This takes care of wage suppression as people can leave after a year. This takes care of body shops clogging the pipelines as they have to spend their own money to finish the checks. This takes care of the limited number of visas as the pipeline empties every 12 months without fail.
This solves almost all the H1-B idiocy. This is, of course, why no one in the valley ever proposes this solution.
The simple solution is “just abolish the H-1B”.
If you want more employment-based immigrant visas, just increase the number of visas issued in the employment-based categories, and eliminate the domestic-wage-suppressing-guest-worker-visa-with-bureaucratic-overhead-to-pretend-its-not-for-suppressing-domestic-wages.
Yes, you can. Someone might want to make the case that preserving H-1B for just academics in the case of general elimination is a good idea, but it's not the simple solution.
> It is also a good way for people with unique skills (usually not in software) to wait for their green card availability.
If you increase the number of, and properly allocate, visas in employment-based immigrant categories, you don't need a dual-intent non-immigrant visa category for people to “wait out” in. (You could further fix the waiting-out problem by eliminating per-country limits, and applying only the global limits in visa categories; it's the per-country limits that create the really absurd wait times.)
Simple: if you want to accommodate more employment-based immigrants, increase employment-based immigrant visas rather than keeping an employment-based, mobility-limiting non-immigrant visa category around, but make it a possible immigration funnel because it allows dual intent.
I don't think any company will wait that long for a single hire.
However, the time delay should be short. 12 months would be pretty close to ideal--24 months at worst. And the company should bear ALL the costs and deadlines of the required background checks and clearances. If they have to hire special investigators to get it all done--so be it--they wanted the candidate, after all.
And, if the proper investigations don't get done, the company CEO goes to jail with a felony. None of this "token business fine" garbage.
That's not true. If H1-Bs were not a good deal for the guest workers, there wouldn't be a 10 year waiting list to get one. Living standards are so much higher in the United States due to massive infrastructure investments than in the countries most of these guest workers come from that accepting a lower wage than an American would otherwise earn is still a once in a lifetime opportunity for them. The workers being exploited by wage depression here are the American ones, and that's not even addressing the infrastructure costs of a growing population which is distributed evenly instead of being born solely by those incurring the cost.
> Companies also have to do prevailing wage checks, which often results in pay increases.
How? In my experience H1Bs always make less because they are taking a hit in pay in order to benefit from the public services they wouldn't get in their home country.
That said, I don't know any of the subtle points of the visa system.
How about this: If below minimum wage illegal work wasn't a good deal for guest workers, there wouldn't be illegal immigration to the US.
This doesn't mean its not exploitation, although not every H1B is being exploited.
> The workers being exploited by wage depression here are the American ones
85K new H1B's a year aren't enough to depress wages when the population of the US is 300M+. Especially when there is record demand across industries. Look at tech, every company wants to hire more and is competing with high salaries.
> and that's not even addressing the infrastructure costs of a growing population which is distributed evenly instead of being born solely by those incurring the cost.
I don't understand this point. Isn't every citizen benefiting from the improved, expanded infrastructure? Legal immigrants like H1Bs pay the same taxes as any citizen or a permanent resident.
Moreover, primary H-1B holders are basically by definition selected to be the subset of the population that poses a negative burden on society. They have a steady job (if they lose it they get deported); they have health and criminal background checks; they are college-educated. Some other country took the burden of educating them and took on the risk that they’d turn out to be a deadbeat, and the US receives them as a taxpaying adult.
(Full disclosure, I was an H-1B holder.)
I thought losing your job created a weird legal grey area, where you were allowed to stay in the country and look for work, but couldn’t reenter if you left.
I was at a large company in Silicon Valley where over 50% of employees were Indian. A large, white American, company.
I’ve seen this shit with my own eyes. I don’t know man, is SQL Migrations and web development so hard to find in fucking Silicon Valley? Lol.
This stuffs a scam.
There’s no way your state labor department or insurance company is going to pay a premium for US workers to train for and work a dead end, low satisfaction job updating 50 year old COBOL or 20 year old J2EE. So they contract out the work on-prem or setup a technology center in Nowhereville, New Mexico to grease the skids and make the hiring process work.
The reality is, without the H1 folks, those jobs would just be outsourced abroad anyway. The calculus is easy: the company benefits from greater control, the country collects taxes from people who may not ever collect benefits, and we get a pipeline of skilled immigrants.
We really don’t need to contract out at all. I’m sorry my Indian friends, but Jonathan at the local community college has been learning AWS too. But don’t fret, you guys have a billion people in your country and they need tech too - stay there, and improve it.
It’s tough to do for a smaller company, you can pay one skilled worker a wage 3x the semi-skilled worker and get 5x-10x the output.
Good luck finding that COBOL programmer.
It’s fine work, but it’s not specialist work, and it has prevented me from hiring American many times.
Well, this is obviously false.
Compare these numbers from 2017 ( https://elaineou.com/2017/08/26/the-mystery-of-the-vanishing... )
> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.
> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.
"74% of the employment pool just isn't enough people to make a dent in salaries" is not an argument that can pass the laugh test.
That "74%" you tout is useless as a number, unless you know exactly how many of them are on H1B and how many out of that subset are "depressing wages" (in which case, you should've used the number for that instead of the one for "foreign-born" employees).
I worked with quite a few H1B people before, and they were being paid pretty much the same as the rest of the teammates who were US citizens. And no, I dont think that all of us were underpaid at all. Unless you count close to $200k/yr for junior devs as being underpaid, in which case, I still am more than happy about being "underpaid" like that in the past at the start of my career.
Not discounting that abuse of H1B happens (just look at the likes of Tata and Infosys), but trying to claim that all H1Bs are like that or, even more ridiculous of a statement, that all of foreign-born employees are H1B holders is just disingenuous.
How did you get that way?
So attributing your presence as foreign born immigrants to the H1B program would be... correct?
I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion at hand at all. Given I am a US citizen not bound by visas or anything like that, how am I even theoretically able to "suppress wages"?
Your point about this just seems like the most pedantic "technically correct" statement that has zero relevancy. I disputed the fact that the 74% foreign-born number has anything to do with suppressing wages, as a lot of them are US citizens and can choose to work wherever they want (note: they dont even need to be US citizens for that, as green card allows that, along with a bunch of other visas). And your retort is that some of them used to be non-US citizens at some point? That doesn't address the point that the 74% number is useless in the context of this discussion.
> I don't see how this is relevant to the discussion at hand at all. Given I am a US citizen not bound by visas or anything like that, how am I even theoretically able to "suppress wages"?
You're suppressing wages by working in the industry. "Suppressing wages" and "being present" are the same thing.
And, as you note, you're present as part of the H1B program.
> Your point about this just seems like the most pedantic "technically correct" statement that has zero relevancy. I disputed the fact that the 74% foreign-born number has anything to do with suppressing wages, as a lot of them are US citizens and can choose to work wherever they want
This is your problem; you don't understand what suppressing wages involves.
Please tell me what it involves then, because throughout my entire career, all I've been seeing is heavily increasing salaries for software devs all across the board, from juniors to seniors. 5-10 years ago, $200k/yr starting salary out of college was either extremely rare or almost unheard of. These days, it is pretty commonplace at bigger tech companies or unicorns.
Also, I don't see how one can suppress wages at the same time as the entire industry is struggling with hiring competent people. At the previous company I worked at, we had to interview about 50 people to fill 1 position on my team. It wasn't limited, if all 50 qualified, we would have hired them all, just spread them out to other parts of the company. They weren't competing for one single spot against each other. And yet, it took us around 50 people just to find a single qualified person. And that's not counting those who got filtered out at the resume stage.
Cannot comment on other industries, but in tech, imo H1B tends to fulfill its intended purpose by addressing the shortage of qualified candidates (exceptions apply where fraud and abuse is involved, like in the OP or certain consultancy places like Infosys).
Are you confusing H1-B with the Green Card queue? I'm not aware of any queue for H1-B - just the annual lottery.
Many years ago we had to relocate engineers from Switzerland, France and Canada in the US after an acquisition. Most of them on H1s or O1s and it sure wasn't cheaper than US devs here in the valley.
> only works as long that labor can't walk across the street for a raise.
They absolutely can. It's a trivial filing for an immigration attorney.
Applicant: You absolutely can!
Employer: Great!
Applicant: It's a trivial filing.
Employer: Ugh, okay.
Applicant: For an immigration attorney.
Employer: click