DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers | Hacker News Reader

DOJ Cautions Employers Seeking H-1B Visas Not to Discriminate Against US Workers

justice.gov

162 pointsprotomyth114 comments

The consulting firms have been abusing the H-1B system for years. I've been documenting it for couple years here: http://www.jobsintech.io/immigration_companies#name=&city=&s...

You can clearly see that the top companies using H-1B visas are consulting firms.

Why are green card and h1-b numbers all equal?

Good catch. Fixing it right now

Between large outsourcing companies (TCS, Infy, Cognizant, IBM etc) and American staffing companies (Edison-based "desi body shops" etc) - who uses H-1Bs more, in your analysis?

Someone posted this link. https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker...

There are whole IT divisions where there is not a single US citizen or GC holder. Tell me how can one distinguish between projects where the whole project members are H1B holders. Do you expect anyone to complain?

The whole thing feels like a april fools joke to me....

If there are reasons to complain, _both_ H-1B holders and others are encouraged to complain. But just because some projects are staffed with H-1Bs, there is no indication of foul play. From the link you posted:

    Examples of H-1B fraud indicators may include:

    * The H-1B worker is not or will not be paid the wage certified on the
      Labor Condition Application (LCA).
    * There is a wage disparity between H-1B workers and other workers 
      performing the same or similar duties, particularly to the detriment 
      of U.S. workers.
    * The H-1B worker is not performing the duties specified in the H-1B 
      petition, including when the duties are at a higher level than the 
      position description.
    * The H-1B worker has less experience than U.S. workers in similar 
      positions in the same company.
    * The H-1B worker is not working in the intended location as certified 
      on the LCA.

Our entire company including founders are people on H1B. If USCIS harasses us we will move to Canada or some place else.

If they are ALL on H1Bs, then why are they located in the states at all? I'm pro immigration (and H1B), but that just seems weird.

so they can reap the benefits of US investment?

It just doesn't seem what the H1B was meant for.

It isn't :)

Following reasons :

Almost all employees are from different countries India, China, Japan and UK. There are very few places on earth where we could have met as students. It is a co-incident. If we were studying at Singapore University we would have setup our company there.

How are the founders on H1B? That's a temporary worker visa that requires employment sponsorship. An EB1 would be the more appropriate visa. If the founders are sponsoring their own visa -- well that would be a neat trick.

As far as the entire company being H1B -- is it even possible that not a single American was available for a job?

H1B is heavily abused.

It's perfectly legal now to be a founder on an H1B if there is a way for the "company" to fire any individual. Establishing a board of directors with investors or having 3 co founders so that any 2 can fire the third.

Umm that doesn't seem possible. The H1b is an employment visa. As in someone literally has to employ you. Are you sure they're not on EB1?

Being located in the US but staffed 100% from overseas sounds strange. Did you guys make a conscious decision to exclude US born workers?

Moreover, please walk me through your "I'll take my ball and go to Canada" ultimatum : if you don't employ a single American, why should Americans care about this particular threat? Are your contributions to the local economy that significant?

Surely they pay taxes locally, no?

Like Apple? lol

There is no threat to anyone here.

We were 5 students from different countries who came here and started the company. Being almost bootstrapped company and pretty small one we had a hard time hiring people who would both pass our bar and willing to work for us. For all the low end work we would simply outsource it to India/Pakistan/Russia and other countries.

>why should Americans care about this particular threat ?

No one needs to care about anything. It is just that we will leave. It is upto Americans to wonder if are worth anything. May be Americans will be better off with it somehow I do not know. But the problem is more business, revenue and potential growth that would move out of the borders permanently.

Companies pull this kind of stuff, then wonder why there is a push back against globalization. Americans need to benefit from globalization, too! If most American work is displaced by foreigners, it really screws our society and economy, amplifying inequality to insane levels.

A simple solution for the consulting companies would be a rule requiring all H-1B sponsors to have at least 51% of their domestic staff be US citizens. That would ruin the wacked out business model of the body shops and return to a fair playing field for Americans in their own country.

Not sure if that's sufficient, but I wanted to answer to your "Americans..." comment: This isn't just an issue for Americans, it's also bad for actually highly qualified foreigners and other companies. Because a few companies gobble up all the visas, the rest have to go through the lottery. Which actually makes it hard to hire highly qualified immigrants, because it takes agrees to see of you're lucky.

I've been through this, and it sucks. In the end I got another type of visa, but that cost a lot of energy and money.

Couldn't agree more. If anything, a lottery system encourages spamming candidates whatever quality over carefully selecting high quality candidates.

Plus, nothing says "Welcome" than waiting several months for a decision in the visa purgatory. So that also discourages high quality applicants who have other choices.

A simple solution for the consulting companies would be a rule requiring all employers to have at least 51% of their domestic staff be Native-Americans. That would ruin the whacked out business model of the body shops and return to a fair playing field for Native-Americans in their own country.

The point of the program was to employ individuals with unique and exceptional skills that were otherwise not found, at all, in the country.

The point is NOT to have 49% of your staff be H1B's in order to reduce costs.

The original rules were fine, let's just get some enforcement, including on the facilitators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU

For a few years, I worked at a US government joint that abused the visa system to reduce its labor costs. The junior positions were staffed 100% by foreign workers who were being paid 25% to 50% of market rates.

The problem is that the US immigration system is rife with selective enforcement. Many rules are open to interpretation, and officers have full discretion as to how they interpret them. In this, the US is unique among nations that uphold the rule of law.

Easiest solution is stack rank all H1b applicants by salary and fill the quota with based on ranking. Top talent in theory should be making the most money so we wouldn't risk losing them.

Seems like an incredibly short-sighted strategy to ensure that only one type of person get's the visa.

Computer programmers aren't the highest paid H1Bs.

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Category.asp...

Hmmm. I have a friend who has an extremely specific PhD and was offered a job in Atlanta, for a position that would be hard to fill otherwise as his expertise is quite unique.

So on one hand, you have a person with unique expertise, but on the other, he would be joining as a junior, so he would be paid a great salary - for that level. But he would be competing for visas with Seniors who will be paid more at other companies, purely because of their age/experience?

Isn't that a market based solution though? Nothing against your friend but if a company is willing to spend more on a senior than your friends company is going to pay him, that indicates that the senior is more valuable to economy

Sure, but it will lead to a solution where only top programmers at highest positions get visas? I mean, I can see the logic why some people would want it that way, but surely, there's value to be provided in hiring someone at a junior position and growing them from there?

There are tons of Americans who would love getting those jobs. The purpose of the H1B visa program is to bring the best and the brightest over so our economy doesn't hit any knowledge bottlenecks that limit our economic growth. Junior developers definitely aren't a bottleneck, the companies are just wanting to pay below market rates for them, which hurts citizens who have to deal with high cost of living and high schooling costs but can't get a good paying job.

The whole point of the h1b program was to bring the best over. Additionally I believe that if companies had any sort of interest in growing juniors as an industry wed see apprentice programs or some equivalent pop up. Hiring a junior whose on a restrictive visa seems to be entirely about cost savings

The whole point of why H1B exists is that yes, only specialists with expertise you cannot buy locally (because of unavailability, not price) should get H1B visas, and that's generally at the highest positions, since you definitely can get local entry-level specialists or generic good programmers.

There's value to be provided in hiring someone at a junior position and growing them from there, but H1B is explicitly not for that - unless the position literally has zero candidates locally, it doesn't/shouldn't qualify for H1B.

So if the extremely niche specialty is really valuable, the potential employer should increase his or her pay to compete and stop linking salary to age or experience.

Any really highly skilled, highly qualified white collar job adds hundreds of thousands in value at the very least in just about any industry, so what's 30-40 thousand dollars more to the company.

H1b visas have primarily been used by consulting companies to bring in less expensive junior engineers (<$100k) [1]. If new directives make it harder to sponsor junior engineers, it will shift the mix to more senior engineers. This will shift the supply/demand curves, so that US salaries will come down for senior engineers and go up for junior engineers.

[1] http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

H1b abusing consulting companies tend to pick the job title with the lowest average compensation no matter what, since the official job title governs allowed salary limits in H1b.

This is why the average salary for a "software consultant" is so much lower than most other titles. These companies all pile on the same lightly used job title to synergistically lower the average salary.

I don't think it has anything to do with seniority levels, it's money. The fact that most of these devs are brought in as junior engineers shows that these companies don't really need employees with specialized knowledge, which is the whole point of the program.

They also invented some new job titles: http://www.jobsintech.io/immigration_companies/infosys-limit...

89k for Cupertino, CA. That's hilarious.

More demand for senior engineers will decrease their salaries?

More supply of senior engineers will decrease salaries. The visas used to be taken primarily by junior devs preventing (some) senior devs from getting one. Senior devs may no longer be blocked which increases supply. Demand is unchanged, at least in the short-term.

The economics aren't so black & white. The incentives to hire an H1B change when companies are paying senior engineer wages for the position.

In my experience of hiring engineers across several companies over the past decade, the pool of senior SDEs who are both not already in the US and willing to move to the US is so small that I'd be surprised if it even registered in the overall H1B flow. Virtually all the non-resident senior SDEs I saw getting hired in my orgs ended up being H1B transfers who got hired straight out of college into the US and grew into seniority while here.

I doubt it. The number H1Bs for people with the equivalent of a Masters degree or Phd is something like one percent of all H1B visas.

I seriously doubt that a shortage of H1B visas would be an issue for a company that decides to hire someone into a senior position. Senior positions are handled with more care then junior positions.

Yeah, I don't really see the logic in that post. You will most likely see a slight rise in salaries across the board. In addition a larger effort to recruit for junior positions from universities and job listings.

The only real change is that recruiters will have to change there talent pools. There reliance on H1B is mostly because no one stopped them not because there is a lack of us talent.

Most of the consulting companies like Infosys, CTS etc work as such: They hire tons of people fresh out of college. Some of those have contractual obligations called "bonds" which force them to stay with company for 2 years or so. That is the stick. Later comes the carrot in form of H1 sponsorship a year or two down the line. So the median work ex for H1 tends to be 3-4 years. Then there are those who change jobs simply to get the promise of being sponsored. I know couple of people, one with Amazon, with over 8 years of work-ex joining as software analyst because it helps companies pay them least of salaries. If senior dev is the new norm they will shape the supply accordingly and try to suppress salaries in that direction. The only way out was(is?) to provide salary directions too but vague wording allowing companies to include non monetary benefits will again be suspectible to manipulation. But not doing so means startups will not be able to afford engineers with only monetary benefits. It is a very difficult problem to get around.

Median salary may go down for senior engineers, that's okay with me if more will have permanent jobs.

It's not fair to software engineers at the tail ends of their careers that they are so often relegated to contract positions. Many of them very competent (even if slightly dated in current practices).

You are right. For the 85K visas, there were ~240K applications. If 30% of them were for senior engineers, then with these new stricter directives all 85K visas go to them, thereby increasing the supply of senior engineers.

Otherwise there would have been 30K senior engineers and 55K junior engineers.

That assumes that the pool of senior engineers is large enough to fill that quota every year. Or that the demand for foreign seniors is that high

Junior engineers filling up the quota is actually preventing senior engineers from getting through. There is always demand for high quality senior engineers, and companies like more choice.

I am not sure about the salaries going down.

Senior engineers = a little older = probably have family = harder to make the move to another country

I've been on H1B since about the time I graduated and it was no brainer to start new life in US. Had I stayed and started my family and career in Canada, it would've been much harder move to US and it probably wouldn't be worth it because my wife wouldn't be able to work etc etc

Only if laws of economics in such a complex system were easy to guess.

The more likely scenario in my opinion is American companies more aggressively moving their jobs to India and even other related business to more visa friendly countries like Mexico. My employer has already moved his QA department to India full fledge putting freeze on all QA hiring in USA. Easily 10-15 jobs lost.

Company I'm at (and building up a team at) is currently ramping up our QA/SDET efforts here in the US, as my belief is that we want the Quality Engineers to be as close as possible to the regular engineers (to the extent possible) - for maximum benefit (rapid iterations, faster to fail, higher velocity).

Been interviewing a ton of QA/SDET candidates over the last few weeks, and a challenge is that so few (regardless of immigration/legal status) seem to be open to working with many different languages/tech in any given day - meanwhile switching between areas that historically may be perceived to be within coding, product management, ops.

It's a challenge finding people that fluently can navigate between all those areas. I strongly believe the future of QA is in filling out this void that is - usually - left behind when you have Product/Dev/Ops working together; nothing encompasses all disciplines but good QA folks.

It sounds like you are looking for a unicorn that is already familiar with your stack. Just pick someone who has the desire to work hard and learn new things. The rest comes with time.

On the one hand you warn about trying to guess the outcomes of complex economic systems, while on the other you go ahead and put forward a wild guess yourself.

It's just as likely that although some jobs may be sent back to India, if all wages increase, then it's a net benefit to your average American.

No sir. I am not making any guess, I am only stating the fact.

> if all wages increase, then it's a net benefit to your average American

If all wages increase it leads to inflation making it ineffective.

This also came out and is more narrowly focused on areas relevant to frequent discussion on HN: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/nativedocume...

SUBJECT: Rescission of the December 22, 2000 “Guidance memo on H1B computer related positions”

(edit to add:) Some key passages from the USCIS memorandum: "... an entry-level computer programmer position would not generally qualify as a position in a specialty occupation ...

Based on the current version of the Handbook, the fact that a person may be employed as a computer programmer and may use information technology skills and knowledge to help an enterprise achieve its goals in the course of his or her job is not sufficient to establish the position as a specialty occupation."

This is just bringing up the Nebraska center up to speed with the California and Vermont centers. This is done because Nebraska will restart processing H-1B application which it had not been. USCIS clarified there is no change in policy.

"... an entry-level computer programmer position would not generally qualify as a position in a specialty occupation ...

So that's why every job is "Senior Developer" now.

"Senior Developer" is the new "Entry-level developer". Now we have job title inflation.

Also, USCIS has announced plans to combat H-1B fraud [1]. They seem to provide two provisions with this:

1) An avenue [2] for members of the workforce to report H-1B abuse. People on H-1B are offered some protection against retaliation.

2) Targeted onsite visits at worksites of employers who have larger fraction of their employees on H-1Bs, and those who sent employees to other locations.

Together, this seems to be aimed at curbing H-1B abuse by staffing companies. Some Silicon Valley employers - like Apple, Cisco etc - who use these staffing companies extensively might also be affected. But overall, this should be good news for both H-1B employees and citizens/permanent residents.

[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker...

[2]: An email address really - ReportH1BAbuse@uscis.dhs.gov

You know what's the fastest way to curb H-1B fraud?

Make it so that if an H-1B visa holder complains, and their complaint is found to be valid, they are entitled to apply for a green card immediately, and get EAD for the duration of their application.

Then you get H-1B fraud complaint fraud ;)

I'm fairly sure an H1B'er isn't going to seek extra USCIS attention unless things are bad.

It would be pretty hard to defraud the government here. Either a complaint is valid, or it is not. If it's valid, then by definition it's not fraud, and the employer gets punished (fined, prohibited from hiring any further H1Bs etc). If it's not valid, then employee gets no green card, and their employer is likely pissed enough at them that they get fired. So collusion between employer and employee is basically impossible here, because either way, someone has to suffer the negative consequences.

This is akin to having more IRS agents policing tax fraud.

Simplest way is to ensure H1Bs are at 90th percentile of the market for salary.

H1Bs are supposed to be for engineers that are very hard to fill so making their salaries high ensures that that gets met.

You really want them? Pay for them and be done.

Simple to enforce and simple to get the H1Bs for folks who really need them.

All birds killed with that stone except for the company's desire for cheaper labor.

I am so torn on this. On one hand, I spent 10 years on H1B in the US and the amount of H1B abuse that goes on is crazy. On the other hand, I would not have received my H1B under current guidelines.

Yeah, this policy is very clearly meant to curb immigration, not H1B abuse.

Can you explain why that is? I'm not clear on how that's the case.

Tech workers have been complaining about H1B abuse since its inception.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU

Trump should be given credit for finally doing something about instead of Trump-deranged people looking for phantom motives.

I feel for the immigrants who won't be able to come, but this kind of abuse is hurting the career outlook for Americans. Our government needs to put the citizens ahead of the corporate interests.

I'm concerned about the effect this will have on F-1 Visa holders, if they can't convert to H1-b, they'll take their graduate degree back to their home country which is a net negative for us.

This seems to be throwing out the baby with the bath water, if you want to fix the body shop consulting firm issue, then target that. "Entry level programmer" is very broad, it could mean a guy with no experience who just graduated MIT with expertise in machine learning, but no projects under his belt.

This is still predicated on the assumption that there's a STEM shortage right?

Almost everyone I know who has a graduate degree in CS came here on a visa. The reason is because employers don't reward graduate degrees in CS with compensation commiserate with their costs.

So US nationals make the rational decision to not pursue a graduate degree. But if you're a foreign national, getting a graduate degree from a US school increases the likelihood of getting a Visa. So they make a different rational calculation.

If employers want their programmers to have graduate degrees they can make the bump in pay worthwhile, and American students will start pursuing graduate degrees.

>> This is still predicated on the assumption that there's a STEM shortage right?

Not at all. It is predicated on the assumption that a programmer is not the same as a compiler writer, and the former cannot exist without the latter, while the latter can exist without the former.

Almost none of the theoretical advances we are having in machine learning, deep learning and what-not could happen without some people who are crazy enough to venture into graduate degrees.

Not everyone who holds a graduate degree can write a compiler, true. But by the same token, not everyone who calls themselves a programmer can code either.

Aren't these Trump/Bannon attacks predicated on the idea that there's stem unemployment? The unemployment rate in the tech sector is what, less than 3%? Are there large groups of qualified Americans who can't get jobs because h1-b workers took them? That sounds fishy to me and if Americans aren't getting graduate degrees because of college costs, we can fix that by making college more affordable instead of making it harder to immigrate.

If the issue is salary, we'll call me an old fashioned hacker but I prefer people interested in the pursuit of knowledge at high levels driven by passion for inquiry not monetary reward.

I'd rather not have people enter graduate programs as carpet baggers interested mainly in the salary benefits of the title as opposed to the benefits of learning and researching. That's turning our institutions of higher learning effectively into body shops of another kind.

> Almost everyone I know who has a graduate degree in CS came here on a visa. The reason is because employers don't reward graduate degrees in CS with compensation commiserate with their costs.

I think the main reason for that is because the vast majority of software jobs do not even remotely require a graduate degree in CS.

A lot of great research into ML, data science, distributed systems, etc., is driven by people with graduate degrees, but that's still a very tiny part of the programmer-job pie.

No matter how you frame the issue, call it an abuse, or try to solve it, I don't think anything will change other than some minor adjustments. Jobs are not going to magically appear or wages rise.

India/China has a huge supply of engineers across the board (good, bad, senior, junior etc.,). And US companies always want to maximize their profits. So increasing the bar on H-1B visas will increase the quality of H-1B's making their way to US.(very competent, hard working, willing to work for lower wages in the initial years).

This is a huge benefit for technology companies who can directly recruit from these countries for US offices, which they were not doing before due to lottery uncertainties, and instead had to rely on L-1 route. (recruit for local office, then transfer)

As for the other US jobs that were being filled by low skilled H-1B's, they will simply move offshore/nearshore/remote or replaced by AI in few years. This is a big win for consulting firms as their offshore profitability per employee is 3 times higher than onsite. Given a choice, they would want all their employees offshore, and the only reason they had to bring in some % of H-1B's was on the US client companies request, which they may do away with now.

Bottomline: Protectionism did not work for manufacturing, and will not work for Tech either.

Protectionism does work. Just ask the Lawyers and the Airline pilots. The reason software engineers are not paid as well now is because we don't have a Bar association or Labor union to keep out the low rate foreign competition.

Lawyers and Pilots, hahhahahaha. I guess you are completely out of loop on unemployment among Lawyers. And Airline Pilots are even worse off. So no some magical unicorn union isn't going to fix massive oversupply of intelligent Chinese and Indians, if America tries another not directly named Chinese Exclusion Act (The White House just tried that with Muslim Ban), then maybe its Canada who will benefit.

>The reason software engineers are not paid as well

The annual mean wage for Software engineers is higher than that for lawyers and pilots.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/2015/may/oes_nat.htm

Please double-check the link you posted on mean salaries:

Programmers $98K Lawyers $136K Airline pilots $136K (not including big retirement benefits)

The link you posted proves the point I was making.

You are partly right. Protectionism may work for jobs which need physical presence or security clearance. (lawyers, doctors, teachers, government/defense/aviation employees). But I am not so sure it will work for Tech jobs, which can be moved anywhere in the world. IaaS platforms make it even trivial.

It can help in the short term, but it can also kill the competitiveness of the companies they work for, leading to worse long term outcomes for everyone.

This is a big win for consulting firms as their offshore profitability per employee is 3 times higher than onsite. Given a choice, they would want all their employees offshore, and the only reason they had to bring in some % of H-1B's was on the US client companies request, which they may do away with

The clients probably have a reason for wanting consultants onsite. Many modern software development processes ("agile methodologies") require ongoing communication between a customer and developers. This is a lot harder remotely, especially when you factor in language differences and time zones. So a significant number would probably pay more to keep a local dev team.

I agree that clients prefer/want their consultants onsite and many of the companies won't compromise on this. But for the ones where cost is the primary factor, they would just keep the critical people onsite. (Onsite coordinator, architect guy etc.,). Regarding timezone, consulting firms already run several projects matching US time. The whole thing is so complex and has so many facets that there is no straight forward solution to it.

One in my area straight-up said "H1-B Visa's Preferred" on the job notice. Not even worried about hiding it. I wonder if any are doing that now.

It took me less than 5 seconds to come up with one. DOJ needs people to complain about this??? Seriously its wide out in the open. They can just go through job boards and figure what is going on in less than a few days and know which companies to prosecute.

Let us break this position below up. Basically no one other than H1b/F1 are welcome. Show me what specialized skill is needed in the requirements. Why shouldn't an american apply for these jobs?

https://www.indeed.com/cmp/American-Technology-Consulting-LL...

[IANAL] Advertising a job specifically targeting H-1Bs is illegal. You should consider writing in to ReportH1BAbuse@uscis.dhs.gov about it.

As an Indian software engineer on H1B I totally support this idea. I see a lot of Indians working with the consulting companies where entire departments are staffed by H1B workers on low (65-70k) salary. That kind of work is degrading even for the engineers who don't get any raises, are overworked and have very few benefits. But this is how things are.

However my main concern is that because the lawmakers don't understand the intricacies of the ecosystem, they might create laws that implement blanket restrictions on software engineers across different domains (that have real shortage in the US market) and salary bands. The earlier proposal for 130k salary band also doesn't make sense since the cost of living, and the salaries, vary widely across different cities.

For example I work at a startup working on some niche technologies and we have had real difficulties hiring good people even though we pay way above market wage for the location (NC).

"That kind of work is degrading even for the engineers who don't get any raises, are overworked and have very few benefits. But this is how things are." My sister recently completed a coding boot-camp in NYC but had to go back to India to work as a software developer at a startup for $12,000 / year. She would LOVE to be 'degraded' by a 65k-70k job.

It depends. 12k in India is a good salary in most cities whereas 65k in New York won't even enable you to rent a studio apartment.

My last salary in India was around 15k a year and when I moved here I was initially getting 65k during probation period. Despite NC being a rather cheap place I immediately saw my relative spending power (eating out, etc) go down. The only good thing is that electronics are cheaper compared to wage levels.

Too late now https://qz.com/889524

The company I have been working as a contractor for several years decided last year to cancel all contractor contracts. Most American contract workers had their contracts cancelled at the end of calendar year 2016, only a few Americans were extended past the beginning of the new calendar year but all H-1B visa contractors were hired into permanent positions. Now as one of the extended American contractors, I have been notified my contract will be terminated, though I am highly qualified and have a very heavy work load. I believe during this month I will be called upon to train another less qualified worker in my current duties. This is occurring all through tech industries.

Good. Fuck the bodyshop consulting firms.

We work with a few of them, and they are universally terrible.

Many Financial Brick and Mortar, like JP Morgan Chase uses H1Bs quite heavily. Many of the job positing listed show this.

H1Bs are used as a cheap source of labor and nothing more.

> H1Bs are used as a cheap source of labor and nothing more.

Really? Even at companies like Google and FB?

There is H-1B, but there is also H-4 (dependents), as well as L-1/L-2. My prediction is that if H-1B visas will be squeezed, we'll see a pick-up in L-1.

https://apps.axibase.com/chartlab/8c9bb9cc/8/#fullscreen

What has H-4 got to do with anything? You can't work on that.

You can't, but you can search for a job with an employer who would be willing to sponsor an H1-B. Being in the country makes it much easier.

> you can search for a job with an employer who would be willing to sponsor an H1-B

What is wrong in doing that?

It causes incremental demand for H1-B visas from H-4 dependents whose specialized skills were not sufficient to warrant an issuance of an H1-B visa in the first place. This could be happening at the expense of more qualified H1-B candidates without physical presence in the country, as well as at the expense of citizens and permanent residents.

> whose specialized skills were not sufficient to warrant an issuance of an H1-B visa in the first place

And how this changes if you apply for H1B while in US (on H-4)? Are the requirements softened?

If the candidate on H-4 visa is physically present in the country and is able to attend onsite interviews, this increases his/her chances and thus creates more competition with American workers.

If "specialized skills" are not sufficient for H1B, it doesn't matter where the candidate resides...

And if the candidate has enough those specialized skills - what's the problem?

Free shipping matters and so does removing the logistics overhead and the risks associated with a potential candidate. Moving overseas labor right next to your door surely increases the pressure on the domestic labor market. I'm an outsider and the State Department unfortunately doesn't publish statistics on visa type transitions, e.g. how many people went from H-4 to H1-B, as well as from J-1 to H1-B. J-1 for instance is a visa type for cultural exchange and it's been known a major vehicle of abuse and illegal immigration because. J-1 has been replacing lower-skilled labor however.

We are not talking about abusing of H1B, but when the candidate really satisfies the requirements and the salary offered is on par or better compared to local worker at the same level. So we agree that "importing" skilled people is good for the country.

I actually talked about a different subject, namely secondary effects. I argued that the displacement of jobs with H-1B visa holders is greater that the exact number of H-1Bs due to additional pool of H-4 candidates who are now in a better position to compete for new job openings.

And I was saying that there is nothing wrong with it. The less bureaucratic hassle for skilled people the better.

> due to additional pool of H-4 candidates

Counting out H-4 EADs [1], the spouse on H-4 has to apply for an H-1B, go through the lottery, prove his/her qualifications, and only then get a job. So no, being on H-4 does not automatically get one a job.

[1] at which point they are only one step away from permanent residency

Not an easy task http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-...

Its a welcome change and really should have been done a long time ago. Not only does it create unfair competion into the US market it also allow companies to underpay their employers.

You're just going to see more remote work. No one's going to want to lose those profits once they have them.

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