H-1B: Outsourcer HCL games visa system to discriminate against non-South Asians
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
Delivery managers prefer a cheaper resource to an expensive resource. They also practice this in India: that's why every team in India is filled with 80% freshers or those who get paid $5k per annum in India.
In the states, they look for the cheapest resource to fill a position. Often times, they find spots that just require warm bodies to add billable hours. Guess, who would they go for? They will hire some H4 EAD who asks $65K per annum in NJ. These people are happy to get some job and experience.
In old days, companies used to have lots of people coasting in their jobs. Now, WITCH companies have captured that profit in a two prong process: offshore to India and charge the client $30 per hour per person, then pay some desperate college grad in India $3 per hour. And capture that $27 per hour.
This is similar to outsourcing the manufacturing, as the middle layers capture the profit, by paying peanuts in China and by getting rid of expensive employees in India.
Edit: basically, these companies are making money off of outsourcing lots of bullshit jobs. They are NOT eliminating bs jobs. In fact, most of WITCH company onsite people are project managers pretending to be super smart workers.
That is 100% true. Also, you forgot another group - sales guys. I think they also play a big role in exploiting Indians by paying peanuts while charging the customer $25-30 per hour.
Indians are not being exploited - they are being paid market wages, and are part of a huge emerging middle-class in India.
A teacher in a government school gets paid more than a IT worker these days, and they have guaranteed job till 55. Since IT job is primarily based on low wages, job opportunities become drastically less once they have 10+ years experience (please tell me I am wrong on this).
Even $10/hour is lot more than $5k/year for someone working full time. It seems the middlemen are gobbling up a lot of that!
Around 2004, many south Indian governments provided free tuition fees for engineering. So, thousands of engineering colleges were opened just to grab the fees by admitting more students. Now, the new minimum for students is: Bachelor of Technology.
This is India, where 1.3 billion people live. Unemployment is extremely high. So, even 3 lack rupees ~ $4k per annum is better than not having a job. If you want to call it a market wage, that's fine. It is like $15 per hour in the bay area is market wage, just because people have some jobs.
Inflation in India more than doubled in the last 15 years. 15 years, the base salary was $7k per annum. Now the same is paying $4k. (In other words, 300,000 rupees was 2004 salary , even today it is 300,000 for freshers). Basically, WITCH shops want warm bodies for their billable hours.
When you say this does not make it okay, it seems you simply have no clue the level of disparity most people in India are dealing with. Unless someone magically make every one earn >10K dollars per annum, 5K is lot of money in country where median income is about 600 dollars yearly.
Who is 'you', exactly? I assume it's some hypothetical 'you' and not me specifically, given that I've only asked a clarifying question.
> So yeah, its market wages by definition, but it doesn't make the practice OK.
No, it doesn't make the practice ok, but it's important to identify the right problem if you want to solve it. "The market affords better opportunities for these workers but they are being forced to work below market" is a different problem with different solutions than "Better opportunities do not exist because the market is very competitive".
I feel really sorry for them. One of the project managers lived in a rented bedroom of another Indian family with his wife and daughter because he couldn't afford a place of his own. Another guy, single, lived in a shared 2BR house with 8 other people for the same reason. And there were more people in the same situation.
This was in NY where housing is not cheap but either way, the way I see it they were being exploited. Probably should blame the company I was working for as well, or perhaps just the VP that pushed to replace Infosys with Tata because he had a history with them and they were cheaper.
Edit: typo
I see your point and in no way do I advocate for people being treated that way in US. But the viewpoint of many of the workers who accept these arrangements is that its better than what they had back home, or some variation of that argument. I'm not sure how to argue with that.
Its not so black and white, if that person is living in the US temporarily then his main motivation is to save a lot of money when in the US and then use that to buy a house back in India.
Some of them make enough money to live alone comfortably but why do that when your main objective is to save so you share with others who have the same mindset.
Today, 5 years later, this figure is surely even more inflated. But if you talk to graduate engineers from these companies they still pay 5k USD. So, I don't know if we can safely say there is no exploitation here.
The counter point obviously here is that there is a large young population joining the workforce each year. So, ensuring everyone gets an IT job as well as paid well is a challenge.
What I found was that 12k USD inflated adjusted was same as 5k USD in 2007
[0] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5000&year1=200...
Exploiting is pretty loaded word, we are not talking about sweatshops. These IT companies provide jobs to many people directly and indirectly. The good people who are paid peanuts then move to greener pastures.
In my experience, these companies as well as the American consultancies were hiring Indian students who studied in US way way more than h4 eads. These students are desperate to get a visa, so they will settle for any job that will sponsor them. Over 100k Indian students alone come to US every year, so its no wonder there would be insane competition for the 80k visas.
Also, I wonder, if South Asia employees are so productive, why do they need an expensive US-based management reaping most of the profit? Why cannot they create their own company?
WITCH companies are reaping profit. TCS market cap is $100B today.
Now, the WITCH companies are into the BS jobs, jobs that help American economy be far more efficient.
Any comment can be criticized in two ways: (a) it is a generalization; (b) it is too specific or anecdata. Here, we are talking about HCL's preference for Indians.
Even in WITCH companies, there are smart people. If there are x percent of smart people in the world, then WITCH companies do have x percent of smart people.
The way WITCH companies send people onsite (USA, UK), depends NOT so much on how smart a candidate is, BUT on some kind of cronyism. At TCS, if someone wants to go onsite on H1, he needs to cozy up with all three levels above him, then this big boss recommends him to HR.
Even if someone comes onsite, he has to suck up to onsite managers to process I-140. If he doesn't suck up to these parasite managers onsite, he will be sent back to India.
Not many Americans know how these WITCH companies operate. That's what I am shedding light on.
Here is something to look at: https://www.petition2congress.com/ctas/stop-eb1-c-abuse-frau...
Since I am involved with lot of immigration advocacy I am familiar with the so called eb-1 abuse. It is not abuse at all. It is a sensible strategy where the companies follow the letter of the law. It is US Congress that is idiotic to put foreign managers and noble winners in the same group of immigrants.
I do feel hr1044 is a perfect solution to this coupled by increasing h1b cap significantly.
Companies that want to discriminate by country of origin clearly aren't using immigration visas as they are intended. Do you really think they'd still be in the game if there was a $200k minimum? I doubt it.
The USA has, as a society, decided it wants to limit the number of immigrants. (I say this as a non-American who has had work visas in the US before, and left). If you disagree with that idea, vote for politicians who will change things. But if we take it as given that the number of immigrants on H-1B should be limited, then the question is: how do we decide who gets them?
I contend that raising the salary minimum is better than lotteries. First, if you're going to limit the number of immigrants, you should be limiting it to the most talented rather than a random assortment of anyone at all that applies. Salary limits isn't a perfect fit for that, but it's a close approximation. Second, companies shouldn't be using immigration as a means to have cheap labor, given the laws around limited immigration. The H-1B isn't meant to be a means to lower the salary costs of a company, it's meant to bring the best talent to America.
Lastly, in a lottery with limited winners, small companies will always lose out. Why? Because companies with less integrity can and will abuse the lottery system by inundating them with applications, often for job positions that could be easily filled by Americans. These companies want H-1B employees that they can underpay and abuse.
Worth adding as well, if every H-1B holder is making $200k+, they're paying taxes on that huge salary too. This helps shut up those xenophobic types saying 'lazy immigrants don't pay their share'.
My argument isn't that it's a fix-all for every problem. But given the premise of limited immigration, I think lotteries are a terrible solution companies to salary-based sorting.
This is a complicated problem and the solution has to be non-trivial. Both lottery and salary-sorting seems too trivial, and are therefore prune to cheating. For example, abusers can just pay their employee $200k but then charge them $100k "legal fees" for "immigration processing"? (I know some companies are already doing something similar)
If people prefer to work a accountants in Cincinnati rather than devs in the valley, that’s the market’s answer. If people choose to drop out of stem PhD programs and open a crepe stand, that’s the markets answer. If being a PhD student we’re a better deal, the market might give a different answer.
Why a program that allows corporations to determine the jobs immigrants are allowed to work and the circumstances under which they are allowed to live in the us, simply because they don’t like the market’s answer?
All this discussion about requirements of “market pay”, limitations on skills that “can’t be found elsewhere”, jobs “citizens don’t want to do”... i just find it so weird that people use free market rhetoric to defend a program like this. I mean, to people who lean libertarian, doont phrases like the ones above seem terribly clueless, even deeply corrupt?
I think this actually becomes an affront to human freedom. What, you’re only allowed into the us if you interview the way google says you should interview, live where google says you should live, and so forth? And yeah I know ther is some limited transferability if you find a new “sponsor” (a euphemism, in my opinion, for someone who can have you deported if you get too uppity about not liking open offices or daily scrum applications of deadline pressures).
If the 300 million us citizens or roughly 1.2 million immigrants who come to the us don’t want to do the job at the pay offered... I just don’t get it, how can people who appear from their comments to be libertarian or free market leaning not see the state power granted to tech companies using the h1b? It’s weird, and gives me pause.
I’ve started thinking a lot of so called libertarians are 11th hour libertarians. They want the government to prop them up with all kinds of subsidies and state power, but get pissed when there’s the slightest state interference with their scheme to profit from it.
They need to raise wages, obviously.
> Even in tech, how do you expect small start-ups or small businesses to compete with giants like FAANG who can just throw money at the problem?
How do you expect a small pizza chain to compete against Pizza Hut? Niche market, customer service, quality product.
> Also, what about the cost of living factor
I agree. $200k is not high enough. Should be $400k. Let big corporations put their money where their mouths are, we'll see just how much of that 'top talent' is really coming here, and how much is just low-wage immigration labor.
Need is a funny word. If google "needs" a programmer and is willing to pay $250k/year to fulfill this need and Pierre's Bistro "needs" a chef but is only willing to pay $80k/year to fulfill this need--what can we say about the relative strength of these needs and the value that enabling them to be met will create?
Economics has volumes on different auction methods and how they solve different problems.
Sort of. I think the problems can be solved by making the H-1B a portable work visa that only requires and initial sponsorship, but not a continuing sponsorship.
If a employer really needs employees from overseas, then they'll have to pay a competitive domestic wage, otherwise the immigrants they sponsored will immediately jump ship to a better paying competitor.
Some might challenge this idea by asking "then why would the employers sponsor H1-Bs?" My answer is that they'd stop unless they had a genuine need unmet by the local market.
If those programs have problems (e.g. per country limits) let's fix them instead of papering over them with a not-really-temporary visa program.
Or just rank the applications by descending order of salary, and give the visas to the top 65K applicants.
It’s not a barrier for the FAANGs, but smaller companies aren’t going to save anything at all.
>>> "H-1B, employing visa holders directly and through outsourcers, and has lobbied for an increase to the annual 85,000 cap on new visas." >>> My alma mater UC Davis graduated ~300 students in computer science per year (big school). 85,000 new visas.
Firstly, not all 85000 visas are for computer science graduates. So the better number might be the total graduates from UC Davis, or at least the total graduates in Engineering, Management, Economics, etc, etc.
Secondly, UC Davis is not the only school in the country, however big it is. There are thousands of schools.
The total Undergraduate enrollment in the USA is ~10million per year. You can assume 1/4 of that are seniors(2.5M) and perhaps 80% graduate (2M). Obviously not all are Engineering, Management, Economics -- but my point is the "300 student vs 85,000 spots" figure is wildly wrong.
What I don't understand is what is defensible about putting any non-demographic limit at all. Why 80k and not 160k?
* pay local and federal taxes * pay into the social security benefit system (if such a system exists)
If yes, would you still say that they shouldn't be allowed to vote?
It's a tool to ingest raw h1b data into postgres, so you can study the data easier with SQL.
I am also working on an app that allows you to look at h1b data on web.
According to this article: https://m.economictimes.com/nri/visa-and-immigration/h-1b-ex...
Six Indian companies — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, and the US arms of Tech Mahindra and HCL Technologies — accounted for nearly two-thirds of the rejections among the top 30 companies, the think tank said after analysing data put out by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
The six firms got just 16%, or 2,145, H-1B work permits, less than the 2,399 visas that Amazon bagged in 2018.
Cognizant, which is headquartered in the US but has the majority of its workforce in India, saw 3,548 rejections during the year — the highest for any company.
From this: https://m.timesofindia.com/business/india-business/tcs-among...
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the only Indian company among the top 10 firms to get foreign labour certification for the H-1B visas for the fiscal year 2018 by receiving over 20,000 such certifications, according to official data in which Ernst & Young was ranked No 1.
London-headquartered Ernst & Young, a multinational professional services firm, has emerged as the top employer to have received the certification, the date from the US labour department said. In fact, Ernst & Young with 151,164 H-1B specialist occupation labour certifications accounted for the 12.4 per cent of all foreign labour certification for the H-1B work visas for the fiscal year 2018 ending on September 30, according to the latest annual report released by the Department of Labour early this month. Ernst & Young is followed by Deloitte Consulting which received 69,869 H-1B specialty occupations labour conditions programme. Indian-American owned Cognizant Technology Corp comes at number three with 47,732 specialty occupations labour conditions programme, the Department of Labour said in its latest annual report. Cognizant is followed by HCL America (42,820), K Force Inc (32,996), and Apple (26,833). India's Tata Consultancy Services or TCS is the only Indian company in top 10 for the year 2018.
In 2018, for these 6 companies, the initial approval rate is 60% = 2145/(2145+1405)
Continuing approval rate for these six companies is 77% = 29638/(29638+ 8742)
Source: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...
In addition to this, if you consider the cost of healthcare (to the company and employee) which makes it too expensive to hire an older US citizen instead of hiring 2-3 young H-1B workers even if the per hr $ rate is higher. A US worker will balk at the kind of health insurance offered by these employers. Fresh grad h-1b often has no idea nor does care about it because they are young and healthy.
How can this be solved so that it is fair to the US workers?
Convert aspects of H-1B into a green card equivalent visa:
Aspect 1) employer can sponsor and bring in or hire a local non-citizen candidate. The new employee gets a 3 yr work permit to work anywhere at any time. Possibly the worker can leave on day 1 of work also.
What does this achieve? It means the employer will make sure the worker coming in has the best pay/benefits etc compared to anything offered anywhere else in the country.
If that happens, why will an employer, even if it is one of the WITCH companies, hire someone for below market rates at the risk of losing them the next day? If anything, at this point anyone who doesn’t need a visa, even a 50 yr old US worker (costs a lot w.r.t healthcare to the company) may be cheaper to the employer.
Aspect 2) automatic conversion to permanent green card after 6 yrs: Since it’s been proven with Aspect 1 that the non-citizen is capable of being employed for 6 years without displacing an US worker, after being on this new H1b / temp GC visa, just mail a permanent Green Card to this non-US worker.
The only thing in such a visa is that the employer who is into abusing H-1b visas or wants to replace costly older employees with cheap young contractors stands to lose quite a bit. But why should anyone care about such employers? Sadly, these are the employers who lobby hard to keep h-1b visa with bonded labor aspects, alive.
Pet peeve: This article is making so many racist/regionist generalizations it is hard to understand what “South Asian” means. Does it mean people from India/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka/Pakistan? Or is it just a euphemism to refer to 1/4th of the world population ?
About me: I’m an ex-H1b person who became a Canada permanent resident without stepping into Canada even once (except for the landing procedures). This, after working for 6 yrs on H1b and my last US employer trying to get me to slog for my green card application. Being born in India, I saw no point in going in for a US GC and remaining a bonded laborer till retirement. While o fee sad that US and USians are squandering this opportunity, I’m glad to see Canada capitalizing on this and see a great future for Canada.
The first day I landed in Canada, I became a Permanent Resident.
The requirements may be there for other streams / work permits / students (I'm not aware of those paths).
This is similar to how the Green Card lottery works.
Otherwise one or two large countries will just monopolise the whole system, spamming applications from their brethren.
This is exactly what is happening, with Indians making up 76% of H1B holders.
Why not 5%?
Actually, why not just ban applicants who are born in China and India?
</sarcasm>