H-1B abuse: Bay Area tech workers from India paid a pittance, feds say
mercurynews.com
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The solution is "EXTREMELY" strict penalties including prison time for board of companies who indulge in it willingly.
http://alexyar.tumblr.com/post/156649015342/anyway-heres-the...
(Canadian here btw).
"The nonimmigrant NAFTA Professional (TN) visa allows citizens of Canada and Mexico, as NAFTA professionals, to work in the United States"[0]
[0] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/employme...
No, it's not. (It's technically not even a way to be hired as an immigrant, and there are work-based immigrant visas as well.as other work-eligible non-immigrant visas.)
> If you made it wage-prioritized there would be basically no way to get an h1b for entry level jobs
That's not even theoretically the purpose of the H-1B, and I'm not really convinced we need to import entry level workers.
> which would really suck for new graduates.
I'm not sure “it would reduce the incentive for US colleges to train foreigners rather than Americans for entry-level jobs in high-demand, high-paying professions in America” is an argument against a policy change.
"The nonimmigrant NAFTA Professional (TN) visa allows citizens of Canada and Mexico, as NAFTA professionals, to work in the United States" [0]
[0] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/employme...
But I think there is a better way to fix the program and not have the kind of collateral damage that your plan would create. It's a method that's in use in many parts of the world and it works well...ratios. Let companies hire as many DHS-cleared immigrants as they want provided they also employ the requisite number of US citizens in similar roles.
This national auction for visas would be an economic disaster, resulting in immigrants being paid much less in areas that have higher a cost-of-living.
Companies could pay immigrants less than the prevailing wage of American citizens, and lay off the citizens. Immigrants would take the jobs too because it has the added value of the visa.
There are a fixed number of slots in the program. Requiring the highest paid employees take those slots would mean immigrant labor would be costlier.
Say you limit the supply so that only immigrants being paid more than $90/k yr gets approved. Now companies start laying off American citizens getting paid more than that in high-cost-of-living areas because they can hire replacement immigrants for $98/k yr.
If you look at the purpose of the H1B program, it's not to play a numbers game with wages - it's to allow skilled labor to come to the U.S. and contribute to the economy.
40% of Fortune 500 companies are founded by immigrant families, and if you keep lowering H1B quotas to make sure Americans survive the wage auction, you're going to stagnate the economy.
We control the supply completely, which means we control the price. We can set any floor, or regional floor we want, and we can keep the existing rules in place if we want as well.
The purpose is to allow new skilled labor into the U.S. so that the economy can flourish. The prevailing wage already sets the wage floor to prevent stagnation - scrapping it for a wage auction only creates more problems for American citizens working in skilled labor positions.
But honestly, I don't think that's needed except for a few areas like translators. If a company truly needs someone, they're going to be willing to pay.
Why not just eliminate the employer-sponsored H-1B and allow individuals who aren't personally barred from entry to pay for temporary residency and work permit on an annual basis, with prices that escalate with higher demand?
How could a company in Ohio compete?
Would have to adjust to living expenses of the location. But, as far a I know, H1B visas aren't tied to a location.
This is rather slippery way to paint the picture. And from the looks of it this is more of an abuse of the F-1/OPT visas program. These visas haven't got the coverage as much as H1B program:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2495580/it-careers/for...
Unlike H-1 the F-1/OPT visas don't have any wage requirements. It rather asks employers to attest that people on F-1 are paid according to someone with similar duties.
Workers were paid $800 a month during training, he said.
The whole training thing is another sword of damocles hanging on people getting H1/F1 visas. I have heard stories about Infosys suing people for money if they leave before serving 2 years on H1 with Infosys. The route Infosys take is that company has paid for training and needs to claw back that amount from these employees.
Other visas are also abused (J-1, L-1, even O-1). It wouldn't be that hard to have a saner immigration path for skilled workers, like Canada, Australia and many European countries.
Desi consulting shops are most to blame for. They learned tricks from big guys, it's easy to make big guys change their ways but not all these moms and pops shops.
Is it $175000 in back wages per person, or total for all 12 people? The wording is a little sloppy here.
Given that's what one might have paid for only two of those workers for a year at their expected salaries, this seems woefully inadequate as a deterrent.
Still, there's no deterrent here, you're correct. If they do again there may be real fines however.
Turn H1B into an auction. Lotteries are a terrible way to allocate a scare resource.
Companies could hire immigrants for less than what the prevailing wage is of citizens working the same job in the same area - then lay off the citizens.
And you're kind of overlooking that the program is already heavily used for what you're afraid of.
But, frankly speaking, I would not care about a dev who earns $150k in some tech company in the Valley if his salary will be closer to $80-$100k because of the free market. Those money could be better invested or spent on taxes.
Resume the brain drain.
1. Bank outsources to vendor. Typically IBM. “It’ll be cheaper!”
2. IBM is, initially, cheaper - because all of their staff are in India of course.
3. But they can’t do the job from India because they need to be here talking to their colleagues at the bank.
4. So they get flown to Melbourne, but still on Indian wages, where the poor souls live ten to an apartment because they can’t afford anything else.
5. The bank has now saved money by “offshoring” despite the workers actually being here in Australia.
It’s a disgrace and I have no idea why it isn’t in the news.
"Wait, everyone wants to get out of Mexico though. Why would you go there? My gardener cut off his testicle to come."
These are the sort of people who most desperately need to leave the tit to meet other people in other cultures but in my experience they are the least likely to.
On the other hand, the people leaving Mexico to be taken advantage of in the States are the most desperate. Just like these Indians. So if those are the only people you hear about from Mexico or India, you don't get an accurate picture.
Workers have a better shot at demanding a fair wage if they didn't have to face deportation if they spoke up.
What would happen if we opened the floodgates entirely ? Let's be 100% idealistic and just assume everyone reciprocates, China and the like magically become non-dictatorships, and so forth. Rule of law in rural Madagascar magically becomes as reliable as in the central cities of Switzerland. We just equalize the labor market worldwide.
What happens ? Well wages everywhere strongly trend to the worldwide average wage, and benefits. Okay ... so what is the worldwide average ?
1480 PPP$ or 600 actual $ per month. (source: ILO) (note: I would argue there are several reasons why this is too high, for instance this isn't a real average. This is pre-tax income of employed persons, and it's the mean: 80% or so of the population actually earns less than that. Pensioners, kids, disabled ... all earn $0 in these statistics)
And, by the way, you might think, this would make it cheaper to live in those places with high-paying job, but even a cursory analysis of what happens in Delhi will quickly correct you: no it won't. Places like Melbourne would likely actually become more expensive if you open the floodgates.
WHO would this be a desirable outcome for ? Well, there's 3 groups:
1) Obviously for the people currently in high-paying places this would be an extreme negative. They would face 60-70-80% pay cut without a real reduction in living expenses.
2) For people that would immigrate to those places it would be a slight improvement, or a wash. They would, after all, not improve that much in wages, would be far away from where they want to be and have to pay much higher living expenses. (and initially it would probably be a strong negative, as an outsourced wage pays for a lot of luxury in India and doesn't even approach the poverty level in Melbourne, but that's what they'd get. And with wages like that, they wouldn't be able to leave)
3) For the people staying behind this would be a strong negative. A pretty decent portion of the market would disappear (because people drive GDP, more than any other factor), which would mean that most industries would downsize. And that's to say nothing of China's and India's outsourcing sectors. Those would be utterly devastated.
A lot of people in Silicon Valley fall in the category that would benefit from moving (after all, that's why they're there), so they think that if it were to repeat, they would once again benefit. Even if that is a correct assessment (I don't think so, many Silicon Valley positions would be fine with dont-care-about-IT seat-fillers), that is still a tiny, tiny group. The vast, vast majority of people would fall into groups 1 and 3.
Like wages in the US are all equal to the national average? Like wages in the EU are all equal to the EU average?
Now don't be confused, you can be Indonesian or South American and be strongly culturally Dutch (though there aren't many). But you can't be Polish or Algerian, for example.
Or maybe it's just the pendulum swining back I guess. When democrats and republicans were young, new, parties, republicans were definitely left-wing and democrats were right-wing. Maybe it's just switching around again.
American tech companies are basically the richest companies on the planet, and they can well afford to hire and train American workers. In light of growing income inequality, it makes me sick to think that so many of the best paying jobs in the economy go to foreign nationals.
Oh, and, as I've said many times before, non-profits, which include basically all hospitals and universities in the entire country are exempt from the annual cap.
H1-B produces terribly unjust outcome for American workers.
And yet, the words "anti" and "h1b" in the same post ? -5 karma, at least !
Free migration empowers labor in the same way that free movement of capital empowers capital; real immigration systems in capitalist regimes tend not to favor free and reciprocal movement but instead are regulated to favor domestic capital, but it's a foolish leftist that is opposed to free migration rather than migration regulated to favor capital.
OTOH, H-1B is one of the most blatantly capital-serving elements of the current US immigration[0] system.
[0] well, it's really a guest worker, not immigration, program, though it's possible for people to move into the immigration system directly from it.
So in reality, free movement of capital is bad for 99.99% good for 0.01%.
However, I get it, it is a very popular illusion among business owners that this is not in fact true. That they could do better if they could just put their business in more places, deploy their money and capital more flexibly.
99% of them are wrong. Of course, you wouldn't be running a business if you didn't think you could do this, I get it. But time and time again it is shown: 99% of them can't.
No, it's a fact, which is why...
> It is a well established fact in economics that free movement of capital will concentrate the capital in fewer hands.
Yes, the nature of capital is such that policies which empower capital also accelerate it's concentration, whereas policies which empower labor decelerate (or even reverse) the concentration of capital.
Let's think about the power of labor for a minute. I think we can both agree that it's heavily contingent on its replaceability. When workers are difficult to replace they are naturally valued more highly. Doctors don't earn huge paychecks because there's some enormous value placed on their work, but rather because there are few doctors relative to demand and so each doctor has a very low level of replaceability. It's the same thing for jobs like athlete or actor. These workers become irreplaceable which gives them a tremendous amount of negotiating leverage.
Even unions can easily be seen in the same framework. Unions work to treat a large number of employees as a single force whose entire source of power and leverage comes from the fact that that 'single' force is less replaceable. This is also why unions in fields where workers are easily replaceable generally don't work (without some sort of third party protection or more underhanded tactics) as they are unable to sufficiently reduce their level of replaceability.
And I think we can also both agree that free migration would massively increase the replaceability of nearly all workers. I'm completely open to your idea, but I'm not seeing the logic!
Similarly, an economically right person might say that work visas are necessary to make certain kinds of labour affordable for business owners. A socially right person might say that work visa programs are abhorrent because they bring foreigners into the country.
"Left" and "right" are broad tents - they're sure to contain conflicting or mutually exclusive viewpoints on some issues.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3096103/it-careers/the...
It is very common for employers in the EVC model to pay well below market wages, and often withhold, or ask employees to pay back some of the money under the table, making the actual wage much lower. The employees are pretty much powerless - if they refuse, they would get fired and be forced to leave the country.
These employers often add fake projects or fake experience to their employees' resumes when offering them to a vendor or client.
There is only one solution - a massive clampdown on third-party placements on H-1B employers, as is already done on L-1 and STEM OPT employers.
Here's how I think the offshoring model works with many of these companies:
1) US company wants to get rid of its aging workforce (benefits costs will be too high, due to rising insurnace costs) 2) US (IBM, Accenture, HP etc) and Indian (Infosys, TCS etc) outsourcing companies bid on a project, get trained as replacements, jobs get offshored. 3) Quality complaints and rising costs of offshoring/outsourcing makes the company end the contract, and start hiring younger employees. 4) Profit! Firing / Laying off older employees in the US companies is not easy. But taking this route, the employer gets to wash hands off from the rising costs issue.
This problem with tech workers paid low is because: - Healthcare and Insurance is broken in the US (it works for those who are healthy and are in a company with younger workforce) - H1b is basically a high tech indentured labor visa: If an employer is willing, the employee on H1b can be treated as such (no job mobility, no hikes, no option to even raise a voice against something going wrong). Fortunately, those on H1b visa as employees of actual companies (not outsourcing firms), they are treated much better, and it doesn't feel like indentured labor.
Solution? Turn H1b, L1 and F1 OPT into time limited Green Card equivalents EADs: - An international student graduating with a degree gets a 3 yr green card equivalent work authorization - Once the student green card expires, give them a 6 yr green card (instead of an h1b). At the end of 6 yrs, if the employee has not been sponsored for an employment based permanent green card, he/she has to leave. - No limits on the number of these green cards available. - No H1b or L1 visa work restrictions. H1 and L1 dependents can work with a similar EAD.
How will this work? - Giving true job mobility and freedom to switch jobs at any time, without giving the employer any hold in the immigration process, helps bump up the wages for the employees (US citizens or those on 3yr temp green card). - Employee has no fear of job loss / retribution from employer. - Employer has to pay at market or above market salaries. Or else employee will jump ship. - This will automatically regulate the number of jobs that get outsourced to teams/companies that genuinely address the problem if inefficiencies, and immediately create a penalty for those companies that are body shops running on indentured labor. - Having H1 and L1 dependents be able to work (with the new green card equivalent EAD), enables the primary visa holder to risk it and start a new venture.
About me: I came to the US on F1, worked on OPT, got H1. now sick of the US immigration system, I'm moving to Canada soon! :D
Here's the content:
A dozen Indian workers at an East Bay technology firm were promised salaries of up to $8,300
Cloudwick Technologies of Newark has been ordered to pay about
Seriously, what is this East Bay area? Google turns up nothing.
Edit: Thank for pointing out my mistake. Looks like my understanding of US geography isn't that great.
Here in the Bay Area we have East Bay, South Bay, Peninsula, etc