The visa system is prone to abuse as long as it is the sponsoring company that controls the visa. The visa should be issued to the individual and be valid for a fixed length of time.
Would it be more palatable if the employer did not pay the visa fees but did have a signing bonus equal to the visa fees?
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/can-the-foreign-appli...
A much better use for these visas would be to bring in workers we need at competitive US salaries. There are plenty of positions that need filling that would still make sense to pay full market salary for. (Speaking from personal experience trying to find certain skill sets in LA.)
For a thought experiment: imagine if the price of a haircut was fixed by law at $500 (or that 99% of barbers suddenly died and the price naturally surged to $500). Enough people would start cutting their own hair at home that the entire haircut GDP and employment of the nation would go down. Even though the lucky few who still have jobs have excellent wages and there is still a steady supply of haircuts to rich people willing to pay $500 a pop.
It sucks, but that's the way it works.
Also, this applies to the skills of the employee. If your skills aren't good enough that people would pay top dollar for them, then you should find something else to do.
it sucks, but that's the way it works.
There’re places outside US where you can find top-notch people for less than $100k.
Companies can cut costs by dumping waste in a river and burning garbage, too, but we don't let companies do that any more. If a company wants to operate in a country then they need to obey the laws of that country.
But in this case it doesn't suck for the rich management and shareholders (they'll manage just fine without doing the project at all) it mostly just sucks for the taxpayers who get less tax revenue, the community that has one fewer consumer, and the foreigner who has to stay put in his country working at something even less productive making $25k.
I assume the purpose is to select only those who are going to be employed securely enough at a high enough salary that they're extremely unlikely to ever go on welfare or otherwise be a net burden on the US.
Mercedes and the economy are missing out because of the commerce not being transacted right?
The idea that work that's profitable at $100k and not at $120k -- that means that the work isn't profitable if the market cost is $120.
Everything is profitable if the cost of inputs is less than the sales price. It's an absurd argument.
Essentially, your statement singlehandedly destroys minimum wage arguments. "If I could pay less, then I could be profitable, otherwise I am not profitable and thus won't hire anyone."
But you are also admitting that the purpose of H1 isn't to fill shortages -- it's to fill shortages of people willing to work at a rate below what the market dictates. It's like the illegal immigrant advocates that claim that Americans don't want to pick fruit -- at $5 per hour, probably not. But at $15 per hour, suddenly there isn't a shortage.
Except in rare cases, H1s are not used to fill actual shortages but to lower costs. A junior level Tata engineer isn't filling a shortage of skills, they're filling a shortage of engineers willing to work for $50k per year.
Yes, it does. Minimum wage laws are not good economics. We would be better served scrapping them and instituting a basic income to ensure a quality-of-life floor instead.
Yes. That statement shows exactly why minimum wage is economically unsound in the long-term. e.g. why else would McDonald's feel the need to automate their cashiers?
In practice, it's ludicrous to think that the vast US university system cannot produce employees with whatever skills are in demand, so workers must be imported from countries that have much smaller education complexes.
The reality is that many US employers don't want to pay market rate for those skills. I would argue that this is especially true in tech. The same or similar forces are at play at the bottom end of the labor market, which is what has driven much of the illegal immigration through the southern border.
Edit:// as example. Right now barely any swiss tech pros consider the U.S. as interesting destination. A lot of husstle for just minimal more pay.
Sadly in my case I was applying for jobs at companies that are relatively big but concentrate their developers in the silicon valley.
I just throw in the money argument because almost always i say anything against SV someone comes with the money argument ;)
Less complicated to reach if one is based in EU or is from USA, Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland.
So basically 85% world population is excluded from working there.
Many of the students in the US universities need a work visa to work for a US employer. I've worked with several people who finished a US degree, and apply for an H-1B visa for when the OPT visa runs out. As far as I can tell (I didn't read everyone's posting), their wages were comparable to mine, so it doesn't feel like a cost savings move to me.
The logic is that employers would have to invest more in their employees (training, scholarships, salaries) to get the number and kinds of employees they want.
To the extent that all salaries are equal, there is equal treatment. But increasing the supply of labor does help employers keep costs down at the expense of others (like almost-qualified U.S. workers who can't find employment).
No, it's ludicrous to think that a vast network of overpriced liberal arts colleges with chronic grade inflation can produce enough high quality engineers and scientists for the largest economy in the world, especially when the majority of its industrial capacity is in high value add manufacturing like aerospace and defense, clean(er) energy, pharmaceuticals, and other specialized fields. The rest of the world takes education a lot more seriously than we do and even though they may not be ranked highly by the US News World Report, the rest of the world's universities easily produce enough talent in their top 3% to leave the bottom 80-90% of US STEM graduates completely jobless, at any salary. Paying someone more after they graduate isn't going to make an 18 year old take their education seriously and the best universities in the world can't help a student body obsessed with everything but their education.
It baffles me to no end that a few H1B immigrants from some podunk mining university in Siberia can bang out a complex PCB on their own faster than the vast majority of MIT/Caltech/Stanford EE graduates I know. Even though the latter have a year+ of internships each under their belt, they're useless without months or years of on the job training. When they do get that training, they're still years behind someone who had no choice but to work 40 hours a week while going to school in a poor country with few prospects. This isn't a hypothetical: I've met and worked with half a dozen different people in SoCal from the same Siberian mining university (because it was one of the few in the Soviet Union without institutional anti-Semitism) who came here shortly after graduating to fill long empty mid-to-senior level engineering positions. None were underpaid or exploited and many filled positions that their employers were actively trying to fill for years.
I'm sure that higher salaries would push a few people in the direction of STEM fields, and a few of those would be capable of filling positions that an immigrant would take. If the salaries went high enough, I bet it might even obviate the need for skilled immigration entirely but Americans as a nation just don't want to pay the price, full stop. It would mean doubling the amount of money we give out in research grants, let alone every other corner of our economy. Just look at a variety of goods in Italy or France: the public is willing to pay more per article of clothing or furniture so there is a large industry of highly paid artisans with job security and high quality of life, willingly supported by consumers.
Disclaimer: the above probably does not apply to a significant portion, if not majority, of annual H1Bs because they go to Tata, Infosys, and other sweatshops. Those are absolutely abuses of the Visa program meant only to depress wages.
Edit to add some more concrete info: based on my parents' old high school/undergrad textbooks and my own experiences, the average American STEM college student spends the first few years of undergrad catching up to the level of a good but not great high school junior in the Soviet Union. Five year dual BS/MS degrees including institute R&D were the norm back then so how do you think the average 23 year old Soviet graduate stacked up to the best 20-anything American? The level of education doesn't even compare.
That is because colleges in America do the job of professional high schools in the former Soviet Union. when you count in those too (e.g. not just kids meant to go to university), average math levels gets real bad.
American students dont to that badly on an international tests, not compared with former Soviet Union. America has bigger variety - best juniors do real good and worst one real bad. Former Soviet Union tends to even things out and sort of kill a lot of talent.
Tens of thousands of H1Bs go to universities and smaller companies every year and many of those go on to get permanent residency so over decades, the numbers really add up. That doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of abuse, but you have to be extra careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
What baffles me the most is, not only the education is lacking some of the most basic items but it's self perceived as world class. That perception extends out of the US, at least it did to me at some point.
The mirage of the ARPA funding during the sixties and its undoubtedly success still resonates deeply, but the H1-B system and gaming it's only a canary of a deeper problem: the education system in the US is not on par with the rest of the western world anymore, possibly for the last twenty years. And indeed the public is not ready to even acknowledge it, much less to pay for it.
The low level details of salary, duration, mountain of paperwork etc for visa were adjusted as per demand and supply.
If it made sense to pay market salary, why aren't they filled? Market price, after all, is a look back on the transaction once it has happened. The market salary is exactly what it took to get someone in that seat.
Perhaps you mean it would make sense to pay below market salary, necessitating a change in the market (i.e. increase the supply of workers through foreign imports) to meet that lower price goal?
This is ignorant ranting at it's worst. Changing companies for H-1B visa holders is one of the easiest operations in otherwise byzantine world of US immigration. The only restrictions are that the new job should be in same or similar area of expertise which is usually not a problem at all (except in case the person is drastically changing career fields) and should pay at least prevalent wages etc. H-1B holders can and do use these opportunities to find better jobs (usually with higher pay) all the time.
Everything I've read indicates that the visa is portable for the visa holder. The employee can change companies without too much trouble.
Am I mis-informed?
Philippines has a backlog for family-based green cards.
Looking at the current bulletin.[1] It now looks like China, India, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and the Philippines all have some backlog for EB-3.
Yikes! However, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras only have a ~4 month backlog.
[1]https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/law-and-policy/bul...
EB2 green card visa wait times: only China and India (for now)
EB3 green card wait times: Mexico, Phillipines and other countries
I think most folks may not realized that there are a variety of green card paths, even within the employment category, and the requirements for EB1, EB2 and EB3 are completely different.
So, no, it doesn't violate its intent. And, pragmatically speaking, it's the only viable track to green card and, ultimately, citizenship for the majority of skilled immigrants into the USA.
Yes, it is still a silly setup, and most other countries have an explicit skilled immigration track that covers the same niche. Most of US immigration law and regulations is so ad-hoc and randomly slapped together (due to widely differing polices and a lot of knee jerking), that it is like that in general, though.
This rule changed so recently that it hasn't trickled into the job market yet.
https://www.uscis.gov/news/news-releases/uscis-publishes-fin...
Effective from Jan 17th, 2017.
Previously, if your employer found out that you interviewed elsewhere (due to to a reference call or other means), they could fire you and there was only 10 days where you could wait for the new employer/offer to materialize.
https://www.uscis.gov/tools/ombudsman-liaison/practical-immi...
So, yes - you're somewhat married to your company.
In places which have "at will employment" regulations, they can. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment:
At-will employment is a term used in U.S. labor law for contractual relationships
in which an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason (that is,
without having to establish "just cause" for termination), and without warning.I wish - not where I work (California).
There are protections by law [1], but none that protects an H1B employee from being fired for trying to quit.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment#Statutory_e...
When I filed an H1 for my startup, they issued a Request for Evidence just because the documentation mentioned our investor pitch "founder previously employed by LinkedIn". They thought I had already quit my job. Luckily I was still employed and was able to send the pay stubs.