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Denial of H1-B visas to India’s largest IT services exporters at all-time high
- lykr0n 7y agoLooks like something positive is happening.
- enraged_camel 7y agoSlapping every H1-B application with an RFE is not positive, unless your goal is to make immigration lawyers richer.
- sn_master 7y agoThe article is talking about slapping every H1-B application from well-known abusers only. Its mentioning nothing about FAANG or similar companies who are actually using the visa for what its meant for.
- zzleeper 7y agoBut they are doing it with everyone. Ask any recent Harvard/MIT/Stanford PhD graduate and he will tell you he got an RFE. Same thing with Greencards.
- cy_hauser 7y agoI suspect this is just the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction. In a year the PhDs and such will be back to normal. Sometimes it's just easier to clamp down on everything and then ease things than it is to try to figure all the angles to fix things by introducing lots of small adjustments to try to stop abuses.
- cylinder 7y agoNo there is a specific political agenda right now to deny or refuse or delay as much as possible. You have to challenge and spend more on fees to get supervisory review, litigate, appeal etc and they know most employers aren't willing to do that for these "disposable" employees.
- throwaway082729 7y agoAbsolutely. After having been here 17 years and still without a green card, having to be at the mercy of my employer, I'll most likely be going back taking my $1.5M in savings with me. You can replace me with one of your mass shooters.
- dang 7y ago> You can replace me with one of your mass shooters. We've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you understand the rules of this site and will follow them. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- llarsson 7y agoYeah, this is definitely what all that "America first" and "Make America Great Again" stuff was about. Isolationism, pure and simple. Short term, it looks like a good strategy that benefits the own country. Long term, you lose potential partnerships and access to great workers, who will now be elsewhere, in competition with you. But I guess that will be someone else's problem, so why should a politician care?
- tus88 7y ago> and access to great workers and access to cheap workers Let's be honest here.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- untog 7y agoThe way the system is currently set up it's both. Outsourcing companies like those mentioned in the article (Infosys etc) absolutely abuse the system to hire cheap workers. But a lot of talented engineers are hired that way too. Hopefully I don't sound too biased when I say that, since I'm a former H1B holder. Whether I'm truly talented or not, I can assure you I was paid market rate.
- ptr 7y agoI've got a very knowledgeable and experienced friend from Sweden that aced both Google's and Amazon's interviews, but they're only willing to employ him outside the US (Canada for example) due to the H1B issues. He didn't accept their offers and is now a top paid developer at a local startup. I'm not sure how this is "Making America Great Again".
- dondawest 7y agoExactly. If they gave it an ounce of thought, Right-wing guys would be PRO H1B visas because they brain-drain other countries and maintain western dominance. H1B visas are awesome for the west and terrible for the countries the immigrants come from. Brain drain is crazy
- ryanmarsh 7y agoThe H1B program was being abused for corporate greed.
- belltaco 7y agoThere are several better ways of dealing with that instead of just making up arbitrary and capricious rules enforced in a random and unequal manner. When even companies like Apple protest it, there's something more than preventing abuse by body shops going on. E.g They almost turned a routine matter into a catch-22 where it turns people requesting for work visa extensions while following all rules into criminals and putting them into the criminal court system. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new-uscis-policy-will-carry-harsh-consequences-for-applicants/#7bfb70504615 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new-u... They only backed down on that aspect after backlash from several big companies in the form of a letter addressed to DHS, but the other things in that letter still continue. https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/23/news/companies/business-roundtable-immigration/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/23/news/companies/business-rou...
- leakybit 7y agoWhy should anyone put their trust in what corporation say? They're an entity whose sole existence is to generate profit from employee labor. Not to mention Apple has a 99% approval rate for h1b apps.
- belltaco 7y agoBecause said corporations can move the same high paying jobs to Canada or India. Especially easier in these days where big companies are becoming more comfortable with people working from home and fully remote work. So instead of taxes and consumption happening in the USA, all that money will go offshore. Citizens' jobs will be affected too when new teams are set up offshore with people already up to speed on internal knowledge of IT systems. When they are already set up offshore and they look for new hires, do you think they will hire first in SV/NYC or in their Canada/India offices? Same with layoff preferences, they would prefer to lay off people in the more expensive location. And maybe hire someone new in the cheaper location. This will affect a lot of non-tech local jobs both at the company like HR and cafeteria, and jobs in the local economy. >Not to mention Apple has a 99% approval rate for h1b apps Then why do you think Tim Cook personally signed this letter? https://s3.amazonaws.com/brt.org/archive/letters/Immigration.Nielsen%20Letter%2008232018.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/brt.org/archive/letters/Immigration... It isn't just about approval rates, it's about being able attract the best foreign talent, people being stuck in green card queue for a decade+ with no end in sight, not getting visas in consulates etc.
- doh 7y agoWe are still a small company of 40+ people and have quite unprecedented issues with H-1Bs, from transfer though extension. Literally every single H-1B extension or transfer got slapped by RFE. The amount of documents we had to produce to prove that an employee, who works for us for 3 years, is still valuable, is just mind-blowing. BTW we got RFE equally for people that are from Europe and India. PS: because it was brought up by someone in this thread, we don’t employ immigrants to save money. Check any of my “who is hiring” posts [0] and you can see, that we pay equally across the US to all employees based on their skill level. We bring immigrants because we’re having hard times finding skilled workers locally. The competition for talent is quite brutal and we just can’t pay the same as FAANG. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20587535
- dnsiz 7y agoThen hire Americans. Happy to see they are making the process so inconvenient that you won't hire from outside just to save money.
- miaklesp 7y agoUnfortunately, Americans aren't worthy or anything beyond flipping burgers or making Frappuccino.
- achingtooth 7y agoI'd take a burger flipper over an Indian that poos all over the code base.
- dang 7y agoWe've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 7y agoWe've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoNote that this data was just from 4 of the giant Indian IT outsourcers (e.g. Infosys, Tata Consulting, Wipro), who were basically the worst abusers of the H-1B system. I'm interested to know what the rate is for smaller companies and US-based companies.
- whatshisface 7y agoI am trying to find a table of the number of H1B visas awarded. The best thing I can find is [1]. It doesn't show enough years of the Trump presidency to be useful, and the 2017 number is incomplete because the report was published before year end in 2017. Other than the fact that visa awards significantly increased from 2015 to 2016, the chart doesn't show what we're looking for. If anyone can volunteer a better source that would be much appreciated. [1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/BAHA/h-1b-2007-2017-trend-tables.pdf https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...
- blamewhitey 7y agoThere is a cap that is always reached. More denied applications just means more people are applying.
- refurb 7y agoYup. H1-B has been over-scribed for close to a decade I think. When a friend applied post-9/11, they didn’t even use up the quota each year.
- belltaco 7y agoThose numbers are skewed because they count visa extensions and transfers to a different company instead of just new H1Bs arriving. They also don't count people leaving, except in the sense that they won't apply for an extension or transfer in 3 years. The country numbers are also skewed because someone from countries other than India/China, say France, shows only once or twice in your data before they get their green card and don't have to renew their work visa. This is because of the hard cap of 7% per country for work green cards regardless of the size of the country. i.e countries with a billion plus people have the same 7% limit as tiny countries.
- belltaco 7y agoThis does not just impact consulting companies and body shops. Big companies like Apple, JP Morgan, Blackrock, Coca Cola, Visa, Verizon and dozens of others are also very negatively impacted. https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/23/news/companies/business-roundtable-immigration/index.html https://money.cnn.com/2018/08/23/news/companies/business-rou... Full text of their Business Roundtable letter to DHS about work visas and the list of signatories: https://s3.amazonaws.com/brt.org/archive/letters/Immigration.Nielsen%20Letter%2008232018.pdf https://s3.amazonaws.com/brt.org/archive/letters/Immigration...
- shaklee3 7y agoApple appears to be unaffected: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Reports%20and%20Studies/Immigration%20Forms%20Data/BAHA/h-1B-quarterly-requests-for-evidence-2015-2019-Q1-top-30-employers.pdf https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- leannekim 7y agoBig companies and startups look good by supporting expanded foreign worker programs. It makes them look progressive. It also lowers their costs to have more qualified workers around. But actually I know many local (US citizen) Silicon Valley programmers who don’t support those programs. They know that more workers means lower salaries for everyone.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- achingtooth 7y agoYou have no reason to hire non-Americans there are so many competent and skilled people. Instead of going through all the paperwork try training a local person. This helps the local community tremendously. This reminds me of a story involving IBM. They are notorious for bringing in lots of people with H-1B. I was volunteering to teach underprivileged youths how to use a computer. IBM donated 500 gaming computers to the children. I was thinking about how instead of donating all these computers, they should hire from the community and train the employees. That would have a much greater impact on the community than donating some disposable computers. Not only that, but H-1B destroys communities. I'm from a small town that was nearly 100% white, it's now less than 50% white and is mostly Indian/Asian. Most came in through Infosys, IBM, Credit Suisse, etc. The result is the community my ancestors have been in for hundreds of years is destroyed. I know people will say that this is what happened to the Native Americans, and how I'm a racist white man for saying it's bad. I still can't help feel sad since people in my family died fighting for the soil from 1780 to as recently as 2007. Just because population replacement happened in the past doesn't make it right now.
- thatfrenchguy 7y agoHave you ever hired in tech ? Good engineers are hard to find, that’s the reason companies pay for their stuff and family to move across the world.
- achingtooth 7y agoYeah I have, I started my own company about a year ago. I hired my first employee 2 months ago. Edit: Go ahead and down vote me, can't change the truth!
- mciancia 7y agoWow, just hired first employee. You really must have a _lot_ of experience in sourcing engineers then, right?
- 7y ago
- dmayle 7y agoI've always thought that the current salary requirement (min 60k) was a poor way to go about implementing H1B. Companies want H1B visas, workers want to make sure that their jobs are not displaced. As such, they should make the salary requiement something like twice the rate of whichever is greater: market rate for the role, the highest salary paid to any non-H1B employee at that company in the same role. At that point, you can relax (not remove) the H1B cap, because it makes it cheaper to hire locals, so companies will only seek out H1Bs when there really are talent shortages.
- raverbashing 7y agoHere's an idea. Make the caps salary dependent. No caps for positions paying > 100k (example), or keep the lottery if needed but every 10k increase on the salary from the minimum gets the application a new ticket on the draw.
- mobilefriendly 7y agoCompanies want the visas primarily to undercut American workers.
- blamewhitey 7y agoPutting the interests of mostly white Americans above foreigners is racist. @dang, can you ban this person?
- lalaland1125 7y ago> market rate for the role, the highest salary paid to any non-H1B employee at that company in the same role. Easy, just give all your H1B software developers the official role of "janitor". The real way to solve this is with a higher salary floor, or even better, a salary auction.
- kccqzy 7y agoDo you really think the labor certification process which all H1Bs go through will allow janitors?
- thatfrenchguy 7y agoFor the sake of all the great skilled people from India who have been on H1B for decades, Congress really need to fix the green card attribution problem: there’s no reason why a person born in India has to wait 10 years to get a green card when a French person can have one in 18-36 months.
- refurb 7y agoSure there is a reason - diversity. The “no country can get more than 5% of immigrant visa in any given year”, was done so that large countries don’t dominate the immigrant mix. Same reason you can’t get a green card through the lottery if your from Canada - it’s only open to under-represented countries.
- whatshisface 7y agoIs there any reason why you would want diversity? On its face Indians wouldn't be less valuable per capita than inhabitants of some small Pacific island just because there are more Indians alive. In fact if you believe in normal distributions then the best Indians would be better than almost any other country because there are more Indians to draw from.
- pkaye 7y ago> Is there any reason why you would want diversity? Diversity is generally considered a positive thing for companies and countries. Also there have been complaints that US is poaching the best people from other countries so diversity helps moderate that.
- whatshisface 7y ago>Also there have been complaints that US is poaching the best people from other countries so diversity helps moderate that. The US sets US law to serve US interests, so I don't see how that would be a motivation.
- diebeforei485 7y ago
- avip 7y agoI'm going to wildly extrapolate from here and go meta about the future, though this is just a piece about your usual visa abusers finally getting the treat they deserve. In 10-20 years there will be one viable immigration policy: closed borders. This is an inevitable corollary to the climate crisis. In other words, if you're trying to better your life by relocating to a better place, get into pace - now.
- b_tterc_p 7y agoNot closed borders. Just specific closed borders. Notably, the ones facing the equator. Awkwardly the ones who will most need to close borders will be the ones against whom borders will be closed in the next wave of emigration.
- ArtDev 7y agoGood. The system is rigged against local workers in favor of global corporations. In addition to depressing wages this corrupt system sucks for the H1B workers too. They can't earn more at another company unless they return to their home countries and reapply to the system all over again. Which is absurd.
- achingtooth 7y agolol @ all the pajeets in this thread downvoting the anti H-1B comments
- dang 7y agoWe've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sn_master 7y agoThe article isn't talking about denials for FAANG or other reputable companies. All the companies in the article are well-known abusers of the H1B visa, and a primary reason why Indians using the system as intended at top companies have the huge Green Card backlog. You'll find endless discussions about those companies dating way before Trump.
- jzunit 7y agoThe restrictions on H1Bs is only a temporarily restraint and will only hasten the transition to 100% remote teams. Soon people will no longer be complaining about Infosys and Tata Consulting but instead about Toptal, GitLab and Zapier - and there will be no regulatory way to stop them. Politicians can only protect your jobs for so long.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoPoliticians don't care about American's jobs. If they did they would have reigned in the H1B abuse years ago. Disney had their IT department literally training their H1B replacements before being laid off. That was blatantly illegal. Nothing happened to them. How may other companies got away with this without notice because they weren't as stupid as Disney? We can rake Zuck across the coals but Disney is untouchable. That's what politicians care about.
- yborg 7y agoExactly this. I work for Anthem, and they are implementing a plan to move the majority of their IT development work to a captive subsidiary in India. This is increasingly the model.
- number1dangfan 7y agoThere is a yearly cap that is always reached. More applications denied just means more people are applying.
- dang 7y agoAll: please follow the site guidelines when posting here. They include: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." We ban commenters who break them and have had to do so several times in this thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tracer4201 7y agoThis sounds like a good thing to me, as long as the visa denials are targeting the low-skilled Indian coders. I've been at companies where we contracted with Infosys, Larsen and Toubro, and some other Indian shops. We ended up having guys in our office who couldn't speak English, lacked an understanding of basic fundamentals (they've never used source control of any kind or write 2000 line Java methods). Ultimately they delivered garbage and it gave IT a bad rep at the company. But we kept them on the payroll to "cut costs". The contracting companies literally don't give a shit (senior managers and directors would get ball game tickets and other perks under the table), and management on our side would hold these jobs for these incompetent coders instead of qualified local talent.
- sumedh 7y agoHow did they get the project in the first place, did you team in the US vet the Indian team before signing the contract?
- tracer4201 7y agoThere’s usually an on-site account manager who hooks up the team in the US with either an offshore team or Indian coders that work for the contracting company who are already in the US. The interviews are a scam. You interview a person who seems decent but someone else will show up in their place. I had one interview where the person obviously wasn’t the one coding. He couldn’t actually describe what his code does. :) Typically management in these companies aren’t technical folks, and they have no idea what to look for.
- chewz 7y agoIt is good thing overall. If a resource becomes more scarce (programmers in this case) companies learn to use it in more effective ways.
- klipt 7y agoGood for software engineers, bad for those hiring them. Just like a scarcity of doctors is good for doctors, but bad for patients. If the USA had only one doctor, we would't magically be able to treat everyone by using the one doctor "more efficiently", rather only the super rich would get treatment.
- belltaco 7y agoDoctors cannot be easily offshored to another office or given 100% remote work. Software can, and it's happening, article mentions it at the very end. If it happened to manufacturing and factories, it could even more easily happen to software.
- chewz 7y agoDoctors (and also lawyers) are replaced by technology as we speak. Now it is time for programmers to follow and it would be easier as there is less regulation involved then in case of doctors. So not all bad.
- anon1m0us 7y agoThat's what I don't understand. A doctor earns an average salary of say, $300,000, while a programmer building software that automates the job of a doctor earns an average salary of $75-100,000. The value of the programmers is equal to all the people their programs replace, but yet, they are paid less than a single one of the individuals they replace. Our society doesn't properly value programmers. If it did, there wouldn't be an H1-B issue. There are more Americans who want to be doctors than America will legally allow to exist. There's no cap on how many programmers there can be, yet America throws its hands up in the air wondering why. The answer is obvious: America doesn't value programmers appropriately. You can't say, "We can't afford to pay what programmers are worth." How about pay sales people less. Why do sales people get 30% commissions? Why do CEO's get millions? The only real solution to the problem is to properly value the work and pay for it.
- sys_64738 7y agoInstead of all the lawyers fees and filing fees, could some of these employers retrain employees to do these jobs instead of laying people off?
- cy_hauser 7y agoIt's not a matter of retraining. The issue was US corporations abusing the H1-B system to fire expensive US workers and replace them with Indian workers at half the going US worker rate. There's not shortage of workers for companies willing to (1) pay market competitive rates and (2) hire older (i.e. over 40) workers.
- Roboprog 7y agoHow long until executive jobs are offshored as well? What stops that from happening 10 years after many of the skilled labor jobs are offshored The only barrier I see is the capital to create competing startups, but places like China may be well on the way to doing a “head transplant” on much of the work they have already been doing. Discuss, pro / con?
- conanbatt 7y agoThey key concept here is Liberty. America was founded with the principles of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Rules on how American's should be able to hire people, or humiliating and excruciating bureaucratic processes goes against the very fabric of what America was supposed to be about. The way America treats is foreigners is world renowned for abusive, expensive and unpredictable. It shames everyone who appreciates freedom of association. For all the rest, the petty happiness of the mediocre.
- duaoebg 7y agoI've been on H1B numerous times at big and small companies. Each time they used my immigration status as leverage to pressure me to take increasingly bad deals and are somehow surprised when I quit. I would consider the bulk of H1B to be about suppression of worker rights (and salary) I now remote consult from my home country. I still get employers who figure they should pay me less since I live in a cheap country but it's much easier to negotiate when they can't kick me out of the country.
- softwaredoug 7y agoIt really is the worst of all immigration outcomes for all but the employer. You come into the US, but entirely as a kind of guest worker. You demonstrate you have great skills and work ethic, but there’s no path to permanent residency or citizenship. The relationship turns exploitative. So you go back home and do great things there instead of here in the US. We could have had a smart, productive addition to the American workforce through a more thoughtful approach to immigration. Instead we gave you up to your home country. Your home gain a skilled and experienced knowledge worker bolstered with your experience at a US tech giant, we cycle in the next H1B to repeat the cycle.
- dmix 7y agoPeople in the US seem hostile to switching to a Canadian or Australian style immigration because each worker will only be able to bring their spouse and kids, not their entire extended family (including grandparents, cousins, etc) for every immigration granted like it currently is in the US. Instead it should be more lax on the front end, the advanced workers account for a significantly higher percentage of Canadian immigrants than the US (something like 30 vs 60%) which is how it should be. Any country that doesn't make it easy for the world's best and brightest to come is missing out and having gone through the US immigration process there is so much low hanging fruit to fix things without adding any pressure to the system. The US immigration system is surprisingly liberal but in the wrong places.
- TheCoelacanth 7y ago
- damnyou 7y agoThere's so much discussion here about how H-1Bs are good or bad for cohort X or community Y. Why does no one talk about the effects on the immigrants themselves? How much do they level up their technical and language skills? Are they able to support their families better? Are their kids now living in a less polluted environment (good for lifelong physical health) and in abundance, not scarcity (good for lifelong mental health)? How integrated are they in their local communities? How well do they form social bonds, both within their culture and across cultures? How different are they from family-based immigrants? Surely we should care the most about the people whose lives are impacted the most? (This is a rhetorical question, it's qwhite obvious what the reasons are.)
- segmondy 7y agoPercentage doesn't tell me much. If it's just a percent thing, they can just send through more applications. 10% can be higher than 90%. Without the actual numbers, the data is meaningless.
- diebeforei485 7y agoMost of the lawbreaking and shady activity related to H-1B visas seems to happen when there is this sort of third-party arrangement, where these companies bring workers in, and then contract them out to other workplaces (often through a chain of contracts via other intermediaries). From that sense, it's good to scrutinize these so that genuine applications have a better shot at the lottery.
- privateSFacct 7y agoAgreed - I wish they were making it easier on the legit direct hire folks, and much much harder on these third party placers. The problem is, the third party placers are playing a numbers game. No individual is critical in their H1B apps, they just need to have 22% approved so they can fill their body slots. The smaller legit direct hire firm has often invested a lot in a potential H1B usually after really trying very hard to get non visa folks in. The denials there are brutal.
- gesman 7y ago+1 Our tax dollars at work.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- shagie 7y agoOne of the questions that appears to be at the heart of the H1-B visas - does rank and file software development still meet the criteria for a specialty occupation? From https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-workers/h-1b-specialty-occupations-dod-cooperative-research-and-development-project-workers-and-fashion-models https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker... , one of the following must be true for it to be considered a specialty occupation: > Bachelor’s or higher degree or its equivalent is normally the minimum entry requirement for the position > The degree requirement for the job is common to the industry or the job is so complex or unique that it can be performed only by an individual with a degree > The employer normally requires a degree or its equivalent for the position > The nature of the specific duties is so specialized and complex that the knowledge required to perform the duties is usually associated with the attainment of a bachelor’s or higher degree. With today's world of bootcamps for entry level software development being more and more common - I really wonder if this is still the case. A bachelors degree is helpful... it signals that a person is willing to work on a multi year program to complete something that has a wide range of requirements... but it's not essential. I work with a person who has a degree in physics and another who went from truck driver to registered nurse to working on medical records software. Digging into this question, https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/nativedocuments/Characteristics_of_H-1B_Specialty_Occupation_Workers_FY17.pdf https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/nativedocume... - 70% of all H1-B visas are going to computer related occupations.
- diebeforei485 7y agoPlenty of wiggle room with "normal", "so common to the industry", "usually", etc. Also keep in mind - at most companies, bootcamp grads often join at a lower/different job title than those with a Bachelors in CS.
- webninja 7y agoAt Infosys, upwards of 90% of employees have a bachelors degree or higher. I’m not going to say that a bachelors degree is a requirement... but most employees have one.
- newprint 7y agoMy best friend is full blown concert pianist, who graduated from Yale, finishing her PhD in one of the most prestigious conservatories in US. She performs internationally with orchestras : Japan, Europe, Asia. Has CD recordings, won number of international competitions. Recently, she played Rachmaninoff piano concerto with orchestra in VA/DC area. Guess what ? She is struggling to get any documents to stay here permanently. And here, I'm sitting in Fortune x0 company, filled with unqualified HB-1 software engineers, who produce trashy code and don't care about quality of their work, because in x-Months, they will be out or replaced. HB-1 was made for people like my friend - a highly qualified PhD and not cheap contractors shipped in packs from overseas. I'm kind of glad that this racket is being closed for good.
- kijeda 7y agoIsn’t an O-1 visa designed for situations like your friend?
- newprint 7y agoAccording to immigration lawyers, it is very hard to get docs through O-1. You literally have to be international star. She is not, but still, she is level above what many musicians achieve in their lifetime.
- dmix 7y agoI've heard of people getting O-1 while being far less than an "international star". Canadian founders getting minor acquihire buyouts have gotten them. You just need to get some letters from influential people. ie, business leaders in the local industry or a politician. Like most things it's as much about who you know and how well you check the right checkboxes as it is about merit. This another perk of VCs and selling to big companies.
- whoevercares 7y agoIt really depends on the immigration lawyer, I know many people who study public health & even computer science use O-1 as alternative. non of them are even close to have international influence
- kaitai 7y agoA lot of folks are -- often justly -- saying that we should be training more Americans for some of these jobs. I worked for some time in a professional masters program that mostly has non-US enrollment, despite being in flyover land. To complete it costs a fair bit, though it's lower-priced than similar such programs on the coasts, and when you get out especially if you're an American student you're often looking at $90k+ for starting salary (depends on a few factors). It's a very remunerative field. But we just can't get many US students in! We've been trying to figure it out. US students mainly come in when they've reached a point at their company where they have a manager who says, You need these additional skills -- go to school to get them, and we'll pay. I'm not talking "learn JavaScript library blah", I'm talking stochastic calculus. The school part really is helpful because there's a ton of theory that you don't learn by doing the practical applications. US citizen grads are placed so fast. There's no such thing as a sure bet, but this grad program is a high-expected-value bet. And yet we just... can't... get... Americans. I think it's the math. So many Americans are just scared of math. Some of our Chinese students "know" they're "just bad at math" but they don't see that as a particular obstacle; just need to study harder. Americans tend to see it as an inborn anatomical characteristic or something. But also it's the cost of a master's after taking on the crushing load of undergrad debt. Some of our students got their bachelors degrees for free in their home countries & then just had to float the cost of this masters, which is less tuition-wise than 3 years of state college. There are more structural problems than just "companies, you should grow your own talent". I agree companies should do more: but if we really wanted a US society that fostered technical excellence, we could make sure our schools did that. We've made sure our schools foster football excellence, for instance. And to get back to the direct topic: we're seeing a ton of RFEs for our grads, and there is no other masters' program that does this stuff within a state and a half of us. You've got to drive 8 hours to get to the next one.
- deepaksurti 7y ago>> RFE I didn't know what RFE is, posting it for other readers as well. USCIS makes an inquiry called a request for evidence, or RFE, when they require additional evidence to make a decision on a H1B case. ... An RFE can be for information about either the beneficiary or the petitioner, or both. After receiving an RFE, you have up to 90 days to submit documents proving your case.
- pauljurczak 7y agoI wonder if we will observe an uptick in software quality as a consequence...