H-1B visa holders scramble for jobs after 2022 tech layoffs
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
During a downturn in the tech sector, while companies are boasting about "cutting the fat" in their workforce by the tens of thousands. I'd assume it's much easier to find a citizen than it was a few years ago
The companies admitting they over hired by thousands, also includes them claiming they needed immigrants they do not really need.
This[1] article estimates 2,000 of the 23,000 tech workers laid off in November 2022 had H-1B visas. According to the U.S approach to immigration we should all be prioritizing the 21,000 non-visa holders before we try getting people more jobs so they can keep their visa
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/11/answers-for-h-1b-workers-w...
This is true for a company sponsored Green Card application, not H-1B visa.
[0]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit...
[1]: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende...
This simply says equally or higher qualified US workers who apply to the same job should be offered the job, but there is no need to seek out US workers.
How does this work exactly? Say I am currently unemployed and match the criteria. They post an ad in a paper, I see it and pass the interview. At the negotiation step (because of course total comp is not listed in the ad), I say I will take the job if they pay 2X of what they would have paid to an H-1B if I did not come (again X was never mentioned, it is just the number the company keeps in mind). What next?
To hire an H-1B, the company has to do a Prevailing Wage Determination (PWD), where they ask the Department of Labor what an appropriate wage for this a) job function, b) experience level and c) geographic area is. To go forward with the H-1B, they only have to offer that much for the position.
> This is true for a company sponsored Green Card application, not H-1B visa.
IIRC, that's typically gamed. It's been awhile, but I knew a couple of guys who went through that and I recall they postings "to find an American citizen" were written hyper-specifically in order avoid hiring anyone, and if anyone actually applied, I'd imagine the interview would have been tough with a predetermined outcome.
It's a crappy system. Tests like that should be at the start, not at the end. If they're at the end, it just wastes everyone's time and subverts the test: even if you think the company should hire more Americans, are you going to undermine your coworker in such a way that they may get deported? Is it fair to do that after someone's put down roots? (No.)
Nowadays, it is seen as acceptable to post it virtually, let's say on an HR page on SharePoint, in addition to the physical notice in whatever office there may be. For certain areas we also considered mailing a notice to all employees in the area, but I don't know if that ever happened. The idea is that the physical notice covers the letter of the law, and the electronic notice covers the spirit.
I don't know if DoL has issued any guidance since then, but at the time there wasn't any.
- Software engineer
- Is able to effectively communicate in Italian and French.
- Has 3-5 years of cultural experience in Southern Italy.
- Culinary skills in contemporary Italian cuisine not required but nice to have.
Let's not pretend there is some huge injustice here. This is a risk we must take into account as immigrants.
None of us have the automatic right to stay and work here, and that isn't the intention of the program. Immigration is not a right, it is a privilege.
It seems like the only people who do understand the program are the people who are directly participating in it.
That said, when I was sponsored for an E-3 visa by a US company the recruiters made it clear that my position was permanent (subject to performance) and that the company would sponsor me for a Green Card.
These representations were contradicted by the legal documents I presented in my interview at the US consulate.
Nonetheless, I can imagine some employees on these sorts of visas might take their employer at their word and plan their lives accordingly.
The current wait time for indians is over 100 years whereas all other countries get their green card in a couple of years(after green card sponsorship).
This makes the system crushing the Indians who have roots for more than decades.
For people who would say , you should have seen it coming , recently the demand from other countries are too high that wait time for indians are in decades at minimum
I think the H-1B to EB-2 and EB-1 process should be improved to not be subject to immigration rates.
The people waiting in the employment green card lines are evaluated on the same set of criteria . Their ability to perform a particular task for their employer.
What about people who are already here for decades ?
Some don't understand the complexity of the system and think their case will be different
They need to understand that immigration is a privilege and not a right. If it were a right, then could have successfully sued the US government in a court of law and gotten their green cards ages ago. They forget that and start crying when faced with long wait times. The US didn't invite them , they made the decision to come here.
ETA: I am not saying the H1B program is that, just responding to the sentiments up above.
However it's not good for a nation to discriminate people from certain countries worse than they treat people from rest of the world.
No system is perfect, and we go through iterations of refining the laws/solutions.
What most people are calling out is this discrimination in a peaceful manner and asking for a change.
Without people asking for change, nothing would have changed in history. The entire labor rights and freedom from slavery were as a result of people asking for a change and to be treated equally on the same set of standards.
American culture(as i understand) is based on concept that anyone can raise up and become successful based on ones own merit. The current legal immigration system for Indians fails to provide it.
And people are currently pointing out the flaw in the system.
i have to disagree with you on this.
USA did invite them here and provided a dual intent visa(H1b).
Every H1b visa holder did go to embassy and got interviewed by US Visa officer.
so USA very well knew the people who were invited to work in USA can become a US citizen eventually.
But arguing you shouldn't have children... really?
Other H-1B holders who point out this inequity are not morally "wrong", or "crybabies" (paraphrased from another of your comments). Petitioning the government for a redressal of grievances is a very American thing to do. And doing what you have done - accepting the reality of one's situation and adapting to it - is very mentally healthy and pragmatic.
Some people, like you, work around the existing system, while others ask for a better system. Neither group should put down the other, or denigrate the choices they have made. Try to be a better person than that.
There are a lot of things that we don't have to do to help our fellow human but that we still should do.
If anything, the US has given me opportunities that I wouldn't get in India. I work on a front office team at an HFT. In India, for front office roles, most of the HFT's don't hire anyone not from the IIT's. My resume would be thrown straight in the bin, if I were still in India. A while back, FAANG offices in India would only prefer hiring from the top tier Indian schools.
[0]https://www.stilt.com/blog/2019/04/h1b-visa-holders-in-usa/
I don't think percentages are useful here. Hundreds of human beings suffering is something I will always empathize with.
If H1B visa holder gets laid off, they need to find a job in 60 days. That is a lot of stress. Suppose they find a in different state, they need to move. This is stress for the family and children as well. In the worst case, they may need to leave the country. It is harder, because they need to sell all their properties, move the stuff and relocate the family in an extremely short period of time. I think the H1B rules are draconian.
IMHO, H1B must be reformed or abolished. In the current form, it only benefits big companies to hire great talent for cheap and keep under their control. Similar to bonded labour.
EDIT: This apparently is wrong, see downthread; the original text below is preserved for context
When they are no longer legally employed, with legal employment including any terminal leave. (But not extended by severance, even if that is calculated based on pay for a particular time period.)
But also it's not clear, and it might be the legal employment end date in some cases.
1. http://blog.cyrusmehta.com/2022/11/guide-to-terminated-nonci...
It'd be kinda annoying if they could have it one way for the WARN act and it was another way for the H1B.
If USCIS denies your application, then the 60 day clock starts the moment you stopped working (for Twitter laid off folks, this has already started). If USCIS approves your application, then the 60 day clock begins the moment you stopped being an employee of the company (for Twitter laid off folks, this is January 4).
I dunno, this would need an immigration lawyer to weigh in on. There's a YC one who appears from time to time.. This could be something YC does which would make startups more attractive to h1bs.
Related to this, it is high time for this indentured servitude-like legislation to be scrapped for good, but as long as the people affected earn relatively good money I guess we won't see a real move against it anytime soon.
Isolationist countries end up with poorer people, in the same way if you made an isolationist state, county, city, or household, would simply end up making you poorer.
It's a shame more people don't read economics widely enough to understand this.
Sweden also has a PPP adjusted median disposable income over 30% lower than in the US [1]. I'd prefer to live here.
"Lowering America Citizen Wages" is a problem with American Companies paying less to foreigners, not with foreigners being available for hire.
The comment is xenophobic
Companies are paying absolute minimum they can. It is only rational.
The problem is with expectations. A lot of H1 workers are used to a much lower quality of life than native workers. US graduate would want to have a 40 hour work-week, separate bedroom, 401k and such. For a foreign worker from a less reach region 401k and medical are not a requirement, sharing a bedroom with 3 other guys is not an issue. Working round a clock is fine as long as you can send money to your family back in the old country. Oh, also in US you can afford a car that will make you look super-successful on social media.
Do you really want to drive down quality of life for everybody.
Maybe this salary injustice exists for H-1Bs being hired from abroad, but it doesn't exist initially for most H-1Bs when entering the job market. Of course 2 years into the job is a different story because H-1Bs have less negotiation power to seek out other jobs and get good retention offers etc
Also, I would wonder: 1. How much of those foreign graduates went to college solely for a visa. 2. I would also expect that those graduates have much lower expectations from the life style. Young men don't really need a lot of money and have a lot of time to spend at work.
Go ahead and ask any immigrant who had a H-1B about their path. I am confident you will come to the same conclusion.
From my experience most h1s are imported by vendors. I've seen a lot of really small "consulting companies" who does this. I had heard over and over again that most regular companies are terrified of having to deal with H1s, due to extra cost and lots of uncertainty.
The H-1B program is heavily used by graduates from US institutions.
I would welcome someone actually studying this rigorously. I am confident my observations will hold. There is also no evidence to assume that Indian consulting services occupy the majority of H-1Bs.
(Some of these peers might be their classmates from a US university, who got their green cards near-instantly by virtue of being born in a smaller country).
I feel the same way about doctors and other highly paid skilled professions, and immigration as a whole.
Or, we can let the skilled workers end up elsewhere, those places develop the next innovations, and soon the high paying jobs are not here, but have moved to those places willing to invest in talent.
The main reason the US has such high salaries is not that we stopped skilled workers coming here - around 50% of Fortune 500 companies were started here by imiigrants.
I, as a US citizen, want the world's best and brightest to come here, so I can learn, have to compete, and become part of improving tech sectors, not backwater xenophobic countries banning workers.
It's historically extremely shortsighted to think that having to compete solely makes wages lower. If that were true, we'd all have lower wages than our ancestors, which is demonstrably untrue.
I got a good laugh out of that…
Every study I’ve heard about says that relative wages have been steadily decreasing compared to earlier generations. This naturally leads to a lower standard of living which, incidentally, get covered over by technological advances.
Not that I blame immigration for this but take issue with the “demonstrably untrue” part.
You can prove that my niece making $15/hr in 2022 is higher than her mother making $5/hr in 1987 for essentially the same job but what’s the relative difference?
Huh, not sure what all these minimum wage workers are complaining about then, that’s like 14% better.
Cite one. There's ample evidence (Census, BLS, FRED, many more) pointing otherwise. For example, here [1] is FRED inflation adjusted median personal income, which is clearly not at all near your claim. Here's [2] FRED inflation adjusted median household income, also no where near your claim.
There are many relevant factors that make this tricky, and pop econ often presents bad data. For example, wages is not total remuneration (which is tracked by BLS) which is not total cost to employ (also tracked by BLS). Both of those include other factors changing over time, such as more vacation, healthcare perks, regulatory requirement changes (FMLA, OSHA, more). So if you're going to talk about wages, you need to address total benefits. Hint: this factor is extremely relevant.
Also, you need to adjust properly for demographics. On average people make more as they age. So as a population ages or gets younger, median and mean wages can change for the entire population, but it's not an accurate comparison: it is possible for every person at every age to make more than a person in a previous generation at that age, yet for the median to decrease, simply because demographics are changing where in careers the median lies. Hint: this factor is relevant.
You also need to be careful if you're talking household wages, since household makeup also changes over time.
When you consider these and other relevant factors, I've seen nothing that points to people being poorer than previous generations in any widespread or wholesale grouping, at any decile of the income breakdown. And I've spent significant time researching this issue.
In fact, if you correct the first order data I just presented from FRED, the modern person makes even more than the FRED graph: the workforce are skewing younger (as Boomers retire), companies are adding more benefits (both to compete and because of legislative requirements), and households are becoming more single person (i.e. single earner), yet the median household income still grows.
So, cite your evidence.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
Maybe the US is just a better place for business? With the attraction to immigrants being an effect not a cause. Economic predictions have been saying for decades that the number of software engineering jobs will be increasing much faster than the population. It's supply and demand.
Well, its also not because of immigration, at least not mainly. Europe has plenty of immigration and salaries are much lower. In my non expert view its the U.S world hegemony and dollar's status as reserve currency that do the trick. U.S can stop immigration tomorrow and still salaries will be very high for decades.
Most of our discussions around the system impact of layoffs have been in regard to changes in TC long term, but I personally think that's minor compared to potentially saying goodbye to some friends for a long time.
The issue is not just this current scramble, but if the job market in tech does shrink and continue to do so we're going to see the number of places sponsoring H1B shrink tremendously. Estimates are hard to come by accurately, but the number of H1B holders in tech is fairly large, this could be a change that quite literally changes the face of tech in the US.
There are legal versions of that approach.
That said, I don't understand education+early career visas. "Come get an education at one of our universities, and then take your utility elsewhere!" If we're gonna train people, we should have onramps to employment so our economy can benefit too.
That's the effect of being the single most desirable target for immigrants. If US immigration laws were any more lenient, it would be the most populous country on Earth already, way ahead of India and China.
I have never met any current or former H1B holder who didn't enter the program through this route.
I am a naturalized citizen who also followed this path.
The United States has some of the most generous and charitable immigration policies of all countries on Earth. The problem is that the sheer number of people trying to immigrate means that it appears cruel for turning so many people down. Particularly when people don't look into just how restrictive other developed nations are with their own policies.
Western nations need to adopt more stringent immigration policies and also be much more rigorous in testing how well the applicants have assimilated. Most of the current 1st gen. immigrants hardly make any effort to assimilate.
This attitude is going about as well as you'd expect.
Depends on your definition of stringent. You picked the one outlier - Switzerland - where apparently your canton gets to vote on whether you become a citizen. Or something crazy like that, idk.
Most European nations I'm familiar with let you become a permanent resident after residing legally for a certain number of years, and passing a language test. Then citizenship after some more years and more tests.
Is the US very different from that? Unless you're born in India or China...in which case, you might have an easier time in Europe.
Depends on who is immigrating, doesn't it? The Diversity Visa Lottery is outstanding, true. However, I consider Germany's Blue Card superior to H-1B: you can get a visa in a few weeks once you have a contract and a BS degree. For H-1B, not only you have lots of paperwork and processing time, you also have to win the spring quota lottery. Unless you work for a university, they have separate quota.
I personally think we should only confer citizenship on people who are in the country legally. There's too many tourist vacationers that come here to give birth to their child, incur hospital fees that they won't pay, and then fly back home. The fact it takes so long for actual good immigrants is terrible policy. My close friend from India who was making over $1 million per year at FAANG has been waiting over a decade for his Green Card. The system is a mess. He is also a proponent of very strong immigration rules because he sees how the rules are being bent and it's utterly unfair for those who follow the rules.
Germany allows too since I have seen many, many first generation immigrants become German citizens.
"Foreigners over the age of 18 (or age 20 prior to April 1, 2022) may become Japanese citizens by naturalization after residing in the country for at least five years, renouncing any previous nationalities, and proving self-sufficiency through their occupation or existing financial assets."
You have to renounce previous nationalities, whereas the reverse the United States is much more generous towards the possibility of dual citizenship.
I was pointing out that Japan does let people become citizens after they've lived there for a period of time, the OP was suggesting the complete opposite. Renouncing previous nationalities is not the same as Japan not allowing people to become citizens, no matter how long they have lived there.
It's ironic that you say that, but are making claims that just aren't correct.
"The US and Canada have the most lenient and generous citizenship policies in the world."
This is widely agreed to be false. I'll refer to the following sites:
https://flagtheory.com/ja/easiest-countries-to-become-a-citi...
https://getgoldenvisa.com/easiest-countries-to-get-citizensh...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/easiest-c...
You'll notice there are many countries with 2 or 3 year citizenship tracks as the default, while the US's is 5 years, and requires significantly more difficulty.
The US isn't anywhere near the top of any of those lists.
The US policy is certainly better than a lot of countries, but that doesn't make it "most generous in the world", just not "least generous".
That's a big accusation.
I'm entitled to feel embarrassed about the problems with our system, regardless of if some other country does a better or worse job than we do.
> There's too many tourist vacationers that come here to give birth to their child, incur hospital fees that they won't pay, and then fly back home.
[citation needed]
this blames the reader of the comment indirectly, and calls to gather and act now to remedy these obvious and ugly moral traits
yet, most readers (like me) have had nothing to do with setting the rules for this system, nor implementing them. In addition, it is large companies that routinely exercise the actual restrictions.. and yes I have seen it directly.
Overall, this comment to flay and riddle the reader with guilt over this issue, is corrosive to unity.. and comes off as whiny and naive
How does me, an American, being embarrassed that it's hard for my friends from other countries to visit and/or live here make an abstract reader feel guilty?
Corruption all the way down, friends.