I know H1Bs working at $40/hour for jobs their American counterparts are making $75/hour. They can’t move to higher paying roles at other companies because of the visa.
Also the termed “highly skilled” is an absolute joke. I can teach a person off the street to be “highly skilled” in a few weeks, based on the standard of what “highly skilled” means in H1B.
H1B needs to be highly reformed. It’s the tech equivalent of hiring construction workers from the Home Depot parking lot and paying under the table wages. I am not generally a fan of tariffs, but I suggest a 100% tariff on H1B wages paid by the hiring company. And that tariff would be a sliding scale — the more H1Bs you hire, the higher the tariff. If you need that foreign engineer so badly, paying $100/hour shouldn’t be a hardship. That would incentivize hiring the American/permanent resident at $80/hour. We’d find that “shortage” going away pretty quickly. Drive up the costs of Accenture/Infosys/etc., to make them unattractive. The only reason those companies exist is to provide cheap labor to companies like Best Buy, etc. The money collected from that tariff can be used to fund tax breaks for companies that don’t hire H1Bs. H1B isn’t about highly skilled labor. It’s about “highly” skilled cheap labor.
In FY 2021, 66% of approved H-1B beneficiaries earned a master’s degree or higher compared to the 13% of americans with masters degree
Now coming to indians in the USA doing low paid labour - average indian household in USA earns 152,341 vs 74580 of US average.
get your facts right and say thank you to indians for making america great!
The big “consulting” body shops are doing the labor equivalent of dumping. Dumping is a WTO violation, but seemingly doesn’t apply to labor.
My post isn’t about Indians. It’s about Indian companies that exploit the H1B system to create a pipeline to offshoring. I saw it with my own eyes.
“Average Indian household income is 152k” — the average Indian in the U.S. isn’t an H1B worker. This isn’t about Indians — this is about Indian “skilled labor” that’s filing a “shortage.” Indians are highly represented in many highly paid careers in the U.S. and the vast majority of Indians in the U.S. aren’t working “$40/hour” tech jobs.
And, a tariff on H1B (and offshore team) wages shouldn’t hurt H1Bs right? If there is actually a shortage, companies would be glad to fill the position. So how would that harm H1Bs? If a tariff on H1Bs results in fewer H1Bs, then clearly the shortage was a myth.
With Best Buy, I was in those meetings. The decision to hire Accenture had zero to do with any “shortage,” but it was to boost the company’s diminishing profits due to the impact of Covid on the retail space. So this argument that we need H1Bs and offshoring because of some “shortage” is a complete lie. If you fire your workers, then that’s the opposite of a shortage. You had a surplus of workers — otherwise why are we firing people?