Can someone explain like I am five:
Briefly, What is the current immigration policy?
Why is it so broken?
WHY/HOW did it get the way it is (who benefits from having it the way it is)?
Briefly, What is the current immigration policy?
Why is it so broken?
WHY/HOW did it get the way it is (who benefits from having it the way it is)?
The H1B Problem
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* Foreign high-tech workers need a document called an H-1B visa.
* A limited number of H-1B visas are handed out each year.
* If more people apply than the limit of visas, the recipients are picked by lottery.
* H-1B visas go to two types of workers: (a) low-grade skills, underpaid, working in "consulting" sweatshops in Edison, NJ, and (b) mid- to high-grade skills, paid at or above market, working at reputable companies like FB, Google, etc.
* It's questionable whether people of type (a) are needed or good for the economy. It's pretty clear that people of type (b) are needed and good for the economy. However, the balance doesn't reflect that.
The citizenship problem
=======================
* A foreign student can get a U.S. undergraduate degree, go on to get a Ph.D. at a U.S. university, all the while paying federal, state, and other taxes. They can go on to get a sweet job at Facebook or Google, and get put on a "path to citizenship". If they happen to be from India or China, they then have to wait anywhere from 5-9 years to get their permanent residence ("green card"). For a portion of this time, if they switch employers, they get to start the process all over again, from scratch.
* A pedophile drug dealer puppy strangling wife-beater can arrange a faux wedding with an American citizen and get their permanent residence in less than a year, regardless of where they are from.
Also, not all green card holders are on a path to citizenship, and I'm sure a lot of H1-B holders would be just fine with permanent residence that is not on a path to citizenship.
* A foreign student can get a U.S. undergraduate degree, go on to get a Ph.D. at a U.S. university, all the while paying federal, state, and other taxes.
For a portion of this time, if they switch employers, they get to start the process all over again, from scratch.
AC-21 portability doesn't come into play until you are almost at the end of the green card process. The long wait is before you get to that stage.
> AC-21 portability doesn't come into play until you are almost at the end of the green card process. The long wait is before you get to that stage.
This is not true at all. AC-21 portability allows the transfer of employment to another employer willing to sponsor the visa. Employment with the new employer can begin as soon as a request to transfer has been filed. The confusion is usually surrounding the idea that once permanent residency has been applied for the employee is stuck, which is true for 180 days post application.
From the M-274 Handbook for employers (documentation on Form I-9 but relevant to this case)
Under the American Competitiveness Act in the Twenty First Century (AC-21),
an H-1B employee who is changing employers within the H-1B program may begin
working for you as soon as you file a Form I-129 petition on his or her behalf. To
qualify for AC-21 benefits, the new petition must not be frivolous and must have
been filed prior to the expiration of the individual’s period of authorized stay. You
must complete a new Form I-9 for this newly hired employee. An H-1B employee’s
Form I-94/Form I-94A issued for employment with the previous employer, along with
his or her foreign passport, would qualify as a List A document. You should write
“AC-21” and enter the date you submitted Form I-129 to USCIS in the margin of Form
I-9 next to Section 2. See Completing Form I-9 for Nonimmigrant Categories when
Requesting Extensions of Stay below.
For more information about employing H-1B workers, please visit www.uscis.gov.Current immigrations policy is based on quotas. IE, only a certain number of immigrants from each country are allowed. The total number of immigrants allowed each year is 700,000. Not every immigrants counts towards this, though. The biggest exception is family members of current US citizens/greencard holders. There are other exceptions.
It is broken because the US does not allow everyone who want to immigrate to do so. There isn't a perfectly fair way to decide who gets to come and who doesn't. Since there are always more people who want to come, than can actually come, the problem keeps getting worse. However, allowing everyone would also create tons of problems (eg a country could pay to send every poor person in their country to the US). Basically, this is one of those cases where all you can do is choose the least shitty solution.
The system got so broken due to racism. The original immigration policy was anyone not sick was admitted. Yes, even criminals. Prior to the early 1900's, the only people (voluntarily) immigrating to america were western europeans. Even so, racism was a problem. When the Irish and the Germans (both, predominately Catholic) came over in the 1830's and 1840's, the predominately Protestant English country threw a shit-fit (eg "help wanted, but not from paddy, inquire within"). By 1870 (ie one generation) no one cared and the Irish and germans were fully part of america. As an aside, the immigration boom in turn caused an economic boom as well.
In the early 1900's, another immigration boom began, this time by eastern europeans, jews, and italians. This did not sit well with the predominately western european america, especially with the irish and the germans (yes, they really forgot about the shit they went through in just a couple generations). So a law was passed limiting immigration to 3% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890, [1]. By the way, 1890 just happened to be before the new wave of immigration started. This had the practical effect of allowing just about anyone from western europe who wanted to emmigrate to immigrate, while denying just about everyone else. This stayed in effect until 1965, when a new law was passed, which "replacing [the old law] with a preference system that focused on immigrants' skills and family relationships with citizens or U.S. residents. Numerical restrictions on visas were set at 170,000 per year, with a per-country-of-origin quota, not including immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, nor "special immigrants" (including those born in "independent" nations in the Western Hemisphere, former citizens, ministers, and employees of the U.S. government abroad)," [2]. Basically, the law became slightly less racist. By 1990, the number of immigrants allowed was 700,000.
Here's some more links related to immigration law in the US: http://www.umass.edu/complit/aclanet/USMigrat.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1990
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1924, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Quota_Act [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Act_of_1965
It is difficult to say who benefits from this arrangement. At least in theory, it's US workers, because they are more in demand. But at the current time, demand outstrips supply enough that the limit could be raised without significant issues. The reason this hasn't happened is largely that "immigration" has become a politically sensitive topic- skilled immigration and "illegal" immigration from Mexico get bunched up into the same topic. Now that there is an appetite to tackle immigration as a whole, we might see a change.
(1) I had started an overview of US skilled immigration- I currently have no time to finish it, but it does contain an interactive chart breaking down the immigration categories: http://experimenting.alastair.is/immigration/
What happens when the tech industry crashes again, like it does every decade or so? Silicon Valley is tremendously cyclical and always has been. It's not a good idea to predicate our immigration policy on the current boom.
http://www.jointventure.org/index.php?option=com_content&... ("Today is not the first time that Silicon Valley has experienced a boom/bust cycle. The Valley experienced significant job growth, followed by job losses, in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Each time, from these down cycles emerged the “next” Silicon Valley economy. Economic adversity helped stimulate the Silicon Valley habitat to major innovations, including the commercialization of the integrated circuit (1970s), the development of the microprocessor and personal computer (1980s), and the application of the Internet (1990s)").
I understood the basic premise that any country wants to be able to limit the number of immigrants, in theory, to ensure that their citizens get jobs, assuming the citizenry is skilled enough.
It appears to me that at the heart of immigration reform is education reform.
Frankly, I think that education in the US is utterly broken.
And I think that at the core of this issue is the difficult balance between socially funded services and for-profit corporate motives:
If we find that developing a basic level of skill and well being in a society is dependent upon a well educated and healthy populous, then the purpose of a civilized society should be providing education and healthcare to the people who create that society.
Then, the ability for the market to build for-profit companies, staffed by well-educated workers seems to be a natural benefit.
The fact that the US is at odds with its own people over education and health - while at the same time upholding policies that would prevent well educated workers from being able to enter the country speaks to a much more dark and sinister character of the US government as a whole.
And it may just be the sad result of many many complex factors and not some conspiracy of the government out to stifle every aspect of healthy growth of society - but the fact that there appears to be so much active resistance to fixing these sorts of issues surely makes one wonder what the fark is really going on the minds of the government to let these issues fester.
The AMA is instrumental is keeping the supply of doctors limited. We wouldn't want those unqualified European doctors dispensing aspirin.
There isn't an equivalent strong lobby for tech folks; In short, their salaries are doomed, so make hay while the sun shines.
The U.S. does not limit the supply of technologists. Industry has pushed for literally a century to flood the market with engineers educated on the public dime (many land-grant public universities were founded with the primary purpose of producing engineers to support the industrial revolution). The public spends huge amounts of money every year subsidizing the training of the engineers who work at these companies.
It's what the MZ article is about: They can't find enough, they want to change H1B's. You can choose to call that something other than a limitation, but it doesn't change the fact that it limits the supply of technologists.
You can't explain it briefly because it is a complicated mess with conflicting goals, which include, but are not limited to:
1. Limiting public costs associated with immigration (including, by not limited to, protecting American workers) by limiting the overall level of immigration, 2. Using family bonds to promote national identity by encouraging family-based immigration, 3. Advancing the interest of firms in America by permitting temporary (both long- and short-term) use of foreign, non-immigrant labor (including encouraging long-term foreign labor by allowing, but not requiring, long-term workers to apply for immigrant status.) 4. Preventing individually-undesirable people (career criminals, terrorists, etc.) from entering the country 5. Encouraging diversity in immigration by limiting (on top of the limits in #1) immigration individually by each country of origin
> Why is it so broken?
Largely, because it has incoherent purposes.
> WHY/HOW did it get the way it is (who benefits from having it the way it is)?
Different people benefit from different pieces of it, and immigration lawyers and people who like to have a permanent mess to use to justify new policies (whether or not they are related to fixing any of the features of the mess that are pointed to to justify them) benefit from the complexity and incoherence.
Historical parallels - Chinese workers were imported to build the transcontinental railroad. They were paid approximately 2/3 of what white workers made, and charged for room and board. About 1/8th of them died from on-the-job accidents during the 7 years or so it took to construct the railroad.
Amusing connection: the president of Central Pacific Railroad at the time was Leland Stanford. You might say that exploiting foreign workforces is in the blood of Silicon Valley.
Without comment on your broader thesis, the H-1B is something of a bad example here, in that it is a dual intent visa which provides a path to citizenship, in that one may apply for an immigrant visa (the direct route to citizenship) while on an H-1B, whereas most non-immigrant visas, including other work visas like the H-2B and H-3, do not allow this.