US committee votes $30,000 increase in minimum salary of H1B visa workers
businesstoday.in
businesstoday.in
As long as the new minimum still clears the market and all spaces are still filled (I think they would be), all this bill does is replace the pool of H1-B visas awarded with a higher-paying one.
The quote "It also could disrupt the marketplace, threaten thousands of US jobs, and stifle US innovation" would only make sense if one would expect that lower-paid workers on average contribute more to US innovation, and are less likely to displace Americans. I would predict the opposite, or at least no effect. One might hope that the people companies are willing to pay top dollar for are the higher skilled ones that companies have trouble hiring enough of in the US.
It's interesting that the bill is a half-measure in that it doesn't take the idea to its logical conclusion and eliminate the lottery and sort applications by salary and take the top N, but I imagine that would be politically unpopular.
I think you could possibly argue against this bill perhaps for some kind of fairness reasons, but I think the arguments quoted don't make sense.
I'm not super familiar with data on the topic though, that would definitely be nice to see.
This is exactly what should happen.
It's the other side of that.
I can't help but think that the H-1B VISA program should be tightly restricted by industry and time-limited.
If we can't find programmers, our immigration policy should be to recruit them abroad and then find a way to put them onto a fast-track to citizenship. NAY...we should COMPEL them towards the process of citizenship lest they forfeit some amount of tribute.
In no way or shape should our immigration policy serve to distort the labor market here to corporate benefit. We should be seeking every possible mechanism to help our economy grow via the increasing demand for skilled labor here in the USA. That doesn't happen when you collapse demand for entry-level positions in the USA like H-1B has ben demonstrated to do.
We should also BAN in the strongest possible terms the practice of forcing an employee to train their replacement or put it under such onerous terms that no corporation would do it. I'm talking about the equivalent of a years salary in severance or more. If you can't do the job on day one, you have no business replacing a native worker who is doing the job.
Universities, for instance, would have real problems. Universities can often use other visa classes, but not always -- eg the J1 visa can't be renewed after five years.
The whole point of restricting immigration is to avoid the sort of race to the bottom that accompanies the corporate directive to get the best possible labor at the cheapest possible price. You only get that when you're able to cast a very wide net and allow in a population of people who can exploit geographic arbitrage to earn money in one area while planning to spend it in another. I'm specifically talking about people who have zero intention of ever relocating to the USA long-term.
It only makes sense to reserve the benefits of this country to those who invest in it. I'm specifically including corporations in that calculus. The goal of our immigration policy is to balance the needs of private industry against the interest of the state to compete on a global basis.
As a foreign prospective employee you are willing to let go of almost anything to get your nominal salary up high enough to be on the list. Its still a perverse incentive.
Companies can make second class citizens within: higher intensity and time of labor + lower benefits.
You can reduce PTO, you can reduce the quality of the healthcare plan, you can increase working times (ex. be on call on saturdays), you can assign the even worse and worse quality job opportunities (lots of current H1B's do bank-jobs, maintenance and dying tech jobs) etc.
If it were just the same, then what you need to pass is a law that bans all these other instruments like bonuses and equity. Id like to see americans in general say "it doesnt really matter, because I always looked at total compensation".
This just harms the poorer immigration in favor of the richer immigration. Its an active ingredient of inequality. For whose benefit?
It would increase inequality (marginally, H1B pool is still small), but I only think inequality is bad insofar as the poor are worse off. This just creates more wealth since in theory Google would only pay $200k+ if they're at least that productive at developing new useful things people want to pay Google money for. The US also gets more tax dollars, and more "innovation" insofar as that is a thing.
You could still argue it's better to give the large salary increases to poorer people though. I wrote another comment elsewhere with a list of reasonable potential arguments against top N sorting and this was one of them.
>I wouldn't take a high-stress poor quality job even if it paid really well
isn't really an option when doing so risks upending our lives. Even if we don't plan to stay here permanently (I don't), the risk of having the application denied creates an enormous pressure for us to maximize the salary number.
Another angle that is overlooked is that the H1B program isn't just for tech and finance people. I have friends in the creative industry who are on H1B too, and their salary is never as high as ours. In that sense, abolishing the lottery and prioritizing by salary would absolutely deny them any chance of working in the US. Now, if you take the absolutist position that the H1B program is only there to fill positions that are not filled by Americans, then perhaps you'd be OK with that scenario, but I think the diversity (in terms of industry and skillsets, not demographics) provided by the lottery scheme is an important benefit of the program.
I was writing what you quoted from my perspective, I'm a Canadian student who would like to emigrate to the US after I graduate. I have offers from companies in the US that are significantly larger than the still quite good amounts I could earn in Canada.
These offers are already large enough they could probably win a top N salary sort, if the bonus/stock was reallocated as salary. But, if they tried to make the job high-stress or low-quality in order to compensate for additional salary to win the sort, I'd just not take the job and stay in Canada. I imagine most people who could win top N salary sorts are also in enough demand in their home country that they could do well there (if not as well as in the US).
Like I said though, top N sorts would be politically unpopular , because among other reasons, people like me aren't good humanitarian targets for charity, and fair enough.
Ideally I'd say decide who immigrates based purely on economic reasons and use the marginal tax revenue of approving higher-paid people to increase aid. Back of the envelope math suggests that if you did that you could save ~7 children from dying horrible deaths by malaria every year of their career for every marginal top N immigrant rather than lottery immigrant. That helps a lot more poor people. But, I know this kind of thing also isn't politically feasible.
Why? I'm in the US with a work visa and the idea of having a lottery to decide who is allowed to work in the US is absolutely insane for me. It just does not make sense.
There's a lot of angles that people could get mad about:
- The "one percent" angle: The visas would help well-off people like me to earn extremely large amounts of money instead of merely large amounts of money in our home country. Instead of people from India/elsewhere who aren't as well off.
- the fairness angle: Almost all the visas would probably end up going to Silicon Valley, which may seem unfair to other industries and locations.
- lobbying angle: As someone else mentioned, the industries that profit off of cheap H1B workers, as well as industries outside of tech that couldn't pay enough, would lobby and advertise against such a change.
These same arguments all apply to raising the minimum salary, but just to a lesser extent.
I mean, I'd be in favour of sorting by salary, both from a selfish perspective (It would make it easier for me to get a visa) and because I think it would be better for the US in terms of bringing in highly skilled labour that is least likely to be competing with Americans (if you could hire an American, why would you pay a huge amount to win the visa salary sort?). I think there are much better immigration policies, but as far as tweaks to H1B go its solid.
But, I think it would be unpopular both among Democrats and Republicans.
" The bill prohibits H-1B dependent employers from replacing American workers with H-1B employees, there are no longer any exceptions. It also lengthens the no-layoff policy for H-1B dependent employers and their client companies for as long an H-1B employee works at the company, which means they cannot layoff equivalent US workers.
For H-1B dependent employers to be exempted from the requirement that US workers be recruited first, the Protect and Grow American Jobs Act dramatically increases the salary requirements for H-1B workers. "They must pay the lower of USD 135,000 which is indexed for inflation or the average wage for the occupation in the area of employment, but with a floor of USD 90,000," said a media release issued by the House Judiciary Committee."
This proposed changes would only apply to H1B dependent employers, which are employers with 15% or more of their workforce on H1Bs. Furthermore, there isn't currently and won't be if the proposed language becomes law, any minimum salary for H1B visa workers. Instead the salary mentioned acts as a safe harbor for H1B dependent employers to avoid certain steps they'd otherwise have to take in order to file additional H1B employee petitions beyond the 15% level.
Title of the story linked-to is quite sensational.
I'm not a fan of the current administration at all, but as a former (Indian) H1-B visa holder myself, I welcome this move. It's clearly aimed at the top 10 H1-B visa abusers, almost all Indian Companies - think Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant Technologies, Wipro, Tech Manhindra etc - who grossly underpay the Indian software engineers and abuse H1-B visa program.
Now these crooks won't be able to file Labor Certificate applications with very low prevailing wages, and I think this will help real startups and software companies everywhere in the US, who can't find top engineers in US for new technologies, hire people from Europe, Asia and other parts of the world who are qualified, and not just from India.
Code-monkey Indians and the companies that try to bring them in on low wages will automatically get filtered out.
Diversity is mostly just defined as "not White," so majority Indian, Black, etc. companies, are "diverse," they exist, and no one goes after them.
This is why you have those majority-xyz-race companies, but Apple's chief of diversity was fired for saying Whites can also be diverse if they come from diverse backgrounds.
That's why everyone should be treated as equals regardless of race, gender, religion, etc.
This convoluted system of privilege is concerning. Consider a poor White born into an abusive family, in a rural area, with no inheritance. This qualifies as "privileged" under current dogma. They pretend like these kinds of people don't exist.
It's more of a class war being disguised as a race war.
I'm pretty sure that's not true from a legal standpoint and is therefore only your opinion.
Huh? Casual racism.
I realize (because you say it below) that you're Indian so it feels ok to say this. That might be true in person, but not here. You're broadcasting to a far larger audience with far less information about your intent. In this context, subtleties with slurs (such as 'it's a self-slur too, so that's ok') aren't really possible. If you casually drop the slur in anyway, you're damaging the container that protects what little kindness we have here, so we'd appreciate it if you'd not do this sort of thing.
Added that this bill closes the loopholes for replacing local US workers mean that for a greater number of workers this is a much better situation.
All rules imposed by the government, not by Infosys and Cognizant. If those two companies can no longer hire these indian developers, then the indian developers will suffer along with Infosys and Cog.
One way or another, those workers will be competing with US workers regardless.
There are plenty of very good people who can't get an H-1 because the quota is used for cheap people. I came here on an H-1 myself and it was quite difficult because the quota got used by bodyshops. My life would have been easier if they had set a minimum salary.
This sentence feels dogmatic to me. I would like to see a bunch of citations, and even then it would be hard to prove the negative.
In any case(!), the economic principle at work here is the law of comparative advantage.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as...
To claim that protectionism improves prosperity is to claim that the law of comparative advantage is incorrect.
Of all the purported liberal ideas the U.S. thinks it embraces, restriction of immigration is one of the most baffling.
Protectionism is building prosperity in China today.
I'm not saying protectionism is always right, I'm saying do what gets results. Sometimes that's free trade. Sometimes that's protectionism.
Did you know that New York City was founded to get out from under protectionism, and became the economic capital of the world?
Correction, all countries that have ever existed restrict trade, and all of the most prosperous nations today heavily control their trade across nearly every industrial segment. The sole variance is the level of restriction or tariff that they utilize depending on their context or skill at trade & production.
That includes present day Germany (a big restrictor of trade, heavily tilting their export/import ratio to a $300 billion trade surplus), France, Britain, Japan. Even while the US market is more free than most when it comes to trade, it also heavily controls & restricts trade using tariffs and global trade bodies.
That particularly includes China, which has dramatically restricted trade into their nation. They've done so on purpose in order to buy time to build up their domestic giants, which has worked extremely well for them. They've been allowed to have their cake and eat it too for decades.
By itself, China proves that you can get extraordinarily prosperous utilizing trade restriction policies under the right circumstances.
All the richest countries we have today have been among the list of richest since before and after great changes in their protectionist policies.
It has been seen time and time again. It would be great is this meme were put to rest.
That's true. That doesn't mean it produces prosperity. Consider that those same countries impose sanctions on other countries to punish them.
How is a sanction different from protectionism?
Consider also a more comprehensive implementation of protectionism - Smoot-Hawley, which is credited as being a major cause of the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...
This has been one of the ways in which China has improved technological innovation at an incredibly fast pace.
This rule was long in coming. Low wage body shops wasn't doing anyone any good.
I think that the main benefit is to have higher quality H1Bs. There are many talented temp stays who lose the lottery to less talented people and have to leave the US. Salary can be used as a heuristic for talent.
Of course they aren't making too much of a noise about it as they're smart.
These policies are already backfiring.
If that means companies discover that you don't have to be in California to do tech that would be a good thing . Bring on the foolishness I say .
I would like to add that I'm not talking about this policy in particular but the growing sentiment against even skilled immigration.
I would wager a great deal that not only will all slots still be allocated but that demand will continue to far outstrip supply. The number of workers excluded from the US will be identical as to that under the previous rules but those granted H-1B visas will be paid closer to what their American colleagues are.
Almost 199k applications for 90k slots.
what makes you think they aren't? I work for Red Hat. It is an amazing company to work for. But our main technology center is in the Czech Republic, where the cost of living is 40% lower than the US. Those are absolutely great engineers to work with, and despite some of the alarming comments here they are absolutely as high quality as any US engineer if not more so. But the fact remains that their salaries are spent overseas and not here in the US.
This is why the point of free trade is to raise the standard of living in those nations so that not only does life get better for everyone around the world, but also other nations no longer act as a cheap drain for jobs that pay artificially higher wages domestically. It's a huge idea that has worked in many ways, raising US GDP vastly beyond what it could be under heavy protectionism (think: the whole world as your customer base as well as your production base vs. just the US). But it also failed spectacularly in that it isolated low skilled workers in the US who became even more resentful of foreigners than they already were, who then went ahead and elected a facist government. Whoops.
Id take it for granted that eliminating H1B visas would increase wages for software engineers: obviously at a cost for everyone else. Anything else in the middle to that will have a proportionate effect.
It relates to H1Bs that are contracted out to other employers where those H1Bs are at least 15% (slightly higher thresholds for employers with under 51 employees) of an employer's workforce. They are colloquially known as Body Shops. The legislation as it stands allows the DoJ and DoL to investigate/prosecute these employers unless the employee makes a certain minimum salary OR has a masters degree. This is a good thing since it specifically targets the abusers of the H1B program while leaving most employers alone. The minimum salary will go up to $90k and the threshold will go up from 15% to 20%.
The proposed bill removes this too.
Also, you imply that immigration restrictions decrease cost, but it's quite the other way around.
immigration restrictions raise salary for people like me, citizens. Most countries have some form of immigration restriction for similar reasons.
100, 10K, 100K, million?
N is currently 65,000 with another 20,000 for US advanced degrees.
Which is fine if you follow history and just accept the rise and fall of empires.
There aren't enough CS grads in the US to fill the demand as education is so crazy expensive. Foreigners have skewed the system since forever, see all the 1st generation founders.
The constant feed of well-educated foreigners to the US is coming to an end. Someone else will collect that talent. Whoever that is will dominate. Tencent passing FB in market value should be a big clue where we're heading.
There aren't enough CS grads sure, but I don't think the price of education is the reason. A CS degree costs the same as any other bachelor's and there are plenty of grads with business or liberal arts degrees. A much bigger factor I think is that CS, engineering, the sciences, etc are hard, challenging fields.
There never was a skill shortage. Only a pay shortage.
Wages have been FLAT vs rising inflation for ages, mostly due to labor over-supply.
In software engineering? Are you kidding?
Both being, ironically, the qualities his base finds most appealing about him, and which probably got him elected to begin with.
I would have loved to see some de-regulation in the employment effectively removing the reasons of foreign talent being lock in to a company, thus not having a negotiation power which results in lower salaries.
In my opinion nationality based employment opportunity differences are no different to race or gender based ones.
Don't get me wrong, I actually don't advocate global free movement of labour, I just highly dislike artificial ways like salary caps or employer lock ins to manage it.
There isn't an effective visa that allows a tech innovator to bootstrap a company in the US. I can get my company to ramen profitability with minimal funding, but I cannot sponsor my own visa because my startup coffers can't afford to pay a founder-coder $150,000 salary. If you don't have multiple advanced degrees or a magical track record of successful companies or something, you can't get an O1 visa. You have to waste a bunch of time and money daisy-chaining educational visas and associated work authorization from cheap community colleges until you get your company established. We all know building a sustainable product and company is hard enough without arbitrary obstacle courses to waste your time on.
Having experienced this first-hand, as a cofounder who had to leave the country for 2 years and work remote until we had gained enough recognition and a warchest to justify an O1 visa for me.
I'm not saying the solution is to ignore payscale for H1B's, but until there's a more appropriate visa for an entrepreneur (which by definition has to have simple initial requirements, low cost and reliable success, maybe with down-the-line auditing for extensions), it would be certainly help innovation if the H1-B weren't denied to all the international bootstrapped company founders.
Is it that you need the US presence to be closer to customers or partners, establish some type of perceived legitimacy, prepare yourself to bring on investors in the US, or perhaps something else?
So now you can be a high school graduate but if you earn 135k or higher, you are eligible for an H1B? Am I reading that right?
Also, would this affect (say) a postdoc virologist in Ohio trying to get an H1B? Or is this just for programmers in Silicon Valley?
Then, some Infosys employees report that they do not receive the minimum H-1B salary in practice, and that they're forced to give their tax return money back to their employer. I do not know if these reports are true, but I think they should be aggressively audited.
To that you need to add that the Infosys business culture, as reported by their own employees, is not the kind of business culture you want to assimilate.
Then, if there are more applicants than spots, naturally the US could rank them and pick the best.
If this actually makes it through and becomes law, I'm curious about the possible impact on those older workers. Since in some cases it seems like those older workers are back in the job hunt because of companies closing up their in-house IT in favor of outsourced contracts, this seems like it might be directly applicable at least there.
you can change jobs on an h1-b.
Absudity by the reverse: if it is not problem, how about a law that makes it equally cumbersome for visa holders and americans to make jobs. It can't possible harm americans, and it will satisfy the irrational demands of those that see a difference.
I wish they made getting an H1B even harder to get.
Canadians still have it easier since you can work on a TN and try the lottery many times.
Immigration is starting to reject renewals - ref Canadian nurses working in Detroit [1]. I have family members who are being refused TNs.
Personally, I get worried crossing the border and I'm on an H1-B.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/canadian-nurses-workin...
I'm not saying my thought was controversial or even wrong (the thought being that predominately white Canadians fit in better with predominately white Americans), but I'll bet most HR people would deny that it has any influence on their hiring practice.
It explicitly does not allow a path to citizenship, so you have to transfer to an H1-B to get a green card. If your intent is to attempt to get a green card, you are in direct violation of a TN visa and can be deported.
Unlike those jammy Australian bastards (they get a visa that looks like an L1! So jealous), spouses cannot work on the TD (visa for partners/dependents of TN holders). This means your partner cannot work if you're on a TN until you first transfer to a H1-B and then transfer again to a green card. For a Canadian, the process is probably 2-3 years to get an H1B, and then another 2 years to get the green card. Reducing the competition for an H1-B will reduce the length of time spent in the first step of this process.
Indians and Chinese people have it much, much worse. The length of time after their green card approval to when they are granted one is quite literally measured in decades.
The inability for spouses to work causes a lot of stress on relationships. Spouses get depressed, angry and feel a complete loss of independence. They no longer have a career nor their "own" money.
If they're canadian, why don't they just get their own TN?
However, the ability for spouses to work also affects all H1-B holders, and they're a much, much larger group for a much longer period of time.
Bring in the best only, and $90k is a good salary requirement
Because making the iPhones abroad takes jobs from americans and lowers their wages. You wouldnt want 30k a year chinese people taking jobs from Americans would you.
"Those damn hicks, they're so selfish and backwards, and quite possibly racist...
...ah yes but let's cut down on the foreign IT workers bringing down my own salary"
Instead, the consultancy companies would have to raise their wages by 30k if they wanted to keep on submitting tens of thousands of H1B applications.
India is exporting it's poverty all over the world and taking advantage of the US.
We can't all just close our eyes and let them keep coming here and taking jobs that pay 30%-40% of what a fellow US employee gets payed.
Just look at Sabre Systems, Toyota, etc in the DFW area. There are more Indian employees now on H1B visa's than there are American employees. It's in the 1000's and I'm not kidding all because they can work them like dogs and threaten to fire them at any moment and pay the what a office admin would earn.
How does this benefit the USA other than decreasing labor costs for corporations at the expense of American jobs.
I would like to scrap the whole H1B program all together, it would only be good for American Employees.
What an insane proposition. Its exporting its labor, and us is buying it. And its a better price for both the US and for the Indian person to bring the labor into the US than to keep it there or not have it at all.
indians (and everyone else on the planet) simply pursue what looks to be a good option. it seems goofy to blame a person for pursuing decent options available to them, so they can better provide for themselves and their family.
your whining should be at the legislators who enact policies you disagree with, not with people just trying to live a decent life.