Republicans get to use ‘illegal immigrants taking jobs’ as a stick to beat democrats with, and progressives use cries of racism to rally support amongst Latino voters.
Meanwhile anyone who espouses common sense ideas such as reforming our immigration policy gets called a racist and ‘anti-immigrant’.
That people still want to come here despite having to put up with that is a testament to how powerful the draw to living here is. I can't blame someone for illegally immigrating when they see that the legal path will take so long, and that they could be building a better life in the meantime, despite the struggles that come from living here without papers.
This isn’t both sides not wanting to do anything. This is both sides having very different solutions.
All of which is irrelevant to the article since this is discussing legal immigration.
pay a penalty, and stand in the back of the line for American citizenship while they are provided recognized status so they can live in the country legally in the meanwhile.
This is basically amnesty/open-borders. Not arguing for or against, but it is. There is no "line" for citizenship, after five years of permanent residency anyone qualifies. The "line" is for the permanent residency (green card), and you have to qualify to even get in the line, that's why people come illegally. So what's the new qualification? "already in the country"? Then what about the people here 20 years from now? Is it a rolling admission? If not then you have the same problem as before. If yes, then the policy is 'open borders' possibly with a qualification of "can avoid getting caught for X years".
If you don't find open borders acceptable the only reasonable compromise I can think of is a capped category that anyone can apply for, where the cap is adjusted as needed. Somewhat ike the current Diversity Visa (Green Card lottery) which is capped at around 50K per year, though that cap rarely changes.
It might be what progressives are calling for, but it's not what Democrats are calling for when they are in power. Additionally, I'm not sure how progressive it is to prefer elite immigrants with "advanced degrees" over other immigrants.
This is a legal immigration issue. There are no illegal immigrants on H1Bs waiting for a green card.
This could definitely be fixed or reformed without touching the illegal immigration issue.
Federal policy is hardly ever “common sense”. Have those people actually tried not saying racist things? Because I swear, 99.999% of the “common sense” reforms I hear about I nvolve deporting basically everyone who isn’t super white..
But keep winning votes and changing minds by calling your opposition racists and bigots. That will win your votes.
bold statement. source?
First: total strawman.
Second: not even relevant to the issue at hand. There is, to first approximation, exactly zero undocumented immigration among "Indian immigrants with advanced degrees" so I'm having a very, very hard time imaging how this is an "enormous penalty" we have to pay for failing to solve the "illegal immigration issue".
So... enlighten us. What's your common sense idea that would address the problem here? I'll only call you a racist if it's a racist idea, I promise.
>Second: not even relevant to the issue at hand. There is, to first approximation, exactly zero undocumented immigration among "Indian immigrants with advanced degrees" so I'm having a very, very hard time imaging how this is an "enormous penalty" we have to pay for failing to solve the "illegal immigration issue".
The "issue at hand" the parent discussed is immigration in general. Not "Indian immigrants with advanced degrees" immigration only, even if TFA is about that. Posts on HN are taken with liberty as starting points of a discussion, and the parent never mentioned that they constrain their observation to only concern "Indian immigrants with advanced degrees", so your response is disingenuous.
No. djrogers above literally said that "This is one of the enormous penalties we as a nation have to pay because neither of our political parties actually wants to solve the illegal immigration issue." So unless you want to play games with finding an alternative antecedent for "this", you are going to have to retract that.
What the grandparent poster was doing, and you, is trying to inject a fundamentally unsound and offensive position into the debate by not saying it and instead creating a giant strawman around the issue to preemptively accuse the rest of us of intolerance.
So out with it: what's your common sense fix to this that we're refusing to discuss?
1. There is no per-country quota on H1Bs
2. There is a per-country quota on EB-1/2/3 GCs
3. And this is crux of the problem: H1Bs are issued indiscriminately, most problematically to so-called bodyshops.
There are various proposals to fix the immigration backlog. There's one bill that would get rid of per-country quotas. I wonder what that would do to the backlog of everyone. I kind of see this one as a nonstarter.
Bizarrely, it's the current (otherwise abhorrent) administration that is the first to even talk about fixing the real problem, which is (3). H1Bs are a lottery now. When the likes of FAAMG companies can't hire people because the likes of Infosys and Tata are flooding applications for people who will essentially become indentured servants, that's a problem.
Infosys settled a visa fraud case with the US government several years ago including a payment of millions of dollars. How exactly are they still able to apply for visas?
There are problems with ranking applicants based on salary (or total compensation) as the one proposal would do. This would potentially drown out lower-paid STEM fields that have legitimate need with FAAMG SWEs. Then again... that's still probably better than the current system.
People have also complained "well you can't hire graduates if you rank on salary". That's true. But at the same time, are newly minted college graduates fulfilling unsatisfied demand for specialty occupation? Or just being used to lower labour costs?
>IT industry body Nasscom on Monday came out in defence of its members TCS and Infosys, saying the two accounted for only 7,504—8.8%—of the approved H1B visas in 2014-15.
https://www.livemint.com/Industry/pHkRcTtIoKd8MkTkBNdtSN/Inf...
They must be partial to Infosys. I mean, what did it do. https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...
> These students are one of the primary abusers of the H1B system.
Right, the startups in bay area, good groups at Apples, Googles and Facebooks of the world are filled with people from Infosys ;)
>Literally every scam I saw in H1B is from body shops in US
That's partially true; I will let it slide
I understand you are frustrated, but you are barking up the wrong tree. The trouble is the easy jobs i.e, low-skilled in high-tech, are already filled. For example, see clouts of Infosys employees in some US companies. These days, people have two options, be really good at what they do, or find a clout to stick to. May be you had a hard time sticking to the Infosys clout(I am not surprised, given that you like to think). Don't blame it on others. If anything, most of the technically competent desi people in US have a US degree.
What I understood GP to be saying is that "most desi people in US having a US degree are technically incompetent".
Both these view points are not incompatible, and true in my experience.
I am not quite sure if LCA is an accurate metric of visa count. For example, I had my visa renewed 3 times so far. Every time, they filed for an LCA. I had to relocate one time. For that also, an LCA was filed. Then another one for my green card PERM or I-140 stage. People who come from India and work for TCS, Infosys etc end up relocating more often. Also, unlike American companies, visas are given to Indian companies only for 1-2 years and sometimes even less (American companies usually get for 3 years). Further, 25405 number doesn't mean they all were deputed from India. Indian companies hire a lot from US. They actually prefer hiring these students because they are desperate for a visa and are willing to settle for a lower salary. If they have to bring someone from India, they have to file the h1b application, hope they get into lottery and then only they can even think of putting them in a project. Most clients won't even want to wait that long unless they had been working on that project for a while and has acquired good knowledge. Where as for students, they can hire them, and file for h1b in the next few months (students get upto 18 months of something called OPT that allows them to work without h1b). This is precisely what's happening in my company. Same I heard is the case for Infosys. And these companies also hire people who are in the green card queue.
>Right, the startups in bay area, good groups at Apples, Googles and Facebooks of the world are filled with people from Infosys ;)
100 thousand Indian students come to US every year. How many of them end up working in these companies? Your own list shows less than 15k.
Among the deputed ones from India, the good ones never stay in the likes of Infosys. While I don't know anybody who went to Google or Facebook, I know a few who jumped from these Indian consultancies to Amazon, Intel and few other Silicon Valley companies. So, I don't think its fair to dismiss a person working for an Indian consultancy company as incompetent. My friend in Infosys was saying recently that a lot of people are joining Amazon and a few other companies like them these days. They can't be stupid if they are getting hired in these companies, right?
Also, I was recently talking to 2 of my friends from Infosys on 2 separate occasions. Both said there teams were trying to hire people locally (Americans), and both had the same opinion as you about the people who came for interviews about skills and competency.
> If anything, most of the technically competent desi people in US have a US degree.
I actually developed a bad opinion of them based on their performance in my own company. People who end up in good colleges probably are good. But those who come from tier 2 and lower colleges are not going to be good just because they studied in a US college.
The entire premise of "limiting immigration" is discrimination based on a binary national origin/citizenship (i.e. you happened to be one of us or not) so it is comically laughable to talk about how to make such system "fair" without opening it to everyone, which has practical issues. Immigration is an inherently political mechanism constructed as a result of amalgamation of various underlying game theoretic balances and trade-offs over the years between nation states. It's important to note that you cannot divorce the individuals from their own governments/resource allocation when thinking about that.
They request power of attorney from employees, file their tax returns on their behalf and steal their tax return money. Some employees do not receive their full wage.
In paper they meet H-1B salary requirements but in practice they don't.
They are not only in violation of immigration law but labor law as well.
The only "violation" I know these companies do is that they make the employee sign a bond that they have to come back to India and give a 3 months notice period if they want to resign while in US. And this is not just Indian companies. I was surprised to learn recently that the Indian division of an American product company (top 1 or 2 in the world in what they do) has a 12 months notice period with around 10 lakh rupees bond. Compared to that, Indian companies are less evil.
Another thing the Indian companies do is make you work on less desirable projects or otherwise you have to go back to India. And they don't treat their employees the same way a product company in America would do. They see us more or less as "you should be grateful to us that we gave you chance to come to US".
So what do all these applicants do in the meantime? Are they overseas? Are they in the States on dual-intent visas? Are they in some creative legal limbo?
If somehow, in the meantime, they obtain a green card or work permit, are they allowed to take that same position, if it's still open -- clearly, they can accept any other position, as they're fully allowed to work in the States, but can they take the one EB-2 and I-140 was filed for originally?
This used to be the case. But not any more. A lot of people I know are getting RFEs and rejections for their extensions after i-140. I am actually one of them. Got my I-140, then got RFE. I am in a state that gives license based on your visa and won't renew license unless I have an approved work permit. So, I cannot renew my license, and has been using ride sharing for the last 1 month. Its going to be another 1-2 months before I get a decision on whether I can stay. Fun times. They always find creative ways to make your life difficult. Its amusing they refuse to give me license, but the state has no problem taxing me, even for the income I get in India.
Trump talked about self deportation. He succeeded at least in my case. I am done with all this immigration bull. I hope I can find a job in India soon so that I can escape from here.
Some forms of intolerance: believing in gender superiority, a caste system, exceptionalism based on ethnicity or country of origin. If you believe in those things, you might have a tolerance problem, no matter where you are from.
I try to be as tolerant as possible, and do not have negative views against immigration. But if you are intolerant I will have a hard time getting along if you openly express those views or if you apply those at work.
You'll universally find a much better healthcare system (e.g. health insurance not tied to your employer), with the exception of the UK. You'll find a humane immigration system that doesn't kick you out if your employer decides to screw you over (again with the exception of the UK). You'll generally have some form of state support if you lose your job instead of being thrown to homelessness. Etc etc. The US is a second world country nowadays.
And any children you might have will be far safer, and at lower risk for severe mental health problems.
They'll wait for 250 years
> 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.
The focus seems to be on the temporary nature.
It sucks that the system is the way it is, and I think a point-based system like Canada is far more efficient, but it's not discrimination. If there are already known rules, and one particular country comes in an adds a massive amount of applications, you can't turn around and yell discrimination.
If the rules are discriminatory then it's entirely valid to call them as such, and doing so may help to change them.
Brilliant logic on your side!
"Discrimination" is a neutral term though: there are acceptable kinds and unacceptable kinds. For instance, it is discrimination to not let a stranger sleep in your home or in your bed, though no one reasonable would call that unacceptable discrimination.
The actual policy we're talking about here is a country-neutral permanent immigration quota coupled with country-neutral per-country percentage caps. There's nothing specially discriminatory in the law against people from India. It's just that there's massive amounts of temporary-worker immigration from there, which crashes hard against the other quotas. If German immigration were equally massive, Germans would have the same problems Indians have now, so the problem has nothing to due with racial or ethnic discrimination.
You could also think of the quotas another way: they're protecting the ability of people from countries other than India to immigrate, so the incoming immigrant stream is more diverse.
I pay my taxes, I pay social security for which I get no benefit, I have to pay US tax for income I make in India. I cannot understand why I am less valuable to your country.
It sucks that the system is the way it is, and I think having the same water fountains for everyone is far more efficient.
(There is a term for when the system discriminates. It's called... you guessed it, systemic discrimination.)
