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Comment by dmode | Hacker News Reader

As an H1-B visa holder, on EB2 green card queue for 7 years, and in the US for over 12 years, working for a FAANG in the Valley, make a ton of money, I must say it is kind of grinding reading repeated headlines (in HN and elsewhere) about how I am the enemy of the American worker.

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I know the politics are complicated, so take this with a grain of salt, but I can't help but think that the easiest way to keep H1-B visa holders from taking high tech jobs away from American citizens is to make them American citizens. :)

yes yes yes

That's a great answer! Barring that, just hand H1-B people a green card or something that makes it easy for them to switch jobs. That means they can easily compete for the same wages everyone else gets, rather than being stuck with one company.

"Give them a green card" is essentially the same thing - the standard track to citizenship is ... -> green card -> citizenship, you pretty much never jump straight to the latter. Generally speaking, green card holders can apply for citizenship after 5 years, and it's pretty hard to be ineligible for one, but not the other (some people prefer to stay on green cards for other reasons).

A lot of H1-B's don't want to become American Citizens and are satisfied with obtaining a green card.

Citation needed

As the adage goes, we don’t hate the player, we hate the game. Companies local and international are gaming the visa process at the expense of American workers.

Just as China or Japan don’t owe Americans jobs, we don’t owe foreign nationals jobs.

That said, there are good cases for H-1B visas when we don’t have local talent. It has good uses, but it gets abused and there’s the rub.

Hating the player vs hating the game is a distinction without a difference as the manifestation of the hate is on the individual. I sincerely believed that unlike China and Japan, US is the land of immigrants where you work hard and there is a path to citizenship. I guess I fell for the attractive marketing there.

Given that we’re still politically organized by nations, governments owe allegiance to those who have nurtured that government to do good by its people.

That’s to say, protect our workforce, but where it makes sense, import labor to bridge gaps in skills or labor pool. America will always allow immigrants and will always welcome those who go through the official process (we allow in over one million legal immigrants yearly). But we must also be vigilant against abuse as many of these so called body shops do. You may be a bona fide needed professional skilled worker and thanks for your contribution, but for every you there is a doubiously skilled H-1B undermining the system.

Here we might be able to get a glimpse into part of the problem that the US is having with its immigration system, that certain jobs are linked directly with certain immigration status (in a sense of semantic interdependence). And thus, whenever someone who is a current US citizen loses his job, entirely (e.g. layoff) or partially (e.g. wage cut or reduced working hours), then an assumption based on equivalence arithmetic can easily arise for him that the part of the job he loses would be occupied by another person, who is very likely an immigrant, due to that 2nd degree link (from his perspective in reasoning) between job and immigration status. But the root cause for his job loss can be much more complicated (if we thinks a bit harder), and more real, than someone who was born in another country and fresh-off-boat took that job away (or stole, if the process was not a concrete thing that could be touched or seen)...Then suspicion, hatred, and sometimes even aggressiveness naturally follow...

But the job market, in its traditional sense, can still shrink, as long as there is increasingly more automation and growing average productivity in our society, even if we chase away all the workers born outside the United States who are not US citizens, and build a wall to create a certain physical separation between us and them. But would we hate and become aggressive towards our new machines and our more productive way of working? Sometimes we would...But it's still much easier to do that towards a living person, especially when he is more vulnerable, legally, than us on our land...

Perhaps the most interesting point here is whether such exclusion, expulsion or isolation could eventually solve our problem...Admittedly, they really work sometimes, for us, and for certain other nations throughout the history, for this or other problem or "question" -- and this indeed is our problem (or at least we have a share in the overall situation) -- and perhaps it's not our responsibility to worry about what that would leave those who are not the "same" as us to...

But is this really the best solution? And best in what sense, and best for whom?

For what it's worth, I don't think there's anything wrong with having an H1B. The system of tech consultancy companies (some of which are American) staffed up by H1Bs are what is being abused, where there are already people doing the job being directly replaced.

You absolutely are not the enemy. I've worked with tons of H1Bs who explained the hoops they had to jump through and ongoing citizenship issues they faced. The system is convoluted and it's difficult to have a discussion that doesn't descend into race-baiting garbage.

I feel the real threat to American workers as a whole isn't about individual (hard)workers rather entire departments being outsourced to overseas companies as a proxy to void the rights Americans are entitled to in order for some middle manager to show increased profits because the money comes out of a different 'bucket'.

H1B 'outrage' articles are just a distraction. The crap you guys have to go through to come here is insane.

You are not. But others from your country are (the ones coming through staffing companies). It is tough to be punished for being from a wrong country. Maybe people like you should speak up more and join in fighting the H1 system abuse instead of joining with the abusers in demanding more visas?

The only thing that would happen had they allocated more visas - more people would be brought. You will still be stuck.

We have been fighting and have sponsored specific legislation to alleviate this. But there is no appetite in the US government to reform immigration. There are no votes there.

It is not the engineers. It is the staffing companies that abuse the system. The engineers are just pawns in the game.

But you're not, and insisting that others say you are seems to be a bit of a melodramatic strawman.

The H1B system has been abused by corporations. This has been to the detriment of American workers and H1B holders.

It is not a strawman. The Trump administration views ALL H1 workers as detrimental to the American economy. My H1 extension with a FAANG was denied last year and I had to jump through thousands of hoops, beg managers who I haven't spoken with in 10 years, beg HR of companies that I left decades ago to give me specific, USCIS approved reference letters.

Nothing you wrote in anyway refutes the article's points. If the article is correct, should your feelings be put ahead of the economic wellbeing of citizens of a nation of which you are not a citizen? If the article is not correct, then there are arguments you can make that don't involve your emotional state.

The framing of the article is incredibly rude and dehumanizing to the workers themselves, while burying the actual lede (global outsourcing companies) deep at the end of the page.

It's part-and-parcel of the New York Times to lay the blame for bad policies at the feet of the people least in control of and most harmed by those policies.

It's objectively bad reporting.

For perspective, remember that "12 years" means that you were working in the US throughout the "Great Recession", when hundreds of thousands of residents with tech degrees were unemployed and underemployed.

In the same situation (not FAANG, earning a lot less), but been here almost 10 years, in the queue for close to 5 years.

One must understand that not all H1B folks are the same. Some are genuinely highly skilled and add a lot to the existing workforce. I do agree, some do not really qualify as highly skilled. Maybe the cap on the annual salary to be qualified for H1B should be higher.

Congrats. I was a H1-B holder myself and I agree.

How did you manage to get beyond the 6 years limit for H1-B?

Once you have your I-140 approved, you can extend your H1B for 3 years unlimited number of times.

Once you've got a green card application in, you can renew your H1B yearly ad infinitum.

Begin Greencard processing and get I-140, after which, you can keep extending your H1b beyond 6 year limit.

The problem is that until you get a green card, you're on a fairly short leash.

The solution is to make it easier to get a green card.

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