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Comment by biocomputation | Hacker News Reader

If I'm not mistaken, non-profits ( virtually all hospitals, colleges, and universities ) are exempt from cap on H1b visas.

It would be interesting to know how many H1b visa holders are employed in STEM positions at institutions that are exempt from the cap. What if it were something scandalous like 800,000 or 1,000,000?

If the numbers were this high, it might have something to do with the fact that there's so much double speak about STEM shortage / STEM surplus in the United States. More American STEM degree holders might be able to find jobs if they weren't forced to compete with foreign nationals.

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To my memory, you're not mistaken, but as I recall the numbers are in the very low six figures if that, but it's certainly an big issue for people considering the science route including a Ph.D. and postdoc work before trying to land a permanent job.

In fact, it was the nation's science policy establishment that started this whole mess in the late '80s or so when they apparently decided they were paying too much money for scientific labor in universities and akin non-profit research institutions, as I recall the National Science Foundation got the ball rolling,

(But my focus on that "industry" back then might have caused me to overlook the same in the E and T in STEM, and certainly "consulting" and the safe tax harbor for it were a very big issue at the same time and cost me my job then, see Section 1706 of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_tre... .)

>> Tax Reform Act of 1986, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986#Tax_tre.... .)

Fascinating. I hadn't seen that before.

While it's debatably correct policy (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permatemp and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Labor_p...), good old Pat Moynihan inserted it into the bill in the dead of night with no discussion, for the benefit of few big IT bodyshops (IBM wasn't mentioned at the time), since we all had to use them going forward, giving them more than a small cut of our compensation.

Or just work directly for The Man, one company I worked for in '93-4, for a specific, time limited contract they were fulfilling (a cool NASA science Data Distribution Facility), had their default body shop refuse to hire me for some reason, so I was made a no/small? benefits hourly worker. Anyway, it suddenly smashed the working setup of many, many technical professionals, and very seldom for the better. And rather strange to single us out, yes, an indirect bill of attainder perhaps?

Further anyway, starting in the late '80s national/Federal public policy turned irredeemably hostile towards us, and you can see it in the static real wages we've earned since around that period. We may be viewed as essential, but....

I also find it odd that we allow people to come to our Universities and then kick them out once we've trained them. That seems like an inconsistent policy.

The school I went to had a decent sized group of students from China, and all but one of them is back there, despite wanting a job in the US.

To be consistent then if we are nationalistic, we should either strive to keep the graduates here, or not allow them in our universities at all. Conversely if we are globalistic, then we should be fine with immigrants working here.

Why shouldn't universities benefit from the influx of foreign money and students regardless of what happens with immigration policy?

It wasn't like this in the past, none of the Chinese I knew as an undergrad or grad are back in China. But their are also many many more Chinese going to school in the states these days.

" and then kick them out once we've trained them. "

University is not 'tranining'.

A STEM degree doesn't really prepare you for much.

At a startup, you have developers, product, product marketing, marketing, finance, ops, HR.

Most devs are needed for their practical skills: experience in programming, getting through nightmare builds, tons of APS, grasp of server technologies etc. etc..

Most devs are not dealing with highly scientific or 'researchy' things.

I think STEM grads are often much, much better placed to do Dev, and if they take the time to learn the skills, I'll take an Eng/Science grad usually over others because there are a bunch of other intangible benefits, but smarty pants arts major could easily do the work if they were motivated, and sometimes that has advantage today given focus on user experience which is sometimes a little too intangible for some to grasp well.

USCIS publishes annual reports that include the number of approved H-1B visas.

https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...

So clearly there are lots of people working outside the cap. The approvals listed there would indicate the maximum possible number, I think you'd have to combine 3 years of reports to get an estimate of the total population.

Thanks for this info!

Do you think these numbers affect the STEM shortage / surplus arguments?

I have no idea.

I knew a phd who did a couple of post docs on a J1 for a lot less than the average salary given in the report there. Just an anecdote, but it points away from H-1Bs competing for science jobs.

What is the "force" here? Hiring a person via H1B is more, not less expensive, than hiring a local.

That doesn't sound right to me. If it's the case, then why do they bother hiring H1B?

If you believe in the claim that they can't find a local then it's consistent.

Reasons including, but not limited to:

a) actual shortage of specialists (shocker!) b) new projects that has to be staffed quickly (we need 50 Java EE developers in Phoenix, AZ, for the project starting in 6 months) c) moving existing projects to maintenance mode after feature completion: existing expensive team is downsized, and lower-cost maintenance engineers are hired to fix occasional bugs and user support (have to be hired fast and in large numbers, hence the shortage and need for H1B). This creates a lot of protest and drama, but looks like a perfectly valid business decision to me: some projects actually do reach completion stage, and keeping all expensive developers afterwards doesn't make any sense.

No. That may be true for a tiny handful of experts, but most of them are paid less.

Less than who?

To hire somebody via H1B route, you need to: a) pay at least average salary for this position; b) prove that there are no local candidates available for your opening, c) prove that it is not because of your low pay rates, but because of genuine shortage of specialists with these particular skills, d) pay processing fees and wait for at least 6 months, perhaps more.

If you really believe H1B holders are paid at least the prevailing rates and are hired only because of genuine shortages, then I got beach-front property in Arizona for sale.

Common sense says if someone cannot freely move between jobs, who faces immanent deportation if fired, who will have much better prospects of living well in US than their home country, then this person has much less leverage and would be paid less. It is easy to test this hypothesis: do H1B holders have a much higher rate of changing jobs after obtaining visa than their peers.

Do you know the process of hiring for H1B? You have to _prove_ you can't hire a local, AND that the salary you are offering is fair. Yes, most of H1B jobs are menial and boring, and employees don't hold much leverage, but they are "underpaid" because of the nature of most such jobs (supporting ageing JEE / mainframe systems with lots of legacy code no one else want to look into), but it isn't that there a lot of competition for these kind of jobs, worth of TheDailyWTF front page. I started my career in software engineering with something like this: supporting a ton of spaghetti code coming from a large investment bank. If I had chosen a H1B route back then, of course I'd change this job immediately after getting a green card. But somebody had to do it, right?

It's a scam. Meet some h1bs. I have that did my same job. They made 20-50% less than maket rate.

I was on receiving end (cancelled my application, though). 135k looked like quite normal salary for me (Boston).

>Do you know the process of hiring for H1B? You have to _prove_ you can't hire a local, AND that the salary you are offering is fair.

Come on now. You can't actually believe this is how it works in real life.

http://www.cringely.com/2013/07/18/so-thats-how-h-1b-visa-fr...

a) The official averages are low due to collective collusion. b) They only have to advertise somewhere in the dusty corner of a newspaper nobody reads. c) They've successfully conned Congress into believing that there is a labor shortage without any real evidence such as rising salaries. d) That's what Infosys and Wipro are for. H1Bs on demand.

To hire H1B you have to go through a legally defined process which is a proxy for 'proving' that there are not local candidates available at the rate. There are ways to manipulate that process by adjusting the scope of the specialty skill set such that the protection of the 'proof' process does not fulfill it's stated purpose.

Where is your statistics on that?

Here are some interesting statistics:

>> The EPI study, written by University of California-Davis computer science professor Norman Matloff, compared American-born college graduates holding degrees in computer science and electrical engineering to their foreign-born counterparts.

>> There are, of course, reasons for this that have nothing to do with intelligence. More than 80 percent of H-1B visa holders are approved to be hired at wages below those paid to American workers for comparable positions, according to EPI. And because H-1B workers and green card applicants are locked into jobs with whatever employer sponsors their visa, they have less less leverage to push for raises and promotions. As Matloff puts it, "the worker becomes a de facto indentured servant."

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/02/h1b-visa-bloomberg-f...

Also:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/03/microsoft-stem-e...

The parent comment is specifically about cap-exempt institutions though, which typically pay everyone following rigid pay scales. In this case, an H-1B (or often J-1 actually) always costs more.

Now you can argue that postdoc and research positions don't pay well enough to attract local talent[1], but I don't think you should conflate this issue with the typical Indian consultancy companies working their way around H-1B constraints.

[1] Which seems true from what I've seen. I know people at the Berkeley Lawrence Lab who would triple their salaries working in the industry.

I like that the top comment on this article is about a hypothetical possibility for a theoretical scandal and not about, say, the actual state of reality.

We wouldn't want to go asking questions, would we? I think the tone of my comment is on point: it would be interesting to know, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask questions about how many foreign nationals are currently doing jobs that could be done by Americans. Especially in the context of the ongoing debate about STEM surplus vs. shortage.

This type of non-profits h1b positions more than likely are postdoc positions, which really not a job

Why isn't a postdoc a real job? A postdoc is a professional position in a research institute working as part of a team under a more senior researcher. They're normal full-time salaried positions with career paths everywhere that I've seen them.

In the US, an academic postdoc is a training position with a shamefully low salary and without provision for advancement, somewhat analogous to a medical internship. It's a job, but not a career.

Depending on location, there may be mechanisms to preferentially hire a postdoc on as non-tenured faculty. It became more common in biomedical sciences after the recession when grad students stayed on for "postdocs" with their advisors when they couldn't find a job, and were then aged out of the postdoc.

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