8 ms·

A lot of consultancy firms abuse this system, BUT: not all H1Bs are "cheap labor". If you are not American and want to work in a tech company in the US, you don

A lot of consultancy firms abuse this system, BUT: not all H1Bs are "cheap labor". If you are not American and want to work in a tech company in the US, you don't have much choice: 99% of the time, you have to get an H-1B. I once got a position in a very interesting startup in Palo Alto (with a salary significantly above average in the region), and the company was thrilled to have me join them (because there really is a shortage of candidates in my field)... until we learned that I didn't get my H-1B. It's a lottery, the most stupid way to pick who gets to enter you country. American tech companies are so frustrated with this system that they often build offices in Europe just to be able to recruit local talent. Many companies moved to Canada because the immigration law is more flexible there. It baffles me that some people believe most non-American employees are just "cheap labor". There are smart people on the other side of the pond as well!

RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago
The way to fix this and to make sure that the H1-B is used for its intended purpose (to bring in extraordinary talent that is not present in the US) and not just for cheap labor, is instead of a lottery, to give it based on salary. The position that offers the highest salary gets an H1-B visa, then the next highest and so on until the quota of H1-B visas is used up. How much a company is willing to pay is probably the best indication of the supply and demand for the talent.
- ones_and_zeros 10y ago
  Who sets the quota? And how do we ensure the quota isn't lobbied to be resized to the point where it allows cheap labor?
  - Shivetya 10y ago
    what is going to prevent even further off shoring then? Software development, support, and even project management, are all easy candidates for off shoring and with ever improving conferencing tools, change management, and similar, its bound that there will be more competition. So either the cost come down because they live and work here or the costs drop faster as the work simply goes off shore. Far too many in the tech industry are first to jump at competition in their areas of expertise but mock those concerned about workers similar to those at Carrier whose jobs are moving to Mexico as either progress or being non competitive
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      The terrible experiences that companies are having at offshoring? I mean, there's a reason why they're bringing in the H1Bs, or paying Tata, Infosys, et al for those consultants instead of doing the offshoring in the first place.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    Peg the minimum to some sort of standardized wage / poverty / CoL metric. Salaries being paid to H1-Bs rise overly much, quota increases. Salaries fall, quota shrinks. It's not overly hard to design a compensation-based system that guarantees use for only extraordinary talent, because the current abuse is solely because low salaries are still possible.
  - 1024core 10y ago
    The quota is set by Congress. It was 65K for many years, but I hear during the bubble it was temporarily increased.
    - davidw 10y ago
      Sounds like a 'magic number' to me. What's it based on?
      - SilverCurve 10y ago
        It's Congress's work, so it's likely a compromise between parties.
        davidw 10y ago
        Which means it's entirely a number pulled out of someone's ass rather than anything related to reality. http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number-of-immigrants.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
      - st3v3r 10y ago
        A number that sounds good. There isn't much in the way of reasoning behind it.
    - maverick_iceman 10y ago
      65K open to everyone and 20K for those who possess US masters degree or higher.
- LukaAl 10y ago
  No, the Visa you are referring to is the O-1 Visa, it is much more difficult and expensive to obtain, but it is not subject to Visa CAP (I know it well, I'm on O-1). H-1B is for specialty worker, and they are not defined by exceptionality but by the fact that they possess a qualification for a specific job, there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary. We could agree that the behavior of consulting companies like Tata or Infosys seems like cheating (basically, send thousands of application hoping that a good percentage succeed). But they are hiring for positions that require a degree people qualified; it is difficult to hire for that kind of position (primarily because you could make more money with the same qualification in different companies); and they are paying market rate salaries (or at least, that's what it is certified!). I could agree that the current H-1B Visa system is broken, but I'm not sure that fixing it just for the perspective of highly paid Silicon Valley Bro is the best solution for the US as a whole. What I'm saying is: are we sure that this kind of cheap specialty labor is not useful for the US society as a whole? E.g.: are we sure that, if System Integration companies have to pay engineers a much higher salary, they will be able to provide prices low enough for other company to pay it? And if few companies could pay for their services, this wouldn't impact their efficiency on one side and the B2B software market on the other side? I'm not defending the violators nor supporting the "cheap H1B" practices. Just saying that the world is a little bit more complex than that.
  - praxulus 10y ago
    >there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary That's not quite right. If you can't hire somebody at salary $X, then $X is not the market rate for someone in that position. The language I've heard is "prevailing wage", which can be less than the "market rate" if workers aren't making full use of their bargaining power.
    - arachnids 10y ago
      This doesn't make sense to me, CS skills aren't a big fungible set that allow people to move around freely. I have a particular set of skills that I've honed over several years. These skills make me valuable at my specific job, but completely unemployable as a databases person, or an SRE, or a distributed systems specialist. It doesn't matter how much money they offer, they can't hire me because I don't have the skills. It's perfectly possible for subsets of the market to grow demand faster than the population responds by training for these skills (say by new targeted degree programs in school). You're left with the choice of offering other native employees a pay bump to do something they don't have the skills for or want to do, or bring in foreign talent that is trained and interested, this is not a hard call at all. The problem is that "STEM" is a ridiculously broad classification to try and capture this need, clearly not all science/tech jobs are spiking in demand. At the same time, it's probably a bad idea to have the government specify sub-quotas within, say, software engineering. Government intervention like this, letting bureaucrats make arbitrary decisions on things they don't have expertise about is how you get bad rules.
- serge2k 10y ago
  > to bring in extraordinary talent that is not present in the US I don't think that is the standard.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
Not all H1-B's are cheap labor, but the plurality are. We all know how to fix the system (auction the visas by salary), but the abusers block the political will, as does the fact that Congress believes in cheap labor as a principle.
- GreaterFool 10y ago
  There's a trivial fix to the whole system: free the employees. As long as employees are completely tied to their employer wages will be lower. What else do you expect? Forcing employers to pay a higher salary is a half-measure. I imagine they'd still prefer H1B's over locals for one simple reasons: you hire a H1B employee and they're gonna stick around for a few years. Even if the job sucks. It's worth to pay a bit more and significantly reduce turnover. I'd love to see actual turnover stats of H1B employees versus American employees. I think it's a huge driving factor in hiring decisions, especially at giants like Facebook or Google.
  - GreaterFool 10y ago
    edit: food for thought: think about Google and Go. Go is by design simple easy and boring. That's step 1. Now you need hundreds of people to write Go. Step 2: hire H1Bs. You're bored of writing simple code in Go day in day out? Well, we pay you well so get over it and you can't leave anyway even if you wanted. Step 3: programmers as a commodity.
  - hatred 10y ago
    > you hire a H1B employee and they're gonna stick around for a few years. Even if the job sucks. Can you elaborate a bit more on this? H1b's are free to change jobs. There is nothing that prevents them from doing so.
    - vskarine 10y ago
      Green card process prevents it. I changed jobs 3 times on H1B and my green card process reset every time. It's been 7 years and I am still waiting for green card, but if I just stayed with my first employer then I'd already have it years ago. Most ppl stick around to get green card and I've seen employers taking advantage of this.
supercanuck 10y ago
>It baffles me that some people believe most non-American employees are just "cheap labor". It is not a "belief" because they are cheaper. Everytime this topic comes up, a bunch of Ph.D's are shocked, SHOCKED! to learn that there are companies abusing the system and to learn that Infosys, Wipro and Tata are the leading H1-B Sponsors with an average salary of ~$73,000 http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx
- khare_ashwini 10y ago
  Even $73,000 is high end if you include all outsourcing firms. Here's some writeup I did which compared silicon valley tech firms v/s outsourcing firms: http://ashwinikhare.in/tech-firms-guest-visa/ http://ashwinikhare.in/tech-firms-guest-visa/
- RealGeek 10y ago
  Most of the abusers of H-1B are such body shops and consultants. A simple solution is to disallow consultants from sponsoring H-1B. Only the direct employer should be able to sponsor H-1B. One of my friend was recruited by Tata in India, and then sent to work for Citibank in US. His visa was sponsored by Tata, he gets his paycheck from Tata ($72,000), but he works for Citibank in their office. Citibank pays Tata more than the market salary, and Tata's business model is arbitrage. Citibank could directly hire him at market salary and cut off the middle men. They are not just abusing H-1B, but L1 visa too.
- surds 10y ago
  I have worked at one of the above mentioned companies and I have seen that A LOT of people would be interested in getting to work here at ~73000, which might be lesser than average but works fine for them. Also, they probably have several other considerations in this matter: - Get the work experience of working in a different country at a client location that means more responsibility, more learning, etc. - Get the option to travel and explore another country, and the job salary covers for the expenses. Now, usually, the role and responsibilities are that of a technical or functional consultant. But they are not an individual employed directly by the US company. Their employer, one of the above mentioned companies or one of the several ones out there, is contracted. Note that I haven't worked here in US at any company while being an employee of a consultancy. I believe that the US based company where the individual works might be charged at a higher hourly rate but only a certain percentage of it makes to the employee and thus they may have lesser salaries. I would love to have this belief clarified, if anyone has any input. All that being said, I agree that the abuse of H1-B sucks. Though it is all too common outside the bay area. Haven't come across any instances here yet.
mcnawoh 10y ago
As an H-1B worker in Palo Alto (who also had to struggle through the ridiculous immigration process for almost two years), I'm being treated extremely well by my employer. They went out of their way to get me through the long-winded and expensive H-1B application process. I get compensated well, and I'm treated as any other valued employee. While I recognize that a lot of ambitious and driven engineers from abroad have a similar experience to mine in the Bay Area, I'm also not blind to the fact that our situation is simply not representative of the typical H-1B worker. The incentive structures surrounding the immigration process are not set up to effectively prevent abuse and exploitation of cheap labor. "Importing" desperate and often undereducated workers is cost-effective enough to happen at a fairly uncomfortable scale, to the detriment of the workers themselves and the industry as a whole. Immigration is obviously complex for a whole host of reasons, and there's a lot of countries that struggle with (or outright abuse) that process. Of course, H-1B engineers in the U.S. are nowhere near as mistreated as migrant workers in many other nations — including wealthy ones — but it's still a commonly exploited system here. Those of us who have a relatively dignified experience in this mess are not near the middle of the curve. I'm not familiar enough to know which nations get it "right", if any, but there certainly are lessons to be learned by looking elsewhere.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
chrisper 10y ago
So, what did you do then? Working in Europe? I was considering doing the H1B route, but decided to not to bother. Probably, will just go back to Europe and work there.
xen2xen1 10y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/lawsuit-claims-disney-colluded-to-replace-us-workers-with-immigrants.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/lawsuit-claims-disney-c... Disney laid off their Disneyland I.T. staff and forced them to train immigrants beforehand. Stories like this is what unnerves so many people and causes the backlash. Ignore it at your peril. Before this I would have agreed with you. After...
- civilian 10y ago
  A company ought to be able to choose who they employ. What makes Americans more deserving of an I.T. job than a team in India? You're not thinking like a global citizen.
  - jazzyk 10y ago
    A company may choose who they want to employ selecting from the pool of the citizens and legal residents of the country. Works like this everywhere in the world, why should the US be different? If we want to go global, then: - All kinds of jobs should be open to imports, not just software (let's start with importing a few CEOs from India/China, judging by the outsized salaries, there apparently is a severe shortage of CEOs) - Let's open up all countries to everyone. Most countries' labor markets are not easily accessible to foreigners.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    "You're not thinking like a global citizen." No. Because I'm not a global citizen. I'm a citizen of the US. And it is much more in my interest that my countrymen have good jobs, than someone halfway around the world.
  - ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
    If the company is hiring someone on-site in America, they should not be able to just circumvent local labor markets thanks to visa loopholes that were put in place by their crooked crony politicians. That American company succeeded in part because of the infrastructure, security, and society that has been set up and paid for by American tax dollars. Why should anyone support a system that lets companies take all the tax payer funded benefits of being based in America, yet gives nothing back in return (much like the current tax code)? If the employee is living in America, these companies should not be allowed to abuse the visa system.
1024core 10y ago
> It's a lottery, the most stupid way to pick who gets to enter you country. Instead of a random lottery, rank the applications by salary (decreasing order) and take the top N. Everyone wins: company has to pay more, it ensures that the visas go to really hard-to-fill jobs, and workers get more.
- ecnal 10y ago
  Alternately, remove the need for highly skilled workers to get visas entirely, thereby completely preventing companies from abusing the system.
- serge2k 10y ago
  No, big Silicon valley tech companies win.
  - 1024core 10y ago
    By that token, they win anyways (even with American workers) because they pay more. And why is anyone entitled to cheap labor??
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago
  Well, Infosys, Wipro and Tata would lose in that scheme. Whether they ought to win or not isn't a matter of debate here, but it is important to a lot of people.
- anpk 10y ago
  Someone in texas would definitely lose out because their salary will be much much lower than the bay area. This doesn't factor in cost of living.
  - 1024core 10y ago
    > This doesn't factor in cost of living. The more "factors" you throw into the equation, the more people will find ways to game the system.
RealGeek 10y ago
Tens of thousands of foreign students come to US every year for education, majority of them are among the top of talent pool. They have to be top performers in their country to be able to get university admission and visa to come to US. After they graduate, if they want to stay and work in US; their only option is H-1B. Even they are subjected to the stupid lottery system.
khare_ashwini 10y ago
>99% of the time, you have to get an H-1B. Not if you are a citizen of: Canada : TN Singapore, Chile : H1-B1 Australia : E-3 Thanks to trade agreements
- jensvdh 10y ago
  I wish Europe had a trade agreement with the US like this :(
wrsh07 10y ago
Not that this is a good excuse, but for some Americans, their primary contact with immigrants is news about those coming up from the southern border. I learned a lot more about immigration law after starting at a bigger tech company where a lot of my colleagues are immigrants.
serge2k 10y ago
It's especially bad when a lot of the reason for lotteries every year is shitty consulting companies flooding applications. Then they use the H-1B workers they get to help them displace American workers. Meanwhile people who are just trying to legitimately immigrate to the US and join the workforce without really displacing anyone get to hear about how they are shitty underpaid foreigners who are hurting America with their H-1B visas. :/
PopsiclePete 10y ago
Former H-B myself. I was actually the most expensive member on the team. All 3 devs had the same base salary and bonus structure but they had to cover immigration lawyer fees for me on top of everything else. In general, Americans' view on immigration is extremely skewed. Most people I've spoken to are surprised I'm not a citizen and are even more baffled to learn how little sympathy I have for illegal immigrants, since to them, all immigrants are "illegal", there must be no other way to get into this country! Few know what a Green Card is, or what an H1B is, or what other pathways there are for living here - they just assume that I must already be American, since all immigrants are poor abused people from south of the border, and I don't look the part.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago

The way to fix this and to make sure that the H1-B is used for its intended purpose (to bring in extraordinary talent that is not present in the US) and not just for cheap labor, is instead of a lottery, to give it based on salary. The position that offers the highest salary gets an H1-B visa, then the next highest and so on until the quota of H1-B visas is used up. How much a company is willing to pay is probably the best indication of the supply and demand for the talent.

ones_and_zeros 10y ago
Who sets the quota? And how do we ensure the quota isn't lobbied to be resized to the point where it allows cheap labor?
- Shivetya 10y ago
  what is going to prevent even further off shoring then? Software development, support, and even project management, are all easy candidates for off shoring and with ever improving conferencing tools, change management, and similar, its bound that there will be more competition. So either the cost come down because they live and work here or the costs drop faster as the work simply goes off shore. Far too many in the tech industry are first to jump at competition in their areas of expertise but mock those concerned about workers similar to those at Carrier whose jobs are moving to Mexico as either progress or being non competitive
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    The terrible experiences that companies are having at offshoring? I mean, there's a reason why they're bringing in the H1Bs, or paying Tata, Infosys, et al for those consultants instead of doing the offshoring in the first place.
- ethbro 10y ago
  Peg the minimum to some sort of standardized wage / poverty / CoL metric. Salaries being paid to H1-Bs rise overly much, quota increases. Salaries fall, quota shrinks. It's not overly hard to design a compensation-based system that guarantees use for only extraordinary talent, because the current abuse is solely because low salaries are still possible.
- 1024core 10y ago
  The quota is set by Congress. It was 65K for many years, but I hear during the bubble it was temporarily increased.
  - davidw 10y ago
    Sounds like a 'magic number' to me. What's it based on?
    - SilverCurve 10y ago
      It's Congress's work, so it's likely a compromise between parties.
      - davidw 10y ago
        Which means it's entirely a number pulled out of someone's ass rather than anything related to reality. http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number-of-immigrants.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
    - st3v3r 10y ago
      A number that sounds good. There isn't much in the way of reasoning behind it.
  - maverick_iceman 10y ago
    65K open to everyone and 20K for those who possess US masters degree or higher.
LukaAl 10y ago
No, the Visa you are referring to is the O-1 Visa, it is much more difficult and expensive to obtain, but it is not subject to Visa CAP (I know it well, I'm on O-1). H-1B is for specialty worker, and they are not defined by exceptionality but by the fact that they possess a qualification for a specific job, there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary. We could agree that the behavior of consulting companies like Tata or Infosys seems like cheating (basically, send thousands of application hoping that a good percentage succeed). But they are hiring for positions that require a degree people qualified; it is difficult to hire for that kind of position (primarily because you could make more money with the same qualification in different companies); and they are paying market rate salaries (or at least, that's what it is certified!). I could agree that the current H-1B Visa system is broken, but I'm not sure that fixing it just for the perspective of highly paid Silicon Valley Bro is the best solution for the US as a whole. What I'm saying is: are we sure that this kind of cheap specialty labor is not useful for the US society as a whole? E.g.: are we sure that, if System Integration companies have to pay engineers a much higher salary, they will be able to provide prices low enough for other company to pay it? And if few companies could pay for their services, this wouldn't impact their efficiency on one side and the B2B software market on the other side? I'm not defending the violators nor supporting the "cheap H1B" practices. Just saying that the world is a little bit more complex than that.
- praxulus 10y ago
  >there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary That's not quite right. If you can't hire somebody at salary $X, then $X is not the market rate for someone in that position. The language I've heard is "prevailing wage", which can be less than the "market rate" if workers aren't making full use of their bargaining power.
  - arachnids 10y ago
    This doesn't make sense to me, CS skills aren't a big fungible set that allow people to move around freely. I have a particular set of skills that I've honed over several years. These skills make me valuable at my specific job, but completely unemployable as a databases person, or an SRE, or a distributed systems specialist. It doesn't matter how much money they offer, they can't hire me because I don't have the skills. It's perfectly possible for subsets of the market to grow demand faster than the population responds by training for these skills (say by new targeted degree programs in school). You're left with the choice of offering other native employees a pay bump to do something they don't have the skills for or want to do, or bring in foreign talent that is trained and interested, this is not a hard call at all. The problem is that "STEM" is a ridiculously broad classification to try and capture this need, clearly not all science/tech jobs are spiking in demand. At the same time, it's probably a bad idea to have the government specify sub-quotas within, say, software engineering. Government intervention like this, letting bureaucrats make arbitrary decisions on things they don't have expertise about is how you get bad rules.
serge2k 10y ago
> to bring in extraordinary talent that is not present in the US I don't think that is the standard.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

Not all H1-B's are cheap labor, but the plurality are. We all know how to fix the system (auction the visas by salary), but the abusers block the political will, as does the fact that Congress believes in cheap labor as a principle.

GreaterFool 10y ago
There's a trivial fix to the whole system: free the employees. As long as employees are completely tied to their employer wages will be lower. What else do you expect? Forcing employers to pay a higher salary is a half-measure. I imagine they'd still prefer H1B's over locals for one simple reasons: you hire a H1B employee and they're gonna stick around for a few years. Even if the job sucks. It's worth to pay a bit more and significantly reduce turnover. I'd love to see actual turnover stats of H1B employees versus American employees. I think it's a huge driving factor in hiring decisions, especially at giants like Facebook or Google.
- GreaterFool 10y ago
  edit: food for thought: think about Google and Go. Go is by design simple easy and boring. That's step 1. Now you need hundreds of people to write Go. Step 2: hire H1Bs. You're bored of writing simple code in Go day in day out? Well, we pay you well so get over it and you can't leave anyway even if you wanted. Step 3: programmers as a commodity.
- hatred 10y ago
  > you hire a H1B employee and they're gonna stick around for a few years. Even if the job sucks. Can you elaborate a bit more on this? H1b's are free to change jobs. There is nothing that prevents them from doing so.
  - vskarine 10y ago
    Green card process prevents it. I changed jobs 3 times on H1B and my green card process reset every time. It's been 7 years and I am still waiting for green card, but if I just stayed with my first employer then I'd already have it years ago. Most ppl stick around to get green card and I've seen employers taking advantage of this.

supercanuck 10y ago

>It baffles me that some people believe most non-American employees are just "cheap labor". It is not a "belief" because they are cheaper. Everytime this topic comes up, a bunch of Ph.D's are shocked, SHOCKED! to learn that there are companies abusing the system and to learn that Infosys, Wipro and Tata are the leading H1-B Sponsors with an average salary of ~$73,000 http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

khare_ashwini 10y ago
Even $73,000 is high end if you include all outsourcing firms. Here's some writeup I did which compared silicon valley tech firms v/s outsourcing firms: http://ashwinikhare.in/tech-firms-guest-visa/ http://ashwinikhare.in/tech-firms-guest-visa/
RealGeek 10y ago
Most of the abusers of H-1B are such body shops and consultants. A simple solution is to disallow consultants from sponsoring H-1B. Only the direct employer should be able to sponsor H-1B. One of my friend was recruited by Tata in India, and then sent to work for Citibank in US. His visa was sponsored by Tata, he gets his paycheck from Tata ($72,000), but he works for Citibank in their office. Citibank pays Tata more than the market salary, and Tata's business model is arbitrage. Citibank could directly hire him at market salary and cut off the middle men. They are not just abusing H-1B, but L1 visa too.
surds 10y ago
I have worked at one of the above mentioned companies and I have seen that A LOT of people would be interested in getting to work here at ~73000, which might be lesser than average but works fine for them. Also, they probably have several other considerations in this matter: - Get the work experience of working in a different country at a client location that means more responsibility, more learning, etc. - Get the option to travel and explore another country, and the job salary covers for the expenses. Now, usually, the role and responsibilities are that of a technical or functional consultant. But they are not an individual employed directly by the US company. Their employer, one of the above mentioned companies or one of the several ones out there, is contracted. Note that I haven't worked here in US at any company while being an employee of a consultancy. I believe that the US based company where the individual works might be charged at a higher hourly rate but only a certain percentage of it makes to the employee and thus they may have lesser salaries. I would love to have this belief clarified, if anyone has any input. All that being said, I agree that the abuse of H1-B sucks. Though it is all too common outside the bay area. Haven't come across any instances here yet.

mcnawoh 10y ago

As an H-1B worker in Palo Alto (who also had to struggle through the ridiculous immigration process for almost two years), I'm being treated extremely well by my employer. They went out of their way to get me through the long-winded and expensive H-1B application process. I get compensated well, and I'm treated as any other valued employee. While I recognize that a lot of ambitious and driven engineers from abroad have a similar experience to mine in the Bay Area, I'm also not blind to the fact that our situation is simply not representative of the typical H-1B worker. The incentive structures surrounding the immigration process are not set up to effectively prevent abuse and exploitation of cheap labor. "Importing" desperate and often undereducated workers is cost-effective enough to happen at a fairly uncomfortable scale, to the detriment of the workers themselves and the industry as a whole. Immigration is obviously complex for a whole host of reasons, and there's a lot of countries that struggle with (or outright abuse) that process. Of course, H-1B engineers in the U.S. are nowhere near as mistreated as migrant workers in many other nations — including wealthy ones — but it's still a commonly exploited system here. Those of us who have a relatively dignified experience in this mess are not near the middle of the curve. I'm not familiar enough to know which nations get it "right", if any, but there certainly are lessons to be learned by looking elsewhere.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

chrisper 10y ago

So, what did you do then? Working in Europe? I was considering doing the H1B route, but decided to not to bother. Probably, will just go back to Europe and work there.

xen2xen1 10y ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/lawsuit-claims-disney-colluded-to-replace-us-workers-with-immigrants.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/26/us/lawsuit-claims-disney-c... Disney laid off their Disneyland I.T. staff and forced them to train immigrants beforehand. Stories like this is what unnerves so many people and causes the backlash. Ignore it at your peril. Before this I would have agreed with you. After...

civilian 10y ago
A company ought to be able to choose who they employ. What makes Americans more deserving of an I.T. job than a team in India? You're not thinking like a global citizen.
- jazzyk 10y ago
  A company may choose who they want to employ selecting from the pool of the citizens and legal residents of the country. Works like this everywhere in the world, why should the US be different? If we want to go global, then: - All kinds of jobs should be open to imports, not just software (let's start with importing a few CEOs from India/China, judging by the outsized salaries, there apparently is a severe shortage of CEOs) - Let's open up all countries to everyone. Most countries' labor markets are not easily accessible to foreigners.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  "You're not thinking like a global citizen." No. Because I'm not a global citizen. I'm a citizen of the US. And it is much more in my interest that my countrymen have good jobs, than someone halfway around the world.
- ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
  If the company is hiring someone on-site in America, they should not be able to just circumvent local labor markets thanks to visa loopholes that were put in place by their crooked crony politicians. That American company succeeded in part because of the infrastructure, security, and society that has been set up and paid for by American tax dollars. Why should anyone support a system that lets companies take all the tax payer funded benefits of being based in America, yet gives nothing back in return (much like the current tax code)? If the employee is living in America, these companies should not be allowed to abuse the visa system.

1024core 10y ago

> It's a lottery, the most stupid way to pick who gets to enter you country. Instead of a random lottery, rank the applications by salary (decreasing order) and take the top N. Everyone wins: company has to pay more, it ensures that the visas go to really hard-to-fill jobs, and workers get more.

ecnal 10y ago
Alternately, remove the need for highly skilled workers to get visas entirely, thereby completely preventing companies from abusing the system.
serge2k 10y ago
No, big Silicon valley tech companies win.
- 1024core 10y ago
  By that token, they win anyways (even with American workers) because they pay more. And why is anyone entitled to cheap labor??
LeifCarrotson 10y ago
Well, Infosys, Wipro and Tata would lose in that scheme. Whether they ought to win or not isn't a matter of debate here, but it is important to a lot of people.
anpk 10y ago
Someone in texas would definitely lose out because their salary will be much much lower than the bay area. This doesn't factor in cost of living.
- 1024core 10y ago
  > This doesn't factor in cost of living. The more "factors" you throw into the equation, the more people will find ways to game the system.

RealGeek 10y ago

Tens of thousands of foreign students come to US every year for education, majority of them are among the top of talent pool. They have to be top performers in their country to be able to get university admission and visa to come to US. After they graduate, if they want to stay and work in US; their only option is H-1B. Even they are subjected to the stupid lottery system.

khare_ashwini 10y ago

>99% of the time, you have to get an H-1B. Not if you are a citizen of: Canada : TN Singapore, Chile : H1-B1 Australia : E-3 Thanks to trade agreements

jensvdh 10y ago
I wish Europe had a trade agreement with the US like this :(

wrsh07 10y ago

Not that this is a good excuse, but for some Americans, their primary contact with immigrants is news about those coming up from the southern border. I learned a lot more about immigration law after starting at a bigger tech company where a lot of my colleagues are immigrants.

serge2k 10y ago

It's especially bad when a lot of the reason for lotteries every year is shitty consulting companies flooding applications. Then they use the H-1B workers they get to help them displace American workers. Meanwhile people who are just trying to legitimately immigrate to the US and join the workforce without really displacing anyone get to hear about how they are shitty underpaid foreigners who are hurting America with their H-1B visas. :/

PopsiclePete 10y ago

Former H-B myself. I was actually the most expensive member on the team. All 3 devs had the same base salary and bonus structure but they had to cover immigration lawyer fees for me on top of everything else. In general, Americans' view on immigration is extremely skewed. Most people I've spoken to are surprised I'm not a citizen and are even more baffled to learn how little sympathy I have for illegal immigrants, since to them, all immigrants are "illegal", there must be no other way to get into this country! Few know what a Green Card is, or what an H1B is, or what other pathways there are for living here - they just assume that I must already be American, since all immigrants are poor abused people from south of the border, and I don't look the part.