I'm all for importing top talent to work at American companies. In fact, I think H1-Bs should be allowed to start businesses and move from job to job like anyone else. If it's about innovation, why force them to stay in one job while they're here?
https://www.newsweek.com/microsoft-layoffs-h1b-visa-applicat...
Companies always want the lucrative American businesses and consumers as customers, all the while wanting to shed expensive American workers.
Big tech is not the one abusing this program.
It doesn't have to follow directly; the problem is often indirect. H1Bs are much better behaved for employers because they are nearly powerless to say no, and can be slow-walked for raises, promotions and squeezed for high hours worked to reduce effective wages. There's also cultural migration issues - India is 70%+ of the H1B program. Does India have a monopoloy on top global talent, or is it just a process vulnerable to political capture and top execs' whims?
Talent exists everywhere, but when one country absolutely dominates a process, it suggests the process has been captured.
>Big tech is not the one abusing this program.
Did they promise that in a press release or something? Compared to Microsoft, TCS and Infosys are bottom tier tech, but the H1B program in general is sketchy based on the accusations the biggest players have had over the last decade.
Instead, you end up competing against the whole world on salary and servitude hours for a local job.
Not the H1Bs at Amazon who were paid less and guilted into working weekends. Not my Mexican girlfriend who works for $50k as an oil rig chemical engineer in Houston at a company that only hires visa workers on the cheap. Not my Indian neighbors I befriended making $60k in software at Chase bank in Houston on their all-visa teams.
SLB is a good example, where I met my girlfriend. Entry level American chemical engineer: $120-150k. Visa chemical engineer imported to work on the same team in the same position: $50k. Guess which part of the pie chart grew while I worked there.
But I'm not supposed to notice any of this. And until very, very recently it was a faux pas to mention it at all.
If your claim only applies to a subset of visa workers in a subset of companies, then refine the claim to use a word like "some", and it will be a trivial claim that I agree with.
I do agree that there should be minima to prevent abuse. I do not agree that every H1B hire was to abuse the system.
In the early 2010s there were hiring shortages, the startup that hired me would have probably preferred saving on the attorney fees and the 6+ months it took between the offer and the start date. For a new H1B you have to prepare the paperwork in March at the latest, apply the first week of April, for a start date of October 1st. And not only that, but with the quotas and the lottery you're absolutely not guaranteed that your hire is going to make it. All things being equal without a shortage or the ability to underpay, it is not an attractive solution.
H1Bs do push salaries down, because there is more "supply" of workers, so it should probably only be used for hiring for areas with shortages, but even then you can have downturn like what we're having in tech, and some companies may keep their H1Bs over FTE because they are less of a flight risk and can't negotiate their salaries as well. Even with a shortage, this means that employees with that specific skill will be paid less, now it's more of a matter of which one is better for the economy/society.
They are forced to do that, and they in fact do that.
Source: I was hired by one big tech company as an H-1B worker (I was a new grad) over a decade ago (2012), my salary was ~15% higher than what the chart says for "class of 2014".
It's just evident that's not what's happening across all H-1B positions in the US, and those are the ones worth talking about here.
He said what you surmised: while there are plenty of qualified American engineers in the United States, citing Motorola headcount reductions as an example, it was a challenge to convince them to move to California's cost of living.
To recap: 1. Move to the Bay Area circa 1997 2. Buy houses 3. Profit enormously in the 2020s
Mind you, I had no idea...
But if it's a replacement for supporting domestic education and a source of cheap skilled labor, no thanks.
If FAANG were screaming at Congress about their inability to hire and the solution was better primary and secondary education programs for people at home to create that skilled workforce, we probably wouldn't have such an aggressive urban/rural political divide in this country.
Did I give the impression that better education is sufficient to solve the problem?
* The British system may not be superior, I left uni in 2006 and the UK in 2018, and UK politicians have been fiddling with education seemingly forever.
But that just means you should substitute whichever country is doing education best at the moment; the point is, even obviously correct things are still hard in the world of politics.
You don't know what you are talking about.
P.S. you probably want to provide a source for that number.
Not really. More than 70% of all H1Bs are going to software positions. Biomedical engineers are less than 1%, so a rounding error
> you probably want to provide a source for that number
Just google it yourself.
Fact is, immigration systems in all of the richest countries are already bursting with abuse from certain countries with very ingenious schemes and you gotta have some ways to protect it unless you want a free-for-all.
Additionally, you can already today legally switch jobs as an H-1B, but it is a process that gives undue amounts of power to the employer, which makes switching difficult. Finally, regarding switching fields, it's not that easy. You have to show that your new field is related to your degree and experience.
So please, instead of making up imaginary bogeymen, learn more about the immigration system.
At this point it doesn't look like allowing anything other than net emigration is practical. You just can't trust the people involved to do anything else.
Can you give an example where H1Bs changed voting patterns?