H-1B Visa Program Changes Aimed at Stopping Applicants from Gaming Lottery
wsj.com
wsj.com
2/ this would mean only bigger software companies would get a chance and people would willing to work in startups will stand lower chance.
What we need is a way to avoid abuse by body shops.
> 1/ this will incentive IT and software jobs and marginalize other fields with lower pay (physics, mechanical, chemical, etc).
Why!? If those people are important they can be paid well too. There are plenty of chemical engineers that make good money.
> 2/ this would mean only bigger software companies would get a chance and people would willing to work in startups will stand lower chance.
Startups can pay too. In any case, most startups don't sponsor H1Bs because of the uncertainty associated with the process.
Not all industries can pay as much as software. A PhD with an extra 5-10 years of industrial experience may get a 200K salary in biotech, often less. A CS bachelor with 1-2 years of experience would get that 200K. Pay doesn't always equal the value of your contribution, especially if you compare them across different fields.
Value and pay aren't the same across industries. Someone can still contribute the same value but the field they are in simply doesn't have the economic profitability required to pay them the same way software does. In fact, software is the anomaly in compensation. Making a policy that benefits only one type of industry over everything else is simply bad policy.
The government shouldn't fight for lower paying jobs at the expense of higher paying ones. There are a limited number of visas granted each year, and higher pay is a signal from the market that a particular position is _actually_ more difficult to fill. If startups can't afford top talent, then surely they can hire American workers instead?
All tech O1s that I know of are PhDs and many PhDs have been denied O1 because they worked in an applied role, in industry or immigration officials woke up on the wrong side of bed. On the other hand, even the most mundane TV actor will get an O1 without much issue.
A PhD exists for a certain kind of person, and can feel like mind killer to many others...that sentiment is not new in tech. Mining papers and patents until you're O1 worthy is not impossible. It just feels like a useless detour to life, that you'd take only so you could get an O1. As someone with a couple of tier 1 papers and a decent amount of industry work, the best research is never allowed to be published.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-spec...
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
Originally H1Bs required $60k/year salary, which was in 1990 and indexed to inflation would be $140k. I don't think there's any need at all for a bidding process, the minimum salary just needs to be raised to $140k and indexed to inflation. (As it should have been to begin with.)
The problem is that it also biases towards much more senior roles.
One scenario we generally want to handle is: a person comes to the US, gets an advanced degree in a high-demand field at a US university... and then is immediately kicked back to their country of origin. H1Bs can help that person stay here and put down roots. But a fresh college grad is never going to be able to compete in a salary-based auction like you're describing, so pretty much all young, ambitious, well-educated people will get the boot.
Fine print: qualified applicant must be willing to work at lower salaries and than their experience would otherwise demand on the open market.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-04-20/h-1b-work...
https://www.businessinsider.com/h-1b-visa-rejects-moving-to-...
That'd be turbocharged if there's actual H1B restrictions or bans.
Canada even started a program recently that directly targets H1B workers being pushed out of the US and it was oversubscribed very soon.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2023/07/02/canad...
I was on the board of a school that teaches in a foreign language. We used to recruit teachers from countries where that language is used, because we followed a foreign curriculum too.
Teachers look for new jobs in April/May to start in August. We used to get them H-1s. But once the H-1s were exhausted in October it became impossible to bring teachers over.
What instead needs to happen is that visa officials need to be trained to understand the meaning of terms like "speciality occupation", "highly specialized knowledge", "extraordinary skill" and "lack of qualified applicants". This would automatically filter out the hundreds of thousands of H-1B applications put in by companies like Cognizant, Infosys, TCS and Wipro every year. I'm willing to bet we wouldn't even need a visa lottery if applications were just required to meet the minimum bar that the law already prescribes.
https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/08/news/economy/immigrant-doct...
Many emigrating doctors are choosing to go to Canada instead to avoid this nonsense.
And for that matter, that applies to immigrants to Italy, Canada, England, etc etc
https://www.cfr.org/article/crossing-darien-gap-migrants-ris...
I would much rather see FAANG invest in opportunities for inner city and poor rural high schools… programs to support bringing up people already in this country. Rather than siphoning off the best and most ambitious people from poor countries who need those people’s talents.
I can’t blame anyone for chasing the best opportunities for themselves and their families though.
I do not like how H1-B alters the game and who loses as a result.
As far as I know, the system usually relies on essentially phony job postings made specifically not to get filled (despite, in general, plenty of perfectly qualified applicants who'd otherwise apply). Then, the employees are sort of tied to the employer and can be made to work long hours for substandard pay. Nowhere in the process seems to select for "the best and brightest" as far as I understand.
You're confusing green card applications and H1B, as has been tradition on tech forums since decades.
The H1b program does have some method of selecting for qualification (i.e., you must have a bachelor's degree) but no method of selecting for the "best and brightest." The fact that some of the best and brightest may come in that way is true but irrelevant if the process itself doesn't select for it at all.
I was talking about how the O-1 is not a sufficient or even ideal visa for extraordinary STEM practitioners. It only selects for a sliver of the overall extraordinary talent pool.
How come the government can know better than the companies who should they employ?
Is there a risk of Apple employing an Afghan shepherd as a product manager if there wasn’t a visa requirement?
If it is about creating artificial scarcity to rig the job market, I’m not sure it works for the employees since the work visas are tied to a job so as a result you end up with employees who can’t stand against their employers of fear getting deported.
IMHO, the visa reform should be abolishing the visa regime. Just security checks.
Why not have a meritocratic job? And no, nationality is a skill.
Very unpopular opinion - I know but just can’t get an explanation on why everyone loves visas so much. Why do you love being limited with your options and controlled by the bureaucracy.
Because citizens vote and migrant workers don't?
It means that politicians are going to protect the labor market for their constituents. Visa restrictions are a form of trade protectionism except that the "good" being protected is labor.
Sometimes companies win subsidies or protectionist tariffs just with lobbyists. Workers have actual votes.
the government does not say "this person is not the right choice for this job." the government does however do the necessary criminal/education/security/background checks etc to make sure the candidate (or company) isn't lying. some of these checks may be difficult for a company without government-level resources (maybe?) to perform.
so if the checks are passed, and the company has performed the labor cert properly and there are visas left (quotas), then a visa is issued to the candidate that the company picked.
That’s why for companies it’s not the same thing to hire someone who has a foreign passport and the local one. H1-B it’s not just a form that you fill when you’re going to employ a foreign national.
Which brings me back to my original comment, you’re advocating for unlimited immigration.
Just because you can point out a reason, the reality doesn’t change. Nothing happens without a reason.
However, I agree that it’s nicer than European/British/Australian/Canadian point based system. At least US don’t try to pretend that it’s about skills.
Unless you’re referring to the requirement for a bachelors degree which in my opinion is perfectly reasonable. In that case the company won’t even put in the application.
and this is why I couldn't care less to emigrate to the US.
That doesn't seem so difficult to understand the motivation.
I find this motivation, misguided. The more people work, the more prosperous the place is. You can’t just limit the number of workers and create prosperity because you’re paid in something that you can’t use directly.
Do you think that you can limit the number of workers to 10% of population and get incredibly high salaries, and just tax them so high and distribute the money to the unemployed? If you can do that, then you will have a bohemian society where everyone is having a great time or being paid amazingly. However, you can’t have that your society needs to produce as much as consumes.
Without something that functions like work visas, you have no mechanism to control immigration. And while racism is perhaps the main argument against employed against immigration, there are a few non-racist arguments you can make.
One of the primary reasons that work visas specifically exist in the first place is to ensure that immigrants do not become indigent and net drains on the state.
Outside of supply constraints, there’s nothing stopping everything from being a minimum wage job.
FIY, the same argument was made against women’s employment. More people working doesn’t reduce prosperity.
Capitalism always finds a way.
Don't get me wrong: the US visa polices are a shambolic mess that is counterproductive to its own aims. I'd very much prefer a system that's a lot closer to "employer can sponsor anyone to come into the country if they need to hire from other countries." But what's preventing that isn't the existence of work visas; it's the unwillingness of politicians to advocate for such an immigration system (for which the primary reason I'd suspect boils down to some variant of racism--they feel immigration should be extremely difficult for various undesirable groups).
The spirit of the H-1B visa is being a last resort when filling vacant positions. "Prior deference" doesn't make much sense to me.
Everyone knows Indian "consulting" companies abuse the process. Where are the prosecutions?
can this be done via executive action or rule making process? sounds like something that needs a new law.
The USC is created and maintained by the Congress. USC delegates to federal agencies implementation of USC through CFR, i.e. by writing it. Any changes to CFR, should be published and given a comment period, my understanding that it's 6 months. During this time, the Congress has option to review, and disapprove changes to CFR if they see that it makes sense. (Others could also write comments and send them to the federal agency).
My non-lawyerish understanding is that this describes proposed changes to CFR within the authority delegated by the congress.
Yeah this seems like a pretty big change i think will be taken to court for. This effectively makes the h1b visa an eb5 visa.