Canada Woos American H-1B Visa Holders Fed Up with U.S. Immigration System | Hacker News Reader

Canada Woos American H-1B Visa Holders Fed Up with U.S. Immigration System

wsj.com

39 pointsadvpetc53 comments

Ironically the #2 post on /r/canada right now is titled "'I'm done with Canada': High cost of living leads some to leave the country" (https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/1538vpj/im_done_wit...)

I'm done with the cost of living and I was born here.

What a fascinating thread. Here's an interesting sentence from a comment there:

> This is a cultural problem because majority of the immigrants are from India and they focus on education too much. We need to get people in to trades and creating new job opportunities in energy and lumber our natural resources or infrastructure.

I can't imagine that America's byzantine visa system is accomplishing any useful policy goal, it's just a mess.

Compare to a country like Germany, where you can get a work visa, extend it indefinitely, and then roll it over into permanent residency after five years. No bullshit, no lotteries, you just meet the legal requirements and your applications are accepted in a matter of weeks.

> I can't imagine that America's byzantine visa system is accomplishing any useful policy goal

I am positive it is. It works like most things in the US. The ruling class profits tremendously from the exploitation it enables, and American citizens are much too propagandized and alienated from politics to do anything about it.

The sad fact is that the ruling class could profit much more by opening up visas for skilled workers. You only hire workers and pay them because they make you more money than they cost. Business literally doesn’t work if that’s not true. Every visa you deny a skilled worker is lowered economic activity.

Our visa policies directly hinder economic growth. And in the most absurd ways imaginable. H1B is tied to an employer. If your startup goes under you’re out. If you get laid off you’re out. I’d you want to switch jobs lawyers have to get involved.

It’s a lottery once a year so tons of skilled workers sit on their hands waiting. Then most don’t get in because… lottery.

I literally couldn’t invent a more useless and stupid visa system if I tried.

That is very naive. What employers want more of is workers that can be exploited for more labor at lower cost, and no workers are more exploitable than those under threat of deportation if they lose their job.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-money/2022/05/3...

It is a mess, but the corporations love it. It creates an indentured servant class that applies downward pressure on technical salaries.

If you have a US work visa for 24 months (max), it should automatically roll over into a green card. Background checks should be the responsibility of the company to get finished before 24 months and failure to do so should be a Federal felony that puts the CEO in jail.

This would completely unblock the technical pipeline for US visas.

I hope Canada sucks up all the good H-1Bs leaving behind the dregs. It would finally force corporations to lobby to fix the problems.

It seems like fixing it would push tech salaries down even more so wouldn't corporations prefer that?

Why would fixing the visa system push US tech salaries down?

Because fixing it would make it easier for tech professionals to immigrate to the US, which would increase the supply of these people.

Why don't tech salaries decrease come graduation season when hundreds of thousands of college students majoring in CS move on from college and are about to start working? Or why have tech salaries grown as much as they did when CS major enrollment kept hitting record highs throughout the late 2010s?

Salaries are a function of supply and demand. There's a huge amount of demand for these skills, and a new graduating class doesn't change that significantly (new grads aren't very productive after all, and salaries don't change that fast, since people don't change jobs every month). And demand has been increasing, faster than the new supply.

But there's probably other variables too. Why are tech salaries so low in Canada, for instance, despite there being lots of demand, and not that much supply (with many Canadians trying to go south to get the higher salaries there)?

Because you've got it backwards.

H-1Bs depress salaries because the companies don't have to give an H1-B a significant raise, basically, ever (read: 5+ years or more).

If people can get green cards in 24 months, those people can leave indentured servitude for a company that pays better. It also completely obliterates the "body shops" as they would have to pay a bunch of money for people who are going to jump out at the first opportunity. So, companies wouldn't automatically bring in a visa holder as there wouldn't be a real advantage over a domestic worker unless there was a real, technical reason for doing so.

I have no problem competing with tech people who come here and can move between companies. In addition, immigrants in tech are generally from a higher socioeconomic strata in their home country and have a tendency to found companies.

More tech folks normally means a need for even more tech folks as long as they aren't artificially suppressed.

What prevented Canada from hiring the good H-1Bs before all this if their process is easier?

Laws. IIRC, Canada recently made some changes to their laws to enable them to grab immigrants who would normally be placed under the US H-1B rubric.

>Compare to a country like Germany, where you can get a work visa, extend it indefinitely, and then roll it over into permanent residency after five years. No bullshit, no lotteries, you just meet the legal requirements and your applications are accepted in a matter of weeks.

Yep, it's much the same in Japan. Work visas for skilled jobs (like IT) are easy to get if a company wants to hire you, and you can apply for permanent residency in 1, 3, or 10 years, depending on how many points you score. IT professionals can easily get enough points for the 1 or 3-year requirements. As you said, no bullshit, no lotteries, just meet the legal requirements.

After seeing what canada's immigration system did to their white color jobs' salaries and home ownership, they can have them.

The plan is to use origami techniques to fold the H1-B Visa into an affordable home in Canada.

Or just get a slice of the entrepreneurial opportunities these immigrants bring to actually grow the economy. 55% of the unicorns in the US have atleast one immigrant founder. 66 of the top 500 unicorns in the US are founded by Indian immigrant founders.

https://www.businesstoday.in/amp/entrepreneurship/news/story...

s/economy/inequality/

Wonder how many people are thinking “maybe I’ll go to Canada, spend a few years, get citizenship there, then come back to America as a Canadian with much better prospects”?

As a Canadian, currently stuck in the US immigration process, I chuckle at this remark.

Also I-485's i.e. Green Cards, Permanent Residence status, in the US are based on where you are BORN not which citizenship(s) you have.

Yes but the goal is not to move to the US permanently, it is to make a ton of money here and then retire in Canada.

that used to be desirable. But the canadian health care system has degraded, and cost of living is now super high with the housing boom

I say this as a canadian based in sf

If u have a ton money, it's cheaper to just live in US. Canada is very expensive for the plebs. The cost of living keeps rising and the politicians are very anti small businesses and pro oligarchy. They have a strangle hold on the country simliar to the Murdoch in Australia. Ironically, US is fairer in helping the small timers.

> If u have a ton money, it's cheaper to just live in US.

Not if you have a chronic illness and have doctor appointments most weeks.

It was the saving grace, but I am not sure if that's the case now as the situation deteriorates. If I am already having the big tech insurance and I am gonna to fly to Mexico/India for some of the items anyway, why do I need it?

The politicians simply DO NOT care. They just let oligarchs keep eating the small palayers, and it will totally break the health system some day just like how they killed 3rd party internet providers. Telus is already making the play in the health sector.

Basically, if you have valuable tech skills and are young and healthy, the US is a great place to make a lot of money.

Otherwise, not so much.

As an H-1B holder, we are legally entitled (and required) to work for one specific employer and that's it. You cannot even think of starting a company, you cannot work a gig job, you can't work two "high-paying" tech jobs.

Everyone knows the "ton of money" doesn't come from working a salaried job, it's from creating something new / starting a company.

But only US green card holders or US citizens can even dream of considering that as an option they can pursue.

Ton of money is ill-defined, but it's quite possible to work a salaried job in tech in the US and achieve financial independence and an extremely high standard of living.

You can found on a H-1B. My friend has.

The TN visa maybe enough for them once they become Canadian citizens.

I'd estimate that most people in the tech pipeline intend that. TN status is a lot easier to get and tech salaries are much higher in America.

TN visas are not for software engineers, they are for software analysts, or actual engineers. And they are not dual intent (you can't convert them to a green card).

1. The are plethora of examples online people holding TN work as a SDE with a CS degree 2. I believe you can file to change intent 90 days after entry

Job titles are at some level made up.

Try using that argument with a xenophobic highschool dropout immigration official...

Are there any highschool-dropout immigration officials in the US? I kind of doubt it.

TN is useful, but not _that_ useful if you eventually want to get a Green card.

And GC quotas are based on place of birth.

Biggest advantage of TN is there is no annual quota which is by far the largest obstacle for most folks trying to even get in the country. Once you're in getting a transfer or obtaining eb2 is much easier bc you're going to have income to support it.

A couple of my cousins did this and this was also my parent's backup plan in case we didn't get a GC.

It's a big reason a lot of Indian national SWEs on H-1Bs end up in Canada.

So according to this article Canada has seen an increase of 500,000 foreign students.

Assuming a highly conservative $20k in annual tuition fees (the cheapest decent US public college will run you at least $30k for 2 semesters in tuition alone, never mind fees, living costs, etc), that’s about $10Bn in additional annual revenue with about 4 years locked in, every year.

And that’s just tuition. It doesn’t include living costs, the fact that many students might have friends and family visit, they will contribute to the academic and research programs at the university, and will graduate and almost certainly have a much higher output than what they will consume, being, almost by definition, more highly educated than the average Canadian.

the most frustrating thing about US immigration is that nothing changes. The American politics is deadlocked. Even though both sides agree that GC backlog is a problem, nothing happens because now in American politics only small inconsequential incremental changes are possible. Anything reformative is just not possible here anymore. This is also true for issues that impact americans like gun laws.

> only small inconsequential incremental changes are possible. Anything reformative is just not possible here anymore

For a year that’s seen massive changes in abortion rights, monetary policy, deposit insurance and military posture, this is a strange conclusion to come to.

The answer is the “both sides agree that GC backlog is a problem” observation is wrong.

Well abortion rights were reformed by supreme court and not by politics.

https://archive.is/RiD5H

Not sure how to feel about this. It can be a good thing if we get new business and companies in line with all the talent but without that it will just push down Canadian salaries even more. I guess it depends on if they have plans just as effective in encouraging VCs and entrepreneurs to invest more here.

Immigration aside, why don't these countries ever invest in their own citizens to level up?

Canada’s dealt with a brain drain problem to the US for a couple of decades at least. The amount of folks I know who got educated in Canada and eventually moved to the US due to CoL and salaries is significant.

It’s a shame.

That's how you buy a house in Canada. Get paid in America.

It’s a shame.

Many of them do. Canada and India both have some excellent educational instutions. Yet there's often far more lucrative opportunities for an ambitious 20-something in the US than they can easily find in the location they may happen to already be in.

Leveling up is a long, slow process of decades. Immigration offers to improve someone's life a lot faster.

In the United States there have been scholarship programs sponsored by the US government that pay for a students IT degree in exchange for government employment for X years after graduation. Obviously, government pays less than private sector, but at least you have a job and a degree. It would be lovely if private companies offered similar programs. The cynical answer as to why they don't is because it's cheaper to import workers than train them here, plus importing more workers suppresses wages (see supply and demand) and brain drains foreign competition.

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