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The simple consequence of making life difficult for immigrant software professionals in our company has been a wholesale shift to hiring in India and Eastern Eu

The simple consequence of making life difficult for immigrant software professionals in our company has been a wholesale shift to hiring in India and Eastern Europe (well, also Canada for all the people who were hired in the US and then the US wouldn’t give them visas based on the lottery) instead of hiring within the US. And it makes complete sense. The potential H1B visa holder the company was hiring otherwise does not disappear off the face of the universe the moment their H1B disappears. They are still available to work from their home countries, where, in almost all cases, they will be happier with a lower salary! Most software jobs don’t require client meetings, but it’s anyways been cheaper for the company to just fly them in once a month anyways if needed. Making immigrants life harder increases offshoring, and not domestic hiring. The H1B visa is indeed flawed and ripe for abuse. The obvious solution is to fix the flaws, and eliminate the abuse. The current administration has instead chosen to make it more capricious and arbitrary, basically telling all honest companies that if you want a global workforce, it’s probably much better to leave that global workforce outside the US. The current administration keeps promising a “smarter” immigration scheme, but it’s been 3 1/2 years and there isn’t even an outline for such a scheme, never mind an actual effort at fixing the issues in work visas. Offshoring consultants are once again in vogue thanks to the administrations capricious efforts and the pandemic basically forcing companies to work remotely, making any local advantage disappear entirely.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
Offshoring is a clearly better alternative than abuse of H1B, it clearly benefits poor countries. Still there must be set some caps on offshoring, to prevent loss of technological superiority.
kamaal 6y ago
>>They are still available to work from their home countries, where, in almost all cases, they will be happier with a lower salary! I disagree, there is dog-eat-dog politics in offshore centers all the time for visa and abroad work opportunities. And you'd be surprised the kind of dealing goes behind the scenes for a person to make it to a visa. It is a toxic mixture of nepotism on several lines, plus Machiavellian game play for a person to land to US shores. In fact most of the Green card holders and Ex-Indian US passport holders you see are ace at office politics and not at Software. Its not surprising Indians do well in climbing the ladder in company ranks in the US. They have years of practice, and success at wrecking dozens of careers back home in India to get there. The US citizens are rookies and worst sitting ducks against this kind of Machiavellian talent.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago

Offshoring is a clearly better alternative than abuse of H1B, it clearly benefits poor countries. Still there must be set some caps on offshoring, to prevent loss of technological superiority.

kamaal 6y ago

>>They are still available to work from their home countries, where, in almost all cases, they will be happier with a lower salary! I disagree, there is dog-eat-dog politics in offshore centers all the time for visa and abroad work opportunities. And you'd be surprised the kind of dealing goes behind the scenes for a person to make it to a visa. It is a toxic mixture of nepotism on several lines, plus Machiavellian game play for a person to land to US shores. In fact most of the Green card holders and Ex-Indian US passport holders you see are ace at office politics and not at Software. Its not surprising Indians do well in climbing the ladder in company ranks in the US. They have years of practice, and success at wrecking dozens of careers back home in India to get there. The US citizens are rookies and worst sitting ducks against this kind of Machiavellian talent.