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Comment by thawaway1837 | Hacker News Reader

The drop from 92% to 75% isn’t the complete story, or even the more important story.

The real problem is all the other nonsense people have to deal with.

We have a really great employee who single handedly wrote most of the company’s build infrastructure, and was happy in the US on his H1B because while it requires renewal every 3 years, he was well paid and enjoying his life.

Until about a year and a half ago when he went back to renew his visa in India but didn’t get an approval for about 6 months. The approval process required the company to submit the salaries of the entire 15000+ global employees from the janitors to the CEO.

Once his visa was approved, he packed his bags and moved to Toronto within a couple of months. And our company has stopped hiring more tech workers in the US because they don’t want to have to deal with this anymore.

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Why your company and employee didn't start H1B to green card conversion process?

My thoughts exactly.

As far as I can tell, this House-passed Bill has yet to pass the Senate: https://qz.com/india/1663752/indian-h-1b-holders-may-be-one-...

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/386...

Therefore, someone from India can't just "start H1B to green card conversion process."

They can start the process, it just the process won't complete for a few decades :)

Because permanent residency (green card) visa is based on the country of birth, according to this bulletin, some categories haven’t get any progress in 11 years. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...

Doesn't matter even if they did because GC wait times for Indians are ~50+ years right now.

Green cards are a joke. For some countries they are effectively impossible to get in your lifetime. That's why we have this H1B nonsense in the first place.

Depends how you look at it. The countries with the longest waits are the very ones who get the most green cards. Even if everyone from India was allowed to move to the front of the line, we'd simply end up with a very long wait for everyone.

It's an employment based GC not diversity based. The primary criteria should be how good the person is as an employee and not where they were born.

I strongly agree with this idea.

You mean if the govt could somehow assess quality? That would be nice if you have a good idea how to do that. But companies have two priorities: one is a high skill level and the other is lower pay.

If we simply removed country caps from the current system then it would be dominated by certain countries with the highest pay difference. The smartest scientist in Germany would be waiting in line behind hundreds of thousands of far-less-skilled programmers from developing countries willing to work for at-or-below market rates (in a hot market where salaries would otherwise be rising faster).

Today the smartest scientist in India could be waiting behind hundreds of thousands of far-less-skilled programmers.

A lot of countries have moved towards points based system. It deals with your level of education, level of experience, salaries etc. That could be a good start. And docking points based on where they were born should not be part of that.

Also, smartest scientist will still get the priority via EB1 instead of lowly engineers who will get the EB3 category. This is already accounted for in the current system. so we are really talking about two lowly engineers in Germany vs India. Do you agree they should have to wait for same amount of years for employment based GC? How about two scientists from China and tiny country of Monaco?

Even the smartest scientist would probably have better odds of getting in via the EB3 category than EB1.

Yes a points system is obviously better but can be manipulated, particularly in developing countries without consistent school quality. As soon as a process to get visas is created it becomes an adversarial game to beat the system. I wouldn't rate their degrees equal. India's "engineering" degrees, for example, in my view are more akin to associate's degrees in engineering technology or such. It's all multiple choice and cramming. Even if we ignore how easy such an approach is to cheat, it doesn't teach them useful skills anyway. So if they were really assessed accurately I wouldn't expect many from India to match graduates from Germany, apart from those who attend school in the west.

China has a lot more solid schools, at least in my area, though a lot of rampant cheating and everything else too.

> China has a lot more solid schools, at least in my area, though a lot of rampant cheating and everything else too.

China also has probably 1000x schools, so even by law of averages, there would more scientists coming out from there compared to Monaco. And I would leave that to companies to figure out whether a candidate is actually good enough to be their employee or if they "cheated".

> Even the smartest scientist would probably have better odds of getting in via the EB3 category than EB1.

I don't understand the point. I explained that. Anyone in EB1 gets here before anyone on EB3.

About rest of your comment, I never said two bachelors degrees should be counted the same. Having a masters or PhD in a US university or having worked at a US based company should count much higher.

Anyway, it seems pointless saying anything more at this point since you seem to have a lot of issues with the points based system but you fail to see any issues with the current system. Have a nice day.

Green card processes are also not without caveats these days. Every visa extensions with or without I140s can be subjected to "administrative reviews" that can take anywhere from a month to six months. That's what the original post refers to. Lot of folks around HN have no clue about how the Trump administration has wedged a bureaucratic block at every stage of the work visa process. I am also pretty well settled in the US but will be moving to Toronto to get rid of this visa nightmare.

Why did he go back to India to do that?

Many visa renewals require the applicants to do so from the US embassy in their home country.

You cannot renew a visa from within the US

It was possible - pre 9/11. It was stopped after that and never restarted.

Was your company Infosys or TCS?

So, doing business in the US is only good for you if you hire non-US workers? Not a lot of sympathy for that, really.

Yep. If they don't want US workers, it seems the logical thing to do would be to move the business out of the US.

Almost as though companies want to hire the best person for the job...

Where "best" = "cheapest", true.

Get off the entitlement high horse! what you snidely dismiss as "cheap" is what companies can afford to pay. Most businesses aren't FAANG and treading water mostly. Would you apply the "no shortage if you pay enough" argument for housing, healthcare or education etc. ?

Sauce for the goose == sauce for the gander

Sounds like these companies don't have viable business models then.

To me, it sounds like the complainers about "cheap labor" are entitled brats living way beyond their means.

sauce for the goose==sauce for the gander

"entitled brats" in this case being people who don't want to live in third-world conditions.

These other countries are free to try and improve their conditions. Trying to drag us down to their level is pathetic.

> These other countries are free to try and improve their conditions. > Trying to drag us down to their level is pathetic.

QED

Wow, talk about entitlement. Your birth in a developed country was an accident. Don't act as if you earned it.

so do you also agree that there should be no minimum wage for small companies?

H1B salaries are public. For my employer anyway, the salaries paid to H1Bs are about the same as for anyone else at those levels.

Another way to look at it is that the salaries of other workers are pegged to the salaries of H1B workers.

There is a way to improve this situation -- allow H1B workers to easily change employers.

Alternatively, employing an H1B requires paying into a tuition scholarship fund. $50k/year sounds reasonable to me.

I dunno, from the 98th percentile I’m not too anxious to move to 99th. I’m much more worried about losing my Chinese friends and colleagues.

And no amount of tuition assistance is going to make more than a handful of the kids I grew up with capable of this work.

I think it is quite likely that there are many people in the US who are smart enough but lack the $100k to go to university for 4 years. Not saying that immigration is bad, but there are many US citizens who could participate if they had education.

The US skims some of the best students and programmers from around the world, but also people who are equivalent but cheaper, and also indentured.

>The US skims some of the best students and programmers from around the world, but also people who are equivalent but cheaper, and also indentured.

Exactly. The latter needs to be shut off.

> And no amount of tuition assistance is going to make more than a handful of the kids I grew up with capable of this work.

How do you know that?

You realize the companies that push that line don't actually believe it themselves, right?

I always suffer a bit of second-hand embarrassment when others earnestly accept such crude propaganda.

It's all about protecting access to cheap labor.

Multinational companies are quite capable of opening offices in places where labor and cost of living is cheap.

If they have trouble bringing people to the US, it's a bigger incentive to do so.

Great, they are free to open offices there then. Good luck to them!

I'd rather they do that here, thanks

How? Sounds like their business models aren't viable in the US.

Producing software, in, say, Romania, and selling it in the US is a perfectly viable business model.

In which case the software shop is in Romania, not the US. Not sure your point.

If your goal is to employ more people in the US software industry, you've kind of shot yourself in the foot.

There are also good reasons to want to employ people who are 'closer to the client'. Plenty of places have engineers both in the US and elsewhere. Lots of companies just want to employ the best talent from wherever.

Make those things difficult though, and software is about the easiest industry to route the work abroad.

By "difficult" I assume you mean for higher pay as supply and demand dictates.

And as for the supply, everyone talks about US grads not going into STEM as if it's a law of nature. If salaries were allowed to keep going up during these temporary hot markets, more of the best and brightest would be attracted away from medicine/law (the current default choices for top students). STEM has always been a stepping-stone for the lower-middle class, not a particularly prestigious profession in my lifetime (at least compared to what someone of the same intelligence could have otherwise done). Now it is being turned into a stepping stone for the middle class from developing countries, again driving those domestic students away. (I work in education and see this every day).

Why would salaries go up that much when you can just hire people directly in Romania or wherever?

I think you are failing to grasp that this is a global market for talent. Sure, being local helps some, but if the disparity is too great, companies will move. Also, there is not a fixed lump of labor to go around.

I can grasp the concepts just fine. Being local helps immensely. The disparities are correspondingly immense. More so when you consider the high unemployment rates in developing countries.

Also there needs to be sufficient talent available across all roles needed, to completely move the company to a new location. As opposed to just a lot at the low end of skills. The cost and other downsides of that move would also be immense.

Perhaps one day remote work will be far more common, and I think this would be a good thing, by the way. I also think brain drain is bad overall. Developing countries need those productive residents far more than the west does.

You want all the benefits of a free market but all protections in the labor pool. It is not H1B workers fault that your students don't take STEM up. Stop putting everything on immigrants.

How did you infer that from the post?

It's almost as though having a US office contributes to the US economy regardless of whether there's foreign or domestic workers there. It's a net positive for the US regardless, even if 100% of workers at that office are foreigners if the alternative is moving the office to a country with a sane immigration program.

Folks in the office have to rent/buy property, buy food, supplies, etc, all from local workers too. Taxes are paid. You know, business.

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