Basically all of the problems with the H1-B system could be fixed overnight by simply banning visa holders from working for consulting companies. 'No visa holder may be employed by a company whose main business is consulting for other firms, or staffing'. We'd keep the highly skilled folks who are going to the FAANGs, and at least letting the midmarket companies bid for everyone else. But there's no compelling national or economic interest in importing a class of Accenture/Cognizant/Wipro/Infosys workers who work on 6 month contracts at Wells Fargo or whatever.
I'd actually support more skilled immigration if we could get rid of the consulting firms
Edit to clarify slightly: if your concern is 'skilled immigration', I would like to gently but firmly state that most of the developers that work for the consulting firms are just not very good. Sorry. If you're in a hiring capacity at a tech company at all, everyone knows that the Wipro guys who work on 6 month contracts doing Java at Fortune 100 companies cannot pass even the simplest tech screen. Yes it makes me sound like a jerk to say this, but they're not 'highly skilled'
I agree on the principle but that condition would be specific enough to invite abuse.
Using pay as the article is mentioning would force a natural market clearing mechanism into the system (if you really want that person you may not get them if another company is willing to pay more for the H1B slot).
But most H1-Bs are brand new grads, so their salary is just not very high. You'd be kicking out every 22 year old graduate of Stanford, Harvard etc. if you enforced a pay scale. The US has had a public policy since the 60s of making it easy for foreign grads of our elite colleges to stay here, I wouldn't mess with that
I think they shouldn’t be indentured servants and they should just charge a huge fee, discount it for US grads and then don’t allow someone here to easily switch so they can’t maintian a pay disparity.
They're not tied to a particular employer, this is a myth that will seemingly never die. H1-Bs are transferrable between employers. I know multiple people in both my professional & personal life who have done so easily
Replace the lottery with a compensation auction until it reaches 90th percentile for the area and ban any companies with layoffs in the last three years. Anything else, like making it "skills based" will be gamed.
Pay more? Even on language learning sites there is variability on language and location. So if french language is that important so should the compensation be. You US will end up like Quebec https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/23-quebec-business-o...
The only people that matters to Indian tech managers in the US is being able to hire more Indian H1Bs. It’s not their money. It’s the company and shareholders’ money so they can pay whatever amount the government dictates.
In my position I directly deal with the consequences of others design choices.
There is one type of software engineer who creates software to keep running without any maintenance. Or with a very small number of people. They create software that operates logically and is essentially self documenting.
There’s another group of people who create software with no regard to the amount of mindless busy work that is required to maintain it. It seems like their primary goal is to create more work, not to actually solve the problem.
From years of direct observation and experience, people in the first group are those who are not concerned about being deported.
The ones in the second group are people who will do absolutely anything to stay in this country.
It’s not just because of being afraid of losing H1B. Even the Indian developers in India behave the exact same way. They are extremely envious of their foreign counterparts and often sabotage the project through passive aggressive ways. They are even more envious of other Indians that have better jobs in India. They will often try to overcompensate by astronautic architecture designs.
Yeah...look at all the top researchers in AI, and count how many of them came here through H-1B. Gotta be something like 70%-80%.
Nothing against "homegrown" talent, but let's be real - US is getting cream of the crop talent from other countries.
(And that's just AI, not do the same for other fields. Many of these people started as regular engineers and devs., and didn't come to the through the EB-1B/Einstein visa. Just a regular H-1B. And many on student visas.)
If the supposed benefit of H-1B is getting top researchers from other fields, why do we allow body shops to fill the annual quota with low skill workers?
Like, shouldn't we be in favor of rules will which will shift the balance of H-1B recipients towards the highest skilled (and probably highest paid) workers, instead of a lottery that rewards spamming the system with the greatest number of people who technically have a bachelor's degree?
It seems like a rules change could actually increase the number of very highly qualified people coming to America.
H-1B for top talent in fields like AI makes sense. But in most cases it's not being used for that. It's just being used to fill generic software jobs that can be filled by US citizens/residents.
Those top tier researchers are the kind of people the program is legitimately meant for, but for every one of those there are probably 10 or 100 H-1B contractors being paid below-market wages resulting in underemployment of US citizens, especially early career graduates.
The program is also used to employ people that won’t quit when they are mistreated because their family’s existence in the country depends on continued employment.
If they truly have extraordinary talent in AI, there is the O1 visa. Bigger hurdle, but considering how Zuck is paying 100mil for some of these people, a low bar relatively.
The EB1 visa exists for these "top researchers", the H1B is being used to suppress wages by increasing labor supply for basic software engineering roles a fresh college grad can easily complete.
I have worked with many very smart engineers at big tech firms. We were constantly searching, never hitting hiring goals. The H1B people were not displacing anyone and were paid top of market.
By and large the majority of our H1Bs are from India. Why isn’t China fighting tooth and nail for these hires if they’re so valuable? Additionally, why isn’t India fighting tooth and nail to keep them home and help their own country? Last I checked, Modi is working to facilitate these hires.
Higher comp in the US, because that's where the capital is. More freedom, too. Especially if you're religious (compared to China).
Indians are already very integrated in tech, so networking benefits. If Indians prefer to hire Indians, makes sense that more Indians want to give it a shot.
> Yeah...look at all the top researchers in AI, and count how many of them came here through H-1B. Gotta be something like 70%-80%.
It's funny how easily the argument flips between that and "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.", so long as it leads to the desired conclusion.
This is complete BS. There are plenty of good candidates all over the world including the US. To make it fair, just put a 1000 limit per country per year.
My understanding is that the specifically set limits per country are actually somewhat unfair in the status quo. It means that applicants from smaller countries are way more likely to get in just based on where they were born rather than based on merit or employers’ talent needs.
A lot of people seem to believe that the path to the next generation of American prosperity is playing a series of zero-sum games through demagoguery. I’m not convinced.
I'm not even sure that's it's a desire for greater prosperity, honestly. I think it's most about enforcing social hierarchy by race and gender and parentage, though people vary a lot on what they want the hierarchy to be based on. This is a huge change from past visions for America, and will lead to far less prosperity, inevitably. The fight against DEI, policies meant to maximize corporate success by taking the best talent no matter race or gender, is clear indication of that. And there was plenty of indication that companies that used ESG in running their companies overperformed, yet there was a huge revolt against that.
> The fight against DEI, policies meant to maximize corporate success by taking the best talent no matter race or gender, is clear indication of that.
That's not how DEI looked to me. In the places I've worked, DEI consisted of policies meant to force organizations to hire underqualified applicants so long as they were members of certain demographics, i.e. a variant of affirmative action.
Personally I think the DEI push was a mistake, purely because a push for social equity carried out by the private sector was always going to lead to complete disaster. It was another zero sum game, if not in actual application due to legal issues, then in rhetoric.
But I think you’re right overall, or to put it differently, certain people want to redefine what it means to be American in a way that funny enough, would have excluded large chunks of the Trump administration if applied out when their ancestors got here.
This is my current thought as well. The neo-fascist movements throughout the west all do not have a positive vision, beyond it being a narrative vehicle to convince the people who bought into the rethoric.
Returning a nation to former greatness is a strong story, especially among those who never benefited from that hypothetical greatness. If you ask those politicans to make their promise of a return to greatness more concrete, they often can't even point at a point in time where the nation was great. And when they do you it usually involves prior atrocities where one class of people was beneath the others.
Excuse me for being vague and open here, but I purposely tried to tell it in a way that works for all countries with whose neo-fascists movements I had experiences with, so Geemany, Austria, Italy, Serbia and now unfortunately also the United States of America.
H-1B visas have significantly benefited many non-profit science labs, attracting talented researchers who often earn less than those in the technology sector. Therefore, using salary as the sole criterion for H-1B eligibility would be bad idea. A careful approach is needed, as many H-1B talents, though perhaps not immediately impressive on paper by certain metrics, consistently add immense value.
Here's a bulletproof working visa policy: automatically approve everyone who will be in income tax (state and federal) more than the median gross income (~$60k). Sort of minimum-income-tax personal guarantee, which all highly-skilled migrants for in-demand occupations will easily match (OTE >$200k). Alternatively, earning 2x of the median income in their profession, with a national floor of $200k pa.
It won't solve all immigration woes, but it will do a great deal to keep the country competitive.
Yes, only that it leaves vast parts of the US economy without workers, since not only skilled labour is sought after. Farm work would be one popular example.
So unlike you somehow explain to Americans why foreigners get the good jobs while they now have to work the fields, a kins of labour that has been beneath them for decades, that won't even remotely fly (at least not without other major restructuring).
As an immigrant, I understand the deal (for a working visa): I must bring valuable and scarce skills that this economy lacks (as demonstrated by the premium it is willing to pay). "Total Compensation" is an imperfect-but-good-enough proxy for how valuable and scarce my skills are. This does nothing to address other issues in immigration or labour forces, but if your goal is to attract global professionals with valuable and scarce skills, you need a working visa based on the total compensation this economy offers for those skills (i.e., Total Compensation).
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I'd actually support more skilled immigration if we could get rid of the consulting firms
Edit to clarify slightly: if your concern is 'skilled immigration', I would like to gently but firmly state that most of the developers that work for the consulting firms are just not very good. Sorry. If you're in a hiring capacity at a tech company at all, everyone knows that the Wipro guys who work on 6 month contracts doing Java at Fortune 100 companies cannot pass even the simplest tech screen. Yes it makes me sound like a jerk to say this, but they're not 'highly skilled'
Using pay as the article is mentioning would force a natural market clearing mechanism into the system (if you really want that person you may not get them if another company is willing to pay more for the H1B slot).
> An eligible H-1B worker can change employers as soon as the new employer’s nonfrivolous H-1B petition is properly filed with USCIS.
https://immigrationhelpla.com/h1b-visa-transfer/
How about a French language teacher? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=french&city=&year=202...
Pay more? Even on language learning sites there is variability on language and location. So if french language is that important so should the compensation be. You US will end up like Quebec https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/23-quebec-business-o...
There is one type of software engineer who creates software to keep running without any maintenance. Or with a very small number of people. They create software that operates logically and is essentially self documenting.
There’s another group of people who create software with no regard to the amount of mindless busy work that is required to maintain it. It seems like their primary goal is to create more work, not to actually solve the problem.
From years of direct observation and experience, people in the first group are those who are not concerned about being deported.
The ones in the second group are people who will do absolutely anything to stay in this country.
Nothing against "homegrown" talent, but let's be real - US is getting cream of the crop talent from other countries.
(And that's just AI, not do the same for other fields. Many of these people started as regular engineers and devs., and didn't come to the through the EB-1B/Einstein visa. Just a regular H-1B. And many on student visas.)
If the supposed benefit of H-1B is getting top researchers from other fields, why do we allow body shops to fill the annual quota with low skill workers?
Like, shouldn't we be in favor of rules will which will shift the balance of H-1B recipients towards the highest skilled (and probably highest paid) workers, instead of a lottery that rewards spamming the system with the greatest number of people who technically have a bachelor's degree?
It seems like a rules change could actually increase the number of very highly qualified people coming to America.
The program is also used to employ people that won’t quit when they are mistreated because their family’s existence in the country depends on continued employment.
Student -> regular dev/engineer -> promoted to lead/researcher/manager (or jump to another company for those positions).
If they didn't come to the US on a student VISA, or H1-B to begin with, they wouldn't have been able to follow the path they did.
What’s your source?
Indians are already very integrated in tech, so networking benefits. If Indians prefer to hire Indians, makes sense that more Indians want to give it a shot.
It's funny how easily the argument flips between that and "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.", so long as it leads to the desired conclusion.
You're thinking of equality. The Equity of DEI is different from that.
That's not how DEI looked to me. In the places I've worked, DEI consisted of policies meant to force organizations to hire underqualified applicants so long as they were members of certain demographics, i.e. a variant of affirmative action.
The America that limited citizenship to free White persons, and had an effectively Whites-only immigration policy until 1965 [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...
But I think you’re right overall, or to put it differently, certain people want to redefine what it means to be American in a way that funny enough, would have excluded large chunks of the Trump administration if applied out when their ancestors got here.
Returning a nation to former greatness is a strong story, especially among those who never benefited from that hypothetical greatness. If you ask those politicans to make their promise of a return to greatness more concrete, they often can't even point at a point in time where the nation was great. And when they do you it usually involves prior atrocities where one class of people was beneath the others.
Excuse me for being vague and open here, but I purposely tried to tell it in a way that works for all countries with whose neo-fascists movements I had experiences with, so Geemany, Austria, Italy, Serbia and now unfortunately also the United States of America.
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It won't solve all immigration woes, but it will do a great deal to keep the country competitive.