3 ms·

The same applies for Americans working in Europe as highly skilled migrants. A company sponsors your visa, and when that job ends (like the company shuts down,

by blunte 10y ago

The same applies for Americans working in Europe as highly skilled migrants. A company sponsors your visa, and when that job ends (like the company shuts down, for example), you must go find another company willing to sponsor you. Or if you're fortunate, as with Americans in Netherlands, you can start your own business easily and get a freelance visa. But the point is the same - you work at the place that sponsored you, or you risk having to go back home.

nottorp 10y ago
Well, for some reason nobody's complaining about Western Europe immigrants taking US jobs...
- virmundi 10y ago
  It appears to be a difference between immigrant (with permanency) vs transient skills. There was a time when society needed itinerant skilled workers. Now we have the infrastructure to train, en masse, our workers. While skipping the training step is nice, hence the permanent workers, H1-Bs appear to bring mostly unskilled, or low skilled workers into the country under the banner of master masons, so to speak.
  - blunte 10y ago
    H1-B, as championed by Microsoft and embraced by many large companies, was clearly used as a tool to replace market wage tech employees with low wage immigrants. Microsoft's arguments before Congress were fully debunked, and many of us who have worked for two decades in US IT have seen the reality. Plus, over the last 15 years as what we do with and demand from computing technology has expanded exponentially, the knowledge gap between management/hiring managers and IT workers has grown to the point where management often has no clue at all about how to spec a job or how to filter/evaluate a candidate. This has led us to the alphabet soup that is job specs - the "what did our last guy do before he quit? yeah put all that on the list of requirements" problem. So it's not just an H1-B problem; it's much bigger. But it probably results in a feeling of futility on the part of hiring managers, leading them to think, "well since we're basically guessing at this hiring thing, we might as well hire the cheapest we can get."

by blunte 10y ago

nottorp 10y ago

Well, for some reason nobody's complaining about Western Europe immigrants taking US jobs...

virmundi 10y ago
It appears to be a difference between immigrant (with permanency) vs transient skills. There was a time when society needed itinerant skilled workers. Now we have the infrastructure to train, en masse, our workers. While skipping the training step is nice, hence the permanent workers, H1-Bs appear to bring mostly unskilled, or low skilled workers into the country under the banner of master masons, so to speak.
- blunte 10y ago
  H1-B, as championed by Microsoft and embraced by many large companies, was clearly used as a tool to replace market wage tech employees with low wage immigrants. Microsoft's arguments before Congress were fully debunked, and many of us who have worked for two decades in US IT have seen the reality. Plus, over the last 15 years as what we do with and demand from computing technology has expanded exponentially, the knowledge gap between management/hiring managers and IT workers has grown to the point where management often has no clue at all about how to spec a job or how to filter/evaluate a candidate. This has led us to the alphabet soup that is job specs - the "what did our last guy do before he quit? yeah put all that on the list of requirements" problem. So it's not just an H1-B problem; it's much bigger. But it probably results in a feeling of futility on the part of hiring managers, leading them to think, "well since we're basically guessing at this hiring thing, we might as well hire the cheapest we can get."