Absolutely nothing. It's central planning for something that doesn't require it: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
Ability to switch jobs at will, can bring up the paid salary and it puts the onus on employer to ensure employee is treat equal to other other employees in US. If employee is not treated/paid well enough, employee can move to another company in US.
If I get a job, and my company NEEDS me, and I'm GOOD at what I'm doing, I should get IN; period. There should be no crap involved. How the hell is it good for a company to be told that it can't grow because it happened to petition the 65,001st person out of 65,000 that year? How the hell is it good for the prospective employee to have to try again later? And in extremely-fast-moving industries such as tech, even the arbitrary time frame of "one year" is an insanely long time.
The only limit that kind of makes sense is a thorough investigation of the type of person you're bringing in (e.g. university degrees or other background, some indication of what they're bringing to the country as a whole). It may make sense to force companies to prove that no U.S. citizen can do the job but this system has been gamed for years, as companies produce vague job descriptions just like they post vague patent descriptions.
My first experience with H1-B workers was working with contractors at a state agency (in Virginia). They were nice, but not highly skilled overall, and terrified of losing the job as they didn't have any guarantee of getting another U.S. job. This, in turn, made work life worse for everyone, as they'd never complain about anything on the job, even when it was egregious and not just software devs being whiny.
My second experience with H1-B workers was when I moved to Seattle. My colleagues were often H1-B, and were vastly skilled (still nice). Good workers (generalizing, of course), but perfectly willing to complain if the workplace or work was subpar, because they knew they could land another job in the U.S. more easily than our employer could replace any of us.
That said, the paperwork process was amazingly bad, and many of them got stuck in jobs (even avoiding promotions) because they had started the citizenship process, and for at least one phase changing your job starts the process over. Ugh.
The difference between the two, and the impacts it had on the workplaces were stark. My leaving the first job was in the middle of most of their non-H1-B talent leaving (you could call that a self-correction, but that just left those that stayed worse off). My second experience left me rethinking everything I thought I learned from the first experience.
Something that'll genuinely solve all the problems (qualified americans losing jobs, outsourcing companies abusing loopholes, salaries racing to the bottom), would be to have a concept of temporary green card.
Instead of a 3 year H1b, have a 3 year green card (lets call this the Super H1b). Once an immigrant is here in the US on a Super H1b visa, he/she will be free to take up any employment if need be, even with multiple employers.
This will ensure that an employer sponsoring the Super H1b visa will be paying at or above market rate salary, because the employer truly needs this employee.
Are there chances of this visa being abused? sure. But its way low, much more beneficial (to americans, to the immigrant and also to the genuine Super H1b sponsors).
@ergothus : Do you think having such a visa would have helped (considering your experiences in Virginia and Seattle?)
1) 10x poverty guidelines in US for 2015.
That's not enough for some places. I know mid level engineers at some of the big companies make more than that, for example.
$117,700 in San Francisco is not the same as $117,700 in Austin.
Again, any minimum salary requirement, becomes very easy to game (employee can be expected to pay back in cash, for the difference). This will put genuine companies (that cannot do such shady deals) at a great disadvantage
When I was on an H1B visa I changed jobs multiple times, very easily. Part of the problem is that people (including potential employers) aren't aware how easy it is.
3 years, immigrant can work anywhere, any number of employers.
Guess how many illicit h1b employers will be interested in bringing an immigrant, if they are not guaranteed that the immigrant will stay with them?
Once you apply for a green card, you have to maintain legal immigration status continuously. Furthermore, nationals of India and China have to wait longer, due to country quotas and relative demand. There is something called a priority date, which is somewhat akin to taking a number instead of waiting on queue, except it's really more like a number for the secondary queue to get a number for the real queue.
There is an I-140 form that is part of the process, which is filed by the employer. If this form is withdrawn, perhaps in response to changing jobs, it can reset priority dates or cause extensions to be denied.
Until this happens, Americans are going to be at the receiving end.
Even limiting number (drawn out of thin air) of visas, or increasing the cost of the visa, doesn't solve any issues. If anything, it'll make it worse for the legit h1b sponsoring company to bear the costs and handle the immigration process.
Who wouldn't want to hire a bunch of people that are beholden to you to stay in the country? Remove that from the equation and wages will move back up to market.
This isn't a cold trail of off shore shell accounts and obfuscating financials dealings. The trail is pretty clear.
This is about high tech companies lobbying congress for a special temporary guest worker visa (that allows for a dual intent to remain in the US), held and controlled by a corporation, where the guest worker resides in the US at the pleasure of the corporate "sponsor", on the grounds that there is such a shortage of critical tech employees that we need to empower corporations to bestow the right to live and work in the US on non-citizen who possess these skills. Some of these corporations have then turned around and fired US Citizens, some of whom are in fact immigrants, in order to replace them with workers brought in on this program.
While there is plenty of debate here on HN on the extent to which the new workers are "captive" in their jobs, I think we can all agree that the H1B workers absolutely are not free and full citizens, free to choose their own path in life, decide where they will live, what they will work on, what career they will pursue, and so forth. Even if they can change jobs, they need to find a new corporate sponsor who bestows the right to live in the US on them.
This kind of corporate power over individuals, on a massive scale, really bothers me. You can object deeply this while celebrating immigration that preserves the freedom and autonomy of the individual, and supporting general immigration (or even a more general version of skilled immigration).
They aren't citizens right away. Getting even a green card takes about 5 years. Citizenship another 5-10 years.
Adding 65,000 day laborers is very different from adding 65,000 engineers.
That implies a lot more power over the latter.
Here's the article that was posted here a little over half a year ago. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff-...
It's nice to see some closure.
Hadean justice would alter the H1B visa category such that the guest worker could perform no function for the company other than to train American nationals to perform adequately in the labor category that required the imported foreign worker.
Clearly, if it is advantageous to import a skill, it would be more advantageous to replicate it during the limited time that it is available.
This is not true.
Let's say you need someone with expertise in a very specific category, like embedding javascript into Postgres. You find the one person in the world who does that and hire them using an H1B. Your whole company uses Macs and she is used to Windows.
Is training that new employee to provision an OS X machine fraud?
No.
I thought the main reason for H1-B visas was because there aren't enough American workers?
So why would they get rid of American workers they already had ,that have been doing the job?
Surely it couldn't be because they lower pay of the H1-B workers?
The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers
who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and
abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the
temporary employment of qualified individuals who are
not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
You'll not that list is pretty heavy on the "body shop" side.
Note that, according to the article, the laid off people seem to be (relatively speaking) older, with multiple years in the company. It is likely that their salaries are higher than what management would like them to be. My theory makes the prediction that the H1 holders are young. If so, they'll take lower salaries, specially if they aren't aware of living costs. Until they actually move, whatever offer they got must have seemed like a crapton of cash.
Yes, it is the main purpose: http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm
If the companies are not using it for that purpose and telling the government something different then they are committing fraud.
Disney had a project cost of $X, the outsourcing company moved in offering to accomplish similar goals for $Y, where $Y is significantly less than $X. How the outsourcing company plans to accomplish this - through lower-paid workers, or some secret process management kungfu, or having 100x workers accomplish much, much more in a short amount of time, is a mystery for outsourcer to resolve.
Recall that crime rates in the US among immigrants are lower than in the general population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_crime#United_S...
That being said, the H1-B system is broken and needs urgent reform, I suggest looking at the point-system used in Canada.
That hasn't been the case for many many years, but the memory lingers and some employees feel beholden to companies. Many large public corporations these days look for maximizing "share holder value", which translates into "what can we do right now to maximize revenue". That being said, those short term actions will have long term effects. Cringely has done well to document the case of IBM. My graduate advisor was old school IBM and was still getting money from a time when (i don't know the exact specifics) where if an employee made a significant impact that saved the company money, they company would provide some renumeration in kind. His patents, etc. still brought him money from his time at IBM.
This is going to be a gross over simplification, but it is based on personal experience at two companies -- both startups. There are certain nationalities, maybe it is due to national ties, sometimes it seems due to prior business relationships and potential kickbacks, where an individual in power puts significant pressure on the company to hire a particular out sourcing firm or sponsor an H1-B for a particular individual.
Just like the numerous debates around "women in tech", there are factors at play and decisions made where hiring isn't always about "what's right for the company", but more about a "cultural" or "ethnic" fit.
Skill and merit should be at the forefront (a pipe dream, but we like to think it is there). Any work place where there is a significant dominance of one culture over another (unless, say a whole team was brought in as a whole) speaks to a diversity and cultural problem. Unfortunately, a lot of these can also be coupled to Visas like the H1-B.
This is a give away to the outsourcing firms. Helping them having a bit more control over their employee.
If so, why not create the same restrictions on, say, a company in California from hiring someone from New York?
Or is this a guise for xenophobia?
Like citizenship? Do you consider citizenship an artificial barrier?
As someone who has worked at tech companies and various law firms in the Silicon Valley, I've seen this story played out several times. Hire Cognizant, TCS, Infosys, Symphony, or some other outsourcing firm and then bring in H-1Bs for an entire department. All it does is drive down wages for everyone and hurt everyone except for the 1% at the top.
How do you feel about companies and law firms gaming job postings to disqualify qualified workers in the US so they can hire someone on a visa for much less? Employers are posting jobs that don’t really exist, seeking candidates they don’t want, and paying for bogus non-ads to show there’s an IT labor shortage in America. Here is the law firm Cohen & Grigsby advising other employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU Do you consider this abuse or fraudulent?
>Or is this a guise for xenophobia?
Implying that the only people against immigration are racists is just a lazy, offensive, and dismissive argument. Try something else.
Actual barrier to a job: knowing how to deliver that type of service.
Artificial barrier: Something arbitrary synthesized by a party not involved in an A<->B transaction. Such as, having your papers in order so someone doesn't throw you in jail.
>All it does is drive down wages for everyone and hurt everyone except for the 1% at the top. Specious argument. What about the person from New York/India moving to California?
Does allowing a company from California hire someone from New York 'drive down wages hurt everyone except the top 1%"? If not why does it suddenly 'drive down wages hurt everyone except the top 1%" when you change New York to India? This is my motivation of suspicion that H1 visas are a guise of xenophobia.
To me, H1 visas appear to be a sophomoric tantrum of the US transitioning to a global economy.
Addendum for your reflection: Doesn't buying foreign manufactured goods 'drive down wages'? Do you not buy foreign mfg goods? Why not force all companies selling goods in the US to have those products exclusively made in the USA?
Can you elaborate a bit more on this? Doesn't the initial LCA application with the Dept. of Labor requires you to submit wage details that conclusively prove that the offered wages are as per market norms.
how about if your company employ cheap labor, all the 99%ers quit? that'd change how company are run pretty quickly
but somehow the 99% like doing nothing about it, or so it seems.
What about the guys on H1B's who are now earning 4x more than they were back in India? Are they not people too?
It's funny how much this parallels file sharing and the music industry (and even open source) over the past 15 years: the sharing of free music, open source, and even the app store (how can you possibly make a living when you charge 99 cents for an app?) drove down the cost of both software and music to peanuts.
It's pretty clear artificial government controls haven't worked here (IE: copyright laws) and all industries involved have had to learn how to work around it to survive.
Globalization is here to stay and the thing we all love, technology, has made it easier and easier to replace us with overseas workers.
You can try to restrict the companies through law, but they will just end up moving out of the country (and more jobs will go along with them) to compete at a global level. There are plenty of countries that would love the tax dollars in exchange for lax hiring practices.
"How do you feel about companies and law firms gaming job postings to disqualify qualified workers in the US so they can hire someone on a visa for much less?"
it's not really 'gaming' anything. It's using technology to find the best applicant (be it experience, cost, or both). Business owner have learned that just getting cheap labor barely works, but it seems like companies like Facebook are getting not only cheaper labor, but employees that are educated and can compete with their American counterpart.
"Do you consider this abuse or fraudulent?"
Is adblock technology considered 'fraudulent' or 'abuse'? People using it are actively choosing to deprive a website of money, which will result in job loss.
Site owners have to learn how to still make money despite this new technology and so will you if you want to continue working and compete with overseas workers.
The logic is really very simple: those artificial barriers are also the borders between economies, social benefit systems, etc. etc. Every person within those borders that does not have a job puts a drain on the rest of the country. Someone without a job outside of those borders does not. So bringing someone across those borders while an unemployed person is within them is a net economic negative.
Obviously that is a vast, vast oversimplification, but there is a logic. Xenophobia is an "intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries" - putting your own economic interests ahead of others isn't necessarily the product of dislike or fear. And some would say it's entirely rational.
You're right - that's a vast oversimplification. Here's one of my own: at the same time Linus Torvalds moved to the US, there were a number of unemployed people. I still think it was a net win to let him in, though.
Be very wary of the lump of labor fallacy, it's what's behind the "they took rrrr jawbs" mentality.
Can anyone elucidate why having artificial barriers to employing certain types of people is beneficial?
If so, why not create the same restrictions on, say, a company in California from hiring someone from New York?
As far as the Xenophobia bit? Yes and no. It's very easy to argue that discrimination based on place of birth is fundamentally wrong, and that open borders are an ideal worth striving for. Not sure if anyone has figured out the pragmatic policymaking around that -- i.e. designing social structures that are resilient to open borders.
To prevent a race to the bottom on 1st world wages and worker welfare and to arrest 3rd world brain drain.
Can you explain why India should be forced by dint of its poverty to invest in free education for its smartest citizens and let the benefits accrue to US elites rather than to the Indian people?
>If so, why not create the same restrictions on, say, a company in California from hiring someone from New York?
Because they are both US citizens and their welfare is the responsibility of the US government.
If the United States and India were to join at the hip and elect a single government collectively (do you want that?) then I see no reason why we shouldn't have free and open immigration between the two countries.
>Or is this a guise for xenophobia?
Or is race baiting just a cynical ploy to funnel yet more money into the pockets of the 0.01% hyper-elite?
That's a pretty bold claim! That would imply widespread fraud. I don't think all companies do that, not even most of them. I think the bodyshops heavily skew the perception, though.
Why are free rider effects acceptable when someone moves from New York to California but not when it's India to California?
There are two, distinct forces at play here. Free-rider effects and cost subsidization.
The non-local worker would start paying taxes into that system? If a corporation is taxed on it's profits, wouldn't they start paying more into that social community.
Personally, I would like to see the H1-B system go away/become unavailable to large body shops and consulting firms. All they are doing is the scenario outlined above.
Some companies are good, some, like IBM which are attempting to cater to the daily whims of Wall Street, not so much.
Also citizens vote, foreigners don't.
TIL not actively undermining your countries economic foundation is xenophobia.
And it's not "certain types" of people. It's all non-Americans.
I bet a lot of opposition would disappear overnight if foreign workers could only be hired at a very high high salary level. Of course, go too high and you'll get complaints from US citizens that are not yet at that level. But I guess that would be a minority.
Level the playing field (at least in wages), and there's much less of an excuse to restrict immigration. After all, if an immigrant with no networking, who doesn't have English as his native language and a different culture, and has to jump through a lot of hoops just to be able to legally move and work in the country (a process that can take months), if he can just walk in and steal your job, then there was something wrong about your job security in the first place.
The problem is how to define what a [high|fair] wage would be at a given location and industry.
Would you be in favor of increasing the general US immigration cap by 65000 and abolishing H1B completely? Because I would. If you are not in favor of that then perhaps there is a motive to your concern other than racial harmony.
Source: my Italian wife and I went through that process when we moved here from Italy.
We've compromised as a society and said sure slave labor will exist but not in the US, if a company wants to benefit from the infrastructure and educated workforce and culture and benefits that American society has developed they have to be decent corporate citizens and treat workers with a modicum of respect. You're suggesting bringing slave labor here, I'd suggest rather we sprint in the opposite direction and ban it everywhere through e.g. making the import of goods made through slave labor a criminal offense.
Why should Disney expect to keep that monopoly privilege and control if the public could still get the same benefit from someone else?
Why should the laws of a mostly free and mostly democratic society matter?
If you're playing a game, with rules, why can't you just help yourself to extra tokens and change the die rolls, and look at other people's cards?
Because the other players will frickin' kill you, that's why, you lowlife cheater. The rules are there so that everyone has a reasonable chance at winning, even in the enhanced-difficulty challenge modes.
For a variety of reasons, some supportable and others abhorrent, the rules-makers decided that unrestricted immigration would someday turn the country into an exploitative, stratified, third-world hellhole. So far, none of their grandkids have had the balls to throw open the gates and fill up their ancestors' neighborhoods with scary brown people with their thick accents and weird foods. Deep down, we're still tribal animals, and the law reflects that.
So the reason is that we follow the law, even if it is stupid, racist, and xenophobic. That's why the citizen gets priority over the foreigner. If you don't like it, you change the law for everyone instead of cheating it just for you.
We know that Disney knows how to lobby for changes in the law. And we know they can get stuff passed that would make ordinary people want to vomit. So why wouldn't they want a new law allowing a specific business category--one so narrow that it could only reasonably refer to Disney and a few other big companies--to import unlimited numbers of foreign workers at below-market wages?
The laws should be good for the people in the country.
Or have we entered an era where hereditary property rights are so much more valued than a citizens rights that we can no longer even see the analogy here.
People all over the world also get the short end of the stick when expats are favoured over locals. The third world is full of high-paying positions held by white westerners doing jobs that locals can do.