Trump suspends H1B, H4 visas till year end
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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 by lottery, before being asked to leave the country. Regardless of their qualifications.
2. Instead of staying in tech for their career, 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.
My understanding is that the latest executive order includes several exemptions, but I still want to emphasize how widely used and important H-1B is as an channel for introducing talent into the US.
I know several brilliant new/junior professors who are nevertheless on the H-1B track. My point is that H-1B is far and beyond the default and most common visa for introducing foreign working talent, and others like O-1 and EB-1 are the rare, rare exceptions.
EB-1 is an immigrant visa and, aside from being smaller in number than H-1B, was already halted along with immigration generally on April 22, and this order extends the immigration halt through December as well as adding a few nobimmigrant visa categories to the halt.
No, it stands for “Employment Based, First Preference”, and you can go tell U.S. Citizenship.and Immigration Services that it's not a visa, because they think it is.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-worker...
Employment-Based Immigration: First Preference EB-1 […] You may be eligible for an employment-based, first-preference visa if you are an alien of extraordinary ability, are an outstanding professor or researcher, or are a certain multinational executive or manager.
The reason for this is because the O-1 visa is significantly harder to qualify for. The same people who would expect would be in the running for an O-1 (master's and postdoctoral students) apply for an H1B, in large part because the bar for the O-1 is just that high.
This is only if you have a research-based job. If you graduate with a PhD and get a job on the software engineering ladder, you're SOL.
In fact, enumerating the criteria here is useless, because almost all of them pertain directly.
Just having a publication record is not enough. It needs to be a strong record and you need to have strong ties to the academic community through things like program committees. I've sadly had to turn down a lot of people who would easily improve the country by working here because their publication record isn't enough to get an O-1 visa.
I know faculty at MIT who aren't on O-1s.
It's not easy.
There are several valid reasons to seek permanent residency - which I don't want to dive into here or moralize.
Just wanted to call out again that O 1 is a dead end.
If it's an “immigration” quiz, why are all the scenarios about nonimmigrant status?
(1) All actual immigration entry was already suspended since April 22.
(2) The present order adding suspension of some nonimmigrant visas through the end of the year also extended the general immigration halt to the end of the year.
You don't apply for a “green card”, you apply for an immigrant visa. If you get and enter on an immigrant visa (including getting one while already present on another type of visa), you are then issued a permanent resident card (a “green card”, though it's not green.)
What was suspended April 22 is essentially all immigrant visas.
Also, if I remember correctly not all non profits can do this, but only certain category of nonprofits hiring for specific roles. Otherwise I could start a non-profit software foundation, bring in workers and then write lots of free and open source software.
Some administrator at Wright state university got cap-exempt H1B visas, then sent them to various for profit clients: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/wright-state-university...
There are more interesting stuff about US visas IMO. With a number of them, and if you come from countries like Poland, after a year in the US you have to stay away for 2 years before coming back to the US. With a number of visa your spouse also can’t work and is reduced to a stay-at home. Internships that want to be converted to FTE needs to try the H1B lottery also.
This is not true in general, assuming you're a student (since that's the usual situation for an internship). You can rely on CPT during school (with some bureaucracy), or OPT if you run out of CPT time.
This has resulted into huge queue for Indian citizens. Any Indian who applies for employment based green card has to wait around 150 years to get his/her green card. Until then they have to keep renewing their H1B and subject to constantly changing laws. It is estimated that there are around 300K-500K Indians stuck in the backlog many of whom are in country for more than 10 years.
A lot of H1B rule changes by current admin are done specifically to target these individuals.
> Still H-1B
Wait, really? I would think EB-1 would be the better route to take via the "Outstanding professors and researchers" qualifications, no?
https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/permanent-worker...
Actively trying to keep talent out to appease idiots who believe in the type of ideology all those great physicists were running away from is national suicide.
BTW, the rise of Xi Jinpeng is an incredible opportunity to absorb top talent from China, and we are squandering it by making ourselves inhospitable. Same goes for top talent who doesn't feel like swinging on Vladimir Putin's nuts.
Putin's been around for a long time, mon ami. Those that didn't like him and could leave already have. There is a reason there are a lot of very expensive houses (that stay empty) in Vancouver.
They have been making these sorts of life changing policy decisions at the drop of the hat for years now - no notice, no coherent long term plan whatsoever, only a year old tweet from Trump promising reforms. Even if you have spent 5 or 10 years in the country studying, working, paying taxes, building friends & family in the US, you have no more stability or value to the government than a fresh immigrant.
The constant instability of your entire life as an immigrant is not worth putting up with. Might as well go somewhere else - in most places you get points based immigration and a STABLE visa & path to citizenship that won't fall out from under you.
Even with all the hassle, it is still worth it working for big tech. People won't make nearly as much elsewhere.
Getting treated like a second class human being by even "liberal minded" folk simply due to an accent and the lack of hip phrasology "like, I KNOW! I CAN'T EVEN, OMG"
Being kept at arms length for decades even after putting enormous amounts of money in escrow and submitting piles of paperwork just to get the slightest hope of a visa appointment at your local US consulate, let alone entering the Green Card Lottery?
It's over-rated, over-ripe, and the "Land of Opportunity" is now the "Go away, we have self-inflicted problems we will likely blame you for" land.
Flag this if you want, but I have direct personal experience in many many countries and I come from the states, so I'm not talking out of my behind. We are the meanest country on earth right now. That's why I left. (well, actually it was the Iraqi invasion, Guantanamo Bay, and the ongoing activities in central Asia coupled with the new-speak that even the Dem-aligned rags were pushing, NYT, WaPo "Weapons of Mass Destruction" and wars on emotions and such... but see, this is related: it's about being mean and making others pay with their lives for ones ideological comfort zone, etc.)
I was just pointing that the reason a lot of skilled h-1bs still come and stay despite the issues is because the salaries at some companies are just really damn good compared to what they'd make at their home countries.
You will have a ridiculously high salary rather than a garangutan SV salary, but it's worth not getting stuck in a Bay Area traffic gridlock every day while worrying about whether you'll be allowed to go back to the country after renewing your H1-B.
Years ago made the decision to stay permanently the European Big Tech office which I was going to stay temporarily, and I'm much happier for it.
1. The focuses on family reunification visas instead of skills which differs from other countries such as Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.
2. Visa applicants are tied to their employer and require their employer to sponsor their Green Cards.
3. Green Cards being issued based on country of birth. I think we can park the idea of "diversity" being a quality of an immigration system.
If you are referring to national immigration quotas then I agree that yes, it was quite unfair for awhile now.
It's just a bit odd. There wasn't even a hard physical border with Mexico until the 1920's. There used to be a rather active workable "temporary farm worker visa" program that got sacrificed on the altar of pleasing xenophobic morons somewhere in the 70's or 80's I guess...
As a person that lived thru it, it was not xenophobia, it was NAFTA that sent everyone scrambling to survive. Our farm lost viability due to it, as did most small family farms. You either conglomerated with the emerging mega-farms if you where big enough or you died. Organic was nowhere on the horizon at that time and was the only thing that brought back the viability of small plot farming. Xenophobia is an easy answer to reach for, but the reality is people where scrambling to save their livelihoods and kicking the legs out from under the big conglomerates via removing the migrant workforce they relied on was one of the efforts. It has more to do with surviving than a disdain for other people. Also there was no love loss for the big conglomerates as they where the very entities that pushed for NAFTA, so trying to remove their workforce was fair game.
In the end I miss the family homestead but it worked out for me. I was a crappy citrus farmer (due to lack of passion) and while I appreciate my youth, I don't ever want to own a farm so I am glad my family got to reap the rewards of selling it, rather than me inheriting a farm that I would have to figure out what to do with.
The visas in question made it easy to legally hire foreign (mostly Mexican, I’d guess) agricultural workers. That would have reduced the cost of farming your family homestead.
Canceling the visas presumably encouraged many of those workers to accept lower wages to work farms in Mexico. The old visa program was effectively a subsidy for US farms; ending it created more competition for US farms. Arguably, it also made NAFTA more likely to happen, since it moved agricultural production from the US to Mexico, and people have to eat.
Suspending the H-1B and green card programs will have the same long term effect on the US tech industry.
fwiw, this is not required. people can apply for GC themselves if they want.
The US switched to acting stingy, mean, xenophobic, etc. a few decades ago. I'm not sure why, as it has about 1/9th the population density of an India.
One could wax philosophical about "the end of the west" and how the influx of immigrants was needed to colonize the land up to the Pacific Ocean and feed the factories of our vast manufacturing sector, and clearly those motives both dried up.
I'm not sure where the whole "punish immigrants and treat them like garbage" concept came from.
I may sound extreme to some folks, but having some experience as an immigrant FROM the USA moving TO Europe after significant time lived abroad (50+ countries in a decade) I can honestly say that no country on earth is currently more xenophobic and snobby.
Someone will probably flag me for promulgating such views but it's the inexorable conclusion I've come to given my experiences.
stingy, mean, xenophobic, etc. a few decades ago
I’m not sure why either, but I’d definitely like to maintain or even decrease that population density. I’m not sure why people focus on increasing population density as a good thing. It’s not like we have some sort of shortage of people.
In the US, basically everything is tied to employer: healthcare, retirement (though at least with 401ks they now float from employer to employer), etc.
I think this is primarily because there is now so much money in politics that only large corporations (or the rich in charge of same) have enough to participate in the political system.
The only way this nonsense will change is when more people who do have other options take them. This is mainly an image issue; in the Obama years, even though it was probably as bad as this today (just not overt), the risk-reward ratio of surviving all this was viewed as better than going somewhere else. All this changed with Trump being this transparent. There is going to be a lot of hesitation now for anyone who wants to immigrate. Anywhere except the US, and only if necessary.
Since getting them to do that is literally the purpose of the nonsense currently being executed, and which has been executed against immigrant and nobimmigrant aliens for the last several years, I think you are mistaken. It's not like that's been at all a secret.
This image now is a lot nearer to reality than it previously was. When this leads to people not having US-citizen children, or not buying houses, or just not jumping on the boat to reach the US come what may, or just not being too optimistic in general (essentially not tying yourself to a country when the country hasn't done the same with you in terms of citizenship), things will maybe get a bit more sane.
> has to be based on the employer's decision to continue their employment and not some politician's whim
While everyone here would love for this to happen, clearly nothing's working as it should be, or how we want it to be. It hasn't been, for quite a while. This is realpolitik.
I am engaged to a Chinese citizen, who is an active H-1B visa holder working for a U.S. technology company. We were visiting China in January to both see her family and friends and to do the yearly renewal of her re-entry visa. This latter point is important because it is a mind bogglingly inefficient process that forces people to travel back to their home country to renew a visa they already have and are using to live and work in the U.S. just so they can be able to leave and re-enter. This is just so the U.S. can have the possibility of keeping them out when they want for whatever reason, just as they have in this case.
Anyway, the U.S. Consulates shutdown during the outbreak in mid-January, halting her visa processing, needlessly in my mind because she had already accomplished her in-person interview. Then, the U.S. Consulate held her Chinese passport, which had valid visas to other countries, for over a month. This prevented her from going to another country and doing the visa processing there. (It is normally recommended to do the renewal in your home country, for reasons of being stranded wherever you're doing the renewal.) So the U.S. stopped processing her basically finished visa renewal, then held on to her non-U.S. passport preventing her to travel between two countries that aren't the U.S., and now they have kept her out of the country on the point of helping unemployed workers when she already has a job because she was the qualified candidate. This was all in January and February and some of March, long before the "official" bans on visas.
I have not seen my fiancee in over five months. It is unlikely I am to see her in 2020 and even 2021. I may eventually be able to travel to China to see her, but it is looking more and more that she will be unable to return to the U.S. any time soon. This is all complicated by the fact that her H-1B is time bound and the Green Card is a lost cause because it takes multiple years to be issued.
This is a person who already has a U.S. job that she was more qualified for than U.S. citizens. Just because people are unemployed doesn't magically make them qualified for jobs they already lost out on. It also is unclear what companies who already employ H-1B holders are supposed to do. There is no policy or method to get the fiancee of a U.S. citizen who already holds a valid H-1B back into the U.S. right now, and it's not clear when one will open up. It also makes no sense, from the very beginning, why the U.S. prevented her from returning at any point unless you understand that the U.S. is literally at war with China, immigrants, and non-immigrant workers.
All of this is vastly compounded by the inefficiencies, directed by our miserable administration, of the USCIS, because applying for a K-1 visa is not as straightforward as you would think. Even though the H-1B is a dual intent visa, applying for the K-1 visa could see the H-1B process incur delays or even denial. The U.S. government holds immigrants and non-immigrant workers hostage, and this is affecting U.S. business and citizens' personal lives. Right now, it is literally impossible to get someone who has a job in the U.S., has a current H-1B visa, a home, cars, and other assets in the U.S., is engaged to a U.S. citizen, and planned on immediately marrying a U.S. citizen after a "routine" vacation back into the U.S. any sooner than years. This is a pathetic situation.
I am a tech worker who has worked for technology companies and national security labs. I am now being forced to think about leaving my parents and brother behind in the U.S. to consider moving outside of the U.S. so that I can continue my life with my fiancee and build my own family.
People in this country wax on (whine) about freedoms, but what they are really wanting is to do whatever they want when they want it at the expense of literally anyone else but themselves, including their neighbor. It's nothing but extreme narcissism, and I cannot help but feel this country is a lost cause. The U.S. is an extremist state now, taken over by charlatans and textbook traitors.
You must renew your visa in your home country. There is a possibility of doing it in another country, such as Canada, but this is not usually recommended and has a higher probability of failing.
Mind you, these are people that already have visas. They are simply being renewed. The secondary effect of this is that it slows down processing of visas, which lowers how many are given out and increases the cost of the USCIS. Although I think this particular thing has existed for a while now, the Trump administration has made it a point to needlessly increase the processing time by making policies to delay the processing. This is a tactic that further slows down the USCIS, making it much more costly, just so that they can point out how costly and inefficient the USCIS is when it is their policies that make those things worse.
For example, if you make an application for an H-1B, extension, or renewal, it takes months to prepare the paperwork. Once submitted, the USCIS can send it back, requesting more information. This has become much more common under the Trump administration, because it basically adds a minimum three to six month delay to the process. It gets sent back to the applicant, one must extremely carefully understand the confusing request for more information, provide the information, and resubmit. The USCIS then starts the whole evaluation process back over again.
I don’t think that’s correct. Although often it’s considered advisable to do it that way (consular processing), there is an alternative process (change of status) where you apply while remaining in the US.
(source: renewed an L-1A visa a few years ago; advice received from my firm’a immigration attorneys)
The process is so overly complicated, it's hard to track. I am not aware of any process in which you can re-stamp an H-1B inside the U.S. You meed to do an in-person interview, and these are done at U.S. Consulates and Embassies, none of which are inside the U.S.
Of course, it's difficult to quickly find the information on the official U.S. websites, but here are sites that explain it.
http://www.greencardapply.com/question/question17/H1B_Visa_S...
https://www.h1base.com/visa/work/h1b%20visa%20stamping/ref/1...
Upon renewal even the most trivial thing can be used with no transparency or accountability or review and keep you out of the country for life. Bam. Can't get back home, stuck in India, everything left behind. That's it. I know because I've had several clients lives ruined by thus lunacy.
Initial visa issuance (for three years) will be at a consulate abroad by definition, and then one more visit to get the extension stamped (for the next three years).
My experience of the whole process was much less dramatic than many here. I was advised to budget for a week out of the country (for consular processing of an L-1A extension), and it ended up taking rather less.
Is the real problem after the six year term when extensions are done on a year-by-year basis for those with pending labor certification or backlogged priority date for an immigrant visa?
Having said that, the story from the OP does not add up: you don't need to renew the visa stamp to stay in the country. The stamp is for crossing the border. I, for one, never renewed my H1B stamp since I did not have a need to leave the country. If I were to leave, I'd just go to a consulate and get a new stamp to get back so having visas stamped only outside of the country does not appear as such a hurdle - you only need the stamp if you are already abroad.
My story does add up. We needed to leave the U.S. to visit China, and we also visit Canada sometimes, hence necessitating the stamping process to take place at a U.S. Consulate in China. And it was this process that ended up being indeed a massive hurdle. In fact, so massive it is a major part of what kept my fiancee from returning. This is one of the cruxes of the story.
>We were visiting China in January to both see her family and friends and to do the yearly renewal of her re-entry visa.
sounds like the renewal per se was a goal of your visit. If you are saying that you went to visit China and had to get a new visa stamp because the current one expired then it indeed adds up.
No. At least for Chinese citizens, it is either every year or every two years that you must renew the stamp to be able to leave the U.S. and return.
I would advise not trying to dilute the impact of the rules just because you don't know or didn't experience them yourself. You aren't mentioning the country you are from, which also confuses the matter. These things change depending upon the origin country.
Even worse, the priority date for EB-1 India, where I am from, jumped nearly 11 months forward in 1 month, and my priority date is just 7 months behind. If I end up getting a GC before she is able to come back, we'll have to go through an entirely separate process to get her GC, which will take at least 1-2 more years.
The only option seems to be to wait for the GC for a few more months, and then move to a different country so we can be together and start anew. We will then have to start the process of getting her GC and deal with all the paperwork that entails, assuming laws don't change again. Who knows, in this time maybe we'll just end up living in the new place for good.
Both of us have PhDs from a top engineering school, own a house, and have lived in the Bay Area for the past 15 years. The chaos this is creating is mind boggling.
Another friend got fired from Uber a few weeks ago on an H1B. Does it mean she have to leave now?
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/proclamation...
Majority of talented people are doing that already for several years now. Besides US is not as attractive anymore.
U.S. workers in the engineering and technical disciplines cannot compete with H1B visa applicants who are submitted at probably 30% market rates and wages, and openly discriminate in the work place if you're the token white dude U.S. citizen working in the same office. H1B is miserable, corporate welfare for Zuckerberg and Bezos.
I would def hire an H1B even it costs me upfront premium for those reasons.
No they cannot, this causes issues with their perm processing. You need to find an employer that can sponser your greencard otherwise you are out of country in 6 yrs. So you not just have find an employer that will transfer your h1b but also pick up perm processing from your previous employer.
More info here,
https://www.murthy.com/2019/12/26/how-a-job-changes-may-impa...
This is just one example.
It is far far far away from 'freely'. Given the arbitrary nature of uscis processing people try to minimize their iteraction with the agency. No visa employee will attempt this risky move for a 10k salary bump.
2. Yes FAANG's might be ethical h1b users that pay 300k+ but that doesn't automatically imply everyone else is.
3. I have personal experience with this have encountered higher manager wanting to hire h1b for the reasons i've described above.
4. X is conspiracy theory because there are exceptions to X is a basic logic fail. 'real conspiracy' is an oxymoron.
My post again, and stop flagging it you angry H1B workers that leave 20 pairs of shoes outside of your hovel:
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There is no question H1B visa holders can escalate through the ranks and make a bunch of cash in the United States.
And that's exactly what is wrong with the entire thing. That entire teams of Indian H1B visa holders will immediately get whitey off the project, every single time, while making sure that the hiring manager and technical team leads are always Indian. This is the caste system, re-invented here the U.S. And you cannot get shit done if you are a competent engineer dealing with an offshore team or onshore H1B team. They will not do what you tell them to do. They will argue about every single point. They will trash your credibility and refuse to implement anything, using groupthink that controls the entire project. Managing a team of onshore H1B workers is nothing but interoffice politics that they completely control in all aspects. It's blatantly racist and has destroyed U.S. worker opportunity in the engineering fields, all of them.
H1B is a complete scam, especially in the Beltway / Northern Virginia area where everything is a billable contract. Headhunters get their fee and/or a large chunk of the first year's hourly revenue. The company hiring the H1B worker is on some federal project or grant and is making the spread between what the headhunter charges and the hourly rate on the contract. The hiring company couldn't give a shit less about the quality of work provided by Indian H1B workers, nor is a college degree granted from an Indian university anywhere near what is required in the U.S. from an engineering perspective - there is no comparison in the quality of education, nor have I ever met a single H1B engineer that was better than anything but a limited segment of technology that they specialize in, by design, because that requires their team in order to complete the project.
Makes total sense if you're the headhunter and hiring company, both of whom only care about having a warm body in a seat that is billable, and you can get three warm bodies in the seat for the price of one market rate position using H1B. It's complete bullshit, a scam on the taxpayer and attack on U.S. workers. Worthless 99% of the time, and the 1% of H1B engineers that actually do know what they are doing are not worth the damage the H1B program has done to the entire U.S. technical space.
H1-B visas are for highly skilled workers, either holding higher education diplomas or similar qualifications. They also come with a minimum salary requirement, which for most tech companies would start at $150,000.
Any company paying their visa holders less than the required minimum salary cap, is indeed committing a crime.
Also, this move is obviously directed against tech companies. It does not make any distinction between large IT providers such as TATA, well known for their dumping tactics, and Microsoft, Google, or Apple.
I would even go further to say that, given the lack of interest in banning the entry of seasonal workers, who focus mostly on blue collar jobs, and given that the highest contribution to the rising unemployment numbers come from lower paid service and manual jobs, this is just another move to appeal to the rural, hard right wing Trump base.
As it will not impact them in any significant manner, yet it would create more uncertainty in wealthier, highly educated, urban areas.
While I understand that my company is cheating the system, this particular requirement is news to me. I personally work with dozens who are probably taking home something in the $70-80K range. I'm guessing this particular cheat is that most are working through Tata and Infosys (and others, but they're local, and would give away who I work for). The company is probably paying the placement firm that kind of money, and the visa holders are getting shafted. The direct H-1B's are higher-level, and, given what I know of the company's salary schedules, may well be getting paid at the bottom of the requirement.
"The H 1B also requires that the H-1B employer pay the H-1B employee the prevailing wage or the actual wage, whichever is higher. The prevailing wage is the salary paid to workers in similar occupations in the geographic area of the intended employment. The actual wage is the wage that the employer pays employees in similar occupations at the location of the intended employment.. Since the procedures and record keeping required for the H-1B are complex, an attorney or other trained person will be necessary to complete the paperwork."
Given that H1-B visa holders are required to be paid a prevailing wage, hiring companies should not be able to undercut local workers' demanded salary.
Now, consultancy companies aren't following the spirit of the law here, obviously, and thus should be punished. Instead, we have got an order that hurts thousands of legitimate visa holders and prospects.
I work for a large tech company (not FAANG), am a visa holder myself. If the Trump administration wanted to go against the actual issue, they would take on the obvious abusers, i.e. consultancy companies. Instead, they chose to leave thousands of high skilled workers on the limbo.
This is just patently false.
The solution to that problem is to relax immigration restrictions to make it easier for immigrant workers to switch jobs so they have more leverage. Not go the other direction and further torture immigrants by making their lives harder.
Even from the Valley perspective, the picture is more nuanced.
Business leaders from the Valley are fully aware of H-1B restrictions on job mobility and take plenty of advantage of it. Particularly the fact that the huge GC backlogs for employees from India and China allows a version of indentured servitude they can take advantage of.
After the 2014 State of the Union address there were plans[1] to provide EAD[2] to people on Greencard backlogs, allowing them to switch jobs with less friction. This was torpedoed by Tech business leaders. Also, notice how little attention Tech leadership puts on Greencard backlogs (and the H4 kids who will age out) and contrast that against the crocodile tears they shed for DACA, Muslim ban etc.
[1] Executive Action: Support High-skilled Business and Workers - http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_...
[2] Employment Authorization Document - https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-processes-and-pr...
That doesn't mean I'm making SF compensation levels, but I also don't have to pay 3/4 of it in rent.
Maybe you could come visit and consider your options.
This isn't true of Vancouver and I'm not sure why.
One data point does not prove or disprove. If you look at average cost of living numbers compared to average developer salaries, my ratio is much closer to the picture those paint than yours.
I was only considering my lifestyle in Toronto, where we have similar problems but not to the same scale. Toronto is less afraid to build up! Last I heard there were something like 50+ buildings over 50 stories under construction in the city.
Have you seen California state tax rates? The SALT deduction limits from the 2018 "tax cut" bill have only made the calculus worse. And anything you save on income tax, you (or your employer) will spend on health insurance.
Someone living in California or Ontario will have almost the same effective tax rate (like within 2-3 percentage points) for a given salary.
Agreed. This is a huge tax break.
> In 2018, I took my total $$$ paid to Fed + CA and divided over total income and effective rate was only 28%
Do you mind plugging in the same income to https://simpletax.ca/calculator for Ontario, use $26500 of RRSP deduction and see your effective rate? In this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23618074) I showed that an income with 30% effective rate in California has a 35% effective rate in Ontario. Higher? Yes. A lot higher? IMO, no.
Here's an article from Canada's most respected business and finance paper breaking it down.
Don't forget that cost of real estate/rent in Toronto or Vancouver is not significantly cheaper than SF, salaries are lower, cost of living expenses (food, car insurance, clothes, electronics, cellphone plans, etc) are higher and you're still going to want to carry supplemental health insurance because OHIP does not cover everything.
Effective tax rates provide a clearer picture. Let's take one example.
I plugged in $200k (CAD 270k, admittedly quite high for Ontario) of income to a California[1] and Ontario[2] tax calculator.
For California, I used the following: "Filing status - Single, 401k deductions - $19k". Effective tax rate: 30%.
For Ontario, I assumed CAD 26.5k in RRSP deductions. Effective tax rate: 35%.
> cost of real estate/rent in Toronto or Vancouver is not significantly cheaper than SF
Buying isn't cheaper. Renting is still significantly cheaper (at least by 1/3).
> salaries are lower
This is true.
> cost of living expenses...are higher
Cellphones and internet, yes. Everything else (yes, even milk and dairy products if you shop at Costco) is comparable to US prices.
> you're still going to want to carry supplemental health insurance
Most employers provide this. And vision/dental is far cheaper than paying for everything.
I'm not saying you'll end up with more money if you live in Canada. I just want to point out that many of the fears of "higher taxes" and "higher CoL" may be a bit overblown.
5% of 270k CAD/200k USD is 10k USD. That's not an insignificant amount of money.
Sales tax is higher here, 13% in Ontario vs ~7% in CA (varies by county or something weird).
Things really are more expensive. Grab any book off your shelf and look at the Canadian and American MSRP, notice how it's still more expensive in Canada after accounting for currency conversion. Gas is more expensive. Alcohol and cigarettes are more expensive. The list goes on and on.
Off the top of my head the only things I can think of that I know to be cheaper in Canada are maple syrup, propane and lumber.
>Most employers provide this. And vision/dental is far cheaper than paying for everything.
Most employers provide it in the states as well, but it's still money they spend on you instead of paying to you. Insurance needs to cover less here, but it is needed for much more than vision and dental. The biggest one I can think of would be prescription medications, there are more but I don't feel like grabbing a policy book off my shelf.
>Buying isn't cheaper. Renting is still significantly cheaper (at least by 1/3).
I haven't gone into any great detail verifying this but I doubt it is true. What cities and neighbourhoods were you comparing?
Again I love my country but moving to a major Canadian city from a major American as a way to save money is a foolish idea.
Please read my entire comment again. I did write "I'm not saying you'll end up with more money if you live in Canada."
But people hear "Canada has higher taxes" and assume it's like 20+ percentage points higher, not 5 percentage points higher.
> Gas is more expensive.
Not really. It's the equivalent of USD 2.81/gal at a Toronto Costco[1]. It's $2.75 at the Sunnyvale Costco (cheapest gasoline) right now.[2]
> What cities and neighbourhoods were you comparing?
2 bedroom in Downtown Vancouver - $3250 (presumably CAD, which is ~USD 2400)[3]
2 bedroom in Mountain View - $3600 [4]
Same thing for Toronto.
> Alcohol and cigarettes are more expensive
Uh...don't smoke? It's expensive for your health too :-P. Yeah Ontario and BC liquor laws seem to be stuck in the 1940s sadly. But alcohol isn't usually a major component of most folks' household spending, so it's hardly a budget-killer.
1. https://www.gasbuddy.com/Station/130688
2. https://www.costco.com/warehouse-locations/sunnyvale-ca-423....
3. https://www.padmapper.com/apartments/vancouver-bc/downtown-v...
This is one of those instances where things get lost in statistics without local knowledge. West Vancouver (part of downtown) is a very nice area a person who makes 200k USD would be happy to live. The Downtown Eastside (also a part of downtown), a short walk from West Vancouver, is littered with used 'insulin' needles, aggressive panhandlers and crime. Mountain View is a suburb (70k pop), Vancouver (700k pop) is the hub the suburbs extend from.
>Not really. It's the equivalent of USD 2.81/gal at a Toronto Costco[1]. It's $2.75 at the Sunnyvale Costco (cheapest gasoline) right now.[2]
Trust me man, gas is more expensive. Look at averages, not the lowest available price at any given time. There are times when you get lucky but overall it is more expensive. The divide gets larger when the commodity price of oil is higher (unlike right now).
I think you're underestimating how insanely expensive renting in the Bay Area is.
> Look at averages, not the lowest available price at any given time.
I compared prices from the same outlet (Costco) in different locations. That's as apples-to-apples as you can get.
I made two visits to Canada last year, and bought gas at random (non-Costco) outlets. At no point did it feel significantly more expensive than California prices - I converted in my head every time I filled up.
Gas is extremely cheap in Texas, compared to California (and also Canada).
This is another point. Canada is a huge place, where gas prices vary wildly even within provinces. Gas in north Ontario is often much more expensive than south. Sometimes the price in St. Catherines is 20 cents cheaper than gas in the GTA because of the 'gas wars' their stations are famous for.
> I compared prices from the same outlet: Costco. That's as apples-to-apples as you can get.
You can cherry pick information to say whatever you want. You compared a single daily station price in Vancouver to a single daily station price in CA. Costco also requires a membership and they use cheap gas to lure people in, it's not a traditional gas station (though I may look into a membership now...). This is also a time in history when gas is unusually cheap. I suggest you look at averages. There is good reason for the price difference. Although Canada produces a lot of crude, we refine almost none of it so we import pretty much all of the finished product.
That money you're saving on the apartment in Vancouver vs Mountain View basically works out to that 10k USD extra you would spend on tax you worked out earlier as well (but of course you would not make anywhere close to the same salary in Vancouver or Toronto).
If you want to move to Canada I encourage you to do so, it seems like you would be happy if you did. But to go back to my original point, if you move to a major Canadian city from a major American one with purely financial motivations, you will be sorely disappointed.
Also I wanted to work this in somewhere: https://xkcd.com/180/
I think I've already acknowledged this.
> If you want to move to Canada I encourage you to do so,
Don't be so sure I won't. We should hang out then, since we both like arguing about inconsequential stuff online for way longer than is healthy :-P
Lol, I meant that sincerely. You should do it if it's what you want to do. Life is short, if you want something don't wait. If not now, when. Cheers buddy.
I'm not even American but let's be honest about H1B - it's 10% best and brightest and 90% wage suppression.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/News/visas-news/s...
It's a simple process:
- Actively court American companies to set up shop in EU
- The global market is filled with tech workers who would otherwise be sucked in by the US. Give them visas.
This is a great boost to GDP and bounce back from covid recession. Canada has capitalized on this for the past 4 years and the wages in Canada have only gone up and up.
EU can have the pie too while the US shoots itself in the foot.
They have already been doing that pretty actively for quite a while. Doesn't seem to help much, if at all. Have you seen how much those American companies are paying to their employees in the EU? It is a joke compared to how much they pay in the US, and even with that in mind, their pay is still well above local equivalent companies. And it isn't due to differences in cost of living, just take a look at how much FB London pays (yes, I am aware that UK is not a part of EU, but the point still stands; I just simply picked one of the biggest "hub" cities in the are with very high COL).
>The global market is filled with tech workers who would otherwise be sucked in by the US. Give them visas.
EU doesn't suffer from a lack of talented individuals who have a desire and skills to start their own tech company. There have been countless discussions on this topic on HN, and the hard truth is that the governments in EU are simply not providing a conductive environment for those tech startups to flourish into internationally known giants. And the whole EU fragmentation due to wildly different legislations and language/culture barriers on a per-country basis isn't helping the matter either.
From my experience, my colleagues in Seattle make about twice as much as I do in the UK. Raw numbers, not counting taxes, cost of living, etc. In general a new hire in US can make as much as a senior in EU.
Comparing income between countries is very difficult due to a lot of factors (different currency, cost of living, taxes, social benefits like health and education...) but I don't think is hard to argue that tech workers are paid much better in the US than they are in the EU, factoring everything in.
Also just because Seattle gets more, does that mean its not worthwhile to have higher wages in UK? What kind of reductionist point of view is this?
It has been clearly observed that the standards of living and wages have gone up in countries that have invested in tech over last 20 years. These countries are USA, India, China and Canada recently. Don't you want higher than what you are getting now? Make it easy for industry to survive and operate there.
Because if Seattle has significantly higher wages, the best talent will move to Seattle.
Not if the entry to Seattle is blocked. In which case, the employers have to move to where the best talent is.
I am in agreement with you here. Even with the abysmal FB London compensation (compared to heavy majority of tech companies in SV/Seattle/Austin/NYC), it is still way higher than local equivalent tech companies. This just reinforces the point I was making in my previous comment.
>The salaries aren't that much lower from what you'll get in Silicon Valley.
They are much lower than in SV/Seattle/Austin/NYC, if you count total comp (which is what majority of people in tech actually count, because the base cash pay becomes less and less relevant the higher you get promoted). And that's not even mentioning taxes and such being much lower in the US(no state income tax in Seattle/Austin at all, for example, only federal).
P.S. on my last point, there is no need to bring up insurance costs that don't come included with lower taxes in the US, as majority of tech companies in the US provide amazing insurance coverage for pretty much no extra charge.
Managers will deny it but from my experience and anectdata career opportunities are simply much better in the main offices. Colleagues in sister teams in the US work on more interesting projects, and get promoted 2-3 times more. Unless I'm convinced I'll have the same career opportunities here I could in the US, staying won't be a long term option.
Hate to say it, but you're wrong. American tech companies are American companies, run by Americans with American consumers in mind. What you need to do is figure out why Europeans are using American sites rather than European alternatives (where those exist).
It's certainly a better opportunity for Canada on the other hand. Canada is the country that will profit from all this the most.
I think it will be a unfortunate denouement for both industry and research.
- H1-B - Specialty occupations
- H4 - Immediate family members of the H-1B visa holders
- L - Intracompany transferees from oversees
- J - Work-and study-based exchange
- H2-B - Temporary non-agricultural workers
Disclaimer: I'm currently on H1B in the US, so I'm not unbiased.
It will devastate US institutes of higher education if it is maintained over the long term, and merely cause massive damage over the short term. Which is part of the plan, no doubt; the political faction executing it isn't exactly know for it's fondness for the academy.
This does have reason rooted in the unemployment rate, the issue is that it is done in a way to fuck over a lot of people.
They should’ve not let companies abuse H1B over the past X years, instead of fucking over a bunch of people.
Pointing out the obvious here: Long hours = low cost
Or that H1B holders pay taxes for benefits they cannot receive like Medicare, social security, and a sleuth of federal gov programs?
Or that H1B holders typically have english as a second language and surely pay a productivity and optionality penalty for that?
Requiring equal wages is almost like banning it. I want none of that.
H1B holders can actually receive social security benefits. See https://www.ssa.gov/international/agreements_overview.html
H1B's did not get the relief funds for COVID, and definitely don't have unemployment benefits.
It's not designed to be "equal". It never was. It's (nominally) for importing highly skilled workforce, which, naturally, would be earning somewhere in the upper quantiles, their ESL English notwithstanding. Instead it's mostly used to depress entry level wages for recent grads as well as to reduce overall cost of labor by dramatically boosting supply.
> I want none of that.
Why? Seems like fresh grads could use help getting started, and so could the folks recently laid off due to COVID. And so, by the way, could US citizens from disadvantaged backgrounds, a lot of whom would be competing for entry level positions. What's so bad about increasing wages in the entry level segment, and increasing demand for native talent in that segment? Remember, some of the companies in question are inching towards multi-trillion dollar valuations.
I'll grant you that immigration depresses the wages of the field they get in to: but thats true of any importation. Immigration restrictions are like tariffs, just on people instead of goods. Importing iphones from china also depresses wages of those who would manufacture them in the US.
Its the wrong way to look at it, its really not economics. If an immigrant produces X and gets paid X - Y, the country gets richer, period. And if the X-Y is used within the united states it becomes a virtuous cycle: if instead the immigrant works from outside and exports into the us, americans lose on demand and the American governments gift taxes to other governments.
If there are good reasons for immigration, they are not going to be economic, and this is so widely accepted in economics that its truly absurd to argue otherwise.
> Why? Seems like fresh grads could use...
Whatever conceptualization you make about the economic effect of immigration will have to be backed by the limitations of imports which have the exact same effect. Unemployment is not caused by immigration at all, it's even the other way around: any immigrant spends in the US creating demand for other jobs.
Regardless of one's opinion on immigration however, suddenly creating an immediately invoked executive order with no warning, no grace period, and no plan for what comes next is reckless and will needlessly cause harm to many people who were just trying to do what's best for themselves while acting fully within the law and system as it exists (er, existed). It is a morally bereft and politically motivated action, which is to say, exactly what we should all expect from the narcissistic orange clown in the Oval Office.
There's been warning that something like this was coming for a while, and it's been broadly expected since the April 22 immigration halt order, given the way Trump had previously railed against the existing H-1B system as worker-hostile and the entire justification for the April 22 immigration halt was the threat to US workers from immigrants in the present crisis.
I think much more likely it’s a strategy to provoke a legislative solution. There is basically no reform legislation that can occur in 2020 without a major forcing function.
But for someone preparing their entire life to start a job, everything is up in the air now. They're not so privileged.
Both you and the parent are correct. It sucks for me. It is just a political play: his approval ratings have been slumping, this will help for a point or two.
However, I have heard the notion that, with unemployment numbers soaring, the American job market ought to prioritize the re-employment of Americans before serving the employment interests of foreign nationals.
I don't know what the numbers are, but anecdotally I know a few people in my social circle who are highly skilled/educated and have been jobless due to the pandemic.
Will this work visa suspension be a positive development for those people?
In my circle nobody's been seriously thinking about emigrating to the US if they have the option to go to Germany, Switzerland, Spain or the UK instead.
I personally still plan on moving to the US but my employer changing their transfer policy the day after Trump's inauguration certainly didn't help.
I found this part to be the most interesting. If this current proclamation is a prelude to the overhaul of H1B system in a way that would make it work like described above, then it is somewhat exciting for a couple of reasons.
1. It would get it closer to Canadian system for work visas, which works as a point system that (I think a lot of people here would agree) is more preferable to how H1B works now.
2. It solves the whole issue with consultancy companies flooding the H1B pool with extremely underpaid bodies, thus making it more difficult for other people to get their H1B visas.
EDIT: after reading some replies, I feel the need to clarify what I meant. I am not saying "this H1B suspension is a good thing, because it means they will implement those other changes very soon" (because I don't believe this will happen). I simply meant that this H1B suspension aside, it would be great if that proposal for a giant H1B reform actually materialized, and I am glad it got mentioned. And no, I am not holding my breath that it will happen soon, but I am just glad that it seems to be getting some traction.
I think most people who've dealt with the immigration system would think that that is naive. This administration has proven time and time again with regards to immigration that they will pay lip service to making improvements while almost always simply making life harder for immigrants and people on visas.
See: how they suspended H-1B premium processing for a while some time back, also claiming that it was in service of "overhauling" the H-1B system.
Except this time they didn't say they suspended H1B to "overhaul" the system, and that by the time it is over, we will get a new system. They just said they have longer-term reforms in that area in their plans.
Which makes perfect sense in my eyes, because swapping to an H1B system similar to what Canada has is a massive change. I don't see it happening on a scale that is shorter than 5 years from start to finish.
Not much different than 8 years of previous administration [1]. One good thing about this administration is that it hurts SV, and that might bring attention to the problem of Greencard backlogs, and the resulting indentured servitude and labor market distortions.
Also, note that the person putting hold on the bipartisan S386[2] bill is Sen. Durbin, a Democrat. So, please don't lay all blame for this situation at Republican's or President's doorstep.
[1] Executive Action: Support High-skilled Business and Workers -http://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_... [2] Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2019 - https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/386...
The problem is that the actual immediate actions don't reflect the message and cause chaos and uncertainty in lives of people whose futures depend on these work permits (ex: recent international student grads whose OPTs are expiring)
Only if you still believe the current administration
I have no reason to believe anyone will start “working” on this in an election year in the middle of a pandemic
TIf immigration is good, then you want as much as possible. If immmigration is bad then you want as little as possible. It doesn't make sense as a goal to say you want to limit something you want to get.
The second is that wage is a very fungible metric. It's a bad metric target because the economic value of a work to the country is not necesarily measured by wages. Clinical doctors make less than some categories of software engineers, but their value could literally save lives by cheapening and increasing access to healthcare.
And then you have a lot of ways to manipulate it: FAANG pays a lot with stock that does not show in the base compensation, so now the incentive would be to eliminate stock and increase salary, which can be tax inneficient and more expensive and inconvenient for the company and the employee. Then you can cut benefits: PTO, parental leave, health insurance. Then you can cut office presentism and hire contractors, etc. What a perverse incentive.
> It solves the whole issue with consultancy companies flooding the H1B pool with extremely underpaid bodies, thus making it more difficult for other people to get their H1B visas.
It solves them by reducing the underpaid persons wages to 0, because they become unemployable in the US. Why a software engineer making 70k is better by making 0? Senseless. This is a senseless discussion that only exists because a rule exists. This discussion makes no sense in hiring international contractors, importing software products or hiring internacional software companies, all solutions that pay less than prevailing wages and pay no taxes to the US.
Most countries run subsidy programs, campaigns, prizes to try to keep software engineers from going to the US, and the US keeps investing money in throwing that advantage away.
People want food to sustain themselves. But, for a lot of people, limiting the amount of food consumed and picking healthy foods over junk food is a good idea. You don't want just "any" food, you want the food that will sustain you and will be good for your health in long-term.
Additional, the best argument against limitation of immigration for labor is not that immigrants don't have rights, but that this is taking rights from Americans to choose. It is Americans that are being forced into hiring more expensively, or not at all.
I did Masters in CS at a top 30 University in the US, graduated in Feb 2017, got into a major US tech company on OPT, at a higher-than-median income as a software engineer, unsuccessfully tried 3 times to crack the H1b lottery from 2017 to 2019. In 2020, I received a Canadian PR, and moved to Canada (we have an office here in Vancouver, although I took up a remote position in Toronto). I'm working on the same job here in Canada, although I had to take a bit of a pay cut. I'm happy to be here, and its great. It was a bit of a circus to get my Social number in Canada in the beginning due to COVID, but it's been smooth sailing since then.
I miss my girlfriend who's in the US and is on OPT. So I got my company to apply for my H1B again in 2020, and finally got through lottery on the fourth attempt (consular processing), and was going to be back by October 1st. Due to the H1B travel ban, I now cannot travel to the US before Jan 1st 2021 as I don't have a visa stamp yet. I'm now considering not going back, as I don't see the point. My girlfriend is quite capable of moving her job to Canada as well, and her company is more than willing to do so via a work permit.
I know for a fact that I'm not the only person who moved an American job overseas due to visa policy. The fact that my company's HR and immigration consultant company (Fragomen) worked on this like clockwork suggests that this is something they're used to doing, as they reached out to me before my OPT work permit was expiring. When a company has an employee for three years, it's a lot easier to hire them overseas than hire someone else, American or not, even if the former option costs the company a lot more. I unfortunately know several people who had visas they couldn't renew follow the route I took, and it worked out for them in the end. I want to start my own start-up eventually, and that's probably not possible on an H1B anyway (or so exceedingly difficult that I wouldn't try).
I'm going to miss US National Parks though.
It's especially bullshit, given part of the H1B criteria is proving there's no US citizens that can do the job. I have a hard time seeing any good coming from this, and it feels like Trump is just pushing his xenophobic agenda further.
Very sorry to hear about your family situation.
This is a great decision and one of the few good things about this presidency. H1Bs as they now exist should be banned outright and only specific VISAs handed out based purely on merit.
The H-1B is a nonimmigrant visa, and there has been a blanket ban on ALL (not just skilled) immigration since April 22, which the same order that added a handful of work-related nonimmigrant visas to the ban that we are discussing also extended at least to the end of the year.
So, no, it's not a “virtual” ban on “skilled” immigration, it's part of an actual ban on all immigration plus certain non-immigrant entry.
Again, it’s dual intent and is functionally the only way for skilled immigrants to get green cards to become citizens outside of family unification (which the admin also wants to abolish).
“Dual intent” refers to a nonimmigrant visa which does not prohibit applicants from intending to apply for an immigrant visa without leaving the country when they apply for the nobimmigrant visa (suspicion of this “immigration intent” is grounds for denying other nonimmigrant visas.)
> and is functionally the only way for skilled immigrants to get green cards
It's not a way for anyone to get a green card, which you can only do with an immigrant visa. It is, however, a way to get into the US while trying to qualify for an immigrant visa. (Or while already qualified for one for which there is a long delay.)
I wasn't aware we were playing a game of contradiction, but you were not contradicting me before I started not contradicting you, so I'm not sure why you are pointing that out.
An immigrant visa is one that permits (in principle, perhaps subject to removal of conditions) lawful permanent residency in the U.S.
A green card is a document that proves immigration status as a lawful permanent resident.
You don’t need actually to have received an immigrant visa to be a lawful permanent resident because you can also achieve that through adjustment of status.
A non-immigrant visa is one that does not permit permanent residency.
A non-immigrant visa that permits dual-intent is one that can be held concurrently with an application for an immigrant visa or for adjustment of status to a category of permanent resident.
There are great universities in the US. Use them to train young American people. This could even benefit African Americans and other minorities.
I'd rather have good engineers around the world than all competing in California just because it's a good way for the FANG companies to keep wages lower than they should be. The same companies that tell us that we're living in an interconnected world and so on. Fine, just open offices everywhere in the world, or promote remote work, instead of trying to get everyone in the same physical talent pool.
Ultimately it only benefits the shareholders of those companies, not engineers (American or foreign), nor the population of the areas where tech cash is driving all prices up.
Btw not correct that you need to show no American workers available for an H1B.
(How border agents choose to enforce, however, is anyone’s guess)
Anyways I am already packing my bags and will be out of the country in a few days when I am able to find a flight.
According to [1], the Bay Area has around 12,435 people living and working here on H1B visas, no doubt mostly in Tech.
[1] https://insights.dice.com/2020/01/14/h-1b-salaries-filings-h...
"W2 Role: Scala Developer, Loc : NYC, NY, Salary : $114k per annum, H1 TRANSFERS, H4 EAD, L2 EAD, USC, GC."
The order does not apply to those already in the United States, and it gives the Trump administration some leeway in making other exceptions. For example, immigrants applying for visas to provide labor "essential to the United States food supply chain" are exempt. Individuals "whose entry would be in the national interests" as determined by the federal government are exempt as well.
It specifically does not apply those in the US on the date of the proclamation or with a valid nonimmigrant visa or nonvisa entry document. So, no, there is no ambiguity on the face on this point. (That is, it expressly only applies to those outside the US on the date it becomes effective, who don't have a visa, and don't have a nonvisa travel document.)
Sec. 3. Scope of Suspension and Limitation on Entry. (a) The suspension and limitation on entry pursuant to section 2 of this proclamation shall apply only to any alien who:
(i) is outside the United States on the effective date of this proclamation;
(ii) does not have a nonimmigrant visa that is valid on the effective date of this proclamation; and
(iii) does not have an official travel document other than a visa (such as a transportation letter, an appropriate boarding foil, or an advance parole document) that is valid on the effective date of this proclamation or issued on any date thereafter that permits him or her to travel to the United States and seek entry or admission.
Sec. 3. Scope of Suspension and Limitation on Entry. (a) The suspension and limitation on entry pursuant to section 2 of this proclamation shall apply only to any alien who:
(i) is outside the United States on the effective date of this proclamation;
(ii) does not have a nonimmigrant visa that is valid on the effective date of this proclamation; and
(iii) does not have an official travel document other than a visa (such as a transportation letter, an appropriate boarding foil, or an advance parole document) that is valid on the effective date of this proclamation or issued on any date thereafter that permits him or her to travel to the United States and seek entry or admission.
That said whether DOS interprets it that way is another story.
Despite the fact that you legally can (according to a sibling comment), it's practically unwise.
Hope these restrictions are temporary, also AFAIK after being actually married, your spouse would be eligible for K-1 US visa. Wish you luck in any case.
I hope these are temporary, but I imagine they will be temporary until at least January of next year. If the unthinkable happens in November, the prognosis is not good. Even the K-1 visa has large delays, and they aren't even processing any visas at U.S. Consulates in China right now.
If a U.S. citizen marries abroad, they would file an I-130 petition for their spouse to immigrate in the IR/CR category; they would then be able to file for a K-3 non-immigrant spouse visa so their spouse could accompany them to the U.S. while the I-130 petition was processed.
"In addition to the H-1B visa, the temporary ban will apply to new H-2B visas for short-term seasonal workers in landscaping and other nonfarm jobs, J-1 visas for short-term workers including camp counselors and au pairs and L-1 visas for internal company transfers."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-order-would-temporarily-s...
There is not a 'fixed lump of labor' to go around.
A good follow on twitter for immigration issues is David Bier, of the CATO institute: https://twitter.com/David_J_Bier . I'm not a libertarian, but he puts out a lot of research and well-informed articles.
You can't know ahead of time which ones will go on to be successful, or maybe have a kid who is.
The solution to people in the US going through tough times is to help them directly, not encourage companies to open offices in Canada and the EU.
I volunteer your neighborhood to host the first 500,000; do you have a pull-out bed or a few spare cots we can use?
As for the ones who can afford their own houses, I think the market for real estate has increased here at at least 3x the rate of inflation over the past twenty years, we certainly don't need more buyers.
The legal minimum H-1B salary is substantially higher than the median American salary, and of course, the average salary is in turn higher than the legal minimum. They are better equipped to afford the median rent than the average resident of your area.
> the cost of schools, utilities, social services etc
Are you under the impression that immigrants don't pay taxes or something? Skilled immigrants are higher income than average and pay far, far more into the system than they take out of it.
But, since you bring it up...
The legal minimum H1-B salary is based on 'prevailing wage' standards, of which there are many to choose from. Sufficiently so, such that one employer I know was hiring PhD statisticians with 20 years of experience in bioinformatics for 90K/yr. In downtown Cambridge, a block from MIT.
Doesn't that sound like a princely salary for today's senior scientist with a family in Massachusetts to support? Maybe they'll throw in a gym membership at Planet Fitness.
Are you under the impression that current rates of state & local taxation realistically reflect the actual cost of servicing future obligations for services and infrastructure, including pension costs? They don't pay that much more into the system....of course, if Trump set the minimum H1-B salary to 300K nationwide, and allowed for a marginal rate of 65%, that would be a different story.
The median American worker makes something like 30k+/year. So yes, the person making $90k is paying far more into the system than they take out, even if you account for the fact that the current system is not quite fully funded. Skilled immigrants are also less likely to be on disability, be unemployed, end up in prison, etc, or otherwise end up in a position where they are extracting more resources than they put in.
Another interesting fact about MA is the cost of public elementary education is massive, if this employee had children the tax burden per child is greater than 16k+ per year. To offset the tax burden for a 2 child family they would need to own a home that would have a property tax bill of over 32k a year. In many US locations people are a massive tax burden even if they are making what is considered a good salary. Someone making 90k a year wouldn't be able to afford that. In fact someone making $96,250 with a family of 4 can qualify for subsidized housing if they live in Cambridge,MA.
The marginal tax rate in the US is to low for the services the government provides and the country is going broke because of it. The pay for many of these H1-B visa is too low for the location and experience they require. The system has been abused by companies, and neither side is going to correctly adjust it.
- Edit spelling "subsidized"
Don't forget that most families have two working parents. $90k/year * 2 = 180k/year.
> Another interesting fact about MA is the cost of public elementary education is massive, if this employee had children the tax burden per child is greater than 16k+ per year. To offset the tax burden for a 2 child family they would need to own a home that would have a property tax bill of over 32k a year.
Many immigrants do not have kids, and the ones that do have kids only send them to elementary school for a very short fraction of their working career. The average person making 90k/year pays more into the system than they take out of it. The system is going "broke" because the median person makes ~$30k+/year, and a large fraction of the population is on public assistance or in prison, not because the people at the 90k/year (or 180k/year) end of the spectrum are draining the system of resources.
Can you find any apartments in the Cambridge area for less than 3k a month, I picked that number because of was incredibly low? If it is so easy can't you find actual show proof. Don't even get started with finders fees for many apartments/rentals. Housing in the Greater Boston Area is a huge game.
The median household income in the US is around 60k, and many have households have spouses that do not work (or part time), and are in areas of low cost of living. There is no way to compare the wage you need in Rural America vs the coasts. Most of the H1B-Visas are in companies in the high cost areas of the nation that haven't correctly scaled over the years.
I've met several while I lived there. In the Rindge Homes, or who were getting Section 8.
The ongoing outlay for city & state services is overwhelming MA, even with its high-earning, high-educated population. Even at a (risable) $90/K a year, the debt keeps growing, and adding more people will only increase the consumption of public services whose costs are not being adequately reflected.
Opening offices in Canada and EU directly correlates to the sales of their products and services in those markets.
Not quite sure what your point is.
Forcing companies to hire out of the _massive_ pool of US workers(~330 million) is good for the country, its people, just not so good for the profit margins of the companies hiring foreign labour to save money & labour rights strength.
No skills in use that can't be learnt/trained.
Except that this is a myopic view of the economy as a zero-sum game that is not supported by actual... well, evidence.
https://www.cato.org/blog/three-reasons-why-immigrants-arent...
The point about Canada and the EU is that companies can and will move operations to places with more liberal immigration systems. Taxes, innovation and many other benefits will accrue to those places, rather than the US.
No longer a problem, unless the problem was really that they're not "american" enough all along?
The problem is that they’re not “American”, and my politicians shouldn’t be making laws to put its citizens at a disadvantage when they could be making laws that help pull up lower socioeconomic Americans to participate in these higher paying jobs.
Once these immigrants become citizens, they’re as “American” as me.
That whole time they're paying taxes like a citizen, but without most of the rights and benefits, and no representation.
So, there's a whole pile of people that your government is effectively disenfranchising, and harassing with this kind of activity. And it's disproportionally towards folks who have brown skin.
Oh wait, it's racism, and this is working as intended.
Here's an example that was in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
H1-B has been massively abused for decades. Any attempt to reign this in should be welcomed by American workers, who are the ones this abuse affects most.
You're also making the economic assumption that Americans are a perfect substitute and this is at worst a net 0 loss for the economy.
I think neither is true.
You must have missed what happened in 2016
That notion is disappearing in the US quickly, though, and soon the rest of the world will follow. It's going to be nice living in a giant global slum with a few extremely wealthy pockets with a de-facto segregation by IQ and wealth /s
I think it's better if each country tries to retain their elites to build their own nations, instead of having everyone end up in Silicon Valley to work on spying technology.
How do you define yourself? Don't you have a people, a group or tribe (whatever you want to call it) you belong to? I know people who define themselves as "human" and "citizen of the world", but they are quite uncommon.
Is a legal construct, which can be granted to a natural person by law.
Legislation can be (relatively) easily changed. I don't think there's anything preventing legislators from granting citizenship to $PERSON for $REASON.
So I'd argue that it is something that can be given - it's just that there's reasons that it's not.
It says nothing about requiring blood spilt.
If you have 1 million jobs held by Americans and 1 million jobs held by immigrants, and you kick out the 1 million immigrants, you do not get 2 million jobs held by Americans. You get 500k jobs held by Americans and 1.5 million extra jobs in China, India, the EU, and other any other regions that are less keen on punching themselves in the face with self-destructive industrial policy.
Used property, the H1-B program brings in new talent and contributes positively to the American economy through both innovation and actual tax payments by the immigrants who can't even get all the benefits their taxes pay for (making them greater net contributors than US citizens).
* builds a bad work culture
* hires all candidates who pass the coding interview
* sets interview standards that require more than just local applicants to reach your staffing needs
it can easily be true both that you've never rejected a qualified US citizen and that you're deliberately seeking to hire H1-Bs.
I think they are violating the public justification more than the actual intent.
I agree on this one in particular. It is quite transparently a process that has morphed into a way to reject older candidates. The older you are (relative to a fresh college graduate), the harder it becomes to jump through the various algorithmic hoops (even if you studied Computer Science in college). That's exactly what the majority of the large tech companies want --- hire large numbers of folks who have no life outside of work so that they can work them more / pay them less.
You can always claim 'but he/she did not make the cut' and appear impartial, while selecting for young kids just out of school. It would have been interesting to see how this would have affected fall hiring, but for the confounding effect of the recession.
rajat@kuver.com
So they certainly won't
1. Actively poaching US employers to quickly setup shop in EU
2. Give visas to tech workers
Outcome? More business activity in the EU, more tech industry and instant boosting of GDP coming out of covid.
It's a good decision by Trump. It benefits American workers and non-American nations. Win/win.
The losers are the Gates and Bezos who are already extremely wealthy. I will find have to find a source but I think there is a gap between the share of profits captured by IT workers vs banking workers in the US, and those are industries with equivalent levels of workforce education and capital intensity.
a "French in the US" facebook community with 200 comments of people panicking.
But you also can’t ignore the population growth problems that would exist in this country without immigration. We would be Japan.
And the entire suburban growth Ponzi scheme that every post-1890s American city suffers from will be exacerbated by shutting off not just immigration but immigration of skilled labor.
How many countries would dream of educated people flocking to live in their country?
Unfortunately the whole discussion seems like one big digression. No matter which angle you approach this at, it’s just bad policies all around. You’d think that a policy built on training the vast US citizen population with better, more equitable education would be better than importing foreigners. You’d think that lowering the cost of education would help, that companies would prefer a large supply of educated citizens.
The problem is, all that thinking naively assumes our policymakers and the donor class don’t hold active disdain for their own constituents: because an H1B worker is a worker with no leverage and worse ability to quit.
If you read this whole comment and are confused at what position I’m trying to take, you’re not alone. I don’t even know anymore.
No, we wouldn’t; Japan has negative natural population growth, the US has positive natural population growth (and it's the greatest contributor to overall populayion growth, more than net immigration.)
With those fertility rate I would expect be around 1.2,1.3 for us which far far below replacement rate (let alone population growth).