Trump’s “Hire American” order makes it harder to get H-1B visas
axios.com
axios.com
Okay but let's also let americans compete on the level that they have an advantage in - Location. If someone wants to outsource, fine, but if they want workers in the states, it shouldn't be foreigners on temporary visas working there.
H1bs were a solution to the problem of having a cheaper, more locked down labor force without correspondingly making the execs themselves obsolete. It’s about bringing back a greater degree of authoritarian control in competitive labor categories where such behavior would otherwise make them unattractive to workers.
If companies are willing to open remote offices in Bangalore or Mumbai or Shenzhen, they should also be willing to open remote offices in Chicago, Denver, Austin, Atlanta, Boston, Toronto, London, or Berlin, or to just have remote employees that are not attached to any office building. And yet, many of them still want everyone on site in Silicon Valley.
Those companies won't go anywhere. They want everyone to come to them. It doesn't matter to them if the talent is in Islamabad or Sacramento, if the talent can't (or won't) relocate. SV is by no means the only place where that happens, of course. Some companies have gone all in on a single corporate campus, even when there are no particular economies of scale to be had in doing so. It makes the org chart simpler.
The problem is not in the workers, really. Most companies are completely incompetent at remote management and almost anti-competent at distributed management. Putting together a team that works well without physical proximity is a lot more difficult than periodically counting butts in seats and doing the "manager walk" behind everyone in your open-plan office, to make sure your direct reports at least look like they're working.
These numbers don’t mean there are less workers anyway, more people being denied can also mean the rules are less clear or applied in a more inconsistent way, or it could be that it has become easier or cheaper to apply.
In my personal experience, I have never seen a company hire someone on an H1B that wasn't seen as the best person for the job. Immigration status was simply a non issue at the sponsoring companies I've worked at. On the other hand, I've worked at places that rejected out of hand anyone that did need sponsorship because the company simply didn't have scale to hire immigration lawyers.
My understanding is that H1B isn't designed to expand the hiring pool but to fill a gap where the local pool is effectively 0.
Maybe that was the intent, but is that true in practice? My experience has been that it expands the hiring pool because most places simply want to hire the best skill they can get for the money.
Honestly, the idea that you're going to restrict H1B visas to scenarios where they couldn't hire an American first is very naive and misguided.
If American workers want to ensure their wages aren't being driven down, they have to abandon these antiquated policies that only benefit employers who want to hire cheap foreign workers because the policy artificially puts them at a disadvantage in the job market.
It's ironic that Americans think putting foreign workers at a disadvantage in the job market gives them an advantage. The truth is it ends up hurting them more because it's these policies that are the tools use to exploit foreign workers' situation. Why would you hire an American if you have the tools to hire and retain a foreigner who wants it more? If they have to find another sponsor, they're less likely to job hop or ask for a raise.
I've long argued that one reason H1B workers are low salaried is because H1B visa makes it harder for them to job hop and earn a better salary. Don't get me wrong, I know H1B visas don't prohibit switching jobs, but it does add enough fiction and it limits access to some employers.
I would love to see fair work visas inspired by Singapore's policies that empower foreign workers to earn market wages. It only makes sense to me that we should absorb as many skilled foreign workers as we can provided they earn some minimal threshold of a salary adjusted for the cost of living in their area. It shouldn't be too high as to make it impossible to get a visa, but it also shouldn't be too low.
Importing skilled tax payers is a great way to grow the economy and provide more revenue to the treasury.
Pushing away foreign workers is just bad policy. It will will only encourage outsourcing and offshoring of offices. That means local economies will never benefit from the wages of foreign workers. Offshore wages can't be taxed. You encourage other countries to accelerate the development of their own tech hubs at the expense of your tech hubs.
This would be win-win-win:
- Companies that truly need the talent will bid highly for a slot.
- H1-b employees will get paid more as quantities are limited.
- H1-b slots will be better utilized towards jobs that actually need specialization, not lower wage work.
- It'll probably be cheaper to "Hire American"
Downsides: Only FAANG and other large companies could afford such a system, but so what? What entitles companies to hire cheap labor anyway? A fix for this could also be to make it more expensive for each additional h1-b slot the company hires, I suppose.
What entitles you to decide what labor companies hire?
And two can play that game. Judging by your incendiary comment history on your account, why should I believe your question is in good faith?
I love it when people comment on my account name as if it were some sort of rebuttal. It exposes the lazy thinkers.
I don’t see how the bid system wouldn’t work for doctors and nurses
2016 H-1Bs [1] - 398718 submitted with 53456 denied = 13% denial rate
2017 H-1Bs [2] - 403675 submitted with 37993 denied = 9% denial rate
So it looks like the denial rate has actually decreased.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...
[2] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/nativedocume...
On the first table, it shows the total submitted is 398,718. The number approved is 345,262, which leaves at most 53,456 denied (398,718 - 345,262 = 53,456).
Many problems admit no pareto-optimal solution.
Part of the trick is that an H1B employee cannot complain about poor conditions, or low wages, because they're dependent on the sponsoring company.
If that was true, H1Bs would quickly force wages back up, and employers would once again freely compete for talent.
Do denied applications count towards the cap? If not, then this change can't be making it meaningfully "harder" to get a visa. If it's harder for one applicant to get a visa, it's easier for another who benefits from the first one being rejected.
Ideally this should benefit the really excellent applicants and disadvantage the body shop outsourcers, which is exactly the H1B reform HN is normally calling for.
The biggest flaw in the H-1B system is that it's a nonimmigration visa. A very common path, is to come to United States on an F-1 student visa, graduate, then get a job on an H-1B. But the H-1B is time limited, and indentures people to a specific employer. Get a crappy job, get low balled, you're screwed, and god help you if you don't start your green card paperwork early enough. Couple this with the limited number of visas, we're simply turning away talented people and encouraging them to go home and compete against the United States on the international stage. It's stupid. Instead, we should create a new visa that's allows anyone that graduated from an American university to stay in the United States, work get a job, change a job. Allow their spouse and children to come, and also work. Essentially, give them a diploma and a green card.
Do you think smart native students can't see that all the grad students are foreigners, all the entry level jobs are filled with H1Bs and F1 visa-holders, and that salaries aren't really that great compared to finance, or medicine, or dozens of other fields that have barriers to entry, or at least aren't completely overrun with workers from low wage nations?
Instead of letting the market work as it's designed - where demand pushes up wages, we flood the industry with labor and depress wages, then throw a few billion dollars at public school unions to teach kindergartners to program (i.e. buy IPads), and expect things to work out well. :/
Immigrants stay when you encourage them to stay. Not only do they get jobs contributing to the American economy, but they also have kids here.
None of this makes sense through any sort of economic lens. It does make sense, if all you care about is if people from different places, with different languages, different customs, and different looks aren't getting ahead in your society. There's a word for that. In fact, there are several of words for that, but I'll go with the simple one. It's racist. And just, so we're both clear, I'm calling you a racist.
If you switch jobs the other employer has to file the paperwork.
If you lose your job you have 30 days to find employment or you have to lesve the country- most immigrants would do anything not to be in this position.
1. Let everyone in
2. Let no one in
There has to be a middle ground, skewing on either side depending on economic conditions, job availability etc. You have to concede not all foreign workers are good (subjective I know and also I'm saying this as someone who is on H1B). So the idea of giving a green card to someone just because they have a US graduate degree is not wise at all. I believe that it is something that should be earned (I don't know what the definition of "earned" should be) not given away; I bet if the roles were reversed, us foreign workers would expect the same criteria in our home countries.
Not quite clear how exactly this data was collected and how reliable it is. Also what is "other data".
However a friend of mine has, at several different companies and in general has not been impressed. Specifically when a quote for single sign on was made for the customer, that it would take 3 months. He implemented the feature over a weekend...
This is in the "body shop" consulting side of the industry. I have heard similar complaints about H1b's in the cell phone and telecom industry as well.
EDIT to add: specialty cases as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, could well be different...
I imagine this test would discredit nearly every H1b software hire.
One workaround tactic I've read claimed on forums is the requirements stipulate that the candidate must work with offshore business analyst teams in their native language, which is not English. I can't believe it would be that easy, though. If that actually passes muster with federal immigration review, then these more stringent rules are just a paper tiger and political bluster.
Can you source that?
I think move to Canada makes the most sense. Similar laws to the USA, close and a similar set of advantages that you've described.
low salaries, high taxes/cost of living, less jobs and less dynamic job market.
If you operate outside the EU GDPR will apply to all your EU users if you are offering goods or services, or monitoring their behaviour in the Union. (3.2)
Just hire remote is not an answer for a lot of companies.
If you think you can just do some programming job in fire and forget you are going to be surprised. You have to actually think about what task to give to remote team and what not. What areas are strong for who and divide work accordingly it is a lot of work in itself.
Last but not least, there is ton of legal stuff, compliance, what type of customers you are tending to. Some big corps own specific parts of code and sending something outside country could get you into trouble.
Getting a german work visa for Indians is not easy. They don't have "liberal immigration laws" , just less competition than H1B.
H1B sounds good in theory, and I'll admit is a valid system for a small percentage of talented employees and companies working on hard problems.
OTOH, big business and the body shops have ruined it for the rest of us. If there is indeed a talent shortage, the most short-sighted thing you could do as a nation is to import foreigners, depress wages, and make the industry as unattractive as possible for current students.
BTW, I've worked in India and seen how the game is played both here and there, so I'm not just the typical xenophobe who's crying about Der took er jerbs (as if that wasn't a valid thing to be angry about).
But I know that people from any other country would NOT tolerate training foreign workers from lower-COL nations as replacements for their own job, and Americans now need to push back, too. Enough is enough.