Tech firms' nightmare: Vanishing green cards
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There is no DACA/DREAM equivalent for these people even though they did everything 100% legally and have greatly contributed to the US economy. There are estimated to be >960,000 people currently stuck in this limbo, mostly Asian and mostly in tech (https://www.fwd.us/news/per-country-cap-reform-priority-bill...).
[1] https://www.visalaw.com/onboarding-mass-litigation-clients/
[2] https://twitter.com/LilySAxelrod/status/1437846756394520582
At the same time, this is what happens when the basis of your immigration system is “legislation by hostage taking.” Ever wonder why the H1B says “temporary” status on paper, and you have to pretend like you plan to go back home at some point? (“Dual intent?”) That’s because it’s because it was never designed to be a permanent immigration system. No permanent immigration system designed for that purpose would let you build your life in the country first and then decide only a decade later whether you’ll be allowed to stay. It’s absurd.
Since the 1960s the executive branch has been doing with fragile regulation or executive action things that it can’t achieve consensus to do through Congress. The 1990s reforms that created the H1B did nothing more than paper over the most egregious shortcomings of using a temporary worker visa as the main vehicle for permanent immigration. DACA is a prime example of what happens when your political system is so broken that you have to use executive action because you can’t get concensus in Congress. And it shows how fragile that can be.
Folks considering immigrating to America should understand: H1B is not meant for permanent immigration. Proceed at your own risk. Maybe try the more sensible immigration regimes in Australia or Canada.
As I understand it the "dual intent" means you don't have to pretend you plan to go back home at some point. After I switched to an O-1 from an H-1B for a new job I was advised not to leave the country while my green card application was in progress because applying for a green card could potentially be grounds for denying entry at the border on a visa like the O-1 without the dual intent.
> The concept of dual intent is a legal fiction that allows an immigration officer to grant a nonimmigrant visa or admit a foreign national into the United States even though the visa may allow for the holder to seek permanent residency status. This means that a foreign national may enter the United States on a nonimmigrant visa that may allow him to seek a green card in the future or, alternatively, he has already filed a petition for a green card but is seeking to enter the United States on a nonimmigrant visa.
The distinction is critical. At all times when you hold an H1B, you’re saying “I intend to go back when my H1B expires,” because that’s required by the visa. All you have with “dual intent” is the government’s executive grace that they won’t consider it to be a signal of immigrant intent when you apply for a Green card.
I have had distant relatives earning in tune of million dollars a year dying for a need of hospital bed. Plenty of people in India who are not Chinese level rich but still well-off and looking to move to Canada from India. They are not in hope of better earning but just better living standard with the money they earned in India.
Having said that there is thin slice of situations where one can be better off in India. One of which is having lot of domestic staff. So someone can have a full time worker at home who can cook, clean, and take care of kids for about same money that will get you a weekly maid service in USA in a month.
This is backwards. Dual intent means that you do not have to "pretend"; having an immigrant-intent, expressed by things like applying for permanent residency (marrying a US citizen), does not invalidate an H1-B in the same way that it invalidates an O-1, TN, etc.
We are rewarding criminal entry into the country and punishing lawful citizen candidates.
Welcome to the era of inverted incentives!
There's no illegal immigration crisis at the southern border. There are occasional refugee crises and most critically a mistreatment crisis (the latter exacerbated by the people that have, for political purposes, also invented the myth of an illegal immigration crisis), but actual illegal immigration has been low, not a crisis, for some time.
> We are rewarding criminal entry into the country
Uh, no, there are lots of things you can make colorable arguments about about no-visa entry on the southern border, but that it is being rewarded right now is not one of them.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration
[2] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/09/24/poli...
There used to be a time when kingdoms would raid each other for new subjects, now the opposite is in effect.
Yet, some come forward, and still complain.
There doesn’t seem to be any correlation there.
My wife got her green card in less than a year after we got married. And she came to the USA on a fiance visa.
This has never been my concern as an immigrant because we just assume we won't have any connection, in any country, from the moment we leave our home.
I think going back is more of a problem with a way of life we are not (no longer) familiar with, culturally and politically
1. Green cards have a per-country cap (of 7%) but there is no per-country cap for work visas. This creates a bottleneck since India has the same quota as French Polynesia;
2. Applications for work visas and green cards from low-value employers, specifically IT body shops (eg Tata) are clogging up the system. Relatively few of both of these categories are actually being given to high0-value employers like the Big Tech companies;
3. H1B visas are for 3 years and can be renewed once, for a total of 6 years. After this there needs to be a gap of a year. But if you have a pending green card application you can stay indefinitely;
4. Demand exceeds supply (being the annual quota), which leads to a lottery situation. One of the few things the previous disastrous administration proposed that I actually agree with was the proposal to prioritize work visas based on compensation rather than handing them out randomly. This would help combat the body shops in (2);
5. The bottleneck in (1) means people from certain countries, most notably India, means employees may be in the queue for decades. This is actually an advantage for those aforementioned body shops. it is a modern form of indentured servitude. The employee can't leave nor complain about conditions because then they lose their application and have to return home;
6. This can go on so long that children of said employees age out of the system before their parents are granted a green card. If when granted a green card you have children under the age of 18 they automatically become permanent residents. After that, they don't. This can mean that children who turn 18 may need to leave the US and return to a country they have possibly never known. This is barbaric and inhumane;
7. Before the pandemic there were proposals to alleviate this situation by removing the per-country cap. The pandemic stalled this and it seems to be dead. I personally think this was the wrong solution as it means we would spend the next 3-10 years where only backlog applications would get processed. As such, it's likely to be met with resistance from other immigrant groups. We need a better solution; and
8. If a person is granted a green card and has a spouse and 2 children that counts as 4 in terms of the quota for employment-based green cards, both in total and per country of birth. This too is problematic.
Silicon Valley does not, I am not sure why SV would not just hire the programmer in India, instead of bringing them to Silicon Valley, infact I am pretty sure we are going to see that more and more in the next few years
Rand Paul, of all people, actually had a pretty reasonable alternative to the 2019 bill [1] that took a different approach: nurses were simply excluded from the annual quota.
[1]: https://www.cato.org/blog/sen-pauls-believe-act-raises-skill...
Perhaps the best band-aid fix is to add H1-B quotas by state, because then you might end up getting enough support throughout the nation for an actual solution. The military industrial complex has a lesson for us to learn?
It's worth nothing that all H1Bs are technically priority occupations. Part of the process is to receive a labor certification that demonstrates you, as an employer, were unable to fill the position with a US citizen or permanent resident.
That itself is a whole can of worms because the system is heavily gamed to ensure that many such positions remain technically unfulfillable locally. For example, advertising such jobs where people are unlikely to find them and apply for them (eg in newspapers).
Now for big tech jobs, that need is genuine. For the body shops, it isn't. Despite attempts in the system to ensure such jobs are paid a fair market wage, they are not. The only people who take them are those Indian nationals who are so desperate to emigrate to the United States that they are willing to endure pseudo-indentured servitude for possibly decades if they and their family can have a better life.
That's a noble goal to be sure but we shouldn't enable employers to take advantage of them so. Even worse, in doing so, they're costing genuinely good jobs in big tech because of the lottery system.
I disagree with you, it put the young adult (it’s 21 and not a 18 I think) in a complicated situation. However H1–B was never voted to be a path towards permanent residency but as a three-years work visa, the parents should take this into account from the beginning
First, the H1B visa in particular is classified by law and by USCIS as an immigrant intent visa. That is to say that it's not incompatible with having intention to immigrate to the United States. Put another way: this specific case was thought about and included in the visa system so you can't argue it wasn't the intent. It explicitly was.
Second, there's no reason why someone should be in work visa limbo for 20 years. That's by choice (of the US government). Having made that choice, you're somewhat responsible for the consequences. That includes not deporting people to a country they may have no memory of and may not even speak the language.
This same issue is relevant to DACA recipients (aka "Dreamers") who are typically children who through no choice of their own were brought to the United States as young children and know nowhere else as their home. It is cruel and unreasonable to deport such people to countries they have never known.
I would rather suggest to change
> 3. H1B visas are for 3 years and can be renewed once, for a total of 6 years. [...] But if you have a pending green card application you can stay indefinitely;
to "You didn't get a green card in this timeframe? Bad luck - go home." This would solve the mentioned problem with children and also the mentioned problem
> 5. [...] it is a modern form of indentured servitude. The employee can't leave nor complain about conditions because then they lose their application and have to return home;
Please excuse an uninformed question, but does anyone get a green card within that timeframe?
I'm not OP or GP, but that was my interpretation.
There are a number of other advantages to this too. For one, it helps immigrants integrate better the more Americans they end up working with. The current system can result in silos where immigrants mostly work with other immigrants. And it helps Americans to work alongside skilled workers by giving them increased learning opportunities. It also works better for lower-paid skilled positions like nurses and scientists who don’t have to compete with higher-paid tech workers for visas.
I’m okay with giving an unlimited number of visas (background checks required) to any company that employs at least 70% Americans in each salary band. At worst, it creates an incentive to hire unqualified Americans just to get access to foreign talent, which is still a win for this country.
Why don’t the parents move back with their 18 year old so they are not alone?
People move to countries they do not know all the time.
If you come to the US on an H1B and a teenager it will also happen
Was it inhumane to bring the teenager to a country they did not know?
As I am applying to US software consultancy firms as a remote dev I see more or less 80% of them will explicitly mention that they have an office in Eastern Europe or in India. I have heard stories of managers on H1b asked to open and manage offices back in their home countries.
Industrial production has successfully left United States for bad policies and better opportunities. So will the tech scene.
Oh, and it’s “adapt” not “adopt”.
The time zone issue you mentioned is the real killer. Working across time zones is hard. It's easy to dismiss them until you've had to work with a Ukrainian team who is a solid 9 hours off phase with you.
My experience is that to immigrate to America you have to study there first or be incredibly talented so that businesses have confidence to bring you there. After hundreds of applications to American companies that hires for fully remote roles, I got 3-4 replies on my application.
One of them asked me to reach out to their offshore offices rather than HQ at states. And that is from a funded startup with a 7 figure investment.
Job 1: Knowing a very niche domain (that I happened to work on as a serious hobby for a couple of years) and lucking into a startup that works in that very domain (not really replicable).
Job 2: Applying to a startup which interviewed solely based on algorithmic puzzles, and apparently acing all of them.
Job 3: Knowing a fairly uncommon technology (Scala) and getting into a startup which had a super-hard time hiring Scala devs in Bay Area.
None of which is directly replicable, but I guess the more you develop your skills, the more likely you're to get in one way or another. I didn't even have a github account back then FWIW.
I have been doing freelancing for 5 years now. Not sure how can I develop my skills any further, unless I just study statistics for data modeling and build various projects which I am already doing right now.
Project building has its limitations. My hobby projects wouldn't scale up to a position where I have to learn and apply anything that is intermediate-ish. I can look into learning cloud services but I will never get good at it as I don't have a product based on that.
Edit: I might sound I am making up problems and I am a defeatist person but I am working on web applications as I have nothing else to do. But those projects have very little chances to be a showcase of my skillset as they are not scaled to use cloud services effectively and complicated SQL db.
I'm not sure if any of those fields are in enough demand for US companies to look for people overseas. Perhaps one exception (that I know of) is Data Engineers - there's a huge move in Data Engineering to use Python. Perhaps you could try specializing in that area.
Can you give me some pointers though? My response emails was pretty bad. I assumed -
1. Data engineering roles are mid level roles 2. Those roles require extensive hands on experience 3. There isn't junior data engineering role 4. They don't often any hire remotely 5. You can't reasonbly self teach yourself 6. It is one of the those roles where you NEED atleast CS bachelors.
I saw in DE subreddit those who are struggling to hire DEs should hire a python/sql dev than teach them DE on the job. But I am not sure how it would work out.
Industrial production is a Chinese farmer screwing bolts on an assembly line for $3 an hour after the harvest is done. Software is (among other things) soliciting and reviewing specifications and then coding it up with dependency injection, unit/e2e/integration testing, interface contracts and so forth.
An assembly line is the same thing over and over, software is different for each spec.
Industrial production involves expensive inputs, energy, the procurement and maintenance of large, very expensive machines, and some skilled and unskilled labour. Many of those do better with scale and within the borders of a single country. Perhaps it was once true that the only advantage of Chinese manufacturing was cheaper labour, but I don’t think that is true anymore. Why would so many hi-tech devices be manufactured in China? The margins are often large so they could be produced in richer countries, and labour is cheaper in other countries too so perhaps costs could be reduced elsewhere too. I think the answer lies in all the existing expertise in, and production of high tech goods and components in (certain parts of) China.
It is higher that in the most of the West, US included. I have not yet seen a single worker struggling with basic arithmetics the way even university grads in the US do.
> The margins are often large so they could be produced in richer countries, and labour is cheaper in other countries too so perhaps costs could be reduced elsewhere too.
In fact, skilled assembly labour in South China was hovering in between 10000 and 15000 CNY (without pension/insurance/provident fund payments,) the later is higher than the price of factory labour in the US in flyover states.
Skilled assemblers are becoming an increasingly scarce resource. People work for 5-10 years on such job, and then leave for something (or increasingly somewhere) better.
Indians, and Bengalis are importing Chinese engineers in droves these days. Guangzhou-Dhaka flight was booked full through the whole pandemic period. It was one of very few such flights in entire China.
So who get these EB1C visa? Well technically International managers but over a decade and half these WITCHs have brought hundreds of thousand mid level, non-technical account managers on L1 visa and filed for their green cards which are processed in say six months as opposed to decades for H1B folks. Due to this rampant misuse, the availability of employment based green cards is reduced drastically for H1B folks around same time.
EB1C abuse is one of the biggest source of green card delays for H1B folks. And since it is legal in letter of law all this abuse go unnoticed.
https://www.canada.ca/en/services/immigration-citizenship.ht...
Even sponsorship/spousal immigration is super unforgiving, since you are on the hook for any money the state ends up spending on the people you bring in, especially if it's social spending.
The only real exception is refugees but we send tons of them back and don't take anywhere close to the same amount of illegal immigrants as the US does. We also have agricultural labor immigration but again, it's nothing but Canada wanting cheap labor since they have to go back at the end of the summer with almost 0 exceptions.
But your feeling is pretty widespread here, Canadians really like to think way way too highly of ourselves especially on immigration. When keep in mind, if your refugee status gets denied here you are almost assured to be deported, which is not the case in the US. In that regards the Canadian immigration policy is much more colonial and centered around a transactional relationship, which is also somewhat the case in the US but at least they have the very humane lottery system, DACA, etc.
That's the difference. The focus is on the community contribution, not a specific company's requirements.
In Australia we have the equivalent of H1B (457) visas that are "sponsored" by an employer. That's separate to individual immigration visas.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, my point was mostly that thinking of Canada as being less strict/picky/transactional with regards to how it treats it's immigrants is just classic Canadian soft self-delusion[1]. Even the US lottery system is wildly more "progressive", and opens opportunities that just wouldn't exist otherwise if you cant meet the more stringeant requirements most of the other Western countries require.
[1]. I mean 18 years ago my dad was about to get denied at the very end of the whole process because an x ray showed a small shadow in his lungs that could've meant he may have had tuberculosis at some point in his life (it thankfully turned out that he didn't) . That would've meant that my mother, my sister and I would've been just flat out dropped too. After years of waiting! Though I understand that the system needs to filter these things out, but imo there's still nothing humane about that, it's just a transaction
My family-based AOS is at 385 days with no scheduled interview yet (SF field office, Biometrics were done in December)
I'd say it's infeasible to improve US education that can produce population as good as importing the best and brightest mind from foreign countries.
Please note that I'm not against improving US education, but to think that we can improve it to the point that it can compete with importing the best mind from other countries is delusional.
US has such a huge advantage on this part that an absurd green card system seems like a noise.
Since the 90s the USA has "won" by attracting the top talent of India, China and most of the rest of the world, resulting in a booming tech sector directly at the expense of those countries. Now in recent years immigration rules, politics and bureaucracy are making this less and less feasible, and you are already seeing the results. The next generation of teenagers worldwide are using TikTok, not Facebook or Instagram. Freshworks just had a $15B IPO and is shaking up the CRM market. There are countless other examples.
I'm one of those who moves to US from a worse country, and I can tell you that I'm much happier.
In countries like China, India, and many other developing countries, every aspect (apart from my family/friend being there) is worse... much worse.
While US won at the expense of those countries, individuals get huge upgrade to their lives.
The US is a massive, diverse place, filled with good and bad outcomes. Just as Europe or the EU are, just as Asia is. There is enormous poverty and tens of millions of poor education outcomes across Europe. There are literally over a billion very bad outcomes spread across Asia, Africa and Latin America in terms of poverty and education. Asia still has a billion people trapped in third world outcomes.
The top quarter in the US will match up very well against the top quarter from most peer nations. There may be a few exceptions among tiny elite nations, like Switzerland, just due to the fact that 1/4 = 80+ million people in the US.
Yes, that is better for US, no?
This is also why US tech industry is absolutely eclipsing every other country's tech company combined.
They have the best mind from all over the world working for them.
My main point is that you cannot improve education that your average citizen is better than the best and brightest from other countries. It is infeasible.
Now my main question for US is: why do we want to import fewer brightest mind from other countries?
While it certainly benefits you personally, can you see how offensive and frankly racist this is?
The U.S. population is under 5% of the world population — our competitive advantage has always been our ability to poach the best and brightest from across the world by rewarding them appropriately.
It's very reasonable to say that our population alone can't compete with the best and brightest of every other country in the world, and that it's more important to continue being a place that attracts immigration.
I'm not sure why US is so against getting more of the best and the brightest, meanwhile we are pushing to get more refugees instead.
H1B/greencard often acquires the very best mind of foreign countries. More is good.
At the current state, we try hard to get less the best and the brightest and more refugees.
I understand there's a humanity reason for the refugees. But why can't we do both?
Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs.
> H1B/greencard often acquires the very best mind of foreign countries.
Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies.
It's also responsible for the lack of job training by companies. Why have an employee learn new skills on your dime when you can find a foreigner who got experience at some other company, or perhaps just with the good sense to exaggerate their resumes...
Knowledge workers create jobs. Software begets more software.
> Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies.
A lot of people desperately want this, but it is tricky to make improvements since any federal discussion of immigration immediately widens to include all forms of immigration.
Too bad the US can't have the same... because of corporate lobbyists as well as anti-meritocracy factions on both right and left, who serve as patsies to the rich by protesting any change to the current system.
Following the same logic, my manager up to Sundar Pichai is driving down my wage and stripping me of opportunity.
If they didn't exist, I would have been a Google CEO and earned $200M a year?
That's absurd
There's no reason for a high tech American worker to view this situation as remotely in their particular interests. No only does it lower but it allows companies to maintain their grueling coding schedule, a system that burns out a whole lot of people.
There are approximately 4million software developer jobs in the US.
There are only 65k H-1B visas given out every year. And not all of them even go to software engineers (doctors, finance professionals, etc. all enter through the H-1B route).
And the H-1B visa lasts a maximum of 6 years.
Let's be generous and assume all 65k visas are going to software professionals. That means at any point of time, you only have 390k H-1B visa holders (this is not correct, but I will get to that a little later). So your claim is that 390k visa holders are driving down the wages for the 4 million software professionals?
More damning is the fact that we are talking about an industry where people can and did work remote and offshore, and there are over 20million software professionals in the world. A software engineer working in Kiev is far more likely to have an impact on US software engineer wages than the 10% who may be on an H-1B in the US. Furthermore, the US software engineer's wage is kept higher by the fact that the same engineer is working for Microsoft for 125k minimum in Seattle, than they are working for Microsoft for closer to 50-60k in Microsoft's massive Hyderabad campus.
I did mention the exceptions.
1) Visa abuse. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a lot of visa abuse. However, by the mid 2010s both the Obama and Trump administrations cracked down on this, and it's fairly trivial at this point.
2) EB1 visa holders. Due to the fact that the US immigration system was last updated in 1990, you have a situation where Chinese and Indians are singled out when they have an approved green card petition and forced to wait years and decades. As a hack, on the backs of the approved green card, which the US is unable to actually give them, they are given a much worse offering of an H-1B which has inflated H-1B numbers. But these are not a reflection of the H-1B visa, and more a reflection of the failure of Congress to fix the green card process. This does inflate H-1B numbers quite a bit, but the article is talking about how the administration is missing an opportunity to greatly resolve precisely this issue.
The 100k green cards that the administration is wasting instead of giving to already approved green card applicants, would almost certainly reduce the number of H-1B holders by an almost 1:1 relationship almost immediately.
"US has just over 580,000 H-1B visa holders, says USCIS" [1]
The figure you quote, 65K, is, (as you do say) the number of H-1bs issued per year. But that's not comparable to 4+ million statically existing software jobs and contrasting the two figures gives the wrong impression - the impression that H-1bs don't impact software job market where clearly they do.
-- Could 500K influence a job market of 4 million? Obviously, notably when they are concentrated in certain area but just generally, you don't need another 4 million to change a supply and demand equation.
Given this, I'd say the rest of your argument falls apart.
I'd note that I'm not "anti-H1b", I'm anti the entire sweat shop system I describe above. I'd agree with other posters who suggest H1b holders should be able to choose the employer as soon as they enter the country.
[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/visa-and-immigratio...
Uhh, yes... What you said is certainly absurd. It has no relation to my comment, however.
H1-B visas are being used very directly to drive down wages. US workers are fired from their jobs, replaced by H1-B visa "contractors" and left to go find other jobs, or sometimes offered the option to apply for their old jobs, at reduced wages.
One of the stated requirements for H1-B visas is that they will not replace a US worker, but that is being quite flagrantly violated. The program is constantly abused and needs to be completely ended and replaced.
H-1s are being used to drive down tech wages, and are also used as a way to create indentured servitude in that the worker leaves or is fired they lose their visa.
At the same time tech is and has been vastly overpaid, WFH is bringing wages down too.
The overpaid tech argument was always 'well you need engineers and you'need to be in SV so you need to pay whatever FAANGs are. But that bubble is bursting before our eyes, and just like last pop, they simply can't believe it until the end.
This immediately proved the wages were artificially inflated, and were the effect of SV madness.
With location being of less importance, the need to hire only the best seemes to have waned (not really it was always a bs rhetoric).
I've said repeatedly that programming is to this bubble what web designers were to the last.
I've also said it's not some magic language like some pretend it is, I made sure all three of my children picked up various programming languages from a young age.
As always, I could be wrong, I just call it how I see it.
You emigrate from a country and immigrate to another. When speaking of people becoming new residents somewhere they are immigrants who have immigrated.
I'd argue only ever hearing about one who made it, as opposed to personally knowing several for whom it did not, further drives the point that it's a broken system.
Put simply - anything a business wants is to increase profit and power, never not once have they made a decision to help their employees.
Business get more profit and power. Employee also get more money and quality of life.
It's possible now (it previously was not), but it resets the H1-B worker's immigration process back to the start as well, leaving them in limbo for years longer. And they are taking a risk that the new job might not work out and if they don't find another quickly, they'll be expelled from the country.
You just need to get that priority number ASAP from the first job, which might take a year or less, and then wait X number of years for it to be 'your turn' and then stay at last the job where you'd actually get your green card for a year or two, which is already pretty typical job behavior already. Most people stay at a job for a year minimum, and once you get promoted up the ranks, they stay at places multiple years.
In those X in-between waiting years you can change jobs without it materially effecting your immigration timeline in any serious way. Even then, if you get a good opportunity you can change jobs in exchange for waiting a year or two longer for your green card, which is a choice you can make.
It's far from 'indentured servitude', just some annoying paperwork barriers that makes it more expensive for firms to hire you, because it costs money and time to hire an H1B than a person with a green card or citizenship already. And yes, you cannot go work with risky employers, which limits you to big tech and startups at the series B+ stage of funding. There are even cases of successful people who have founded startups with H1-Bs or some other immigration visa with a lot of hassle. Which in the scheme of things as history has shown, has ended up not to be that bad :D
America controls something like 80% of the world software market (depending how you measure it) with ~5% of the population. I’m very skeptical that this would remain true if domestic companies were restricted from hiring the top talent in the world.
There are arguments for and against immigration (full disclosure, I’m an immigrant), but the “steal our jobs” rhetoric is based on the false counterfactual that you could get rid of immigrants but keep their jobs.
I didn't say "steal", but it's absolutely happening all the time:
"Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs."
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2879083/southern-calif...
So what you’re saying is that H1B visa abuse allows the small handful of people who own massive software companies to benefit at the expense of the citizenry of the United States?
>The unemployment rate for tech occupations dropped to 1.5% in July, according to the "Employment Situation" report released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals. (#JobsReport). That's the lowest level since August 2019 and is close to the historic low of 1.3%. Aug 6, 2021
This is the wording of H1b visas as well - hiring for talent with special skills that can't be found by workers in the US.
Studies by Norm Matloff detail, and anyone with experience with Cognizant coders know that these are not visas which are only going to "top talent". It is going to imported coolies in order to undermine wages, and have a captive workforce tied to the company, effectively unable to leave.
That is a myth. Every single study done in this area shows very clearly that skilled immigration helps the economy and creates jobs/increases wages. It's weird that tech employees who make six figure salaries the day they graduate are the ones blaming H-1B visas. Chances are you wouldn't have a job (or at least a much more shitty job) if these immigrants weren't here building the entire US tech industry for the last 40 years.
It's incredibly dumb how many smart people the US turns away — especially those who have gone to US schools (which are partially federally funded).
H1B visas are toxic, because it's easy for companies to abuse H1B workers since their visa is tied to their employment with that company. But green cards — we should be handing those out to educated foreign nationals like candy.
Silicon Valley salaries are being driven down to half a million dollars a year by H1Bs.
Riiiight.
Many people myself included fully support increased immigration but oppose the H1B visa program unless serious reforms are made to it.
This could be viewed in a lot of ways. In theory a severe labor shortage in an industry could cause a massive increase in wages. However that may not be sustainable long term and could lead to industry collapse if it can't compete with other countries who are not experiencing such severe shortage, or if the market demand drops significantly due to increased prices.
You have to balance & diversify. Who is going to open restaurants? Who is going to build houses? There is more than science & engineering.
The economy is made up of people. People make up the labor supply curve,and people make up the product and services demand curve.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_imm...
Everybody with a reasonable mind knows many southern border crossers are not refugees but illegal economic immigrants. And we don’t have a national policy to import unlimited low skill workers.
Right now the situation is as simple as this: legal immigrants are held hostage for illegal immigrants.
This is an extremely political opinion, not a "reasonable" one.
It does not apply to anyone and everyone seeking work, or those who want to live in a more wealthy nation.
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-and-asylum/asylu...
The democratic party denied this, they wanted a more 'comprehensive' reform, and tied H1B with the 'low skilled' and illegal immigrant reform as well. The republicans were not on board with that, even though they were willing to reform the H1B.
They basically held the H1B suferes/intenured servants, hostage to advance their agenda. (they thought they will be winning the 2016 election). That didn't happen, and Trump got elected, and the rest is story.
The tech lobby should be really nervous about what Hillary Clinton just said https://www.vox.com/2016/7/11/12106796/clinton-immigration-v...
While there are many brilliant people working on H-1B visas, H-1Bs are people with bachelor's degrees, not necessarily "the best minds".
The advantages provided by the H-1B system are:
- As a country, get the benefits of educated people without the economic cost of having to raise and educate them.
- As a company, more leverage over employees, and in many cases, you get employees with lower compensation expectations.
- The visa last 3 years and it can be renewed once, giving you 6 years before a green card is required. In this way, you get the most productive years of an educated adult.
The disadvantages are:
- Wage depression.
- More competition for local workers.
- The process of degree certification is done by attorneys not educational institutions. Most 4-year programs are eligible for H-1B, but not all foreign 4-year programs are equivalent to an American Bachelor's degree.
I oversimplified it too much, but effectively for an employee the most important requirement is a bachelor's degree or equivalent.
This is like saying "if tim cook and anybody who is smarter than me doesn't exist, I will be apple ceo and earn 200m a year.".
If these smart people didn't work for apple, apple wouldn't exist in the first place.
I can assure you h1b wage depression is minimal.
We of course should get rid of h1b abuse. There is always an improvement.
But we should not get fewer h1b people...
The business model of these companies is to provide workers at a cost below what it costs in the US. This business model is a big reason why they are so successful. At scale these companies drive cost, and wages down. US workers then need to accept lower paying jobs. The worst thing about it is the wage depression here is most felt by the low-tier tech workers, not the well paid SV engineers.
And they don't always follow the rules either. Infosys and Cognizant have been caught up in legal trouble for visa fraud. [2]
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe... [2] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1347409-usa-v-infosy...
They are fraudulent as fuck.
- They realized the quota system is based on the physical action of taking random entries from the mail. So what they did was submit the same application multiple times, so that their H-1B applicants had a higher chance, to the detriment of other applicants.
- They forced their employees to sign a power of attorney and kept all money from the employee tax returns.
They suck. They should be sued to oblivion until bankruptcy.
I don't think this is the reason why we accept refugee... to be low-skilled low-paying workers.
We accept them because they cannot live in their home countries due to political reasons (and etc.), so we extend help for humanity reason.
But I believe that is what a lot of people on Dems' side support: open borders and accept anyone from mexico.
It's easier to grow the underclass of economically-distraught refugees and keep them on the "Democrat plantation", just like they've kept black Americans for decades. Legally-immigrating, high-income naturalized citizens are probably more politically right-leaning than people assume[1]. That is counter to the objectives of the Democratic Party, who have been trying to create a de facto uni-party system at the national level via demographic manipulation[2].
[1] https://polisci.ucsd.edu/undergrad/departmental-honors-and-p...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/11/12/2020-elect...
Or someone has to sit them down and explain what 'nightmare scenario' really means and when to use it.
https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2021-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...
1. The Keystone XL oil pipeline was proposed in 2008. Construction was blocked by the Obama administration, unblocked by the Trump administration, and then re-blocked by the Biden administration, at which point the company trying to construct it gave up. In total, this process took 13 years and huge amounts of money, and nothing came of it. If there had been clarity and consistency in the government's policy here, the thing would either have been approved or rejected much sooner -- and either would have been a big improvement on what actually happened.
2. Covid-related rules have had much more harmful side-effects than they would have had if they were easier to predict. Rules surrounding masks, distancing, indoor and outdoor dining, and so on, all seemed to change a lot more frequently and arbitrarily than necessary in most places. To change the rules when the evidence and situation changes is one thing; changing them in seemingly random ways for dubious reasons is another. Even if the reasoning behind the decisions were consistent and well-thought-out, which is doubtful, there are advantages to having a predictable but sub-optimal policy rather than jerking everyone around in pursuit of perfection.
3. There are some federal student loan debt forgiveness proposals currently being considered in the US. I don't know how much, if any, will pass. If I were still in college, this would make me wonder: should I use money from a job to help pay my tuition, or just keep it? If I just take out more loans instead, and those loans get forgiven through a stroke of political luck a few years later, that's free money in my pocket -- but if that doesn't pan out, I'd end up paying a lot more interest. Whichever way Congress decides, I'd be better off knowing in advance -- but probably won't have that option, since the proposals seem to be (mostly?) retroactive in their design.
4. Finally, today's topic. If you apply for a green card, what are the odds that the paperwork just doesn't get processed? This is the kind of thing that would be really nice to know in advance, one way or the other.
Without expressing an opinion on what the decisions should be in any of these cases, I'll say: there's no decision so bad that unpredictability can't make it worse.
On 2) agreed, except we're working through a 1-in-100 year pandemic with idiots denying reality on one "side" of the debate about rules. The science advances, so that the advice changes, but it hasn't changed much. Get vaccinated, wear a mask, socially distance, wash your hands.
On 3) student debt is the dumbest own goal in US history. Provide funding for college, but do it as a loan, charge exorbitant interest rates and perverse incentives for colleges to charge more. The Federal government could start by reducing the interest rate to zero. Then reduce outstanding balances by a fixed percentage per year. People would redirect their available money into housing and consumables instead of paying back stupid loans.
On 4) the US immigration bureaucracy has been stupid for years. When I was doing some work in the US back in 99/00, we were on 90 day business visas. Each time we applied, it took more than 90 days to get approval. The last time, I received a letter saying that it would be a year before they would approve the visa.
I received the letter 6 months after I had left the US.
> Physical punishment is increasingly viewed as a form of violence that harms children. This narrative review summarises the findings of 69 prospective longitudinal studies to inform practitioners and policy makers about physical punishment's outcomes. Our review identified seven key themes. First, physical punishment consistently predicts increases in child behaviour problems over time. Second, physical punishment is not associated with positive outcomes over time. Third, physical punishment increases the risk of involvement with child protective services. Fourth, the only evidence of children eliciting physical punishment is for externalising behaviour. Fifth, physical punishment predicts worsening behaviour over time in quasi-experimental studies. Sixth, associations between physical punishment and detrimental child outcomes are robust across child and parent characteristics. Finally, there is some evidence of a dose–response relationship. The consistency of these findings indicates that physical punishment is harmful to children and that policy remedies are warranted.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
America has giant tech and science industries and needs lots of workers to remain competitive.
We're feeding these industries with lots of talent that is born here, but raising children has become increasingly complicated with the eroding middle class and desire to have fewer babies.
Parents don't have support. It's not a fun or rewarding job, especially in a world where you can turn Netflix or TikTok on for a quick dopamine hit and plan on being childless.
We can fill this need with immigration. We don't need less of it, we need more. These positions will be filled anyway, and if it happens abroad that will lower American competitiveness. Not bad for the world. Just stating this from America's perspective.
But you also pointed to a problem that we should address domestically: making child rearing easier and desirable. We could provide assistance (time off, early childhood caregiving) and tax incentives.
I also think a pragmatic, though inequitable, approach to developmental incentives would help. Tax breaks for parents or "fun money" for children who are involved in extracurriculars: STEM, music/arts, clubs, "leadership", etc.
Kids would love to earn a salary to buy toys and games. Pay them a small stipend to follow an academic or artistic interest. Or be involved in a club of some kind. It doesn't have to be much of a monetary reward: $50/month or even less. It won't matter for rich kids, but will make a world of difference for the underprivileged.
Are we though? I am not seeing it. The education system, even universities are still often behind the times, and getting a CS degree or CIT degree is not going to help you much in a modern company (or even a legacy company)
the skills gap for recent graduates is huge, though personally I am somewhat glad for this because we need to get away from the system of credentials, at least university credentials.
False premise. Lots of Americans want to have kids, they just can't afford it [0]. This reality hits immigrant families too. Unless housing, childcare, healthcare, and higher education are once again made affordable to the middle class, mass immigation is and will remain an economic Ponzi scheme.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-havi...
I'd argue that some of the best software engineers slash developers I have worked with came from non-cs backgrounds like engineering or business. They learned on the job, after hours on their own time, or in a bootcamp program.
And it's more pleasant to work with people that have a sense of humility and some empathy so I'm all for the feelings education.
Here are a couple examples of free resources. Google "{my city or state} free coding bootcamp" and there are tons more.
https://adadevelopersacademy.org/
https://www.builtinchicago.org/2020/11/12/chicago-coding-tem...
And if you are in a position to share time or money, find and organization that provides these services and help them with outreach or mentorship. It's something within reach for a lot of folks already in tech.
In minority communities with first generation immigrants they may not know that services like these exist. Try to spread the word within those communities too through local community groups.
Claims about American schools, good or bad, are almost always either about a specific place or kind of place.
The US used to be unique in taxing citizens resident abroad, but Australia has in the past few years started to.
The H1B visa is a visa created by tech companies that allows them to run a shadow, parallel immigration system where they get to decide who is allowed to live and work in the US, what they are allowed to have studied, what jobs they are allowed to work, and the circumstances under which they are allowed to remain. They have been partially successful in convincing people that opposition to this is xenophobic.
I'm not sure how much support there has been for a points based system like Australia or Canada has, where tech is one of many fields of study and work that is considered worthy of skilled immigration, and each field gets a determined number of points (plumbers get top points, as do many high educated fields outside tech). I do recall a debate where a spokesman from Oracle called a system like this "communistic" because it would allow the government - not business - to decide who to hire.
That's the kind of toxic bullshit we've gotten in this debate in roughly forever. I don't hold participation in the H1B against anyone (really, truly, I absolutely do. not). The US immigration system is bizarre, and if you don't have relatives in the US, it's hard to immigrate. Tech immigration is one of the ways you can get access to one of the most lucrative job markets in existence. And the US closes off many other avenues - I've had international students explain to me how much harder it is to get into a US law or medical school and remain here, or what it means to graduate from a program with a STEM designation vs one without.
But I do hold it against the tech firms, the people who claimed that there was a labor shortage while conspiring to fix and suppress wages. I think tech firms' real nightmare is a workforce, immigrant and otherwise, that is free to choose a career path according to how their own life interests align with market signals.