DHS weighs major change to H-1B foreign tech worker visa program

After uprooting your family and bringing them to the States, you have zero bargaining power. It's a pretty dark system.

Frankly the whole original point of H-1B was to bring in awesome people and encourage them to stay if they showed they brought enough value.

It should, as you said, be attached to the person with a fixed term (10 years?), then at the end of the term there should be a "job interview"-like process where it is determined if this person has brought enough value. If they succeed hand them a Green Card.

Employers should still help them get the initial H-1B to show they have a job and that their credentials are credible. But after that the employee alone should hold the H-1B and be allowed to jump ship if they're unfairly treated or poorly compensated (after all the point of H-1B was never to get CHEAP labour, it was to get GOOD labour).

The fixed term also gives them more personal security, without the threat of being kicked out with little notice.

H1B is not an immigrant visa. It’s a temporary visa. Also pretty much everywhere in Asia has the same kind of visa and it’s always tied to the employer. This kind of visa isn’t some uniquely American outlier.

The number of lottery tickets one application gets should be proportional to the salary (for example, 1 ticket for every 10k salary after 80k/yr)

The choice is not to play this game and go back. Of course there are consequences, but its all about the mindset and staying away from building one's life/mindset around "h1b -> greencard -> citizenship". For me, it is one possible outcome in my life.

While it's described that way, I don't think the statement accurately conveys the right kind of meaning. US immigration law uses intent as a principle: if you're in the US on a non-immigrant visa and you're suspected of having intent to immigrate, then that's grounds for cancelling the visa. That makes sense for tourist visas.

But H-1B visas (along with L-, V- etc.) are explicitly dual-intent visas, so intent to immigrate doesn't put them at risk. So calling them non-immigrant visas is potentially misleading because they don't carry the same intent risk. They're a kind of halfway house.

What happens now is that people are hired in the H1B status, which is, by definition, a status for temporary worker. And then the vast majority of them suddenly realize that the job is not temporary (wow, surprise!) and they need to be in a permanent status to do this job, nobody else can (here is the proof that we tried to find somebody and failed, honestly!). So they need to go through adjustment of status (AOS) process to change their "temporary worker" status to the "permanent resident" one. Of course, while the process is going, the worker is in a vulnerable position. On one hand, he or she just claimed that they have been in the wrong status (by requesting it to be adjusted) so their temporary status became even more temporary, so to say. On the other, the EBGC has not been granted yet so the worker remains in the state of, essentially, temporary suspended deportation. For the great benefit of the employer, of course.

Don't you find this strange that so many companies fail to estimate permanency of their jobs? Don't you think they might be doing this intentionally in order to exploit the AOS process?

Also this hurts only Indian and Chinese people and not the usual white people coming from say Canada or Germany.

They can't do that by executive action; they are attempting to limit the program without Congressional action.

> I understand that H1B is a non-immigrant visa, but if this change goes into effect, most people won't even apply for the H1B because it would make no sense.

It makes perfect sense as a limited term work visa; this would reduce the significance of the dual intent nature of the visa that allows immigration intent unlike other non-immigrant visas, but that's arguably peripheral to the purpose of the visa.

This affects individuals who have green card applications pending and are being granted 1-year extensions while their applications are pending due to a country-based quota system and thus backlog.

The only way this would not affect these individuals is if they remove the quota and backlog and grant green cards immediately, but it doesn't sound like the Administration is planning to do that with the talk of "self-deportation" and all.

Instead, they just plan to stop the 1-year renewal and effectively kick these individuals out of the country, even if they like their current status and have been waiting for a decade for a green card.

I fail to see how this is a step in the right direction for these workers.

AC21 contains a lot more than H-1B extension. It increases job portability which absolutely is the right direction.

I'm standing in the same line as you are, and I have the exact same choices. My choice is to leave the US and go back to India - and take all the money back to India, of course - the money that would've been spent in the US.

I do agree that some clarity on whether one will get permanent residence or not is better than this suspended animation we are all in today. Even a definitive "no - you have to go back" is better.

Edit: Changed "visa" to "permanent residence"

Also, ratios should be in place to prevent abuse of immigrant visas. Ensuring that employers are only able to utilize immigrant visas when they're already employing a significant majority of Americans is also a win-win and prevents abuses like the consulting companies that hire almost exclusively foreign workers. It also socializes immigrant workers better to ensure that they're not isolated in immigrant groups with little exposure to US culture and language.

As an American, I'm less concerned with where someone was born than I am with where they want to live their life, raise their family and retire. The current H1B program doesn't seem aligned with getting immigrants to commit to a life in the US. It seems designed to encourage foreign workers to put their foreign life on hold for a few years to come to the US, make a lot of money (relative to what they'd earn in their own country) before returning to resume their lives there.

As an India I find India far worse than slavery in USA that is why I am in USA in first place.

I request Indian employees to gang up and try to move their jobs to India so we can build better industries in India.

So? That’s a problem for their government to solve, not mine.

Vancouver, Montreal, and Waterloo are major tech cities. There's cutting-edge research paired with major companies and univerisites. You might have heard of a few small companies such as "shopify", "500px", or "kik". Canada is 6% tech.

But there's a bit of ramp-up delay. Canada has nearly the population of California. There's a practical limit to how fast growth can take place. There are also other factors, such as weather (it's -26C in Montreal today), and salary (you will earn less as a canadian permanent resident than you will on a H1B in the states).

It is time to stop incorrectly weighting race as a factor in American politics, as if it's a solved problem, or as if it's a central problem, or as if it's an unsolvable problem. But more importantly it's time to stop pretending most Americans aren't racist, or that the problem is getting better with Xers and Millenials. Ignoring the depth of racism in the country is how people draw the wrong conclusion that Trump is some kind of black swan event. As well as the very specious idea that this gets better with Millennials.

The American National Election Studies, the long-running, extensive poll of American voters, asked voters in 2012 a basic test of prejudice: to rank black and white people on a scale from hardworking to lazy and from intelligent to unintelligent. The researchers found that 62 percent of white people gave black people a lower score in at least one of the attributes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/clinton-wasnt-wrong-...

https://www.thecut.com/2015/01/millennials-are-less-tolerant...

Once it becomes law you can ask for people with decency to resign.