11 ms·

Legislation would restrict H-1B visas

76 points by lnguyen 10y ago

arenaninja 10y ago
> employers can be exempted from that paperwork if the potential employee holds a master’s degree or is paid at least $60,000 annually. Wow, I wasn't aware the bar was so low. Given the recent brazen misuse of the program I hope this goes through
- Clubber 10y ago
  The salaries listed for a senior programmer that gauge how much H1Bs are paid are obnoxiously low. Last time I looked, I was shocked. When the average salaries listed are lower than anyone other than junior programmers, they get H1Bs for cheaper. Also, the companies can hire a person as a front line support and pay them accordingly, but actually have them doing system development or design. Big businesses in the macro sense, seem willing to do anything to cheat the system to drive down costs and subsequently wages. I do think raising the cap will help.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
anupshinde 10y ago
Misuse must definitely stop. But wouldn't this force businesses to outsource to offshore offices... Losing talent, losing jobs to other country and losing out on taxes. And the jobs that cannot be offshored would require higher/complex skillset
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  The H1-B program allows employers to hire foreign employees, at below-market rates, by limiting those employees' options to compete freely on the US domestic labour markets. Employment is an area in which employers already have a natural advantage, a point noted (and explained in detail) 240 years ago by Adam Smith. Offshoring introduces additional challenges to management -- it's simply easier to manage a workforce who rolls into the office and is locally present, though yes, remote (or occasional from-home) management is possible. If a company wants to pay offshore-wages, then it can employ offshore talent, offshore, and incur the offshore management and logistics hassles. If it wants to hire domestic labour, it should do so at local labour rates. If foreign workers are brought to domestic markets, allow them full mobility between employers. Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program is to use one class of restricted-rights workers (the visa holders) to depress domestic wages through threat of a cheaper, effectively indentured workforce. This has been clearly evident for years, and eloquently argued by Norman Matloff of UC Davis: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    > The H1-B program allows employers to hire foreign employees, at below-market rates However, it's also by far the most attractive visa type for people from many countries. If I'm an e.g. German dev, what other options do I have if I wanted to work in the US long term? L-1? > Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program Obviously misuse isn't okay, but I'm sure they'd be chilling effects worth thinking about. I've always wondered why there aren't visa swap programs, i.e. if a Dutch and an American citizen wanted to live in the US/Netherlands respectively, why not swap (as long as some basic criteria are met)?
    - socmag 10y ago
      Interesting you picked Dutch/American. Did you know about the DAFT? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT I don't know about using it to go to the US, but for a Dutch Visa it wasn't so painful.
      - guitarbill 10y ago
        haha, I had no idea. oops. I was picking countries where I know people have complained in the past - British myself
    - int_19h 10y ago
      If you're a German dev, I doubt you'll come to US to work at Tata. Wouldn't be worthwhile. You might come to work at Google and such, but they wouldn't be affected by raising the bar as this law does, since they already comply with it in practice.
      - guitarbill 10y ago
        sure, but it's still the same visa class, right?
        int_19h 10y ago
        Yep. But not all legislation that pertains to it affects all companies that use it equally.
- witty_username 10y ago
  > losing jobs to other country That may not necessarily be true. People may find other jobs; and the profits from outsourcing would be spent possibly resulting in job creation.
- douche 10y ago
  I think people might finally be wising up to to the fact that outsourcing knowledge work to the cheapest foreign country doesn't often produce great results. Communication overheard, time-shifting, mismatch of cultural expectations and norms, it introduces a lot of complexity. And sometimes, you just get what you pay for. I work with customers every day that decided to axe their internal IT staffs and outsource it to the big consulting and services firms. It may have made Bill Lumbergh's stock go up a quarter of a point in the short term, but the reduced efficiency, red tape and typically less-than-stellar competence drags on the whole organization.
  - Clubber 10y ago
    You are absolutely right. The people who make those decisions aren't paid for quality, they are paid to cut costs. They will offshore their entire departments, get a huge bonus, then cut and run to do it to the next company before it all comes crashing down. There are success stories, but those success stories of H1B aren't the ones that pay bare minimum. Companies who pay top dollar for H1B get the great ones. The companies who pay bottom dollar get shut down in 5 years. You'd figure after 20+ years of this, executives would learn, but they don't care to. They are incentivized for precisely what they do.
    - splintercell 10y ago
      > The people who make those decisions aren't paid for quality, they are paid to cut costs. This exists because not every product carries same gross profit margin. Apple launched iWatch, but it fails miserably, so Apple in an attempt to recuperate some costs, wants to produce the watch cheaply. Enter the people who can produce it cheaply. Of course the quality won't be the same, but apparently there isn't a market for high quality steel smart watches, but for lower quality plasticky smart watches.
      - Clubber 10y ago
        We're talking about labor, specifically programming, not cost of materials.
- jordanb 10y ago
  Offshoring is currently way cheaper than bringing people onsite, so as it stands now anything that can be offshored is being offshored. If work is being done in America either by a citizen or by a foreign worker it's because the company hasn't figured out how to offshore the work. Actually from what I've seen a lot of the bodyshops use H1B to facilitate outsourcing. They bring in smaller numbers of people on H1Bs to act as go-betweens for the much larger team offshore.
wrong_variable 10y ago
People need to first understand that the minimum wage in america allows you to save more money as a single male then working as an engineer in a large part of India and many other poor countries. The salary in my own country for a mid level software engineer is 600 dollars a month ! Think about that for a moment . . . . Now imagine if you are a company, you can hire a developer with 10-20 years of experience at the cost below your junior developer. Why won't you do it ? The other part of the equation is the fact that if you do not do it you are a strong competitive disadvantage compared to companies. Now many people on HN might want to crack down on this Donald Trump Style. But actually cracking down on it will make matters worse. Software, IP is really global these days. So as soon as wages are pushed up in america, the flow of FDI ( which is growing at 5x every year in India ! ) will shoot even higher. Someone made this argument that I find the best explanation for what is going on. Countries like India have more untapped computational power compared to the US, just due to having 4x the population and not even 1:1 the wealth. There is nothing immoral about what is going on. Its capitalism working as intended - I also do not think americans are losers in this game, it just means they will not see any investment or improve in their standard of living while private money is busy improving the lives of everyone else.
- theocean154 10y ago
  Arbitrage in labor markets results in a regression to the global mean. Every year that wages do not grow in the US, the buying power of those wages decreases due to inflation (increasing the cost of living). This will result in the standard of livings of the US moving towards that of India. And as a US citizen, I do not want this. If capitalism worked as intended, we'd be a world full of slaves fighting for pennies and shitting in open pits while our masters live like kings.
  - wrong_variable 10y ago
    I think that is not what is happening. Standard of living in the US is growing - but very slowly. While standard of living is increasing rapidly in developing countries. You can see the same issue in China, where standard of living has actually grown rapidly. I am not arguing to make American standard of living regress at the expense of improving the standard of living for other developing nations. Standard of Living would have risen regardless of FDI money moving into India and China - the only difference is that western capital is allowed to make money off that development. The issue is that the amount of money that is required to bring any massive improvement in living standard in western countries is really large. Things like self driving cars are much harder to create - then just copying current technology and distributing it. This is why it should have been upto western govt to channel a lot of public money and tax multinationals aggressively so that western countries can have accelerated rate of growth.
cheriot 10y ago
Right now H1B is a lottery with country specific quotas? Could we think of a worse way to choose people to bring in? Let's make it an auction. Let the bids tell us which skills are in highest demand and use the proceeds for scholarships and training of citizens in those jobs. Think H1B fees funding computer science scholarships. And at least with an auction we'll bring in higher quality workers that will contribute more to our economy (relative to a random selection). Second, the catch-22 on why brown people hating politicians can't solve the problem: To make companies prefer foreign workers less we have to protect those workers better. Make it easier for them to change jobs and harder to force them into long hours without pay.
- acchow 10y ago
  > Right now H1B is a lottery with country specific quotas? I'm pretty sure the H1B lottery is evenly distributed. Are you thinking of the green card lottery?
  - adharmad 10y ago
    It is a lottery if H-1B filings are oversubscribed in any calendar year. However, there are no country specific quotas AFAIK.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jon_richards 10y ago
  I'm not too familiar with the H1B system, but one of the issues I have with the idea of an auction is that it hurts startups who are willing to give up a lot of equity but not much cash to an employee.
  - c0g 10y ago
    Even if the equity was taken into account most startup equity (once you read the terms and conditions) is worth ~0. There's a few bigexits warping thenfigures but the median is pretty low.
adrenalinelol 10y ago
The purpose of H1B Visas is to supply talent that CANNOT be found domestically. They are not designed to suppress the wages of locals at the benefit to the owners of capital. This is no different than a company whining about a tax-loop hole being closed and throwing around rhetoric like: "it'll come at the cost jobs and innovation!" The IT workers cited from the article in question are not uniquely skilled over their american counter-parts, they are simply being used by corporations to lower wages.
- x1798DE 10y ago
  You are saying that the additional price for local talent has to be infinite? Because otherwise I don't totally understand this position. You could almost always find local talent, at prohibitively high costs. Pay enough and people will retrain, too. This sort of thing is dynamic, and what doesn't exist at one price point does at another. Of course, I also don't think forcing higher costs on everyone in the name of favoring certain groups of people over others is a particularly laudable goal.
  - evgen 10y ago
    This is called supply and demand. The most flagrant abusers of the H1-B system use it to artificially increase supply of workers to depress costs. If the costs rise to the point where retraining is considered an appealing option I don't see how that is a problem.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      I'd say the supply of workers is artificially being kept low; there's nothing "natural" about immigration restrictions. Of course, I also don't agree with the use of "artificial" as a synonym for bad (or good).
      - rayiner 10y ago
        Sure it's natural. Just about the first thing any social mammals do is figure out how to control group membership and access to shared resources.
dschiptsov 10y ago
Nowadays remote is as good as local. There is really no big difference from what physical location one is accessing project's resources (repos, tracking, etc). Big and sophisticated projects like GHC (leave alone Linux kernel) are being successfully developed by remote teams. The only downside is that pointy-haired managers cannot easily bully and abuse (with unpaid hours) migrant employees and there is no easy and accessible personal payment solution (Paypal sucks for non-us citizens) due to "anti-terrorism" money-control cretinism. Actually, there is no technical problems at all, only organizational.
- lgieron 10y ago
  > (...) there is no easy and accessible personal payment solution (Paypal sucks for non-us citizens) due to "anti-terrorism" money-control cretinism. What's wrong with bank transfers?
tn13 10y ago
USA does not have any visa that would help companies bring in outside talent at cheaper rate. Create that sort of visa first else H1B would always be a mess.
- adrenalinelol 10y ago
  Politicians in democratic countries overtly suppressing wages for the benefit for the super few (0.001%) is not politically feasible and anecdotally, is probably bad in a consumer driven economy (which the US is).
  - tn13 10y ago
    I am not sure what that means. Politicians can suppress wages ? When have they done it in past ? Isn't the overwhelming support for illegal immigrants in USA from democratic party similar to what you are talking ? Why is that there is such a massive support for illegal mexicans but not for legally immigrating highly educated Indian and Chinese ?
- naveen99 10y ago
  For farm workers and boat crews there are. https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/other/crewmember.html https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/other/crewmember.h...
tn13 10y ago
H1B is a classic case of how legislators are far away from reality. Increasing minimum wage does not help it creates a bigger problem. A lot of smaller companies will happily show $100,000 salary to their employee while paying only $30,000. This is technically a fraud but the companies do it all the time. Google or Facebook wont be able to do it but those consulting companies could. Here are my suggestions: 1. Do not allow consulting companies to file H1B at all. If the person is specialized then let some company hire him/her full time. Create a separate visa category for consulting work for foreign companies trying to send their staff to USA. 2. Scrap H4 and give EAD to the H1B spouse. Most of the illegal things about H1B is because of the desperate attempts by H1Bs to get the well educated spouse be productive. Also given that most H1B are male this is also a very anti-women thing to do by putting women out of work. My wife enrolled for F1 in a small university just to get an OPT EAD. Wasting $20K and 2 years for a completely useless masters degree. 3. Have a clear and simple path to green-card for H1Bs.
- rtpg 10y ago
  Also, stop connecting H1B to the hiring company! If the H1B company isn't offering a good salary, the person should be able to change jobs to another in the US without paperwork. This would remove most incentives for a person to take a below-market wage, removing the downward pressure (that I think is theoretical but...) Plus it stops treating people like indentured servants. +1 for humanity. For companies whining about people leaving fast: don't offer shitty jobs! Signing bonuses exist for americans, figure out how to keep people without the threat of deportation.
  - tn13 10y ago
    Yes. H1B = EAD. My wife had h4 and she could not work. I was sponsored a green card and she got her EAD while I am still waiting for my PR.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  Yes, I think the people on H1Bs should also be able to stay here for the full duration of the visa even if they are no longer employed. Current regulations just give too much power to the employer. There also needs to be shorter waits for green cards for some nationalities. The 15 year wait for people from China or India is just ridiculous.
rbanffy 10y ago
Is it me or I suspect the 100K lower limit is kind of ineffective? Every time I ran the numbers about moving to the US, the minimum acceptable offer was well above that number.
- arenaninja 10y ago
  I imagine it depends on your country of origin and current standard of living. There's two salary averages of current H1B holders quoted in the article at less than 80K
vinceguidry 10y ago
I was talking to my friend yesterday, she works for AT&T. She described being overworked, and, while she was paid well compared to other PMs, she considered the idea of taking a pay cut in exchange for a better managed workload. The problem was that her reports were all leaving her project or leaving the company. The company was responding to the staffing difficulty with outsourcing, moving her entire project to Israel. Directors were squabbling over the most capable employees and twice she was approached about switching departments. She has a friend who nominally is an architect, but is instead doing the work of a frontline dev. He's about to jump. Recruiters have made the job market liquid enough that businesses can't meet their objectives with the coders they hired. In some sectors, coders right out of school can command six-figure salaries, and they're only going higher. In the larger job markets, firms are moving en-masse to consulting companies to meet business needs. The developers are following suit. 5 months ago, I worked at a marketing company as an in-house dev. I now work for a consulting company, my old company hired a consulting company to do my old job. I am somebody whose natural tendency is towards loyalty. I want to find a nice position at a nice company and just stay there for years. The current job market makes that impossible. The siren's song of getting a 30% pay bump every year, sometimes twice in the same year, is impossible to resist. Make no mistake about it, the US needs more developers. Immigration is an excellent solution to the problem. Protectionism is only going to make it worse. If businesses can't meet their objectives, then end result is going to be a recession. No one comes out better in one of those.
- dominotw 10y ago
  > Recruiters have made the job market liquid enough that businesses can't meet their objectives with the coders they hired. Curious what you mean by this?
  - ta_donk_gt 10y ago
    It implies that it's too easy to get another job, and that we should do something to make it more difficult to leave a job, so that companies can focus on output rather than hiring.
    - 10y ago
ausjke 10y ago
A while ago I searched on the data, the majority H1Bs are from India and China. China took about 12%, most of them are graduated in USA, India had about 47% of all the H1B visas, most of them are from India and were put under India's consulting companies. The current lottery system for H1B might have changed that situation a bit, as it might be able to prevent possible abuse.
diogenescynic 10y ago
Good. The top 10 recipients are all outsourcing bodyshops. It's undeniable the program is being abused and no longer functions the way it was intended.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Here's my question: wouldn't it fix a lot of the issues with the program if preference were given to awarding visas to largest number of sponsors, rather than a true lottery? So in essence you couldn't get a second visa in the lottery as a sponsor until every sponsor had gotten at least one.
  - qaq 10y ago
    thats a good idea
  - diogenescynic 10y ago
    No, it should just be an auction. Bring in the top earners and the specialized skills will follow. Most of the companies are bringing in H-1B workers who lack experience and specialized knowledge/skills. In addition, somewhere between 47 and 85% of H-1Bs are being significantly underpaid compared to their peers: >Wages for H-1B workers in computer programming occupations are overwhelmingly concentrated at the bottom of the U.S. pay scale. Wages on LCAs for 85 percent of H-1B workers were for less than the median U.S. wage in the same occupations and state. http://cis.org/PayScale-H1BWages http://cis.org/PayScale-H1BWages The top H-1B recipients: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx 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 Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, and Cognizant that game the immigration system by applying for the cheapest H-1Bs possible.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      Yeah, but my suggestion would do that too and wouldn't overwhelmingly tip the scales in favor of particular industries.
gwbas1c 10y ago
I think in our industry we have a huge wrench. It's very hard to hire experienced Americans in Silicon Valley right now because the cost of living is so high. There's no way that an experienced engineer, making a Silicon Valley salary, can afford the same kind of home that he/she expects everywhere else in the country. In contrast, an H1-B from a country where homes are typically smaller, might think the kind of home that he/she can afford in Silicon Valley is perfectly fine!
geebee 10y ago
In many ways, I like the idea of setting a high minimum salary. It's a simple approach, but complex regulations often just produce elaborate ways to exploit loopholes. And honestly, the higher the salary, the less I worry that the visa is being misused. 100k still seems a bit low. I think Ted Cruz suggested 110k. That's still below the average salary for an applications developer in SF or San Jose. I'd go higher, though I do think that 110k would do some good - it would have no effect whatsoever on the use of the H1b to bring in the truly talented, and it would probably deter some of Disney/Edison style abuses.
lgleason 10y ago
Keep in mind that Hillary and her running mate are pro H1B. A lot of people don't like Trump for good reason, but it makes it difficult to vote for her given that she is likely to work against my interests as an engineer.
- mywittyname 10y ago
  1. More engineers = more valuable products built. 2. Move valuable products in the market = more money to reinvest into building valuable products. 3. More money invested into building products = more demand for engineers. 4. Goto 1. Being pro-H1B is in your interest because it increases demands for your skill set.
- spoonie 10y ago
  How do you feel about Canadians (and Mexicans!) coming into the US via the NAFTA program? My employer didn't even have to show that they weren't able to hire an American for my position.
- azemetre 10y ago
  It's a good thing Congress makes federal laws and not the President then.
ones_and_zeros 10y ago
Make college free and give tax subsidies to organizations that have training programs and be done with it. This program has been around for decades and was created in an effort to bring in skills not found in the country. If in all of that time we haven't trained up enough people to meet "demand" then we are obviously doing something wrong and non immigration intent visas aren't going to fix it.

76 points by lnguyen 10y ago

> employers can be exempted from that paperwork if the potential employee holds a master’s degree or is paid at least $60,000 annually. Wow, I wasn't aware the bar was so low. Given the recent brazen misuse of the program I hope this goes through

Clubber 10y ago
The salaries listed for a senior programmer that gauge how much H1Bs are paid are obnoxiously low. Last time I looked, I was shocked. When the average salaries listed are lower than anyone other than junior programmers, they get H1Bs for cheaper. Also, the companies can hire a person as a front line support and pay them accordingly, but actually have them doing system development or design. Big businesses in the macro sense, seem willing to do anything to cheat the system to drive down costs and subsequently wages. I do think raising the cap will help.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

anupshinde 10y ago

Misuse must definitely stop. But wouldn't this force businesses to outsource to offshore offices... Losing talent, losing jobs to other country and losing out on taxes. And the jobs that cannot be offshored would require higher/complex skillset

dredmorbius 10y ago
The H1-B program allows employers to hire foreign employees, at below-market rates, by limiting those employees' options to compete freely on the US domestic labour markets. Employment is an area in which employers already have a natural advantage, a point noted (and explained in detail) 240 years ago by Adam Smith. Offshoring introduces additional challenges to management -- it's simply easier to manage a workforce who rolls into the office and is locally present, though yes, remote (or occasional from-home) management is possible. If a company wants to pay offshore-wages, then it can employ offshore talent, offshore, and incur the offshore management and logistics hassles. If it wants to hire domestic labour, it should do so at local labour rates. If foreign workers are brought to domestic markets, allow them full mobility between employers. Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program is to use one class of restricted-rights workers (the visa holders) to depress domestic wages through threat of a cheaper, effectively indentured workforce. This has been clearly evident for years, and eloquently argued by Norman Matloff of UC Davis: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
- guitarbill 10y ago
  > The H1-B program allows employers to hire foreign employees, at below-market rates However, it's also by far the most attractive visa type for people from many countries. If I'm an e.g. German dev, what other options do I have if I wanted to work in the US long term? L-1? > Otherwise, the only effect of the H1-B program Obviously misuse isn't okay, but I'm sure they'd be chilling effects worth thinking about. I've always wondered why there aren't visa swap programs, i.e. if a Dutch and an American citizen wanted to live in the US/Netherlands respectively, why not swap (as long as some basic criteria are met)?
  - socmag 10y ago
    Interesting you picked Dutch/American. Did you know about the DAFT? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAFT I don't know about using it to go to the US, but for a Dutch Visa it wasn't so painful.
    - guitarbill 10y ago
      haha, I had no idea. oops. I was picking countries where I know people have complained in the past - British myself
  - int_19h 10y ago
    If you're a German dev, I doubt you'll come to US to work at Tata. Wouldn't be worthwhile. You might come to work at Google and such, but they wouldn't be affected by raising the bar as this law does, since they already comply with it in practice.
    - guitarbill 10y ago
      sure, but it's still the same visa class, right?
      - int_19h 10y ago
        Yep. But not all legislation that pertains to it affects all companies that use it equally.
witty_username 10y ago
> losing jobs to other country That may not necessarily be true. People may find other jobs; and the profits from outsourcing would be spent possibly resulting in job creation.
douche 10y ago
I think people might finally be wising up to to the fact that outsourcing knowledge work to the cheapest foreign country doesn't often produce great results. Communication overheard, time-shifting, mismatch of cultural expectations and norms, it introduces a lot of complexity. And sometimes, you just get what you pay for. I work with customers every day that decided to axe their internal IT staffs and outsource it to the big consulting and services firms. It may have made Bill Lumbergh's stock go up a quarter of a point in the short term, but the reduced efficiency, red tape and typically less-than-stellar competence drags on the whole organization.
- Clubber 10y ago
  You are absolutely right. The people who make those decisions aren't paid for quality, they are paid to cut costs. They will offshore their entire departments, get a huge bonus, then cut and run to do it to the next company before it all comes crashing down. There are success stories, but those success stories of H1B aren't the ones that pay bare minimum. Companies who pay top dollar for H1B get the great ones. The companies who pay bottom dollar get shut down in 5 years. You'd figure after 20+ years of this, executives would learn, but they don't care to. They are incentivized for precisely what they do.
  - splintercell 10y ago
    > The people who make those decisions aren't paid for quality, they are paid to cut costs. This exists because not every product carries same gross profit margin. Apple launched iWatch, but it fails miserably, so Apple in an attempt to recuperate some costs, wants to produce the watch cheaply. Enter the people who can produce it cheaply. Of course the quality won't be the same, but apparently there isn't a market for high quality steel smart watches, but for lower quality plasticky smart watches.
    - Clubber 10y ago
      We're talking about labor, specifically programming, not cost of materials.
jordanb 10y ago
Offshoring is currently way cheaper than bringing people onsite, so as it stands now anything that can be offshored is being offshored. If work is being done in America either by a citizen or by a foreign worker it's because the company hasn't figured out how to offshore the work. Actually from what I've seen a lot of the bodyshops use H1B to facilitate outsourcing. They bring in smaller numbers of people on H1Bs to act as go-betweens for the much larger team offshore.

wrong_variable 10y ago

People need to first understand that the minimum wage in america allows you to save more money as a single male then working as an engineer in a large part of India and many other poor countries. The salary in my own country for a mid level software engineer is 600 dollars a month ! Think about that for a moment . . . . Now imagine if you are a company, you can hire a developer with 10-20 years of experience at the cost below your junior developer. Why won't you do it ? The other part of the equation is the fact that if you do not do it you are a strong competitive disadvantage compared to companies. Now many people on HN might want to crack down on this Donald Trump Style. But actually cracking down on it will make matters worse. Software, IP is really global these days. So as soon as wages are pushed up in america, the flow of FDI ( which is growing at 5x every year in India ! ) will shoot even higher. Someone made this argument that I find the best explanation for what is going on. Countries like India have more untapped computational power compared to the US, just due to having 4x the population and not even 1:1 the wealth. There is nothing immoral about what is going on. Its capitalism working as intended - I also do not think americans are losers in this game, it just means they will not see any investment or improve in their standard of living while private money is busy improving the lives of everyone else.

theocean154 10y ago
Arbitrage in labor markets results in a regression to the global mean. Every year that wages do not grow in the US, the buying power of those wages decreases due to inflation (increasing the cost of living). This will result in the standard of livings of the US moving towards that of India. And as a US citizen, I do not want this. If capitalism worked as intended, we'd be a world full of slaves fighting for pennies and shitting in open pits while our masters live like kings.
- wrong_variable 10y ago
  I think that is not what is happening. Standard of living in the US is growing - but very slowly. While standard of living is increasing rapidly in developing countries. You can see the same issue in China, where standard of living has actually grown rapidly. I am not arguing to make American standard of living regress at the expense of improving the standard of living for other developing nations. Standard of Living would have risen regardless of FDI money moving into India and China - the only difference is that western capital is allowed to make money off that development. The issue is that the amount of money that is required to bring any massive improvement in living standard in western countries is really large. Things like self driving cars are much harder to create - then just copying current technology and distributing it. This is why it should have been upto western govt to channel a lot of public money and tax multinationals aggressively so that western countries can have accelerated rate of growth.

cheriot 10y ago

Right now H1B is a lottery with country specific quotas? Could we think of a worse way to choose people to bring in? Let's make it an auction. Let the bids tell us which skills are in highest demand and use the proceeds for scholarships and training of citizens in those jobs. Think H1B fees funding computer science scholarships. And at least with an auction we'll bring in higher quality workers that will contribute more to our economy (relative to a random selection). Second, the catch-22 on why brown people hating politicians can't solve the problem: To make companies prefer foreign workers less we have to protect those workers better. Make it easier for them to change jobs and harder to force them into long hours without pay.

acchow 10y ago
> Right now H1B is a lottery with country specific quotas? I'm pretty sure the H1B lottery is evenly distributed. Are you thinking of the green card lottery?
- adharmad 10y ago
  It is a lottery if H-1B filings are oversubscribed in any calendar year. However, there are no country specific quotas AFAIK.
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jon_richards 10y ago
I'm not too familiar with the H1B system, but one of the issues I have with the idea of an auction is that it hurts startups who are willing to give up a lot of equity but not much cash to an employee.
- c0g 10y ago
  Even if the equity was taken into account most startup equity (once you read the terms and conditions) is worth ~0. There's a few bigexits warping thenfigures but the median is pretty low.

adrenalinelol 10y ago

The purpose of H1B Visas is to supply talent that CANNOT be found domestically. They are not designed to suppress the wages of locals at the benefit to the owners of capital. This is no different than a company whining about a tax-loop hole being closed and throwing around rhetoric like: "it'll come at the cost jobs and innovation!" The IT workers cited from the article in question are not uniquely skilled over their american counter-parts, they are simply being used by corporations to lower wages.

x1798DE 10y ago
You are saying that the additional price for local talent has to be infinite? Because otherwise I don't totally understand this position. You could almost always find local talent, at prohibitively high costs. Pay enough and people will retrain, too. This sort of thing is dynamic, and what doesn't exist at one price point does at another. Of course, I also don't think forcing higher costs on everyone in the name of favoring certain groups of people over others is a particularly laudable goal.
- evgen 10y ago
  This is called supply and demand. The most flagrant abusers of the H1-B system use it to artificially increase supply of workers to depress costs. If the costs rise to the point where retraining is considered an appealing option I don't see how that is a problem.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    I'd say the supply of workers is artificially being kept low; there's nothing "natural" about immigration restrictions. Of course, I also don't agree with the use of "artificial" as a synonym for bad (or good).
    - rayiner 10y ago
      Sure it's natural. Just about the first thing any social mammals do is figure out how to control group membership and access to shared resources.

dschiptsov 10y ago

Nowadays remote is as good as local. There is really no big difference from what physical location one is accessing project's resources (repos, tracking, etc). Big and sophisticated projects like GHC (leave alone Linux kernel) are being successfully developed by remote teams. The only downside is that pointy-haired managers cannot easily bully and abuse (with unpaid hours) migrant employees and there is no easy and accessible personal payment solution (Paypal sucks for non-us citizens) due to "anti-terrorism" money-control cretinism. Actually, there is no technical problems at all, only organizational.

lgieron 10y ago
> (...) there is no easy and accessible personal payment solution (Paypal sucks for non-us citizens) due to "anti-terrorism" money-control cretinism. What's wrong with bank transfers?

tn13 10y ago

USA does not have any visa that would help companies bring in outside talent at cheaper rate. Create that sort of visa first else H1B would always be a mess.

adrenalinelol 10y ago
Politicians in democratic countries overtly suppressing wages for the benefit for the super few (0.001%) is not politically feasible and anecdotally, is probably bad in a consumer driven economy (which the US is).
- tn13 10y ago
  I am not sure what that means. Politicians can suppress wages ? When have they done it in past ? Isn't the overwhelming support for illegal immigrants in USA from democratic party similar to what you are talking ? Why is that there is such a massive support for illegal mexicans but not for legally immigrating highly educated Indian and Chinese ?
naveen99 10y ago
For farm workers and boat crews there are. https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/other/crewmember.html https://travel.state.gov/content/visas/en/other/crewmember.h...

tn13 10y ago

H1B is a classic case of how legislators are far away from reality. Increasing minimum wage does not help it creates a bigger problem. A lot of smaller companies will happily show $100,000 salary to their employee while paying only $30,000. This is technically a fraud but the companies do it all the time. Google or Facebook wont be able to do it but those consulting companies could. Here are my suggestions: 1. Do not allow consulting companies to file H1B at all. If the person is specialized then let some company hire him/her full time. Create a separate visa category for consulting work for foreign companies trying to send their staff to USA. 2. Scrap H4 and give EAD to the H1B spouse. Most of the illegal things about H1B is because of the desperate attempts by H1Bs to get the well educated spouse be productive. Also given that most H1B are male this is also a very anti-women thing to do by putting women out of work. My wife enrolled for F1 in a small university just to get an OPT EAD. Wasting $20K and 2 years for a completely useless masters degree. 3. Have a clear and simple path to green-card for H1Bs.

rtpg 10y ago
Also, stop connecting H1B to the hiring company! If the H1B company isn't offering a good salary, the person should be able to change jobs to another in the US without paperwork. This would remove most incentives for a person to take a below-market wage, removing the downward pressure (that I think is theoretical but...) Plus it stops treating people like indentured servants. +1 for humanity. For companies whining about people leaving fast: don't offer shitty jobs! Signing bonuses exist for americans, figure out how to keep people without the threat of deportation.
- tn13 10y ago
  Yes. H1B = EAD. My wife had h4 and she could not work. I was sponsored a green card and she got her EAD while I am still waiting for my PR.
TheCoelacanth 10y ago
Yes, I think the people on H1Bs should also be able to stay here for the full duration of the visa even if they are no longer employed. Current regulations just give too much power to the employer. There also needs to be shorter waits for green cards for some nationalities. The 15 year wait for people from China or India is just ridiculous.

rbanffy 10y ago

Is it me or I suspect the 100K lower limit is kind of ineffective? Every time I ran the numbers about moving to the US, the minimum acceptable offer was well above that number.

arenaninja 10y ago
I imagine it depends on your country of origin and current standard of living. There's two salary averages of current H1B holders quoted in the article at less than 80K

vinceguidry 10y ago

I was talking to my friend yesterday, she works for AT&T. She described being overworked, and, while she was paid well compared to other PMs, she considered the idea of taking a pay cut in exchange for a better managed workload. The problem was that her reports were all leaving her project or leaving the company. The company was responding to the staffing difficulty with outsourcing, moving her entire project to Israel. Directors were squabbling over the most capable employees and twice she was approached about switching departments. She has a friend who nominally is an architect, but is instead doing the work of a frontline dev. He's about to jump. Recruiters have made the job market liquid enough that businesses can't meet their objectives with the coders they hired. In some sectors, coders right out of school can command six-figure salaries, and they're only going higher. In the larger job markets, firms are moving en-masse to consulting companies to meet business needs. The developers are following suit. 5 months ago, I worked at a marketing company as an in-house dev. I now work for a consulting company, my old company hired a consulting company to do my old job. I am somebody whose natural tendency is towards loyalty. I want to find a nice position at a nice company and just stay there for years. The current job market makes that impossible. The siren's song of getting a 30% pay bump every year, sometimes twice in the same year, is impossible to resist. Make no mistake about it, the US needs more developers. Immigration is an excellent solution to the problem. Protectionism is only going to make it worse. If businesses can't meet their objectives, then end result is going to be a recession. No one comes out better in one of those.

dominotw 10y ago
> Recruiters have made the job market liquid enough that businesses can't meet their objectives with the coders they hired. Curious what you mean by this?
- ta_donk_gt 10y ago
  It implies that it's too easy to get another job, and that we should do something to make it more difficult to leave a job, so that companies can focus on output rather than hiring.
  - 10y ago

ausjke 10y ago

A while ago I searched on the data, the majority H1Bs are from India and China. China took about 12%, most of them are graduated in USA, India had about 47% of all the H1B visas, most of them are from India and were put under India's consulting companies. The current lottery system for H1B might have changed that situation a bit, as it might be able to prevent possible abuse.

diogenescynic 10y ago

Good. The top 10 recipients are all outsourcing bodyshops. It's undeniable the program is being abused and no longer functions the way it was intended.

emodendroket 10y ago
Here's my question: wouldn't it fix a lot of the issues with the program if preference were given to awarding visas to largest number of sponsors, rather than a true lottery? So in essence you couldn't get a second visa in the lottery as a sponsor until every sponsor had gotten at least one.
- qaq 10y ago
  thats a good idea
- diogenescynic 10y ago
  No, it should just be an auction. Bring in the top earners and the specialized skills will follow. Most of the companies are bringing in H-1B workers who lack experience and specialized knowledge/skills. In addition, somewhere between 47 and 85% of H-1Bs are being significantly underpaid compared to their peers: >Wages for H-1B workers in computer programming occupations are overwhelmingly concentrated at the bottom of the U.S. pay scale. Wages on LCAs for 85 percent of H-1B workers were for less than the median U.S. wage in the same occupations and state. http://cis.org/PayScale-H1BWages http://cis.org/PayScale-H1BWages The top H-1B recipients: http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx 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 Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL, and Cognizant that game the immigration system by applying for the cheapest H-1Bs possible.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Yeah, but my suggestion would do that too and wouldn't overwhelmingly tip the scales in favor of particular industries.

gwbas1c 10y ago

I think in our industry we have a huge wrench. It's very hard to hire experienced Americans in Silicon Valley right now because the cost of living is so high. There's no way that an experienced engineer, making a Silicon Valley salary, can afford the same kind of home that he/she expects everywhere else in the country. In contrast, an H1-B from a country where homes are typically smaller, might think the kind of home that he/she can afford in Silicon Valley is perfectly fine!

geebee 10y ago

In many ways, I like the idea of setting a high minimum salary. It's a simple approach, but complex regulations often just produce elaborate ways to exploit loopholes. And honestly, the higher the salary, the less I worry that the visa is being misused. 100k still seems a bit low. I think Ted Cruz suggested 110k. That's still below the average salary for an applications developer in SF or San Jose. I'd go higher, though I do think that 110k would do some good - it would have no effect whatsoever on the use of the H1b to bring in the truly talented, and it would probably deter some of Disney/Edison style abuses.

lgleason 10y ago

Keep in mind that Hillary and her running mate are pro H1B. A lot of people don't like Trump for good reason, but it makes it difficult to vote for her given that she is likely to work against my interests as an engineer.

mywittyname 10y ago
1. More engineers = more valuable products built. 2. Move valuable products in the market = more money to reinvest into building valuable products. 3. More money invested into building products = more demand for engineers. 4. Goto 1. Being pro-H1B is in your interest because it increases demands for your skill set.
spoonie 10y ago
How do you feel about Canadians (and Mexicans!) coming into the US via the NAFTA program? My employer didn't even have to show that they weren't able to hire an American for my position.
azemetre 10y ago
It's a good thing Congress makes federal laws and not the President then.

ones_and_zeros 10y ago

Make college free and give tax subsidies to organizations that have training programs and be done with it. This program has been around for decades and was created in an effort to bring in skills not found in the country. If in all of that time we haven't trained up enough people to meet "demand" then we are obviously doing something wrong and non immigration intent visas aren't going to fix it.