13 ms·

H-1B: Outsourcer HCL games visa system to discriminate against non-South Asians

141 points by hanging 8y ago

thecoinrepublic 8y ago
So some of the biggest H-1B proponents are racists. I'm shocked! I thought the H-1B critics were supposed to be the racist ones.
ycombonator 8y ago
They don’t need to game the system. The legislations are written by lobbyists with convenient loopholes. Unfortunately for this guy this mega outsourcer has ton of legal firepower to wiggle out of this.
- thewhitetulip 8y ago
  And lot of money too, for lobbying
- conanbatt 8y ago
  There isnt many loopholes to the H1B. Most people that want it dont get it.
  - stefan_ 8y ago
    Yet, outsourcing companies that are decidedly not hiring rare talent gobble up the majority of it.
    - conanbatt 8y ago
      A tip of the iceberg. United states could import 2 million doctors easily (there is a market for it) and it would be the full H1b quota forever. What I don't understand is what is defensible about putting any non-demographic limit at all. Why 80k and not 160k?
      - pm90 8y ago
        There's no good reason, its politics. If one party says they want to increase the limit, the other party will say: well, just give us this instead and we will increase the limit. And if neither party cares very much or has other priorities, this issue just keeps remaining where it is.
        conanbatt 8y ago
        Thats one interpretation. After all, immigrants don't vote.
        ycombonator 8y ago
        They don’t get to. You don’t immigrate to China on a work visa and get to vote and dictate their destiny.
        pm90 8y ago
        Interesting. Would you say that the immigrant in question should: * pay local and federal taxes * pay into the social security benefit system (if such a system exists) If yes, would you still say that they shouldn't be allowed to vote?
        ycombonator 8y ago
        “Paying taxes” is a common theme used to support argument in favor of letting temporary immigrants vote in their host country. I am still searching for a country that lets it’s temporary immigrants vote before they are naturalized. There is an argument to made to tax the working immigrants. They use the public benefits of the host country - free public education, law enforcement, judiciary, libraries, roads and various other benefits. And finally they are not obligated to pay taxes if they don’t like to, they can simply return to their country.
        pm90 8y ago
raincom 8y ago
Delivery managers at WITCH (Wipro, Infy, TCS, CTS, HCL) outsourcing firms are paid based on how much they can earn from every account. So, this drives them do many things. One of the consequences is the perception of the said discrimination. Delivery managers prefer a cheaper resource to an expensive resource. They also practice this in India: that's why every team in India is filled with 80% freshers or those who get paid $5k per annum in India. In the states, they look for the cheapest resource to fill a position. Often times, they find spots that just require warm bodies to add billable hours. Guess, who would they go for? They will hire some H4 EAD who asks $65K per annum in NJ. These people are happy to get some job and experience. In old days, companies used to have lots of people coasting in their jobs. Now, WITCH companies have captured that profit in a two prong process: offshore to India and charge the client $30 per hour per person, then pay some desperate college grad in India $3 per hour. And capture that $27 per hour. This is similar to outsourcing the manufacturing, as the middle layers capture the profit, by paying peanuts in China and by getting rid of expensive employees in India. Edit: basically, these companies are making money off of outsourcing lots of bullshit jobs. They are NOT eliminating bs jobs. In fact, most of WITCH company onsite people are project managers pretending to be super smart workers.
- nonamechicken 8y ago
  I think it's unfair to blame it all on the Indians. There is another side to it, in the form of extremely demanding customers. The Indian companies resort to using cheap resources because the customer has x amount of budget, and they want things done within that budget. I knew one American product company (who is/was number one in the world in what they do) demanding that they will pay only x amount per hour for a person and make all these Indian as well as American consultancies compete with each other to find the lowest paid person. My Indian employer didn't even want to sent people there because they wouldn't make much profit while providing a decent salary.
  - raincom 8y ago
    I am not blaming Indians, any more than Foxconn workers. Just showing how these companies operate and capture profits, while screwing everyone else in America/India/China.
nonamechicken 8y ago
Is h1b abuse by Indian companies still an issue? According to this article: https://m.economictimes.com/nri/visa-and-immigration/h-1b-extension-rejections-rob-indian-it-firms-of-visa-power/articleshow/68312136.cms https://m.economictimes.com/nri/visa-and-immigration/h-1b-ex... Six Indian companies — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, and the US arms of Tech Mahindra and HCL Technologies — accounted for nearly two-thirds of the rejections among the top 30 companies, the think tank said after analysing data put out by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The six firms got just 16%, or 2,145, H-1B work permits, less than the 2,399 visas that Amazon bagged in 2018. Cognizant, which is headquartered in the US but has the majority of its workforce in India, saw 3,548 rejections during the year — the highest for any company. From this: https://m.timesofindia.com/business/india-business/tcs-among-top-10-firms-to-get-foreign-labour-certification-for-h-1b-visas/articleshow/66328540.cms https://m.timesofindia.com/business/india-business/tcs-among... Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the only Indian company among the top 10 firms to get foreign labour certification for the H-1B visas for the fiscal year 2018 by receiving over 20,000 such certifications, according to official data in which Ernst & Young was ranked No 1. London-headquartered Ernst & Young, a multinational professional services firm, has emerged as the top employer to have received the certification, the date from the US labour department said. In fact, Ernst & Young with 151,164 H-1B specialist occupation labour certifications accounted for the 12.4 per cent of all foreign labour certification for the H-1B work visas for the fiscal year 2018 ending on September 30, according to the latest annual report released by the Department of Labour early this month. Ernst & Young is followed by Deloitte Consulting which received 69,869 H-1B specialty occupations labour conditions programme. Indian-American owned Cognizant Technology Corp comes at number three with 47,732 specialty occupations labour conditions programme, the Department of Labour said in its latest annual report. Cognizant is followed by HCL America (42,820), K Force Inc (32,996), and Apple (26,833). India's Tata Consultancy Services or TCS is the only Indian company in top 10 for the year 2018.
- raincom 8y ago
  That article is wrong about 16%. In 2018, for these 6 companies, the initial approval rate is 60% = 2145/(2145+1405) Continuing approval rate for these six companies is 77% = 29638/(29638+ 8742) Source: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/BAHA/Top-30-H-1B-Employer-Table-FY-2018.pdf https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...
bigcostooge2 8y ago
I would be more surprised if they weren't discriminating. It's an unwritten rule that new candidates must be Indian at many corporations, regardless of quality. I don't even get to see American citizens in interviews any more. HR only sends me H1B Indian candidates.
mabbo 8y ago
It seems to me the problem of the H-1B system can be very easily solved. Instead of lotteries to cap the number of people accepted, just raise the minimum salary requirements until you have the number of people you wanted. Companies that want to discriminate by country of origin clearly aren't using immigration visas as they are intended. Do you really think they'd still be in the game if there was a $200k minimum? I doubt it.
- horyzen 8y ago
  Every time I see an H-1B related thread comment like this will pop up. No, it cannot "be very easily solved" by sorting salaries. For example, what about other industries who also need foreign talents? $100K might be top wage for some other industries but no where near the top in tech. Even in tech, how do you expect small start-ups or small businesses to compete with giants like FAANG who can just throw money at the problem? Also, what about the cost of living factor? Is $200k in SV considered more competitive than $150k in some other rural area?
  - mabbo 8y ago
    You make a lot of good points and I'm not saying I disagree on all of it. But many of these issues are orthogonal to the problem here. (Tech startups always have a problem of salary competition, which they fight via stock options; SV's problem is housing and local legislation that prevents sufficient supply; etc). The USA has, as a society, decided it wants to limit the number of immigrants. (I say this as a non-American who has had work visas in the US before, and left). If you disagree with that idea, vote for politicians who will change things. But if we take it as given that the number of immigrants on H-1B should be limited, then the question is: how do we decide who gets them? I contend that raising the salary minimum is better than lotteries. First, if you're going to limit the number of immigrants, you should be limiting it to the most talented rather than a random assortment of anyone at all that applies. Salary limits isn't a perfect fit for that, but it's a close approximation. Second, companies shouldn't be using immigration as a means to have cheap labor, given the laws around limited immigration. The H-1B isn't meant to be a means to lower the salary costs of a company, it's meant to bring the best talent to America. Lastly, in a lottery with limited winners, small companies will always lose out. Why? Because companies with less integrity can and will abuse the lottery system by inundating them with applications, often for job positions that could be easily filled by Americans. These companies want H-1B employees that they can underpay and abuse. Worth adding as well, if every H-1B holder is making $200k+, they're paying taxes on that huge salary too. This helps shut up those xenophobic types saying 'lazy immigrants don't pay their share'. My argument isn't that it's a fix-all for every problem. But given the premise of limited immigration, I think lotteries are a terrible solution companies to salary-based sorting.
calvinbhai 8y ago
A person who is a citizen or a green card holder in the US, compared to a H-1b bonded (tech) laborer, has way too much rights and way little incentive to slog for an employer that is paying peanuts. It’s very easy for a manager to get more out of a team member who is on H-1B than from someone who is a US worker. So often US managers In US companies also prefer to hire H-1b workers because they/employer have/has such disproportionate control over their immigration aspects. In addition to this, if you consider the cost of healthcare (to the company and employee) which makes it too expensive to hire an older US citizen instead of hiring 2-3 young H-1B workers even if the per hr $ rate is higher. A US worker will balk at the kind of health insurance offered by these employers. Fresh grad h-1b often has no idea nor does care about it because they are young and healthy. How can this be solved so that it is fair to the US workers? Convert aspects of H-1B into a green card equivalent visa: Aspect 1) employer can sponsor and bring in or hire a local non-citizen candidate. The new employee gets a 3 yr work permit to work anywhere at any time. Possibly the worker can leave on day 1 of work also. What does this achieve? It means the employer will make sure the worker coming in has the best pay/benefits etc compared to anything offered anywhere else in the country. If that happens, why will an employer, even if it is one of the WITCH companies, hire someone for below market rates at the risk of losing them the next day? If anything, at this point anyone who doesn’t need a visa, even a 50 yr old US worker (costs a lot w.r.t healthcare to the company) may be cheaper to the employer. Aspect 2) automatic conversion to permanent green card after 6 yrs: Since it’s been proven with Aspect 1 that the non-citizen is capable of being employed for 6 years without displacing an US worker, after being on this new H1b / temp GC visa, just mail a permanent Green Card to this non-US worker. The only thing in such a visa is that the employer who is into abusing H-1b visas or wants to replace costly older employees with cheap young contractors stands to lose quite a bit. But why should anyone care about such employers? Sadly, these are the employers who lobby hard to keep h-1b visa with bonded labor aspects, alive. Pet peeve: This article is making so many racist/regionist generalizations it is hard to understand what “South Asian” means. Does it mean people from India/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka/Pakistan? Or is it just a euphemism to refer to 1/4th of the world population ? About me: I’m an ex-H1b person who became a Canada permanent resident without stepping into Canada even once (except for the landing procedures). This, after working for 6 yrs on H1b and my last US employer trying to get me to slog for my green card application. Being born in India, I saw no point in going in for a US GC and remaining a bonded laborer till retirement. While o fee sad that US and USians are squandering this opportunity, I’m glad to see Canada capitalizing on this and see a great future for Canada.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
TuringNYC 8y ago
@ransom1538 >>> "H-1B, employing visa holders directly and through outsourcers, and has lobbied for an increase to the annual 85,000 cap on new visas." >>> My alma mater UC Davis graduated ~300 students in computer science per year (big school). 85,000 new visas. Firstly, not all 85000 visas are for computer science graduates. So the better number might be the total graduates from UC Davis, or at least the total graduates in Engineering, Management, Economics, etc, etc. Secondly, UC Davis is not the only school in the country, however big it is. There are thousands of schools. The total Undergraduate enrollment in the USA is ~10million per year. You can assume 1/4 of that are seniors(2.5M) and perhaps 80% graduate (2M). Obviously not all are Engineering, Management, Economics -- but my point is the "300 student vs 85,000 spots" figure is wildly wrong.
LockNess0 8y ago
If we are going to use a lottery for the H1B, we should also place a ceiling on the number of visas issued to nationals from any particular country: I suggest 10%. This is similar to how the Green Card lottery works. Otherwise one or two large countries will just monopolise the whole system, spamming applications from their brethren. This is exactly what is happening, with Indians making up 76% of H1B holders.
- calvinbhai 8y ago
  10% is too much. Why not 5%? Actually, why not just ban applicants who are born in China and India? </sarcasm>
ycombonator 8y ago
The last good paying jobs in America are in software and the tech cartel in backhanded collusion with outsourcers are actively working to suppress the wages by flooding the market pure and simple. 10 years ago I had a neighbor who at the time was 40 was a QA analyst and was earning decent wage fast forward 10 years he is driving Uber because his company brought in hundreds of new labor and gave him the option of “transferring” as a contractor to the outsourcing company where the starting hourly pay was $25 an hour. Simple supply and demand mechanics.
- conanbatt 8y ago
  I am so sad that you can't use the power of the state to prohibit your competition from getting jobs.
  - IWeldMelons 8y ago
    But I am so happy you can use the power of the state to prohibit outraged plebs from going after you, after you moved their jobs overseas.
    - conanbatt 8y ago
      Come get me.
  - geebee 8y ago
    The h1b visa is a govt program that allows corporations to control who is allowed to move to the US and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain here. Corporations use this state bestowed power to prevent their workers from participating freely in labor markets. I am bewildered that anyone thinks there is a libertarian argument for this program. It’s power of the state, harnessed by corporations, to create a captive workforce shut out of full participation in a free economy.
    - conanbatt 8y ago
      If you only made the H1B program costs on the account of the state, american citizens would do away with the whole thing altogether in a heartbeat.
IWeldMelons 8y ago
H1B is just a tip of the iceberg. HCL etc. employ a lot of people on B1, L1 and J1 visas. They bring them on-site for 3 month, rent an apartment for like 6 or 7 of them, pay pittance and send back to India.
entwife 8y ago
This lawsuit has more likelihood of success if the plaintiff is part of a protected class (non-white, female, age over 40). The article didn't mention this.
jsnk 8y ago
If you are interested in analysing h1b data, please check out my project, https://github.com/serv/h1bhub https://github.com/serv/h1bhub It's a tool to ingest raw h1b data into postgres, so you can study the data easier with SQL. I am also working on an app that allows you to look at h1b data on web.
- sytelus 8y ago
  Why don’t you put this in big query or Collab notebooks?
  - jsnk 8y ago
    I never used those two before, but this may be a good idea. Feel free to create issues in the repository, and we can continue our discussion there.
miramardesign 8y ago
once government starts picking the winners and losers on a racial basis, like affirmative action, like what happened at harvard against asians, it becomes a slippery slope of racial division. you will never get the perfect diversity, its an ideology that discriminates against the very people who welcomed immigrants into a free country and they are endevouring to make it less free. thus i am against immigration if people fresh off the boat can become diversity hires before poor americans. so in short maga 2020

141 points by hanging 8y ago

So some of the biggest H-1B proponents are racists. I'm shocked! I thought the H-1B critics were supposed to be the racist ones.

ycombonator 8y ago

They don’t need to game the system. The legislations are written by lobbyists with convenient loopholes. Unfortunately for this guy this mega outsourcer has ton of legal firepower to wiggle out of this.

thewhitetulip 8y ago
And lot of money too, for lobbying
conanbatt 8y ago
There isnt many loopholes to the H1B. Most people that want it dont get it.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  Yet, outsourcing companies that are decidedly not hiring rare talent gobble up the majority of it.
  - conanbatt 8y ago
    A tip of the iceberg. United states could import 2 million doctors easily (there is a market for it) and it would be the full H1b quota forever. What I don't understand is what is defensible about putting any non-demographic limit at all. Why 80k and not 160k?
    - pm90 8y ago
      There's no good reason, its politics. If one party says they want to increase the limit, the other party will say: well, just give us this instead and we will increase the limit. And if neither party cares very much or has other priorities, this issue just keeps remaining where it is.
      - conanbatt 8y ago
        Thats one interpretation. After all, immigrants don't vote.
        ycombonator 8y ago
        They don’t get to. You don’t immigrate to China on a work visa and get to vote and dictate their destiny.
        pm90 8y ago
        Interesting. Would you say that the immigrant in question should: * pay local and federal taxes * pay into the social security benefit system (if such a system exists) If yes, would you still say that they shouldn't be allowed to vote?
        ycombonator 8y ago
        “Paying taxes” is a common theme used to support argument in favor of letting temporary immigrants vote in their host country. I am still searching for a country that lets it’s temporary immigrants vote before they are naturalized. There is an argument to made to tax the working immigrants. They use the public benefits of the host country - free public education, law enforcement, judiciary, libraries, roads and various other benefits. And finally they are not obligated to pay taxes if they don’t like to, they can simply return to their country.
        pm90 8y ago

raincom 8y ago

Delivery managers at WITCH (Wipro, Infy, TCS, CTS, HCL) outsourcing firms are paid based on how much they can earn from every account. So, this drives them do many things. One of the consequences is the perception of the said discrimination. Delivery managers prefer a cheaper resource to an expensive resource. They also practice this in India: that's why every team in India is filled with 80% freshers or those who get paid $5k per annum in India. In the states, they look for the cheapest resource to fill a position. Often times, they find spots that just require warm bodies to add billable hours. Guess, who would they go for? They will hire some H4 EAD who asks $65K per annum in NJ. These people are happy to get some job and experience. In old days, companies used to have lots of people coasting in their jobs. Now, WITCH companies have captured that profit in a two prong process: offshore to India and charge the client $30 per hour per person, then pay some desperate college grad in India $3 per hour. And capture that $27 per hour. This is similar to outsourcing the manufacturing, as the middle layers capture the profit, by paying peanuts in China and by getting rid of expensive employees in India. Edit: basically, these companies are making money off of outsourcing lots of bullshit jobs. They are NOT eliminating bs jobs. In fact, most of WITCH company onsite people are project managers pretending to be super smart workers.

nonamechicken 8y ago
I think it's unfair to blame it all on the Indians. There is another side to it, in the form of extremely demanding customers. The Indian companies resort to using cheap resources because the customer has x amount of budget, and they want things done within that budget. I knew one American product company (who is/was number one in the world in what they do) demanding that they will pay only x amount per hour for a person and make all these Indian as well as American consultancies compete with each other to find the lowest paid person. My Indian employer didn't even want to sent people there because they wouldn't make much profit while providing a decent salary.
- raincom 8y ago
  I am not blaming Indians, any more than Foxconn workers. Just showing how these companies operate and capture profits, while screwing everyone else in America/India/China.

nonamechicken 8y ago

Is h1b abuse by Indian companies still an issue? According to this article: https://m.economictimes.com/nri/visa-and-immigration/h-1b-extension-rejections-rob-indian-it-firms-of-visa-power/articleshow/68312136.cms https://m.economictimes.com/nri/visa-and-immigration/h-1b-ex... Six Indian companies — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, and the US arms of Tech Mahindra and HCL Technologies — accounted for nearly two-thirds of the rejections among the top 30 companies, the think tank said after analysing data put out by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The six firms got just 16%, or 2,145, H-1B work permits, less than the 2,399 visas that Amazon bagged in 2018. Cognizant, which is headquartered in the US but has the majority of its workforce in India, saw 3,548 rejections during the year — the highest for any company. From this: https://m.timesofindia.com/business/india-business/tcs-among-top-10-firms-to-get-foreign-labour-certification-for-h-1b-visas/articleshow/66328540.cms https://m.timesofindia.com/business/india-business/tcs-among... Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the only Indian company among the top 10 firms to get foreign labour certification for the H-1B visas for the fiscal year 2018 by receiving over 20,000 such certifications, according to official data in which Ernst & Young was ranked No 1. London-headquartered Ernst & Young, a multinational professional services firm, has emerged as the top employer to have received the certification, the date from the US labour department said. In fact, Ernst & Young with 151,164 H-1B specialist occupation labour certifications accounted for the 12.4 per cent of all foreign labour certification for the H-1B work visas for the fiscal year 2018 ending on September 30, according to the latest annual report released by the Department of Labour early this month. Ernst & Young is followed by Deloitte Consulting which received 69,869 H-1B specialty occupations labour conditions programme. Indian-American owned Cognizant Technology Corp comes at number three with 47,732 specialty occupations labour conditions programme, the Department of Labour said in its latest annual report. Cognizant is followed by HCL America (42,820), K Force Inc (32,996), and Apple (26,833). India's Tata Consultancy Services or TCS is the only Indian company in top 10 for the year 2018.

raincom 8y ago
That article is wrong about 16%. In 2018, for these 6 companies, the initial approval rate is 60% = 2145/(2145+1405) Continuing approval rate for these six companies is 77% = 29638/(29638+ 8742) Source: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/BAHA/Top-30-H-1B-Employer-Table-FY-2018.pdf https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...

bigcostooge2 8y ago

I would be more surprised if they weren't discriminating. It's an unwritten rule that new candidates must be Indian at many corporations, regardless of quality. I don't even get to see American citizens in interviews any more. HR only sends me H1B Indian candidates.

mabbo 8y ago

It seems to me the problem of the H-1B system can be very easily solved. Instead of lotteries to cap the number of people accepted, just raise the minimum salary requirements until you have the number of people you wanted. Companies that want to discriminate by country of origin clearly aren't using immigration visas as they are intended. Do you really think they'd still be in the game if there was a $200k minimum? I doubt it.

horyzen 8y ago
Every time I see an H-1B related thread comment like this will pop up. No, it cannot "be very easily solved" by sorting salaries. For example, what about other industries who also need foreign talents? $100K might be top wage for some other industries but no where near the top in tech. Even in tech, how do you expect small start-ups or small businesses to compete with giants like FAANG who can just throw money at the problem? Also, what about the cost of living factor? Is $200k in SV considered more competitive than $150k in some other rural area?
- mabbo 8y ago
  You make a lot of good points and I'm not saying I disagree on all of it. But many of these issues are orthogonal to the problem here. (Tech startups always have a problem of salary competition, which they fight via stock options; SV's problem is housing and local legislation that prevents sufficient supply; etc). The USA has, as a society, decided it wants to limit the number of immigrants. (I say this as a non-American who has had work visas in the US before, and left). If you disagree with that idea, vote for politicians who will change things. But if we take it as given that the number of immigrants on H-1B should be limited, then the question is: how do we decide who gets them? I contend that raising the salary minimum is better than lotteries. First, if you're going to limit the number of immigrants, you should be limiting it to the most talented rather than a random assortment of anyone at all that applies. Salary limits isn't a perfect fit for that, but it's a close approximation. Second, companies shouldn't be using immigration as a means to have cheap labor, given the laws around limited immigration. The H-1B isn't meant to be a means to lower the salary costs of a company, it's meant to bring the best talent to America. Lastly, in a lottery with limited winners, small companies will always lose out. Why? Because companies with less integrity can and will abuse the lottery system by inundating them with applications, often for job positions that could be easily filled by Americans. These companies want H-1B employees that they can underpay and abuse. Worth adding as well, if every H-1B holder is making $200k+, they're paying taxes on that huge salary too. This helps shut up those xenophobic types saying 'lazy immigrants don't pay their share'. My argument isn't that it's a fix-all for every problem. But given the premise of limited immigration, I think lotteries are a terrible solution companies to salary-based sorting.

calvinbhai 8y ago

A person who is a citizen or a green card holder in the US, compared to a H-1b bonded (tech) laborer, has way too much rights and way little incentive to slog for an employer that is paying peanuts. It’s very easy for a manager to get more out of a team member who is on H-1B than from someone who is a US worker. So often US managers In US companies also prefer to hire H-1b workers because they/employer have/has such disproportionate control over their immigration aspects. In addition to this, if you consider the cost of healthcare (to the company and employee) which makes it too expensive to hire an older US citizen instead of hiring 2-3 young H-1B workers even if the per hr $ rate is higher. A US worker will balk at the kind of health insurance offered by these employers. Fresh grad h-1b often has no idea nor does care about it because they are young and healthy. How can this be solved so that it is fair to the US workers? Convert aspects of H-1B into a green card equivalent visa: Aspect 1) employer can sponsor and bring in or hire a local non-citizen candidate. The new employee gets a 3 yr work permit to work anywhere at any time. Possibly the worker can leave on day 1 of work also. What does this achieve? It means the employer will make sure the worker coming in has the best pay/benefits etc compared to anything offered anywhere else in the country. If that happens, why will an employer, even if it is one of the WITCH companies, hire someone for below market rates at the risk of losing them the next day? If anything, at this point anyone who doesn’t need a visa, even a 50 yr old US worker (costs a lot w.r.t healthcare to the company) may be cheaper to the employer. Aspect 2) automatic conversion to permanent green card after 6 yrs: Since it’s been proven with Aspect 1 that the non-citizen is capable of being employed for 6 years without displacing an US worker, after being on this new H1b / temp GC visa, just mail a permanent Green Card to this non-US worker. The only thing in such a visa is that the employer who is into abusing H-1b visas or wants to replace costly older employees with cheap young contractors stands to lose quite a bit. But why should anyone care about such employers? Sadly, these are the employers who lobby hard to keep h-1b visa with bonded labor aspects, alive. Pet peeve: This article is making so many racist/regionist generalizations it is hard to understand what “South Asian” means. Does it mean people from India/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka/Pakistan? Or is it just a euphemism to refer to 1/4th of the world population ? About me: I’m an ex-H1b person who became a Canada permanent resident without stepping into Canada even once (except for the landing procedures). This, after working for 6 yrs on H1b and my last US employer trying to get me to slog for my green card application. Being born in India, I saw no point in going in for a US GC and remaining a bonded laborer till retirement. While o fee sad that US and USians are squandering this opportunity, I’m glad to see Canada capitalizing on this and see a great future for Canada.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

TuringNYC 8y ago

@ransom1538 >>> "H-1B, employing visa holders directly and through outsourcers, and has lobbied for an increase to the annual 85,000 cap on new visas." >>> My alma mater UC Davis graduated ~300 students in computer science per year (big school). 85,000 new visas. Firstly, not all 85000 visas are for computer science graduates. So the better number might be the total graduates from UC Davis, or at least the total graduates in Engineering, Management, Economics, etc, etc. Secondly, UC Davis is not the only school in the country, however big it is. There are thousands of schools. The total Undergraduate enrollment in the USA is ~10million per year. You can assume 1/4 of that are seniors(2.5M) and perhaps 80% graduate (2M). Obviously not all are Engineering, Management, Economics -- but my point is the "300 student vs 85,000 spots" figure is wildly wrong.

LockNess0 8y ago

If we are going to use a lottery for the H1B, we should also place a ceiling on the number of visas issued to nationals from any particular country: I suggest 10%. This is similar to how the Green Card lottery works. Otherwise one or two large countries will just monopolise the whole system, spamming applications from their brethren. This is exactly what is happening, with Indians making up 76% of H1B holders.

calvinbhai 8y ago
10% is too much. Why not 5%? Actually, why not just ban applicants who are born in China and India? </sarcasm>

ycombonator 8y ago

The last good paying jobs in America are in software and the tech cartel in backhanded collusion with outsourcers are actively working to suppress the wages by flooding the market pure and simple. 10 years ago I had a neighbor who at the time was 40 was a QA analyst and was earning decent wage fast forward 10 years he is driving Uber because his company brought in hundreds of new labor and gave him the option of “transferring” as a contractor to the outsourcing company where the starting hourly pay was $25 an hour. Simple supply and demand mechanics.

conanbatt 8y ago
I am so sad that you can't use the power of the state to prohibit your competition from getting jobs.
- IWeldMelons 8y ago
  But I am so happy you can use the power of the state to prohibit outraged plebs from going after you, after you moved their jobs overseas.
  - conanbatt 8y ago
    Come get me.
- geebee 8y ago
  The h1b visa is a govt program that allows corporations to control who is allowed to move to the US and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain here. Corporations use this state bestowed power to prevent their workers from participating freely in labor markets. I am bewildered that anyone thinks there is a libertarian argument for this program. It’s power of the state, harnessed by corporations, to create a captive workforce shut out of full participation in a free economy.
  - conanbatt 8y ago
    If you only made the H1B program costs on the account of the state, american citizens would do away with the whole thing altogether in a heartbeat.

IWeldMelons 8y ago

H1B is just a tip of the iceberg. HCL etc. employ a lot of people on B1, L1 and J1 visas. They bring them on-site for 3 month, rent an apartment for like 6 or 7 of them, pay pittance and send back to India.

entwife 8y ago

This lawsuit has more likelihood of success if the plaintiff is part of a protected class (non-white, female, age over 40). The article didn't mention this.

jsnk 8y ago

If you are interested in analysing h1b data, please check out my project, https://github.com/serv/h1bhub https://github.com/serv/h1bhub It's a tool to ingest raw h1b data into postgres, so you can study the data easier with SQL. I am also working on an app that allows you to look at h1b data on web.

sytelus 8y ago
Why don’t you put this in big query or Collab notebooks?
- jsnk 8y ago
  I never used those two before, but this may be a good idea. Feel free to create issues in the repository, and we can continue our discussion there.

miramardesign 8y ago

once government starts picking the winners and losers on a racial basis, like affirmative action, like what happened at harvard against asians, it becomes a slippery slope of racial division. you will never get the perfect diversity, its an ideology that discriminates against the very people who welcomed immigrants into a free country and they are endevouring to make it less free. thus i am against immigration if people fresh off the boat can become diversity hires before poor americans. so in short maga 2020