (as I understand it) of the H1-B process is to allow foreigners who've come to the US for school to stay here and work after they've graduated. This seems (IMO) better than training a bunch of valuable people, then having them immediately go back home.
A system based entirely on salary would bias towards only senior roles, preventing the handling of that scenario at all.
The point is that paying more isn't gaming the system
(and to be super explicit, yes if the US were to choose to allocate 25k annual h1b by ranked wage & thus all 25k were to go to various flavours of computer programmer or financial modeller, that seems totally fine)
The purpose of H1B is to keep wages in control amongst highly qualified American workers so that owners and executives can create a more competitive financial advantage in P&L and stock price juicing
I'm surprised even in HN we are taking PR at face value.
The problem with replacing a lottery with a salary ranked cutoff is that all skills do not exist on a single linear axis proportional to economic value. It is not as if all academics are currently highest paid across the economy, so why would that be true of imported academics?
To me, an ideal skilled worker system would define quota categories by skill/job at a much finer granularity, i.e. hundreds or thousands of different H1-B sub-categories somehow weighted by policies rooted in national strategic interest.
Maybe some kind of blinded auction process that could minimize abuse. Both potential employer and employee go through some vetting process and post their needs/skills using a standard ontology. Then, a matchmaker assigns job offers that are binding. You might allow either party to reject the offer and go back into the matchmaking pool for a limited period or number of offers before they are evicted with a cooling-off period before they are allowed to reapply.
You would also need some kind of anti-abuse audit. Otherwise, malignant players could establish esoteric job requirements via covert channel and then mislabel both the worker and the position to try to force the matchmaker's hand. How do you distinguish a truly rare skill from covert ear-marking?
Firstly, your assumption seems to be that it’s broken but I don’t think uscis or most other participants actually share that opinion. What they need to fix is fraud and you can have fraud in any system including the one you proposed.
Secondly, h1b is not just a working visa - it’s officially a “dual intent” visa meaning it’s also a path to immigration. If we do what you are suggesting then 99.99% of applicants will be senior-principal sw engs from china/india. Which, i assume, is not the intention of this program.
Besides, companies already have to pay over prevailing wage for the role in the area. I don’t think you can just conjure up expert professionals out of thin air by raising wages despite what folks on hn/reddit seem to believe. We tried that in 2021 - didn’t work too well
Yeah junior devs that barely can use css being paid 200k was quite common sight at the height of pandemic bubble. Most of them are gone now though. I guess that’s why HN seems to be in slightly more bitter mood nowadays than in the past 2-3 years
It’s because the positions that talent may not exist for (but is needed) isn’t necessarily as profitable (and can’t pay as much) as other industries under the same program.
Basing on salary alone would mean ~100% of visas go to tech talent in major cities, and every other profession is cast aside.
That’s not to say that ranking based on salary within an industry wouldn’t be a potential improvement. Or modifying caps to be industry based. There are definitely options here that could be a bit more surgical.
According to your logic the H1-B program doesn't need to exist at all then. You can find all special skills within US Citizens. However what happens is that companies deny interviewees the chance so they can obtain H1-B workers for cheaper or for political power.
The fact that the U.S. immigration system is so obviously broken is the topic on which I am most vulnerable to conspiracy theories. It just makes no sense. From the Southern border to H1-B, it looks designed to anger and disappoint every single stakeholder (excepting the businesses who employ illegal immigrants for poor wages).
Because the major donors for both parties support illegal immigration.
Republican donors enjoy the labor of illegal immigration which is much cheaper than domestic labor. Any crack down on unauthorized workers in agriculture or hospitality, for example, would disrupt lots of big donors.
Democratic donors have openly stated that demographic changes would help them win more elections. These are the "demographics are destiny" folks that noted that increasing hispanic populations are good for them in elections. (If you're not winning enough votes, change the voters.) There was a lot of truth here -- just look at California, New Mexico, and Arizona elections from the 80s and 90s vs today. Recent polling suggests this may be changing.
So you end up in a strange situation where policies supported by the vast majority of Americans from all political stripes is (mostly) ignored by the parties.
An employee with an H1-B is definitionally not an illegal immigrant. H1-Bs are definitionally documented legal workers, the companies using undocumented workers are not companies interested in getting visas.
The solution to the "apparent" scourge of undocumented workers is to make it so that the people running companies the use that undocumented labor are the ones who go to jail, and in the event ICE finds undocumented labor the minimum fine for the company should be a significantly greater than one multiple of the amount the company would have had to pay a documented worker, in addition to ensuring the undocumented workers are fully compensated at the amount a documented worker would have been paid. Threatening to report them to immigration, underpaying, and wage theft are all clear evidence that the company knows they were employing people who were not allowed to work.
That's all that would be needed. Instead of ever more draconian penalties for the undocumented workers - many of whom have lived in the US for essentially their entire lives at this point, and simply don't have a choice - the penalties that should be being increased are the ones that apply to the employers. It's great because it will stop all that evil undocumented labor people claim to hate, because now these employers have to pay the undocumented labor if anything more than documented labor, because undocumented labor can report unsafe or illegal working conditions, come out fully compensated and in addition to those costs the employer has to pay even more in fines, while the managers and executives who knowingly employed said laborers go to jail.
That said as we've seen in Florida, plenty of businesses in America have set themselves up to be unable to operate without violating the law, so when Florida started passing its various "lets punish the workers, but not those that employ them" laws a whole bunch of businesses couldn't handle the idea of capitalism and complained about how they couldn't get any workers.
It’s not even really a conspiracy. The status quo is good for many and so it continues because people don’t care enough (or are persuaded to care in ways that others want them to).
The system as it currently stands was a quick hack on the prior, explicitly racist immigration system we had before the Civil Rights Act. To be clear, there was no Congressional will for racially equitable immigration at the time. They wanted to keep the immigration system white without having to have the words "white race" in the text of the bill. So instead they changed the system to heavily favor family sponsorship, under the idea that white people would just keep sponsoring other white people and that would keep the system white.
Now, it'll probably be a shock to you, but these family sponsorship visas actually make America's immigrant pool way less white. It may not feel like it if you're trying to get an immigrant visa on an employment basis, but America is actually one of the easiest countries to immigrate to if you have relatives here. Other developed countries are far more selective and bureaucratic.
The trick is to recognize that nobody agrees on what part of the system is actually broken. The DNC said the quiet part out loud[0], but the GOP has been thinking for decades that immigration was just a way to dilute Republican voters. A good chunk of the GOP thinks the problem is that it's too easy to immigrate and we need to become like Japan[1]. Another chunk doesn't care about immigrants, but they want to end illegal immigration by any means necessary. The DNC wants, at a minimum, immigration amnesty with a path to citizenship[3]. And then you have business interests that maximally exploit immigrants, legal or otherwise. None of those positions are reconcilable in a way that will produce an immigration bill that will pass the House, Senate, and President Biden.
[0] "Demographics is destiny", which was DNC-speak for "Hillary Clinton can't possibly lose because we have enough Mexicans in California".
[1] As a massive weeaboo[2] I do not understand why anyone would want to adopt Japanese immigration standards.
[2] "Japanophile", but a different, derogatory term I won't use; wordfiltered by 4chan to a word they stole from https://pbfcomics.com/comics/weeaboo/
[3] Keep in mind that there are two classes of illegal immigration:
- People who just moved in without the proper visa, have been here for decades, have no intention of going back, and are already integrated with their local communities. Deporting them would be needlessly cruel.
- Agricultural companies who are importing massive amounts of day laborers from Mexico to avoid having to pay minimum wage
You can argue that the former should have amnesty while still wanting to have a functional minimum wage law by stopping the latter.
> So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?
Because then the acceptance rate would be x% for people from India, y% from China, and 0.001% for everywhere else, which would be politically untenable.
H1B does not have country caps. So the acceptance rate is already that based on the distribution of applicants. You are thinking of green cards, which do have country caps, and that's why this whole set up is quite asinine. It creates a large immigrant population with limited rights and no realistic path to permanent residency.
One thing I find really, really weird about the US immigration system is that immigrating illegally is trivial (apparently even more so nowadays than it was 15 years ago), and it even comes with a loophole that can make you a legal immigrant later, yet legal immigration is a very tedious and often impossible path.
I have a relative that 15-ish years ago simply overstayed their tourist visa and never left. Some 5 years later he found a chick and put a ring on it (and because he married a US citizen, all his overstay was instantly forgiven). Then he had a immediate US citizen relative who sponsored him for a green card, which he got a couple of years ago. In a couple of years he can apply for naturalization. Yes, he couldn't leave the US until he had the GC in his hands, but I'd say it was a small price to pay for a massive shortcut.
For a married European that would love to live in the US, like myself, legal immigration paths are simply not viable. I would not accept a non-immigrant visa (like H1B), because it doesn't come with any guarantees that I'll be able to stay in the US, and legal immigration paths are basically limited to winning the DV lottery or coughing up $900k for the EB5, as no company in the right mind would sponsor me for an EB2/3.
And for many people from oversubscribed countries (like India and China), marrying a US citizen is the ONLY viable path to a green card.
Having been through it myself, I agree that US immigration is fundamentally broken. With that being said:
> One thing I find really, really weird about the US immigration system is that immigrating illegally is trivial (apparently even more so nowadays than it was 15 years ago)
The system had serious negative consequences on my health, but my personal suffering isn't even a hundredth as bad as what hundreds of thousands have gone through.
>For a married European that would love to live in the US, like myself, legal immigration paths are simply not viable.
As a European, you have several options. H1, O1, L1, etc. are all fine. None of them have any guarantees, but realistically, you'll be able to apply for a green card through an employer and get one within a couple of years under EB2/3. You can also apply for EB2-NIW or EB1A by yourself even from outside the US if you qualify, and you don't need to get a visa at all. You'd get a green card directly.
Worked in jobs that didn’t ask for proof of employment authorization.
Being white also probably helped a lot. I’m actually willing to bet that most americans aren’t even aware that white people can also immigrate illegally.
How so? There’s a 100+ year wait on EB2 and EB3 Green Cards for people born in India. Only 7% of GCs can go to people of any one country. At the current cap of 49000, it means only 3400 EB2 GCs can actually be issued to Indians per year. An approved application doesn’t equate to a green card actually minted and issued. There’s a 12 year backlog on applications alone. (https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...)
H1B is neither a green card nor a path to one.
There is one category that has no cap at all however. The “Immediate relative of a US citizen” one.
The majority of "Top H1-B Recruiters" are in the "Professional and Technical Services" industry. I think people imagine that most immigrants on H1-B visas are being paid princely sums directly by FAANG companies. Instead the reality looks like they're being exploited by the same Indian bodyshops like Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra, etc. Of the companies in that list that aren't bodyshops, the majority aren't in IT.
Aside from all of the obvious problems with the system, and the political implications, I think many people really have the wrong impression about who the real beneficiaries of the H1-B visa system are.
> The initial registration period for the FY 2025 H-1B cap will open at noon Eastern on March 6, 2024, and run through noon Eastern on March 22, 2024.
I know fraud prevention is whack-a-mole, and I know the system has been broken a long time, but this still works only for a certain segment of hires.
I was on the board of a "foreign" school. All instruction (except English) is in the home country's language, and we of course want native speaking teachers familiar with the subject material. For years we used H-1s -- all the teachers qualify, as they all have master's degrees or more and the specialized skills -- but when the big consulting companies started scamming all the H-1s in early October that became impossible for us. Teachers don't tend to think about leaving until late in the school year, certainly not in March, and they need to know relatively quickly so they can move to the US and get settled before the school year starts. What a pain.
US immigration is an absolute nightmare especially for Indians.
In Europe its simple. Job offer above minimum salary? Apply and get a blue card yourself. Has been in the country for over 5 years and speak the language? You get citizenship.
In the US its nearly impossible to get a Green Card. Forget how difficult it is to get an H1B visa in the first place because of the lottery system.
India has a brain drain problem. The most profitable career in India is to leave India and become an immigrant.
The US is not responsible for that problem and never will be. And even if the US fixed its immigration inconveniences, the problem in India would remain.
India has other problems as well. For software engineers, the number one threat of hiring from India are the corporate cultures at Infosys, TCS and similar companies. I do not want to work with the alumni of those work cultures. It's radioactive-level toxicity.
The US should absolutely make it easier for brilliant people to immigrate. A very high bar for immigration + a simpler process for such people is a net benefit. The current H1B process is broken and exploited. Some Indian kid graduating from Berkeley with a perfect GPA shouldn't have to rely on a lottery system.
Friends of mine pursuing Swiss citizenship had a much longer road than what you describe above. I know them to be pretty fastidious when it comes to paperwork exercises and they did not have citizenship after 10 years, though they indicated they were on a path towards it.
That's because Switzerland needs 10 years in the country for citizenship. Spain too. Switzerland also has a lot of extra steps in their citizenship process. It is vastly easier and simpler in say the Netherlands.
In Switzerland you have to apply for citizenship to the local government, and each one of them is xenophobic to various degrees. There are some famous cases where citizenship was denied because the person had a few speeding tickets, or thought that loud cowbells should be forbidden because they torture cows.
> Also under the new rule, USCIS may deny or revoke the approval of an H-1B petition if it determines that the fee associated with the registration is declined, not reconciled, disputed, or otherwise invalid after submission.
The fact that they mention this suggests that they couldn't do so previously... which is pretty mind-boggling.
Oh, so this looks like it's correcting for that thing where companies were essentially using multiple contracting companies to all apply for a visa for the same person? e.g. double (triple? n-ary?) dipping in the lotto?
I still think a lot of the more wanton abuses in the H1-B system could be resolved by requiring the employee be a direct employee of the company they're actually working for (e.g. you can't get a contracting company to provide you with engineers), and to require compensation be - say - a minimum of say 20% above the average wage for the job they're doing, relative to other employees at the company, other workers doing manifestly similar jobs in the same geographical area, etc.
If nothing else this will apply upwards pressure on wages even in shitty "we're abusing the h1-b process" contracting companies, because every new h1-b employee they have necessarily increases the average wage at that company, which increases the minimum wage for the next h1-b, etc. The reality is that the set up of the h1-b program allows employers to abuse h1-b employees with relative impunity (including notably lowering wages), so a mechanism by which simply increasing the number of h1-b employees you have forces the wages up counters their ability to use h1-b supported abusive practices to undercut local workers.
Yeah I’ve heard of multiple applications, some sketchy applicants swaps (basically purchasing the winning ticket) and more. You won’t see it in large established companies because they mostly play fair but there is good amount of fraud in the fat tail
My recollection was that it was essentially company A would decide they wanted to employ person X, and they would then go to contracting firms 1 through 100 and get all of them to apply for the same person X. And they could use the contracting company model to then deflate the salary for the h1-b recipient by having the wage comparison be to similar (below real market rate) contracting company jobs rather than the employees they would be working with.
Readit News
So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?
Let any company apply and list a salary which they have to agree to pay for at least two years, and then just issue them highest salary first until they hit the quota for the year. No country based quotas or any other kind. Just straight up salary. And make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.
If people are so skilled then they must be valuable, right? This would be good for both the employee and the country, bringing in the most highly paid people.
The only ones that would get hurt in this process are the companies that abuse the system to underpay people and then get them beholden to the company.
> foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens
This is honestly rare, unless you couple it with a wage level that is lower than the domestic market will bear. Some individuals involved in R&D, but outside of that there are few skills that are not found in the US. I believe the condition isn't not found, but rather, in low supply?
> make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.
This would be a huge boon.
I am not satisfied with my job/employer -- bad environment, bad culture, etc.. I have coworkers from all over. Of the non-US native ones that I interact with, they all absolutely love our job and/or employer.
I've asked them about it, and I generally get the sense that I could not survive in the conditions from which they originally came -- both at work and outside of work.
If a dumb drone like me could figure that out, then I am sure plenty of employers found out long before me.
Hence the idea of prevailing wage, and paying somehow above that.
This of course creates an avenue to game the system, because prevailing wage for basically any work in SF or NYC is likely higher than on average over the entire US. You can undercut local markets a bit by bringing in smart people from abroad, and paying them less than they would make in SF or NYC if hired as locals, but more that the country-wide average.
(Smart, hard-working, educated people from underprivileged places get a chance of having a better life while working to improve the US economy! What's not to like?)
Yes, it alters market dynamics and the whole reason it's done is that the same skills are not available domestically for that price (or at all) - but talking about "low-wage labor" and "exploitation" as the whole point of the program is pretty rich.
As others have pointed out, you're assuming highest salary == most valuable, but what your idea will lead to is a bunch of talented people working on new ways to get people to click ads or write yet-another trading algorithm.
IMHO, you'd fix the H1-B program by doing two things:
1. Eliminate the requirement that the visa-holder have a sponsor past the start date, so the they can quit immediately and take a different job if they are underpaid or the working conditions are poor. That will eliminate any potential exploitation enforced by the program.
2. Limit the sponsors to legitimate US-based companies who will employ the workers for in-house work. Working out a precise definition may be hard, but it should be possible because it's pretty clear when we see it. Basically, something to prevent foreign contracting/outsourcing companies from even using the program.
A lot of the appeal of an immigrant is that they can't quit or take a better deal.
A system based entirely on salary would bias towards only senior roles, preventing the handling of that scenario at all.
Because industries pay differently. Unless you argue H1Bs all go to big techs.
The problem with H1B program is, no matter how it is structured, it WILL be gamed.
(and to be super explicit, yes if the US were to choose to allocate 25k annual h1b by ranked wage & thus all 25k were to go to various flavours of computer programmer or financial modeller, that seems totally fine)
Dead Comment
I'm surprised even in HN we are taking PR at face value.
To me, an ideal skilled worker system would define quota categories by skill/job at a much finer granularity, i.e. hundreds or thousands of different H1-B sub-categories somehow weighted by policies rooted in national strategic interest.
Maybe some kind of blinded auction process that could minimize abuse. Both potential employer and employee go through some vetting process and post their needs/skills using a standard ontology. Then, a matchmaker assigns job offers that are binding. You might allow either party to reject the offer and go back into the matchmaking pool for a limited period or number of offers before they are evicted with a cooling-off period before they are allowed to reapply.
You would also need some kind of anti-abuse audit. Otherwise, malignant players could establish esoteric job requirements via covert channel and then mislabel both the worker and the position to try to force the matchmaker's hand. How do you distinguish a truly rare skill from covert ear-marking?
I think that academic positions are already exempt from H1-B restrictions. To be more specific, these will be exempted [1]
- a higher educational institution
- a nonprofit entity related to or affiliated with a higher educational institution, or a nonprofit research
- organisation or a government research organisation
[1] https://www.nnuimmigration.com/h1b-cap-exempt/
Dead Comment
Secondly, h1b is not just a working visa - it’s officially a “dual intent” visa meaning it’s also a path to immigration. If we do what you are suggesting then 99.99% of applicants will be senior-principal sw engs from china/india. Which, i assume, is not the intention of this program.
Besides, companies already have to pay over prevailing wage for the role in the area. I don’t think you can just conjure up expert professionals out of thin air by raising wages despite what folks on hn/reddit seem to believe. We tried that in 2021 - didn’t work too well
Basing on salary alone would mean ~100% of visas go to tech talent in major cities, and every other profession is cast aside.
That’s not to say that ranking based on salary within an industry wouldn’t be a potential improvement. Or modifying caps to be industry based. There are definitely options here that could be a bit more surgical.
We need to abolish the program completely.
Republican donors enjoy the labor of illegal immigration which is much cheaper than domestic labor. Any crack down on unauthorized workers in agriculture or hospitality, for example, would disrupt lots of big donors.
Democratic donors have openly stated that demographic changes would help them win more elections. These are the "demographics are destiny" folks that noted that increasing hispanic populations are good for them in elections. (If you're not winning enough votes, change the voters.) There was a lot of truth here -- just look at California, New Mexico, and Arizona elections from the 80s and 90s vs today. Recent polling suggests this may be changing.
So you end up in a strange situation where policies supported by the vast majority of Americans from all political stripes is (mostly) ignored by the parties.
The solution to the "apparent" scourge of undocumented workers is to make it so that the people running companies the use that undocumented labor are the ones who go to jail, and in the event ICE finds undocumented labor the minimum fine for the company should be a significantly greater than one multiple of the amount the company would have had to pay a documented worker, in addition to ensuring the undocumented workers are fully compensated at the amount a documented worker would have been paid. Threatening to report them to immigration, underpaying, and wage theft are all clear evidence that the company knows they were employing people who were not allowed to work.
That's all that would be needed. Instead of ever more draconian penalties for the undocumented workers - many of whom have lived in the US for essentially their entire lives at this point, and simply don't have a choice - the penalties that should be being increased are the ones that apply to the employers. It's great because it will stop all that evil undocumented labor people claim to hate, because now these employers have to pay the undocumented labor if anything more than documented labor, because undocumented labor can report unsafe or illegal working conditions, come out fully compensated and in addition to those costs the employer has to pay even more in fines, while the managers and executives who knowingly employed said laborers go to jail.
That said as we've seen in Florida, plenty of businesses in America have set themselves up to be unable to operate without violating the law, so when Florida started passing its various "lets punish the workers, but not those that employ them" laws a whole bunch of businesses couldn't handle the idea of capitalism and complained about how they couldn't get any workers.
Now, it'll probably be a shock to you, but these family sponsorship visas actually make America's immigrant pool way less white. It may not feel like it if you're trying to get an immigrant visa on an employment basis, but America is actually one of the easiest countries to immigrate to if you have relatives here. Other developed countries are far more selective and bureaucratic.
The trick is to recognize that nobody agrees on what part of the system is actually broken. The DNC said the quiet part out loud[0], but the GOP has been thinking for decades that immigration was just a way to dilute Republican voters. A good chunk of the GOP thinks the problem is that it's too easy to immigrate and we need to become like Japan[1]. Another chunk doesn't care about immigrants, but they want to end illegal immigration by any means necessary. The DNC wants, at a minimum, immigration amnesty with a path to citizenship[3]. And then you have business interests that maximally exploit immigrants, legal or otherwise. None of those positions are reconcilable in a way that will produce an immigration bill that will pass the House, Senate, and President Biden.
[0] "Demographics is destiny", which was DNC-speak for "Hillary Clinton can't possibly lose because we have enough Mexicans in California".
[1] As a massive weeaboo[2] I do not understand why anyone would want to adopt Japanese immigration standards.
[2] "Japanophile", but a different, derogatory term I won't use; wordfiltered by 4chan to a word they stole from https://pbfcomics.com/comics/weeaboo/
[3] Keep in mind that there are two classes of illegal immigration:
- People who just moved in without the proper visa, have been here for decades, have no intention of going back, and are already integrated with their local communities. Deporting them would be needlessly cruel.
- Agricultural companies who are importing massive amounts of day laborers from Mexico to avoid having to pay minimum wage
You can argue that the former should have amnesty while still wanting to have a functional minimum wage law by stopping the latter.
Because then the acceptance rate would be x% for people from India, y% from China, and 0.001% for everywhere else, which would be politically untenable.
I have a relative that 15-ish years ago simply overstayed their tourist visa and never left. Some 5 years later he found a chick and put a ring on it (and because he married a US citizen, all his overstay was instantly forgiven). Then he had a immediate US citizen relative who sponsored him for a green card, which he got a couple of years ago. In a couple of years he can apply for naturalization. Yes, he couldn't leave the US until he had the GC in his hands, but I'd say it was a small price to pay for a massive shortcut.
For a married European that would love to live in the US, like myself, legal immigration paths are simply not viable. I would not accept a non-immigrant visa (like H1B), because it doesn't come with any guarantees that I'll be able to stay in the US, and legal immigration paths are basically limited to winning the DV lottery or coughing up $900k for the EB5, as no company in the right mind would sponsor me for an EB2/3.
And for many people from oversubscribed countries (like India and China), marrying a US citizen is the ONLY viable path to a green card.
US immigration system is fundamentally broken.
> One thing I find really, really weird about the US immigration system is that immigrating illegally is trivial (apparently even more so nowadays than it was 15 years ago)
For the immigrants most at risk (not the ones overstaying visas), this has never been true. Many immigrants have to cross the Darien Gap: https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-ris...
The system had serious negative consequences on my health, but my personal suffering isn't even a hundredth as bad as what hundreds of thousands have gone through.
As a European, you have several options. H1, O1, L1, etc. are all fine. None of them have any guarantees, but realistically, you'll be able to apply for a green card through an employer and get one within a couple of years under EB2/3. You can also apply for EB2-NIW or EB1A by yourself even from outside the US if you qualify, and you don't need to get a visa at all. You'd get a green card directly.
How did he make money during those 5 years?
Worked in jobs that didn’t ask for proof of employment authorization.
Being white also probably helped a lot. I’m actually willing to bet that most americans aren’t even aware that white people can also immigrate illegally.
That's obviously not true, by both analysis and observation.
H1B is neither a green card nor a path to one.
There is one category that has no cap at all however. The “Immediate relative of a US citizen” one.
The majority of "Top H1-B Recruiters" are in the "Professional and Technical Services" industry. I think people imagine that most immigrants on H1-B visas are being paid princely sums directly by FAANG companies. Instead the reality looks like they're being exploited by the same Indian bodyshops like Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra, etc. Of the companies in that list that aren't bodyshops, the majority aren't in IT.
Aside from all of the obvious problems with the system, and the political implications, I think many people really have the wrong impression about who the real beneficiaries of the H1-B visa system are.
I know fraud prevention is whack-a-mole, and I know the system has been broken a long time, but this still works only for a certain segment of hires.
I was on the board of a "foreign" school. All instruction (except English) is in the home country's language, and we of course want native speaking teachers familiar with the subject material. For years we used H-1s -- all the teachers qualify, as they all have master's degrees or more and the specialized skills -- but when the big consulting companies started scamming all the H-1s in early October that became impossible for us. Teachers don't tend to think about leaving until late in the school year, certainly not in March, and they need to know relatively quickly so they can move to the US and get settled before the school year starts. What a pain.
In Europe its simple. Job offer above minimum salary? Apply and get a blue card yourself. Has been in the country for over 5 years and speak the language? You get citizenship.
In the US its nearly impossible to get a Green Card. Forget how difficult it is to get an H1B visa in the first place because of the lottery system.
The US is not responsible for that problem and never will be. And even if the US fixed its immigration inconveniences, the problem in India would remain.
India has other problems as well. For software engineers, the number one threat of hiring from India are the corporate cultures at Infosys, TCS and similar companies. I do not want to work with the alumni of those work cultures. It's radioactive-level toxicity.
> Also under the new rule, USCIS may deny or revoke the approval of an H-1B petition if it determines that the fee associated with the registration is declined, not reconciled, disputed, or otherwise invalid after submission.
The fact that they mention this suggests that they couldn't do so previously... which is pretty mind-boggling.
I still think a lot of the more wanton abuses in the H1-B system could be resolved by requiring the employee be a direct employee of the company they're actually working for (e.g. you can't get a contracting company to provide you with engineers), and to require compensation be - say - a minimum of say 20% above the average wage for the job they're doing, relative to other employees at the company, other workers doing manifestly similar jobs in the same geographical area, etc.
If nothing else this will apply upwards pressure on wages even in shitty "we're abusing the h1-b process" contracting companies, because every new h1-b employee they have necessarily increases the average wage at that company, which increases the minimum wage for the next h1-b, etc. The reality is that the set up of the h1-b program allows employers to abuse h1-b employees with relative impunity (including notably lowering wages), so a mechanism by which simply increasing the number of h1-b employees you have forces the wages up counters their ability to use h1-b supported abusive practices to undercut local workers.