We need to hire and train US. Anyone can learn the skills, why are we rewarding education in other countries? Why are we drowning a hot job market and neutering the innovation industry?
Of course the system gets abused, that's par for the course in the united states with all the lobbying. But that doesn't mean that a company is going to suddenly use non-existent local workforce to do the job. At the same time, if it really was just displacing locals for profit, that same could probably be done by just moving an entire department out of the country.
There is only one real way to resolve it effectively: be the better option.
If you are trying to apply some weird protectionism construction instead of simply being the best option, it just ends up hurting everyone.
When I say jump you say how high!
Why would offshoring the department hurt everyone though? Does "everyone" only count US residents?
If you were to make such a comparison you'd have to take all of the non-technical parameters in to account:
- communication
- culture
- values
- productivity
- intrinsic motivation
- team fit
Those would pretty much remove most of the 'canned workers' people seem to point to from the conversation, as well as most of the enterprise 'consultants' and the like (i.e. Deloitte)
If you want to include them, you would have to set the bar much lower, but then you also should make sure that the provisioning that government program for visas explicitly mentions that. At the same time, the 'interview process' is just bad as far as I've heard and experienced. 90% of the people you interact with and the activities you attend have nothing to do with the actual work or work context. At the same time, those kids that did some school work and now think they instantly get a job that happens to use the same words in their postings as the words they used to label their classes simply have a disconnect between theory and reality. But that's more of a general American thing than purely college-to-job flows being bad.
In the defense industry they can't hire internationals. Not coincidentally, this how interviews at those companies mostly go. And they plan for a lot of training of new hires to boot. Needing a hire to be productive their first day is a necessity for startups, not massive companies like Apple/Amazon/Intel/etc. They're just being cheap.
You can’t tell me that you couldn’t get a qualified Americans for 70% of what the major cloud providers pay.
Many H1Bs like myself were educated at taxpayer expense in their native countries. US essentially gets them for free to help fuel silicon valley and other tech hubs.
Skills shortage is real. If you are in a position to hire people, you would understand. You can't train people to perform at a silicon valley interview level no matter how much money you pour into training courses. Proper education from a university is needed to clear the high bar for most people. Free college education like in government run colleges in India would solve some of the skills shortage.
I’ve done interviews where we passed on a candidate who’d be educated and onboarded within 1.5 years. Except nobody wanted to take that risk as we’d rather hire the person who can start today.
If there was no h1b program, we’d of hired that American and trained them.
I am an immigrant myself, but I don't think the US gets anything for free when it gets an educated H1B. It's a trade off, you get more opportunities than any other country can give you. It's up to you to be able to identify them.
H1B fraud is pervasive at this point and it needs a major reform. I have friends who work in immigration and it's obvious that some schools in India (JNTU for instance) are diploma mills that teaches nothing and ends up with people who should never have a degree to begin with. They exist just to ship people to the US through networking. Then there is the fraud where people from different countries come do their masters at Maharishi International University (or similar) and, once again,study nothing and get a degree. Finally the cherry on top is a lot of the people who were in H1Bs become rich by creating staffing companies bringing more H1Bs and paying them pennies. The government only does a bit of enforcement really. One of the few good things Trump did was to enforce the rules more.
Most H1Bs need a lot of training to be productive. I have worked with many. The H1B program - when it comes to STEM - was created to bring very educated people (think top universities with good grades, IIT and similar). Unfortunately, the many who should not have gotten one in the first place, create the problems for the ones who should truly qualify to get an H1B.