4 ms·

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

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.
  - foota 6y ago
    Yes, I don't think the current implementation is great. Hence my last sentence. That said, it may be better for the people coming in than not having it at all. Although the net harm maybe be greater than without it or a similar program (corporations benefit, locals hurt some, immigrants benefit). It's not clear to me what the magnitude of the harm to locals is though.
- pylua 6y ago
  The problem is that it doesn’t cut both ways. You will not be able to get a job in their country.
  - foota 6y ago
    I mean, I don't really want a job in a country paying a fraction of what I make now? It's true though, there is not an existing reciprocal program afaik, but so what? We have things much better economically. And who knows, maybe we could arrange a labor trade deal of sorts with these countries.
    - pylua 6y ago
      By the logic presented earlier , it would only be fair if Americans could compete for jobs in foreign countries the same way their workers compete for jobs in ours .
      - foota 6y ago
        Sure, I think that would be reasonable. I have two points though. Someone else doesn't have to do the right thing for us to do it. While it would be better if other countries reciprocated, it doesn't have to stop us from doing the right thing. Secondly, from a practical point of view the demand for people to emmigrate from the US and work in a country with lower wages is not nearly as high as the demand the other way.
        pylua 6y ago
        With the high number of jobs being offshored and outsourced I would not be surprised if many Americans would gladly leave to increase their job prospects. It may be the case that people in the United States can no longer sustain a living here due to the high cost of living. Perhaps we will reach that point.
        foota 6y ago
        The United States had a very high employment rate leading up to the covid crisis. Lower than it had been during the 90s, but that was an anonymously propserous decade: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate#:~:text=Employment%20Rate%20in%20the%20United%20States%20averaged%2059.25%20percent%20from,percent%20in%20April%20of%202020 https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate#:.... It stood at roughly 62%. According to the same website India's current employment rate is ~50% (part of this likely due to gender imbalances) and you can bet that wages are much lower. The relevant metric is purchasing power parity adjusted household median income. It's roughly 50 times higher in the United States than in say India (less so for China and Russia). I don't understand how you can see countries like China or India as presenting more opportunity with local wages. There are of course cultural reasons to want to move there, but I don't think there's any reasonable case that there's more economic opportunity. Some things will be cheaper for sure (rent and labor, namely) but consumer goods, food, electricity, and the like, will not be commensurately cheaper wrt the drop in income.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  I agree with you, actually. But we have to be honest about the intent of the H1B program if we want to fix it. TBH I would support throwing away H1B entirely and creating a much more permissive midskill/lowskill immigration visa whose intent is more in-line with the actual use of the H1B. But if you try to get there by reforming H1B, it's never going to work well. So, if we keep H1B, we need to start using it as intended. And then fight for another visa class. I'm just fundamentally skeptical that the H1B will ever not be abusive until we align the original intent and practice of the policy.
- geebee 6y ago
  So what if we allow more software engineers from other countries? We do! The US takes about 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year, and they are welcome to become software engineers. Now, if you ask "so what if we create a visa so that high tech employers can bestow, control, and revoke the US residency rights of people who work in a few narrow fields, including software engineering", I can take a crack at explaining how this can lead to harmful market distortions, to say nothing of labor and basic human rights abuses.
aspaceman 6y ago
Personally I disagree and think the notion that we have to give a job locally first is an empty political promise. Like honestly don’t see the point. Just give the smart person a job.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Dude no one has a problem with this if you pay market rate. You can’t see where the discussion lives?
btilly 6y ago
Companies that import labor when they had a perfectly acceptable local candidate should face severe fines... Who defines acceptable local candidate? Anyone who has interviewed candidates knows that are always a lot of local candidates who think that they are qualified for the job who you don't want for any of a variety of reasons. I don't want the government telling me that I can't hire the sysadmin I want because there is a Java programmer who thinks he can administer Unix systems. Because computers are computers, right? Alternately I don't want to be told that I have to hire someone with a particular degree rather than the high school dropout who is self-taught and whose open source projects demonstrate ability to me. Government tends to be very impressed by certificates that industry insiders know well don't mean squat. Companies should be forced to pay H1Bs significantly above prevailing wage, where "prevailing wage" is interpreted liberally instead of conservatively. A modest proposal. If H1Bs are at the quota and someone else wants to hire an H1B worker and pay more than you're paying, you should get the choice between giving up your worker's spot (they can continue working for you remotely) or upping their pay. Without setting any particular dollar figure this would create salary competition among H1Bs that would take spots away from the worst of the sweatshops. I don't think that would be much of a fix. But it would be an improvement. 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. I both believe that it would help, and that the abuse would continue. I see value in limiting how much abuse employers can get away with.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  > Who defines acceptable local candidate?... sysadmin... java I think your question already demonstrates the deviation of the H1B from its original intent. Bringing in a generic sys admin or generic java programmers on an H1B is visa abuse. Sorry, but neither of those is a special skill and neither of those jobs is an appropriate use of the H1B. There are more than enough sys admin and java programmer candidates in the USA above a certain (quite low) price tag. When it comes to H1B's intended purpose, I would expect something like: "we need someone who is expert in this aspect of the Java garbage collector and knows the internals of the X framework. Our candidate has made significant open source contributions to both. There is no one in this country with expertise in both who is currently looking for a position." Or, "we need someone who has extensive experience working in the insurance sector and also has experience being the senior developer on a large project written in Haskell. We can't find anyone who has passed the first actuarial exam and who has also been a senior engineer at a firm using Haskell". That sort of thing. The H1B was designed for __skilled immigration__. Not warm body java school kids. I get your point that this is difficult to evaluate. That's why one of my proposals was to provide Justice with plenty of funding so that they have the resources to spot-check cases with high accuracy. NB: I absolutely would support a new midskill immigration program for things like sys admins and generic java app developers. But the H1B program was never really meant for those sorts of jobs. The H1B program has radically diverged from its initial intent, and that is why the abuse of H1B workers happens. And, in fact, this is why even within H1B you don't see nearly as much of the abuse that happens in tech within other sectors (academia, medicine). CS has been democratized over the past 20 years and our H1B criteria in CS needs to catch up. Oh, and BTW, H1B abuse also fucks over actually skilled immigrants. I've been trying to hire a PhD with huge amounts of high-quality open source contributions, a bunch of publications, and there's a whole class of very particular algorithms that literally no one except him understands. He's literally the only person in the world who is qualified from day 1 to lead this heavy-R R&D project. This is what the H1B is for. But apparently his qualifications are equivalent to low-level Accenture drones doing sys admin and java app dev. I just don't buy that a properly equipped Justice wouldn't be able to hire someone who knows the difference... If we want a midskill immigration program, we should just create it from scratch. That'll be easier than morphing the H1B into 80% of what a midskill program should look like.

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.
- foota 6y ago
  Yes, I don't think the current implementation is great. Hence my last sentence. That said, it may be better for the people coming in than not having it at all. Although the net harm maybe be greater than without it or a similar program (corporations benefit, locals hurt some, immigrants benefit). It's not clear to me what the magnitude of the harm to locals is though.
pylua 6y ago
The problem is that it doesn’t cut both ways. You will not be able to get a job in their country.
- foota 6y ago
  I mean, I don't really want a job in a country paying a fraction of what I make now? It's true though, there is not an existing reciprocal program afaik, but so what? We have things much better economically. And who knows, maybe we could arrange a labor trade deal of sorts with these countries.
  - pylua 6y ago
    By the logic presented earlier , it would only be fair if Americans could compete for jobs in foreign countries the same way their workers compete for jobs in ours .
    - foota 6y ago
      Sure, I think that would be reasonable. I have two points though. Someone else doesn't have to do the right thing for us to do it. While it would be better if other countries reciprocated, it doesn't have to stop us from doing the right thing. Secondly, from a practical point of view the demand for people to emmigrate from the US and work in a country with lower wages is not nearly as high as the demand the other way.
      - pylua 6y ago
        With the high number of jobs being offshored and outsourced I would not be surprised if many Americans would gladly leave to increase their job prospects. It may be the case that people in the United States can no longer sustain a living here due to the high cost of living. Perhaps we will reach that point.
        foota 6y ago
        The United States had a very high employment rate leading up to the covid crisis. Lower than it had been during the 90s, but that was an anonymously propserous decade: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate#:~:text=Employment%20Rate%20in%20the%20United%20States%20averaged%2059.25%20percent%20from,percent%20in%20April%20of%202020 https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate#:.... It stood at roughly 62%. According to the same website India's current employment rate is ~50% (part of this likely due to gender imbalances) and you can bet that wages are much lower. The relevant metric is purchasing power parity adjusted household median income. It's roughly 50 times higher in the United States than in say India (less so for China and Russia). I don't understand how you can see countries like China or India as presenting more opportunity with local wages. There are of course cultural reasons to want to move there, but I don't think there's any reasonable case that there's more economic opportunity. Some things will be cheaper for sure (rent and labor, namely) but consumer goods, food, electricity, and the like, will not be commensurately cheaper wrt the drop in income.
throwawaygh 6y ago
I agree with you, actually. But we have to be honest about the intent of the H1B program if we want to fix it. TBH I would support throwing away H1B entirely and creating a much more permissive midskill/lowskill immigration visa whose intent is more in-line with the actual use of the H1B. But if you try to get there by reforming H1B, it's never going to work well. So, if we keep H1B, we need to start using it as intended. And then fight for another visa class. I'm just fundamentally skeptical that the H1B will ever not be abusive until we align the original intent and practice of the policy.
geebee 6y ago
So what if we allow more software engineers from other countries? We do! The US takes about 1.2 million immigrants legally into the country every year, and they are welcome to become software engineers. Now, if you ask "so what if we create a visa so that high tech employers can bestow, control, and revoke the US residency rights of people who work in a few narrow fields, including software engineering", I can take a crack at explaining how this can lead to harmful market distortions, to say nothing of labor and basic human rights abuses.

aspaceman 6y ago

Personally I disagree and think the notion that we have to give a job locally first is an empty political promise. Like honestly don’t see the point. Just give the smart person a job.

runawaybottle 6y ago
Dude no one has a problem with this if you pay market rate. You can’t see where the discussion lives?

btilly 6y ago

Companies that import labor when they had a perfectly acceptable local candidate should face severe fines... Who defines acceptable local candidate? Anyone who has interviewed candidates knows that are always a lot of local candidates who think that they are qualified for the job who you don't want for any of a variety of reasons. I don't want the government telling me that I can't hire the sysadmin I want because there is a Java programmer who thinks he can administer Unix systems. Because computers are computers, right? Alternately I don't want to be told that I have to hire someone with a particular degree rather than the high school dropout who is self-taught and whose open source projects demonstrate ability to me. Government tends to be very impressed by certificates that industry insiders know well don't mean squat. Companies should be forced to pay H1Bs significantly above prevailing wage, where "prevailing wage" is interpreted liberally instead of conservatively. A modest proposal. If H1Bs are at the quota and someone else wants to hire an H1B worker and pay more than you're paying, you should get the choice between giving up your worker's spot (they can continue working for you remotely) or upping their pay. Without setting any particular dollar figure this would create salary competition among H1Bs that would take spots away from the worst of the sweatshops. I don't think that would be much of a fix. But it would be an improvement. 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. I both believe that it would help, and that the abuse would continue. I see value in limiting how much abuse employers can get away with.

throwawaygh 6y ago
> Who defines acceptable local candidate?... sysadmin... java I think your question already demonstrates the deviation of the H1B from its original intent. Bringing in a generic sys admin or generic java programmers on an H1B is visa abuse. Sorry, but neither of those is a special skill and neither of those jobs is an appropriate use of the H1B. There are more than enough sys admin and java programmer candidates in the USA above a certain (quite low) price tag. When it comes to H1B's intended purpose, I would expect something like: "we need someone who is expert in this aspect of the Java garbage collector and knows the internals of the X framework. Our candidate has made significant open source contributions to both. There is no one in this country with expertise in both who is currently looking for a position." Or, "we need someone who has extensive experience working in the insurance sector and also has experience being the senior developer on a large project written in Haskell. We can't find anyone who has passed the first actuarial exam and who has also been a senior engineer at a firm using Haskell". That sort of thing. The H1B was designed for __skilled immigration__. Not warm body java school kids. I get your point that this is difficult to evaluate. That's why one of my proposals was to provide Justice with plenty of funding so that they have the resources to spot-check cases with high accuracy. NB: I absolutely would support a new midskill immigration program for things like sys admins and generic java app developers. But the H1B program was never really meant for those sorts of jobs. The H1B program has radically diverged from its initial intent, and that is why the abuse of H1B workers happens. And, in fact, this is why even within H1B you don't see nearly as much of the abuse that happens in tech within other sectors (academia, medicine). CS has been democratized over the past 20 years and our H1B criteria in CS needs to catch up. Oh, and BTW, H1B abuse also fucks over actually skilled immigrants. I've been trying to hire a PhD with huge amounts of high-quality open source contributions, a bunch of publications, and there's a whole class of very particular algorithms that literally no one except him understands. He's literally the only person in the world who is qualified from day 1 to lead this heavy-R R&D project. This is what the H1B is for. But apparently his qualifications are equivalent to low-level Accenture drones doing sys admin and java app dev. I just don't buy that a properly equipped Justice wouldn't be able to hire someone who knows the difference... If we want a midskill immigration program, we should just create it from scratch. That'll be easier than morphing the H1B into 80% of what a midskill program should look like.