We should've just have a stack ranking of H1B candidates, based on income (and severe penalties for regression in comp, so you can't just do it for the visa). This would immediately break companies like Infosys that simply spams the lottery system with bogus applications.
H-1B applications must pass the prevailing wage test, i.e. applicants cannot earn less than the prevailing wage for their position at the chosen employment location.
Companies like Tata, Infosys, WiPro, etc. need to maintain a part of their workforce in the US for certain projects anyway, so they slave away these applicants with draconian contracts. It's not that they pay them significantly less than any other, but the fact that they can guarantee a 3 to 5 year headcount for their larger US based projects, with a larger talent pool to choose from, if needed.
This is why a lot of people, like me, favor high levels of general immigration but don't support targeted visas like the H1B. I'm especially opposed to visas that are controlled by the employer and restrict the personal and economic freedom and mobility of immigrant workers in the US. If employers are lobbying for visas that allow someone to work in the US only on the condition that they remain in a specific role at a specific company at a specific salary, that should raise all kinds of red flags. You're allowed to be a software developer in the valley, but you'll be deported if you try to open a small business or enter a different profession or even change employers without new "sponsorship"? I find it remarkable that so many people don't see the egregious problem here.
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=software+developer&ci...
The prevailing wage test fails to account for stock and bonuses and is basically a joke.
Soviet-style labor lotteries are not a good system. Those "consulting" companies know how to abuse that system.
They found the "loopholes". Given that the system is being abused, the government hasn't made much effort in fixing it.
People are coming to the US, learning about technologies, and bringing those back to other countries with plenty of people willing to use them. In the longer term, this will result in more, better technology, all over the world.
There will be more net good than if all such technology were concentrated in the US, though the US will have less domestic benefit than it would have otherwise.
I'm no expert, but I don't think this is quite right. For an applicant with a bachelor's degree, the cutoff date is February 2012 for India, and April 2018 for China:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
With an advanced degree, it's December 2014 for India and April 2019 for China.
Please correct me if my understanding is incorrect.
An Indian born person applying for a Green Card today will likely be retired or dead before their priority date becomes current.
While dating across cultural groups to find the one, is rewarding in its own right , being that materialistic with your choice in partner is probably going to make for shaky foundations of a relationship.
I don’t see how that’s a compromise though? The cultural expectations are just different for folks from India: no parent from France is expecting their kid who decided to move to another country to be with a French person, and 90% of immigrants from India end up marrying another immigrant from India, even if they more to the US in their early twenties.
Culturally, 'Western Europe + USA' are more similar to each other than Indian sub-cultures among themselves. In most cases you are interacting with other white people coming from christian cultures. Even the People-of-Color that white people do date tend to be deeply integrated into western culture to the point where they're more culturally white than Indian.
In terms of cultural exchange, most of the effort to integrate is being put in by the Indian. (replace Indian with any non-western cultural group). The extent to which the cultural exchange is unidirectional isn't even funny.
There isn't a lot of great data on this, but limited dating data tells us that it is actually white people (esp men) who have strong intra-race-dating preferences as compared to Asians or Latinos. [1] [2 Table 3]
[1] https://imgix.bustle.com/inverse/be/92/f8/14/fb8b/44a7/9f63/...
[2 Table 3] https://www.mit.edu/~6.s085/papers/racialPreferences.pdf
I'm French and my partner is American. This is really really really really not true, the cultural differences between French and American people are enormous.
[2 Table 3] https://www.mit.edu/~6.s085/papers/racialPreferences.pdf
> While this is significantly below the 53% that we would observe under random matching, it is still far above the 4% of interracial marriages observed in the Census data
They clearly have a sample bias though :). Their data is also fairly outdated: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trend...
One thing I find really strange as an American, is that while our immigration system could be improved, in both China and India there is absolutely no way for a US Citizen to get permanent residency.
Not "it's really hard" or "takes a long time", but short of maybe being a billionaire or world famous athlete, a non-Chinese/Indian simply cannot permanently immigrate to these countries. It doesn't matter if you marry someone who is a Chinese/Indian citizen, doesn't matter if you have kids with them, etc there is zero possibly you will be able to immigrate to these countries.
People legally resident for 12 years can apply to naturalize. And spouses can just register to get citizenship.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_nationality_law#Volunta...