9 ms·

H1B visas provide employers every incentive to lie to import cheap talent and work them hard. There are ways to meet the very real need to import the best brai

• sjg007 6y ago
  What would a bond accomplish? It seems easily gamed by say an insurance company that would pay the bond for premiums.
  • tomp 6y ago
    The employee would need to be skilled enough, to generate enough excess value, to make it worth it for everyone (the employee, the company, ...) over hiring a local worker.
  • btilly 6y ago
    The bond would serve two purposes. The first purpose is to pay for background checks and any costs that the immigrant might incur in the USA. (For example it would pay for deportation if the immigrant broke the law.) The second is to serve as proof that the immigrant is enough in demand that the government should believe we get a net positive from their admission to the USA. And not exactly onerous proof - it is only a fraction of what has to be paid in salary and benefits. Also note that this is only a partially baked proposal. I am sure that there are much better options than this, just as this is would be likely to work better than the current H1B program does.
    • sjg007 6y ago
      Companies already pay for background checks etc... Applying for an H1B is not free.
• z9e 6y ago
  Yup this was my experience at a very large financial corporation in the US. As a Team Lead I had to interview and hire for multiple positions across my org. Most of our jobs ended up being filled by H1B candidates, and not necessarily because we couldn't find local people. We paid them peanuts, and worked them to death. A lot of the money went to the staffing company that provided them. Predictably, some people are going to claim racism for this move by Trump, but I think it's a big problem that needs to be addressed.
• throwawaygh 6y ago
  Really, we should just enforce the original intent of the H1B. 1. Companies that import labor when they had a perfectly acceptable local candidate should face severe fines, and Justice should be given a real budget for running these investigations as a matter of course. And the burden of proof to demonstrate you needed to import labor should be pretty high. If you don't do this, then H1B abuse will happen. 2. Companies should be forced to pay H1Bs significantly above prevailing wage, where "prevailing wage" is interpreted liberally instead of conservatively. H1Bs for software engineers making less than $200K (maybe 150K) in a major metro area is a pretty obvious violation of the intent of the H1B, imo. NB: this will have the effect of making H1Bs a lot harder to get and keep. But I think this is the least evil of all possible worlds. In addition, we could also independently argue for increased immigration in general. But midskill immigration to fill jobs for which local qualified candidates exist should not be done through the H1B program. That's not what it's designed for, and that mismatch between program design and actual use is the source of a lot of H1B mistreatment. I actually don't believe that ending the tie to an employer will help. I mean, we should do it anyway, but the abuse will continue.
  • foota 6y ago
    Personally, I don't think it matters much. So what if we allow more software engineers from other countries? We haven't done anything special to deserve a job more than they have. My only concerns with it are about their well-being and freedom under the current system.
    • rukittenme 6y ago
      > We haven't done anything special to deserve a job more than they have. By being born to an area you have done something special. You have received the special benefit of local education and infrastructure, you have familial and social connections to the people of that local area. You may even have a shared sense of local obligation to uplift the people you live near. The problem with importing foreign labor isn't that they can't develop feelings of community or form social ties to an area. It's that someone local is harmed or excluded (after significant investment in them) while a foreign worker is underpaid and overworked in a job that exists because of the local's tax dollars. We're allowing greed to create a permanent underclass of locals who can not climb the social hierarchy while also importing highly-educated quasi-slaves into the country. The whole thing reeks of economic opportunism and, to me, represents the very worst of capitalism.
• adrr 6y ago
  Why not just stack rank h1b applicants by salary instead of using a lottery system? That forces the income levels up which should benefit Americans workers as well.
  • HarryHirsch 6y ago
    If you did that you'd favour profitable industries (say computing) over areas with actual shortages (say Arabic translators in Detroit). You'd also make it impossible for areas with low cost of living (Detroit) to be allocated any H1B visa. It's one of those perennial proposals that always come up but are really poorly thought out when you look into it.
    • AlchemistCamp 6y ago
      If there were "actual shortages" of Arabic translators in Detroit as you suggest, market forces would drive wages up until enough people with the skills were sufficiently motivated to move to Detroit. In the case of a long-term, widespread shortage, rising salaries would lead to a widespread increase in people training to enter the industry. This is exactly what's been happening with software the past several years.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • dragonwriter 6y ago
        An actual shortage would, by definition, mean that, at least in the short term, no amount of price pressure would meet the need, because of a supply constraint that prevents response to price level changes. For jobs that need to be done on site and take significant time to acquire necessary skills, national borders can be a supply constraint for labor if there is an absence of local talent sufficiently qualified but there is foreign qualified talent. That's the problem H-1B notionally addresses. If you have static demand and it is possible to train to meet the need, you shouldn't have long-term shortages, but dynamically increasing needs can produce a long-term gap, where you are continuously playing catch up. If H-1B was well adapted to real shortages, the continuous use in tech would indicate such a persistent dynamic shortage. I don't think that's the real condition, and I don't think H-1B is well adapted to serve only real shortages, but the idea of real, including persistent, shortages that price signalling alone doesn’t suffice to close is not to be dismissed.
• runawaybottle 6y ago
  It’s an artifact of colonialism that has been properly abstracted to fit the corporate interface, with a nice layering of cake to obfuscate reality. I want no part of it. Actually, no one one wants any part of it. The ones that take part in it are desperate. I want no part in the desperation, it’s never good.
• damnyou 6y ago
  Plenty of people that grew up lower middle class in their home countries now making 500k a year on H1s at FAANGs. H1s benefit the immigrants the most, and any analysis that centers anything other than the immigrants is deeply inhuman.