The Senate will move next week on comprehensive high-skill immigration reform
thenextweb.com
thenextweb.com
We moved to the Bay Area when I got a job at Google a year and a couple of months ago. We really like it in California: my job is super interesting, the weather is nice, and the people are amazing. I cannot imagine any place in the world where I could have a bigger impact being a programmer. However, going back to Europe is a topic of our everyday conversations. Why?
My wife is one of the smartest people I know. She is the webdesigner you would love to work with (you know, those who can actually code their stuff in a way that works with all browsers, use source control, and are not afraid of using the command line). She worked as a project manager and her team loved her. She has interesting things to say about startups, business models, and Goedel's theorem. She used to have a career back in Europe, but in the US she's almost a non-person. She can live here, yes, she can drive a car, but she doesn't even have her own SSN. She cannot do any productive work, and getting an H1 visa if you are not a software engineer is extremely hard (we had this conversation with a couple of immigration lawyers).
I have my dream job, but at the same time I cannot help the feeling that I am ruining my wife's life.
* High bureaucracy levels while dealing with it, which means cost, which means most small companies won't do it.
* You can't just quit your job and live in the US for a while, while looking for another one (or not). IT salaries make it absolutely possible to take a year off if you feel like it.
* No cleaning of the path to greencard. It's possible, especially when you come from a country with a large number of applicants, like India, that you won't receive a greencard before your second visa expires and you have to go back "home" for a year.
* Just like above, the limit of 2 applications.
Overall a very mellow step, which does not make me any more inclined to come and work in the states. Greetings from the beautiful city of Cape Town, where immigration procedures took me a few days and 60 euros.
Cheers, fijal
If you want to expand those visas or reallocate them, advocate for it. I'm hugely in favor of eliminating nepotism based immigration (what we have now) and replacing it with something favoring high skilled individuals [1].
But that doesn't mean there isn't a place for temporary work visas.
[1] This is, however, a political non-starter. Bush's amnesty bill was killed because someone slipped this in as a poison pill.
As a highly-skilled South African (which, interestingly enough, appears to be where parent ultimately decided to emigrate), the effort, duration and uncertainty involved in acquiring US citizenship makes it a non-starter option for me.
I'm better off remaining in South Africa where I don't have to work non-stop for years and years unless I want to risk being deported, don't have to play a different game in the job market, can stop working at any time to go full speed on my startup, etc.
Eventually I hope to be successful enough that emigration through business and wealth is a simpler and more direct option. Of course by then I may very well have a family and other commitments that again make emigration a non-option.
Assuming I'm the sort of person this reform is meant to entice into the USA (a country I very much admire), it certainly isn't comprehensive, which appears to be parent's point.
Maybe we could focus on retraining non-technical people to fill tech jobs. Or people with outdated skills, and clamp down on age discrimination. There's a lack of programmers and an abundance of food-service/sales workers. We should re-work high school in the US to focus on vocational work, such as programming or other skills such as industrial electrical work. And as we've just renewed unemployment benefits, doesn't this give government leverage to force people to learn things?
We tell America that with new automation and technology comes the need to educate yourselves for the new jobs. Now we're going to add unlimited temporary workers to compete for these new jobs?
But that's not the quick fix corporate America is lobbying for. They want masters/php grads to come in and be essentially locked in to working for them for at best an average salary. If we refuse to educate our public in useful skills, then I'll take unlimited H1Bs, as I'd rather have a vibrant work force in our country than a scattered remote one and see innovation and taxes go elsewhere.
Granted, I'm all for comprehensive immigration reform. Let's do it comprehensively and let in a steady stream of people to fill all levels and variety of jobs. Let's let people live the American Dream and let them choose jobs or quit jobs or strike out on their own. That's what we're not giving H1B holders. And that's the competition we're giving ourselves.
However, there is a whole bunch of people who work in niche professions. I work in VMs. There is maybe a 100 people (maybe 200) who are even remotely in the area of dynamic language VMs. It takes years (sometimes tens of years) to be highly skilled and be able to deliver what some companies want. Right now, H1B is really the only viable option for such people to go to states and has a whole bunch of strange requirements, that should not apply. Do you really suggest a McDonalds-worker-trained-IT-professional can be competitive in such area?
On the other hand, I can assure you that visa costs outweight importing people for average salary. It's really about shortage of skills (or shortage of good immigration policies) that drives those efforts, not the will to employ people for less-than-average money.
Sure, this isn't a magic solution where we all learn and make 100k/year and fix all labour shortages. We need immigration, no doubt. But don't we need it for all careers, if not for the companies, then for what we want the American experience to be for newcomers?
I think there probably is a pool of US developers doing more mundane work that have the capacity and skills to do the type of work you do. And I think there are some baristas that could do what most HN readers think of as mundane IT work.
Also, how does a person become trapped working 'long hours' for the same company 'for years' when there is a porting aspect of the H1B where the visa-holder may port the visa to another employer after 6 months. If they don't wish to work for that employer, or another can provide them with a better option then they are free to port.
Sorry, but respectfully your comment is utter bullshit.
"how does a person become trapped"
Illegal collusion, a pink slip, and a simple phone call.
"Sorry, but respectfully your comment is utter bullshit."
I guess you win the thread then, way to go winner.
Citation needed.
The H visa is a pretty bad deal though.
It is also what is required to end the current recession.
It's certainly true that importing new employed people will increase the denominator in the unemployment rate will reduce unemployment, but that doesn't help any human.
I believe you are making the fallacy of reasoning from a composition change. Amusingly, one of the better explanations of this I've found is at OpenBorders: http://openborders.info/compositional-effects/
Look at it from the other way around. What would happen to the economy if 50% of high skilled people moved to a different country? It would be disastrous for the country. So AS and AD go down as a direct consequence of those people leaving, but AD will also go down as a consequence of the resulting recession/depression. Importing high skilled people has the opposite effect.
So yes, high skilled workers add to AS and to AD, and the ratio of AS to AD won't change much because of that. But the economy will still get a boost (another increase in AD).
Looking at it the other way, if 50% of high skilled people moved to a different country, it would be a disaster. I just don't think it would be a Keynesian disaster. If anything, AD should hold constant while AS dropped, leading to an increase in employment.
Note that I'm disputing your reasoning, not your conclusion.
With a PB system, you, the applicant, know where you stand when you make the application.
With the non PB visa, it was so confusing as to what was actually needed, I hired an agency to help me. I'm now at the beginning of the up-to 16 week wait for a response.
PB system: they tell you exactly what you need to show
Non PB system: they suggest a range of what you should show. While the truth of the matter is you must show everything in the range along with a pile of other things that they don't even allude to.
Comprehensive is DC code for "includes illegals currently in the US, low-skill immigrants from central/south america, etc." High skill is in the "etc." that everyone supports, but which was being held hostage to deal with the politically-contentious other groups (which are 100x the size)
+ cap increase for H1B
+ easier green cards for US STEM students
- easier for established companies, not startups and smaller ones
- still fails for many of this founders: http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/10/startup-act-2-0-great-for-f...
Companies should focus on finding quality US personnel first.
Let's look at how the process works. A company advertises, in this case I chose to use Monster and looked for "SQL 2012" and found a company that's looking for someone with 5 years experience using SQL Server 2008. That "requirement" is impossible, so HR and management will bypass all applicants since they're "not qualified". The next company down wanted 2 years of SQL Server 2012. Again, an impossibility.
The companies will whine to politicians that they can't find anyone that meets their requirements. The politicians will do some grandstanding about how quality tech personnel are scarce and next will be the flood of personnel driving down salaries even worse than they already are. Developer salaries have been stagnant since the dotcom bust 10 years ago.
The best solution is eliminate H1B and utilize the people who are unemployed.