Don't Blame H-1B Workers for Woes

1. "people who are smart enough to get jobs in some of the top corporations" - Not all H1B's work in top corporations, not all H1B's who work in top corporations do 'smart' work, not all employees of top corporations do smart work.

2. "I want get a job doing smart stuff for a smart employer[2], and I don't expect to get that job in India." - Most 'top' corporations have offices in India - where a lot of smart people do smart stuff. Not all of them do it because they dont have an option of going to the US. A lot of them do it because they are happy staying in India. Please stop twisting facts to rationalize your motivations.

There might be other value additions though: people with diverse backgrounds generally means people with different ways of looking at a challenge, which is generally a good thing if your team trying to solve hard problems.

I think that your first claim "smart people" is an ambiguous argument. H1Bs do not enter all fields equally, largely because of the visa requirements and uneven licensing and regulation of these fields. My biggest concern is that if the US protects legal jobs, but issues hundred of thousands of visas to foreign nationals in engineering, then we will create circumstances where US citizens are deterred from entering engineering - not because of markets, but because of misguided regulation. A lot of people opposed to the H1B would drop this opposition if they believed that it wasn't specifically targeting engineering and technical professions. As it stands, I think that the US is (perhaps unintentionally) pursuing a policy that greatly discourages its own citizens from pursuing graduate engineering degrees and strongly encourages them to go into law or more protected fields.

Another thing I disagree with is the notion that H1Bs are a highly talented group of people across the board. This isn't a knock on H1B's - I just don't believe that there are 200K talented engineers out there for the taking. I'd say that no more than 20K are really tops, and yeah, we definitely want those folks here. But otherwise, many are rank and file run of the mill technical workers. I do know an American woman who, at age 50, was "downsized" and offered a severance and an additional 6 months of a paycheck in the condition that she assist with "knowledge transfer" to the new team of H1B's. She sat down to show one of the workers the DB schema, and another new H1B worker attended the meeting as well to learn. Wanting to learn is an admirable quality, but he didn't know anything about databases, and in fact, his degree was in soil science. To me, this was a clear case of displacement - and the loss of an opportunity to train a US citizen in a new technology. A big part of how you feel about the H1B depends on whether you think that the US is getting two hundred thousand entrepreneurial geniuses or ordinary people who are motivated and looking for a job. If it's the former, I'd love to see a visa that not only brings them into the country, but allows total freedom and autonomy once they are here (ie., the visa is awarded directly to the individual with no conditions about how and where he/she will work). If it's the latter, I don't have any real problem with that person coming here, but I see no reason why we should have special visa instead of just using the standard immigration system (which brings in well over a million immigrants a year to the US anyway).

I also take a dimmer view of population growth in California than many people do. Traffic, sprawl, housing prices, and the loss of open space has become a serious problem in California. While a small number of highly talented people would add far more than we'd lose, I don't feel the same way about massive numbers of merely above average workers. And is it such a big deal if Indians innovate in India? A lot of Indians live in poverty, and from what I read, there is a lot of entrepreneurial activity going on. I've never agreed with the notion that I should feel threatened by Indian prosperity. Why do we need to cram all the software developers in the world into San Francisco/Silicon Valley area? Nothing wrong with trade.

On the other hand, I do know at least one scientist who checks out all the patents granted to a competing lab to keep tabs on the sort of research they do. He claims that, in our field, patents are a far better indicator of the amount of effort a lab is expending on a topic than papers published or press releases put out. shrugs

The "dark side" of H1b program is various ethnic sweatshops often filled with mediocre talent unable to find work anywhere else. I have known a person in Boston area who, along with 4 roommates, lived in his "owners" (H1b sponsor) basement where they were looking for contracts for themselves, so the sponsor could sell them later for a percentage. This crowd doesn't file patents.

Another, less evil "H1b business" is what many 3rd grade no-name universities do: they bring people from all over the world using student visas, give them loans, put them through 6-8 month Java crash-course, after which students are supposed to find themselves H1b employment. When they do, they have to pay $10-30K to their "school" while completing their "education" online (the requirement that lets these institutions maintain their legal university status).

I suspect that these shady H1b sponsors take up as much as half of all H1b visas issued to programmers year after year. As I said, big companies rarely bring people from overseas, they like to hire the best foreign graduates from good schools instead, where H1b works as a temporary bridge between a student visa and a green card, and that was the original idea behind it, IIRC.