H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act
grassley.senate.gov
grassley.senate.gov
* The bill would restore Congress’s original intent for the H-1B and L-1 visa programs.
* The bill requires employers to make a good faith effort to recruit and hire American workers before bringing in foreign workers and prohibits employers from replacing American workers with H-1B and L-1 workers or giving preference to H-1B visa holders when they are filling open positions. It modifies existing H-1B wage requirements, and for the first time establishes wage requirements for L-1 workers. This will prevent employers from using the H-1B and L-1 programs as sources of cheap labor and encourage the hiring of qualified American workers.
* The bill prohibits employers from outsourcing H-1B and L-1 visa holders to other sites unless the employer obtains a waiver which is available only in limited circumstances when the rights of American workers are protected.
* The bill gives more authority to the Departments of Homeland Security and Labor to investigate fraud and abuse in the H-1B and L-1 programs. It requires the two departments to audit employers and share information so that visa petitions are more effectively scrutinized.
* The bill would crack down on outsourcing companies by prohibiting companies from hiring H-1B employees if they employ more than 50 people and more than 50 percent of their employees are H1B and L-1 visa holders.
* The bill creates a new H-1B visa allocation system that gives top priority to workers who have earned advanced science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) degrees from U.S. institutions.
* The bill increases penalties on those who violate the law, and provides visa holders with a list of rights before they enter the U.S. so that they are better protected against mistreatment or underpayment of wages.
I know many people on the H-1B and this is the problems that I see personally:
* if you are not married, you have to get married or break up (I personally decided to get married, even though I do not believe in marriage)
* your spouse cannot work. Many of my friends have had their spouse not working for years, and going crazy.
* they cannot change job easily, they can't even quit if they're burning out to take some rest time, some of my friends feel like they are basically slaves of their current company
* if they get fired (which happened to one of my friend who works at Uber a few days ago) then their life goes to hell
* they are hard to come by (I applied twice and didn't get it, had to leave the US and wait for a year and a half for a greencard to be able to come back)
I think that has not been true in a while.
> * they cannot change job easily, they can't even quit if they're burning out to take some rest time, some of my friends feel like they are basically slaves of their current company
That is not necessarily true either. I have worked with plenty of H-1B workers who easily switched jobs. From what they told me their new employer takes care of all paperwork.
I know plenty of people that stick to a sub-optimal job out of fear of being stuck out of the US.
Changing jobs is very stressful on an H1B visa.
Sure, you can get a lawyer to write a demand letter why you’re hoping to not get deported before you find another job. And of course risk a reference from that job or worse. But the whole system is designed to create indentured servitude to corporations for foreign workers. Just put everyone who graduates with an advanced degree on a greencard and call it good already.
> I think that has not been true in a while.
It is temporarily not true (since an Obama Administration rule change in 2015), but the change is being fought in court (the case was remanded a few months ago from a panel of the DC appeals court back to a lower federal court, after they found the plaintiffs to have standing; I’m not sure what the current status is).
The Trump Administration has stated multiple times that it intends to roll the rule back. I’m not sure what the status of that is either; it’s not clear if they were just too disorganized to get around to it in 3 years, or if their stated intentions were political posturing and they never intended to follow up, or if they changed their mind, or ...
The people affected have been able to work for a few years but I’m sure the possibility of losing that right on short notice still causes some stress.
I’m not an expert but if you are curious about the details the keyword is “H-4 EAD”.
(Other points are valid though)
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
If anything, any restrictions on H1B force jobs to move out of the country rather than resulting in more "American workers" getting hired. With COVID forced WFH transition with no loss of productivity - even medium-size companies without prior experience in offshore employers are now willing to consider remote tech staff (anecdotal), and will be happy to pay 25%. Unless a very protectionist tax regime accompanies this legislation hard to see this going any other way.
Full disclosure: I am on H1B, and am partial to the visa that helped me build my life and career in the US. Now its a real possibility that I, my ineligible to work spouse and my three "very much American" children will have to leave this country due to these attempts by law-makers to find a bogeyman to target their frustration against.
EDIT: I don't know why on earth I'm being downvoted. I'm speaking from first-hand experience as I have moved from one company to another on H1B and I know other people who did.
Update: I see I got downvoted not sure why but in any case this is the way world will most likely progress whether you like it or not or whether it’s fair or not. I say a lot more about this when I called the wfh being the norm before twitters and facebooks wfh announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22558552
> Specifically, the bill would prohibit companies with more than 50 employees, of which at least half are H-1B or L-1 holders, from hiring additional H-1B employees.
The only companies I can see hitting this requirement are the Infosys/TCS types. I highly doubt most of the rest of tech has > 50% H-1B employees.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), that could be an exception.
It's quite disappointing that the US has decided to politicize two core pillars, healthcare, and legal immigration. I think both of these should be delegated to a bipartisan body, like the judiciary.
It's also disappointing to see the senators miss an opportunity to revamp the whole program. As an Indian, who did no go to grad school in US but worked at one of the FANGs, I think H1-B/L1-B should be just scrapped all together and every foreigner who graduates from an American university should get a green card. It will hurt people like me from coming to US, but generally it will be quite good for the US university system and the tech industry, and also a blessing in disguise for people like me.
If you do that, aren’t you just making the issue of who can come into the country for education the main problem instead of who can come in for work?
That being said, why is it a bad thing then? If the people are spending money to get some quality education that can be regulated within United States, then I don't see any downside in delegating the vetting process to the universities. 4 years in the United States, one family visit per year and it brings a lot of commerce to the country. If they don't perform well, then it's always upto the university to make the judgement.
This would also kill the financial incentive to hire H1-Bs for low pay.
if students cheated in college and their parents are sentenced to 5 years, i think HR head should be treated as same
This is mere political posturing, nothing more. Immigration bills are pretty hard to pass.
I think they don't have quotes, this is not a lottery.
Just let them not be tied to their current employer. Allow them to switch jobs with minimal bureaucracy and let them compete for better jobs.
Simply allowing employees switch employers without hassles will be enough for even outsourcing companies to pay high wages - because those employees won't suck it up. They'll leave for greener pastures asap, pressuring all companies to pay higher and higher for everyone.
For all the talk of capitalism and free markets, we never seem to actually practice it.
Another method, that I think would be more acceptable is to just allocate the visas based on pay. Hard to argue that H1Bs are being used to undercut US workers when there are no H1Bs making under $200k.
The problem is that there are plenty of fields besides 'computer stuff' where immigrants might make valuable contributions - but they're simply not fields that are that highly compensated.
Given we have sufficient unskilled labor, we should just scrap the existing family based green card program and h1b program and roll all quotas into employment based green card.
Firstly, if we are not producing enough "talented" people, then we should be investing on producing more "talented" people rather than bringing them from overseas. If companies can just bring in foreigners to undercut american workers then what incentive is there for companies and local/state/federal governments to invest in american workers/people.
Secondly, if we are stealing "talented" people from other countries, how fair is it to these countries that need these people to develop. Isn't it amoral for a wealthy nation to steal resources from a poor nation just so that some billionaire can get cheaper workers and/or suppress wages? And if poor countries realize that their "talented" people are going to be taken by wealthy nations, then what incentive is there for these countries to invest in and develop their own people?
If politicians supports this, then I propose we also open up these elected positions to foreigners. Let foreigners run for the senate, house and presidency. Lets see how they like it. Let them also bid for the wages as well. Don't see a downside from where I'm standing as it can't get any worse than the current political class we have.
I recommend this book for a really detailed exploration: https://www.smbc-comics.com/openborders/
For instance, the outsourcing of american manufacturing to China has seriously heart middle America. There is no real way around that. It has arguably been good on net for the world, but it has been quite bad for those specific communities. It's important that we fully recognize those tradeoffs, and not imply that unfettered immigration is a universal good.
It is almost certainly good for 'the economy'. But it can be quite bad for most of the individuals in that economy, and it's very important to disambiguate those things. On balance I think I come down in favor of more immigration, particularly high skilled, but I think it's important that we not pretend like people aren't seriously harmed by it, too.
Look at the difference between middle America and middle Portugal.
Yeah, and it's strange that the people who make these arguments are in positions unassailable to those taking advantage of "open borders".
That seems like a too general argument, as it also applies to technology.
1) High skill effect. If you invite someone who has higher productivity than average for your country, that has basically the same effect as technology. This is a strong argument for skilled immigration.
2) Low wage effect. If you invite someone who's willing to work for a lower wage (being from a poor country), you are better off, but only until they learn to ask the same wage as natives. This is why I think Caplan's main argument for unskilled immigration is weak.
3) Poor proximity effect. Most natives don't want to live among poor people, so natives become worse off when you invite poor immigrants. This is a strong argument against unskilled immigration.
Europe experienced some unchecked (outside of EU) immigration in the past couple of years and it hasn't worked well for the average person on most aspects to be honest (though yes, there are unfairly negative views as well). And yes, I'm aware some numbers look good on paper and some jobs were filled.
But the truth is that during the big immigration waves of the XX/XIX (and earlier) centuries the limitation was technology. And that limitation is mostly gone now (ok not right now, but you get the point).
Sure unlimited immigration and then what? House them where? Let them work where? What are you going to do with the people that have limited reading/writing skills (and no English skills)?
> Not necessarily. "Low-skilled" is actually kind of a misleading term here. Even American high school dropouts have at least one key skill that immigrants generally don't: the ability to speak English. That makes it possible for immigrants to complement the labor of low-skilled, native-born workers, rather than replacing it. "Low-skilled Americans who are fluent in English in a place like New York City wind up supervising the low-skilled immigrants," Caplan says. "They wind up being the bridge, or the people who train immigrants in jobs that they wouldn’t even know about from their home countries."
The problem with this hypothetical is that Caplan overlooks that libertarians wouldn’t have any political clout in this new world order. Reimagine all of Caplan’s hypotheticals, except the Squad is in charge of everything. How long do you think they would stand for English language skills being a determinant of whether someone was entitled to a supervisory role?
Yeah. Right, no more jurisdiction to DHS on labor matters.