Does the tech industry need so many workers on H-1B visas?
msn.com
msn.com
After the Twitter saga, two of my acquaintances had to leave the US after being sacked. The H1B is tied to your job, and switching employers is incredibly stressful since you need to find someone willing to sponsor you.
If you’re aiming to stay in the US permanently, the path to a green card and eventual citizenship is just as thorny. Many people go there on an H1B, work in big tech, buy houses, get fired, and often leave the US in shambles.
Countries like Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands handle this visa process better. If you work in tech, you get a Blue Card that transitions into a green card in three years, and then you can apply for citizenship after five. After a year, your visa is no longer tied to your employer, so you can switch jobs. But these countries suffer from bureaucracy and extreme language fragmentation. It’s hard to get excited about learning German and joining a local tech company for peanuts in salary.
However, the problem is that the US tech market is volatile, with zero job security. Since H1B makes it difficult to switch employers, tech companies often exploit this and pay these workers disproportionately. On top of that, there’s always the looming risk of getting fired before securing a green card, and the stress of that hangs over you constantly. This part could definitely be improved.
That is to say... if the goal is diversity, which is a good goal, you should probably split some of these larger countries up. Especially countries like India which are not dominated by any one ethnic group. There is no equivalent to the Han Chinese in India.
Unfortunately, the basic precept here seems to be 'has brown skin' makes you exactly the same as anyone else with brown skin, which leads to absurdities, such as California's old anti-miscegenation law that considered Indians and Mexicans the same race.
Mauryans were an empire which means that they ruled over disparate nations
No the country of India is in fact not at all united. The various jatis worship different gods, speak different languages, have distinct cultures. Just because they all celebrate a few holidays in common and have some shared cultural beliefs does not make them the same
This is like saying every Roman Catholic is an Italian.
Lastly, the Mauryans never ruled all the way to South India. This is the first time in history the entirety of 'Bharat' has been under one polity (although arguably with the exclusion of Pakistan and Bangladesh, even this is wrong).
Since when does a country mean a single cultural group? By that metric Switzerland, Russia, the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Central Asia, most of SE Asia, any country in Africa, large parts of the Middle East and South America are not countries. For that matter, all of China isn’t Han Chinese, there are Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs, Zhuang, Hui etc.
The difference is that no one clan in India comprises any majority. Again, imagine a country where the french lived next to the english and the italian (like literal next door neighbors), but kept their own languages, customs, etc and only intermarried people like them. That is India. There is ample evidence for this. The differences between the cultures can be extreme.
It is relatively recently that any person in India would even claim to be 'Indian'. Most identify with the state / jati they belong to. Yes, they're 'Indian' in the same way that an Indian is 'Asian' or an Englishman is 'Eurasian', but it's not a coherent identity.
The indian gov't is certainly trying to make that a reality (this is the source of their 'Hindu nationalism' -- which is really a particular kind of North Indian hegemony), but it's been a long time coming, and there are a lot of issues with it.
There is no quota for the H1B visa.
There is a quota for the number of H1B visa holders who have then additionally been sponsored by their company (something which costs a company $20k at a minimum) that can get permanent residency in a year.
Why would this ever be rational a basis for immigration?
This argument makes no sense at all.
> Hasnt happened at the country level but has happened at the company level
Yep, I've seen a company completely taken over by a single nationality and the result wasn't anything to be happy about.
Second, an immigrant can take their spouse, have kids, sponsor their families' visas, etc. Any one of these will double their demographic's representation, and they are not mutually exclusive, i.e. it can easily be triple or quadruple, or more.
There is no per-country quota on H1b, but the total number of H1bs are capped to 85000, (and close to 100k if you include research / non profits) a year.
A lot of this feels like a worry over the fact that many tech companies now are no longer majority American (or white), with Meta being the first tech company that’s fallen below the 50% threshold. Probably other companies will fall soon, looking at the trends. Has Meta’s culture been destroyed? I don’t know, feels like Mark has far more control over Metas culture than the immigrants who choose to work there.
Don't let the subcontinent bit trick you.
because I feel like foreign relations between India and the US have never beeen better
does this mean if you change your citizenship to a low population country by paying 100k and then applying it would speed up the process? or does USCIS have some law that prevents that
The current date for India (Employment-based green cards) is most backlogged, followed by China, Mexico, Philippines, and Others (Others being its own category).
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
But those numbers are not comparable. In most European countries, you first spend a number of years on a temporary residence permit, and then you can apply for permanent residence. That application typically takes less than a year to process. In the US, you can apply for permanent residence any time, but the application process takes several years.
I don't know about Germany but in the Netherlands there is also a minimum income restriction in order to get a knowledge worker visa. I would be surprised if Germany didn't have one as well.
While the US is more expensive and its healthcare system can be a pain, I still managed to save more money there than I can now. Europe is just poorer, and the tech industry is much smaller. In terms of opportunities, cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, or London don’t even come close to North Carolina, let alone SF/ NYC.
On top of that, the language barrier is frustrating—I can’t imagine anyone being thrilled about learning a new language, earning less, and working in relative obscurity. Still, I moved because dealing with the H1B process in the US was even worse.
In Europe (at least speaking from the perspective of the Netherlands) a lot of money / resources go to fee's employer have to pay, unlimited sick days, maternity leave (also for men), protection from getting fired, the fact that you have more humane rights with your blue card then a H1B, etc. That stuff costs a society money and someone has to pay for that. It's all money which is there, but you don't get to "see it" because often it is paid directly by employers. It is basically all wealth redistribution which is simply not there in the US. So sure, it means you will be able to pocket less money, but that doesn't directly mean there is less money in the system.
That said, I was fairly lucky and found something that isn’t terrible, so I moved. Other than the language barrier, I don’t have many complaints. I’ve heard the language situation is better in the Netherlands than in Germany.
During the express entry period where you are employer sponsored, unlike in the US, if you get fired, you have until your visa expires to find another sponsoring job (the visa is valid for 5 years IIRC).
I’m pretty happy with how it went and glad we can settle, I’m not sure we would have chosen Canada if a rapid permanent path hadn’t been clear up front.
As a Canadian with a CS degree who's been trying to get into tech for years, this is horrible to hear. We have thousands of new grads in Canada who end up working in fast food because they get passed over for cheaper immigrants. I've seen it first hand, all my tech friends have seen it. We're worse than the US for this, and we have even less tech jobs here.
We don't need to be bring more entry level talent, we have tons of that not being utilized here.
There's plenty of talk about greedy corporations until the topic of using immigration to increase their profits comes up. Then it's silence.
In tech in Canada, usually we aren’t hiring immigrants because they’re cheaper—visas, moving someone, etc, is a huge expense. It’s often more that they’re the best possible fit for the role. After Covid with remote work etc, I don’t think there’s as much of that immigration going on, though—I don’t know of many Canadian companies sponsoring right now.
The entry positions are FLOODED with new comers. We aren't hiring them because they're the best fit, we have plenty of unemployed locals begging for work. To say we only bring in the best because we cannot fill the roles is a blatant lie.
You sound like you're describing senior position, which I would say is fair.
The weirder thing that’s going on right now that’s counter to all of this is US-based companies _only_ hiring Canadians, rather than Americans, when people leave because Canadians are cheaper overall—even though American companies tend to pay more. It’s kind of a paradox, but works out well.
If you guys have vacant positions, I'd love to apply. Anonymously of course.
But this one of those places where I with a boomer voice have to scream, “stop being a victim”. The picture you are painting is a complete misrepresentation of reality. I think this stems from the fantasy of thinking that tech workers right now, are akin to factory workers and are being exploited by greedy capitalist overlords, who are using immigration as cudgel to ground them down further. Tech is nothing like a factory job. The demand for talented people in Tech has never gone down (probably higher because of the AI boom). Just consider the fact that openAI is willing to pay 800k+ to employees and it is not even profitable yet. And OpenAI has hired quite a bit of immigrants, and most immigrants come from much poorer backgrounds than natives. Develop your skills and you will easily find a place in the tech industry that will pay you 200k+. The fact that your friends can’t means they did not put in enough effort to develop their skills, while an immigrant from a likely poorer country did.
End rant
Easiest way to fix this issue. Tie the Visa to a state or federal government. They check in and can stay as long as they are working in X industry in potentially Y state. Still not as easy to move, but the company has much less leverage to keep an H1B hostage.
The workers brought in by Cognizant, Tata and Infosys are actually not highly skilled, and they undercut American workers. Their use of H-1B visas should be limited, and the visas should be reserved for highly paid workers who work for Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and so on.
Then that will be the next complaint... these immigrants are being paid $30k more than me... and I am a citizen!
Saying that only pisses people off. I have seen this too many times. People who clearly aren't qualified nevertheless want the job because of the higher pay, and pointing out their lack of qualifications only pisses them off more. In their mind the higher paying jobs belong to them because they are white, dammit!
Does the tech industry really need so many workers on H-1B visas?
Or: H-1B visas power the tech industry. But experts say that's not necessarily because of a talent gap.
Source article: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/h-1b-visa-technology-industry-e...
The fact that H1B is still being favorable despite higher cost speaks volume about how it really is. In many ways, H1B is one of the reasons the US is so competitive. It takes in talents (like it or not, many H1B are just as good or more skilled than a native), force them to work much harder than a regular resident would ever want to, make them pay taxes on incomes that are higher than natives, then discard them after a few years since not everyone can have residency or can wait that long.
A H1B will always avoid conflict, keep their head down, and straight up afraid of even being anywhere near a crime much less committing it. They are an ideal underclass that can be exploited easily.
And for that reason, in capitalist America, H1B will not go away. They will try to fix some abuses, raise the barrier, make things slightly more difficult, etc. But the F1 to H1B gravy train will continue. An obvious way is to favor US degree holders to make the expensive universities here more attractive, limit abuses, while still cater to the anti-immigrant crowd.
I bet if there is a H1B reform, this will very likely be one of the changes.
In my biased Indian view, unless something drastically changes, the proposition of 20+ years on a Green Card queue is looking a lot less appealing for a software person, especially if they are talented.