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Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

i recently saw a table of firms awarded these visas. it seemed nuts to me that a large proportion of the visas go to firms whose primary business line is outsourcing in one form or another.

i typically think of visas as fulfilling unmet hiring needs for domestic US firms - like Facebook! - but instead see they are largely squirreled away by firms whose primary function is overseas labor cost arbitrage.

I would be interested to hear informed opinions as to why so many visas go to these firms. i thought the stated objective is to help american firms meet their hiring needs where the local work force is deficient.

instead, it seems like all the demand is corralled into a few firms which do the dirty work for everyone else. if your primary purpose is outsourcing, how can you plausibly claim to be searching for qualified workers inside the US, and thus deserving of access to these visas?

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The visas are helping american firms meet their hiring needs... through the outsourcing firms. The people who want to hire don't want to be burdened with the paperwork of actually keeping track of work-visa'ed employees; the outsourcing firms are willing to take that burden on for them. Everyone wins.

The "real" (as opposed to outsourcing/staffing) companies that want a visa for an employee and don't get one because of the cap aren't winning. Plus I'm guessing the pay / benefits would generally be better at many of those places as well.

H1B workers typically work for contracting companies, so that when the work is up (or if they lost their job) they can go to a new company and continue their green card application. The way the government attaches the process to a job really discourages H1B workers from working for US companies as full time employees.

There should be a quota for each company, say less than 500 H1B visas each year. The companies then have the incentive to pick the best candidates. Or there could be different brackets depending on company's sizes.

If the reason for such visa distribution is really the need to outsource paperwork, then introducing the quota you propose would only result in visas going to myriad of smaller outsourcing companies instead of few big ones.

Should be a percent of workers, say a maximum of 5%.

And who will categorize all the companies and make sure that they are not mis-representing themselves?

Already exists. It's called Payroll Tax.

I’m assuming those firms need to have specialists who speak foreign languages. More so, those firm leverage on executive close to the decision making while others (not really Facebook, admittedly) would need far more people to make the same impact. This means they can put a lot more effort into lobbying their positions.

The one job type where these visas should not be usable is consulting. If the employee isn't coming here to work on a very specific product or service, then they are being brought in only to reduce wages and not because the employer can't find someone who is capable of performing a very specific need. Consulting by its nature is the most unspecific need. It's a wildcard need.

The most valuable employees to the country are those that are hired to work on something that scales that can then be sold to other countries. Consultancy is a non-scaleable business model, which does nothing to helping the US' balance of payments. Improving the balance of payments should be the primary deciding factor when determining if an application is valid.

This does not square with my perception but that's anecdotal. Nonetheless I work at a very large financial firm and the rates paid for consulting are 70-80% higher than salaries at the same level. Even accounting for 30-50% add-ons for benefits/vacations, etc, consulting firms are still paid higher than employees, at least here.

That wasn't my point at all. I was making the point that we should be encouraging immigrant visas for positions that actually create growth. i.e. The position will help with scaling so that we end up with a larger business that results in more jobs for Americans. If an immigrant moves here and works for a company that has 10 people and helps create a product that scales so that one day that company employs 1000 people, the US is better off. If the immigrant comes to the country to work at a consultancy doing work that doesn't really scale, that worker is just another person suppressing the wages for Americans who would otherwise be doing that work. An immigrant who comes here to do consultancy doesn't do work that typically generates more jobs. The consultancy can only grow by adding more people like the immigrant since the supply of people like the technical immigrant is already limited.

Second, although consultants typically make more than other software engineers, it still suppresses wages for all software consultants. The pay for software consultants in the US would be much higher without bringing in immigrants to do that work.

Personally, I don't want to reduce the number of highly skilled immigrants that come to this country. I would love to see it increase a lot more. But I don't think it benefits the United States economy and the average American citizen when this immigrant labor is focused on non-scalable activities where the labor needed is likely to be highly fungible. That only serves to increase the bottom line of the shareholders of such companies at the expense of suppressing wages for similar professionals working in the US. That's net-negative for the country, and a subsidy for those shareholders. Every one of those H1-B visas should be decided on the likely value that immigrant can bring to the US economy and not the value that immigrant provides to the shareholders of a consultancy.

IBM getting 5 more generalist software engineers is far less valuable to the US economy than 5 engineers that are specialists in some new emerging technology such as renewable energy. The decision process for granting H1-Bs should be similar to the decision process for making an investment in a startup. You invest in things that can grow.

FWIW, You might think I'm a red-blooded anti-immigration American, but I'm actually an immigrant software engineer living in the US.

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