Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas | Hacker News Reader

Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas

realclearpolitics.com

69 pointsaltstar67 comments

I think one of the main problems with the H1B visa program is that foreign workers are kept too long in a state of precarious residency.

I work for a tech behemoth that imports an enormous workforce from overseas. My overall impression of my foreign colleagues is that they are very competent, hardworking people and the United States is better off for having them here. However, I'm uncomfortable with the kind of leverage my employer has over them. If my boss asked me to work 60 hour weeks or work through the weekends or something, I'm able to say "no" because if they fire me, it's not really that big of a deal. I'll just go work for someone else. I'm not going to get kicked out of the country. For the H1B holders, it's a different story.

Even if the employer never deliberately exploits that situation (and I have no reason to believe that my employer does), there's still that implicit threat in the background.

So, I think we shouldn't leave H1B visas in limbo for extended periods of time. If they've been here for a year or more, they should be able to quit their jobs if they want to without repercussions.

> However, I'm uncomfortable with the kind of leverage my employer has over them. If my boss asked me to work 60 hour weeks or work through the weekends or something, I'm able to say "no" because if they fire me, it's not really that big of a deal. I'll just go work for someone else. I'm not going to get kicked out of the country. For the H1B holders, it's a different story.

Thank you for writing this. I was a H1B worker and this is absolutely exactly how it happens. What are you going to say? No? ... they'll just put you on a PIP and push out your green card application a few months or tell you they're re-evaluating things in light of your transgressions. Now what?

> If they've been here for a year or more, they should be able to quit their jobs if they want to without repercussions.

To clarify: you absolutely can do that on an H1B. The problem is that you need to have a new job lined up to replace it, and that job needs to have gone through visa approval processes that can take up to three months (there is a grace period, I believe, of 30 days, soon to be extended to 60). This also costs the company money in legal fees, so people tend to get jobs with large corporations rather than startups, who are less willing to swallow the cost.

So, it's possible, just very irritating to do. And if you're also applying for a green card sponsored by your company then you have additional issues - you can get shunted back to step one when you change employers if you haven't already reached a certain stage.

> And if you're also applying for a green card sponsored by your company then you have additional issues

If you don't apply for Green Card sponsored by your company, you will have to leave after 6 years anyway - so these additional issues are almost always relevant too.

Thanks for the clarification; as a US citizen, I've never gone through the process myself, so I only know the bits and pieces I hear second-hand.

> there is a grace period, I believe, of 30 days, soon to be extended to 60

AFAIK there is no official grace period, but for practicality the USCIS does process some applications within an arbitrary time-frame.

This!

It's unfortunate that the title doesn't match the article content here. The article correctly identifies that nearly half of H1B don't go to Silicon Valley, they go to the outsourcing firms that hire foreign workers (usually Indian) and hold them as indentured servants (for a decade or more before they can get a green card) and hire them out to US companies as "consultants". It's a total scam, and it needs to be shut down.

The fairly recent landmark decision in Browning-Ferris[1] should take a few steps toward curbing the abuses of this practice. Not only for H1B workers, but also for many of the kinds of people that tend to get -- in this commenter's words -- "scammed" by agencies. The problem is many workers coming in know little to nothing about current US employment law.

If you are building or working on something that is going on the "asset" side of a company's balance sheet, you are probably in a joint employer situation. And if you are in a joint employer situation, you need to be loud and clear about disparities. Which obviously exist when the middleman temp/outsource agency is shaving 35, 40, 50, X percent of your wages, benefits, whatever.

The theory here is that the company that was trying to save a few bucks by hiring "cheap" foreign help now has to account for the liabilities of being a joint employer: now legally defined to include the welfare of any workers being treated like slave labor by the firms they hire. So... maybe it's not really "cheaper" after all.

Makes a lot of sense.

[1] http://www.acc.com/legalresources/quickcounsel/joint-employe...

I would rather see reform in the process of making HB1 candidates citizens. Its a group of people that want to be here and many want to stay but the process is exceedingly painful. HB1 should be a faster path to becoming a citizen not a longer one.

AFAIK H1B is not a longer path to becoming a citizen - it just allows you to apply for a green card alongside renewing your current visa status. The problem is that green cards are allocated according to country, and India has a huge backlog of a decade or more. Workers from other countries do not face this issue. I agree that it should be reformed, but I'm not optimistic.

Workers from other countries do not face this issue

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That hasn't been correct until very recently to be very fair. It used to be a wait of years in the EB3 category, the lane most h1bs qualify for, and has only recently (2014 or so) shortened to a few months. And to clarify, this is just to get a green card.

it still takes 5 years after that green card to become a citizen.

Absolutely correct, it takes five years to be able to apply for citizenship for a green card holder. But a green card holder can move from job to job the way a US citizen does. So ince you have a green card, you are not submitted to the constraints of a visa.

IBM are big on this.

As an american (born and raised) I dislike what has come of the HB1 program for many of the reasons that the author points out.

I have quite a few friends on HB1 who have a hard path to citizenship, we need to make it easier for these talented people to get out from under the HB1 thumb and stay here as well. Attracting and keeping talent needs to be a bigger priority than it is.

You lost me at HB1.

It's H1B, not HB1, bruh.

H1B visas damage people. But then again, so do the university systems in China and India.

You cannot, as a culture, simultaneously underplay the importance of science and math education (nerds!!!) and complain when immigrants come in to occupy the high tech jobs. There is a big outrage about lack of high-paying jobs, yet there is rampant anti-intellectualism and discouragement of critical and analytical thinking which is needed for those jobs.

I actually don't think "nerds!!!" is much of a thing any more - much of our cultural output is based around comic books and fantasy stories, the likes of which were regarded as nerdy persuits when I was a teenager.

I think people are happy to describe science and math education as important, they're just not happy to pay for it. Decades of underinvestment in public education results in undereducated people, but no-one wants to actually deal with the issue.

Agree - "nerds" today may not necessarily be the coolest kids in the room, but they aren't typed as social outcasts either. This is of course location dependent.

I agree, and it is by no means exclusive to the US. It's lucky for the US that it's still in a position to easily lure people from almost every country.

And this won't chance too soon, most TV shows and films, e.g. Big Bang Theory, Mr. Robot, do nothing to normalise the perception of these kinds of jobs. Workers are always portrayed as weird/quirky/dysfunctional. The closest portrayal to normality has been the workers in Westworld. But those jobs weren't exactly aspirational either...

This has nothing to do with it. Minimizing salaries and a compliant workforce has everything to do with it.

It needs to be much easier to switch employers on H1B so that workers are not abused.

There are also needs to be a bidding process. It's absurd that a small company that is desperate to hire someone for $400k needs to participate in the same lottery as a megacorp paying $60k that doesn't really care whether or not they can hire a particular candidate.

It is, supposedly, a program for highly skilled workers and not a low wage worker program.

http://www.emergedigital.com/ is a parked-website landing page.

I think the company was actually an ad agency rather than a "technology" company. But I can't even tell. Regardless, I don't see any reason to think he has actual success, or that his success would make him a credible authority on how Silicon Valley companies function.

Aren't all tech companies now effectively ad agencies?

What does "Cutting-edge digital advertising professionals" mean?

The article is very skim about the specifics of what the folks did.

The article mentions that some tech firms tried to recruit employees at this company, but that's no indicator of if this is the class of employee that companies recruit on H1Bs.

There is a wide variance in talent of people on H1Bs too, though this article has a very simplistic view which goes: "we didn't have access to H1Bs, so people were forced to learn and get better" without any understanding of what H1Bs do.

Your "cutting-edge digital advertising professional" is not an engineer.

Fully agree that the path forward to solving a tech talent shortage in the US is for the US to be internally competitive, but just learning on the job doesn't have the same rigor as pursuing 4 year and/or advanced STEM degrees.

Also, this company on LinkedIn has no information. Just 4 employees showing up, i.e. very hard to see if they have people doing engineer caliber work.

https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?f_CC=2467546&trk=rr_conne...

Till as such point there is some evidence about the quality of work being done here being comparable to what a software engineer does as, I'm going to call BS on this article.

The H1-B visa program sucks. It indentures the immigrant to their employer. If their job sucks their options are really limited.

There's virtually no other path to get a skilled worker into the US.

L1, H1B1, O1, etc.

Unless you already work at the company you can't get a L1.

And H1B1s are for Singaporean and Chileans only. Hardly a meaningful impact on the US immigration system.

TN for Canadians & Mexicans are not visa and don't allow immigration intent.

Getting an O1 visa is non-trivial (otherwise all the people who don't get H1B's would get one)

The wait for getting a green card based on a job application is very long - practically no one goes that way.

The US doesn't have a points-based skilled worker immigration system like many other countries do.

Also:

- L1 is non-transferable

- H1B1 also does not lead to a green card. To get a green card you need to switch to H1B

You can change jobs on an H1B, if you're planning on working in the US it's probably your best option unless you can quality for an O1. I can tell you most people on an E2, an L1 or comparable visa would give their left arm to be on an H1B if they have any intent to stay in the US.

I realize it's the best option right now, but it's terrible. That's my point. The system is awful.

Theoretically you can change jobs but only to another employer who is in a position to sponsor your H1B. Which really limits your options, and doesn't likely move you into a better scenario because the new employer still has a distinct advantage over you (they are the one allowing you to stay in the country.)

It is more difficult to see the positive effects of expert workforce in large economies such as the US, but it is easier to observe how smaller but rich economies rely on foreign experts to compete: Switzerland and Singapour being two of such example. Those countries create strong incentive for expert immigration, in various fields, financials, engineering, academia, healthcare. A large portion of the workforce was not train in the country, and innovation both in academia and the private sector is often lead by multi-national teams. It is a classic pulsion of conservatism to try and severe the ties prone to increase the flux of information and people, but in the long run it will hurt the economy. Because if you are not doing it, others will do it and reap the benefits of freely trained experts and innovators. One key example is the migration of scientists during WW1 and WW2, which benefitted the US immensely and insured its supremacy over the second part of the 20th century.

This seems like it plays into a false dichotomy between increasing tech education/training programs and increasing permissive immigration.

At the top of the industry- people who are advancing the state of the art- there is significantly more to be done than there are qualified people to be hired. It's not a zero sum game.

I do think we should ensure that immigrants have the mobility to easily change jobs, so they don't get locked in with below market pay. Having people chained to their employers lowers wages for everyone. Increasing paths to citizenship is an easy way of ensuring we aren't undercutting market rates for skilled labor by having people afraid to try to change jobs (or start a business) but in the current climate... we'll see.

I don't understand H1B visa program. Shouldn't we be forcing the H1B grantees to become citizens? Instead, we're training them on how to be a modern tech worker, and then shipping them back to where they came once the job is over (assuming that they can't line up another company to foot the legal bills of taking over their visa).

Why? We have 700,000 new citizens every year. Let's make H1B part of the path-to-citizenship... either they're a citizen within 2 years, or they're done. It'll add 10% increase to citizens every year, but these will be high-salary, well-trained, employed citizens.

Excuse me. The USA have a ridiculous system of world wide taxation (like Eritrea). Sufficiently qualified people might want to work there for a while, but not become citizens.

If you force the green card or even citizenship onto H1B employees, they might not want to come.

Furthermore, if you're on a green card (or a citizen), you're subject to the exit tax. On an H1B, you can avoid it for a few years at least.

Some people do, some people don't, but US policy should be concerned primarily with what's good for the US, not what foreigners would prefer.

It's a two way street. I had to leave the US as my US tax bill on foreign income exceeded my US income. I would have prefered to stay but I draw the line at paying to work.

That's backwards. If you want to attract the best and brightest through any program - and you do, every country wants this, it's such a big win - drawbacks will put them off and defeat the point in the program. It then becomes self-filtering, and attracting only the people who are willing to come despite the drawbacks. And you probably don't want that outcome.

So, what the author of the article gets wrong is how many H1Bs want to be citizens and how hard it is to become one. Currently for anyone who starts their immigration process, it takes anywhere between 7-15 years to get a green card if you are a citizen of India or China and are already employed here.

The author gets most of the things wrong in this article. Even though H1B is not an immigration intent visa, most H1Bs come with an intention to stay here. If you give them a chance to stay in the United States, they'll happily stay here. Right now the time to get a greencard is anywhere between 7-15 years for citizens of India and China. H1Bs include students who got their graduate degrees at a lot of good universities and want to work, start a family here, just not people who move exclusively for jobs. Even with a lot of wait, people are rady to wait so long to get their greencards. H1B is not indenture. With little hassle, you can easily move employers if you are smart. Make the regulations strict on consulting companies who abuse the process. They play a volume game where they apply so many visas to improve their probability. A lot of small companies looking to hire engineers and ready to pay market wages miss out since their chance of getting a H1B is less.

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number... is the best short bit of writing on the subject.

Economy follows the path of least resistance and cheaper labor through H-1B is that path now.

But taking away visas does not mean everyone will happily employ local computer science graduates. This is what is more likely to happen:

- Coding camps have lower requirements (notably cost), graduate people faster, and are proliferating quickly. Those will drive wages down.

- Investment will start going to other countries.

If one company doesn't do it, another one does and prevails in the market.

As an engineer, the only way to stay competitive is to demonstrate added technical value or actual technical leadership.

H1Bs do not work for minimum wage jobs. Why then is the minimum wage not rising ? If you do not consider the Indian consulting companies, H1B get paid higher or on par with most Americans and most have graduate degrees.

I was implicitly referring the context of technology.

If companies are really in it because there is a shortage they should pay H1Bs the same wage. If not, limit H1Bs. I'm pretty sure Thiel will prevent this from happening

H1b salaries are on par if not higher with their peers with the huge exception of the outsourcing firms that grab a lot of the available H1B slots in the lottery. Those need to be shut down.

The H1B program needs to be ended immediately. It's an outrageous giveaway to corporations. It represents deliberate attempt to reduce the relative price of labor in the American economy.

But that hasn't happened. Tech jobs have only increased in value. We still need more tech workers, and can't train them fast enough.

Instead, we should be forcing citizenship on workers, encouraging them to stay here, start a family, etc. These are among the smartest and well-educated people in their former countries, and we have space for them.

  We still need more tech workers, and can't train them fast enough.

In the current bubble economy, that is. What happens when there is the inevitable downturn? How quickly people forget the late 2000s (let alone the early 1990s), where one was lucky to get a multi-month contracting gig.

For years, a bunch of coworker friends have gotten together for a White Elephant party after Christmas. During that era, more than half the group members experienced unemployment for long stretches of time... even while H1-Bs continued to be issued, and the entire H1-B quota was always consumed. And these were software engineers with over a decade of experience.

I had started an unrelated business (not in the software industry) and fared comparatively well.

I find it odd that "we" can't train them fast enough but India can. (Ignoring other countries, as India is by far the biggest share here).

What is so magical about a developing nation with a billion people living in poverty that allows them to solve them problem and prevents us from solving it too?

Further, why is nobody asking this question, instead of just saying we can't do it?

Companies have no incentive to invest in training when they can brain-drain other countries for less, and force their terms on the people they bring over.

Amen. People say there is a shortage of skilled labor. I just came out of a prestigious public CA university and can't find a job that pays a living wage. If coming out of a CS program with internships and I still don't have the skills maybe these companies should invest in training me as an entry level worker.

> If coming out of a CS program with internships and I still don't have the skills maybe these companies should invest in training me as an entry level worker.

I came out of an unknown school with no internships and got a big company to give me an entry level job at 100k+/year. I don't say this to be rude, but maybe the problem is you and you should look at what you can do to fix things.

If you aren't getting interviews maybe it is your resume, if you aren't passing interviews maybe it's your interview skills (I'm going through this now, as mine have rusted a lot and it really does suck).

Again, I don't mean to pick on you. I really have no idea what the actual situation is. Good luck.

I second this and if you are in the Bay Area and not getting a job, you seriously need to look at what's wrong in your approach.

> If coming out of a CS program with internships and I still don't have the skills maybe these companies should invest in training me as an entry level worker.

Why is it the company's problem? I'd go after the university first, for providing a worthless degree, rather than a company's unwillingness to pay for (in their perspective) a worthless degree.

If his happens I'll pop 3 bottles of champagne and have the best weekend ever.

Thank you Mr Trotsky...

> Those are the federal waivers handed out to highly trained workers in fields such as technology who don’t plan to immigrate here.

Actually large numbers of people on the H-1B do immigrate. It's a dual intent visa, you can start the green card process while on it.

People living in big cities in China and India can't breathe. Let's deny them the opportunity to contribute to the US economy.

Next up - "don't let anyone import anything from other countries because I didn't raise any venture capital".

While I am sympathetic, perhaps those countries should solve these problems rather than emitting emigrants. The interval between opening new coal fired plants in China is on the order of days.

If it wasn't possible to confuse H1B status with indentured servitude and wages were rising in the US, it would be a different thing. H1B makes feasible a lousy management style that perpetuates bad practice, which results in lousy products.

Unless you're a native american, someone could have made the same claim about your own ancestors, back in the day, no?

Of course they could have. So by the same reasoning, people in China must put up with polluted cities as an inevitibilty?

I have to know that hydraulic fracturing hasn't caught on in China. The barriers are bizarre, but they're still barriers. With fracking, those could be gas fired plants. We're talking < $10B in investment to fix that problem. So why don't they?

That is ridiculous. It's trivial for a someone on H1B to switch employers.

Trivial? Not quite. Possible? Definitely, if you're competent and well rounded.

I'm not sure, but I suspect the outsourcing firms filter more by hard-working (i.e. hours put in) and not quality. After all, that's what people who hire outsourcing firms want. So then, when these poor people want to change jobs, there's not that many roles available. Contrast this to visa holders who work for big tech companies. With that on your CV, getting another role isn't hard.

That's simply false. It is anything but trivial.

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