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Comment by JustLurking2022 | Hacker News Reader

JustLurking2022

Have worked with quite a few H1-Bs with absolutely no special skills. Large off-shoring firms soak up quite a few of them for people coming out of degree mills.

The only advantage to businesses is that these people are modern indentured servants, due to their immigration status being dependent on their employer. I'm all for getting rid of that but I also think there should likely be a smaller number with a salary based bidding system (e.g. if you aren't paying in the 80th percentile or above for a person in the industry of that age, you're not getting H1-Bs, and yes age not years of experience since the latter is easily fudged). Otherwise, it simply continues to be a way for companies to suppress wages.

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Then theoretically, these changes for H1-Bs should both protect them from the indentured servitude, and by removing that leverage, remove the motivation for H1-B abuse.

If companies can't bring someone over that they can overwork and underpay at threat of deportation, they'll rethink the MBA-brained "optimizations" and be forced to create a more resilient workforce rather than a loose collection of people to rugpull every time the rate of profit increase dips by .0004%.

These days H1B is strictly a wage suppression tool and filled with low skill workers from India based degree mills and body shops. Actual skilled workers are coming in on L-1 or O-1 visas.

If you’re already in the US and eventually want a GC (typical Us graduate), both of those are not very good option and H1-B is better bc of its dual intent.

That is patently false. Plenty of skilled engineers come from around the world on H1B visas.

The parent post doesn't dispute that - it's just adding that in addition to the plenty of skilled engineers part there are also a bunch of low skill workers from degree mills coming as well.

Even if that was true, that would be absolutely fine. Getting one Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Lisa Su, Sundar Pichal, etc. would make absorbing 10,000 or even more low/mediocre skilled workers along with them worthwhile. The technological and economic benefits makes it a no brainer.

Jensen Huang emigrated at the age of 4, Lisa Su at the age of 3, Satya and Sundar both came over as part of college visa programs. I don't see what that has to do with mass importation of low skill workers to hammer down high middle class wages in the US?

There are hundreds of thousands folks, who came here for college, are still on h1b. They have been in this limbo for 10+ years.

Can you describe what happens after one graduates after coming here on a "college visa program"?

They might have moved here as part of college visa programs but they needed H1B to work and build their skill set. The college visa (F1/ J1) does not come with a work authorization beyond 3 years.

3 years is a recent thing (from 2008), for Sundar itis likely was 1 year OPT and then H-1B

Elon Musk himself was H-1B at some point.

without H-1B america would not have Elon (for better or worse)

It's not as false as some might want to believe.

The issues are complex - but one of the side affects are indeed artificial suppression of wages for citizens.

We have software titans bursting at the seam with imported labor - yet our domestic universities are also churning out more CS graduates than ever before. Some of these graduates are indeed from foreign countries - but not all.

It's very hard to believe companies need to import labor for commoditized software engineering positions when there are plenty of available workers already here.

We should be importing top-tier talent - the types of folks that are working in complex fields, inventing new fields, developing things that haven't been done before, etc. We should not be importing basic CS graduates and filling basic SE jobs.

H1B's are often cheaper to hire, and do not enjoy the same mobility freedoms a citizen does. In some ways, they are beholden to their sponsor company, and whatever wages that company offers - which may not necessarily be market wages.

Clearly H1Bs are suppressing wages as proven by the fact that software engineers have seen wages rise more than any other job profile in the country for over the past decade.

Oh wait.

Imagine where those wages would be without a glut of H1B's...

Just as much reason to believe it would be lower than higher. There aren't a fixed number of jobs. A talented engineer who comes to America can go on to start up his own company (and there are many examples of this occurring), creating many more high-paying jobs for other engineers. A company that fails because they can't hire enough engineers puts the engineers they do have employed out of work.

I don't claim that H1Bs have the effect of increasing pay, but rather that their effect on pay is non-obvious, and any assertion that they do depress wages should be backed up by evidence.

> Just as much reason to believe it would be lower than higher.

That seems like some wild calculus. Fewer people willing to accept lower pay and be stuck at a specific company = higher pay. There's no other way to make the math work, particularly for extreme-demand positions like SE.

without H1Bs silicon valley would not exist in its current form (it would be more like in 80s-90s)

That's a lot like saying agriculture wouldn't exist in it's current form without importing cheap labor that can be (and is) abused. It's still wrong.

The H1B game, as it's played today, is a relatively modern invention, and was not used to build startups into mega corps anyway.

American agriculture would not exist without seasonal workers from Mexico, farmers love their H-2B visa for seasonal workers (oh, the irony)

Especially Americans working at John Deere, Dow Chemical and all the food processing

> I don't claim that H1Bs have the effect of increasing pay, but rather that their effect on pay is non-obvious, and any assertion that they do depress wages should be backed up by evidence.

there would be fewer/no startups and fewer jobs with less wages, as H1Bs themselves create jobs via startups and product development at traditional companies.

if you carefully look at silicon valley companies (even large ones) - most of product R&D and IP and innovation comes from immigrants. Native born americans are mostly working in admin jobs like HR, Admin, Sales, Operations, Finance, etc

R&D is exactly who H1B is supposed to be for - ie. highly skilled, specialized, and educated positions. Not regular SE jobs.

If you look at your Googles, your Facebooks, your Microsofts, you will find a glut of H1B's working regular SE jobs, such as maintenance and feature development. That's exactly who H1B's are not supposed to be for - and that is the issue.

Mega corps laying off huge engineering teams while simultaneously importing more H1B's tells you everything you need to know. Follow the money, as they say.

you are wrong because H-1Bs pay just as much as regular SWE jobs by law (companies file LCA)

This thread is about suppressing wages...

How is paying the same == suppressing?

Because you'd have to pay more to attract somebody local who's happy at another company.

You understand that immigration is fundamentally different from standard supply and demand? Immigrants create both supply and demand. Producing more eggs doesn't increase the demand for eggs.

Guarantee it's below average at most outsourcing firms. They may play games like advertising a position as a "junior engineer" but require 10 years of experience and then bill clients for a senior engineer but, knowing the billing rates for several vendors, there's absolutely no way they pay market rates.

I am all for cracking down on abusers and scammers, especially body shops.

but it is not the reason to get rid of the entirety of H-1B program, as some people advocate here.

Most companies call a significant amount of their SWE work as R&D. R&D isn’t always “inventing totally new things” but rather closer to “an investment of resources in which there is some amount of novelty and for which the outcome is uncertain”. A lot of SWE qualifies for that, even software that we’d consider fairly mundane and un-exciting.

H-1B is for regular skilled immigration, those with bachelors degrees or equivalent, e.g. regular software engineer jobs. For more highly skilled, specialized, and educated positions there exist O-1, EB-1, and EB-2 NIW visas.

>> most of product R&D and IP and innovation comes from immigrants.

Would love to see your source for this fact, genuinely curious.

Source: my eyes. Literally work day to day with immigrants in product R&D role.

Also you can check names on patents files by google or other tech firm

The H-1B situation is also a problem for people who come from overseas to study for their degrees in the U.S. They get F-1 OPT, and join US companies that then cannot retain them because of the over-subscription of the H-1B.

It's also bogus to say that H-1B is more problematic than L-1B for body-shopping: all the well organized body-shops do massive amount of intra-company transfers.

Agree. The fix is to allow them to be "free agents" like every other participant in the economy. Allow markets to determine their value.

In theory yes but if the premise for why we allow disproportionately large immigration from certain countries is that we're bringing in unique skills, and we decide that premise is flawed, then it would also be cause to reevaluate the immigration policy.

this is demonstrably false, if you ever bothered to look at the actual LCA filings from DOL.

btw these indian body shops are already abusing O-1 and L-1 visas en masse as well, so your latter statement is also not 100% true

Fixing one loophole is not mutually exclusive with fixing the rest...

I am for fixing loopholes, instead of getting rid of the entirety of H-1B program as some people advocate here.

You need no salary rules. Just need to allow them to change jobs at will. Salaries will sort themselves out.

If the visa does not require sponsorship from a company (like the current H1-B does), does that help reduce the 'indentured servants' part and lessen the appeal of it for certain types of companies?

It is always a matter of perspective. As a tech worker, the average H1-B worker you know is probably close to the average of the other tech workers you know like you. But you have to compare their skills and education to the global average of society to understand the benefit they bring.

How small do you think the number should be?

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