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Comment by vzaliva | Hacker News Reader

The assumption that they are hiring H1B employees to save money does not hold the water. It is a condition of H1B visa approval for the company to offer a competitive wage. The company must advertise a similar position and offer an H1B employee a salary in the market range.

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.

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Oh please. They game competitive wages, make the position ridiculous in terms of requirements, or give it abusive attributes nobody with self respect and freedom would accept, write descriptions to match specific people, compare to lowest common denominator, and "advertise" the positions in places nobody will look, etc.

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.

>They count some of the University benefits as contributing to the salary

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.

Advertising the position for certain time periods is typically a requirement related to using federal funding obtained through grants for paying personnel from certain agencies or a general university policy.

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.

Another poster has a picture of a posting for an H1 job that pays $13/hr for someone with a doctorate in a category for which a) the wage is a joke (even a few years ago postdoc average would be $35k+, I think, currently I think it's low 40s), and b) there's no shortage of Americans (well known glut of available postdocs).

I think that's really all that needs to be said.

I just saw that picture. It's an actual LCA approval. Never knew you could get an H1B approved for those rates. I thought the minimum was $60k.

I stand corrected, please accept my apologies.

Dunkin Donuts hires on H1B so imagine the rates they hire for

To be fair I legit don't know the details of the fine print. I just know that I see things that don't really make sense to me and seem abusive of the system.

It is absolutely not a condition of the visa approval process that H-1B receive competitive wages. The language specifies recipients must be paid "prevailing wage" and that is defined and determined in a variety of ambiguous ways that allow lots of ambiguity for wage suppression

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 would be easily fixed if H-1Bs were not tied to the employer.

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.

But they are easily transferable. I've hanged work on H1B at least 4 times.

Check out this "competitive wage:"

https://imgur.com/a/Sao5CKy

(Saw this on a university bulletin board a few years ago and snapped a picture.)

Yes, companies applying for H1B visas are not doing so in an attempt to save money, they are paying a premium to acquire desirable talent. However regarding your comment about "anti-immigration hysteria" US tech companies use foreign contractors to save on headcount costs. These are not H1B visas, these are contractors that are paid a very small fraction of the salaries of software engineers. These contractors are working along side US engineers and doing the same job for much lower pay. That is a concern to me as I cannot compete with the salary of someone living in Eastern Europe, Macedonia, India or Argentina. If you want to label my concern hysteria, you may do so, but it's still something I'm concerned about.

The ironic thing is that extra restrictions on H1Bs and the insane green card wait times will lead to accelerating offshoring and use of foreign contractors. In fact, it's already happening. Not only does it badly hurt the US economy and tax collection, when whole new teams are hired offshore, and the company is used to working with offshore teams, they will tend to hire new people in those places.

E.g Canada is reaping rewards https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2019/09/16/canad...

Exactly, there was a cost to figuring how to offshore the job. Now that it's harder to retain the international talent in the US, if you want to remain competitive, you have to setup overseas. Once you overcome the barrier, expansion overseas is easier.

Canada was...but they’re starting to blow it.

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 person you're replying to was not speaking of all foreign contractors, they were speaking of H1Bs in particular. So it sure doesn't seem that your particular concern was labeled hysteria, because it's a different one.

People on visas cannot get raises. And they can't refuse to work late.

Do you have references to back this up ? Or did you just make it up ?

No raises because many cannot afford to quit and lose the visa and be extradited. Can't refuse to work late or they can be fired and lose the visa and be extradited.

Why would anyone be extradited ? Did they violate some international law ?

OP likely meant deported due to lapse of valid citizenship status, not extradited.

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.

Completely incorrect. H1 employees in SV have a lot of mobility as there are hundreds of thousands of jobs available that sponsor your visa. And your visa can be transferred under 15 days. You don’t even have to quit your previous employer before your approval in place. SV companies have 20-40% attrition rate and a large portion of that is H1 employees moving around

It's made up. I've had multiple visas including (currently) H-1B and it's just not true.

So your personal experience is the experience of every H-1B? Including the ones who are vehemently disagreeing with you?

Of course not. But my experience is a counterexample to the claim "People on visas cannot get raises", which is worded so absolutely as to imply that it is not allowed under the visa program to give someone a raise.

I see. Well, thanks for the single data point!

That's all that is needed to disprove OP's statement. Maybe it isn't as common to get a raise on a visa, but that doesn't justify an incorrect statement (or at best a crucial oversimplification).

The HN guidelines encourage everyone to not take the worst interpretation, but ok, go for it.

It's difficult to have an interpretation of a claim as straightforward and direct as the one I was referring to which flatly uses the word "cannot." The statement is just wrong whichever way you look at it given even a single counterexample. Meanwhile, you seem to have taken the worst interpretation of the comment providing their anecdotal experience, inferring for some reason that they meant it as a general statement that applies to everyone, even after they clarified otherwise in a followup reply. Your interpretation seemed so obscene to me that I felt the need to reply in the first place.

Are you suggesting that the massive wage inflation that happened in SV over the last 10 years , combined with the massive increase in real estate prices, in a place where H1 are probably 50% of eng workforce is an example of not getting raises ?

This has been my experience as well. The company I worked at never promoted h1bs and all of them worked around 60 hour weeks. Not surprisingly the turnover of citizens was extremely high and the turnover of h1bs was virtually none.

Not in my experience.

Give me a break, I've seen first hand how H1B's are treated like dogshit by management.

What are they gonna do? Quit and go back home? It's modern slavery.

Lol, you can quit and go to another employer, no ?

Not on short notice. Need to find an employer willing to sponsor and pray H1B application gets approved. Takes months. I agree it's much easier if you're in tech though.

In the context of SV, 100% of employers sponsor H1 visa. So you can literally walk to the next building, interview and have an offer by the next day. And get an approval in 15 days, and start working. I am exaggerating a little, but there are hundreds of thousands of H1 eligible software eng jobs available in SF and SV.

They gonna find a new job and transfer their H1B there. It is difficult to get the first H1B as you must fit the limited annual cap. But once you got it, you can relatively easily transfer to new employer. Speaking from experience...

From my experience, people are upset about "Mexicans are coming for your jobs!" because of employers hiring illegal immigrants to do labor work at a discount.

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