H-1B Visas: U.S. Lawmaker Re-Introduces Bill to Tighten Rules | Hacker News Reader

H-1B Visas: U.S. Lawmaker Re-Introduces Bill to Tighten Rules

blogs.wsj.com

285 pointsalfozan371 comments

I think there's a big misconception here on this thread, thanks to the poorly written WSJ blog post. Rep. Issa's bill only applies to companies which have more than 15% of their workforce of 50 or more on visas. That number is calibrated to affect outsourcing companies like Infosys, TCS, HCL, etc. So, while it's fun to jump on the "foreigners shouldn't work in America" bandwagon on this thread, this bill is not what you are looking for.

https://www.americanbazaaronline.com/2017/01/06/new-h-1b-vis...

However, Rep. Zoe Lofgren's bill is a little different and does two things, replace lottery by a bidding type system and eliminate country caps, which, by introducing an artificial 8-12 year wait time for Indians, makes even non-outsourcing company employees de facto indentured labor. (So, if you are one of five experts in the world on say, mining safety, you still have to wait 10 years for a permanent residency just by virtue of where you were born.)

Sounds awesome considering those body shops use up most of the H-1B quota and significantly underpay their employees compared to industry wages. For example, somewhere between 47% and 85% of H-1Bs are being significantly underpaid compared to their peers, evidence that the program is not being used to bring over workers with "specialized knowledge" as they claim--but to drive down wages. It makes sense though, when you look at the biggest H-1B recipients: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx It's mostly the low quality outsourcing shops like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, and Cognizant.

Instead of accepting 65,000 H-1Bs at random--accept the 65,000 H-1Bs with the highest wages. That way we are getting the immigrants with the highest valued skills and stopping companies like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, and Cognizant that game the immigration system by applying for the cheapest H-1Bs possible.

I'm not sure about the bidding war. I've been in situations where companies are looking for people with specific skills (e.g. working with specific microbiology techniques) but would never be able to outbid what Facebook or someone in Bay Area would pay for generalist skills in another field. There is nowhere close to 100% elasticity in wages to make an auction system fair.

Also, this would handicap companies in low-cost-of-living regions of the US. This includes a massive chunk of the economy in solid economies with low costs of living like Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia.

Auctions are also predicated on some random, arbitrary number that has little relationship with reality. And, I'll add, is currently absolutely dwarfed by the number of people coming in on other visas; mostly family ones, IIRC.

I'd also be curious how this would affect startups - I very much doubt you can factor in some equity into that equation, so you're looking at a high upfront cost no matter what.

That's why there's also L1, EB3, etc. The problem with H1B is the volume and relatively weak definition of what a "skilled employee" is.

...bummer? This is already the situation with US based talent willing to relocate (which is a fair benchmark since H1B workers are relocating no matter what).

I'm not sure that I'm sympathetic to employers who want to pay less. Keep in mind, the US takes in well over a million immigrants a year, and has a huge internal workforce. The H1B was created to help employers find critical and highly skilled workers that are in desperately short supply in the US.

"Oh, but we can't afford to pay them a lot of money, that's not fair!" isn't the sort of argument that tends to evoke much sympathy. We're talking about empowering corporations to bestow US live and work rights on an employee of their choosing, in an end-run around normal immigration procedures.

Honestly, if the salary isn't really high, I'm skeptical about whether this visa is being used properly.

> We're talking about empowering corporations to bestow US live and work rights on an employee of their choosing, in an end-run around normal immigration procedures.

What is wrong with that ? Honestly I dont see why getting Indian and Chinese workers as cheap labor is bad either.

Whatever regulations drove out manufacturing sector from USA mgiht drive out tech from USA too.

Manufacturing didn't really leave the US, the jobs are just done by robots.

H1-B workers are generally mostly used as programmers and brought in by large tech companies to use instead of native labor. I'm not really sure what manufacturing has got to do with this unless programming was made obsolete by robots already.

The entire justification for the H-1B visa system is so that we can bring in highly skilled labor to fill positions that cannot be filled with citizen talent for a reasonable price. If you're hiring H-1Bs at below market, your failure to fill the position is as likely due to your underpaying as it is an actual labor shortage. You cannot reasonably justify the need for H-1Bs if you're underpaying.

Further, if you use H-1Bs to fill positions that you could have filled with local talent, then you're taking that visa away from another company that might legitimately need it. Making H-1Bs dependent on bidding or pay seems a plausible way to ensure that they are going to companies with real need and not just companies that are trying to undercut the labor market.

Why is it OK to pay a cheap wage for work done by an outsourced employee not in the U.S. for the benefit of a U.S. customer; but suddenly not OK when that person is in the U.S.? If the answer is merely, a critical plurality doesn't like that market outcome and has voted to legislate an alternative outcome, well OK. That's the system we have. But on principle, this must be admitted to be protectionism, it's the anti-thesis of a free market solution (which doesn't make it wrong, just call it for what is is). And protectionism is basically saying the local market is overpaid, that's why it needs to be protected.

If you want to go down the route of protectionist laws you need look to further than the copyright and patent systems. Isn't that anti-free market in the same way accept more to the detriment of consumers as opposed to firms? It seems we live in a nation that has rules that govern our markets and everyone is fine with that, until you wish to use that very same system to protect workers in some way.

That's there and this is here. For better or for worse, I and other American voters are more responsible for our country than for others. If you think this way, and I think a lot of voters do, then accepting someone into your society carries a higher bar than buying something from a society.

Outsourcing results in rapid salary increases in foreign economies, but low wage workers depress US salaries. So they are not apples to apples comparisons.

US workers be they foreign or domestic benefit from US infrastructure like relativly low corruption, clean water etc. Companies want to benefit from that without paying the associated costs.

It's protectionism to be sure, the enemy of progress.

Economic liberalism got too far ahead, and failed to distribute the wealth back to society as was promised.

Finally stung, the people turned their back on economic liberalism (for now), and will continue to until they can say "Yay, we destroyed those jobs, now no one needs to do them!".

Because h1b visas are not immigration. The foreign workers have almost no leverage and have to leave the country if they were fired and unemployed for a few weeks. Even if they start with market rate salaries over time they will earn less on average than an american citizen because they can't just leave their current employer and switch to a better paying job.

"if the salary isn't really high..."

How high? Why is 100k a magic number? 100k isn't even a big deal in SF or NYC. While a high skilled scientist working in say, Corning, NY at Corning Corp or Niskayuna, NY at GE's research labs, 100k enables a king's life. How would you adjust for experience? Perhaps a company sees immense potential and cultural fit in an employee and wants to groom them for future roles? The wages of a 30-year industry veteran would kick the promising young star out of the H1B pool, etc. etc.

Setting a wage threshold without considering other factors is unfairly simplistic.

Besides, companies pay wages based on industry and market averages. You can't suddenly expect them to peg wages to outbid competitors on H1B. Why would Procter and Gamble or Dow or Caterpillar pay university, Facebook, McKinsey, or hedge fund wages? Why should they?

For 65,000 people and bidding based on salary, 300k sounds about right IMO. Think brain surgeons and the worlds best security experts not just DBA's.

Security experts are not paid like surgeons or developers. I wonder what you mean with "just" DBAs.

I know some security people in the 450+k/year range, and I hear 8 figures is possible.

As to just DBA, like programmers there is a long tail salary range but, the majority make under 150k.

PS: At various times you hear things like the Teaching shortage, or the Nursing shortage. But, that just supply and demand working as intended when a job does not pay very well few people are going to do it. However, when a job does pay well and you can't find people that's a separate problem.

> Perhaps a company sees immense potential and cultural fit in an employee and wants to groom them for future roles?

As previously stated, the intention of H1B is for ALREADY SKILLED workers in short supply. If they want to groom someone, they should be hiring a US citizen, not going to the H1B pool to find a low-cost foreign alternative.

Eh? Nothing precludes grooming skilled workers! Also, obviously, new hires can be highly skilled. Someone already skilled may fit better in one company than another, etc. etc.

So what exactly is the mythical groomed position that you envision that both can't be filled by an American worker and requires an extremely skilled H1B visa worker?

H1Bs are intended to address skilled worker shortages. They exist so companies can fill important roles now. If someone is being groomed than they lack the skills required for the position they're being groomed for. Companies should either hire an H1B with the skills already, find someone local they can train or use a different visa to hire someone they can train.

have you already seen a few job offers in tech? The range of skills needed is very often pretty daunting and having a set of skills and hence being a skilled worker does not mean you will be abble to do 100% of the job without having the grooming part. whats the point for someone to go to a job where he will learn nothing? please...

You shouldn't adjust for cost of living; remember, the causality flows the other way. SV and the coasts have a higher cost of living because they've found a more value-generating use of the labor that allows workers to bid up prices. [1] If the system favors them, that seems like it's working properly.

Caterpillar shouldn't pay hedge fund wages; they should pay high-for-the-area wages to draw Americans out there rather than use up competitive slots reserved for the most economically valued immigrants.

[1] Of course, there are land use restrictions etc.

This is goes back to a more philosophical question. Is it fair that some get payed more than others even though they are equally skilled or maybe even contribute more to society? How do you even define being skilled?

Politicians only want to allow high skilled immigration, since low skilled immigration takes away jobs or at least constituents seem to think so.

For the purpose of a green card application you actually have to show that you tried to recruit a US person for the position, but that system is slow and easily gamed as well: You just make requirements up that only one person in the world can fulfill, the person you are trying to hire.

If you define it based on salary you exclude people who are skilled but in locations, industries or professions that don't pay well, say barbers or teachers as an extreme example. Is that fair? I don't know.

Also, the system kind of takes a simplistic view that there are X number of jobs and Y number of people who are qualified to do that job. It doesn't consider that some people are better at the job than other and that job requirements can be fluid.

> If you define it based on salary you exclude people who are skilled but in locations, industries or professions that don't pay well, say barbers or teachers as an extreme example. Is that fair? I don't know.

Shouldn't this be first class evidence that there is no shortage of barbers or teachers? If there were a shortage then you would pay them more.

The same could be said for anyone who is payed less than 100k, right?

Yes. There is no shortage of anyone who is paid under $100k.

> How high? Why is 100k a magic number? 100k isn't even a big deal in SF or NYC. While a high skilled scientist working in say, Corning, NY at Corning Corp or Niskayuna, NY at GE's research labs, 100k enables a king's life.

Highly skilled workers do not receive cost of living adjustments. I've been recruited for jobs in low cost of living and high cost of living areas. The pay is the same in both when there is a true shortage of labor.

This is why the auction system is great. If Company A wants to pay Engineer X $500k and Company B wants to pay Engineer Y $50k then clearly Company A has a greater need.

> Highly skilled workers do not receive cost of living adjustments. I've been recruited for jobs in low cost of living and high cost of living areas. The pay is the same in both when there is a true shortage of labor.

Policy cannot be determined by anecdotes.

> Company A wants to pay Engineer X $500k and Company B wants to pay Engineer Y $50k then clearly Company A has a greater need.

Hardly a forgone conclusion, there are numerous confounding factors. For example company B might not have the resources/revenue to outbid company A.

Another counterexample of many for why an auction system is terrible: employee y could be a research scientist in industry contributing to the foundation of a new industry. An auction system would give their visa to a fullstack developer hired by a startup flush with funding.

> For example company B might not have the resources/revenue to outbid company A.

If Company B doesn't have the resources to outbid Company A then we've decided, as a society, that whatever Company A is doing is more important that what Company B is doing.

> Another counterexample of many for why an auction system is terrible: employee y could be a research scientist in industry contributing to the foundation of a new industry. An auction system would give their visa to a fullstack developer hired by a startup flush with funding.

That sounds like a problem with the way that we fund science and not a problem with immigration.

Also, anecdotally, there is no shortage of scientists. I know plenty of people who had to go into tech or finance because they couldn't find science jobs.

> If Company B doesn't have the resources to outbid Company A then we've decided, as a society, that whatever Company A is doing is more important that what Company B is doing.

The question being - has that been decided in a fair manner?

Capitalism is not about fair, it's about diminishing returns.

VC's don't have access to a significant chunk of US GDP. Sure, some things are over allocated, but Wall Street is limited to the amount of money invested by other people.

Would it be fair for the candidate to not get the highest wage possible? I don't see how this problem is any different than trying to get non-immigrant labor. Company A is offering a significantly higher salary to a citizen than Company B, they'll probably get the candidate.

then we've decided, as a society, that whatever Company A is doing is more important that what Company B is doing.

Congratulations, you've invented oligarchy!

Many tech startups are able to bid up wages not because they're "creating value", but because they have access to the pockets of a small number of venture capitalists. Which means that if you make VC-backed high salaries a necessary part of doing business, you've handed those VCs the literal authority to regulate commerce and decide who does and doesn't get to be in the market.

And last I checked, "have a small group decide which businesses are allowed to exist" is not considered a free market.

>Many tech startups are able to bid up wages not because they're "creating value", but because they have access to the pockets of a small number of venture capitalists. Which means that if you make VC-backed high salaries a necessary part of doing business, you've handed those VCs the literal authority to regulate commerce and decide who does and doesn't get to be in the market.

Very true. That's why we need to tax the VCs very highly and break up monopolistic firms.

All of which has nothing to do with the immigration system for skilled workers on temporary visas.

Outside of a small handful of areas (SV, Seattle, NY, a few others), it's very difficult to find anything in the $300K+ "total package" range. In SV all you have to do is get yourself hired by one of the top firms and then stay in the saddle while your stock vests and not suck too bad. Voila, 400K a year (much of which you will pay in taxes, but nonetheless). I challenge anyone to find a non-manager software engineering job that pays mid six figures in the Midwest.

There are lots of companies in the Midwest that will pay mid six figures for a non-manager SWE. I will concede that there are fewer such jobs in the Midwest.

I'm not convinced that jobs in the Midwest generally pay less than in California because of cost of living. It may well be that SWE openings in the Midwest are generally for less-skilled SWEs precisely because it's not worth paying California salaries for those roles.

This rings true to me because, well, there are companies in the Midwest that will pay mid six figures.

Which companies pay ~500k for a non-manager SWE in the Midwest?

This is total liquid comp, not base salary. I hope I didn't mislead you.

If you're still interested, I suggest that you speak to a headhunter. It's their job to place people and I'm not interested in breaking anonymity.

The only example that I know of in support of vostok's statement are a couple of HFT trading firms in Chicago. If you have the right chops, your comp _starts_ at 500K there, and then quickly goes up to about $1M/yr. But you do need elite chops, and you do have to live in Chicago, and you do have to work in an HFT firm, which is, shall we say, not for everybody.

I am not aware of trading firms that start at $500k, but this is, broadly speaking, correct. The pay is similar to the high paying tech companies, but the mean is higher as the left tail is chopped off due to somewhat higher requirements for hiring.

Obviously a mom and pop flower shop will not hire a fulltime developer and pay them $500k. They just don't need to pay that much to meet their requirements.

Could be. I just couldn't find any such jobs, even after 8 years at Google, which tends to improve one's chances of finding a top paying job.

Why shouldn't they? Salary is proportional to economic value. Shouldn't we be trying to maximize the economic value generated through the H1-B program?

Not necessarily. We should also be trying to make sure that it isn't used as a cheap replacement for citizen labor.

>How high? Why is 100k a magic number? 100k isn't even a big deal in SF or NYC.

Good point. How about high-skilled scientists get paid double that! Besides, the government has to run itself, including the immigration authorities, by taxing these salaries. Best they be high.

I think exceptions for small businesses of 3-10 employees would be a cool idea, but otherwise I completely agree. We need more small businesses. Wasn't Apple, Facebook, MSFT, Goog, AWS .. didn't they all start as small businesses?

Its stupid to begin with, if you can't fill a skill, train somebody, the federal government does this for gigs that require security clearance. You never need to go outside the country for talent. The h1b program enables age discrimination, once you hit 40 you are pushed out for young immigrant labor, the position was occupied but they want to save money so out you go to poverty just when the IRS was counting on you hitting your peak earning power. Now people peak out at 28 in earning power with the extreme levels of age discrimination we see today.

> You never need to go outside the country for talent.

I'm a natural-born citizen with plenty of friends who were unlucky to be born elsewhere. I want to work with them.

Can't the government accommodate my simple desire to work with my friends locally?

You know, as an American citizen you are more likely able to get a work visa to go and work close to your friends.

There are plenty of citizens who desire to have work. Can't the government accommodate their simple desire to be able to support their families?

"You never need to go outside the country for talent" The simple fact that you are selling on a global market means that YOU DO need outside talents...

How long will it take to "train somebody" if you need to translate technical documentation from English to Japanese?

Some of foreign countries have free education. Why not hire their best graduates? They don't have to pay back student loans and can therefore comfortably accept lower salaries than their US counterparts.

FYI, something like 85% of those million immigrants are non-employment based (~65% family based, ~20% refugees). But I generally agree, body shops spoil the system for everyone. I don't agree with require higher salaries than what the company pays similarly ranked employees tho as that is unfair to employees already there + creates resentment within the workforce.

Agreed.

Isn't the high salary the corporation would have to pay a local worker just a sign of supply and demand in action?

Why do we now want to interfere with the high-demand worker's ability to negotiate a really freaking high salary? Isn't that exactly the thing we want, for people to be able to charge a lot for their rare and unique skills?

I'm not afraid of regulating business, but this just seems laser-focused to screw the American worker, no matter how you cut it. At the end of the day, if a business can't afford to pay the going local rate, then they don't have a viable business model.

You could index wage to some cost-of-living metric set by the Department of Labor. That would control for regional differences between company. It'd also further incentivize "outsourcing" to domestic locales with cheaper costs of living. That's arguably a good thing since places with cheaper costs of living would benefit more from the workforce bump than those with high costs.

The Bay Area could truly benefit by some reduction in the H1B workforce. The influx of foreign workers contributes greatly to the housing shortage that's hurting everyone right now.

p.s.: Just in case you're wondering, I'm an immigrant and I left the bay area exactly for the reasons I'm highlighting.

Bay area's housing shortage is entirely self inflicted by its residents who refuse to allow more housing to be built. All this to maintain some arbitrary idea of character. A character that is frozen at some random point in time.

There is no good reason for most of the bay area to be strip malls apartments and 2 story apartment complexes. There are more than enough examples of cities(Barcelona, Paris) with character, history and more vertical housing.

Preaching to the choir, but reality is it won't change anytime soon. I voted with my feet and left, I miss the area but I couldn't justify anymore how much of a hassle it was living there lately.

Do you have any stats to back that claim up?

yes. In 2015 it was more than 50k people. Even if they all share rooms, it's a lot of demand on an housing stock that grows slowly.

I forgot to add a link:

http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2016/visas/

One more datapoint: between 2013 and 2014 the net change in population in the bay area was 100k, we can assume things are more or less the same as before meaning that H1B immigration counts for ~50% of the total change. If you can find more recent numbers (took me 30 seconds to find the links I added) then we can redo the math and see if there's major problems with my statements, but I really don't see how that could be the case.

https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/26/youre-not-crazy-the-bay...

From your link:

> About 10 percent of the LCAs approved last year, or 53,500, were for jobs in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

But, it also adds that:

> More than one employee can be attached to an LCA, and there’s no limit on how many a company can submit. As a result, the number of LCAs accepted by the Department of Labor often far exceeds the number of H-1B visas issued.

Furthermore, when a person on H-1B already living in SJ or SV change jobs, they file a new LCA. This gets counted in the 53,500 number from the article.

Thus, IMO, it is incorrect to claim that "more than 50k people" moved into Bay Area on H-1B in 2015. Please correct me if I am wrong.

I think it's adventurous to think the number would much lower. Let's say that the number is 50% lower, that brings us to 25k new individuals just from the H1B program alone.

You're also skipping over the fact that H1B people have families and tend to bring family members into the area.

Overall I'm comfortable to say the number is still probably in the right ballpark until I'm shown evidence of the contrary.

> Overall I'm comfortable to say the number is still probably in the right ballpark until I'm shown evidence of the contrary.

We have to agree to disagree on this, I guess. I find no evidence to support the claim that H-1B workers have any significant effect on the Bay Area housing situation.

I don't buy that argument.

H-1B is supposed to be for hiring top notch people with valuable, specialized skills. Those people should be making a lot of money.

H-1B is not meant to bypass the regular supply and demand of the job market that usually helps adjust salaries.

Another option would be to put in place a system where companies could be have their H1-B applications automatically approved if they maintain a certain ratio of citizens/green card holders to H1-Bs within the desired salary band and classification. Say, for example, you want to hire an H1-B engineer at $160k/yr and the required ratio is 4:1. If your engineering workforce within the $150k-$175k salary band is already greater than 4-1 non-H1-B, you should be allowed to hire an H1-B. But companies that try to abuse H1-Bs, either by hiring too large a percentage of their workforce or by underpaying them would have to use the lottery system, provided there are any H1-B slots left.

Such a system seems like it works for the large Facebooks and Googles of the world as well as smaller startups and companies in areas of the country with lower CoL. It also works for citizens, green card holders and H1-Bs, since it encourages employment of non-H1-B employees and similar wages for all types of employees. It would only penalize the body shops, those that underpay H1-Bs and those companies that rely on too large a percentage of H1-Bs for their workforce. The only thing you'd have to do is ensure that the local employees are roughly the same job function as the H1-Bs, so that companies couldn't offset underpaid H1-B engineers with similarly-paid customer support or similar gaming of the system.

I like this idea. It also helps immigrants with integration into their new society, instead of forming pockets of foreigners.

I don't see how. If you absolutely need that skill, then you need it, cost of living based salary be damned.

Really glad for your comment. I was agreeing with him until you made such a concise argument for how that makes no sense.

What I would have done is divided out the number of slots on a state-by-state basis (proportional to population, say) and had an auction in each state.

I'm not convinced there would be a huge demand for H-1b visas if companies couldn't underpay them relative to people with green cards or citizenship. Certainly on the margins there are companies that are looking for specialized skills, but for the most part the industry likes high H-1b caps because they depress wages.

This pits new grads against people with many years of experience.

If kids come to the US for their undergrad/masters/phd and want to work here, they're not going to be the highest paid people competing, but they might have more long term value and chance of truly integrating with the country.

I'm not sure there are enough people with many years of experience to fill the quota so I doubt new grads are going to miss out.

Looking at [0] and a simple bit of JS, the bottom end of the 65k person cap is at line 281 at a salary of $100,442, which is on the low end for new grads at Google, Facebook etc.

Plus,

> If kids come to the US for their undergrad/masters/phd and want to work here

I'm not sure of the details but some of my colleagues are in this position and they work on some kind of visa that isn't a H-1B and is related to the fact they recently finished studying here.

There's plenty of jobs out there that aren't at Google, Facebook, etc. Companies in lower cost of living areas aren't going to pay that much.

That is correct. H1B is for highly skilled workers. If the new grad isn't the highest skilled worker, then the visa isn't for them.

Yeah, some of this is almost a product-management problem applied to law: Have a very clear goal for your legislation and don't try to make it so everything for everyone.

What alternative is there for new grads?

My wife is Indian. From Noida. I wasn't going to comment at all on this topic since it's already been beaten to death. But when I see the name Cognizant my blood BOILS.

Cognizant is the most atrocious slave labor company I have ever had the misfortunate of dealing with. My wife's first company in the US to work for was Cognizant. It is horribly run by corrupt indians, and they treated her like absolute slavery. The hours, the offshore team management and conference calls, the incredibly low pay, the worst most backstabbing coworkers ever. She had managers that not only never called her, they didn't even know she worked for them when she would get relocated to another state for another one of their clients.

Cognizant is appalling as a company.

As ex-cognizant employee, I completely agree. My 4yr with them in India is absolute worst career decision. Manager(s) did treat fellow employee as slave. If you think yourself as a person with some kind of self-respect , I bet you will never grow up on career. Their managers want shoe-lickers not talents. Since the work is mostly junk, even school student can do them after few months of training. Ive seen these outsourced companies cheating their foreign clients like creating fake billings when employees are actually on leave or working on some other project.

Indian (outsourced) IT is so bad, I'd say almost 80% people in US(working for bodyshops) is there because they are close to management not due to their talents.

I have lot of friends, who stuck in their life thanks to IT. They do all the hard work in india but their counter-part in onsite gets the reward and visibility, I feel very sorry for them.

Exactly this. The nepotism, the inability to get promoted because you are not a relative or someone, the people who work with management getting all the credit as you said, its all just disgusting. I can't believe Cognizant is as huge a company as it is. They should never have been able to get the size they are.

>They should never have been able to get the size they are.

May be thats because no one really speaks about dark-side of Indian body-shops. Students are attracted by (initial) high-pay and on-site chances etc. It will take at-least 3 or 4 years to realize the mistake of joining outsourced services industry. By then its too late to leave the company - because all these years they execute some batch jobs and worked in excel sheets.

Only option is either completely quit IT & do some other business or go for higher-studies & hope for better future. I assume less than 1% may quit, 10-20% will give high-studies a try while rest of them stuck due to lack of courage or/and personal/family commitments.

How about the top in their job title in their geographical area? That way you can take into account pay variance over the US.

>Sounds awesome considering those body shops use up most of the H-1B quota and significantly underpay their employees compared to industry wages. ... It's mostly the low quality outsourcing shops like Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, and Cognizant.

Stupid question: Can you feasibly fix this by restricting it to large companies like that? Isn't that just going to cause them to split into several companies, like NIS ("Not-Infosys") and TNI ("Totally Not Infosys").

> the program is not being used to bring over workers with "specialized knowledge" as they claim--but to drive down wages.

While that might or might not be the intent, it seems like a pretty likely effect, right? Just based on the additional supply alone?

I wonder about the effect of cutting back H1-B visas too much. If it made salaries rise significantly, wouldn't it upset the social hierarchy of these businesses? Software devs being so scarce that they're getting paid more than executives, e.g.? Seems like working with more foreign software firms is almost a given if costs skyrocket like that.

Depends on how the execs' compensation is structured. After a certain level they get paid more in stock than in cash. This should, theoretically, incentivize them to succeed. Many devs, outside of the startup scene, are not paid in stock. They get a working wage. If their commitment causes the companies stock to increase by 20%, they will likely not see a 20% bump in pay the next salary go round.

I think a generic rhetoric that Indian outsourcing companies just drive down wages is plain wrong. Most of the contracts that these guys bag are long term maintenance type contracts. The companies that are awarding these contracts are doing so mostly because they are stuck with legacy software that are hard to replace. The replacements costs are typically higher than the 5 year maintenance costs. It's no wonder that the people who are employed for these type of roles are paid less. In other words, the market determines the price. Infosys and the like are just optimising for profitability, like any other public company.

Given how competitive the market for talent is, H1B employees of these companies are always free to find other jobs. Since they already have a H1B visa, transfers are possible. Agreed not all companies will sponsor a transfer but many do. Even startups. Some lower quality body shops try to enforce some 'bonded contract' but that is illegal and will never fly in labour courts.

So no, the outsourcing companies are not underpaying talented people. They are just paying the correct price determined by the market for that particular aggregated job function.

>a generic rhetoric that Indian outsourcing companies just drive down wages is plain wrong

>They are just paying the correct price determined by the market for that particular aggregated job function.

If 47% and 85% of H-1Bs at bodyshops are being significantly underpaid compared to their peers, what is your argument that they aren't driving down wages? If these employees weren't on visas, do you really think they would still all be paid below the market rate?

And even still, why are visas for "specialized knowledge" workers going to what you call "maintenance type contracts" for "legacy software"? There's a huge disconnect between the intent and purpose of the visa programs and their actual use.

If 47% and 85% of H-1Bs at bodyshops are being significantly underpaid compared to their peers

Who are the peers ? People in similar job functions ? It's very hard to know just by the report. A 'software engineer' job function is the same on paper across Facebook and Infosys. While the software engineer in Infosys is mostly performing maintenance related tasks and nowhere on par with the software engineer in Facebook, talent wise. There are exceptions of course and they always find better jobs.

"There's a huge disconnect between the intent and purpose of the visa programs and their actual use."

Yes absolutely. That's mostly because there is no other legal option for these companies to hire. L1 was an option, but the USCIS hiked L1 fees and it's now very expensive. Also L1 requires the employees to have spent a year at the home branch.

Are you arguing that H1B's are less talented and that's why they're paid less?

(So, if you are one of five experts in the world on say, mining safety, you still have to wait 10 years for a permanent residency just by virtue of where you were born.)

that's not correct. that person would be eligible for an O1. I haven't heard of any plans to change the mechanisms of the O1 visa

Let's assume that such a person passes a triage for O1 (there's no guarantee! Suppose there are two companies using some very specific technology, first company in the US poaches an employee from the Shanghai office of the second company for his narrow skill in this technology- would he necessarily be an individual with extraordinary ability? Unique ability, yes. Extraordinary "genius"? Hard to say).

There is a significant difference between H1B and O1, which is the burden for evidence. The burden for O1 is quite onerous compared to H1B. You have to present several reference letters, meet strict criteria for excellence, and even then it is not guaranteed. There is a fair amount of inconsistency in how O1 (or EB1) cases are adjudicated.

O1 is even more abused by artists, like DJ's or dancers. There's nothing extraordinary required in the artistic field. Just a few references.

Recently, I have seen O1 being given pretty generously. Couple of people who I know who completed PhDs from mediocre University and less than 10 papers in total have all gotten their O1s. Yes they had to get reference letters and complete all the formality but nothing stellar or extra-ordinary was required.

Since this might be relevant for some startup founders on here, I have a slight nitpick related to the 15% number. There are still thresholds for employers with 50 or fewer employees.

    Total Employees | threshold to be classified a H-1B dependent employer
    25 or fewer     | more than 7 H-1B immigrants
    26 - 50         | more than 12 H-1B immigrants
    51 or more      | at least 15% of total employees

Note the discontinuity at 50/51 - 8 is over 15% of 51.

> Note the discontinuity at 50/51 - 8 is over 15% of 51.

Wow, that's really terribly designed and risks creating a disincentive to growth for companies that would otherwise be growing quickly. Someone should write their Congresspeople about this discontinuity.

What company is going to sponsor H1B visa for anyone that costs $100,000 and isn't a Comp Sc grad in the Bay Area?

There are a LOT of other professions where H1B visa holders add a lot of value to the US economy. It's not just CS grads in SF.

Bay Area is not just software. There are big pharma companies, financial firms, non-software roles in software companies, etc.

Exactly. But the bill in its current form will discriminate against non-CS degree holders.

The mining safety individual could qualify under an O visa or even have their own consulting company....

Starting a consulting company won't get you a green card. At best you will have an infinitely renewable work permit if you qualify for the E2 visa.

You can have a large sales workforce working on 100% commission and play with that percentage.

On one talks about the actual issue with the H1B. I'm a H1B holder from India, living and working in USA for past 10 years. The actual incentive for companies is that, an H1B holder from India has less rights, they cannot change job or even travel freely outside USA (for decades). That gives the employers full control of the employee. Any guess why companies only recruit from India and China? Because, the country based wait time -- to become a US citizen -- is decades for these countries. So, consultancies will have no problem paying higher salary for someone from India or China.

Immigration Attorneys are making a fortune of this broken system; for e.g., every year my company has to pay attorney fee to renew my visa. Any time I change my job, green card process has to be restarted from square one..more cash to attorneys.

P.S. I remember when I first came here 10 years back I was told by the attorney to wait for 5 years to be a resident. Last year, in 2016, when I went to another attorney he too tells me to wait for another 5 years. So, they never tells the actual wait time is 50 to 70 years. Even the USCIS don't disclose the actual wait time. So, hundreds of thousands highs killed immigrants place all their bets based on the words of Immigration Attorney and get into a mess from where they find hard to get out.

[Edit]: In my opinion, a possible fix shall be to give H1B holder job mobility. I.e., if TCS/Infosys brings in H1B holders to replace American workers; and those H1B holders leave TCS/Infosys the next day; then that business model will not work to begin with.

If TCS/Infosys brings in H1B folks to replace American workers; and those H1B folks leave TCS/Infosys the next day; then that business model will not work to begin with.

Personally, I'd have no problem with that.

> Any time I change my job, green card process has to be restarted from square one..more cash to attorneys.

That is not true. Visa can be transferred in mere 15 days. Why dont you change jobs?

Visa can be transferred. But, Green Card process has to be restarted from the square one; that is +10k for attorney.

> Green Card process has to be restarted from the square one

That's not fully true AFAIK. The green card (GC) is a 3-step process - PERM, I-140 and GC itself.

If you already have your I-140, unless your previous employer cancels your I-140 (which cost them a few thousand dollars), your new employer can just start over the third step of the process. This is not optimal, sure, but it is not square one either.

That is not correct. The second employer has to do all three: PERM, I-140 and GC.

If you have an approved I-140 and your I-485 has been filed and pending for more than 180 days (or if you filed I-140 and I-485 concurrently and both have been pending for more than 180 days), you may switch to a same or similar job under the AC21 portability rule. Also, starting 17 January 2017, employer withdrawal of an I-140 pending for more than 180 days will no longer cancel the petition.

So if you can get as far as the I-140/I-485 filing, you should be good to go, though IANAL (and you should retain your own to guide you through this process).

Yeah, but it's not like the employee is paying for the green card. I have loads of friends on H-1Bs (I'm on one as well) and no one I know has paid for the green card application. That's on the employer and they know what they're getting into when they hire a foreigner.

While the visa can be transferred over in a short span, I believe OP is talking about the GC process, which does have to be restarted. It can be ported over depending on the application status and if the new position matches in role to the original application.

From personal experience I can say that this takes up to two years or longer to get back to status quo in the GC process after switching jobs and reapplying. This is a major disincentive for switching even if there's better pay and position on offer. It also makes talented H1B workers stay away from startups as the GC application process is safer when sponsored by established companies.

http://forum.murthy.com/index.php?/topic/90290-can-i-change-...

This is something that I've long suspected was going on with the H1B system.

In essence, we have a limited "guest worker" program that allocates most of the economic benefits to the company (in terms of a compliant workforce that has little incentive or ability to take their skills to a competing company that might offer a better salary or career options) while allocating most of the costs to the actual H1B workers AND the US Citizens and permanent residents who have to compete with a pool of workers that will accept lower pay with little in the way of bargaining power. Great deal for companies. Terrible deal for individual workers (on both sides).

I can sympathize with a company having trouble hiring talent. There is an acute shortage of capable, knowledgeable workers trained in the skills that industry needs. I just happen to think that the H1B program is a poor solution to it.

The better option would be for us to offer a form of permanent legal residency to workers who have critical skills that make them attractive to industry. Once they are here, permanent residency along with all of the benefits that entails (freedom to travel, freedom to change jobs) should be part of the package.

I know we do something like this using a scoring system but frankly I think it's administered very poorly based on what I've heard from others. We can do better.

I don't like the idea of a permanent underclass with fewer rights than others. We should encourage emigration and settlement from cultures that integrate well with ours and have the best possible chance of success in our social and economic systems.

Too little is written about the cadre of interests that benefit from illegal immigration of low-status individuals. It may seem cruel, but we do nobody a favor by allowing illegal immigrants to hide in the shadows and subject themselves to abuse at the hands of those that would profit from their lack of power or ability to go to the government for help.

> allocating most of the costs to the actual H1B workers

If it were not a good option for them, they wouldn't sign up for it, so it has more benefits than costs for them.

In terms of competition.... IT is a very globalized industry already.

> permanent legal residency to workers who have critical skills that make them attractive to industry. Once they are here, permanent residency along with all of the benefits that entails (freedom to travel, freedom to change jobs)

Yes!

"Good" must be put into relative terms. "Better" works better - "if it were not a better option (than working/living conditions in their current country), they wouldn't sign up for it."

There is the opportunity for a significant gap between the effectively indentured servitude that H-1B may provide and the opportunities in other countries.

"If it were not a good option for them, they wouldn't sign up for it, so it has more benefits than costs for them."

The same could be said for child labor though couldn't it?

And I'm sure there are children out there for whom closing of a local factory (because it breaks the child labor ban) would be a tragedy. IMO ban on child labor should be imposed only if the state is equipped to provide adequate material help to children who would lose jobs this way.

> There is an acute shortage of capable, knowledgeable workers trained in the skills that industry needs.

Just like there is an acute shortage of NFL Quarterbacks that are capable of leading a team to a super bowl championship.

The problem with this skills gap myth is that we are looking for people who are better than most of their peers in the industry. The will always be a shortage of top 10% performers in the industry because the top 10% of the industry will always be the same amount.

EDIT: I should just clarify that I'm absolutely in favor of people coming from other countries to work in the US. That said, the H1B in its current form is often just indentured servitude and definitely needs to be adjusted. My statement is specifically addressing the skills gap myth.

There's also, by definition, a shortage of talent willing to work for far-below-market wages. It's in employers' best interest to address this "shortage".

Exactly. They found a way to get around the problem of paying market wages by changing the market.

Sounds more like H-1B is just 21st century legal mean for the company to chain down those employees (like indentured servants of the past).

This would only be true if companies needed better employees than their competitors. If you merely need someone capable of doing a job, there's no such limitation: it's logically-possible for 100% of software developers to be able to put a script in cron that runs a SQL query to generate a report.

Given enough time almost any very junior software developer from any amount of training could successfully complete that task. What you consider capable is that they can do it within a certain time frame and with a certain level of quality. That quality being higher than others and the time frame being faster than others.

Also, that expectation of time frame and quality level has increased significantly since 1985. The reason that has increased is because the average level software developer in 2017 can do that task quite a bit faster and of higher quality than the average software developer could do in 1985.

The definition of acceptable in any market changes with the pool of options available.

The root of the problem with H1B is that despite a bunch of laws meant to make sure that these workers are paid and treated the same as US citizens, that isn't happening at a lot of companies. This is creating a huge demand for visa workers as a kind of indentured servitude. This isn't a good situation for US citizens or visa workers.

If the laws are fixed by, for instance, making it far easier to switch jobs on a visa, H1B workers will be treated a lot better. Demand for visa workers will probably drop somewhat but it will be more in line with what the visa program was made for: to hire talent not slaves.

It's not that hard to switch jobs once you have an H1B: The hard part is to do so while trying to get a green card.

Ultimately, the tremendous wait times for everyone in the 00s, and now the tremendous lines only for a few countries, come down to the maximum number of green card numbers being vastly inferior to the number of people that qualify for said visas and are already living and working in the US.

Even in cases where your employer isn't trying to actively exploit you, the difficulty at changing jobs during the green card process depresses wages. I come from Europe, but I came in as an EB3 in 2000, so I had to wait a good 7 years. I was the highest paid engineer in our small department, and the only foreigner, but I was worth a lot more in the open market than what my employer paid. My salary tripled in the next three years afterwards, as I was paid an entry level salary while being qualified for being a principal engineer at a far bigger shop.

But everyone talks about the H1B program, instead of just opening permanent residency to people that are, in practice, already permanent residents, just with less rights.

Curious, why can't you change jobs during the GC process while waiting for your priority date to become current? I thought it was easily do-able?

Most companies already pay for the attorney expensed once you change employers i.e., PERM, I140 etc.

As a fellow European I'm curious, why did you have to wait 7 years? Isn't the quota almost never hit for European countries?

There is no per-country quota for permanent residency, instead there is a worldwide quota of 120,000 employment-based green cards per year, and a law that says "no more than 7% immigrants with the same country of birth" (Note: country of birth, not citizenship).

The only countries that hit this limit are India, China, Philippines, and Mexico. The 120,000 global quota still applies to the rest of the World. Hence, there still are these potential long-ish delays, even if you're not from one of those four countries.

>Immigration Attorneys are making a fortune of this broken system

Those same law firms hire lobbyists to make sure the system remains complicated and inefficient. Also, all the law firms that service tech companies have almost 100% of the work done by recent college grads for very low pay. Ever wondered why your L-1/H-1/I-140 support letter has so many errors? It's because it was a generic template that some recent college grad spent an hour on and you paid $3000 for an attorney to sign the G-28 form. Oh, and many immigration lawyers haven't even passed the Bar exam for the state they practice in--they can practice having passed the Bar in any state. These are the bottom of the barrel law jobs, IMHO.

I guess it depends on your perspective. Is it the older workers who rake in enormous paychecks for incrementally far less work or is it younger workers who work for much less to make a name for themselves and establish their career?

Green cards too. My family moved out of America a few months after my dads work had secured us greecards at a total of $350,000 (iirc - for the family of 7). These were voided as we didn't stay in the country long enough to validate them - what a waste.

How did it cost $350,000? That's an insane number.

Not sure this was over 10 years ago. A quick search shows that you used to be able to get a greencard through an 'investment' of $50k to the US. It's now risen to $1m but that may very well be how they secured them.

You mean $35,000?

was $50,000 per person I believe

Are you sure it wasn't investment based EB-5 ?

No idea, I got told green card - but I was 15 at the time (so not really involved in the process).

He worked for the WSJ and one of the requirements of him taking the role was that we all got green cards.

> they cannot change job

Correction: You can change jobs, but the green card process needs to start again but you keep your priority date. EDIT: You can change jobs to another "similar" position i.e. the job responsibilities should be similar. You can't move from an individual contributer to a manager position for example. In this case, the green card application will have to be done again.

> That gives the employers full control of the employee

Only if you let them. You are free to leave to another job, but many are risk averse. The employers expolit this; personally I am a risk taker so I don't see this as a hindrance.

> So, hundreds of thousands highs killed immigrants

Calling each and everyone highly skilled is questionable. A lot of H1B employees (and local employees for that matter) do not do highly skilled work, relatively speaking. I know this is controversial statement, but please be honest and avoid hyperbole.

What you mean by you are a risk taker? You have no idea what you are comparing here.

Will you risk your family getting deported due to a clerical error? Once H1B lose his job, he and his family has to leave the country in 15 days. Sell his house, pull kids out from school, etc. All this arises whenever H1B tries to change the job.

About the risk taking, I spoke for myself and not for anyone else. Life is not a bed of roses, I've accepted that. When I got my H1B visa, I was aware of all the risks it involves. I've said this in previous posts as well, nobody forces you to take an H1B, you chose to take it. It's like buying an expensive car and complaining that you have to fill premium gas. Well, no one asked you to buy one, did they?

Secondly, you are asserting that clerical errors are commonplace, where is the data for this? Anecdotal data doesn't count, since I don't know of anyone who was denied an H1B due to a clerical error. You might claim that you know a bunch who lost their visa. This discussion then degrades to a moot point without actual data.

I mean, it's the same argument for indentured service, which today is considered morally reprehensible. The point is not that the people who took that choice knew the risks they were taking. The point that the kind of situation H1B puts you into in its current form is not one that should exist, even if by choice.

But it is also true that many folks are not aware of these risks. I have many friends in the States on H1B, many are completely unaware of this. Most have good employers so I doubt this will be a problem, but there's not as much awareness as there should be.

> I mean, it's the same argument for indentured service

Everytime there is an article about H1B, people start flinging "slavery" and "indentured servants". Please be honest and don't analogize H1B hurdles (which I agree exist) to situations where people were actually killed.

Making an analogy does not mean equating the two. I'm specifically making an analogy between the "hey, you chose to do it" arguments that historically supported indenture and are currently supporting the unsavory bits of H1B. These arguments are similar. They share the fallacy of avoiding nuance in the choice (some people aren't fully aware of the choice. Some people may want to change their minds once they've settled in but can't do so easily), and they also share the fallacy of making choice matter in the first place -- people aren't saying that H1B workers don't choose this, people are saying that it's bad to make them choose it in the first place.

If you don't like the indentured servitude example, take minimum wage. If it didn't exist, many people would still be ok with being paid less. We have collectively decided that that is a bad thing. We have collectively decided that underpaying people is bad even if they choose to be okay with it. We don't say "hey, you chose an underpaying job over no job at all, you can't complain about it".

Choice is a red herring in these discussions. Nobody is saying that H1B workers were forced into this. Folks are well aware they made a choice. That does not affect the argument that part of the "con" side of the choice is something that shouldn't exist in our society. You're free to disagree with that argument, but the "folks chose it" is not a rebuttal because that was never the premise.

We respectfully disagree on this. You make valid points and thankfully it's not hyperbole.

I see the practical side of things, which is either I take it or leave it, as I have no vote in this matter. And if I'm taking it, I'm making sure that I develop my skill set so that I make myself invaluable in future employment or if I venture on my own (and this doesn't have to be in the US), rather than wasting my brain cycles and waiting for this elusive piece of paper from the US government.

> I see the practical side of things, which is either I take it or leave it

I think you're seeing it from a personal POV, where you have a tradeoff where you've made a valid choice with what you have found to be a net gain. And you did explicitly mention that you're speaking for yourself initially. This is all a fine POV to have and I mostly agree with it; I know many people who have made a similar analysis and come to similar resolutions.

My point is about "I've said this in previous posts as well, nobody forces you to take an H1B, you chose to take it", which is a more general statement about all H1B takers. I find it a bad precedent to set to accept that kind of argument; because like I said the discussion isn't about choice in the first place (and accepting such arguments distracts the decision). Like I said, it's fine to disagree with "H1B putting employees on a leash should be stopped", just don't use choice as an argument there :)

Actually, there's threats and downsides to the H-1B that AFAIK are not documented, so there is no way an employee can learn about them and make a rational choice -- other than hiring their own immigration lawyer and having them step through the bad scenarios.

A lot of people on this thread sound like they've come nowhere near close to one of the bad scenarios, and have no awareness of them.

How were you aware of all the risks involved? Did you hire your own immigration lawyer (NOT the company-retained one) and have them go through it with you? If so, then that's very wise. If you didn't, I very much doubt you knew of all the risks, since some I've never seen documented. I really think if you had one of the rough times on the H-1B, you wouldn't be so caviler.

I spoke to my older brother (who left once his H1B was over, as he never wanted to stay here long term) and my seniors in grad school who explained all the intricacies; of course I never understood every single detail. But what I understood was getting a GC for an Indian citizen is a long wait. Frankly, I am okay leaving the US if I have to if I fall into any of the pitfalls. I don't have sleepless nights over it.

And BTW, I got my H1B in the 2008 lottery and had to go through lean times during the recession. So it's not as if I've had a smooth ride all along.

What was the worst risk you learned about?

- Being out of status

- Indefinite wait for a GC for Indian citizens

- Not being able to start your own business (there are caveats)

You weren't aware of the risks. There's much worse than that.

I am not a lawyer, and the following is not legal advice: get your own (experienced) immigration lawyer, and ask them about what I've heard one lawyer call "cost-effective employee retention plans". It can include threatening to unfairly ruin an employee's chances of ever getting another US visa if they leave the company. As in, you may never set foot in the US again. I'm not sure people can relate to how horrible this is unless you've unfortunately lived through it.

That's the reason in my posts I always made a distinction between legitimate company vs shady consultants.

Unless you do something nefarious (spying, stealing etc.) no legitimate company would go after someone. And thinking about it logically, the company has to spend a lot of resources to prove this in the first place. "Innocent until proven guilty"

I believe there are some legitimate companies that treat visa workers well (like the company I work for), but I'd still be a bit careful. You can join what you think is a legitimate company, and then they are sold to someone else. When I joined Sun Microsystems, it seemed like a solid company that would be around forever. Sold in 2010.

> And thinking about it logically

Oh no.

My #1 advice to potential visa workers would be to get your own immigration lawyer. My #2 advice would probably be to stop reasoning about things logically. What matters is the law.

You're implying that it's illogical a company would go after someone like this. I know for a fact they do. And, it's illogical. Knowing it's illogical is little comfort for those visa workers hurt by it.

> the company has to spend a lot of resources

Not necessarily. In one situation (I don't want to describe in detail here), it requires almost zero effort from the employer. And I know for a fact it happens.

> Sun Microsystems, it seemed like a solid company that would be around forever. Sold in 2010

I don't understand, what's the issue when the company gets sold? What bearing does that have on your visa apart from the change of employer filing? If Oracle bought Sun (two legitimate companies), it would be a change of employer which is a straightforward process, or am I missing something?

Standard note: I'm not a lawyer...

You were making the point of choosing a legitimate company vs a shady company, as a way to mitigate risk. Which is a good idea. But it's also worth noting that -- especially in the tech industry -- a good company one day can be bought by a shady company the next. (Although I'm not saying Oracle is shady, I didn't stick around long enough to find out.)

Also, if a company doesn't purchase all assets and liabilities (happened to one company I know of last month), and instead acquires pieces, then it may not be a straightforward change of employer.

I've switched jobs on H-1B three times. All it takes is waiting for the replacement visa to come through before you resign. In each case I trusted my current employer and told them I was waiting for a visa for a new job, but I didn't have to.

If you are on H1B past 6 years, then you will need the copy of approved I-140 petition to get the H1B transferred to the new employer. But, H1B visa holder does not have access to I-140 petition; it is employer's property.

> H1B visa holder does not have access to I-140 petition

I have the I140 petitions from the two employers that I had applied with. This sounds like you are talking about consulting companies who hold their employees hostage. No legitimate company can do that and you have legal recourse if they do.

>This sounds like you are talking about consulting companies who hold their employees hostage

This thread is discussing a law -- that targets only consulting companies.

>No legitimate company can do that and you have legal recourse if they do.

That is not correct. There is nothing an H1B employee can do if his employer does not share the copy of I-140.

Well they also talk about removing the master's degree quota. So it's not just about shady consulting companies.

No, the Master's degree quota is unaffected by this legislation. The version of the bill presented in the previous congress is here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/5801...

I expect the language of Rep Issa's bill for this session Congress to be largely unchanged.

"Exempt" H-1B employees are not counted when determining whether or not an employer is H-1B dependent. Generally, an employer is H-1B dependent if over 15% of their employees are nonexempt H-1Bs.

The old criteria for exempt status were:

(a) at least $60k annual salary OR (b) Master's degree

The new criterion proposed in the bill is:

(a) at least $100k annual salary

This explicitly targets companies like Infosys, Tata, etc. who use hordes of H-1Bs but pay them just over $60k or ensure that they have Master's degrees.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, et. al. will still be able to employ hordes of H-1Bs but they will be unaffected due to the high paying nature of the work.

Isn't that part of the mandatory public record that all H1B employers are required to maintain? Anyone can walk in off the street at your work location or company headquarters and ask to see it, including you. You might have to bring your own battery-powered scanner with you, though.

I think you are talking about is H1B-LCA document. I-140 petition is different, it is employer's property.

Lucky. Every time I've switched on H-1B, I've been advised by immigration lawyers to not tell my current employer for fear of retaliation, along with anecdotes to convince me that the retaliation risk is real and happens in the bay area.

It's extremely painful secret to keep -- it's unfair to be unable to talk to coworkers about your future plans (as instructed by legal council), and one that detriments career growth (you're forbidden from discussing early on that you are likely to quit, at a time when it may be reconcilable with your current employer, and lead to better things: new positions, pay rises, etc.).

You're right about that. But sometimes the only way to get a pay raise is to get a competing offer. It is a risk to ask your new employer to file for a H1 transfer and then back off (at the risk of pissing them off). I haven't done it personally, but I know a lot people do it.

I usually drop hints about a pay raise or change of responsibilities and if my manager doesn't oblige within a reasonable amount of time, then I know it's time to leave. It's nothing personal, but if someone else values me more than my own employer I'd rather seek greener pastures.

> All this arises whenever H1B tries to change the job

Yes, getting fired sucks if you're on an H1B but your comment doesn't apply to job changers generally. H1B visas are transferable (with a little paperwork) so an employee looking to move jobs just needs to ensure that they have their ducks lined up and that any required paper work is filed - usually that means lighting a fire under the HR team of the new employer to make sure it doesn't slip through the cracks.

They can be transferred, but you are still at risk until the other company gets the receipt from the USCIS which might take up to a couple of months.

< 15 days if you file for premium processing

Couple of corrections:

1. You can start working for the new employer as soon as the petition has been sent out. For example, as soon as you have a FedEx/UPS tracking number for the petition, you can start the new job (even before receiving a Notice of Receipt).

2. You get a Notice of Receipt (form I-797C) usually in less than a week (and usually in about 3 days), if the petition was mailed in with overnight shipping.

3. Now receiving a Notice of Approval (form I-797A or I-797B) -- i.e. the actual adjudication of the petition, typically takes a couple of months with regular processing, but only 15 business days with premium processing.

You are actually wrong about the 15 days. It's actually zero (0) days, according to USCIS: "There is no automatic 10-day or other grace period for terminated employees holding H-1B status, so once the individual is no longer in a lawful nonimmigrant status, he/she usually must depart from the United States." See: https://www.uscis.gov/tools/ombudsman-liaison/practical-immi...

However, if your I-94 is still valid, being out-of-status on H-1B isn't really that big of a deal. All you need to do is fly out of the country and return, in order to fix your immigration status. The new employer can file an H-1B and request consular processing. The only problem with being out-of-status is that Adjustment Of Status (AOS) is no longer possible, so you have to fly out and fly back in, before you can start your new job. (You'll get an I-797A consular processing approval instead of the I-797B AOS approval.)

USCIS does not deny petitions for being out of status, and in general, if any lack of legal status is for a period of less than 6 months. You don't need to get a new visa stamp either, if your current stamp is still valid. But if/when you renew your visa at a consulate, just make sure to disclose that you were out of status on the DS-160, as failing to do so could get you denied for lying. But if your upfront about it and disclose it, they most likely won't even ask you a question about it.

And yes, you are illegal in the country, but if your I-94 is valid, you have "lawful presence" but you do not have "legal status" (I know it sounds contradictory) and you are still within your "period of authorized stay". But fundamentally, you are consider to be illegal despite a valid I-94 due to being out-of-status, and you can be deported, but it is very unlikely that DHS will send ICE agents to your home to arrest you and forcibly throw you out of the country.

I've quit a job while I was on the H-1B, and I stayed while being out-of-status in the United States for 4 months after that. I was feeling a bit burned out, and didn't even look for a job for 3 months. In the fourth month, I created a profile on Hired.com, got several interview offers, did a full onsite in the first week, and had an offer by the end of the week. My H1B visa stamp in my passport was still valid, but I decided to get it renewed anyways, just to be sure, so there wouldn't be any trouble at the port-of-entry.

I have crossed 6 years on H1B. So, if I change my job, maximum visa extension I can get is for 3 years (provided my employer was kind enough to give me a copy of the I-140 petition).

This is where it gets tricky. Within this 3 years I need to get a new PERM approved by the new employer. So, say I set aside 1 year for the new employer to get all the internal budgeting approvals and initiate my GC process. Then it takes at least another 6 months (no attorney's file PERM within 6 months these days) to file the PERM. And, then say another 1 year to get the PERM result. So, this will take me 2.5 years into my 3 years limit. Now, god forbid, if the PERM gets denied due to clerical error. There is not time left for another try. Pretty much pack-up and leave.

> Within this 3 years I need to get a new PERM approved by the new employer.

I was able to transfer two jobs using the I140 from my first job. My case is clearly not an outlier.

> Now, god forbid, if the PERM gets denied due to clerical error. There is not time left for another try. Pretty much pack-up and leave.

No, you can use your old I140 to extend your H1B for another 3 years (when I changed jobs, that's what I did)

>No, you can use your old I140 to extend your H1B for another 3 years

That is based on the _assumption_ the previous employer did not withdraw the old I-140. I wouldn't recommend that to any H1B visa holder.

Yes it is based on an assumption you work for a _legitimate_ employer and not some shady consultant. I'll use your statement to prove that it's a fair assumption in the average case.

> So, say I set aside 1 year for the new employer to get all the internal budgeting approvals and initiate my GC process

On one hand, you claim that it takes a year for the employer to get your GC going. And now to withdraw it (which will include the same filing fee + lawyer fees - time spent= thousands of dollars) it takes them less than a month (or few months) to budget this?

No proper company would want to spend another penny on an outgoing employee. And this is a completely sane assumption. You can choose to disagree, in which case I'm sorry to say, you're paranoid.

>On one hand, you claim that it takes a year for the employer to get your GC going. And now to withdraw it (which will include the same filing fee + lawyer fees - time spent= thousands of dollars) it takes them less than a month (or few months) to budget this?

Why do you say withdrawal need to be done in a month? To pack-up an H1-B visa holder, withdrawal only has to be done within the 2.5 years.

Also, withdrawing I-140 is more about sending a message to the other H1-B employees to not leave. Companies are glad to cough up few hundred bucks to send that message.

Ok. So this is how a conversation between an HR and the finance department in a _legitimate_ company goes: "We need to send a message to the rest of the H1B employees, so please budget $X thousand for withdrawing an old employee's I140"

Yeah right. You make it sound like this witch hunt is normal course of action. It clearly is not in a legitimate company.

I want to make a correction about the time you have to switch jobs on an H-1B visa.

It's now officially 60 days, per new rules issued by DHS last year under Obama: https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-publishes-fin...

The relevant paragraphs regarding this new 60-day grace period from the Federal Register:

"Under the final rule, DHS may also authorize a grace period of up to 60 days in the E-1, E-2, E-3, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, and TN classifications during the period of petition validity (or other authorized validity period). See final 8 CFR 214.1(l)(2). In response to public comments, DHS is retaining this provision while adding the O-1 visa classification to the list of nonimmigrant classifications eligible for the 60-day grace period. To enhance job portability for these high-skilled nonimmigrants, this rule establishes a grace period for up to 60 consecutive days, or until the existing validity period ends, whichever is shorter, whenever employment ends for these individuals. The individual may not work during the grace period. An individual may benefit from the 60-day grace period multiple times during his or her total time in the United States; however, this grace period may only apply one time per authorized nonimmigrant validity period. DHS believes that limiting this grace period to one instance during each authorized validity period balances the interests of nonimmigrant flexibility with the need to prevent abuse of this provision.

This 60-day grace period further supports AC21's goals of providing improved certainty and stability to nonimmigrants who need to change jobs or employers. The 60-day grace period would provide needed flexibility to qualifying nonimmigrants who face termination of employment prior to the end of their petition validity periods. The grace period, for example, allows such nonimmigrants to remain in the United States without violating their status and potentially obtain new job offers from employers that seek to file new nonimmigrant petitions, and requests for an extension of stay, on their behalf. In such cases, even though prior employment may have terminated several weeks prior to the filing of the new petition, DHS may consider such an individual to have not violated his or her nonimmigrant status and allow that individual to extend his or her stay with a new petitioner, if otherwise eligible. If the new petition is granted, the individual may be eligible for an additional grace period of up to 60 days in connection with the new authorized validity period."

Finally, the final rule at 8 CFR 214.1(l)(3) makes clear that the nonimmigrant worker, during either a 10-day or 60-day grace period, may apply for and, if otherwise eligible, be granted an extension of stay or change of status. The beneficiary may also commence employment under H-1B portability per § 214.2(h)(2)(i)(H), discussed in some detail below, if otherwise eligible. To further effectuate the intended purpose of these provisions, DHS is also making clarifying edits to the regulatory text at § 214.1(l)(2), and (l)(3)."

Reference: It's in a Federal Register Document (Citation: 81 FR 82398), under Section G "Nonimmigrant Grace Periods", linked here: https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2016-27540/p-553

The document above states: "This final rule is effective January 17, 2017".

> Once H1B lose his job, he and his family has to leave the country in 15 days

This is not true in practice. There is a rule saying that, but it has never been enforced. As long as you don't leave the country, you'll have no problem looking for a new job for however long that takes.

At least that's what my immigration lawyer told me many years ago.

Would you really be able to sleep well every night on the premise "it's okay, it hasn't been enforced yet" if you are unemployed on an H1B? I know I would not be able to. In fact, it's not something you can really rely on and make part of your plans. All you need is getting caught by some mad traffic cop and in court it turns out you are out of status and you will be deported.

> Would you really be able to sleep well every night on the premise "it's okay, it hasn't been enforced yet" if you are unemployed on an H1B?

I actually have done that.

ICE is very slow to deport even the categories they actually prioritize. Millions keep living here for decades. They're not monitoring traffic court for unemployed engineers.

Sure, anything can happen, but the risk of dying in traffic or a crime is far more real than this.

That has been true for many years that is _technically_ you would loose your status the day you lost your job and leave the country. However, there were ways around this.

This has been recently changed though giving a grace period of 60 days and goes into effect from Jan 17:

https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-publishes-fin...

Isn't betting on it risky? I'm afraid that you may get rejected reentry next time if USCIS notices your overstay, unless you never leave the country, of course, but you never know, don't you (family emergency etc.)?

I've commented on this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13361827

I agree with your corrections, to an extent. However, it is also important to note that an H1B holder is limited in the kind of jobs he or she can take. An H1B holder would have a very difficult time changing fields or entering a very different kind of employment. Becoming a private consultant, or leaving the tech field for other, perhaps better, opportunities is not really an option.

So while I certainly agree with you that "they cannot change job" is inaccurate I also believe the statement "you are free to leave to another job" is misleading. You have some very limited mobility rights, but nothing approaching what a free member of the labor market would have (sadly, this is a big part of the appeal of these visas to many employers).

You're right about that; you are only free to change your job for a "similar" position elsewhere.

have you ever thought about yourself as a "risk taker", about getting a greencard ? in 70 years ? Maybe you might have already got it through the L1A loophole fake experience method or future GC abuse method. Do not measure everyone else with the same cup.

Again, stop taking things personally, I spoke only about myself. I don't care if I get a green card or not (I know I'm in the minority as far as Indians are concerned). I'm happy to go back to India if the occasion arises. I'd rather concentrate on my career and do challenging work, instead of wasting my productive years doing donkey work for years on end, while waiting for some piece of paper.

Everyone has their priorities, and in my mind I'm clear about mine.

So there's un-needed friction on the H-1B process that serves only to lower wages.

Remove the link between H-1B visa holders and their employers and suddenly all that wage depression disappears!

In Japan, while an employer can sponsor your work visa, after you obtain the visa you can change jobs at will (so long as its still within the broad category of visa you were given). You just need to signal the change of employer to the immigration office.

"You are free to leave to another job"

You SHOULD be free to quit, you're right about that. But some companies have figured out ways to stop it. If anyone is ever in that situation -- you have to get your own immigration lawyers to represent you, and not the company.

"Any time I change my job, green card process has to be restarted from square one"

The most time-consuming part of the process is waiting for your priority date to be current. Once you have your priority date, restarting the process through another company shouldn't really make a difference, since you can just reuse the existing priority date instead of getting a new one.

Theoretically, you can lose your priority date if the previous company cancels your I140. But since it costs thousands of dollars to do that, most companies don't bother.

Oh, and while you're on it.. don't lose that Green Card!

It costs about $27 in Cali to get a dup of your lost DL [1]; while your Green Card replacement costs... $450! [2]

[1] http://www.dmv.org/ca-california/replace-license.php

[2] https://www.bridge.us/articles/misplace-green-card/

Its very obvious USCIS prays on the fact that most immigrants do not make enough money to actually hire (expensive) lawyer and take them to the court and fight this outrageous fee down to something reasonable. Obviously US citizens have no standing in such lawsuit cause one thing USC can never get is a Green Card :)

I'd say lots of immigrants have the money. What they don't have is a vote.

> take them to the court

On the base of what, though? It's well known that the USCIS is mostly self sustained (e.g. minimal government funding) so that money has to come from somewhere. I believe the thought is that getting a visa/permanent residency is considered a privilege, not a right.

> On the base of what, though?

If they were only the first to be taken to the court for outrages fees.

> It's well known that the USCIS is mostly self sustained

They are part of DHS; therefore founded through DHS that is government founded.

> I believe the thought is that getting a visa/permanent residency is considered a privilege, not a right.

What does this have to do with losing or getting your GC stolen? As long as they can prove it costs around $450 to product a piece of plastic, they are fine in my book.

If you are poor, you can ask USCIS to waive the replacement fee - agency is actually quite accommodating. Obviously it won't work for 99.99% software engineer who actually has money to pay.

Also suing for $450 is ridiculous whether you have money or not. It is a cost of average traffic ticket and most people just pay it without involving any lawyer.

> Any guess why companies only recruit from India and China?

There are loads of Canadians [0] on TNs and H1Bs in the US and most don't particularly care about ever getting a green card. How do you explain their presence if you believe companies only recruit foreigners from poor countries in order to exploit their desire for US residency?

[0] https://techvibes.com/2012/02/24/there-are-350000-canadians-...

You missed my point. It is not about poor countries. Indian's and Chinese will not have job mobility for decades. That is the reason, last year, 80%+ of H1B visas went to Indian/Chinese nationals.

I didn't miss your point, I just don't agree with it.

I suspect 80%+ of H1B visas go to Indian/Chinese nationals simply because they represent a similarly large proportion of STEM graduates interested in emigrating from their home countries.

TN visa restrictions are much less onerous to an employer and employee than an H1B. Similar culture and less restrictive language barriers are also benefits that might lead an employer to hire a Canadian. I would suggest that the first point is the likely culprit for the number of Canadians employed in the US.

If you're Canadian why are you getting a H1B? Get a TN. It's simpler, faster, and way less onerous than a H1B.

It's not dual intent for one thing. I have a TN but my company put in for H-1B for me so that I could switch and then have the option to get sponsored more easily if I decide I want a green card.

TN you can do it, but it's messier.

Can't get a TN for investment banking, it's not a supported occupation (one of my friends had to do this).

Similarly for a few other occupations. And, of course, some want to hedge their bets in case they do want a green card in the future.

What is unsaid is when a Canadian worker in US gets laid off or just decide to leave (s)he is just moving in first world. Apart from less pay, living standards are pretty much same in US and Canada. But if Indian worker gets laid off it will be drastic change in living standard by going back.

Even very high Indian salary would not buy that US lifestyle. Of course many people will like to couch that fact as having friends' circle in US, kids schooling etc makes it difficult to relocate.

https://fromthelandofgandhifilm.com/ is a great documentary about the hardships faced by people on H-1B from India or China waiting for their Green Cards.

A bit different topic - for somebody who spent last 10 years in US, your English is pretty bad. If staying in US is such a high priority to you, I suggest working on that part

>[Edit]: In my opinion, a possible fix shall be to give H1B holder job mobility. I.e., if TCS/Infosys brings in H1B holders to replace American workers; and those H1B holders leave TCS/Infosys the next day; then that business model will not work to begin with.

That, and to switch to a simple points system like most other Anglo countries use. If you have enough points, your residency clock starts ticking as soon as you start working and living in the USA, and doesn't reset or stop unless you commit a serious crime. If the clock counts all the way down, bam, Green Card.

I support many H1B reforms - it is essentially a broken program. Canadian and Australian immigration systems provide a good model to build off of a successful high skilled guest worker program. Of course, like everything in the US, an army of lobbyists will prevent such common sense programs to be implemented.

Raising the minimum wage to 100K is the wrong approach. Computer science degree programs are a major source of development talent for many organizations, and I doubt most companies will be willing to pay 100K for jr developers graduating out of Master's program. This will start a weird loop were US higher education will no longer be attractive and talent pools will dwindle with universities suffering from major revenue shortfalls. And if students start going back to their native countries after a US higher education, it just enriches the talent pool abroad making outsourcing even more compelling.

Further, there are a number of professions outside of software that employ H1B candidates to perform important roles - mechanical engineers, industrial engineers, earthquake analysts etc Those fields have even more shortage of talent and a minimum 100K wage will further shrink the talent pool.

CS grads can easily make over 110k with a Bachelor's on H1B in the SF Bay Area.

If you're looking to hire someone for less than that... hire an American!

In the SF Bay Area.

There are plenty of people who have no desire to live in places with that high of a cost of living.

But those markets and NYC are basically the only place to get those starting salaries and only in narrowly scoped fields that are "hot".

Coincidentally, Australian's can apply for a high-skilled 2-year working visa with the US, the E3 visa (separate from the H1B). Whenever I hear the US discuss visa reforms, I panic a little that they'd alter or outright scrap the E3 visa.

I am a beneficiary of such a program in Canada called Express Entry. I quit my H1B job in US and is currently working in Canada and my Permanent residence process is in progress. I expect to get it within an year. I was selected based on my skills rather than my luck(H1B lottery) Canada's express entry system is a skill based immigration system. I think Australia's is similar. Under the Canada's system, the visa is not tied to the employer and if you have the skills(express entry point system), you get permanent residence.

For those wondering how Canada's system works (I've been looking into it), you get points based on the following simple factors:

* Age

* Language skills (English and French, measured via standardized exams)

* Level of education

* Level of education and/or job experience in Canada

* Job offer

* Desired destination to live in (easier to move if you want to go somewhere underpopulated)

* Personal savings to prevent you becoming a burden

If you get enough points, they invite you to obtain Canadian permanent residency. If you don't, you can still get a work visa, work for a while, and re-apply later. Compared to the US immigration system, it's freakishly straightforward and reasonable.

New Zealand is even simpler: they'll just start your residency process based on the mere existence of a job offer and a few checkboxes regarding age, language, and education. They've got a whole "Move to New Zealand" website now, with pretty pictures, clear instructions, and government webpages bragging about their high quality-of-life.

It really leaves one thinking, wow, this is what a First World country acts like.

The Australian one certainly isn't an example to look to. Reading through these comments, almost all of the criticisms can be equally applied to ours. Plus, we often have jobs like hair dressing that fit into the "highly skilled" category.

Why not take a courageous approach and let people in who want to work? Don't tie them to one job. Don't pick arbitrary numbers of the 'right' number of immigrants. Don't try ever more complex schemes based on where people live and what job they do. Keep the government involved to vet them in terms of avoiding criminals, and let the market handle how many people to bring in, not government bureaucrats and politicians.

I mean, IT work is pretty easy to outsource, so make it hard enough for talented people to come to the US and the work will just get shipped abroad.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...

You would tank salaries.

I doubt it. IT work is pretty easy to send abroad as it is, so if an employer is only looking at cost, that's already been an option for the past 10/15 years. It's only going to get easier in the future.

And if it were, across the board, a lot of other things would get a bit cheaper too, no?

Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

It's not easy when you consider time zone differences.

In the short run, maybe. After the market reaches equilibrium, no.

The equilibrium will be reached at a much lower price point than in the case of restricted supply of talent. Whole industries restrict the supply of workers for that reason: CPA, lawyers, and dentists being three prime examples.

People like to pretend that most things can be trivially outsourced, but that's not the case at all. Managing a team down the hallway is hard enough. Managing a team in another timezone requires the kind of skill not commonly found in US corporations.

One challenge is that people who grew up in America have totally different expectations in terms of quality of life and living standards than immigrants from poor countries who are willing to move here and start from scratch. A poor kid from India or China might move to Silicon Valley or NYC and spend a decade sharing a studio with 4-5 others in his/her situation, just for the chance to escape poverty back home. Is it fair to force two people from such different backgrounds to compete? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Either way, the American citizens who you are forcing to compete against a global labor pool all have the right to vote, and may cause unexpected political turbulence, which is what we saw in this last election (and, my gut says, just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what's to come).

They are already competing, though.

You're probably right that we need to do something to ameliorate the worst effects of global competition and automation, but keeping talented people out (the number of H1B visas is totally dwarfed by people on family visas anyway) is probably not going to help.

Would you use the same reasoning when selling American products in foreign markets? Folks from poor countries struggle with lack of facilities/nutrition and try to produce some stuff in competition with those with better facilities/lives from US and have to compete in the same marketplace head-on. Both of them have advantages/disadvantages but one group has the strength to push others in the form of trade rules. So why should we have free trade in the form of goods but not in the form of labor?

OK so this guy from India shows up, shares a studio with 4-5 others.

Then Twitter offers them quadruple the salary to join them instead.

This is an _entirely solved problem_ if it were not for immigration rules. Jobs with shitty pay will get outcompeted by jobs with better pay. Or those jobs just don't get filled in the first place!

We already see this in the restaurant business. Really shitty jobs at minimum(or waiter minimum) wage are all over the place. They used to be filled by people coming in from central America as undocumented immigrants, but even they got tired of the bad jobs. So now they sit vacant, because nobody wants them.

>A poor kid from India or China might move to Silicon Valley or NYC and spend a decade sharing a studio with 4-5 others in his/her situation, just for the chance to escape poverty back home. Is it fair to force two people from such different backgrounds to compete?

You know, when four to five people share a studio, that's not just a labor competition issue. That's a fire code issue.

I think Germany strikes a good balance: jobs must first be offered to German and EU citizens, and then you get a work visa that's tied to one company for a few years. After that, it's fairly painless to get an unrestricted visa and then permanent residency.

> The proposed legislation would increase required salaries for positions granted under the H-1B scheme that replace American workers from $60,000 to $100,000 per year.

Big whoop.

There are (three?) big players that are heavily outsourcing folks at "client sites". Ideally, H1Bs should be relatively easy to get for the first ones – after all, many companies have a legitimate need to bring in specialized labor from abroad. Then tack an exponential difficulty curve per company.

This way, a startup would be able to recruit a very talented individual from abroad. But big corps wouldn't be able to layoff and replace their workforce.

Why $100K makes sense. Data from 2014 showing how many H1b and the average salary for the top H1b seekers. The legit companies are paying on average >$100K

Infosys 32,379 $76,494 Tcs 8,785 $66,113 Wipro 6,733 $69,953 Igate 2,056 $67,168 Cognizan 1,704 $67,506 L & T 4,380 $59,933 Hcl 3,012 $81,376 Tech Mah 2,249 $73,374 Ust Glob 1,549 $73,374

Deloitte 8,028 $85,295 Ibm 5,839 $87,789 Accenture5,099 $70,878 E& Y 2,188 $88,353 NttData 1,156 $100,889

Microsft 3,911 $113,408 Qualcom 3,086 $105,169 Google 2,163 $126,565 Intel 1,945 $102,883 Oracle 1,773 $113,065 Amazon 1,256 $109,409 Jpmorgan 1,256 $105,837 Apple 1,038 $130,690

Your data presented with better formatting:

        Infosys	        32,379       $76,494 
        TCS              8,785       $66,113 
        Wipro	         6,733       $69,953 
        IGate            2,056       $67,168 
        Cognizant        1,704       $67,506 
        L & T            4,380       $59,933 
        HCL              3,012       $81,376 
        Tech Mahindra    2,249       $73,374 
        UST Global       1,549       $73,374
                                     
        Deloitte         8,028       $85,295 
        IBM              5,839       $87,789 
        Accenture        5,099       $70,878 
        E & Y            2,188       $88,353 
        NttData          1,156      $100,889
                                    
        Microsft         3,911      $113,408 
        Qualcom	         3,086      $105,169 
        Google	         2,163      $126,565 
        Intel	         1,945      $102,883 
        Oracle           1,773      $113,065 
        Amazon	         1,256      $109,409 
        JP Morgan        1,256      $105,837 
        Apple	         1,038      $130,690

Honestly, I am all for raising the wage requirement. This will definitely help to reduce the use of H1B for hiring underpaid foreign labor.

" This will definitely help to reduce the use of H1B for hiring underpaid foreign labor."

Surely it will, but it also may damage many companies ability to compete effectively.

A lot of talented R&D folks, outside of the Valley, may be earning 80-95K doing valuable work - and most of the surpluses will go to those companies, to the US in form of taxes, and remember those people spend mostly in the US as well.

So the issue is the degree to which Americans are actually displaced by those foreigners - that's the real underlying issue.

Here's the thing - if a corporation's "competitiveness" is dependent on a deeply coercive ability to control their employee's right to live and work in the US, with severely limited mobility rights for the worker, I'm not sure I care all that much.

If you can't pay high enough wages to compete for talent that has the freedom to choose which job and industry they work in, then you're probably not a high value employer.

"dependent on a deeply coercive ability to control their employee's right to live and work in the US"

This is a little misplaced I think.

Google, FB et. al. are major users of H1 programs and I seriously doubt they are not 'high value employers'.

'The right to live and work' is governed by citizenship, which goes way beyond just economic issues.

In the 'general case' the H1 program is valuable: US companies can bring in top-talent from foreign places for a few years to do great work. That's good. It's when the H1's are used to displace local workers simply to lower wages - this is the problem.

On principle, I'm generally opposed to any arrangement where the employer controls the employee's right to live and work in the US. That includes bestowing the right in the first place, but it's especially pernicious when that power continues throughout the relationship.

Truth is, even "high value" employers like google are up to mischief. Remember that wage suppression no-hire collusion? I don't really trust them with this power, and not just because I generally don't trust corporations with this power. Google and the other participants in this no-hire scheme gave us good reason not to trust them in this regard.

Now, on a practical note, though, I think sometimes principles need fuzzy boundaries. It's bad PR for high tech employers to talk about a critical shortage of workers while firing $100k a year mid-level tech employees and requiring that they train their H1B replacements as a condition of receiving severance and 6 more months of employment as they scramble to find a new job. But in a same vein, it would be bad PR for critics of the H1B program to get too vocal about the "exploitation" of $250k+ a year SSE's at google. That would not play well in peoria.

Honestly, if we set a very high minimum salary for the H1B (say, 200k a year), I think the problems we see with it would largely fade - though I assure you tech employers would be up in arms[1].

100k does seem too low to me - not because tech employees are "entitled" to more than this (nobody is), but because generally, US employers are required to hire from the pool of people who currently have live/work rights in the US - a country with a population of 300 million that takes an additional 1.2 (roughly) legal immigrants into the country every year. We created the H1B visa largely because high tech employers claimed that they couldn't find critically needed highly skilled workers from this massive labor pool, so they needed the power to bestow (and maintain control over!) limited live/work rights in the US on new hires.

So we're talking about a unique and very serious power and privilege accorded to these companies, granted on the agreement that these are rare and unusual workers with high levels of skill who are supplementing, not displacing, the existing workforce. If a corporation wants that power, but then says 100k is too much to pay this worker (in the bay area, no less!), then I pretty much feel we should dismiss that claim with scorn, frankly. Seriously, this is an utterly critical worker to you and the US economy, you need this person to work in the most expensive city in the country, and 100k is too much? Look, sounds like you can compete for the existing labor workforce like everyone else.

Believe it or not, $250k a year isn't an outrageous salary for a highly skilled worker in San Francisco. That's hardly an unusual salary for a lawyer or physician, and many of these critical H1B hires do have advanced degrees in STEM fields, which at the elite level are arguably more difficult to obtain than law or MBA degrees.

But overall, yeah, I certainly wouldn't be arguing as vociferously against this visa if use were limited to people paid SSE level salaries at google. Nor, I suspect, would most of the people who object to it. The only objections you'd see there would be from the heavy users of this visa, especially the body shops.

[1] I do wonder if there's a good strategy in this for google and Facebook, though. Clearly, these companies are frustrated when they can't get enough visas. So far, their approach has been to lobby for expansion of the number of visas, but that is causing a PR problem at this point. If they were to get a much higher minimum salary - even 100k would help, $150 would be better - they would no longer have to contend with body shops snapping up all the visas. I'm honestly very cynical about this at this point, especially hearing Zoe Lofgren starting to criticize the program. But I think what is happening here is that the industry, and their allies in government, are starting to realize that the H1B program, because of the serious abuses, is gaining a very bad reputation, and they're at risk of losing it. It makes strategic sense to get out ahead of this and reform it so that google can still use it but the body shops can't get visas.

" I'm generally opposed to any arrangement where the employer controls the employee's right to live and work in the US. "

Ok, I see what you are saying there, but the 'right' to work in the US is based on someone's ability to fulfill a specific role, ergo, fair I think.

The terms are very open and stated clearly.

The person is not granted 'the right to live in the US' they are granted the 'right to reside in the US and work for ABC'.

Given that it's temporary, they should not be cutting ties back home etc..

It's not a 'special power' unless people are coming from really desperate conditions, wherein having to return home would be a negative outcome.

I lived and worked in the US on an H1 and see no problem with in this regard.

I feel like this proposed bill doesn't go far enough.

H-1B visas should ONLY be granted for workers that are in such need that they are above the 90th percentile of pay for that role. They should also be limited to no more commitment to the company than their peer workers.

Once within the country, an H-1B worker should also be able to leave for other employment (without the top market rate requirement) whenever they choose and with a 6-12 month grace period for finding new work if they quit or are laid off.

The entire point should be about bringing valuable future citizens in to the country, and the program should definitely be a strong path to citizenship.

It also makes sense to have a different (easier to get) type of immigration for workers that want to start a company (and have most of those jobs) within the US.

I agree with everything you are saying. Almost everything about the work visa and employment based immigration needs to be reviewed.

I grew up in the USA (undocumented) and had to leave because I wanted to try to come back legally. Unfortunately, it's not easy even if I can easily get a six figure job or start a business.

>they are above the 90th percentile of pay for that role

The problem with that is that companies will do what they are doing now. Give people titles for lower wage jobs (support, QA etc...) pay them the 90% for the lower wage job, and have them perform the duties of the higher wage job.

That is a problem. I do agree that it doesn't go far enough though. It probably ought to be like $150k for a minimum, and tie that to inflation. Even if that creates a short term supply problem, that'll just incentivize investment in job training and raise wages.

Make it so that if this is the case, the manager goes to prison, the employee gets paid the difference and a green card. Anybody would snitch in that case and the manager knows that.

As someone that came through Canada's equivalent of the H1-B system, I think the Canadian system gets it mostly right:

- A points system based on a combination of industry requirement, education, experience and English/French language ability

- Permanent resident from day one

- No restrictions on moving employer or province

- Health insurance coverage after 90 days (Ontario)

- Citizenship after 3 years (once Bill C-24 is repealed)

http://www.cic.gc.ca/English/immigrate/skilled/index.asp

That's very generous

That is horrendous, Trump 2016!

I have Indian friends in Canada who were hired for an American company but are currently in a Canada office since the company plans to L1 them (which is much easier since getting an H1B as an Indian citizen is hard). I have been (unsuccessfully) trying to convince them stay and avoid the tons of issues that US immigration has. Well, one of them wants to stay in Canada, but I think he wanted to from the start since he was aware of these things too.

I myself was considering Canada for my current job, but chose against it due to a number of reasons specific to my case.

Fortunately they all work for a good company, which probably won't abuse its power over them once they're in the U.S.

> Once within the country, an H-1B worker should also be able to leave for other employment (without the top market rate requirement) whenever they choose and with a 6-12 month grace period for finding new work if they quit or are laid off.

Isn't that just going to lead tata/infosys/whatnot to establish front companies that people then immediately leave and join tata/infosys/whatnot?

How would that work? People agree to take a paper job for $150k and then quit and take the $75k? This seems like pretty easy behavior to both prohibit and enforce.

But I'm not sure why those people wouldn't just go to Google and leave Infosys on the hook for all their initial immigration expenses anyway.

> The entire point should be about bringing valuable future citizens in to the country, and the program should definitely be a strong path to citizenship.

For what is worth, not everyone who wants to live and work in the long term in the US wishes to become a US citizen. A lot of us would be happy with an easier path to permanent residence (green card), which would solve the problem of being "able to leave for other employment".

Also, from the point of view of US citizens who favor stricter immigration, it can be argued that simply making it easier for people to become US citizens doesn't solve the (real or perceived) problem of depressed salaries or higher unemployment rate due to the increased labour pool.

In theory that sounds good... In practice does the wage difference go directly to the companies who manage the H-1B employees? It's not like they would pass that on...

100K in Bay area is not equal to 100K in some other part of US. Also H1B is not only used by the IT industry but other industries as well, where paying 100K may be tough.

Exactly. I am in Arkansas, $100k is crazy, only a director of a big department can make this kind of money.

Really, a senior dev can't make $100k with bonuses? You should come to Atlanta. Only about a 15% higher cost of living than Little Rock, and you can definitely make $100k as a senior developer.

Heck, come to Knoxville TN. Lower cost of living and 100K is fairly easily attainable for a senior dev.

Not many options left for exchange scholars beyond the extension of J visas now. It'll have some impact on science output in the US.

Maybe they don't need H1Bs then? The stated goal of the H1B is to attract talent that is otherwise unavailable in the United States. If someone is offering six figures and still can't find applicants, I'm willing to believe there is really no available talent. But if someone is offering $60k and can't find talent, an alternate hypothesis is: maybe you aren't offering enough to attract the talent? Have you tried $70k or $80k? You may argue that $60k is a fairly high salary for the area, but that isn't enough to establish that such talent is unavailable in the United States.

There are alternate rationales where it would be justifiable to support an H1B-type system in that case too, but the H1B system's stated rationale isn't to allow companies in lower-cost areas to hire cheap-ish labor when they aren't willing to pay the national going rate for the talent they're looking for.

This post might be hard to read, but believe me I wish to be as respectful as possible and contribute my perspective.

Economy follows the path of least resistance. If hiring a local costs $120,000 but a guy you can message via LinkedIn and interview over the phone can do the same work for $80,000 with less negotiating power and less job mobility, then you do it. If you don't do it, your competitor or someone else will and then use the advantage to beat you in the market. The path of least resistance is also the reason companies move their headquarters to tax havens.

Then, there is a culture issue. Americans are very competitive, even in situations where the best strategy is to collaborate. It can be hard to work with someone who you know will compete at any opportunity even when it makes no sense at all, like getting angry when receiving a suggestion no matter the intention.

Then, everyone is defensive of what is said and how it is said because basically anything can get you sued. The most valuable American management skill is basically how to avoid getting the company sued. Like saying everything on a 1 on 1 meeting with no witnesses or record of it happening.

Then, Americans can hop jobs easily. Make someone angry (e.g: giving feedback, assigning a boring task or project) and that person will quit. Not so easily with H-1Bs.

This creates a culture where it is cheaper to set people for failure and fire them rather than giving them proper feedback, or letting them spend millions in reinventing the wheel with a pet project rather than seeing them go en-masse.

Raising the minimum wage is a welcome move to counter abuse of this visa. However, the minimum level needs to be set based on the city of employment and it's living cost. It cannot be a flat rate.

Counter argument to that is that its better for government and country to have higher paid employees as it increases tax revenues. Tax rates don't change based on living costs.

My proposal would be stack rank all h1b candidates based on salary and take the top X. This would push up the salaries for H1bs and stop the abuse. It would indirectly lead to increase of all engineering salries both my removing negative pressure of having low salaried employees but also H1Bs salaries are public record.

> Counter argument to that is that its better for government and country to have higher paid employees as it increases tax revenues. Tax rates don't change based on living costs.

The goal of reform is to prevent employers hiring h1b workers at below market rates instead of hiring qualified US citizens. It is not to increase tax revenue.

If you don't adjust for cost of living you'll end up removing all h1b workers from lower cost of living areas - or those areas will simply outsource all their tech work overseas - while in higher cost of living areas companies will still be hiring h1b workers at below market rates. So in essence the wage threshold won't be doing its intended job.

However if you adjust for cost of living you can make sure that in all locations the required salary is setup to prevent h1bs as being abused as a cheap source of labor.

Businesses will just lie about where the person is working. Also this is probably not constitutional. If the rate were left up to states to set it might be constitutional, but places like CA and WA would just set their rate to $60k, 50% below market, because that's where all the rich elites who want cheap indentured labor are.

One of the problems with the highest bidder approach its going to favor senior devs. This is good thing but you also have to look at graduates who have come to the US to study and may not be able to earn that much immediately but are just as likely to earn a lot more in a few years. If the ruling forces them to move them, then it will result in draining the talent.

Agreed. It would be absurd to open our universities to foreign talent only to deny them local jobs.

Students from universities already have an OPT valid for 36 months (12+24), which is sufficient time to move to the highest bidder approach.

> (12+24)

The 24 month extension is only available to STEM graduates.

What non STEM jobs are hiring H-1B visa holders?

MBAs also get the OPT but no STEM extension.

It's 12 + 12 if you are stem. Not 12 + 24.

They really need to couple it with an automatic conversion of a student visa to a work visa upon graduating an accredited four year institution. You would need some protections to make sure that the university isn't just a funnel for back door visas, like requiring at least 50% enrollment by citizens or something like that, but it would be a great way to entice smart people to come here and stay here. And in fact remove a lot of the stress of graduating for a foreign student.

IIRC this report[1] says the schools in Dodge City, KS are having funding problems because 86% of the students come to school not speaking English and have to be taught English. This is because the meat-packing industry imports most of its labor. Please explain to me why foreigner workers are needed to trim meat off of beef carcasses.

Maybe everything isn't about coding.

[1] https://news.vice.com/story/kansas-school-funding-crisis

It's an interesting paradox ... the top users of H1s are foreign companies, like Infosys and Tata - they bring in people on these visas.

So in a way, it's kind of 'insourcing' not 'outsourcing'.

I truly wonder if those companies would opt to just leave their staff in India, and to hire mostly just customer-facing support types here otherwise.

In that case, the US would lose a lot of tax revenue (and spending) from those foreigners who are in the US on H1's - who are clearly generating a lot of value, not exactly slouches on welfare or what-not.

Granted - it could be that Infosys may have to hire real talent locally.

All of this outside the issue of FB, Google etc. hiring on H1's.

I wish someone would chime in with some hard research on this ... it'd be nice to know the exact skills of those on H1's and how those align with US labour market ...

I often think these laws are passed without grasp of the nuance ...

The quota of H1b visas (compared to demand) is so low that it's very likely it will be filled even after losing the low paying applications. So tax revenue shouldn't go down.

> the top users of H1s are foreign companies, like Infosys and Tata - they bring in people on these visas

IIRC the top 10 were all consulting companies the last few years. You can look at the pay rates vs google/MS/etc... and see the difference. You can also look at the number of green card sponsorships.

It's really awful.

>I truly wonder if those companies would opt to just leave their staff in India, and to hire mostly just customer-facing support types here otherwise.

It's already much cheaper to employ someone in India than to pay that person in the US. The only reason they are using H-1B employees based in the US, is that some companies that are contracting Infosys and Tata want US based employees.

"It's already much cheaper to employ someone in India than to pay that person in the US."

Agreed, but there might be advantages to having someone in the US.

Given a 'major change' it's not entirely unfeasible that these companies do a re-structuring, i.e. using a different customer engagement model (1 customer-facing American + more staff in India) and leverage more 'remote' style technology.

Also - remember that these companies may have been billing those staff out, so 'more cost' = 'more revenue' for them.

Anyhow - I just don't think it's so simple, and I'm not sure that just upping the threshold will work. Granted, $60K is too low.

It'd be nice to have the number set to be commensurate with specific people in specific fields, as measured by various things, i.e. 'tied to an index' so that as the economy does better, companies can bring in more people, but if things start to tighten, the H1's tighten as well.

>Agreed, but there might be advantages to having someone in the US.

My argument is that they are essentially already hiring the minimum number of US based employees that they can get away with. There are companies contracting them that want a minimum number of butts in seats on premises.

Any US taxes due to their US H1-B operations can also be reduced to zero by inflated internal pricing / profit shifting to their Indian operations. Check the tax rates and median IT salaries in Indian service export cities.

Also, they try to rotate employees abroad between several countries so as to keep them on short term visa & tax rules - and maybe also to avoid them getting uppity or starting unions...

I worked for outsourcing company in India, large hardcore Big-3 tech company in Silicon Valley and a Startup. I can give you a perspective on this.

H1B visas are used by two category of companies.

1. Google like company who needs expertise and hires directly. Treated at par with other google employees. 2. Infosys like company that has its fingers in far too many pies and essentially works to provide cheap labor to American clients.

(Note that "cheap labor" benefits American companies stay a float. An automotive company might have lowered its expenses by engaging Infosys. Take that benefit out and the company might think of moving to Mexico to reduce operating costs by engaging cheaper manual labor. Cheap labor can be seen as exploitation of the worker and hence we can think of that Indian guy on H1B as someone who is being exploited.)

Infosys can file 3000 petitions for H1B and win lotter for 2000 of them. Google can only hire 4 IIT students out of which only 2 make it to USA.

The best way forward is to keep H1B as highly valued employee visa with no cap but much higher salary cap, dual intent visa and no lottery.

Provide another visa to Infosys like company with no immigration intent. Hard limit of how many years they can stay in USA and keep track how how much economic benefit they bring.

   it's kind of 'insourcing' not 'outsourcing'

It's still outsourced, but it's not offshored also.

It's hard to think of another political issue on which the public has been so completely fooled. Your average man-on-the-street really thinks these go to, like, PhDs who are desperately needed in a lab somewhere. But no, they're for pumping the bottom line of Infosys, Tata, Cognizant, et. al.

I would like to see a requirement for contracting companies to keep at least 51% of their domestic staff as US citizens. It's obscene that businesses are allowed to game the H1B program by staffing through these middlemen. That is not the original intent for these visas.

After the Disney fiasco it's clear that the rules for which jobs qualify need to be tightened up. There is no way rank and file IT skills are so special that guest workers need to be brought in.

I found the whole Disney affair to be confusing. I thought the H1B rules were written to specifically disallow what they did. I didn't think you were allowed to use H1B labor to replace US citizens who are already employed.

It's not only obscene but completely racist and violates employment law in a very open and flagrant way. There should be a lot more lawsuits like this:

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3137500/it-careers/info...

Raising the minimum is about the only way (short of auctions) to prevent companies from playing games with the prevailing wage requirements.

The only way to have proper wages for H1B is to allow workers to change company.

Right now, the H1B workers have zero leverage power, zero negotiation power and they can't change job.

They can. It's harder than what it would be for a permanent resident, but they can, as there is a grace period.

Maybe you are thinking of L1?

There is no grace period when you're terminated from an H-1B. There might be one January 17th if it doesn't get revoked but right now officially you have 0 days to leave the country, no?

That's no longer true.

The new 60 days grace period rule has not gone into effect yet so it is still true at this moment.

To be frank: The companies who abuse the H1B system are smart enough to hire people who are not typically hirable elsewhere, but which also are just about able to overcome their respective tasks.

One instance of this is: Hire someone who is not typically hire-able elsewhere, but encourage them to work an extra 30 hours a week, and get acceptable throughput out of them.

Isn't it a HUGE problem that it's not discriminated by cities according to its living costs?

I'm not an expert in macroeconomic policy but I guess it wouldn't be so hard ad doing the discrimination for say the minimum salary, as business owners/shareholders tend to have a better understanding of the concept of the price index than minimum salary earners.

And I'm saying this because tech companies in the Bay Area won't have such a hard time following this rule than startups in cheaper cities.

Which would be a recoil in terms of making all America have knowledge-based industries. Wouldn't it?

As for people taking the H-1B, would this be something better? Or worse?

It is discriminated by city. Prevailing wage for the labour certification is a function of location, position, and level. I am assuming the article is just talking about raising the bottom end of the scale, but can't be sure - it is certainly light on details.

I wonder if the $100k would apply to academic H1B's too. If so, that's pretty much the end of those.

What is an "academic H1B?" Students get a F1 visa, people with real credentials get a J-1 or O-1 visa.

The J1 isn't comparable to the H1B – it's a 12 month visa which must be started within 12 months of graduation. There's also no suggestion of working in academia on a J1 – it's the "intern" visa. I'm on it now in San Francisco, with a view to getting a H1B.

J-1 isn't only for interns and trainees.

A lot of postdocs and researchers in universities and public labs are on a renewable (!) 2-year J-1, without quotas (in a for profit company the number of interns on a J-1 is limited). That's another visa that is vastly abused, but in a very different way :)

An H1B with no caps. Colleges have no caps.

J-1's are issued for a maximum of 5 years per individual. Beyond that, universities can only hire postdocs etc under H-1B, because academic hires are exempt from the quotas. It's unlikely a postdoc-level position would qualify for an O-1.

As an employee on an H1B auth in the US, I cannot express my support for this bill enough. I'd support making the minimum required H1B wage $150K base, adjusted for living expenses.

God, I hate the stigma attached to mentioning what work auth I'm here on. Sadly I have to let my work show that all H1s are not created equal.

The image of the H1B program has been tarnished because it has been used to import people either for not-so-difficult jobs or lower costs, and, in some cases, misrepresentation of abilities.

This bill, if passed, will go a long way in rehabilitating the image of and correcting course for the H1B program. And THAT would be a weight lifted off the minds of truly deserving H1 beneficiaries who are ready to stand up to scrutiny and prove themselves worthy of a program meant for premium talent.

I agree with Congressman Issa on very little. This is something I wholeheartedly support and this Congress better be ready to have some serious justification if they don't pass this bill.

Long time reader, first time poster. Both lawmakers being Califoria democrats, I don't trust this one bit. Hear me out on this one. I have actually experienced the H1B system on my own hide.

As others have mentioned in the comments, today H1B is basically indentured servitude visa. While theoretically you can move to another job, few people dare, especially if they have families, because in case of any screwup whatsoever, you have to leave the country within 2 weeks. That's _insane_. When I was H1-B I chose to wait until I got the green card before making any moves. That took 8 years, during which I did not quite made the kind of career progress I was hoping for. Now that I'm not an H1B, _magically_ I have no problems whatsoever with advancing my career. What a bizarre coincidence.

And I'm not Asian, for Asians it takes longer than that. Another type of abuse you often see (and that was the case with me) is companies hire a very experienced worker in a much lower level position than he ought to be in, considering the experience, and then keep them there until they either work up the courage to move, or get the green card.

The _real_ fix for this should be two fold:

1. Allow H1Bs to move more freely between jobs. If you're a programmer, you should be able to move into e.g. DevOps or Data Science, or DB administration without risking that some bureaucrat decides that's not an eligible transition.

2. Allow more time for them to do so, so they don't have to find another job before leaving their current one. Six months to a year ought to be enough. Implement a cliff of e.g. 1 year to make this more fair to employers if need be, but don't kick families out of the country in 2 weeks just because the breadwinner can't tolerate the abuse anymore.

This will make the market for H1B workers price-competitive with native workers (since they will be able to command market rates given their levels of experience), and DRAMATICALLY reduce abuse. That's literally all that needs to be done. This will also make it easier for people just out of school to get well paid jobs that would today be taken by overqualified and underpaid H1Bs, because the employer will not be able to exploit their ignorance of the job market for long.

Instead they are proposing some tactical bullshit that will only get in the way of a more comprehensive reform that the Trump administration might (or might not, the election is over) come up with.

Factual correction (per first sentence of the article): Issa is a republican and the sponsor of the bill.

Serves me right for not reading the article more carefully. Their proposal is, nevertheless, wrong in its approach to the problem. This can only be solved by putting constraints on the influx and removing constraints on mobility of the people the US does let in. With these two things in place, the rest of the issues will take care of themselves. As proposed $100K isn't much of a deterrent for abuse, seeing that even with $100K+ pay there's a shortage of _entry level_ talent in CA.

Darrell Isa is a senior Republican

Always entertaining watching the HN zeitgeist on H-1Bs or offshoring of tech jobs and contrasting it with the attitude to, say, the elimination of millions of trucking or retail jobs.

Most of the opinions I read consider the eliminating millions of trucking jobs would be horrible for the middle class and are for a living wage to attempt to combat it.

There are probably some Indians who are celebrating this ... a minimum 100k wage + a cost of living adjustment every 3 years.

If this is like the 2015 bill, that also includes the requirement to sign them up for stock options, similar to a US employee.

However, the rule does have a corner case which allows bonuses to be part of the 100k, so the employers might continue to pay low salaries all year round, with a dangled 40-50k bonus at the end of the year.

Because the tech industry is something with a fairly long lag between demand & supply, the best case scenario is that the wages go up all around & hopefully that is spent in the US, instead of hoarded for a princely return to India.

The worst case scenario for a cost increase is that more work moves overseas, taking the spending side-effects & tax revenue away from the US IRS, while the corporate profits are unaffected, just total revenue cuts down.

> Because the tech industry is something with a fairly long lag between demand & supply, the best case scenario is that the wages go up all around & hopefully that is spent in the US, instead of hoarded for a princely return to India.

For that, employment based immigration needs to be addressed. Ideally, one should be able to self-petition to immigrate after a few years legally working in the USA.

> with a dangled 40-50k bonus at the end of the year.

There is nothing wrong with this, unless they are "fired" a week before their bonus kicks in.

I would really like to see a "minimum guaranteed salary" (guaranteed to the government, not the employee). Basically, if a company employs an H1-B, they sign a contract with the government, such that that H1-B will cost the employer $X.

e.g. If they promise to pay at minimum $120K, but then fire the employee before paying them $60K. Then, at the end of they year, the company is fined 60K, or has to replace that candidate with another H1-B to fill that 60K void.

> hopefully that is spent in the US, instead of hoarded for a princely return to India.

Did you notice the anti-equality implications of what you said there? It's roughly equivalent to:

"I hope that when poor people get rich, they eventually give their money back to the rightfully rich people and don't keep it for themselves or use it to support their poor family or to develop their poor economy."

Do you apply that idea generally to any poor people or just Indians?

This will just increase outsourcing - I wonder if there's a law that's going to address that too - a tariff for software and services brought from outside the country.

Seriously, attacking H1B problem purely with salary raises is the wrong approach for many reasons - not all jobs cost a 100k that you can always find American workers to do, it doesn't consider cost of living and further entices companies to look into having offshore workforce. Instead, a slight upward salary adjustment including cost of living adjustments and untying the VISA itself from employer so H1Bs can change jobs freely and making the extension process match the residency delays will go far ways in addressing abuse.

>a tariff for software and services brought from outside the country.

Its an interdependent world, and such things will probably cause another global depression. "While you're squeezing the other guy's balls, someone else has their hands on your balls"

Outsourcing is not a very black and white issue. For one thing, people can't simultaneously claim that "My employers are able to recognize my talent" while also claiming that "My employers are unable to recognize the lack of talent of those other people"

Oh I am absolutely not advocating tariff on outsourcing, far from it. I actually prefer a balanced system hardened against abuse - it's just that there's so much hot headedness going on right now I was wondering if more protectionism in the name of creating jobs is on the way.

Sorry, I guess I mis-read your comment. Feel free to ignore my reply :)

> This will just increase outsourcing

No it won't, outsourcing IT to a third world country, India or China is incredibly hard and costly. In fact I know no big corporation which successfully outsourced their entire IT department. Plenty tried and failed, for many reasons.

I'm looking for serious recommendation on what to do right now in my life.

I'm currently 25 year old with roughly two year of industrial experience and looking for a career change. One thing I absolutely want to work out is by applying for Master's program from a US university and finding work after graduation which will require H1B visa.

Is this a wise option? I will be moving from a third world country and be mostly on self finance Masters. I know it will be expensive but I'm seeing it as an investment which will pay off.

The intended field is in the tech side although I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Did this new bill make it far more difficult to get work visa or will the lottery system work?

I have a lot to lose if I don't get a work VISA really which would force me to return to home country. Note: I'm not from India

I don't think this bill would solve or fix anything. If anything it makes really hard for companies far from cities to find workforce. 100K base salary is very less in bay area and in most cities, so it's not hard for these companies to hire H1B workers.

Think about companies that are far from any cities, they may not find lot of developers and they can't even hire H1B workers unless they pay 100K, why may be a lot more than average labor wages. So, it would be more expensive for businesses.

The same would be the case for proposed bill to introduce bidding system. It just gets expensive for the businesses far from cities.

Removing the country quotas for the green cards is the fix needed. People are tied to the employer now waiting years working low wages. Remove the country quotas or at least give EAD - that encourages people to move if an employer pays low salary.

The real problem with H1B, that outsourcing firms exploit, is the lottery system. Issa's proposal doesn't address that problem. Zoe Lofgren's bill, which replaces the lottery with a salary ranking system, would be much more effective, in my opinion.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/06/technology/h1b-reform-bill/

We didn't have a lottery system a decade ago: What we had was big quotas, but the same number of green cards as we've had for many decades. So instead of a useless H1-B system which only helped big outsourcers, what we had was a big H1B population that had to wait even longer to get permanent residency. Make green cards quotas bigger and people that will stay here anyway will just spend a lot less time as indentured servants, making them far less interesting to the companies that are actually exploitative.

But that sounds like we are bringing in more immigrants, and that's not something that the now suddenly very protectionist US will want to do.

Of the 1M people immigrating every year, only 14% goes to skilled workers on H-1B. Of these both the primary applicant and their family get counted separately, so the actual number is closer to 7%.

Of these 7%, there is a per-country limits - Iceland (population 320K) and India (population 1.2B) both are allotted the same number of Green Cards. These limits treat each nation equally, but not immigrant equally. Applicants from Iceland get their Green Card in few months, but those from India will have to wait many years to get theirs.

This is broken.

Without a provision to account for recent grads, this is also a terrible bill.

Recent grads are going to be competing against people with years of experience, and the pay is going to reflect this. That means there's less reason for kids to go to school in the US, since they're going to have to leave, or if they do go, we lose that talent. They might not be paid as much as someone coming in with more experience, but they might ultimately provide more long term value to the country.

Ideally I'd like a new visa without a lottery system that basically guarantees graduates of US universities a chance to live and work in the country after graduation.

Why in the world should we institute something that would result in brain drain?

I agree - there should be a separate quota for students graduating from top-tier universities.

How do you create a politically correct list of top-tier universities?

Two biggest improvements that can be made in H1B program:

- Fill slots by sorting candidates with highest salaries instead of lottery

- Allow H1B holders to change employers as long as they are paid same or higher salaries

This will create amazing market competition and pay rise for everyone while making sure H1B holders don't get exploited by so called "body shoppers" taking away majority of their pay.

H-1B holders are already allowed to change employers. The issue lies within the Green Card application process that is extremely long for some nationalities.

An auction system sounds great but it would very heavily favor a handful of companies in the tech industry.

Classic case of no-skin-in-the-game politicians making rules about other people with dubious objectives to be achieved using naive policies.

H1B is to hire from other countries because there is shortage of skilled people in the US. If that is the case, why not make the minimum salary 2 times (or some moderately unreasonable) amount the normal prevailing wage. The companies already abuse the previaling wage. So making the minimum 2-3 times is still OK.

I can see Indian companies who where cheating with getting cheap workforce here getting in trouble.

This complements the post: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-uc-vis...

Does this affect remote working in any manner? I am from India and have considered working remotely in later stages of my career. I have no intentions of leaving India and moving to the US, but I might be applying to organizations within the US.

No labor shortages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Criticisms_of_the_pr...

Is this bill is passed, what does it mean for a person in India who wants to apply(from India) and get hired by a US company who has a very good skill set but doesn't have a master's degree?

It means you arent welcome

Be civil [0]. That was blunt, non-constructive, and perhaps mildly xenophobic.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm a liberal AND an immigrant and I strongly favor a reduction in the availability of H1B visas, they are a tool for wage control and nothing else.

We need to open our borders and let anyone who wants to come live and work in the US come here. Fear of foreigners is a poison in the heart of this country. Previous generations of immigrants have made the US what it is. The H1B program benefits the companies at the expense of the people for b.s. reasons.

I say let anyone come here who wants to and if they can hold a job for 5 years and they pay taxes make them a citizen. People are generally good and xenophobia is stupid.

This is a dangerous idea.

Let everyone in, and then watch housing prices shoot to infinity.

Let everyone in, and watch cities deteriorate into slums with the associated no-go areas and warlords.

Let everyone in, let them drive wages to zero. Let everyone starve.

This is what you're advocating?

> Previous generations of immigrants have made the US what it is.

Previous generations had a physical barrier in the form of transportation costs to the US. Today, we have airplanes and autos. Transportation costs are a fraction of what they were in the Ellis Island era.

Have you seen the housing situation in Rio? The food lines in Venezuela? The intense poverty in India? The pollution in China?

We don't have the technological or social controls to handle the affects of high population density that would be the result of accepting your Open Borders proposal.

Your xenophobia is really sad.

The US won't turn into Venezuela, Brazil or China because immigrants come here.

Additionally, jobs won't go to zero because more population creates more demand for goods and services which necessitates more jobs.

This same absurd argument you're making was used to stoke fears about Irish and Italian immigrants in the past. Now we realize how stupid it was then. It's just as stupid now.

How many people do you think would take advantage of your opportunity? How quickly would we expect them to act?

isn't the US already taking advantage of middle east, europe and pretty much everyone its trading with? the dollar being the global money is enough a sign.

> We need to open our borders and let anyone who wants to come live and work in the US come here.

No, we don't. As well as the fact that there are genuine undesirables that should be denied entry, there are costs associated with level of immigration that need to be addressed.

There are, I think, clearly better ways of dealing with that than the particulars of our current system of categories and quotas, and the best would not, IMO, have hard limitd, but immigration with no controls is not a reasonable answer.

The H1B program is literally a giveaway to the 1%, owners of capital. I am glad Trump wants to reduce immigration!

If you're really worried about someone from abroad coming and stealing your job, you should probably work harder and smarter yourself.

Can't help but feel that most Americans don't have a legitimate fear of someone stealing their job and this is just a politicians' dumb game to try to make themselves feel important by pretending they are increasing employment and "doing something for their people". Total crap.

Whoever is going to down vote me - watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVXYmMNwGXM and then come back and give me the vote back :).

I was a full time H1B employee at AMEX for 3 years. Its not only the Indian outsourcing firms who abuse the H1B visa system. All American companies including AMEX also do that. The company never even had plans to give me a promotion, not even increase my salary a bit even though I worked hard than the Americans for 3 years !. They pretty well knew I was an indentured servant and paid me 79K/annum. All salary raises and promotions were going to a handful of lazy Americans who rolls into the office whenever they wish. They will never bother to fix bugs or do production releases( because for them, its not cool, we do only cool stuff like React,Angular 2, nodejs & docker. Customer escalated bugs are not cool, let an H1B slave do it).

Anyways, now I am an ex-H1B, I left US and currently residing in Canada with my permanent residence process well on track. I will get PR within 1+ years. No one is going to abuse my status in Canada. I am totally free to work anywhere for anyone. The feeling of freedom when I left US is so gratifying.

My PR process is not tied to my employer, its in my control and Canada's express entry system gives importance to my skills than my luck as in H1B. Its a good thing that the minimum wages are being raised, it will control the abuse to some levels,like they did to me, but then there is a problem of jobs being fully outsourced.

Why should I bother now. Its all behind me. US and its broken H1B immigration system ! Downvote all you want. I am happy, I broke out this modern slavery system.

> "I worked hard than the Americans for 3 years !. They pretty well knew I was an indentured servant and paid me 79K/annum. All salary raises and promotions were going to a handful of lazy Americans who rolls into the office whenever they wish."

You seem to have a pretty aggressive attitude towards people whose country gave you job and paid much more than you were making in your home country. You also seem to have a measure of how hard someone works based on when they come to work, in tech it's who works smartest not hardest is the most valuable.

> "I am happy I broke out this modern slavery system"

Did Americans force you to come to states and work for them? It was your decision and you were always free to go and find something better in a different country if you wished.

I don't know. He might have had a choice between two shitty options, and took the less-shitty-but-still-shitty option. Many people don't want to go that far from home, friends, and family unless things need to immigrate for... tough reasons.

You know, fallacy of relative privation and such. And as a "native" American, many of us are, or look, lazy compared to a lot of H1-B workers; both of which I personally know many.

He's allowed to complain, because I'd like to be allowed to voice complaints from time to time, too. The Brits have the "chins up" monopoly, anyhow. ;)

(Don't get me wrong, I'm a pretty cheery guy.)

god forbid wanting to be treated fairly!

Are you aware that the majority of pre-revolution willing immigrants (so not counting slaves) to what eventually became the US came under indentured service? This is basically voluntary time-bound slavery. They, too, had a choice. They, too, had full rights to complain about it afterwards. It was a good thing that that was abolished.

Not everyone coming here is fully aware of the consequences of what they are doing or have been misled. Additionally, humans are allowed to change their minds; and as you get settled in the country you lose that opportunity. Indentured service was orders of magnitudes worse than what H1-B does but there are a lot of similarities in the situations involved and the arguments surrounding them.

> This is basically voluntary time-bound slavery. They, too, had a choice. They, too, had full rights to complain about it afterwards. It was a good thing that that was abolished.

If both parties are willing, I'm not sure if the state should meddle in their affairs. In the US indentured servitude was still practiced (in spite of the ban) well into the XX century.

Amex seemed to have a pretty aggressive attitude towards a person who moved across the world to work for them.

Here's a person who had a job, paid taxes, participated in daily life, helped this company grow, and you think you gave them something?

They were hired by a company in the US, the company thanks them by paying them and helping them with immigration. This person was working like most of us, I don't see why they don't deserve to be treated like a human being.

Calling this indentured servitude isn't a stretch. You uproot your life to come to the US, and now your new life is being held hostage through arcane immigration procedures. Of course they have the right to be pissed off!

There's also the irony that most people "earned" the right to work in the US through the difficult task of being born in the country.

> "I don't see why they don't deserve to be treated like a human being."

I don't see how he was not being treated like a human being? He was paid a salary he agreed to when he signed the contract, he did the work that he signed up for, we don't really know why he never got promotion, there could be many reasons why, his aggressive attitude might be one of them...

That sounds like a toxic company culture and I'm sorry you experienced that.

But H1B's can be transferred to a new job. Why didn't you apply to a different company. Working harder than everyone else for a year should put you way ahead, no?

> H1Bs can be transferred to a new job

Its not easy as it sounds. Even if I goto a new company, its the same broken immigration system I have to face, and the job change is not that easy, more complications and risks when your green card process is in progress(even the entire process will be reset in some cases). There are many aspects & risks an H1B employee should consider before changing the job. The GC wait times for Indian born workers are around 7 years for EB2 category. Imagine, the worker being thrown out of his queue position just because he changed his job ! Draconian rules H1B visa has. H1B visa is like a bunch of non-compete clauses written all over it. The worker is exploited in his salary,job mobility, promotions, raises and cannot question the employer on any grounds, because if you are fired, you are illegal from the very next day and have to leave the country !

> Working harder than everyone else for a year should put you way ahead

Well, I don't know how to explain that, you should work there to experience it or take a look at glassdoor reviews for amex.

> I worked hard than the Americans for 3 years !. They pretty well knew I was an indentured servant and paid me 79K/annum. All salary raises and promotions were going to a handful of lazy Americans who rolls into the office whenever they wish.

I've never seen hard work produce good results in software. In fact, I've seen it create more issues than it solves. Hard work produces many LOC, but that creates a maintenance burden.

why do people take things out of contexts and bisect and trisect them word by word ? When I said "I worked hard.." did you think I was burning my midnight oil ?. Trying to make software work by trial & error ?

So to clear it out, when I said "worked hard"..it means sincerely & smart, rather than lazing around, because now I see two comments glorifying smart work rather than hard work. You even went on to predict that hardwork creates more LOC. wow just wow. You are one of those "smart" workers aren't you. I admire you.

> why do people take things out of contexts and bisect and trisect them word by word ? When I said "I worked hard.." did you think I was burning my midnight oil ?

Yes that what it sounded like, especially when you contrasted it with "lazy Americans who rolls into the office whenever they wish". Also based on a decade of working with migrants often, I can't fault their work ethic but the results have usually been subpar.

This is an attempt by the corrupt Darrel Issa to help H1B fraudsters continue their wage theft.

This bill is an attempt to get out in front of any real reform by making it seem unnecessary. A child's trick. The fact is that everyone knows that Silicon Valley corporations like Google, Facebook, and Apple use H1B fraud to suppress (steal) wages.

You don't have to be even one ounce xenophobic or racist to think it's wrong that American corporations hire foreign workers into indenture servitude instead of paying free American workers more money... Look at the job descriptions on the H1B disclosure sites...those are all just regular jobs in Silicon Valley anyone would do for the right money... Fraud.

Google, Apple, and Facebook are literally the highest paying companies in the world. If that is an example of "suppressed wages"...

His complaint is that it isn't higher than Snoop Dogg

Well, keep in mind Apple, Google, and others were behind a wage fixing scheme[1] that kept salaries lower. And because people see them as the highest paying companies, that negatively impacts everyone's wages in the industry.

So, yes, it is an example of "suppressed wages," and if you think stealing from people is alright, I'm not sure what to say.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

> The fact is that everyone knows that Silicon Valley corporations like Google, Facebook, and Apple use H1B fraud to suppress (steal) wages.

Just how much do you think they should be paying?

> Look at the job descriptions on the H1B disclosure sites...those are all just regular jobs in Silicon Valley anyone would do for the right money...

and they hire loads of Americans as well. They hire people who pass the interview.

They have different standards for different groups. If you are a second tier employee or contractor they they know they can pay less and treat worse they hire you for positions that they don't care about as much.

Can you remove the restraint of trade so you can H1-B a president?

not such a silly idea I think Arnie or even a dual citizen leftie like Bo Jo (Boris Johnson) would make a better president

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