Rough.
I know a handful of talented developers stuck at a large company because of visa issues. They are too afraid to look for a better job because of immigration.
I know a handful of talented developers stuck at a large company because of visa issues. They are too afraid to look for a better job because of immigration.
They are the last people to be a "drain on our economy" and they're effectively chained to their jobs, which seems so archaic.
Not just archaic, but wrong. And even if we say "but they're choosing to be here, so it still must be better than what they came from" - which isn't entirely false, but ignores some things - it still means that the rest of us are competing with these extra-abusable workers which some companies might not mind paying a premium for on paper.
First of all, it requires you to reside in the US, permanently (hence the official name). You don't move home for longer periods (e.g. years), as getting back in the US is not automatic. I understand that the US sees entering in the US as privilege, but these people usually help the US economy, and not burden it, so there is that.
Second, it really limits your options. Suppose you decide to go outside of the US in just a few years after the green card, giving it up, and suddenly, for the rest of your life, whenever you enter in the US, you need to tell you life's story to the immigration officer and why you have applied for immigration status and what happened with it.
And if you have connections, properties or investments in Europe, you will be always in limbo whether the European bank will decline business with you based on your US tax status.
Going for a green card is a no-brainer for everyone who is going for US citizenship. Everyone else, take a better look on it, before you go for it.
So what's the alternative? I'm asking out of honest curiosity, because H-1B seems to have at least two serious drawbacks: 1) if you want to switch jobs, you have to go through the lottery again (as far as I understand), and 2) your dependents are on H-4 visa, which means that they aren't allowed to get a job (except as a volunteer).
I do think the US needs a skilled immigration system (perhaps a points based system like Australia), and perhaps we should increase the allotment (the US currently takes in about 1.2 million immigrants a year through a fairly byzantine system that makes it difficult for someone with no close US citizen relatives to immigrate here).
That's where my agreement with the lobbying efforts of large silicon valley companies ends, though. I'm not in favor of granting the HR departments of large silicon valley corporations control over the immigration system under the guise of immigration "reform". And while I do favor general skilled immigration, I don't think it should be specifically based on the notion of a tech or stem worker shortage, as I don't think the evidence supports this claim.
I agree generalizing it as cheap labor is not fair, but I do feel sorry for my friends just starting their careers with a serious lack of job mobility.
That's not pure savings as there are plenty of paperwork costs etc, but you still end out ahead after ~1 year of work. O and just submit a lot of names to the lotto.
But when I say H1B workers are "cheap labor" I'm claiming this on aggregate. If we take a charitable view that an H1B worker is paid $5K less than a non-H1B worker per year - and that's very charitable based on the numbers I've heard thrown around - a company like Tata or Accenture is looking at tens of millions of dollars in savings.
Note also my characterization was not on the quality of the work produced by H1B workers: I've seen some good and some bad, just like everyone else really. But having artificially cheap labor is inherently bad, both for the laborers that can't negotiate something better & workers in the rest of the industry whose wages are deflated to match.
Indeed, cheap labor is really only good for one group: the one that's constantly pushing to increase the H1B cap.
On aggregate, H1B workers are being paid less than non-H1B workers. It doesn't take long to see this in action: http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/performancedata.cfm#s... -- click around and ask yourself if those average wages look right. My state's average wage was what you'd pay a person coming straight out of college.
I'd definitely wager that if you compared all Microsoft H1B software engineers to all non-H1B MS SE's, you'd see a drop in wages. But I don't have a reliable indication of non-H1B salaries at MS, so I can't say for sure.
Why would you think this?
That information is publicly available; e.g. http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Microsoft/356252_Sala...
I'm not sure what the "average salaries" for non-immigrants are, but you can get an idea here:
http://www.salarylist.com/company/Microsoft-Salary.htm
It doesn't look that different.
Because that's been the pattern for most businesses. I doubt Microsoft is any different - why do you think it would be?
> It doesn't look that different.
The two pages you present compare "all MS salaries, globally" to "all MS H1B salaries, globally" - that's a meaningless comparison. A software engineer H1B is going to make more than a non-H1B tester.
Note again, I'm not trying to indict MS for anything here: I'm simply betting that MS is enjoying lower worker costs by employing H1B workers, just like many IT companies do.
I hope that's not the case, both for the H1B worker AND non-H1B workers.
Any restriction on the movement of free labor puts us all down. Their employers are less likely to treat them well because they know how dependent they are on the job just for the visa.
The U.S. can get away with policy inefficiencies like this because there's so many people who want to get in right now, and it actually works in favor of the Powers That Be, because they can get decent talent that's easy to "keep them in their place" because of said policy inefficiencies.
That having been said, the U.S. doesn't going blowing stuff up in Europe to make this advantages happen. For a lot of people, it is a beacon of opportunity. It's not all blue skies and roses though.
No, just in the third and developing world.
In Europe they just push and abuse diplomatically lesser states (up to the point to having supported or even established specific goverments and even dictatorships over the last 60 years) to get the trade agreements and diplomatic support they want.
As a Swiss citizen I don't understand how anyone from a first-world country would like to move to the USA. It's a downgrade in every aspect.
Giving up democracy, social-security, the practical absence of crime for a job in a country where every other Tuesday someone goes on a killing-spree, where people go to the doctor for moar Vicodine, where police will kill you for a donut. Nope.
Edit: changed englishman to briton. Thank you, commenters.
A UK citizen, probably, but I'd not assume that a guy named "McDowell" from Belfast is English.
The downside, of course, being the trade-offs you mention.
Northern-Irish, so technically a Briton, but not an Englishman.
Maybe they want to live somewhere that people have the freedom to build mosques with minarets and where nearly every women born in the country had suffrage for their whole lifetime?
Only from flyover America comes this constant trickle of reports of yet another female principal standing at the school door checking the hemlines of her charges. As for mosques with minarets, I saw this mosque (a big one) in a large Southern city that looked vaguely like a church, didn't have a minaret, didn't even mention that it was in fact a mosque, it just had a three-letter acronym on the side in green letters. This is a strong statement for a religion that actively seeks converts. John 8:7 please.
But, the US is a democracy by name. I'm not sure where you're coming from by saying it isn't.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_foreigners_to_vote
As a European living in California (Orange County currently, but have spent some time in Silicon Valley too), I strongly disagree with that. Most parts of California are safer than my home country, and people definitely do not shoot each other "every Tuesday" (I know you were exaggerating, but still...)