6 ms·

In my opinion, the real fix is to make the H-1B 'lottery' into an auction. Instead of accepting 65,000 H-1Bs at random--accept the 65,000 H-1Bs with the highest

In my opinion, the real fix is to make the H-1B 'lottery' into an auction. Instead of accepting 65,000 H-1Bs at random--accept the 65,000 H-1Bs with the highest wages. That way we are getting the immigrants with the highest valued skills and stopping companies like Cognizant and Infosys that game the immigration system by applying for the cheapest H-1Bs possible. Look at the biggest H-1B recipients: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx It's all low quality outsourcing shops like Cognizant and Infosys. If you've ever applied for an H-1B then you know how easy it is to abuse the prevailing wages. The process to evaluate the skills of the applicant is simply filling out a form online for their experience level, job title, and location. Give it a test here: http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx http://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesWizardStart.aspx It's very easy to game their job title and location to lower the salary. Here is the law firm Cohen & Grigsby advising other employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1B workers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU This seems like clear fraud. The issue I have with H-1Bs is when companies lie/cheat/commit fraud to outsource jobs that Americans do want and are qualified/willing to do, all for the sake of driving down wages.

hwstar 11y ago
I agree, and these people should be offered a green card as soon as they start with the employer.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Put the corporations in charge of immigration? H1B a program is for special access for tech firms to nonresident alien guest workers.
- dominotw 11y ago
  >should be offered a green card as soon as they start with the employer. they can jump ship to a big company like google after your small startup went through the hassle of lawyers/visa fees/ govt fees ect.
  - hwstar 11y ago
    Maybe you should have paid them as much as what they would make at Google then. Having to compete on salary,benefits, and working environment is the true meaning of an open and free market, not a rigged market as the current H-1B system is.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      Then whoever poaches them can just offer salary + cost of getting the visa. It's always cheaper to freeload off the guy who paid for the visa. The right solution is that if google or whoever hires an H1B 1 year into a 3 year visa, they need to pay for 2/3 of the cost of the visa.
      - hwstar 11y ago
        Google in a hypothetical case would then offer a lower salary to cover the visa cost, and/or deem it too much trouble to bring the H-1B on board. This leaves the H-1B worker operating in a suboptimal market. The issue of visa fees does not confront the H-1B employee, only the employer which sponsored them in the first place. Besides it should cost slighly more to bring in an H-1B than current parket rates. Maybe then more natives would be hired.
        yummyfajitas 11y ago
        Why would it be beneficial if more (extremely wealthy) natives were hired rather than (extremely poor) immigrants? Why would you want to use trade barriers to increase inequality?
        hwstar 11y ago
        Is should be slightly more expensive to bring in immigrants because one of the governments missions voters expect is to ensure that there is a job market where there are good well-paying jobs, not a market where it is flooded with immigrants that have driven down wages. Having American citizens and green card holders idled or having to work in a lower paying job is not a true free market because only the employers are benefiting. Once the domestic pool of potential employers has dried up, then employers will bring in the slightly more expensive foreign labor.
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  Good response. And of course the objections to your idea highlight the point that hb1s have generally not been about finding people with unique skills but rather about getting cheap labor on a tight leash.
dominotw 11y ago
>In my opinion, the real fix is to make the H-1B 'lottery' into an auction. Wouldn't that punish small startups by favoring big co's like google/ms?
- tadfisher 11y ago
  It depends; are small startups going through the regulatory hoops to hire H-1Bs at the low end of the engineering pay scale? My opinion is, no, most are not doing this.
  - dominotw 11y ago
    People choose to work for things like equity/mission ect. Sorting people purely by salary very counterintuitive.
    - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
      It's not counter-intuitive, it's textbook market economics. Your compensation package is your compensation package. You don't get to tell the government they should issue a visa so you can pay someone in missionary zeal.
    - sremani 11y ago
      Unless you have numbers to show about usage of H1-B in start-up and how much share it is of the overall H1-B, its a moot point. It is such a high burden on an early strat-up to hire a H1-B and only post Series A, H1-B makes some sense. In the grand scheme of things, I like the market oriented auction, that will at least eliminate the rent-seekers who are clogging the pipeline.
      - hkmurakami 11y ago
        What I've seen based on friends' startups that brought him in people via H1B at seed stage is that I f you already have someone in mind, the time and cost of H1B is much smaller than the time and cost to find a similarly qualified applicant in the states when you are a young company that many of said candidates will find to be an unattractive option to them.
shas3 11y ago
An auction is impractical. It will shaft smaller companies. Even in larger companies, the hiring decisions are based on group/division budgets. Who decides how high to go on the bidding in a big company? In a small company, where will you raise the capital for such auctions? How will it impact wages?
- joe_the_user 11y ago
  The point is that hb1 aren't supposed to be about bringing down wages, now are they?
- sremani 11y ago
  Is it fair for a UPenn grad with a good offer to lose out lottery to oh-so-nobody from TCS. Auction is a lot fairer than the current situation.
- Can_Not 11y ago
  I think the opposite is true. Smaller companies will be forced to only hire high quality rockstars from international sources. Owners will no longer think they can save 20k/year in entry level labor (at the hidden costs of 200k/year in productivity, employee morale, etc..).
dj_doh 11y ago
I second that. Change lottery to auction based on highest wages. Also, don't bind the employee to the employer.
- Can_Not 11y ago
  I like the idea of the auction because it is essentially where the company says "We are importing the best talent and we are willing to pay extra for it" and it also says "Local candidates are so inadequate that it would cost more to train one." in a way that's simply useless to lie about. The current system encourages my boss to buy extra lottery tickets at the lowest price so he can be surprised later when productivity, morale of local employees, and quality ratio to labor cost is at rock bottom. Now about being unfair to startups... If the auction somehow doesn't account for offering ownership/equity (which seems like an obscure rare situation anyways), that's clearly a better problem to have than a market flooded with cheap labor that still needs regular training, in addition to language training and cultural training.
mavelikara 11y ago
> stopping companies like Cognizant and Infosys that game the immigration system by applying for the cheapest H-1Bs possible Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company - something along the lines of "If an employee spends N months at a company on H-1B, not get into trouble with the law, pay taxes and be a productive member of the community, then that person can work at any similar job without being tied to the employer". Facebook, Google or Microsoft are not doing H-1Bs so they can trap those employees into working at low wages - Cognizant and Infosys are. Removing the power these firms have over the employee is the only true way to reform H-1B. President Obama's executive action plans did state intent along those lines [1], but those seem to be torpedoed by vested interests. There is currently a draft rule from USCIS titled "Retention of EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 Immigrant Workers and Program Improvements Affecting High-Skilled Nonimmigrant Workers" [2] open for comments until Feb 29, 2016. If you are interested in acting towards a solution to this problem you identify, please consider reading and commenting on it this weekend. You can do it online by going to www.regulations.gov and searching for the eDocket number USCIS-2015-0008 [3]. [1]: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_memo_business_actions_1.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120... [2] USCIS Seeks Comments on Proposed Rule Affecting Certain Employment-Based Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Visa Programs - https://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-seeks-comments-proposed-rule-affecting-certain-employment-based-immigrant-and-nonimmigrant-visa-programs https://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-seeks-comments-proposed-rul... [3] http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=USCIS-2015-0008 http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=USCIS-2015-0008
- tdeck 11y ago
  > Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company. While I agree that people on an H-1B visa shouldn't be tied to one particular employer, I don't think this will solve the problem at all. The lottery model will always unfairly advantage these outsourcing companies precisely because all they care about is billable hours, and the people working there are interchangeable. That's why they can afford to be relatively indiscriminate by throwing thousands of visa applications at the wall and hiring whoever sticks. Product companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft who have to actually care which individuals they hire are always going to be at a disadvantage in a lottery - their hiring bar reduces the pool of visa applicants and gives them fewer tickets. That doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers at these companies, but as a whole the system perversely incentivizes quantity over quality.
akg_67 11y ago
An auction based on highest wages will be the worst thing that can be done to H-1B. You may have only technology/CS viewpoint here with this proposal. There are lot of other industries that use H-1B. At one time, I was one of such H-1B holder. Do you really want to import foreigners for high paying jobs? Do you really want to starve low margin industries that are unable to pay high wages but need specialized locally unavailable skills? The skill shortage doesn't necessarily equates with high wages, for example shortage of skills needed for short term. One example, a COBOL programmer needed for a cobol to xyz conversion project. Using any one criteria as qualification is recipe for disaster and gaming the system. An appropriate process should look at multiple items both from hiring org perspective and the fit of a foreigner for hiring org as well as industry and the country. A point based system that evaluates suitability of employer and non-immigrant candidate might be better approach, a system somewhat like what Canada uses for permanent residency. In the end, either you import foreigners or you export jobs. If there is an arbitrage opportunity, it will be exploited by someone somewhere.

hwstar 11y ago

I agree, and these people should be offered a green card as soon as they start with the employer.

tosseraccount 11y ago
Put the corporations in charge of immigration? H1B a program is for special access for tech firms to nonresident alien guest workers.
dominotw 11y ago
>should be offered a green card as soon as they start with the employer. they can jump ship to a big company like google after your small startup went through the hassle of lawyers/visa fees/ govt fees ect.
- hwstar 11y ago
  Maybe you should have paid them as much as what they would make at Google then. Having to compete on salary,benefits, and working environment is the true meaning of an open and free market, not a rigged market as the current H-1B system is.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Then whoever poaches them can just offer salary + cost of getting the visa. It's always cheaper to freeload off the guy who paid for the visa. The right solution is that if google or whoever hires an H1B 1 year into a 3 year visa, they need to pay for 2/3 of the cost of the visa.
    - hwstar 11y ago
      Google in a hypothetical case would then offer a lower salary to cover the visa cost, and/or deem it too much trouble to bring the H-1B on board. This leaves the H-1B worker operating in a suboptimal market. The issue of visa fees does not confront the H-1B employee, only the employer which sponsored them in the first place. Besides it should cost slighly more to bring in an H-1B than current parket rates. Maybe then more natives would be hired.
      - yummyfajitas 11y ago
        Why would it be beneficial if more (extremely wealthy) natives were hired rather than (extremely poor) immigrants? Why would you want to use trade barriers to increase inequality?
        hwstar 11y ago
        Is should be slightly more expensive to bring in immigrants because one of the governments missions voters expect is to ensure that there is a job market where there are good well-paying jobs, not a market where it is flooded with immigrants that have driven down wages. Having American citizens and green card holders idled or having to work in a lower paying job is not a true free market because only the employers are benefiting. Once the domestic pool of potential employers has dried up, then employers will bring in the slightly more expensive foreign labor.
joe_the_user 11y ago
Good response. And of course the objections to your idea highlight the point that hb1s have generally not been about finding people with unique skills but rather about getting cheap labor on a tight leash.

dominotw 11y ago

>In my opinion, the real fix is to make the H-1B 'lottery' into an auction. Wouldn't that punish small startups by favoring big co's like google/ms?

tadfisher 11y ago
It depends; are small startups going through the regulatory hoops to hire H-1Bs at the low end of the engineering pay scale? My opinion is, no, most are not doing this.
- dominotw 11y ago
  People choose to work for things like equity/mission ect. Sorting people purely by salary very counterintuitive.
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    It's not counter-intuitive, it's textbook market economics. Your compensation package is your compensation package. You don't get to tell the government they should issue a visa so you can pay someone in missionary zeal.
  - sremani 11y ago
    Unless you have numbers to show about usage of H1-B in start-up and how much share it is of the overall H1-B, its a moot point. It is such a high burden on an early strat-up to hire a H1-B and only post Series A, H1-B makes some sense. In the grand scheme of things, I like the market oriented auction, that will at least eliminate the rent-seekers who are clogging the pipeline.
    - hkmurakami 11y ago
      What I've seen based on friends' startups that brought him in people via H1B at seed stage is that I f you already have someone in mind, the time and cost of H1B is much smaller than the time and cost to find a similarly qualified applicant in the states when you are a young company that many of said candidates will find to be an unattractive option to them.

shas3 11y ago

An auction is impractical. It will shaft smaller companies. Even in larger companies, the hiring decisions are based on group/division budgets. Who decides how high to go on the bidding in a big company? In a small company, where will you raise the capital for such auctions? How will it impact wages?

joe_the_user 11y ago
The point is that hb1 aren't supposed to be about bringing down wages, now are they?
sremani 11y ago
Is it fair for a UPenn grad with a good offer to lose out lottery to oh-so-nobody from TCS. Auction is a lot fairer than the current situation.
Can_Not 11y ago
I think the opposite is true. Smaller companies will be forced to only hire high quality rockstars from international sources. Owners will no longer think they can save 20k/year in entry level labor (at the hidden costs of 200k/year in productivity, employee morale, etc..).

dj_doh 11y ago

I second that. Change lottery to auction based on highest wages. Also, don't bind the employee to the employer.

Can_Not 11y ago
I like the idea of the auction because it is essentially where the company says "We are importing the best talent and we are willing to pay extra for it" and it also says "Local candidates are so inadequate that it would cost more to train one." in a way that's simply useless to lie about. The current system encourages my boss to buy extra lottery tickets at the lowest price so he can be surprised later when productivity, morale of local employees, and quality ratio to labor cost is at rock bottom. Now about being unfair to startups... If the auction somehow doesn't account for offering ownership/equity (which seems like an obscure rare situation anyways), that's clearly a better problem to have than a market flooded with cheap labor that still needs regular training, in addition to language training and cultural training.

mavelikara 11y ago

> stopping companies like Cognizant and Infosys that game the immigration system by applying for the cheapest H-1Bs possible Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company - something along the lines of "If an employee spends N months at a company on H-1B, not get into trouble with the law, pay taxes and be a productive member of the community, then that person can work at any similar job without being tied to the employer". Facebook, Google or Microsoft are not doing H-1Bs so they can trap those employees into working at low wages - Cognizant and Infosys are. Removing the power these firms have over the employee is the only true way to reform H-1B. President Obama's executive action plans did state intent along those lines [1], but those seem to be torpedoed by vested interests. There is currently a draft rule from USCIS titled "Retention of EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 Immigrant Workers and Program Improvements Affecting High-Skilled Nonimmigrant Workers" [2] open for comments until Feb 29, 2016. If you are interested in acting towards a solution to this problem you identify, please consider reading and commenting on it this weekend. You can do it online by going to www.regulations.gov and searching for the eDocket number USCIS-2015-0008 [3]. [1]: https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120_memo_business_actions_1.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/14_1120... [2] USCIS Seeks Comments on Proposed Rule Affecting Certain Employment-Based Immigrant and Nonimmigrant Visa Programs - https://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-seeks-comments-proposed-rule-affecting-certain-employment-based-immigrant-and-nonimmigrant-visa-programs https://www.uscis.gov/news/uscis-seeks-comments-proposed-rul... [3] http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=USCIS-2015-0008 http://www.regulations.gov/#!docketDetail;D=USCIS-2015-0008

tdeck 11y ago
> Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company. While I agree that people on an H-1B visa shouldn't be tied to one particular employer, I don't think this will solve the problem at all. The lottery model will always unfairly advantage these outsourcing companies precisely because all they care about is billable hours, and the people working there are interchangeable. That's why they can afford to be relatively indiscriminate by throwing thousands of visa applications at the wall and hiring whoever sticks. Product companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft who have to actually care which individuals they hire are always going to be at a disadvantage in a lottery - their hiring bar reduces the pool of visa applicants and gives them fewer tickets. That doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers at these companies, but as a whole the system perversely incentivizes quantity over quality.

akg_67 11y ago

An auction based on highest wages will be the worst thing that can be done to H-1B. You may have only technology/CS viewpoint here with this proposal. There are lot of other industries that use H-1B. At one time, I was one of such H-1B holder. Do you really want to import foreigners for high paying jobs? Do you really want to starve low margin industries that are unable to pay high wages but need specialized locally unavailable skills? The skill shortage doesn't necessarily equates with high wages, for example shortage of skills needed for short term. One example, a COBOL programmer needed for a cobol to xyz conversion project. Using any one criteria as qualification is recipe for disaster and gaming the system. An appropriate process should look at multiple items both from hiring org perspective and the fit of a foreigner for hiring org as well as industry and the country. A point based system that evaluates suitability of employer and non-immigrant candidate might be better approach, a system somewhat like what Canada uses for permanent residency. In the end, either you import foreigners or you export jobs. If there is an arbitrage opportunity, it will be exploited by someone somewhere.