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> 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

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.

> 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 wasn’t aware an H1-B holder was subject to deportation as soon as they lost their job.

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.

The clock starts ticking as soon as a H1B holder loses their job, so they have to find a job ASAP before the deadline. I can't remember the exact number but I think it is 30-60 days max after a layoff. And if they don't get a job by then, they have to leave the country, otherwise they are basically an illegal immigrant at that point (overstayed beyond permitted visa), and no company that wants to now sponsor them for a H1B can hire them.

Ok gotcha. Thanks.

85K new H1B's a year aren't enough to depress wages

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.

Note that just because someone looks Indian doesn’t mean they’re on a H-1B.

Of course not, but listen man, I know who was H1B and who wasn’t. The systems literally tell you who are contractors and what company they are from (Infosys, etc).

Some Indians working at these companies are not H1B, FYI. You can't tell unless you ask.

The “abuse” of H1 is mostly for lousy operations and legacy sustainment jobs.

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.

I disagree. When you look at how many young people were scammed by College for their chosen major and then actively bootcamped their way into Tech, you realize there is a strong commitment within the country to fill these industries.

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.

For AWS, sure. Hire ops folks for $60-75k and they turnover pretty quick or move up. If you do a formal mentoring and training program, you’ll “grow” 80% of those folks.

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.

They are not importing COBOL developers man. I know 3-4 members on my team that do Angular. It’s a scam.

None of the h1b workers I’ve worked with have done more than basic web development.

It’s fine work, but it’s not specialist work, and it has prevented me from hiring American many times.

> 85K new H1B's a year aren't enough to depress wages when the population of the US is 300M+.

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.

Being foreign-born isn't the same as being on H1B. I am foreign born, majority of my team is foreign born. All of us are US citizens.

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.

> I am foreign born, majority of my team is foreign born. All of us are US citizens.

How did you get that way?

Myself personally? Parents immigrated on H1B a long time ago. Some of my teammates got their citizenship through their own H1B much more recently (with about an even split of having graduated from a US college vs abroad). Others, typically older ones, got to the US as refugees from the late days of soviet union. Another common story I frequently encounter is a TN visa from Canada or the Australian equivalent (forgot the visa name, but it works similarly to TN). Or families where one parent is american and another one is foreign, they live in the other parent's country during childhood, and then move to the US later in life.

> Myself personally? Parents immigrated on H1B a long time ago. Some of my teammates got their citizenship through their own H1B much more recently

So attributing your presence as foreign born immigrants to the H1B program would be... correct?

That's literally the case for almost every single american, if you are willing to go far enough down the rabbithole. Are you willing to question some americans about their presence in the US being, generationally, dependent on colonizing native american land?

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.

>>>>> 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"

> 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.

> 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).

There’s too much money being left on the table. The government should be levying a hefty tax on every H1B, like $20k/year. That tax should then be used to fund merit based scholarships for US Citizens pursing a degree in the field of the H1B. If the argument is that we don’t have the skills in the US, then let’s use the H1B program to create those skills.

> 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.

Are you confusing H1-B with the Green Card queue? I'm not aware of any queue for H1-B - just the annual lottery.

Exploitation is exploitation even if it affords better opportunities than taking a pass.

That said, I don't know any of the subtle points of the visa system.

Precisely. Getting into a job that accepts H1-B's seemed like big business in India when I was there. Saw ads for it and everything. Not surprising; even a low-end H1-B wage is many multiples over what you'd get for the same job in India, and the living conditions are way better.

Companies also have to do prevailing wage checks, which often results in pay increases.

Supply lowers price. H1bs lower the pay of software developers in the USA, full stop.