I don't think this is too hard to imagine applying to a person living long term in Japan and definitely not hard to imagine in the US, where there are no true "Americans" in the first place, apart from maybe the indigenous peoples.
For the purposes of this debate, "Americans" means citizens and those that can vote, the ones to whom the government answers.
Why can't we discuss the legitimacy of the government?
A nationalist is focused on 1 nation.
So yeah, it's a problem.
That is probably because other countries make it even harder for people to immigrate.
A company hires someone out of college, trains them and has them working and integrating into the company for about a year and a half, but then the government, because of a literal lottery, requires them to randomly replace them with someone else.
And you’re surprised a company that has spent all that money and resources on hiring someone and with the known hit or miss nature of hiring wouldn’t want to replace them with a random new candidate?
Edit: And it gets better. They don’t need to replace the person if someone else accepts the job. They need to get rid of that employee who they are happy enough to be spending tens of thousands of dollars on that they wouldn’t need to on their citizen counterpart, even if their possible replacement didn’t accept the job. Merely if the possible replacement’s resume fit the minimum requirements of the job.
That’s why companies rewrite the position to be hyper specific. Because if there is anyone else available eho can meet the bare minimum who applies for the job, even if they aren’t interested in it and will never accept an offer, they are required to get rid of their existing multi year employee who they are happy with.
There are companies who found the absolute best in the world that they have to have. So they need that H1-B to get the job done and hire the best person.
Then there are companies who just want to contract out super cheap labor, so they do thousands of H1-B applications hoping a few hundred make it through, then the they charge a local rate, but pay the employee a fraction and reap the profits.
I’m flooding this thread a bit, but I’ve always been a little confused by the consultancy firms. Is there a clear difference between off shoring and H1B? Or is it mostly the same thing for these companies, with different margins for each.
So the H-1Bs are loss leaders with actual money being made in offshoring instead.
But the client often has their own employees on H-1B visas as well. This is unrelated to either offshoring/consulting.
Eg. Take a company like Apple. Apple hires employees on H-1B visas and pays them well.
But also Apple uses consulting firms (both US-based and offshored) for specific projects/functions. These workers are not Apple employees. They are employees of the consulting company -- or in some cases, there is a chain of contracts where they are employed by one company, which contracts them out to a consulting firm, which then contracts them out to end client (Apple).
The abuse happens through contractors.
Companies hiring full time H1B employees directly will not save money because there is no incentive to and they have to pay the government additional fees simply for the H1B visa, and they have to almost certainly have an immigration team, or at a bar minimum a lawyer on retainer to keep up with the immigration stuff.
My company applied for an employee I manager’s permanent residency (she is on an H1B visa which has a limit of 6 years unless you apply for a permanent residency). The application process costs the company 30k on a one time basis, including fees to the government, lawyer fees, and associated expenses.
Its not in salary that you see the money. The savings are in training and legal costs.
The average tenure of an HB1 is much longer than a US citizen. Turnover is lower for obvious reasons.
Threats of litigation , etc are much lower too. I havent seen a single HB1 sue their employer. Similarly, i have seen multiple US citizens sue employers, and almost always without merit (often it was to stave off termination, retaliate, etc).
There is alson some risk in a US worker. There is a lot of entitlement even at the high end. I have seen many native engineers and even PMs hit bars every other afternoon...on a 3pm weekday. These were people close to 200k year.
The HB1 is a shield against that risk (or poor hiring), and thats savings too
I'm not unbiased: I'm a former H1B visa holder and wasn't underpaid at all. I promise you we exist! It's not a fun situation to be in... if you have a pending green card application (up to a certain point in the process) you can't change jobs easily. And if you come from some countries (India, in particular) you have a wait of ten years or more before receiving your green card.
It feels like a collision of a bunch of otherwise unrelated decisions that ultimately harms both immigrant and native workers and only benefits companies. It's all fixable, but like so many things in the US right now, not politically possible.
If it's in excess of $300k for all roles it sounds like a Netflix type company or Netflix itself. I highly doubt nobody wants to work for that company.
What exactly does the work involve, if it is so difficult to either find candidates or give a candidate with some missing skills a few weeks to learn something new?
A small list of things that people may consider:
- competitive salary. 300k is one thing in (for example) Kansas City, but completely another in the Bay Area or New York City where it's not uncommon for senior roles to deliver at least a third again, if not more.
- the ethics of the company - does it engage in questionable behaviour? For example spying on users, building weapons, formenting unrest via algorithmic news feeds and so forth?
- the fundamental health of the company from a financial and existential perspective.
- does the company have a local reputation for being a poor place to work? For example, is it a bureaucracy where no-one can get anything done? Does it have a notoriously poor work-life balance, "face time" expectations, a culture where the loudest or most senior voice always prevails in decisions? What does Glassdoor (or levels.fyi) say about it?
- are the technologies you're hiring for overly specific? Are your job ads a buzzword bingo of "nice to have" frameworks, libraries or practices? Do the ads make it clear that experience in them is not required, provided you can learn them quickly thanks to experience of concepts or adjacent technologies?
Also, the vast majority of people on H1-Bs that I've worked with are quite... average. It's nothing against them, but I doubt they were blowing people away in the interview. Many of them do have better attitudes, though.
That's not to say that there aren't exceptional examples, or a given candidate was bad, but we absolutely could of hired some kid from university, or a mid-senior level from a US company. They just tend to have more demands.
It's not exactly a secret the main reason for the program, is to lower wages here. ie. keep the wages of nationals in check. Of course, you also get access to a better deal on labor, and people that want the job very badly.
I could be off base, but many of the people I've worked with on H1-Bs simply cause less political problems. It's not necessarily a cultural thing, as I'm including many different countries. They have the threat of deportation hanging over their head.
I've never seen "could-have" (hyphenated) though. I don't think that's right either.
Personally, I can't take time out of my job to train employees - which in our case could easily take three months. I can't even imagine us finding and hiring some at this time. These guys are an absolute asset to the company.
Now, if the business can survive in the meantime is a different matter. But the business has no choice in the matter. And the business is not alone in the matter. Which probably makes that a moot point too.
I don't claim that it will be easy. "I can't train people" doesn't compel me as a broadly satisfactory counterargument for the above reasons. That sentiment itself is not charitable making it hard for me to read it charitably.
We are in the health IT sector and you may not know this (because it surprises most everyone) but there is an absolute revolution happening in healthcare. We're approaching version 5 of FHIR. And I'd guess 99% of the devs on HN are like "what the heck is FHIR". It's a core standard for exchanging healthcare data. And it's literally the tip of an iceberg. And that's my personal dilemma as a lead developer.
Speaking of skill growth, devs attended FHIR Dev Days last week, CCDA Implementation-athon a few weeks before that, and the FHIR Connectathon a week before that.
None of us are in the office and since we have formed personal relationships over the last few years we know how to "get stuff done". AFAIK we treat every employee well enough they have few reasons to leave. Now is not the time for us to lose a dev. Any dev.
I just ask the government to stop being jerks and let us ride out this covid year without too much more upset...
Still feel free to see my response just below. That said I'm not management but our devs are smart and knowledgeable and I'm sure are getting offers from other companies. And I like to think they are treated well and I hope I get to work with them for a long time to come.
But then they decided they could add a machine learning tag to it, and it was fine.
That's literally one of the requirements for the Visa, the minimum has been repeatedly raised to address this problem.
So? Want to explain that to me?
It can also serve as a way for third party to earn a sizable chunk of that persons wages which would be a less likely scenario for someone hired stateside.
And here’s the kicker. An H1B employee costs a company a lot more than a resident because of government fees and lawyer costs.
So if you have a citizen and an H1B holder drawing the same salary, it actually means the company values the H1B holder far more than they do the citizen.
How is fraud a problem with the visa or the visa holder?
I'm not saying there aren't Americans who could do my job, but I have been on the hiring side since joining and there is clearly enough demand for labour in the market right now that it is hard for them to hire qualified people at all, let alone qualified Americans. Employees in this field just have so many options that companies have to go to pretty significant lengths to get who they want. And I know Americans coming from my background and working in the same field and I can tell you I am not being underpaid relative to them.
The visa workers are second-class citizens and exploited by companies to keep cost low. It undermines all workers and in the long run undermines all nations involved. Take the US's relationship with China manufacturing where China has some of the worst pollution and is one of the largest world polluters as they do not adhere to any of the same regulations that nations of the west adhere to.
Currently there is the narrative that the US has a shortage of talented STEM. This is untrue. The shortage is due to a skewed labor market that suppresses opportunity for US citizens in the same way that a US manufacturer wouldn't be able to compete against a Chinese manufacturer not because we don't have the technology, demand, or resources, but that the difference in regulations makes it more costly.
Oh, and I have to pay taxes to a government that actively torments me with ever changing requirements and absurdity.
And I don't get to vote or own property on my current Visa.
This is why I push for the opening of offices outside the US in every company I work in.
These are the same people who claim that people should immigrate legally, but then close all legal avenues of immigrating.
Eliminate H1B and expand green cards for skilled people who want to live here.
(Lottery is difficult to win due to rampant abuse by certain Indian-US outsourcing companies)
For H1b, you can at least change jobs. An L1 cannot change jobs at all. So, you are completely at the mercy of your employer. Fortunately my employer is benign, but that is not the case for everyone.
Having a proper points system (not one that is easily gamed) and giving people a greencard to enable them to change jobs would be a much better system. This would prevent low-skilled workers and the suppression of US salaries. And if there is a high demand, the US can just take those with the highest points (as the Australian system does).
There are two very good systems: 1. Australian 189 permanent resident system. Example of points:
https://www.am22tech.com/au/australia-points-calculator-for-...
There is limited positions, so only those with the highest points are selected.
(Compared to H1b where the bar is low and people are selected via lottery. This incentivises outsourcing companies to have 4 people apply for every one true position).
2. Japan's point-based high skill visa (Technical stream)
http://www.immi-moj.go.jp/newimmiact_3/en/system/index.html
Processing time for this is 5 days guaranteed and very easy to apply for (I got mine in 4 days).
This is not permanent residence, but you can apply for permanent residence after 1 year.
One means they want to limit immigration of brown people to as close to zero as possible while allowing white people from Europe with money to move here. Where they can't outright forbid anyone except white Europeans they want to increase the difficulty and bureaucracy to the point where virtually nobody gets through. If it takes 10 years to become a citizen great. If it takes 30 better. Let em die waiting.
Two lives in a fantasy land of law and order where the non criminal types could just queue up and prove that they are the right type of people and follow the law. In this fantasy land type one doesn't exist and the people sneaking in are proven to be bad people by the act of breaking the law. These people live in a world where the law exists to protect and privilege them and anyone not following it is clearly transgressing.
Virtually nobody whom we citizens are descended from waited 10 years, hired a lawyer, and filled out paperwork in triplicate and both types are hypocrites who are themselves a disease on the body politic. If you hear someone talking about how they are for "legal immigration" unfriend them, block them, don't hire them, don't associate. You can't fix them so contain the cancer.
Plenty of education and skill in the USA that doesn't have a fitting job (right now) to put that to use.
Say there are 100000 MBA's but you need someone who knows how to run a kubernetes cluster with a custom syscall shim for a modified kernel and there is someone in Norway who knows how to do that. Even combining all those college graduates combined with all their business education wouldn't be useful for such a role, but that Norwegian person would be. But you still want to stop H-1B?
Also, those mass layoffs you reference are rather recent and doesn't seem to have anything to do with this specific visa system. At the same time, the pool of available people might suddenly exist now, and that means that a company that needs someone with those skills now has a native worker available instead of having to search for people elsewhere. H-1B workers that were laid off have to exit the USA so it's not like they will add to that pool.
That said, it is still possible that those laid off people were selected to let go because their stills aren't as needed as others inside that company (i.e. positions that only exist due to scale). That doesn't mean those people happen to be the ones that you'd need to seek someone else for. Assuming that all tech people have identical skills doesn't help the conversation.
That's always true. You don't need to provide particulars.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/06/11/unemp...
If this is objection, why not just raise the minimum salary requirements to 100k instead of banning it? Most Silicon Valley companies would easily meet it.
The difference here is that America has a large 'labour' pool, but the roles you need filled aren't as much just clocking in and out doing some random task, but have requirements that are harder to meet and apparently aren't met by the available Americans. Assuming malice isn't very constructive and to do something about it that actually helps anything needs some backing information.
The other way around: most people don't really want to work in the USA and will only go if the money is right. This also means that the company in the USA that is trying to find someone to fill a gap in their needs might have to spend twice as much getting their problem solved. At the same time, the amount of Americans asked to work outside of the USA is rather low as there aren't that many special skilled people that aren't already available. If you check out the sources listed at the WikiPedia page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_diaspora you'll find that a lot of emigration happens for other reasons, and only a small part is related to special skills needed in emerging markets (which are markets that need a lot of skilled people but are not very attractive to a lot of people due to cultural differences or stability worries).
The "Fixed pie fallacy" [1] is probably both one of the most important tenants of modern policy-making, yet it's rarely explicitly discussed or debated.
Cyclone_, your thinking relies on this fallacy, namely that if one person is working a job, that's one less job available. [2]
In reality, there is quite a bit of empirical research that indicates when people work (especially highly skilled jobs like in tech), it does not reduce (and may even increase) the jobs available to others [3].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/07/opinion/lumps-of-labor.ht... 3. https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/...
Economies are complex, counter-intuitive feedback machines, but the "supply and demand" model fits the last 40 years of data, while the "floats all boats" model really doesn't.
"Lump of labor is a fallacy, honest!" sure sounds like the kind of opinion I could get a good penny for if I were an enterprising economist, though.
"More than half of the top American tech companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants"
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/30/us-tech-companies-founded-by...
Recent immigrants were responsible for creating tens of thousands of jobs, most of them for Americans.
Software isn't a zero-sum game even on a country level and certainly US benefits enormously because companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix etc. are global giants but employ massive amounts of highly paid people in US.
Because it's very difficult. Even then Zenefits' co-founder (Laks Srini) started on an H-1B.[1]
What's that saying? "Entrepreneurship uh...finds a way."
1. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2852250/silicon-valley...
In any case, immigration is the least upsetting globalization policy IMO: it is exactly what it says on the tin, almost everyone agrees that too little or too much is bad, and the amount can be tuned using quotas. H1B, however, is not that. It pretends to be about scarce skillsets (which enter this calculation one way) when it's actually usually about standard skillsets (which enter the calculation in another). Further, it suppresses the bargaining ability of the people subjected to it, depressing wages for both them those they compete with. Worse still is "regulatory arbitrage" where low tariffs encourage companies to bypass environmental, safety, and labor regulation by shipping manufacturing (or what have you) overseas. I prefer immigration to both H1Bs and regulatory arbitrage, and not by a small margin.
As a more general point, exponential growth is one helluva drug and truly does create a "floats all boats" environment, but different economics apply once an economic sector plateaus. Those economics look much closer to zero-sum. Zero-growth = zero-sum. Low growth is low sum. That's why what happened to American manufacturing over the last 20 years is a good model for what happens to American software over the next 20, if we aren't careful.
We've had it good in software, but we're no longer in the phase where we can pretend the sigmoid is a neverending exponential.