Donald Trump to overhaul H-1B visa program
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I have suffered because of this. I spent 6 years on H1 with no end in sight. It would take at least 20 years for Indians to get a Green Card. Till then, you have to do do insane amount of paperwork, deal with lot of uncertainty when we you are up for renewal and are in a limbo state.
Most of my friends who are really smart and are in US, have resigned to their fate and given up on their entrepreneurial aspirations.
If people think that companies like Facebook and Google are not exploiting people, they are mistaken. Even though the wages that they pay are much higher - H1 creates lack of job mobility, within that class of employees. I worked with someone really smart in an earlier startup in India. He spent 7 years in Microsoft because it seemed like he will get Green Card next year.
I worked with someone senior at FWD.us and as per that person the intention of FWD.us is to get more H1 and not Green Cards.
I have lived through this and hopefully out of this cycle. However the best from India aren't moving to US anymore. They now know about the uncertainties in their life because of H1 and are choosing to stay behind in India to build startups there.
Big consultancy companies (TCS, Infosys, Cognizant etc) are abusing the system. I hope someone puts and end to this.
Edited: formatting
Maybe your friend wanted to do a startup where he owned the majority voting control in the startup. You can't do it on H1. Maybe he wanted to go meet his family but couldn't because his visa renewal was going on. Maybe he wanted a great opportunity, but the company wasn't setup to do H1 paperwork.
H1 was expected to be a temporary state. If you are on H1 and not from India or China you can get a Green Card within 1 year. Even Chinese nationals can get it in 4-5 years.
I switched 5 times in 6 years. Joined LinkedIn, left to build a startup (where I couldn't have majority stake), sold it to Dropbox, built and incubator at Verizon, doing another startup. All this while I was doing fine financially. However I felt really suffocated by the lack of freedom.
Finally I am not on H1 and now I can own a controlling stake in my startup. If I wasn't on H1 earlier, I would have made different career choices all this while.
H1 system is broken. Companies all over the spectrum is using it to exploit employees. It's time to fix it.
It took a lot of hard work and luck to get me to overcome this. So I would say that my life improved in-spite of H1. I was able to found a startup (and successfully exit) while on H1, which is extremely rare.
Around 2010, the Green Card wait for Indians went from 3-5 years to 20+ years. Many people who moved before or around that time got invested here (bought a house, grew family, kids going to school) and in a way are stuck in a limbo. Many of them are smart and hard working people, who used to have dreams of building companies. But after a decade in limbo, all they talk about is the next H1 renewal and the uncertainties around that.
Now, the best from India are instead choosing to stay in India and build startups there. While the current system is allowing staffing companies bring subpar talent which displaces good American jobs. So yes the H1B system is broken and it needs fixing.
If I had stayed, I would have had different set of opportunities in India. Difficult to predict whether they would have been better or worse!
And it is easy to say "that's fine" - when you are not living the life with constraints.
Only of my friends, who has a profile very similar to mine just moved to Canada. He was given a Green Card before ever setting his foot there.
Instead US is getting people with really low quality education or fake degree, who are brought here by staffing company. They get paid really low salaries and displace American workers. The current system is encouraging and supporting these companies in taking advantage of the H1B system.
Because there is a lottery every year, best people from across the world do not get a chance to come here on H1 because the quota gets full. If someone decides to move to US on Apr 1st in 2017, they need to wait till Apr 2018 to see if they win the lottery. Even if they win, they can't join till Oct 1st, 2018.
Back in the days, when the quota didn't get full, people could apply at any time and join soon after. If you applied between Oct to Apr, you could join right away. If you applied between Apr-Oct, you could join in October.
It is in US's interest more than any one else to fix the current H1 system. Best among whatever Indians are stuck here in limbo will eventually move somewhere else. Best from whole world do not want to move here on H1 because of the uncertainty. This is not what the system was designed more.
There is a lot more to the story why big companies like contracting to H1 and L1 workers (tax benefits of Capex vs Opex). That story is for another day.
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/express-entry/
It's called Express Entry which gives Permanent Residency. If you are selected, you get PR before you land in Canada. The reason I said Green Card is that this is the term most people on this forum are most comfortable with. What I had meant is PR.
Actually, the intent of H1-B is to fill jobs for which there are no Americans that have the skill set. A "shortage" simply means that they aren't offering high enough wages.
Of the major tech firms (Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, ...) only Google has a presence in NYC of any size even though NYC has far more software people than SV, SF, Seattle. If there really, truly was a shortage as they claim, they would have much larger offices in NYC.
My understanding is that Gates in founding Microsoft in Seattle instead of SV did so precisely because he did not want to have to compete with SV firms for their tech labor which is another way of saying that Microsoft was in Seattle to maintained depressed tech wages.
But also as someone who works in Seattle (for a SV company), it's sort of insulting to imply that you have to be in SV. I get paid SV rates and don't pay any state income tax and have 4x cheaper housing, and the PNW is environmentally beautiful. But sorry I'm depressing your wage!
Nobody is competing with my work, I am simply pointing out facts. HN readers, who generally deal with facts and data should appreciate that. Imported labor depresses wages.
Did Seattle rain in your coffee or something?
Haha very funny. Starbucks HQ is in Seattle. I do drink Starbucks sometimes.
He and his cofounder both grew up in greater Seattle and the area is home to University of Washington, which has a top-ranked Computer Science program (right behind Berkley, CM, & MIT), making talent easy to find.
Couldn't find the tech talent there.
> "which has a top-ranked Computer Science program"
You do realize this was 40 years ago and as I had already pointed out, things change?
Those that have watched the Arthur C. Clark & Stanley Kubrick movie, "2001 A Space Odyssey" know that HAL was created in Urbana, Illinois, home of the Univ of Illinois which is one of the top engineering and computer science schools.
If you examine the chart near the end of this article, you can see that U. Illinois receives $170 million per year in CS NSF funds. #2 Cornell is < $120 million. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/want-a-jo...
As for the business decision of Gates/Allen to locate Microsoft in Seattle so as not to be in the competitive market for talent of SV, I saw it from a reliable source (perhaps something Gates himself said).
Disclosure: I grew up in Urbana (my h.s. is across the street from the U of I CS building) and I programmed for faculty on their supercomputers beginning when I was 15.
Yet you can't clarify where this source came from or provide any reference to it. This is worse than hearsay.
You do understand the business case for not locating his firm in SV? You do understand that at the time he made his decision, that SV and tech was much smaller than today and he wanted to keep his labor rates lower and that locating outside of SV was a way to achieve this.
Why did you not go back then ?
For many Indians including myself all the racist h1b/GC policies of US government are much better than life back home. It is a win-win.
>I worked with someone senior at FWD.us and as per that person the intention of FWD.us is to get more H1 and not Green Cards.
Obviously companies focus on H1B and not GC as H1B serves their need. Asians ideally should form their own organisations and lobby with the government against this selective apartheid.
What is notable is the US newspapers including NYT and WaPo don't write about this issue much. The Guardian (and Breitbart) have been the most consistent sources of information.
Thomas Frank had warned of the real reasons for Trump's rise staring in March 2016. Here is a July 2016 article after the BrExit vote that warned the Dems. Click on the link and you'll see Obama pictured with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg famously want to depress American tech wages by having his own lobbying organization that tries to import more H1-B visa workers.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/19/reveng...
At Wednesday night’s GOP debate, Rubio was asked about his co-authorship of controversial legislation–- known as the I-Squared bill — that would triple the number of wage-depressing H-1B visas up to 195,000 per year. In Rubio’s home state of Florida, the Walt Disney Company used H-1Bs to lay off hundreds of American workers and force them to train their foreign replacements. Disney’s CEO has endorsed Rubio’s I-Squared bill.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2015/10/30/h...
President Obama even allowed spouses of H1-B to work, displacing and lowering wages of yet more American workers.
The intent of H1-B is only for jobs for which there are no Americans available. There should be an independent commission that reviews each and every one of these applications. Frankly, it begs credulity that there are 65,000 STEM jobs that are so specialized that there are no Americans to fill the roles.
But in each case, the Republican contenders and the major Democratic contender ignored the job issues. Sanders was also consistent with Trump regarding working class jobs.
You need to be more informed. Not any H1-B spouse is allowed to work. That provision was created as a bandaid fix to alleviate the problems of people (mostly Indian and Chinese) who have to endure a decade+ long wait to get a green card (due to the stupid EB country cap limits). While that wait continues, their dependents cannot work. By this provision, only spouses of workers who have a permanent residency petition approved but are not able file for a green card due to unavailability of numbers are able to apply. The estimated number of spouses expected to apply was around 179k out of which only about 37% ended up applying. In contrast, the US issues 860,000 green cards every year (non employment based) which by your argument should be displacing even more local workers.
And not all spouses work in the software field. My wife works in healthcare and this provision was a Godsend for us since it has been 5 years and counting since my green card was applied for by my company.
If this provision goes away or the immigration system does not improve for the better (reducing backlogs), we are seriously contemplating our future here.
179K * .37 is still > 65,000 jobs that Americans could have done filled by others and depressing wage conditions regardless of the field.
Remember that most of the people in the US on H1-B are here because the law which states that there must not be any American capable of filling the job was violated. That is the law.
The H1-B has been used by US firms many of which are very wealthy to try to drive down wage rates. That is the problem.
If someone is here on H1-B according to the law where there is no American with the skill set (perhaps a PhD nuclear physicist that deals with machine learning and nuclear reactions) then that is a completely different matter.
But any H1-B hired for almost any software development there are American that can do the job.
I don't quite understand the grief over spouses of H visa holders from India and China being allowed to work legally. The family, by then, have filed for a green card, made clear indication of wanting to immigrate to the country and are not allowed to do so only because of unfair per-country quota limits.
As an aside, I hope HR 392 [1] passes. It eases out the per-country quota limits for skilled immigration over 5 years. It currently has 173 co-sponsors in the house.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/392
I'm for enforcing the H1-B Visa law which means only for jobs where there is no American with the skill to perform it.
> I'm for enforcing the H1-B Visa law which means only for jobs where there is no American with the skill to perform it.
I don't mean to be snarky, but you really need to educate yourself on these issues better before commenting here.
The bill does nothing to increase the number of H-1Bs, nor reduce the enforcement of existing H-1B regulations. All it does it remove the long (decade+) backlogs for skilled immigrants from India and China.
So, in summary, this bill does not have any effect on your stated position - enforcing the H1-B Visa law.
The only bill that needs passing is one that rescinds all H1-b visas that don't follow the letter of the law including the Disney H1-b workers that displaced Americans.
It does not grant any benefits to anyone not already in the system and on the path to immigration, so no, it does not "allow more immigrants to <whatever>".
I'm wondering because I get the feeling that the general populace believes these positions (programming and everything related) pay pretty well. You might get the opposite feeling when browsing HN.
A small part of the visas (less than 10%) is used in the long tail by companies like Google and Facebook. They jobs pay relatively well. However because of difficulty in job mobility, the immigrant employees lose on negotiation and aren't paid we well as they could have gotten paid. At least these jobs do not displace American workers. The above companies have a lot of unfilled openings and if an American worker is available with the right skills, they would hire that person.
I, cynically, assume they're just going to be like "PHD is better than masters, is better than bachelor's" etc.
And if the intention is to solve the problem of jobs moving to India, create a law designed to fix that. H1 wasn't designed to fix this problem. Let it do what it was designed to do!
However current reality is that very few startups employ H1. I founded a startup when I was on H1 hired someone else on H1 and it was a pain to go through all paperwork. Right now, if the potential employee doesn't already have an H1 - the startup will need to apply for H1 lottery where odds are 1/4 and if they win it wait for 6 months before the employees can join.
Recently I built an Incubator where the intention was to pay market salaries while people try out ideas. And once the idea gets traction - raise funding and spin it out. Everyone on H1 refused to join the spin out because they didn't want to deal with the pains of being on H1 while dealing with uncertainties of a startup.
I hope that these regulations stop the abuse happening on H1. This will help in two ways: 1. No lottery - so people who want to move to US have a predictable path. 2. Better path for Indians to get Green Card. Right now the delay is insane (20+ years). Once they get Green Cards they can participate with more freedom.