A small number of companies are colluding to cheat H1B visa lottery, US says
wsj.com
wsj.com
And if it is going to be this hard, why do I have to pay social security and medicare taxes? I call it a donation/yearly fees at this point, working with such a shady system.
However, it seems strange to complain about the US naturalization process, when its not easy for me being a US citizen to become a citizen of india.
https://indiancitizenshiponline.nic.in/Ic_GeneralInstruction...
Citizenship of India by naturalization can be acquired by a foreigner (not being an illegal migrant) who is ordinarily resident in India for twelve years (throughout the period of twelve months immediately preceding the date of application and for eleven years in the aggregate in the fourteen years preceding the twelve months) and fulfils other qualifications as specified in third schedule to the act, 1955.
In addition:
1) A copy of valid Foreign Passport
2) A copy of Residential Permit/LTV
3) A copy of Bank Challan in original amounting to Rs.1500/- deposited in the State Bank of India.
4) One affidavit from self (applicant) and two affidavits from two Indians testifying to the character of the applicant in the prescribed language available in the application form. Affidavit to be allotted by Notary/Oath Commissioner/ DM.
5) Two language certificates certifying the applicant’s knowledge in any one of the Indian languages specified in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. (A language certificate from a recognized educational institution or from a recognised organisation or from two Indian citizens of the district of the applicant).
6) Two newspaper (circulating in the district in which the applicant resides) cuttings of different dates or of different newspapers notifying his/ her intention to apply for citizenship in the prescribed language available in the application form.
From the Congressional research service's report on immigration backlog [1] (note: this was before covid), for applicants from India, the projected backlogs for various employment-based green card applications applying in 2020 were:
EB-1: 8 years.
EB-2: 195 years.
EB-3: 27 years.
EB-1: 18 years.
EB-2: 436 years.
EB-3: 48 years.
eb-1 eb-2 eb-3
2024 12 292 36
2023 11 268 34
2022 10 244 32
2021 9 220 30
2020 8 195 27
2019 7 171 25
2018 6 147 23
2017 5 123 21
2016 4 99 19
2015 3 75 17
2014 2 51 15
2013 1 27 13
In any case, it is reasonable to assume that anyone with a priority date of 2017 or so will likely retire before your priority date is current.
You (and me) will probably spend an entire career paying for social security and never be eligible for it.
Those are two completely different issues.
This is about exceptions to the rule preventing payments outside the United States after 6 months, and is based on more than 10 years of work by the qualified worker.
But the actual worker needs to be a citizen or a legal permanent resident (“green card” holder) [0] to be eligible to either receive benefits themselves or have dependents receive benefits based on their eligibility.
[0] Actually, there’s a few other categories like certain refugees and asylees, but not, general dual-intent non-immigrant visa holders (like H-1B workers.)
I think you're confusing Supplemental Security Income (SSI) with Social Security retirement benefits. Those are two different things.
IIRC green card problem began simultaneously with H1B problem, between 2005-2008. It makes sense: if the major entry to the immigration pipeline ends up 75% of Indian nationals, of course the exit for India-born (due to per-country diversity rule) is jammed.
I know backlog growth has a few unrelated causes adding up together, but at least 90% of the mess correlates very well with overuse of H1B and L1B (transfers) by odd consultancy businesses. Other factors don’t seem as important, for example, China has the same population size as India, but its wait time has been growing several times slower. Both problems are clearly connected.
Much more free time for ie visits back home (basically everybody has 25 days of paid leave + various public holidays, and I can be off sick for a long time without any any effect on paycheck), you have top notch medical and school system for free, retirement savings are forever yours and yours only and accessible from anywhere. CHF is stronger than ever, country is historically most stable in the world for past 800 years, extremely low criminality compared to US.
Being treated with respect regardless where you come from or how you look like and bureaucracy working well are additional features. More real freedom than you could ever dream of having in US (maybe unless you are a proper gun nut) is just a cherry on the top of the cake.
How about being treated as a Swiss regardless of where you come from or how you look? Say what you will about America, but it is a place where you can become an American in all senses of the word within one generation.
This is not the case in the US and Canada. each country has an ugly past but their true strength is in the ability for anyone from anywhere to become fully integrated and equal in their societies.
Unless you marry someone who's not from India (does not have to be a green-card holder or an American either). Indians really get screwed by their cultural expectations to marry someone who's also from India.
I think only true fanatic Republicans would claim this. Normal Americans would not claim this, in my experience.
In case there is any doubt about this, the founding war cry for the country was taxation without representation is basically equivalent to slavery. And then civil war with southern states for the same. How is taking away money from people's paycheck for a service that they'll never use and have no representation into not mini-slavery. I mean if you want to steal that money from down-on-their-luck immigrants then why not just create a new taxrate slab for migrant workers so they have a clear view of what they are getting into.
It is, which is why I said that American is not morally sound.
You don’t; no one is requiring you to reside or work outside your country of citizenship; presumably, you have chosen to do so because it provides economic advantage over your other alternatives. (Also, no one is prohibiting you from taking the necessary steps to qualify for a different immigration category, including the unlimited ones that have no quota and therefore no backlog.)
Previously you have to file a full petition with a serious job offer which costs thousands of dollars but now you just pay some entry fee and you're in. Obviously this was ripe to be gamed by shady staffing companies taking money from applicants for filing a petition and THEN finding a job later based on whichever staffing agency gets picked. It's not even illegal for multiple companies to submit a petition for the same person.
USCIS can fix this by just selecting the lottery based on passport numbers and making sure the full paperwork is filed before the lottery like a few years ago, but of course they'll just lazily blame others for taking advantage of something that is so easily gamed.
The real losers here are the students who studied in the US, worked hard to find a job and only submit a single petition through their employers. It's now way less likely they will get picked in the lottery.
My opinion - USCIS can't legally reduce H1B visas so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications, who they can later reject, or they simply won't file a full petition, and they don't have to issue all the 85K H1B visas Congress has allowed.
then instead in top 5 there is some weird article about like "How I used my old CRT monitor to create a fish tracking app using radios" and some guy reply about some home project in 20 000 words no one really cares about
but for some reason those almost autistic special interest posts few care about is getting quite some upvotes
*I'm not sure how factual the algorithm claim is
I'm not saying you are wrong but I'm saying my confidence starts quite low with this kind of idea. (e.g. the cause could be something different like manual moderation; the effect may just be confirmation bias and not exist; etc.)
Qualifier: I haven't looked into the algo at all, for all I know it could be openly published by YC/HN. I'm mainly responding because I feel like it is important to TRY to be self-aware of our own biases. Emphasis on the TRYing and asymptotically approaching 100% confidence (Qualifier to the Qualifier: it is also important to be at peace with decisions based on <100% confidence lol)
The theory that HN is part of a vast conspiracy in the startup world related to H1-Bs is misguided.
Here you go. There's a real position at FAANG for every petition they file (and if the petition doesn't get selected, there's a position at a subsidiary). Keep in mind that If I want to hire:
A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup OR
A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0]
my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone?
Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE).
[0] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/silicon-valleys-body-s...
USCIS merely follows the laws and rules. As with most things in the US, this is a Republican-created disaster.
In 2005 the Bush administration invented this system after the Omnibus Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005. Which was, to put it mildly, a shitshow. They gave members a few hours to read over 3000 pages of new laws and 9 new bills. No one had any idea what they were voting for and parts of the law weren't even properly drafted; only 2 bills had ever even been debated. It took nearly a week after voting for the actual text to come out.
Post 2016, they dramatically increased RFEs (Request for Evidence) and slowed down visa processing for H1B visas and employment authorization (EAD) cards from a few weeks or a month to years. Many, many women lost their jobs because of that.
This is also primarily why they operate on paper and refuse to modernize.
They wasted hundreds of thousands of employment based green cards every year simply because they didn't bother to process applications on time from people waiting decades.
I'll never understand why we don't just staple green cards to master's degrees. It's absolutely absurd that we're choosing to kick out talented, hardworking people who are already established here, who are disproportionately young and healthy. And they're at the very beginning of their careers - they're ready to pay a lifetime of taxes. They're the absolute opposite of drains on society.
Seems like an interesting idea. Why do you think it's not already being done? I haven't really explored the idea very carefully, but this would amount to giving universities the power to grant citizenship to foreigners, which seems like it has a lot of potential for abuse.
Just a note that green card holders are residents, not citizens. They don’t get to vote, they just get to pay taxes.
Still potential for abuse of course, but an important distinction.
While there are time and other requirements after getting lawful permanent resident status (“green card”), the main limitation on access to citizenship is getting status in an immigrant category and thereby becoming an LPR.
The difference between H1B and permanent resident is massive. Residents aren't beholden on their employer to remain in the country.
PhDs on the other hand, regardless of the field, you've contributed something unique to the collective knowledge of humanity. Instant green card, it's even dumber to kick them out.
Green cards, also aren't citizenship but are simply a step to getting there. There are many types of visas that let you work but have stipulations, especially around leaving the country. If there really is some kind of fear of people collecting citizenship after spending decades in the country and becoming highly educated, special visas with rules are always an option. But there should be a viable path to citizenship either way. We should not be kicking these people out.
Depends on the field. I've met PhDs that are fantastic, and I've also met PhDs whose defining contribution to human knowledge over their entire lifetime was "I made this algorithm 2.3% faster in a specific tiny edge case that no one will ever care about."
That's pretty much what most research or even startups are like. You bet that 5% will blow up, and hence you fund the other 95%.
They have to get accepted into a program and graduate and they have to have the funds to pay tuition. Then they'll work productively here and pay taxes. I can't think of any reason why this would be a bad thing except the bigoted "ugh, too many Indian people."
Absorbing educated people from other nations is an economic superpower.
More educated immigrants lead to more jobs and economic growth.
1. https://www.cato.org/blog/fiscal-impact-immigration-united-s...
2. https://www.aclu.org/other/immigrants-and-economy
3. https://www.bushcenter.org/catalyst/north-american-century/b...
4. https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-e...
5. https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/immigra...
But that said, you would make it more difficult for American citizens to attend American graduate degree programs that they subsidize with their taxes. There's a finite number of seats for students and I'm not sure if they're better filled with locals or people who want guaranteed permanent residency.
The parent poster did not say anything about stopping other avenues of immigration. Immigration is expensive. Do you think a lot of people who aren't privileged enough can easily immigrate?
As someone who has interviewed and worked with a number of international students with master's degrees, approximately 70% of them somehow manage to get a master's from a US college without actually knowing anything, so my cynical side says we definitely should not automatically add green cards to master's degrees.
The reason to give almost anyone working a tech job a green card quickly is so they don't depress the market wage by being indentured serfs.
The absolute worst thing the US could do to the Indian IT sweatshops is to give a "tech worker" a guaranteed green card in 18-24 months so that they can change employers. Those companies would quit applying for visas almost immediately.
Need a source for this. I'm sure there are a vast number of master's students who get their degree from shitty colleges to just be able to work here, but the vast majority of international co-workers I've had were amazing.
https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-eligibility/gree...
It can be easily gamed and would lead to a rise in education industry specifically for this.
I think the better would be to give a green card after getting a US degree in areas that matter to the economic growth, and the students have worked here, in those industries for 5 years.
USCIS has a conflict of interest as it is funded by the applicants. USCIS exists to fund USCIS, which means (applicants) x (fees). Everything that is wrong with immigration from the execution standpoint follows from that.
Maybe stop abuse in the work place? Just a thought
Don't agree with that part. When the market is tough, anyone is willing to work for shitty companies.
You missed out the main point that people on h1b have hard time leaving companies generally because not everyone sponsors h1bs, and the general process around applying for PERM and GC forces candidates to stick around for >1 year at least.It is a resource-protection mechanism for employers.
Adding to that the general incompetence by USCIS in handling h1b applications - where they take even 6 months to approve a h1b transfer.
In both cases they will remind you of how easy it is to get someone else in who can do your job.
https://redbus2us.com/h1b-minimum-wage-or-lca-prevailing-wag...
Fed deployed the tools they had then and they are doing the same now, thankfully taming inflation is something they have more experience with vs pandemics.
2. Curious, did you call for lower taxes on the rich (which usually ends up being the middle class) when inflation was low?
2. I’m not sure why that’s relevant to this conversation and I also reject your premise that tax cuts on the wealthy help the middle class. The last round of cuts made the corporate tax rate lower permanently and the individual and family tax cuts expire soon. Of course if you live in an expensive place like California or New York, you received a tax increase, not a cut.
It's unfortunate, too, because fiscal policy can be surgically precise, unlike monetary policy. If you were trying to assassinate inflation, monetary policy would be like carpet bombing the city where inflation lives, instead of fiscal policy sending in Seal Team 6 to inflation's home address.
The engineers that I know that were recently laid off and are unemployed have huge savings cushions and are being tremendously picky.
It might not be sexy to take a job building software for an insurance company, and it might be quite painful to take a 30% pay cut, but jobs are there for those that want them. In an actual nation-wide recession, they are not.
Outside of tech, nothing has really changed. Consumer spending is going up.
> Massive layoffs in tech
Business be booking everywhere else. Outside the giants who overhired and VC hyped overfunded startups, pretty much every other company has open positions and is hiring. The hiring bar is high, but they are hiring.
> several dozen small technology companies
So this isn’t the FAANGs of the world. I’m curious if these smaller companies all have an immigration/legal consultancy in common or something like that.
Contracting companies grab a disproportionate number of H1B visas for their relative size, and then these employees go work for big tech companies.
https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2021-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...
Out of the top 10 companies, you've got the usual suspects like Google, Microsoft, Amazon. But the total number from consulting companies makes up the lion's share by count, with cognizant being by far the biggest. You can look at the average salaries and tell who's being used for cheap grunt work at scale (spoiler: it's the big consulting companies!).
So what does big tech do with all those contractors? They use them to get work done at bargain basement prices. When they don't need the engineers anymore, they just don't renew the contract. Engineers as a commodity - sort of like the scalability and fungibility of cloud resources brought to staffing.
One of the reason for that is, from experience, they don't really ask for immigration status (at least not long ago they didn't seem to care). If candidate received the greenlight from engineering, it was the legal department's job to get them a visa. What's a 10k of legal fees when the employee's signing bonus is 3x that?
People of certain countries (India in particular) who want a green card are so backlogged that they will be on a work visa for decades. This allows these companies to depress their wages and it's essentially indentured servitude. There have been efforts to fix the green card backlog but those solutions haven't been great either for various reasons.
I'm also curious how this works with all the recent layoffs. Why do employers even need H1B applications when they've so recently laid off so many, some of whom are already H1B holders and have been put in a precarious position of having to find a new job or leave the country (within 60 days)?
Layoffs seem to impact your ability to sponsor for residency since part of that process is to "prove" you can't fill a position with a US resident or citizen. I don't think that's the case with H1B visas. But I honestly think an employer should be unable to file an H1B application for 2 years for a given position where they laid off similar employees in any large layoff.
Anyway, given the cheap cost of buying a "ticket" in the visa lottery, it's unsurprising to me that people are filing applications through multiple employers like this.
It's really hard to get people or the government to care about immigration issues however.
Except the (very public) meltdowns at Twitter and Meta, layoffs were by far dominated by "tech adjacent" roles (like DEI advocates, recruiters, HR, "Solution Managers" whatever that means).
Lay off any SWEs, PMs, data engineers or whatever should invalidate you from filing visa petitions for those or similar roles for 2 years. You can hire back those people.
> That practice, according to the agency, is in large part responsible for inflating demand for the visas to a record high this year, with 781,000 entries into the lottery for 85,000 visa slots.
> About 350,000 applicants for H-1B visas submitted one entry into the lottery this year, compared with about 307,000 last year.
> Some 96,000 people submitted multiple visa entries, for a total of about 408,000 entries.
> About 478,000 people competed for visas last year, a record at the time.
So, 350,000 (single entry submission applicants) + 96,000 (multiple entry submission applicants) = 446,000 unique applicants compared to 478,000 unique applicants last year.
That's 6.7% fewer unique applicants.
This drop in applicants could be a sign of economic downturn.
2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 saw no H1B lottery. 2007 took 55 days to reach the cap; 2010 took 264 days; 2011 took 300 days; and 2012 took 235 days; and 2013 took 71 days to reach the H1B visa cap.
I haven't averaged out the 'days to reach the cap' during the other years shown on that chart but the decade or so of "5 days" mixed in with a few 10 and 20 days tells me that the cap is usually reached in about a week or so.
I'm sure that there are sites with prettier bar charts. What surprised me the most was that in the early-to-mid-2010s you were looking at ~85k H1B applications, with that number increasing into the high 100ks, low 200ks by the late 2010s. 2022 saw ~300k applicants with 2023 seeing half a million.
I really wish we could fallback on the free market here. If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come.
Immigration is the US‘s main sources of national strength, yet we waste it.
Make sure your infrastructure can handle it.
Make sure there's enough housing and regulations to handle it.
> Hoovervilles served as a common ground for many different nationalities and ethnicities. Economic disparity in the United States during the 1930s was not limited to American born individuals. Migrant workers and immigrants greatly suffered from the lack of work and made up a large portion of the Hoovervilles across the country
Modern immigration controls grew out of racist impulse. That's not all they are today. But many of them fail the Chesterton's fence test.
Now high skilled labor, that's OK. The salaries are already sufficiently high that down-pressure because of immigrants isn't an issue - it's skilled labor so you should be upleveling your skills such that you're not competing with "common" skills that are shared by more people.
This isn't the story of Hoovervilles! There was enough housing. People couldn't afford anything because there wasn't work. (I agree with your take on skilled and unskilled labour, broadly, though with significant caveats, given how little we understand about those labor markets. Skyrocketing housing is an explicit American policy choice. We could change it any time, but we prefer to be wealthier and the "feel" of our neighborhoods.)
Again. I’m not trying to say that immigration will cause Hoovervilles or that it’ll cause a similar situation. You’re correct - the Great Depression was a very different situation. I’m just trying to bring an analogy of a situation with some of the same structural similarities. It’s not a perfect analogy but it’s meant to highlight the risk of laissez faire immigration (which I’m generally more in favor of) coupled with poor planning / bad policies on the infrastructure side. I think we’re in agreement that there are structural risks at opening up the border in certain ways at the same time as we have a clearly bad housing situation and matching political crises.
The local, state, and federal tax in 1910 was $380 per capita (adjusted for inflation!) compared to >$20,000 per capita today.
Government revenue has increased from 7% of 500B in 1910, to 35% of 20 trillion in 2020 in inflation adjusted dollars. This means that real, inflation adjusted taxes have increased ~200X.
Did we? I think there's an overly-romanticized view of late 19th and early 20th century immigration to the US. Go to Ellis Island and look at the receiving facilities there where prospective immigrants were evaluated for physical health, mental health, criminal backgrounds, and employment prospects before being admitted into the US. Regardless of how fair or unfair the policies may have been, admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat.
One could interpret those as checks that someone could "work, and pay taxes in the US." They were cruel. But brief and unconstrained with respect to housing, infrastructure and regulation.
I'm not arguing for a return to Ellis Island. Just that our fine control of immigration is a modern phenomenon without a strong argument for existing.
That's completely wrong. As phd514's comment accurately alludes, every single person who came through Ellis Island
* was a legal immigrant
* had passed a medical inspection
* had proof of having enough resources to pay for their upkeep in the US, or a US financial sponsor guaranteeing same
* was turned away if failing any of the above tests, with no possibility of appeal
I, for one, am very much in favor of reinstating such barriers to entering the US.
PS - One more thing: Every single person who came through Ellis Island was coming to a country with an enormous demand for unskilled labor. This is no longer true.
How do you get a number for that based on some version of reality though, and not an arbitrary, magic round number picked by some congressional committee?
The current system is a drain on the US workforce and intentionally dehumanizing
However, I got screwed on the H-1B lottery these last 3 years (when over 50% of the applications are fraud, what else can you say). I wake up every day to face the rather realistic prospect of leaving everything behind - my family, my girlfriend of 3-4 years (who happens to be from a different country herself), my pet dog, my entire social network, my professional career/network.
I know I'm not entitled to being here, but I'm frightened at the prospect of returning to a country where I cannot speak the local language or understand the local working culture. I just don't know any other place in the world better than I know the United States.
I love this country from the bottom of my heart for everything it's given me in my life, and it hurts to see that nothing has changed, and seems like nothing will. I've paid my taxes dutifully, and I'll be willing to give back in any way, shape or form. But I don't get to make that choice :')
FWIW, I support those programs, but wish it included both legal and illegal immigrants.
Source: I’m an immigrant. I ended up in Canada for unrelated reasons, but the system in Canada is much better. Tough, but fair, mostly transparent, and even kind in some ways. In the US it’s so byzantine by comparison.
Which is what the person you are replying to meant anyway.
I am an immigrant myself (not in the US), the only paper I needed was a work contract. After a year of working I got permanent residence with no further requirements attached, it's no longer tied to having a work contract.
From my limited knowledge Canada and Germany have much more rational immigration systems.
Japan also had the second largest economy for decades and a very tight immigration system. China will overtake the US on economy soon if it hasn't already and they have very tight immigration also.
We also overproduce PhDs right now and elite-overproduction is something that seems to be very destabilizing.
Canada is probably about due for a major wage correction though - the PSAC strikes are a pretty good indicator that it's time to either seriously consider 32/hr weeks or starting to claw back corporate excess... that's sort of an international issue though.
And not everyone wants to make as much money as they can, while dealing with uncertainty.
High skilled labor who’s not allowed to work for months while here indefinitely legally.
Other than people banned from entry for personal reasons rather than numerical caps (crime, etc.), I agree, thet should have a free choice to come.
Regulate quantity to mitigate impact via fees in place of caps (for the visa categories that currently have caps), with a share of the fees going to states and localities in proportion to the resident alien population settled there, with lower fees in the “higher preference” categories.
And have a catch-all immigrant visa category (lowest preference/highest fee) for anyone not banned but not in any other immigrant category.
(I’d probably also eliminate H-1B and several other visa categories entirely, because they would no longer be necessary.)
Why aren't other countries as desirable to immigrate as European countries, USA, Canada, and Australia?
Like what's the common denominator with those countries that makes them so desirable to immigrate to?
The same thing applies to neighborhoods which are sort of a microcosm of countries.
GDP? Imperialism which raided the rest of the globe's wealth?
Or did they show up and teach stone age countries how to use their resources??
Like they're still doing to this day.
Maybe to start with they'll lure you in with pro-immigrant rhetoric but once critical mass is achieved the group will baseline to what you see here.
Don't forget that the AFL pushed for anti-immigration law originally.
The point of these programs was to augment labor markets in times of shortage (H1B isn't just used by tech FWIW), IE, the internal US labor pool wasn't big enough to sustain hiring in the US for N job(s) due to requirements and you could demonstrate that some form of training would be sufficiently work in a timely manner
Its been pretty clear this isn't really true for decades yet H1B hasn't been curtailed meaningfully to uphold its intended goals
Whether we should have better immigration policies is a separate discussion, and I think we most definitely should. Path to citizenship would be for the best. It historically has worked out in the favor the nation, after all.
The H1B program isn't this at all though
Whether we should prioritize local workers over foreign (and whether we have enough local workers) is a much broader political question.
H1B has been abused to hire workers of similar skillset for a lower salary.
And I say that as a non-US citizen, interested in H1B program.
We need immigration policies that allow highly skilled workers to come to the US with no strings attached so these workers have the same job mobility as US citizens and permanent residents. The H1B program today resembles something closer to indentured servitude.
So yes, the US should attract highly skilled workers, but no, the H1B program is not working that way.
Whether they want to work for your wages is the real issues.
If they pass the interview then we obviously gladly hire them. But competition is hard.
We do have quite competitive wages. But we need more people than the American-only portion of the market has to offer. Competent foreigners make up a sizeable part of the applicants, and those who don't already have visa or green card we just can't hire. It's as simple as that.
I wasn't aware that there is so strong US nationalism present in the participants of this forum. After this thread I'll need to seriously re-adjust my mental model.
> I have friends who are great programmers (entry level but better than most of the outsourced coders I’ve worked with) working in factories because companies would rather outsource the work than give them a chance.
I have many brilliant co-workers, from many countries of this planet, some are US citizens, some became US citizens recently, and many are from many other countries. They all work well together and if somebody shows up in an interview and clears the bar then they are welcomed. I've also personally witnessed hundreds of "great programmers" in interviews, some Americans some not, apparently thinking they are brilliant and then couldn't participate in a constructive discussion about fundamentals or about real-world program solving.
The generalizations in this thread as well as the assumptions being made about me and my background are quite shocking.
Do you guys have set foot in actual US companies recently? It's not about US citizens vs. outsourced work. The typical company has a broad mix of live stories. Something I value in our industry. Maybe I've just been blind to the bubbles of nationalism that seem to be brewing somewhere. I'm glad they stayed outside of my company (or else I would have).
Well you lost me right there, because there would be no such risk if you hired a US worker. I highly doubt there isn't a US worker who has the skillset for what you are looking for, but rather there isn't a US worker who wants to do the job for the compensation your company is offering.
I'm not against H1B's/attracting top foreign talent, but unless its a highly specialized role I can guarantee there are people with the skillset right here in the US. You're just not willing to pay what they're looking for, or ironically the risk is too high for a US worker to work for you vs what they're comfortable with (i.e. job security, risk of the company going under, etc).
So… The EB visas?
No immigration process is quick. They're probably intentionally designed to not be quick. The Canadian process might be quicker, but it still takes plenty of time, has requirements, etc.
For instance, before our current system (which was lobbied for to add loopholes around what qualifies for talent shortage in the late 80s / early 90s) the H1B program was used for truly unique situations, like hiring Medical Doctors, where you could demonstrate that the US national labor pool couldn't fulfill the demand and additional training would not work either.
In 1990 they changed the criteria for what constitutes a "shortage of talent" allowing broad definitions and weak justifications, and thats when the explosion by the tech industry hiring H1Bs took hold in earnest
Even now companies are giving up on the legal immigration system and hiring outside the US. Canada has a much saner system. Gigantic engineering offices in India and China.
The US treats it as some zero sum game between citizens / immigrants and is losing out on taxes, economic spending (every HC outside the US is less spend in the US local economies).
canadian tech wages are absolutely pennies compared to US wages, i'd hardly consider it an example to follow
Oh wait...
You need to adjust for cost of living, universities, hospitals, non profits don't pay as much etc.
There is a prevailing wage determination check for granting a H1. That rule was revised a few times, that's the right lever to pull.
You could make the prevailing wage requirements == median wage for a given experience in an area. Right now it's the 35th percentile.
If you want to focus on the top of the top, which 200k out of school would be, then H1B1 should be a pure auction system: take the top X salaries offered, and let them in.
I know a few fresh out of school lawyers and they are right below $200k. I could imagine doctors in certain specialties are the only grads getting paid an average of $200k+.
Yes, workers should get a larger slice of the pie. Too much goes to the top.
I'm sure there are many H1B visa holders who are actually highly skilled in something that's actually nearly impossible to find anywhere else. I know from experience that a lot of H1B visa holders are about the same as what you can find domestically (but they're a lot less likely to agitate for better working conditions).
One person I was forced to work with legitimately did not understand how to connect to wifi or know when he was connected to wifi. He kept calling me saying his computer was broken.
USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year.
USA creates about 50,000 new comp sci graduates per year.
There are an order of magnitude too few Americans every year for the jobs available. Whatever you think of the H1B (and it has many problems), I doubt it’s coming even close to bridging that gap.
source with links to sources: https://swizec.com/blog/software-engineering-best-job/
There's lots of reasons software developers in India and China would remain in India and China, but one big one is obtaining a visa and permanent residency to live and work in the US is hard in general, and more so for people in populous countries with many emigrants destined for the US; I think it's India, China, and Mexico that have the three longest queues for green cards where there's a limit per country of birth.
There's certainly a path to immigration through a computer science degree. Especially advanced degrees, which give preferences to visa applications. If you can afford it, get a bachelor's in your country of origin, come to the US for a Masters, work on OPT visa after graduation, hope it converts to H1B, work on H1B until you get a green card, is a well worn path, but there are others.
you're also discounting the fact that there are layoffs, businesses closing etc. There may be 500K new positions per year, and say 250K layoffs / closures etc that isn't accounted for in this. Now I don't have the numbers on total layoffs but this should be adjusted.
I would heavily dispute this problem on the whole. Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now, that tells me there is less slack in the system than this leads on.
H1B is also suppose to have a unable to train element, which needs to also be addressed
EDIT: and as others pointed out, that is taking the stats on their face value, which is questionable in and of itself, as the source is a bit dubious
I think that’s just what happens when you flood the market with 200,000 qualified people in a short amount of time (and those people have extremely narrow definitions for what counts as a good enough job). The overall trend, measured in decades, remains that there just aren’t enough software engineers.
Yes even including all the software engineers that didn’t study comp sci. Even outside USA it’s rough. When I was in college the average completion time for a comp sci degree was 7 to 8 years because people kept getting jobs and forgot to graduate. All our professors complained about the sky-high 3rd/4th year dropout rates.
I absolutely do not buy that number. The citation you've given is "GoRemotely" who a) only cite that for one year, 2017 and b) are obviously biased towards inflating numbers.
Both sources refer to it as the "number of job openings" that year (2017). Obviously this isn't new demand for software engineers, most job openings are vacancies caused by people moving in the industry and will be filled by other people moving. If there are around 1.5 million SEs in the USA and average tenure in a job is 3 years then this explains all the job openings right there.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says the number is more like 400k over the next 8 years.
Article doesn't say that. Its says that's global:
> Despite the pandemic, the number of software developers grew by 500,000 globally in 2020
Additionally earlier in the article, it shares numbers which supports a much smaller number:
> ...make this the most accessible 6-figure job in USA. At 1,400,000+ members and 22% projected growth, it is the biggest and among fastest growing high-paying jobs
The Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies that there will be 411k new software jobs between now and 2031, not per year:
https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
Given the number of 50k grads per year, 400k employees for 411k jobs isn't a massive shortage. (Not to mention that many jobs opening aren't for grads, but for senior developers)
Go to /r/cscareerquestions. Every single post is about a recent comp sci graduate who's applied to _hundreds_ of jobs in the past year without a single offer. There aren't too _few_ qualified Americans looking for work.
First, it's not a random sample of CS graduates--there's a lot of selection bias there. People who face a lot of rejection are going to want someplace to vent.
Second, I've absolutely phone-screened people (not a lot, but some) with CS degrees who couldn't do something simple like fizz-buzz. I'm not taking about nit-picky "you forgot a semicolon" or style things. I'm talking about "fundamentally not getting for-loops". It wouldn't surprise me if the bottom 0.5% of CS graduates each year apply to hundreds of openings, and get rejected by every single one.
Finally, we're in the contraction part of the business cycle right now. I do believe that new grads today/this year are having a harder time finding jobs, but the total number of people employed at tech companies seems to be falling this year, too. Citing jobless American CS grads would be a more powerful argument if jobs were growing at the same time.
Counting the number of Computer Science graduates in a year seems like a fairly trivial problem where you could get an answer within ~1% of objective reality by simply counting public information and published figures.
But how do you count the number of jobs that are actually available? How does anybody distinguish between "real jobs" and companies just putting feelers out there to harvest resumes, manipulate the immigration system, and keep appearances up to investors in trying economic times? A lot of engineers that are looking for work right now strongly feel that a lot of job postings out there are just utter bullshit and many job posts are posted with no real intention of hiring anybody.
The best way to measure supply/demand trends might be to look at wages. That's one thing that's really hard to fake and get wrong.
Are Computer science graduate wages going up or down? If there actually was a massive shortage of computer workers near the level you describe, wages would be on a rocketship straight upwards right now. Are they? A lot of engineers are seeing that wages in tech seem to be plummeting right now.
the business of those companies is to bring some person, pay him $50/h while charge client $300/h. Good US labor wouldn't agree to work for $50/h.
The H1B program is not and its stated goal is not, to be able to undercut the US labor market with foreign labor
[0]: though as someone in the labor market, it does have negative consequences on me potentially
they sell h1b employees as US on-site consultants.
> there's a bunch of ongoing legal costs to doing this
several thousands USD as to my knowledge.
It's a very fine balance to walk.
2 people, same age, but one from USA and one from a country without student dept...
And this person from another country WANTS to come to the USA. They will be able to live on a lower wage. And even if they're done with the low wage, the process or changing jobs is arduous. So you're stuck. This gets exacerbated by the fact that it's really hard to gauge the cost of living from abroad.
At 50k USD per year? Doubt it.
50k is nothing to americans but it's a shitload of money to a lot of people, including south americans like me. Very few people here make more than that. In fact the value of such a salary will probably increase even further as our nations descend ever deeper into economy-destroying communism.
US Immigration is ridiculous in how arbitrary it is. Where you are born matters more than who you are.
A simple process isn’t enough when most companies are terrified of dealing with immigration topics due to unknown (often non-existent) issues.
Or you could layer on another lie if you were feeling frisky - "I don't remember being asked that specific question, we briefly talked about it but I thought they understood the implication of the TN visa. Anyway, here's the process, it's super simple..."
If they're an organization with a competent HR department they should be able to manage - they'll be happy enough that they found a good candidate. As long as it's as simple as the person claims (sign letter, problem solved) it'll only be as much of a "problem" as finding out someone you offered an non-remote job to wanted to work 2 days out of each week from home because they have a kid.
Explain how these exceptions are not "some sort of classist system" that favours some nations over many others?
Define how this was the "will of a democratic people"? Who got asked for these special country exceptions? Do the American people even know about this?
American immigration is utterly broken. I stand by that.
There are also annual limits for H1B1 but they are less likely to be reached. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-1b
Whomever you hire on H1B1 just note you will almost certainly lose them after their visa extension completes.
Once you're in, if you eventually (genuinely) change your mind, that's fine, you can adjust to LPR.
H1B1 can be extended for a long time and is cheap to get and renew.
What do you mean about loosing them?
I mean you want them to have freedom as well right?
For employees, it’s relatively easy to transfer to another employee given how cheap and easy it is to get the visa, especially once you’ve gotten it for the first time.
The guy who I was responding to reacted like I was crazy. His reaction made no sense. We weren’t a body shop and high tech isn’t somehow exclusive to India.
After the meeting, basically, a few of the other participants pointed out the flaw in my argument: the problem was that I was crazy, obviously, as there aren’t Indians in those places to hire.
The point here isn’t india bad or whatever it’s that there is more going on at the hiring manager level than simply filling area under the curve with solid talent. Personal preferences, clannishness and racism of all varieties distorts the outcome and that by and large H1b has been hijacked to serve other goals.
It isn't lost on casual observers either. It's not just that there's an expectation that these roles will be filled with Indians, but Indians of a particular caste from a particular region of India.
It seems largely, in my opinion, to be the result of promoting Indians to executive leadership roles in engineering departments. When that happens, there becomes a clear driving factor towards growing the number of Indians from their origin region in that engineering department completely divorced from other goals. It's normal executive empire-building behavior, but recast through the lens of national and regional origin and ethnicity/caste.
One thing I like about the BU I work in is that we have a lot of staff around the world from many different places and have helped people immigrate to the US from many different places, but when I look around my company more broadly it's very heavily dominated by Indians in engineering, beyond any reasonable expectations. There are many talented people in Central and Eastern Europe, in Central America, and in South America that are completely ignored in favor of trying to hire more Indians particularly in many companies, including mine.
I've even been told before it's due to "cultural fit", which used to be a phrase used to discriminate against anyone that wasn't a straight white bro, and is now being used to discriminate against anyone that isn't an Indian from the same ethnic, caste, and regional origin as the rest of the team/hiring manager. It seems absurd to me that we're in a situation where someone can say that with a straight face for a team that's based in an office in a major US city, and truly expect that the only possible answer is to hire more Indians without considering anyone else.
It's not just that Indian applicants get preferred, it's that Indian applicants only from specific regions, caste, and ethnic groups get preferred.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/21/seattle-ban-...
I had absolutely no idea this was even a thing in the US before reading about it.
Yeah, it's absurd, but it's highly impactful because of the prevalence of Indians in high-paying careers in the US. Indians make up nearly 2% of the US population, and the Indian diaspora is heavily concentrated in just a few coastal tech hub cities, so they make up a sizeable proportion of both the population and the workforce in the tech industry. Caste-based discrimination is therefore highly impactful, and it makes sense that it's now getting the attention from US authorities.
Why blame the applicants? Why not prosecute the companies doing this? It's not like the applicant has much choice in the matter.