So much for being a safe and lucrative place for all the best minds of the world.
Yes, you have to be a genius to go through a 1yr online remote masters program which is mostly group work and essentially a fee for undercutting others on the queue:
Current setup simply brings in foreign labor so that capitalists can reduce wages and they pocket the profit, while Americans pocket the costs. Not to mention migrating for purely economic reasons is obviously not going to make the locals like you very much.
If H1B is gone we will see a decrease in wages not an increase.
https://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/The-Impact-of-H-...
What you said was “If H1B is gone we will see a decrease in wages not an increase.”
Then you said other random stuff that didn’t prove that statement in any way.
Not within the same job in the same location they aren't.
If you're on an H-1B and you get fired or laid off, you have 60 days to find a new job or be deported. That creates an underclass of workers who are willing to put up with much worse working conditions and work longer hours. That drives down working conditions and wages for everyone.
The actual data doesn't support this belief. 100% offer market wages and 78% offer higher than market wages.
2. It's a common tactic to employ people on H-1Bs in a lower paying job title while having the perform the work of a higher paying title.
3. You'd need to adjust for average number of hours worked.
https://nfap.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/The-Impact-of-H-...
https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...
Furthermore as we've seen with "return to office", companies are more concerned with having control than with the bottom line. This new dynamic gives them one more thing to hold over H1Bs heads. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the number of H1Bs increases.
As someone who works with colleagues from India (like, physically in India), I don't see any reason the company keeps me over some other random guy in India, to be honest.
> what is the big difference now?
What is the difference between pre-2020 full-time in-office, vs 3 day or even fully remote? Nothing, in my opinion (CEOs don't agree though). If people are productive with 3 days in office, that could have been the norm before 2020.
All you need is someone actually making it happen.
I know as a matter of fact that my company and other companies almost exclusively create new headcounts in India/UK/Germany. US headcounts are only for replacement or as exceptions. Even some replacement headcounts are moved overseas.
Edited to add: The local Indian economy doesn't sustain those many IBM employees. They are servicing the rest of the world.
The most likely outcome is that body shops can no longer afford H-1Bs, but big tech still can.
Amazon has over 10k H1B workers. Think about how much money it means.
Something like 0.3% of their yearly profit.
They're already paying probably somewhere near $200k a year more. Clearly it's not for no good reason. Clearly there is some advantage to employing them here if they are already willing to pay $200k more than they have to.
An extra $100k doesn't erase whatever that value is. The question is, is employing them here worth $200k to Amazon, but not $300k? Likely the case for some employees, but almost certainly not all.
>while paying a third of the salary
If they're paying $300k, they are paying $200k extra to employ that person in the US.
For publicly-held large tech, the equation isn't about affordability but about maximizing shareholder dividends. Moving jobs overseas has long been the preferred means to that end.
I think the newness (some period before 2020) of tech in general tended to intimidate those legacy shareholder groups who got in early. And I suspect that early shareholding was often dominated by employees, etc (not sure tho).
I think those interests plus the proximity to adjacent industries created strong interest in US Gov's (now-former) incentives to create to bring many of the best minds here.
We've dialed back all the above. We've put truly hostile interests in power that are weaponizing Gov assets & millions of supporters - against every manifestation of immigration. Our actual outcomes are flavored with rising Gov violence and populist animosity toward (mostly non-white) immigrants and those associated with them.
Considering what and where we are, I absolutely see this high-paying, historical class of jobs being shipped overseas.
Cheap labor exists because there is a demand for it. Body shops don't pay those wages - companies who hire those bodies from body shops do. So, body shops are going to raise prices accordingly.
"You need someone to manage your Oracle/SAP ERP systems and do a horrible job of it? And that person needs to be here locally? That will be an extra $60k from our last contract because we cannot bring in cheap bodies now." (assuming they eat $40k of the costs)
In the meantime rural medical centers will be devasted because many teams are made of H1B doctors.
H1B certainly requires more government oversight. But doing their jobs or applying critical thinking skills isn't a criteria for this administration.
If you have to pay 100k, you might as well hire an American worker. The "shortages" will mysteriously disappear.
And why these countries when I've already said the same about Indians vs. Chinese?
The U.S. is also much closer to Latin America, and has a large Latino community already. The disparity in H1bs (70% versus 2% for Mexico/Brazil/Colombia) is just too huge to explain by language preferences.
> since India has the largest population of all countries, those 130M college graduates must have gone through some very tough selection.
Not at all. Outside the top schools standards plummet. Half of those graduates are not qualified to work in their fields: https://www.tbsnews.net/bloomberg-special/worthless-degrees-...
> The disparity in H1bs (70% versus 2% for Mexico/Brazil/Colombia) is just too huge to explain by language preferences.
You base your position on these kind "hunches"? "Just too huge to explain". No, it isn't just too huge to explain. It's really that simple. India is the largest country of the world in terms of population, English is an official language of India, hence there is a substantial amount of people with high qualifications who use those qualifications to seek employment in major English speaking countries like the US and the UK with visas like the H1B. There are also many Chinese people in those countries but the language barrier makes it much harder for them.
People from Latin America have a hard time getting hired for highly qualified jobs in the US for various reasons, one of them being the language barrier.
By the way, if there was some conspiracy to hire Indians with low qualifications, then you'd still have not done anything to explain why these people should be Indians as opposed to Latin Americans. The argument makes no sense. Can't you see that? I'm genuinely puzzled.
I’m an armchair commenter, not a federal prosecutor. But this all seems very fishy. If I were in the administration, I’d start investigating all the major H1b employers to see whether there’s preferential hiring of Indians going on.