Hacker News Reader

Comment by LordHumungous | Hacker News Reader

Your anecdotal experience doesn't change the fact that H1B workers are paid less than American workers for comparable positions.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/silicon-valley-h...

View on HN

You linked to an article that references a study. Care to share the original data?

The Department of Labor has wage floors for H1-Bs (prevailing wage). Company's can't legally pay below that.

>> The Department of Labor has wage floors for H1-Bs (prevailing wage). Company's can legally pay below that.

Companies play games with the experience levels and titles to force wages lower. An "architect" or "developer" gets replaced with an "analyst" or "engineer" making 2/3rds as much.

and H1-B body shops force their workers to work umpteen hours of overtime, bill the clients for it, and H1-B workers get no compensation for all the overtime.

and H1-B body shops do shady things like delay payments, take 'fees' out of payments, pay in rupees, etc.

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26778017/tech-company...

as go the unions, so go the workers...

Increasing the quantity supplied at the "prevailing wage" by way of H-1B depresses the prevailing wage from rising to what it would be in the absence of the H-1B for the positions for which H-1B has increased the supply (and has knock-on effects for other areas of work, because the Americans that don't get employed in the positions covered by H-1Bs then are competing in fields they otherwise wouldn't be, increasing the quantity supplied at any given price point in those fields.)

Its not only basic economics, but if it didn't work that way, there'd be no benefit to employers from the H-1B existing to justify the compliance costs.

The point was that companies are underpaying H1-B workers. My argument is that there are floor wages they can't pay below.

You're making another point about the impact of immigration. I don't disagree and it extends beyond immigration. If you open a new medical school you're depressing the wages of doctors. Just take a look at what happened to the legal profession.

Many countries are lowering the wage requirement. My country (Ireland) is lowering it from ~30k to ~25k. I'm pretty sure the US is too?

This is patently false, and a common misunderstanding of immigrantion laws by U.S. citizens.

>Requirement 4 - You must be paid at least the actual or prevailing wage for your occupation, whichever is higher.

http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupatio...

Dear police: please go home, you're not needed anymore. It's the law, and nobody will ever violate it.

Dont be crass. If there is evidence of violation, it means the immigration enforcement needs a bigger budget to go after employers. It does not mean we need to cut back on immigration because some citizens have a problem following the law.

I dunno where you're getting these claims, and by the way it's the companies not citizens, but let's read the previous comments.

> LordHumungous : h1bs often get paid less

> bduerst: no they don't, because that would be against the law

> me: mocks foolishness

it's like you're deliberately unaware of companies' very successful efforts to modify the law in self-dealing ways, and even when that fails, to route around the law by stopping enforcement. Or the various well known and widespread h1b abuses that googling for seconds would find for you. Or even seen the list of posted salaries in your office, and noted they were way below market.

The article linked to was an opinion piece against immigrants, hence the context. I also eluded to there needing to be evidence, which the op piece didn't really provide.

if you don't have evidence that h1bs are widely abused, and used to drive down wages, it's for no other reason than you're too lazy to google.

It's also telling that you tar a neutral reporting piece discussing the impact of h1b visas as anti-immigrant, I guess because how else could you discredit it. I mean, right there in the very article you seem to have read is this:

   ComputerWorld revealed last week that the top 10 users of H-1B visas last 
   year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys.

and this

   More than 80 percent of H-1B visa holders are approved to be hired at wages 
   below those paid to American-born workers for comparable positions, 
   according to EPI.

as the saying goes, if you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.

You can also use google to find "evidence" that vaccines cause autism. Just because information is indexed by google doesn't make it true.

If I'm too lazy, then enlighten me with your work ethic. Show the evidence already or stop being crass.

There's plenty of evidence, and governments in western countries are lowering the "prevailing wage" requirements to far below market rates.

Can you list some evidence of LCA prevailing wages being lowered?

The government defined "prevailing wage" for a level 1 software developer in San Francisco is $74,000. Does that sound like a market rate to you?

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=41884...

Edit: For a "web developer" the starting number is $52,000. In San Francisco.

http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=41884...

Interesting. How are the "Levels" determined?

Yes it does.

Level 1 is mean salary for entry level, and it's for the peninsula, not just SFC.

Yep. The HN community is not at all representative of the market -- people here tend to be both more experienced and working in better positions than most -- and I can confirm that for non-tech companies the prevailing wage for entry level tech jobs (do-it-all programmer, web dev, etc) in the SJ/Milpitas/Fremont area is in the 70s, going up to ~100 after 10+ years experience.

Also keep in mind that does not include benefits or equity.

I got to be friends with a few of the H1-Bs when I was working at a large company that hired a lot of H1-Bs (mostly Indian, always knew the best places to eat, and since I'd studied Sanskrit in grad. school, knew a bit about Indian culture, and read some Devanagari I always liked getting to hang out). At a point when I was ready to move to another job we talked about salaries. They were generally getting paid 40% less than I was, the best case was one guy (a really scary sharp guy who was a complete workaholic who worked through most weekends) getting 20% less, and they didn't know of anyone getting paid more. Just an anecdote, but it's something to keep in mind. Laws are only relevant if they're enforced.

Why would you expect them to be paid the same. Should something that ships from Alaska cost the same as something shipped from your next door neighbor?

Can anyone explain the downvotes? or does the Upton Sinclair quote hold "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

The metaphor you used appears to objectify immigrants.

Companies can take advantage of situations for profit, and that's their right, but the argument needs to be qualified so that we aren't speaking past one another.

Are we talking about "should be able to" or "it's the right (for whatever definition of right) thing to do"? I'm going to go with the latter since I have little opinion on the law.

For example, a company has the right to ask its programmers to work 80 hours. It's their right to squeeze as much out of their employees as they can. Should they?

Should companies be taking advantage of low wages in other countries instead of paying market value? They certainly can chase the profit, but we're talking about people, not goods. At the end of the day, they're paying a person less simply because they know that they have little bargaining room.

Some consider it unethical, others do not.

"Should companies be taking advantage of low wages in other countries instead of paying market value?"

If someone leaves a programming job in India to take a programming job in the USA, they're implicitly saying, This is a better deal for me. The only unethical/anticompetative practice was that someone created an artificial barrier (often pushed through legislation because of xenophobia) to keep "others" out. If you don't think we should the USA should be hiring talented people from India, do you think California should prevent people from Seattle from working in California?

Where would you draw the line?

I don't want to draw the line simply because I think it's too much a matter of opinion.

To me, it's not about widely applicable ethics. I think companies should have the right to hire people from other countries and pay them low(er) wages. Or at least, they should have the right until there's some agreeable line that can be drawn (unlikely). I simply would lose respect for that company because I think the decent thing is to pay wages based on merit.

I believe paying wages based on where someone is from is on the same level as squeezing as many hours as possible out of your workforce. In my eyes, it's irresponsible and not respectable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com