US plans to strip H1B immigrants' spouses of work permits
sfchronicle.com
sfchronicle.com
Here’s a good yardstick for citizens: for any given immigrant policy X (or heck, any policy X on any subject), would you want to live that way? If “no”, the policy is Wrong. Period.
These policies also keep trying to restrict immigrants without paying any attention to the benefits that companies receive, and indeed that citizens receive, when there are immigrants. First, the basic one: more people = more customers to buy stuff in your local economy, broader tax base, etc. Second, sometimes the entire presence of a site is based on filling a certain minimum number of jobs. A site with 1000 people that has 300 immigrants is not “300 stolen American jobs”, it’s +700 jobs that wouldn’t have otherwise existed for citizens; or, it’s a site that wouldn’t be able to do as much otherwise, possibly causing the entire company to fail in some way that ends up costing U.S. jobs all over the place, even at other sites.
Policies should never be “death by 1000 cuts”, either. Politicians keep finding ways to make things that they don’t like unnecessarily hard, just because they haven’t found a way to kill them off entirely. Well, frankly, that kind of thing is crap.
But understandable, companies that use H1Bs tell us that the H1B holders are highly compensated and doing work that no available Americans can do.
I live in the bay area and I hear (rightfully and often) about the ways that xenophobes make life harder for immigrants (H1b / illegal / otherwise), but I never hear people commit to making the changes they can make here or prioritize the election of officials who will do things like approve enough housing to make it possible to get a 1 bedroom apartment for less than two thousand dollars in SF / Palo Alto / San Jose.
We're a long way from thinking like this. First, let's get most of the country to stop treating immigrants as the enemy.
With H1B visa cap this is literally true
When did H1B turn into a family work visa ?
Not a great test. I would want to live in a place I couldn’t vote, but prohibiting immigrants from voting is good policy.
H1B is a visa. They are visitors.
That being said, visitors should be able to work and so should their relations if they are allowed to visit as well. One shouldn't need the blessings of the federal government to earn a living.
Red herring. He made no such claim. Dual intent acknowledges that these people aren't just visitors, they may stay forever.
Go “visit” New York or San Francisco for 2-3 years (the length of a visa) under the same constraints as visa holders and see how far your money goes.
The title is exactly what the new policy means.
This rule only applied after waiting six years in the green card queue. Is 90k folks in the entire US really that high when fields like Computer Security have 0% unemployment? This might end up encouraging offshoring.
Country based discrimination at it's finest.
Born in the wrong countries(China/India) = 70 years waiting for a green card and dying before your spouse can legally work.
Born in the right countries = Green card in 7 months and being able to work instantly.
The fact that some countries have a decades long wait list and others do not is not because different countries are being treated differently. They're all of them being treated the same. The wait lists are a result of more people from some countries wanting H1Bs and fewer people from other countries.
Of course I agree that this state of affairs is not good. It is stupid to me that countries with 1M people get the same number of visas as countries with 1B people. But it's important to understand the proper causes of problems if you want to fix them
If people want to immigrate, then isn't the correct choice to obtain an immigrant visa?[1]
An H1B is a non immigrant visa[2]:
"Temporary worker visas are for persons who want to enter the United States for employment lasting a fixed period of time, and are not considered permanent or indefinite."
So I'm confused. How is it some kind of tragedy when the visa under which you are working doesn't provide a quick path to a green card? Isn't the visa doing exactly as advertised? Furthermore, providing the H1B spouse with a work permit -- doesn't that mean that the spouse can work in a non-shortage occupation without restriction? Doesn't that necessarily mean that the spouse is able to compete with Americans and permanent residents for jobs that are not hard-to-fill? Basically 1 work visa provides 2 jobs? That doesn't seem like the intent of the H1B program which is to provide temporary workers of high ability to fill specialized jobs for which there are verifiable shortages. It certainly isn't designed to be a recruiting tool for big tech: "Come work for us and your spouse can get a job too! The salary is lower than an equally qualified American, but since your spouse gets to work too, you'll have enough money to live in San Jose and maybe one day, you might even get a green card!" That seems to be the promise the H1B crowd is expecting.
I'm not opposed to immigration -- but H1B isn't about immigration; it's about filling otherwise unfilled jobs in specialty occupations for which there aren't enough qualified Americans. If the sole purpose is to fill shortages, then providing the spouse with a free-riding right to work in any occupation (not shortage areas) is not consistent with the purpose. If H1Bs can't afford to have a non-working spouse, then they ought not accept the jobs at the salaries offered. What's happening now is that the working spouse's job is actually a subsidy to compensate for an H1B wage that is lower than it should be. That lower H1B wage is then being used to displace American workers.[3]
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat... [2] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/employme... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
>So I'm confused. How is it some kind of tragedy when the visa under which you are working doesn't provide a quick path to a green card? Isn't the visa doing exactly as advertised? Furthermore, providing the H1B spouse with a work permit -- doesn't that mean that the spouse can work in a non-shortage occupation without restriction? Doesn't that necessarily mean that the spouse is able to compete with Americans and permanent residents for jobs that are not hard-to-fill? Basically 1 work visa provides 2 jobs? That doesn't seem like the intent of the H1B program which is to provide temporary workers of high ability to fill specialized jobs for which there are verifiable shortages. It certainly isn't designed to be a recruiting tool for big tech: "Come work for us and your spouse can get a job too! The salary is lower than an equally qualified American, but since your spouse gets to work too, you'll have enough money to live in San Jose and maybe one day, you might even get a green card!" That seems to be the promise the H1B crowd is expecting.
The problem is that everything you wrote currently applies to only two or three countries. For H1B from all other countries, H1B is a pathway to green card in as low as 7 months upon which their spouse gets a green card and work authorization. How is that fair?
If H1B is all what you claim it is, why are these people getting green cards and work authorization?
How is that fair?
"Fair" goes both ways.
Born in some countries... have almost zero chance of getting any visa at all.
That way we'd see less abuse as far as some really low level work just being imported for cheaper. At one point you could search active H1B jobs on a government site somewhere, I found what looked like basic customer service positions being filled for pretty low wages. I really doubt they couldn't find someone to do the job, just they didn't find them willing to work for cheap / tethered to the company via an H1B...
We can do this well. Here:
The salary is bid for based on family income percentile in the county. There is a minimum of being at the 99th percentile, and also a minimum of half the salary being at the 90th percentile. Salary is paid to the federal government, which then pays the employee. After the income tax is paid, the federal government collects an additional 50% of the salary from the employee. To cheat this system, an employer would somehow have to demand that the employee issue a payment back to the employer. This should be punishable by the employer going to prison.
If they are willing to pay a lot...I'd say there is a fair chance they really do want that person and they're worth bringing in.
Customer service may be lower if that's what the market bears, but the individual should probably be able to speak e.g. Japanese (at a professional corporate level) and the company can't find that individual locally. The $100k minimum would hurt those companies here (and cost Americans lost tax revenue and jobs). It's an interesting system.
I don't think a minimum would work as you say. The jobs I found were surprisingly common. I think the system is being heavily gamed. We've already seen evidence of companies choosing to do the minimum amount to claim they tried to find local talent with the explicit intent of using H1Bs.
I think you're describing the intent of the systems, and in your area it might actually work, but there's a lot of evidence that it is used in other ways.
The idea that a nation of 350 million people can't supply the workers needed for the US economy is nonsense. What it really means is that corporations want to use foreign workers to cap wages. Or it could be that corporations and governments haven't done a good job developing the work force they needed. That's their problem, not the american people.
I can see a temporary workers program being useful after a catastrophic event like a world war where millions of your people are killed and you need to rebuild. But in peacetime, it's not needed.
Having said that, I'm actually for immigration. But H-1B isn't immigration, no more than human trafficking is immigration.
Immigrants, like Jerry Yang and Sergei Brin, can start and own businesses. Do you know what H-1B visa holders are forbidden to do? They can't start or own businesses. Interesting huh? I laugh whenever pro-H-1B visas try to lie about how H-1B visas is the reason why Yahoo and Google exists. When H-1B explicitly prevent you from starting businesses. Had Yang and Brin be H-1B visa holders rather than being actual immigrant americans, they would not have been able to create yahoo and google.
So the H-1B visa was created so that foreign workers can compete against american workers, but not against american business owners. Isn't that great for business owners?
If you are for immigration, workers rights and plain fairness, then you'd be against H-1B visas because it's purely exploitation by billionaires so that billionaires can profit.
Why not do away with H-1B visas and shift it to real immigration ( which I support ) so that they have actual rights and can start businesses themselves and create jobs?
How about a non-exploitive and fair immigration policy rather than a exploitive non-immigration visa like H-1B? How about we let these foreign workers compete against both the billionaire owners and the workers? Why protect billionaires from competition and subject stressed american workers with more competition?
And it is not like H1Bs are handed out like candy. There are caps, lottery, wage requirements, 6 months of advertising etc. (sure there is abuse like with anything else which should be addressed).
Also ironic that you come to a thread discussing how things like these rip apart families (and work against women) and try to take a higher moral position.
Your stand of, "I support immigration" doesn't sound sincere because you seem to imply that if we reclassify H1B to immigration-visa you will suddenly be supportive of it.
I decided to come work to the US, no one "stole me" from nowhere, and I don't think it's somewhat unfair to my home country that I decided to do so, just as the many immigrants I met and worked with back in my home country in the tech sector.
Then that would be a good thing, both for America and the workers. What is good for other countries isn't and shouldn't be a 1st-order design consideration for an American policy.
What is the nation doing about it though? People that go to ivy league schools (and even not so elite schools) mostly are only able to afford it because they themselves have the financial means, whereas in many countries, top education is 100% government-subsidized.
Also, consider this: there's a thing called a PERM application, which involves advertising for a position for 6 months. The reality is that people getting green cards via H1B sponsorships do so after companies literally spend half a year looking for local talent, and at signicant cost (a I-140 application w/ premium processing costs the company $1400 and that's only one step in the green card process, and that's without counting lawyer fees.)
When high tech companies hire foreigners, it's not for lack of trying to find native talent
Where does this obligation come from, especially considering most large corporations are multinational?
>The idea that a nation of 350 million people can't supply the workers needed for the US economy is nonsense.
For some jobs, a pulse is all you need. High Tech jobs are much more demanding. The US isn't producing enough engineers, this is well known. Even in universities, more than 50% of enrolled students are foreign born in STEM fields, see: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign...
No obligation is required however. The USA can just insist. This is what China does, notably, and China is not alone. Countries all around the world are forcing corporations to serve their people. That is kind of the point of a country, using the threat of force (prison, asset seizure, war, etc.) to serve a group of people.
That is not how countries work - every other country can ennact their own policy
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/08/21/h-1b-visa-reliant-cis...
Few H1Bs would be needed if companies trained.
Until then the system is being abused and it's American labor that's losing out, followed by people being abused by the H1B racket. If they want to pay someone $x to do some job then hire them in their home country and outsource it. Or offer the visa to the worker. It's much more preferable for these firms to abuse the system and their "placements" until it's fixed though.
has to post the job requirement and try multiple recruitment channels for 30 days
Notice how most of those postings allow only mailed replies? Those aren't genuine. What is this, 1985?
There seems to be no interest in fixing the root cause of the problem. The only partial fix for the problem is to let the spouses of approved GC petitioners work. But, this administration is bent on removing those provisions, without providing a fix for the problem in the first place.
10 years is the length of the current backlog for Employment 2nd, 3rd, and “Other Workers" preference visa from India, but only two years for Employment 1st Preference,.and Employment 4th preference is current.
> What are the spouses of such people ought to do?
In principal:
(1) Come to the US but not work, or
(2) Remain in India, to which the H-1B recipient, as a nonimmigrant, will return.
> There seems to be no interest in fixing the root cause of the problem.
Do you mean the existence of the H-1B in the first place, or some other “root cause”.
Have you looked at what's required to get a first preference greencard? 99% probably dont qualify unless you abuse it with companies like CTS or Accenture.
> (1) Come to the US but not work, or
What do spouses with advanced degrees and prior work experience do? With H1B lottery, this was a decent outlet when you have stayed here already for a few years.
> (2) Remain in India, to which the H-1B recipient, as a nonimmigrant, will return.
You suggest stay away from your wife and family when you're just married or have young kids?
I was clarifying the backlog statement, not recommending a method of bypassing it.
> What do spouses with advanced degrees and prior work experience do?
The same as other spouses.
> You suggest stay away from your wife
No, I suggest nothing; those are the options under the law in the absence of the H-4 EAD.
More bluntly, the entire point of the policy change is clearly to discourage H-1B applications, especially from countries like India and China, so complaining that it doesn't leave attractive options for the spouses impacted is pointing out that it is working as designed. What the spouse is really supposed to do, in the eyes of those crafting the policy, is prevail upon their partner not to seek an H-1B in the first place.
The mechanism may be a bit more subtle than closing border crossings and firing tear gas across the border to turn away people attempting to exercise their legal right to apply for asylum, but the intent is the same: to make clear that the affected people are not welcome in the US, at least by the present administration.
Sad to see people advocating for separating spouses from each other at the price of their careers.
Also this problem also applies to China, not just India.
H-1B is a dual intent visa, and US specifically provides for an employer-sponsored green card track, which many people take. So "will return" is wishful thinking.
There are so many “work arounds” or “hacks”, if you prefer, placed precisely because the system is so badly broken. Whether it’s DACA, or this, or the many other things put in place and intended to help families these are all hacks around a fundamentally broken law system.
No one seems to have the courage to fix it and the politics are now so devisive that the state things are in is incredibly sad and frankly inhuman in many cases.
A number of politicians are effectively "bribed" by large firms to attempt to increase the H1-B Visa quota (see Gang of Eight Immigration). My own state sen Schumer, has a daughter that works for Facebook and it is no secret that Facebook wants to increase the number of H1-B Visas.
Fixing immigration is comparatively easy. 1. Get rid of H1-B Visa abuse. The reality is that there should be few H1-B Visas given out because there are in fact Americans that can do most of the jobs. H1-B Visas should only be given out at salaries 1.5 times those of Americans, to incentivize the hiring of Americans and minimizing H1-B Visa abuse.
2. Force the implementation of eVerify with massive fines for employers that don't use it.
3. Obama broke the law by not having Congress pass the DACA legislation. It appears that Congress doesn't want to pass it so they should return to their native countries.
Remember, in all of these programs of Visa abuse, or the hiring of illegal aliens, takes jobs (and in the case of DACA) university spots from US Citizens and those who are living here legally.
Thus, the system is not broken. Just enforce existing laws such as eVerify with massive fines for abuse, get rid of H1-B Visa abuse, get rid of H4 Visas which Congress never passed in the first place, get rid of DACA, have them apply and wait in line like everyone else that wants to live here.
Not really. The system wasn't created for wait times of upto 120 years, someone waiting a few years for their spouse to get a green card like in the past is different from now waiting for 70 years and actually die before being able to work. How is that reverting to what it was?
Only people from certain countries are affected by this, because the 7% visa per country cap is enforced the same for both Vatican City with half a million population[edit: 1000 population] and for China and India with more than a billion population each.
Also, the H4 work authorization only applies after the worker has been working on a H1B for more than 6 years.I am assuming you were never qualified for that when you were on a work visa since you presumably got a green card much faster.
H-1B wasn't crested as an immigrant visa, either, though it allows immigration without exiting. It was envisioned and sold ad primarily a way to temporarily fill transitory needs.
> Only people from certain countries are affected by this, because the 7% visa per country cap is enforced the same for both Vatican City with half a million population[edit: 1000 population] and for China and India with more than a billion population each.
Population is only loosely correlated with the issue, it's not about visa demand; in many cases (basically, all the family-based categories) the backlogs are worse from Mexico and/or the Philippines than India or China.
Population is definitely part of the issue, with people from smaller countries getting a green card in 7 months vs. 70 years for the biggest ones.
>in many cases (basically, all the family-based categories) the backlogs are worse from Mexico and/or the Philippines than India or China.
That's irrelevant because those people in family based backlogs are not legally present in the US fulltime, so the pain for them is much less compared to people on work visas and their spouses who are not able to work.
People in family based queues can still work because they're in their home country.
>H-1B wasn't crested as an immigrant visa, either, though it allows immigration without exiting. It was envisioned and sold ad primarily a way to temporarily fill transitory needs.
I was talking about the work green card system. Also H1B is a dual intent visa. If it was designated as a temporary transitory visa then it should not qualify for green cards.
Perpetuating the myth that H1B somehow qualifies you for greencard is only harming people who sign up for H1B and suffer abuse in hope they are on the way to greencard. Greencards are immigrant visas and obtaining one does not require or benefit in any way from a non-immigrant visa of any kind or even presence in the country. If you are truly an indispensable worker, likes of which could not be found in the US, you could just stay in the home country or any other country where you like and wait for the greencard.
I don't think this is correct.
From the article, it reads, "In 2015, the Obama administration created the H-4 employment authorization document, known as H-4 EAD, to allow those spouses to work until the family can get green cards."
Although I can see with Trump's administration wanting to go back to how it was because it's supposed to protect jobs for Americans and others who are green card holder or otherwise authorized to work here.... although to be honest, I don't think they should restrict H1-B spouses (H-4's) from work. My wife basically learned all the movie dialogues and commercials by heart when she was unemployed and just sitting at home, watching TV or playing on the computer... :)
Good thing is, we were able to claim her 'residence status' after one year on H1B/H4 so we could dodge paying out of state tuition in college for her accounting degree... which would not have been possible if she wasn't an H-4... E.g. F-1, J-1 and similar student visas always end up paying out of state tuition, which is at least 4x-8x more than in state, depending on the state you live in.
On one hand I like being able to say we can get by on a single income... on the other hand, not every wife (or husband) fancies herself or himself as a stay at home entity while the spouse is working... people are designed to work and be productive, thus, this reverting to pre-Obama regulations, IMHO, is not wise. Not wrong.. just unwise. Then again.. it's Trump :)
The normal immigration processes served the country well for generations. The new policy of catering to particular industries by creating second class citizens is never going to be fair to anyone because it was never designed to be.
Legal immigration is the reason silicon valley exists. Ask Mark Zuckerberg why he moved Facebook HQ to silicon valley. It is because that's where the engineers are. If legal immigration wasn't a thing Zuckerberg would have moved considerable number of jobs to places like Beijing, Bangalore and St. Petersburg, because that's where he would have found software engineers.
Canada, already a major center for AI innovation, will be the new silicon valley.
Edit: s/H-1B/immigration/g because the exact visa doesn't matter.
The corollary of this is that with our punishingly high personal income and capital gains taxes and dearth of good exits for startups, the only thing we really have going for us is our sane points-based immigration system. I work at a company with a lot of engineers who were trying to get entry to the US and gave up and decided to work towards PR in Canada instead.
We are essentially arbitraging America's dysfunctional immigration rules. If the Americans ever get smart and pass comprehensive immigration reform (hint - like Obama's Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 which never got a vote in the House and withered on the vine), tech in Canada is even more screwed than it is now.
I lived in Seattle and enjoyed it, but staying in America long term was never an option for me. There's so much more to living in Canada than just our immigration system.
Even with the pay cut for being in Canada, and even with the additional taxes, I still make enough money to not need to worry about money. More money would be nice, but it's not all that motivating.
Meanwhile, those taxes go to things I think are important: a strong public education system; a health care system based on need, not wealth; a safe, gun-free society; a safe haven for refugees in need.
In my office in Toronto, probably 1000+ Amazon devs could transfer to an American office and make more money. But we don't. The same goes for the even larger Vancouver office.
Our immigration rules are just one aspect of why devs live here.
You work at AMZN - I work at a US company in Canada too. Canada is a nation of branch-offices, largely because we have no VC-ecosystem, which is largely because we're a highly redistributive country with high capital gains taxes.
What makes us attractive for branch offices is that smart, hard-working, well-educated immigrants who can't make it into the US can often make it into Canada. Native born Canadians, OTOH, are leaving in droves (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/technology/article-...)
But we're a terrible place to start a company and exit, which is why it doesn't happen very often.
The original poster claimed that Canada could replace Silicon Valley - that's not going to happen without a better ecosystem for funding start-ups and rewarding founders.
As for those devs who choose to stay here when they could leave on a TN-1, make twice the money in the US after taxes and expenses (including health insurance and private schooling for kids), and work on more interesting problems at US companies, I encourage them to do the math. They're not doing themselves any favors living in unliveably-expensive cities earning pennies and not saving for retirement, and retirement will come a lot sooner than they think.
Yet, taxes are still higher in California than in Canada unless you make something like $350k+ (the crossover point used to be a bit lower but then Trump removed the State tax deduction).
And if you ignore things like Canada’s VAT.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19156756
As I corrected your lies in that thread, I'll correct them here as well.
H-1B visas had nothing to do with Silicon Valley. The H-1B visa was created in 1990. Silicon Valley had already existed for decades by then. How can H-1B visas be the reason that Silicon Valley exists if Silicon Valley predates H-1B visas by decades?
You do realize that H-1B visas aren't confined solely to Silicon Valley right? Zuckerburg could have gotten H-1B visas workers to work in Massachussettes. There are plenty of interviews by zuckerburg stating why he moved to california. It had nothing to do with H-1B visas.
And H-1B visas doesn't prevent zuckerburg from opening offices all over the world.
Canada is a country, not a small region like silicon valley. And if canada becomes the new silicon valley, good for them. Please stop repeating the same lies over and over again.
Nonsense. I am guessing you have never been silicon valley. 90% or more of tech workers there were born outside USA.
Edit: it is 70%, which is still very high. https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/01/17/h-1b-foreign-citizens...
What exactly is the meat of the criticism above?
Ignoring the fact that "90% of tech workers there were born outside the USA" is absolutely false, what does that have to do with H-1B visas?
It could be true that 90% of tech workers were born outside the USA and none of them could be H-1B visa holders. There are plenty of american tech workers who immigrated to the US as a child and became american citizens. Like sergei brin or jerry yang. They may be born outside the US, but none of them are H-1B visa holders. They were all american citizens.
The fact that you are intentionally lying and being sneaky with stats is very worrisome.
They've already worked at good tech companies here, most of which have offices around the world. Their choices directly cause the shift of their jobs from US to outside. Couple this with the fact that many of my juniors at the best universities in India (harder to get into than Stan/MIT here) now no longer consider moving to the US because of these cases, there is already an effect of really good talent not arriving here. The effect is not obvious in a year or two, but surely over time you will notice the secondary effects: a lot of engineers coming from India/China would not be the countries'best - the best do not want to put up with this, more employees leaving earlier/not settling, the expansion of India/China offices for these tech companies, or China/India companies doing better than the US counterparts (in cases where this is already happening, a lot of the HN crowd blames Chinese protectionism rather than acknowledging the talent that already exists in those countries).
In last 2 years we laid off entire QA department of my employer to move all those jobs to India. We then later moved half the engineering team in India and opened an office in Singapore to by pass US visa restrictions. US laws will not matter much to Indians or Chinese seeking better life, it is just that US society will waste a lot of wealth and opportunities to comply with them.
Courts have forced them to publish the rule on which we can then obtain an injunction.
First, they get bored out of their mind. They're young, they want to grow, but they can't. While you're off to work, networking, learning, your spouse is at home, trying their best to chase away the feeling of stagnation.
It's OK for the first few months - they go for walks, cook, read, go to the gym - anything to keep busy, but unless there's a child that takes up their entire time, they just get bored, then they get sad, and then they get depressed.
It takes a hard toll on the relationship, which, ironically, is the primary reason why spouses agree to this in the first place. Most just want to live with their husbands or wives and have a normal life. Long distance isn't a realistic option when you're talking about a 6 year H1B visa.
Being unable to work makes the relationship one-sided, because one person goes to work, provides for the family, and has various experiences which slowly add up and allows them to grow personally and professionally. In addition, if you come from a society where gender roles are heavily promoted culturally, it is especially hard when the roles get reversed when the couple is in the US. Typically, men lose confidence in their ability to provide for the family and get very depressed. Women from cultures where there's an expectation that they'll be a homemaker, have much less stigma associated with not working, especially if there's a child to take care of.
They are also competing with other couples in various areas: social status, disposable income (that lets you go on vacations) or ability to buy a house, and they'll be losing ground simply because of the income level (less so for FAANG employees, but there are plenty of places hiring on an H1B visa that pay the minimum they can to meet the H1B criteria).
There are only 2 realistic options most spouses end up taking: the spouse works illegally (clearly a risky move) or the spouse changes their legal status: divorces you and marries a citizen (risky and further damages the quality of your relationship), tries to go to school on an F1 status (which now requires even more income and puts more pressure on the H1B holder), or the relationship deteriorates to the point where the non-working spouse goes back to their home country because they are unhappy here.
Finally, I will say that yes there are many real issues with the H1B visa, but disallowing the spouse to work is not a solution to any of them. It only manages to get these young couples behind in life.
I am fortunate enough to have come out of this ordeal fairly unscathed, but others I know have not been so lucky.
You're also away from extended family. This is difficult for many people.
Native-born people, with or without both spouses working, experience relationship troubles and depression. It happens, even without the culture shock. You may have had the exact same problems had you stayed where you were born.
FWIW though, there is no need for the spouse to sit around being bored out of her mind. The solution is to participate in in-person local mommy groups. Typically the moms gather together at a local park or library, bringing their little kids. The moms chat with each other while the kids do some activity together.
That's applicable to one group of immigrants, namely those who don't want to assimilate. However, this discussion is about those who are perfectly OK with assimilating into the US culture.
> I don't think employment is the issue here.
It's absolutely the issue here. You seem to be focused on immigrants who fail to assimilate, and you're applying their problems to all other immigrants ("What's that, your spouse can't afford to pay for tuition and you are not allowed to work? well, see, it's actually very simple. You just failed to assimilate and you will soon have to go back to your country. Ha ha, one less evil immigrant to deal with!")
> Native-born people, with or without both spouses working, experience relationship troubles and depression.
What we're talking about here is the direct link between a government rule, and the known issues that rule has created for immigrants in the past. The argument you brought to the discussion, however, is similar to shooting an immigrant in the foot and telling them that native people also have foot pain, with or without being shot in the foot. It's non-sensical.
> FWIW though, there is no need for the spouse to sit around being bored out of her mind
Since you said "for what it's worth", I'll just say that it's worth exactly zero. I've already given examples of what most folks attempt to do when faced with the reality of not being able to seek employment, though you, again, chose to focus on a narrow subset of the group, extract a detail about them and then apply it to everyone else in the group. Do you notice a pattern here?
> The solution is to participate in in-person local mommy groups.
Finally we got to the part of your comment where you show how little you think of spouses of immigrants. Just to drive this point home: you took a detail from a subset of the group ('mommies'), and claim it will work for everyone else in the group. Again, do you notice a pattern here?
Also, I've already mentioned in my comment above that a child will consume most of one's time, but also most of the limited income, so that solution 'solves the problem' by creating an even bigger problem. Sometimes it works out, some time it doesn't. We could increase the chance of success for such families if we allowed both spouses to seek employment.
The visa is supposedly not for people who just want to come take a couple ordinary jobs away from ordinary Americans. You're supposed to be extra-special and wonderful, bringing amazing value to the country. The idea is to let you try out the country, with the hope that you might become an unusually productive citizen.
Anyway, if you don't like the deal, you don't have to accept the deal.
Sometimes foreign workers are able to negotiate an above average salary, sometimes they can't, because the company has a very high reputation or access to unique resources and uses that as leverage (for example, NASA, Harvard, etc).
Most likely, they'll get an average salary in exchange for being able to work at the company in a first world country, so they'll be able to afford whatever the 'local' Americans are able to afford in the area. Can your average American afford a 4 bedroom house and 6 children in 2019?
That's the real deal that's being sent in a Word document requiring your signature. Yes, you don't have to accept the deal, but the US government doesn't have to prevent spouses from seeking employment either, causing more issues for the immigrant families.
Which one of these 2 options benefits the US more?
Maybe that doesn't work in San Francisco, but there are many other places to live in the USA. Most of the country is very affordable for somebody who can design software or hardware.
As I understand it, getting an above-average salary is nearly a legal requirement. Going below average is prohibited. (one could be exactly average I think)
To make a random example: $150,000 per year will have you living very well in Deerfield Beach, FL or in Georgetown, KY.
Otherwise you can blame H1B holders forever. They didn't wrote the policy or the law. You shouldn't punish them for what they had no influence. They should be able to plan for their living. They should be encouraged to contribute and integrate with society.
1) Drives up wages to the point where an H1B couple can contain one non-working spouse. Not bad.
2) Causes H1B applicants to skew towards younger folks without families, reducing housing pressure. Not bad.
3) Causes H1B recipients to marry citizens at slightly higher rates and more quickly assimilate, especially in the second+ generation. Call it a wash.
2. I didn't say anything about current recipients. Just commented on how it may impact new applicants and the housing market.
3. Demographics change slowly.
“Trump administration begins effort to strip work permits for immigrant spouses“$500k/year is a lot of fucking money, even in the Bay Area.
"Cheap labor! Exploitation!"
H1B-holder: earns $500k/year
"You greedy bastard! You want a green card on top of that?!"
H1B-holder: shocked Pikachu face
Sorry for the Reddit-style comment :-). Also, I haven't downvoted you (in case someone has and you were wondering) because I don't believe you're posting in bad faith. But you do see the contradiction?