Uber receives more foreign-worker visas as it lays off hundreds of employees
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
There are staffing and consulting service companies out there that exploit H1Bs for profit but I don't believe uber is one of them or the type that uses H1 to save money.
This case is especially egregious since the data is available from USCIS in a CSV file and they still didn't bother.
I've found them to be pretty even-kiltered overall, but am always happy to reevaluate my impression.
1. An international student graduates at the top of their class in Stanford in CS, and goes to work for a tech company. What visa do they use?
The correct answer is F1 (OPT) for one year, with OPT STEM extension for 2 extra years, while they apply for H-1B. If they weren't a STEM major, regardless of their actual role, they have a single year to apply for H-1B, with a ~30% chance of success, before being asked to leave the country. Regardless of their qualifications.
2. Instead of going to a tech company, they work for a year in a tech firm, then go to MIT for CS grad school. They perform excellently, having many publications under their name, doing several industry internships at Microsoft/Google labs. They then get accepted to a tenure track Assistant Professor position at Columbia. What visa do they apply for?
Still H-1B.
I say this because I think most Americans don't have a good idea of how widely H-1B applies. To repeat the caricature of "H-1Bs" being majority underpaid indentured slaves whose employers manipulate salary paperwork while hanging the threat of revoking their visa sponsorship every other week is laughable, if not downright insulting.
This is in addition to the premium processing fee which enables USCIS to run a budget surplus.
Still, the ACIWA fees aren’t enough to make US Citizens cheaper than H1Bs. Another side effect is that housing prices would fall dramatically as the H1Bs would no longer be able to afford expensive Bay Area rentals. They would live 4 to an apartment, freeing up housing stock.
a) are underpaid indentured labor
b) singlehandedly responsible for high Bay Area rents (presumably because they make so much money)
I'm sorry, I really don't follow any of this logic.
How does falling real estate demand and cheaper rent force H-1B folks to live 4 to a room? Isn't it cheaper for everyone in that case?
The price would skyrocket and the market would be completely out of balance... this would then have at least two horrible effects:
1. The top 500 corporations become gatekeepers to citizenship, as they outbid _everyone_ else for the H1-Bs, they then use their stash of H1-Bs to drive the price of wages down for US citizens...
E.g. "A doctor wants YOUR job, brah. Are you a doctor? NO. I only pay doctors the TOP SALARY. Take your $[shit wage] or leave it"
2. It would force highly-skilled people who have immigrated here, learned from our best systems, integrated into our communities and live, to be completely, mind-boggling enslaved by their corporate overlords... OR give up the lives and loves they've built, take all the knowledge they've gotten, and GTFO.
E.g. "Well if you don't show up 7 days a week for a menial job, FRIEND, it'll effect your review and you could lose citizenship if you lose your job. NO ONE ELSE WILL HIRE YOU."
I could not imagine a worse system if I tried.
As for the indentured slave mentality, I’ve seen that today, even in companies where it’s against policy for the H1B to work more than 40 hours a week.
As a US Citizen, I can’t imagine a better system. Our underprivileged citizens will be provided a subsidized education and when they graduate, they will be cheaper to employ than the H1Bs.
There's already a visa for that - it's called the O visa.[1] The H-1B is for specialty occupations.[2]
What’s worse is that when the recession hits, the H1B will still be employed while US citizens will be looking for jobs. The H1B system doesn’t get rid of H1Bs fast enough when the economy tanks. Maybe the bid price should include a multiple that is reindexed each year based upon the US Citizen unemployment in that field. Example - Initial bid is $50k/year. The H1B is hired, and for two years, the employer pays $50k, until in the third year, when the recession hit, and software developer unemployment rises to 8%, then the tax increases to 75k, causing the employer to get rid of their H1B and to hire a US citizen.
$50k is just an example. This tax would be bid on. If a software engineer is really needed, then their employee could bid a large amount, say $50K, and likely be certain to obtain an H1B. If another engineer’s skill is less in demand, maybe the company bids $5k.
Is a tax going to shift the mobility? How much are engineers making in India? (US salary - Indians Salary) = Tax opportunity. Or (US Salary - Canadian Salary) = Tax opportunity. In either of those cases, that Tax opportunity is quite large.
By having a bidding process for the H1B, there’s a quantifiable signal for US Citizens to see and for politicians to act upon. It’s no longer just Zuckerberg and Satya endlessly pushing for greater H1B quotas, as the politicians would be trying to maximize tax revenue to pay for their “free” college.
Additionally, the US will no longer be getting new engineers with questionable skills to tackle a SQL migration project, we will he getting all the MIT graduates who are currently leaving for Canada and Europe. We will be getting all the graduates from all the elite schools. And those software quality jobs currently being filled by the least skilled new engineers? Within 4 years, there will be a flood of domestic STEM graduates to fill those jobs.
This makes literally no sense. How would a company simultaneously pay a million dollars for an H1B and underpay them?
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrat...
That's the point of my post. Just about EVERYONE has to get a H-1B visa.
https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2016/tab...
Obama admin during their lame duck days introduced a one time grace period(within 3 years) of 60 days. If you lose that new job, you're supposed to leave immediately. However, immigration officers usually waive minor periods of unlawful stay before filing for a transfer, how many days is a matter of your luck.
>And your employer possibly requires you reimburse them for all sponsorship fees
This is pretty illegal and even the shady body shops never do this.
Also the law states that that company has to reimburse the employee for the return tickets.
When I was on H1B and faced that situation, I talked to an immigration attorney who told me how things really work.
Caveat: This was 10+ years ago. I doubt it's changed, but talk to a lawyer if you're concerned. A one hour consultation won't break anyone's finances.
Like I said, talk to a lawyer if you want to know what's really up.
The real problem with the H1B system IMO is the uncertainty and inconsistency of everything which leaves those affected in a constant state of concern.
H1B are highly restrictive, but you can change job under an H1B. It’s just more difficult/tedious/dangerous for a number of reasons.
I have changed jobs on this visa as well. It works the same way.
It was sad to see the slow/inevitable march of good engineer being hired essentially by accident (the hiring process didn't recognize them as such and didn't tend to offer them more) and then leaving to greener pastures when they weren't being rewarded properly. When I left, they offered me a near 50% raise as retention offer (why weren't they paying me that already since I was clearly worth it?!), but despite that being a director title, it still couldn't touch the SWE offer at Google ... so here I am.
The biggest overarching problem I would say with most businesses like that is they aren't profitable enough, and engineers can't produce enough value in those companies, to justify really top-tier compensation like what would be necessary to get and retain top talent engineers long-term.
"Big 4" or "Big N" is an equivalent term that's a little less confusing, because it doesn't have the pretense of letters to stand for anything at all.
An older meaning that has fallen out of primary use isn't very helpful in understanding what people are saying today. Etymology != current usage.
You're being prescriptivist, whereas language usage is descriptivist.
Can't imagine the reason for that.
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard!'"
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/40705-but-the-plans-were-on...
As someone who was on H1B once myself, I find articles like this as a disturbing example of anti-immigration hysteria which is quite common in current political climate in the US. "Indians/Mexicans are coming for your jobs!" For people who really think this is the case, I suggest comparing size of the US job market and H1B visa cap. The amount of H1B holder is relatively small.
As someone who lives in the Bay Area, I know the demand for qualified engineers and I am pretty sure all the good engineers of 300 people they laid of will be snatched by other companies immediately.
E.g Canada is reaping rewards https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2019/09/16/canad...
Six years ago, you could apply for a work permit as you crossed the border. It took fifteen minutes and you just needed a few pages of documentation from your employer. The waiting time has shot up to months (on one-year contracts) and the whole process feels a lot more degrading.
The spirit of what was stated is correct. H-1B workers have very low employment mobility and employers know and leverage this as much as they can.
What are they gonna do? Quit and go back home? It's modern slavery.
Let me give you an example: A university near me hires postdocs on H1B despite there being an absolute glut of postdoctoral researchers available. They count some of the University benefits as contributing to the salary despite not being part of pay, and make the job requirements list items impossible to fulfill unless you've already done work with whichever researcher is hiring by making "experience" with their one off research projects or very narrow (but not hard to understand) areas of expertise a requirement.
The whole thing is an absolute joke and is used to import workers by the bucket load.
Often times entire labs will be from the same country as a researcher despite them mostly doing lab grunt work undergrads could be trained to do in a semester or less.
Mind you I'm not against foreign workers, but the H1B program is an indentured servant sham.
It's easy to fix, though. Accept H1 apps based on compensation: high pay to low, no lottery, and grant green cards after 18 months work.
This is not true and simply can't happen. Every single H1B filing data is online and public so if you want to refute me you are free to post the exact filing.
>make the job requirements list items impossible to fulfill unless you've already done work with whichever researcher is hiring by making "experience" with their one off research projects or very narrow (but not hard to understand) areas of expertise a requirement.
Also not true since there is no job posting requirement for H1Bs. Only for EB2/3 green cards. Universities generally don't sponsor green cards unless it's EB1B so this can't happen either.
I agree with your last suggestion though.
The process OP described is extremely common when groups already decided who they want to hire, but have to appear above board. Your resume essentially becomes the job posting making it nearly impossible for someone to compete (assuming you have niche skills/experience which is likely).
I worked in academic research for over a decade and have received a raise using the exact process OP described (I was/always have been a full citizen). I've also seen it used by other collaborating groups.
I think that's really all that needs to be said.
I stand corrected, please accept my apologies.
(Saw this on a university bulletin board a few years ago and snapped a picture.)
I personally know at least 8 H-1Bs that are not being paid competitive wages as specialists in the medical industry who in many cases earn 50% or less than their actual peers.
The current person I've been dating for four years is one of the people whose wage jumped 200% once they obtained their green card and had leverage to ask for a raise or switch employers at will as part of that negotiation process. I know those wages are not competitive because there were several friends working in the same area in a small community as full citizens who disclosed their salaries. In addition, others who went through the immigration process in that community frequently explain the process to H-1Bs that their salaries will jump significantly.
Underpaid H-1B is most certainly not a myth, it's a very real abuse of the system. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of legitimate competitively paid workers on H-1B, but my sampling of exposure to that world leans towards continual employer abuse of the system, at least for the healthcare industry.
I don't hold this abuse against people going through the immigration process, but I do find it highly unethical where many employers use the system akin to past forms of indentured servitude when the individuals are highly capable but make the sacrifice to gain more opportunity. These folks should be getting paid what their peers do (less some of the legal overhead required to manage the H1B aspect which is less significant for large companies than smaller businesses).
This is fatal design flaw in the program, and if fixed, any worker who is underpaid could easily jump to another job that actually paid market rate without having to worry about any visa issues.
In fact, many employment issues in the US are rooted in the poor decision to tie things to an employer. Healthcare being the worst offender, but also shitty high-fee 401k plans, etc.
“The software engineer market, it’s so saturated with H-1Bs that some of the people who are laid off are almost inevitably H-1Bs and some of the people that are being hired are inevitably H-1Bs,” Bier said. “I don’t read into it anything like this is obviously job displacement.”
"The name of the messenger."
The quote is from
> Immigration policy analyst David Bier of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, [who] didn’t see evidence of H-1B abuse by Uber in its increased visa approvals and efforts to obtain more.
- Penn and Teller, the original small l libertarians, are in the board at Cato. That pair wouldn't be caught dead associating with some neocon or populist outfit.
- Cato created and maintain libertarianism.org
- first sentence in Wikipedia's description of Cato: "The Cato Institute is an American libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C."
H-1B exists solely because industry says they can't find needed talent. If you've just had a huge number of layoffs of said talent, you should be getting 0 H-1Bs.
1. I'm simply refuting the ludicrous-on-its-face idea that if you just laid off hundreds of highly paid technical employees, that then hiring double the amount of H-1B's the following year, claiming you are not "displacing any American workers" is total BS.
2. Regardless of the letter of the law, certainly the political justification of why the US should have the H-1B program at all, which is argued by all the SV lobbying groups, is that the US needs workers in specialized fields because there aren't enough US workers.
Also, FWIW, I believe H-1B is a horrible program because it really only benefits the companies while basically allowing the visa holders to be treated like slaves. I'd be much more in favor of a simple "skilled occupations" global lottery that wasn't tied to any specific employer, with stronger protections to ensure visa holders aren't underpaid.
Second, let's take a hypothetical situation. Let's Uber has a US citizen who is a poor performer, and a H1 employee who is a rock star. Let's say both make $300K. Are you suggesting that Uber should layoff the rockstar first simply based on national origin ?
Edit: I also filtered your list by "Senior Software Engineer" in SF and the results are mind blowing with cheap H1 pulling 150-200k base salaries. I will not be surprised if some of these are TC $400k, as FAANG typically pays as much in base salaries
Sincerely hoping I was able to help you as a "friend" giving you better information
I am sure that if you filter for salaries >200K then, indeed, all the results will be >200K. However, they have positions like this one https://www.h1bdata.info/index.php?em=UBER+TECHNOLOGIES+INC&... which does not look anywhere close to 200K and is an engineer in SF. Is not 125K what a fresh grad is getting there? Or a whole bunch of 109K SW engineers (https://www.h1bdata.info/index.php?em=UBER+TECHNOLOGIES+INC&... ) in Palo Alto, is not it in the so-called Silicon Valley where it's below an entry-level SW engineer job salary? If they are looking for fresh grads then why do they need an H1B for that?
Do look at the data, do not try to re-interpret it to match your imaginary reality.
You can safely multiply by 2 the salary number there and still you are not likely to exceed the post-tax salary listed in that database.
That is NOT a small number. They obviously won't be able to fill all of them, but 300 people is larger than the entire IT departments of some relatively large tech companies I've worked for. I realize Uber is global and there is a lot of infrastructure there, but I still don't see how this is a small number at all.
this is a miniscule number
Sorry, english is not my first language. can you please elaborate on what you mean?
Looking at the STEM numbers, there will definitely be a glut of engineers. At least with an H-1B visa, they got a ticket to Disneyland.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/02/02/the-co...
I have a feeling the reason it is tolerated is because some people are genuinely uncertain about what the right thing to do is. In other words, there are business people in government who are saying to themselves, "well, if foreign workers are willing to do the same jobs for less money in exchange for being able to move to a wealthy country, who are we to stop them?"
So I think that side of it needs to be out in the open because I have a feeling a lot of people feel very strongly the other way. And just leaving it as a sort of lax policy without discussion is probably not going to be ideal for anyone.
Part of the role involved migrating the ERP and ATS system, which had employees, salary, details etc.
In the building I was in, which had incredible developers btw some of the best I’ve ever seen (and despite working on a legacy system!)...209 out of 209 were H1-B’s. Our consulting team at the time was about 20, and 19/20 of the team were H1-B’s.
The really sad part about it was as we were leaving, they were establishing a training program for junior H1-B’s with liberal arts degrees to learn programming. I have no idea how they got the visa licenses for those folks.
At the same time, they were the best people I ever worked with. But it’s not a sustainable way to run an economy.
Also the H1B process has always felt like who can create the most compelling application. Remember this is a specialization visa and you are basically demonstrating why (a) you cannot find such talent locally and (b) the value it will add to the US economy. So large companies with creative legal counsel do have an advantage over small shops.
You might be thinking of the L1 visa
H1b places no requirement on the degree you have, only that you have one.
First, you can generally read "architect" as "waste of oxygen" on most software resumes. I have known 4 people who were actually good "architects", and none of them put it on their resume.
Second, perhaps you should grow those people in house, hmmmm?
Third, be prepared for those people to leave when they get better than the "architects" you are seeing.
> Maybe time to ask for a raise?
Probably. But if you're one of the principals in a startup, you understand silly things like "cashflow" and "bankruptcy".
In the current labor market, you should be asking for a raise regardless.
It's surprising that Ron Hira is questioning why the pay packages are close together. If he's studying the use of tech H1Bs he should know that their actual income will be much higher than the number written on the LCA.
Anyone who thinks the technical interview process is based on merit/technical proficiency alone needs a very big wake up call.
The "slave" part of it is that they are totally dependent on the company in the sense that they will be kicked out of the country if they don't follow orders, which usually means being overworked and underpaid.
That's simply not true. I suggest you familiarize yourself with H1B more.
Why else would Uber, and other tech firms, like hiring them?
To be fair, if you're a software engineer the fees, while high, are pretty doable. Especially with a few years of savings under your belt.
source: just signed some papers to start and pay for a green card process.
Globalized world. You can throw some visa restrictions in the path of that tornado but it won't stop it. Profit seeking companies will always gravitate towards optimizing quality per unit of cost.
The solution isn't more complex regulation...the solution is become more competitive globally. It's the only way to win - anything else...regulations, rules, red tape...people with incentive will find a way to circumvent.
The calculation is up to the people in charge. Suspending H1-Bs simply tips the cost benefit ratio.
If your H1-B's are that valuable, then maybe you can find something else for those salespeople to do, eh?
Part of it is do you REALLY need that H1-B in preference to a domestic worker since any layoff you incur will block your access to that pipeline for the next (n) years. That is a calculation at hiring--aka frontend.
Then, once you have employed an H1-B, you're going to have some reticence to pull the layoff lever as that will now block your H1-B pipeline. That is a calculation at layoff--aka backend.
If your H1-B's are actually, genuinely valuable, the calculations are a business decision. If, however, you are using H1-B's to displace workers and then lay them off, that's going to grind to a halt really quickly.