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Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

• neonate 6y ago
  https://archive.is/N3uMd https://archive.is/N3uMd
  • spurgu 6y ago
    Or https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
    • findjashua 6y ago
      this doesn't work for wsj, ft etc - archive.is does
      • ra7 6y ago
        Not sure about Chrome, but that extension works on Firefox for me for WSJ.
      • mardifoufs 6y ago
        It works on the FT and WSJ for me, even on mobile. Do you have ublock origin turned on too? You need it for Bypass Paywalls to work
  • pxx 6y ago
    I noticed today that archive.is / archive.today is not accessible if you use CloudFlare DNS (1.1.1.1). History: https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680 https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680
• airstrike 6y ago
  Link to DHS press release: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/10/06/department-homeland-security-and-department-labor-rule-restores-integrity-h-1b-visa https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/10/06/department-homeland-secu... Probably a better link than the WSJ submission – even though I'm a subscriber, I want the facts, and the facts seem to be hard to find As a matter of fact, I still haven't found the actual "interim final rule" (an oxymoron if I've ever seen one), so if anyone has a link, I'd be immensely grateful EDIT: Here's the unpublished ruling in PDF: https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-22347.pdf https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2020-22347.pdf One paragraph I was keen on knowing more about – and which seems pretty uncontroversial: > Under this new rule, the petitioner will have the burden of demonstrating that there is a direct relationship between the required degree in a specific specialty (in other words, the degree field(s) that would qualify someone for the position) and the duties of the position. In many cases, the relationship will be clear and relatively easy to establish. For example, it should not be difficult to establish that a required medical degree is directly correlated to the duties of a physician. Similarly, a direct relationship may be established between the duties of a lawyer and a required law degree, and the duties of an architect and a required architecture degree. In other cases, the direct relationship may be less readily apparent, and the petitioner may have to explain and provide documentation to meet its burden of demonstrating the relationship. To establish a direct relationship, the petitioner would need to provide information regarding the course(s) of study associated with the required degree, or its equivalent, and the duties of the proffered position, and demonstrate the connection between the course of study and the duties and responsibilities of the position
  • dboreham 6y ago
    I had high hopes for the "Executive Summary".
  • guitarbill 6y ago
    This was already the case, they would ask for a request for evidence (RFE) how the degree was related. This is annoying if you e.g. studied maths and then started working in IT.
    • airstrike 6y ago
      Right, that was my understanding as well, but the WSJ article said the rule "narrowed" the list of degrees so I was curious if they had limited to some specific list like STEM degrees + Law + Medical or something like that
    • CinchWrench 6y ago
      I've seen this abused so badly though--our compliance person in HR was asking me to help write one a while back for a candidate that had a BS in mechanical engineering and no relevant work experience, claiming that a course the applicant had that taught MATLAB was sufficient experience for a role as an android dev.
      • mrtksn 6y ago
        How is that an abuse if the person is actually required to perform the Android Dev role at work? This looks like a rule that will block all the self thought developers, which are plenty and some are among the best.
        • CinchWrench 6y ago
          Because the applicant wasn't qualified to do it. H1B is not a jobs training program, but they were trying to use it as one. The US has a jobs training program for foreign workers/grads. It's called OPT. That's abuse.
• tcarn 6y ago
  I can't believe I'm actually agreeing with something this administration is doing...
  • paulryanrogers 6y ago
    Even a broken clock is right twice a day
    • anonytrary 6y ago
      Misuse of analogy. This analogy says that inaction eventually is the right thing to do. This is action.
      • Strilanc 6y ago
        Even a clock running backwards at triple speed is right eight times a day.
      • paulryanrogers 6y ago
        Interesting interpretation. I always thought the point was that something broken can be correct in some, albeit less useful, quantity.
      • scollet 6y ago
        Absolutely not.
  • flyinglizard 6y ago
    I’m sure this administration’s policies on China will find many fans around here.
    • cblum 6y ago
      raises hand Oh yeah. It's the _one_ thing I can agree with them on.
    • arcticbull 6y ago
• jedberg 6y ago
  Credit where credit is due, this is a good move. The H1B program has been abused for a long time. It sounds like these changes should help make it too expensive for the fraudulent abuse to continue.
  • notJim 6y ago
    > The H1B program has been abused for a long time What's the abuse?
    • mikeyouse 6y ago
      "Body shops" like Infosys and Tata Consulting that import thousands of H1Bs under borderline fraudulent applications, and then underpay these employees. Just a random link, but the contours of the problem: https://www.epi.org/blog/new-data-infosys-tata-abuse-h-1b-program/ https://www.epi.org/blog/new-data-infosys-tata-abuse-h-1b-pr...
      • zerr 6y ago
        50k-60k is pretty normal in many places in US. Were they bringing staff in SF or NYC?
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
        • dodobirdlord 6y ago
          H1B visas are in theory intended to be awarded only when there is a shortage of some specialized labor and it is not possible to find enough qualified candidates within the country. If a person hired under that premise ends up making a “pretty normal” wage it’s a pretty clear sign that the process is being abused.
          • AnAnonyCowherd 6y ago
            I work for a company that's about 30th in terms of H1B's. All around me, I see degreed engineers -- many with their Masters -- doing clerical work that a sharp high-school graduate could do. I'm not talking about a few. I'm talking about dozens. There's nothing about what they're doing that requires specific engineering knowledge. They only have to be conversant about what the actual engineers are doing. So the effect is 2-fold: the fact that his arrangement exists puts downward pressure on wages for the skilled jobs, but it also takes great opportunities away from people who would have gotten those jobs a few decades ago.
• arcticbull 6y ago
  It's pretty amazing to me how anti-immigrant America is, for a country built on immigration, but I suppose it's always been that way. Benjamin Franklin hated the Germans in the 1750s [1]. For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does. Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 1M. This means Canada brings in ~5X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does. [2] [edit] This rate has been consistent since 1992. [edit] I originally stated the US brings in 140,000 immigrants per year, this was a mistake, my cursory search led me to the cap on employment based green cards, not total. Factoring in family members of US citizens, it's ~1M. By Immigrants I include green cards per year, as everyone else is by definition a non-immigrant. It is my understanding the Canadian number is the same category. Blanket requiring additional pay for H-1Bs seems fine, but leaves startups in a difficult spot where they're unable to bring in the same level of foreign talent that bigger companies are, as, of course these rules do not take into account equity based compensation. As it stands, 4 out of 5 H-1B holders make more than average Americans. The process of bringing in H-1Bs is already so expensive, arduous and wasteful that companies aren't going to be bringing in huge quantities of "US replacement" labor. I certainly wouldn't if I were in charge of hiring. [1] https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-bias-starting-with-benjamin-franklins-hatred-of-the-germans/ https://qz.com/904933/a-history-of-american-anti-immigrant-b... [2] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/how-to-read-the-visa-bulletin/ https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/how-to-read-...
  • frequentnapper 6y ago
    As a canadian immigrant, I'm actually against the ramping up of so much immigration because we do not have the infrastructure to support it. I liked the slow and steady pace of quality over quantity before liberals came into power.
    • arcticbull 6y ago
      It wasn't much lower in the past -- the number's been hovering around the high 2xx,000 to low 3xx,000 per year since 1992, and immigration per year as a percentage of the population has remained around 1% that entire time, according to IRCC and statcan. [1] The real issue is that Canada's birth rate is 1.4 children per woman on average. This means within a generation the population would be reduced to 2/3. With a points-based immigration program, the country is able to be selective about who it brings in. I find blanket statements like "the infrastructure can't support it" pretty weak sauce without citations, especially as more folks in the country means more economic productivity, which means more taxes, which means more money to throw at, you guessed it, infrastructure. [1] https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Plan-Graph-2020-article.png https://www.cicnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Levels-Pl...
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  > Under the new rule, the required wage level for entry-level workers would rise to the 45th percentile of their profession’s distribution, from the current requirement of the 17th percentile. The requirement for the highest-skilled workers would rise to the 95th percentile, from the 67th percentile. Looks like there's going to be a lot of new entry level guest workers as existing visa holders get shuffled around. It'll be interesting to see if the wage distribution stays lopsided once the situation stabilizes. If the program is fulfilling its intended goals, they should match their domestic coworkers in the same age brackets.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  >The Trump administration announced an overhaul of the H-1B visa program for high-skilled foreign workers that will require employers to pay H-1B workers significantly higher wages, narrow the types of degrees that could qualify an applicant, and shorten the length of visas for certain contract workers. This seems like a great move. It corrects the incentives to hire foreign workers over domestic workers, and also ensures that foreign workers aren't abused with lower wages due to their immigration status.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Rapzid 6y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this just in reference to legislation introduced recently that has has to, but has not, pass through congress?
• MichaelZuo 6y ago
  Well it seems as if all parties will be better off in the long term if this gets implemented correctly. It certainly would reduce many of the bad incentives in the immigration system.
• ponker 6y ago
  Maybe Trump’s Hail Mary for his re-election is... governing?
• 908B64B197 6y ago
  This is a great move. The current H1B program made no sense at all. If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop my only path forward is H1. They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that makes any sense to anyone?
  • ianmobbs 6y ago
    The changes described in the article do not change your hypothetical whatsoever.
    • 908B64B197 6y ago
      It does indirectly. Hiring for the later will hopefully cease to be cost effective. But the former should still be worth it.
      • ianmobbs 6y ago
        Why do you care whether or not it's cost effective to hire a foreign UI tester? That has zero correlation with whether or not its cost effective to hire someone with experience at CERN. Your hypothetical lists 2 different profiles that would be hired for vastly different jobs, and it seems like you only care that one of them is fucked over - is it just a strawman for racism? Can you point to any actual examples of CERN interns being passed over in favor of foreign UI testers?
        • username90 6y ago
          > Can you point to any actual examples of CERN interns being passed over in favor of foreign UI testers? They both compete for the same H1B visas so it has happened a lot of times. The H1B at Tata getting 70k a year took a spot from a software engineer at Google earning more than twice that. That is how lotteries work. Raising the wage requirement will mean that the actual talent will have better chance to get in. And yes, a lot of Googles new engineers comes from India, that is a good thing, the bad thing is companies like Tata abusing the system to get low paid labor into US.
• api 6y ago
  Fair trade policy has consistently been the one thing on which I agree with the Trump presidency. It hasn't been enough to outweigh all the other absolutely horrible stuff, but it is one thing. I am concerned that Biden will return us to the old days of "free" trade that allows corporations to import totalitarianism via near-slave or even actual slave (see Uyghur prisoners and forced labor) wage arbitrage to crush domestic wages and liquidate the middle class. This isn't even getting into the export of environmental destruction ("out of sight out of mind") or the export of American technological expertise to unfriendly totalitarian states. H1B programs can be shady this way too. It's not as shady as actual slave labor or near-slave sweatshops, but there is certainly a serious power imbalance when your employer can pay you sub-standard wages and threaten to cause you to be deported if you don't keep your head down.
  • ponker 6y ago
    If he had spent four years on trade instead of being a moron on Twitter I might be voting for him this month.
  • jedberg 6y ago
    > I am concerned that Biden will return us to the old days of "free" trade Based on his latest rhetoric, he seems to have adopted Sanders's views on trade, which is mostly protectionist.
  • perfectbeeing 6y ago
    This undecided voter would appreciate the gesture of you sharing with me some examples of the “other absolutely horrible stuff”.
    • ponker 6y ago
      The three worst are: normalization of racism after 50 years of steadily decreasing racism in America, terrible COVID response responsible for 100,000+ deaths in excess of what average countries have achieved, and vast corruption that has destroyed hundreds-of-years-old norms on presidential conduct (Secret Service forced to buy rooms at Mar A Lago, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs participating in a political stunt in uniform, political campaign letter included in food boxes, etc). The election is basically that of a homeowner deciding whether he wants the guy who is spraying a flamethrower into every corner of his house, or an empty cardboard box. If you loathe your house and want it destroyed, the flamethrower guy is who you want. Just be careful, there’s no insurance check when the house burns to the ground.
• nrmitchi 6y ago
  I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status. If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the employee, H1B fraud, in this manner, wouldn't be worth it.
  • jzymbaluk 6y ago
    This is right. The answer that's best for the economy is to allow more immigration, not less (especially skilled immigration). This move will just make it more dificult for the average company to sponsor H1B workers
    • mc32 6y ago
      Why not make companies sponsor underprivileged kids who need the opportunity just as much but don’t get as much consideration?
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • rbultje 6y ago
        Because educating underprivileged kids takes up to 20 years(school, college, potential post-grad studies), whereas the H1B worker can start immediately. H1B workers also typically have several years experience in the specific position where they're being considered. You need both.
        • mc32 6y ago
          Some H1Bs are talented, many, many copy paste. Yes it takes years to develop talent. It’s not easy. But these are the same companies who throw money to the wind for the purpose of empty virtue signaling and making some connected politicos happy. Why not devote that money to real causes that actually provide hope for kids rather than fill the pockets of people who know how to shake corps down?
• paxys 6y ago
  While I'm in favor of the move, wages are just a band-aid fix. The core of the problem is that the premise of the H1B visa itself – extraordinary skill that cannot be found in the US – is complete bullshit. Everyone participating in the program (including the government) knows this, and yet they have to do the entire song and dance of years long approval processes, fake job listings, RFEs and whatnot. Fix the real problem, and salaries will take care of themselves. Another problem with simply raising the salary bar is that there are actually professions (especially in healthcare) that genuinely have a talent/supply gap. A small hospital in the midwest, however, isn't going to be able to compete with a hotshot SF startup with unlimited venture funding to throw at foreign hires.
  • mastazi 6y ago
    It's not "extraordinary skill that cannot be found in the US" though, it's for skills for which there is a shortage in your market, similar to the subclass 189 visa here in Australia. When you say "extraordinary skill" you are probably thinking about the O-1 visa (which is similar to the Australian subclass 124).
  • tyre 6y ago
    I take it you've never tried to hire experienced software engineers. The supply is significantly below demand.
    • eldavido 6y ago
      At what cost? $50/hr?
      • pavanky 6y ago
        I am on H1B (bay area last 4 years, Atlanta 6 years) and my total compensation is significantly higher than that.
    • diggernet 6y ago
      Perhaps that view says more about the hiring process than it does about the available labor pool.
• vkdelta 6y ago
  Without reading the whole IFR, what would be the minimum pay for h1b holder? Will it make harder for entry level F1 OPT students?
  • pavanky 6y ago
    I think this can potentially affect startups who may want to hire H1bs at a lower than prevailing wage for their area(even if they are paying their American colleagues the same amount). Other than that, the biggest issue might be to IT consulting companies (mostly based in India) that tend to have their employees work at a lower rate than tech companies.
• throwaway777888 6y ago
  Can't wait to hear leftists cry about how racist this is.
• sjg007 6y ago
  I mean they will pay H1bs higher but still doesn’t make a company pay a us citizen higher. Maybe it will open up space for lawsuits based equivalent responsibilities and help the equal pay for equal movement. Even excluding H1bs we know there are people doing the exact same work for vastly different
  • nerdface 6y ago
    H1Bs usually require the employer to prove they couldn't find someone within the country.
    • drewbug 6y ago
      I don't think that's true.
      • sjg007 6y ago
        Why not? Seems entirely plausible.
        • mlex 6y ago
          There's no need to speculate on "what's plausible" when it's a documented process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24703643 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24703643
      • mamon 6y ago
        It is true - as a part of H1B application you need to post a job advertisement in some US job board first, which becomes a part of the documentation you submit to USCIS. I went through that as a part of my own visa process. EDIT: ok, maybe my immigration lawyer was a weirdo :)
        • mlex 6y ago
          As someone who's gone through both H-1B and PERM, H-1B only needs the company to prove two things, specifically about how much you're paid: The actual wage: This is the wage paid to other employees in the company who do the same work. The prevailing wage: This is the wage for that occupation in the geographical area. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application##1:_Wages_(the_prevailing_wage_requirement) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application##1... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Labor_Condition_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Labor_Condition_Appl...
• victor106 6y ago
  I finally agree with something this administration is doing. This is a solid move. H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small) for a number of years at the cost of not only American workers but also the visa holders. The only ones benefiting are the companies that sponsor H1B visas by suppressing wages for everyone. I just hope the new administration don't role back these changes. Typically when a new administration comes in they have a "throwing the baby with the bath water" mentality. I hope they realize the things that the previous administration did which makes sense and keeps them
  • guitarbill 6y ago
    exactly. although there's more than one way to fix this. one controversial idea, but in line with capitalism is to just give (highly) skilled immigrants permanent residency (other countries do this already, and the H-1B process is also pretty rigorous). why? because right now with e.g. the H-1B, your employer has to petition for a green card. as you've said, it costs a lot of money to sponsor an H-1B. a reason some bad-faith companies do this is because they know the H-1B employee is tied to them (although an H-1B transfer is not too difficult). imagine if it was easier for visa holders to switch employees? i'm not holding my breath though. in any case, having H-1B be a lottery was always weird. i just hope this doesn't impact any existing H-1B holders :(
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > I finally agree with something this administration is doing. As they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
  • glennpratt 6y ago
    > H1B has been/is being abused by all companies (big and small) I don't see this exactly. I have worked with multiple, brilliant visa holders. Many of them have moved on to bigger and better things. Presumably paying a huge amount in taxes for the privilege. Most software developers I know are not making what I would deem suppressed wages, especially in the current conditions (and I don't have an SV job). Most firms I know would hire more people, but instead are contracting with firms and individuals outside of the US. I suspect that's going to ramp up more.
• matz1 6y ago
  I don't think this is a good move, it will encourage remote work/outsource more.
  • koluna 6y ago
    Which... can already be done today?
    • matz1 6y ago
      yes but this will further encourage it.
      • koluna 6y ago
        If someone is keen on cost-cutting through outsourcing, they already don’t have an incentive to bring someone in and pay benefits. This is a false narrative.
        • matz1 6y ago
          it possible that someone keen on cost-cutting through outsourcing but didn't do it because it still affordable enough to bring someone in but now with the higher cost to bring someone in, they will chose to outsource instead.
          • mrkstu 6y ago
            In a true race to the bottom like that, the American is out of a job regardless.
            • matz1 6y ago
              >the American is out of a job regardless yes if the American can't find their competitive edge.
              • 6y ago
• notJim 6y ago
  The new rule is that H1B workers need to earn higher salaries relative to the distribution of salaries in their profession. The worker must make the 45th percentile wage, where previously it was 17th. Won't this primarily hurt people early in their career, or does it also take into account experience level?
  • mamon 6y ago
    I think this is by design. You don't want to issue visas to "people early in their career" - those jobs should go to Americans first. You only hire from abroad if there really is a shortage of specialists in some profession, and you want those professionals to prove their worth in their home country first, before allowing them to the US.
    • ketzo 6y ago
      Well, it's possible for there to be a shortage of early-career specialists. Even now, with CS majors stuffed to the brim across the country, entry-level software engineering salaries keep rising and the big companies hire as fast as they can. I see your point broadly, but I think it's possible for that to be true and to also take university-grad H1-B employees.
      • mamon 6y ago
        But still, you want that shortage to stay there for a while, because that provides the incentive to US universities to create more spots in CS programs for US teenagers. If you go straight to hiring foreigners you are leaving US kids behind.
    • verst 6y ago
      Exactly. The H-1B program is intended to be for highly skilled workers. Most folks early in their career (GP is probably thinking straight out of school) can hardly be considered highly skilled. And surely there are plenty of American recent graduates from similar programs as the recent graduate H-1B applicant.
    • muzaffarpur 6y ago
• muzaffarpur 6y ago
  It's not gonna take a long time before, most of the tech jobs move to Canada/rest of world. Why should someone hire entry/mid level engineer in usa, if they can hire at same price much senior engineer in same time zone? After successful taste of work from home, things have changed a lot. Unfortunately, now USA have not much to offer (rising healthcare cost, continuous degradation/humiliation of non white immigrants, rising intolerance of society, high cost of education etc). Let's see how it works out!
  • pedroma 6y ago
    It'd just reach some equilibrium. In your scenario, American workers will eventually just accept lower pay (we're overpaid already anyways). Why should someone hire entry/mid level engineer in Canada, if they can hire at same price the same level engineer in the same city?
    • muzaffarpur 6y ago
      Look at the work force in other business sectors. What do you see? Do you see competition? I think tech world have changed quite a bit post Covid (I might be wrong),health care cost is rising(irrespective of where one lives in USA, ), college education cost. There is no competition. The general consensus in American civil society after Bernie's defeat is, there is no need to keep majority of Americans healthy and educated. Sorry.
    • FilterSweep 6y ago
      > we're overpaid already anyways Who’s we? Rent is astronomical
  • Eratosthenes 6y ago
    Good point. Why hire an American at all, for anything, ever, if you can just hire someone for less money in China or India? According to economics, America can't even exist! Impressive.
• jedberg 6y ago
  I agree 100% with you. My view is even more extreme, I think we should allow anyone who passes a criminal background check to be able to get a work visa, with no quotas. But barring that pipe dream, this seems like a good interim step.
  • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Wouldn’t that cause a large displacement of the existing labor force and significantly drive down wages?
    • kbenson 6y ago
      It depends. Short term and long term there's a lot of shuffling that would happen until it settled into an equilibrium (Maybe. On the other hand maybe it would be extremely sensitive to global issues). Those people all need food and housing and need to buy goods and services, so it's not like you're obsoleting an existing person's job, you're adding demand as you add supply. Whether one eventually outweighs the other is dependent on many factors. That said, I would assume that short term increased supply would lead to a tighter job market.
      • Retric 6y ago
        The problem beyond simple policy choices is infrastructure takes time to build. If hypothetically 100,000 people show up in NYC tomorrow there is some slack that might accommodate them. But, how do you scale the transportation network to handle even just 1 million extra people in NYC? Now extend that to every other part of the country. Sure that seems unlikely, but when millions of people are willing to become undocumented immigrants, it’s likely a more open policy would see dramatically larger influxes. Especially in response to local events like civil wars. Really, just raising the caps by say 10% every year gets the same result without the chaos.
        • kbenson 6y ago
          > Really, just raising the caps by say 10% every year gets the same result without the chaos. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing when I was writing the above, but didn't want to get too into the weeds on what I wanted to be a short answer to the original question (I have a habit of going on...). Like many things, an immediate large change has repercussions that are detrimental and can possibly be alleviated with a measured change over time. That's how you acclimate fish to the temperature in a new aquarium. That said, it's also how they tell you to boil a frog...
• dognotdog 6y ago
  Is it only me, or does this sound pretty empty? Except for narrowing of the `specialty occupation` moniker, all the rest seem like things that are already part of the H1-B program?
  • tootie 6y ago
    I'm not anti-immigrant in any way, but I'm wondering if things like H1-B have just run their course. Why would I pay to essentially import a worker to the US instead of just hiring staff in another country? Currently, my teammates could be 5 blocks away or on another continent and it makes no difference.
    • mavelikara 6y ago
      > Currently, my teammates could be 5 blocks away or on another continent and it makes no difference. Synchronous communication with your teammates in time slots reasonable to each of you is a huge difference.
      • tootie 6y ago
        The western hemisphere is pretty big.
• flowerlad 6y ago
  Requiring competitive wages is a good move. They should also have allowed H1B holders to switch to a different employer without requiring a new visa. Along with that they should also have increased the number of H1B visas available. Currently many strong developers are being hired into Amazon and Microsoft but being positioned in Vancouver BC (a Canadian city a couple of hours from Seattle) [1]. These developers take American jobs but pay taxes to Canada, and contribute to Canadian economy instead of American. [1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/property-report/article-vancouvers-emerging-tech-sector-poised-for-accelerated-growth/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/industry-news/prope...
  • dmode 6y ago
    Offering competitive wages has always been part of H1 requirement
    • pseudalopex 6y ago
      In theory.[1] [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wage-levels/ https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wa...
      • bduerst 6y ago
        EPI is a Washington think tank funded by American labor unions. I wouldn't take anything they publish about foreign labor seriously, especially how they cherry pick stats on that report.
        • pseudalopex 6y ago
          What is misleading about the report? Who would you take seriously?
  • vsskanth 6y ago
    You need to pass laws for all that. Even this regulation surviving legal challenges is doubtful.
• notJim 6y ago
  I feel like rather than pitting immigrants against native born workers, and trying to come up with the perfect arcane rule, we should have sectoral bargaining where the workers could negotiate pay standards directly with their employers. Then it wouldn't matter where someone is from, because they'd be covered by that contract, and the government could get out of the way of the labor market.
  • kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    What is this even supposed to mean? We already have bargaining between workers and employees. When you have a larger labor pool, market forces will obviously shift the market towards lower wages in the absence of government intervention. People who oppose H1B oppose it because they think that foreign workers should not be allowed to enter the labor pool thereby depressing the wages.
    • sudosteph 6y ago
      Pretty sure that comment was in reference to syndicalism - a theory of government where worker-controlled unions would have leverage over laws that relate to their domain... But that hasn't been a relevant system of anything since Revolutionary Catalonia was a thing in the 1930s. (disclaimer, I actually love syndicalism as a concept. In an ideal world, syndicalism could ensure that naive and bought-out politicians wouldn't be able to arbitrarily outlaw encryption - because laws which relate to technology would be in the domain of people who actually work on technology. But like so many systems that sound nice in an ideal world - getting there and making it non-corrupt would be no minor feat).
    • notJim 6y ago
      I'm referring to sectoral bargaining where workers negotiate sector wide for things like wages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining. I was thinking of how Nordic countries don't have minimum wages because the unions prefer to negotiate directly with the employers. The bargaining you refer to is between an individual employee and an employer, where the employer obviously has drastically more power, particularly in the case of immigrants on visas. Even having a single-company union would be beneficial, but the problematic companies here would just be non-union shops. The point of sectoral bargaining is exactly what the H1B system is trying to accomplish, where you establish wage guidelines for the whole sector to prevent companies from undercutting wages with immigration. Except that because the government has to make this one-size-fits-all rule, and doesn't understand the specific needs of each sector, it's hard to come up with the right rule. Under sectoral bargaining, each sector could determine its own needs and goals, and because companies and employees each have representatives, the end result is fairer for all.
• Bukhmanizer 6y ago
  I hit the paywall, so I can’t tell whether it’s explained in the article, but are they planning on fixing other H1B related issues? It’s great if the program is abused less, but there are a ton of other problems with the work visa programs in the US.
• Cherian_Abraham 6y ago
  “ Because those required wage increases take effect this week, existing H-1B holders looking to renew their visas might not qualify unless their employers raise their salaries accordingly.” This is really bad. Families are going to get told to leave. I’m surprised that there is no discussion on this thread about the impact to people who haven’t done anything wrong.
  • muzaffarpur 6y ago
    That's not the kind of families HN cares about. Only the right kind /s.
    • fernandotakai 6y ago
      let's be honest, HN does not care about H1B workers. i've seen so many damn comments saying shit like "only low skill indians come here on h1b". it got to a point where i couldn't discern between right wing "they took our jobs".
      • nicoburns 6y ago
        Eh. I think that's a little unfair on us HNers. I have seen comments like that. But I've also seen a lot of comments about how the H1b visas should be more flexible and widely available so as to give visa holders more freedom.
        • fernandotakai 6y ago
          the problem is that those comments are never downvoted. they are ALWAYS upvoted. so is it unfair to say a community that mostly upvotes plain xenophobic comments has an issue? and it's not from now -- i've been here for a while and every single time h1b is mentioned, there are upvoted comments saying weird stuff that is never removed.
          • dang 6y ago
            > those comments are never downvoted. they are ALWAYS upvoted That's far from the case. You might be running into the notice/dislike bias, which unfortunately tends to distort perceptions and leads to false feelings of generality. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=notice%20dislike%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... From there it leads to painful feelings about the community, which is particularly unfortunate. I wrote about this earlier today in a different context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24701584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24701584.
• maerF0x0 6y ago
  > “America’s immigration laws should put American workers first,” Quotes like these irk the heck out of me. American workers is a subset of the populace and no, they should not be prioritized over other competing groups. For example, American Business owners, American Retirees, American disabled folks... It's a lot less about the specifics of this article/case and more about how the "Jobs" aim has become impossible to balance EDIT: If you're going to downvote then leave a rebuttal to the point. Why should Immigration laws (or any law for that matter) focus on a subset of Americans?
  • wu_tang_chris 6y ago
    This is our country, where "we" are the people who already live here. Most of us were born here, many of us moved here, but we have a pretty good thing going on. New immigration should be a net benefit for our society and it should favor the side of the workers - e.g. Americans in general - not the bottom line of a business class looking for ever cheaper labor in order to extract additional money from their efforts. Personally I'd like to see the entire H1B program scrapped entirely. If you can't find an American to do a job, hire and train one. If you don't want to, don't do business here. The rest of your comment is semantic quibbling. "American workers" in this context means Americans. Nothing in that phrasing implies carving the country up into ever smaller groups based on certain characteristics and including or excluding them.
    • zara_arias 6y ago
      Hooray for feudalism, where people's place in society is determined by their birth.
• chairmanwow1 6y ago
  Overall, I really support these changes. However, this piece really struck me as a big mistake: "Under the changes, an applicant must have a college degree in the specific field in which he or she is looking to work. A software developer, for example, wouldn’t be awarded an H-1B visa if that person has a degree in electrical engineering." Some of the best software engineers I know are graduate degree holders from neuroscience, biophysics, EE, and more. This might be a distinction that is only relevant in software engineering, but my intuition is that other fields will feel the sting of this decision.
  • sushshshsh 6y ago
    I would absolutely speculate that this requirement was made to block many good candidates. After all, the point of a visa system is to constrict the pool of potential candidates anyway.
    • chrisseaton 6y ago
      > After all, the point of a visa system is to constrict the pool of potential candidates anyway. No, that's not the point. If that's what you wanted to achieve then you'd be best off not having any visa system. So obviously this is not what they're optimising for.
      • sushshshsh 6y ago
        You mean, if you wanted to constrict international immigrants you would block all immigrants from coming here. If there was no visa system, then companies would be free to hire whoever they wanted.
        • chrisseaton 6y ago
          > If there was no visa system, then companies would be free to hire whoever they wanted. No. I don't know if you're not familiar with what these terms mean, but by default most people don't have permission to work in the US. That's the default situation if there were no visas. Visas didn't create this default situation - they're the tool that allows you to get permission beyond the default of not having permission. If you had no visa system... nobody would have the needed permission. You're thinking everyone would get default permission but that's not the case.
• dmode 6y ago
  This is not. As with anything in the Trump admin, this is not well thought out and just focused on election based xenophobic messaging. The people who can game the system, can easily do that. However, many people who really benefit from H1B will be shafted. For example, doctors and nurses in rural areas. H1 also is a path for many engineers, doctors, and phds to enter the workforce. With blanket higher salary requirements, it will just deny a path to the job market for many international students graduating from Ivy league universities. Also, this benefits FAANGs, and if you are a startup looking to hire someone on H1B, forget about it.
• curiousllama 6y ago
  I really, really want to like this move. I've written on HN before that the Trump admin's revealed immigration preference is, in effect, "as few immigrants as possible" [1]. Every past move this administration has made with regard to visas has been ill-advised and badly executed (imo). That they solved problem 1 (ill-advised) does not mean they've solved problem 2 (badly executed). In that light, I can't help but think this is just another RFE hole: "you studied math and cs, and now want to work as a data scientist? That's not closely enough related" or "quantitative economics is not STEM, even though 12/15 required courses were math, stats, and CS, and we previously approved the program" (both objections I've heard raised in the past year, _before_ this new emphasis on degree-job relatedness). This isn't a bad policy - it may be good, even! - but I hope it gets implemented by the next administration. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23760337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23760337
  • 908B64B197 6y ago
    > "you studied math and cs, and now want to work as a data scientist? That's not closely enough related" This could be trivially avoided by simply aggregating the job posting requirements for similar positions or doing any sort of survey of the qualifications and education of currently employed highly paid data scientists.
    • curiousllama 6y ago
      Yea, it could. A similar argument got rejected. That’s the problem.
• x87678r 6y ago
  > Under the changes, an applicant must have a college degree in the specific field in which he or she is looking to work. A software developer, for example, wouldn’t be awarded an H-1B visa if that person has a degree in electrical engineering. As an EE, that is rough.
  • fizwhiz 6y ago
    Yikes. I would have been unemployed by that measure because I work as a SWE without a CS degree.
    • ketzo 6y ago
      You and many others. My first mentor was a cognitive science major, and she was the person every developer on the team went to for help. This is one of those policy decisions that I guess might sound reasonable on the outside, but has absolutely no bearing on reality.
    • YetAnotherNick 6y ago
      Not getting H1B is not equal to unemployment.
      • fizwhiz 6y ago
        But it does equal to unemployment in the United States because you can only get limited mileage out of OPT. Moreover, you need to work in an industry where employers are willing to sponsor an H-1B. Many of us have had to "pivot" to industries like Software when we realized that we were un-hireable in non-software industries due to our immigration status.
  • throwaway49872 6y ago
    This is deeply ironic given that an number of the best software engineers I know have EE degrees.
  • username90 6y ago
    That example was likely conceived by the journalist and not the administration, I don't see it in other articles on this. I don't believe it will be that strict since degrees looks so different in different parts of the world.
• Will_Do 6y ago
  > Under the new rule, the required wage level for entry-level workers would rise to the 45th percentile of their profession’s distribution, from the current requirement of the 17th percentile. The requirement for the highest-skilled workers would rise to the 95th percentile, from the 67th percentile. This is pretty abstract and probably the most important detail. How much would a software engineer have to make to qualify? I'd figure it'd have to be at ~200k if it's 95th percentile. A number high enough and it truly would be for only highly skilled, hard to find software talent, rather than just labor cost cutting. Does anyone have concrete numbers?
  • renewiltord 6y ago
    You can use BoL statistics for this. In the SF-Oakland-Hayward area, 90th percentile is $207k. 95th is probably north of $250k.
  • woem 6y ago
    A Software Engineer in the SF area with 4+ yoe would need to make $250k+ in base salary.
• fizwhiz 6y ago
  > Under the new rule, the required wage level for entry-level workers would rise to the 45th percentile of their profession’s distribution, from the current requirement of the 17th percentile. The requirement for the highest-skilled workers would rise to the 95th percentile, from the 67th percentile. If you've got an undergraduate degree in CS looking for work as a SWE does that mean you'll need to get paid at p95? Won't this isolate all employment opportunities to places like the Bay Area at companies that pay a high base-salary (no equity counted)?
  • yostrovs 6y ago
    The percentiles are hopefully based on the region where a given employee would be working.
    • mavelikara 6y ago
      They are. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Condition_Application for details.
• 3pt14159 6y ago
  There is a lot of political science research that speaks to growing xenophobia when immigration is unleashed. I understand the sentiment—I'm very pro-immigration—but with respect to domestic policy my primary goal is stability and faith in government. Personally, I like how my country, Canada, does it. Points based system that rewards multiple factors, including skills, employability, and fluency in English and French. A large, sensible limit and a separate target for refugees. Some affordances for family reunification, but fundamentally economically and societally stable.
  • runarberg 6y ago
    Xenophobia is more expected, when the immigrant population is ghettoized, alienated, given fewer opportunities and stricter policing, and made to compete with the local population for limited jobs. A more reasonable policy would be to make sure the that doesn't happen. Say by abolishing racist policing, better urban planning, better labor laws, and partly socialized job market. EDIT: Changed wording, previously incorrectly stated that immigration was natural under these circumstances.
    • munk-a 6y ago
      Xenophobia is never natural, it's comprehensible but there are a lot of folks able to resist falling into it as a scapegoat from bad circumstance. I agree with improving society to help less folks fall into it, but I don't believe in allowing any excuses for xenophobic views.
      • runarberg 6y ago
        This is very true. It was bad wording on my part. Thank you for correcting it. Edited the previous comment to reflect this.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • shard 6y ago
        I would have thought that the comment "xenophobia is natural" is fairly uncontroversial. It's certainly not an artificial construct forced upon people (although certain expressions and targets might be). That's why there are articles like http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/why-your-brain-hates-other-people http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/why-your-brain-hates-ot... . After all, even animals can exhibit xenophobic behaviors. I don't think runarberg meant that xenophobia is acceptable or proper.
• greatwave1 6y ago
  I'm working on a dashboard to track H1B visa hiring and salary data at https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/visas https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/visas Right now you can use it to see the biggest H1B employers and their median salaries for workers on visa. Open to any suggestions on how to make it more useful!
  • KerryJones 6y ago
    This is great, thanks for putting it together. What's the source of your data? It would be great to be able to sort by the median salary (maybe highlight which companies are taking advantage). It would also be useful to compare it with "median non-H1B salary" which also might highlight where people are taking advantage.
    • greatwave1 6y ago
      Thanks! Data is sourced from the Department of Labor: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/performance https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/performance If you click the column heading in the second table, you should be able to sort by median salary for the major H1B employers. Any suggestions on where to find non-H1B median salary data, aside from doing something like scraping Glassdoor?
      • KerryJones 6y ago
        Oops, thought I had clicked on the heading. Thanks! I think some digging would be required, but I believe it's required by public companies, there are some sources like here: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/how-does-your-pay-stack-up/ https://www.wsj.com/graphics/how-does-your-pay-stack-up/ The part that is still problematic is that it obviously varies by region, definitely not an easy problem. Scraping Glassdoor might be easier/more accurate.
  • vsskanth 6y ago
    How is this dataset being updated considering considering the data from the iCERT system is not available real time anymore ? Are you relying on their annual disclosures ?
• rajmath1988 6y ago
  What is the threshold limit for H1B wages as per new rule?
  • neoz 6y ago
    Old Wages Level 1 - 17th percentile Level 2 - 34th percentile Level 3 - 50th percentile Level 4 - 67th percentile New Wages Level 1 - 45th percentile Level 2 - 62nd percentile Level 3 - 78th percentile Level 4 - 95th percentile Source: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Interim-Final-Rule-Strengthening-Wage-Protections-for-the-Temporary-and-Permanent-Employment-of-Certain-Aliens-in-the-United-States.pdf https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Int...
  • weyland108 6y ago
    Yeah. I am looking for the same. Doesnt seem to listed anywhere.
  • mavelikara 6y ago
    45th percentile of the wages, for that job category [1], at that location. [1]: See https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm
• KerryJones 6y ago
  While I'm definitely for preventing companies from taking advantage of the system and foreign workers by underpaying them, there seems to be many obvious and clear negatives to this (some are highlighted from others) - Restriction of qualifying degrees - Contraction of months for contractors - Retroactively forcing salary increases - ... not explicitly stated, _more headache for doing H1B visas in the first place_ The H1B process is already heavily complicated and difficult and I've seen many strong candidates be denied because either the company they were applying to didn't find it worthwhile. Two personal friends had to leave the country after they had lived and worked here and found employment in other countries simply because it was such a headache. It's also important to remember these are not the only changes that have taken place to H1B visas in this administration, and that it's already become more difficult. https://www.investopedia.com/news/impact-trumps-h1b-visa-crackdown-5-charts/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/impact-trumps-h1b-visa-cra...
• FpUser 6y ago
  >"Under the changes, an applicant must have a college degree in the specific field in which he or she is looking to work" For software development positions I suspect it is the dumbest requirement ever. When I used to be employed by company we've hired and brought over many people from former USSR republics. Some of the best programmers ever and not a single one had specific programming education. All were graduates of various universities.
• gumby 6y ago
  I don't mind the salary part much (see below) -- it's such a hassle to bring someone in on an H-1 anyway (at least if you are scrupulous about following the rules) that that's not a big worry. I've only done it when we really couldn't find someone local. The degree issue is short sighted though. The salary issue will be a legitimate problem for some people though: I was on a school board for a private foreign-language school and we needed teachers fluent in their native language and familiar with the curriculum. It was already a nightmare for us when the H-1s would run out in October or December as teachers look for new jobs during the summer. Trying to meet 45% of the median for local senior, unionized teachers might be quite difficult. Still, it's a cost of doing business.
• coding123 6y ago
  It's a good idea, but it misses something very important. The last company I worked at I was one of 6 developers in the US. The rest of the developers was a team in Pakistan - 30 to 50 employees. The 6 employees were paid about the same as the 30-50 in Pakistan (combined). So before I would support this, I would support the US making remote technical work illegal without also increasing that pay to match the equivalent pay in the US.
  • nrmitchi 6y ago
    You want the US government to step in and start dictating to companies what it pays employees in different countries? If that happened, there is an almost-0% chance you get the outcome you want (which seems to be the staff in Pakistan getting paid more).
    • coding123 6y ago
      We'll let's take a step back just to start here - a company in the US that makes some dashboard widgets for a hospital chain. The hospital chain pays this company lets say $1M per year. Half of this money goes directly to people in Pakistan that are "employees" of the company. The other half goes to US citizens. So overall, things aren't so great. We've just contributed $1/2M per year to a country that's let's face it - has a history of supporting terrorism. I want that kind of outsourcing to stop. I mean, what amazing things can come from that scenario? Maybe my original comment didn't capture it, but I would rather force the these remote style companies to not really have that giant pay advantage. I mean what do you think is the total combined amount of dollars leaving the United States per year because of relationships like this.
• intrasight 6y ago
  IMHO, new layers of rubbish regulation on top of old layers of rubbish regulation. Would be better, I think, to throw the whole thing away and start over.
  • dark 6y ago
    it's easy to say. But it suddenly causes more than a million people forced out of this country after following all the rules for decades. Think of human cost here.
• dang 6y ago
  All: don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments in this thread. That's what the More link at the bottom points to. Or click here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=4 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24702393&p=4
• pneill 6y ago
  Across the US, about 20% of the spots to get a computer science degree are occupied by foreign nationals. The research at these universities is funded by US research grants. If there's a need to create more skilled tech workers, it might make sense to tie federal search funding to changing these numbers until the need for H-1B visas falls below a threshold value. Right now, the US taxpayer is funding the education of skilled foreign workers to take jobs from US citizens. That's messed up. For reference: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11347 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11347
  • HeavenFox 6y ago
    Foreign students typically pay full tuition. Rather than being subsidized by the U.S., they are actively subsidizing U.S. domestic students.
    • pneill 6y ago
      It's not about tuition. It's about funding of the university. Typically a university will take 50-90% (Yes, up to 90%) of a research grant to fund the university (keeping the lights on, etc). And universities are the ones making the decision to fill available slots in CS departments with foreign nationals.
      • finolex1 6y ago
        Tuition and university funding are almost directly connected. They are doing so because 50-90% of those research grants is not enough to keep the lights on and professors employed. A lot of universities (barring the most well endowed ones like Harvard, Yale and Princeton) admit international students to help fund the university and either increase the spots for local students or subsidize their school fees.
        • pneill 6y ago
          Tuition is a drop in the bucket of the funding model for a research university. The majority of university funding comes from research grants and that's why the piece they take off the top is so outrageously high. Note that I don't question your point about the use of international student fees to subsidize domestic students. I'm just saying reducing the cost for students can be done many, many other ways. The point I'm making is that the US tax paper should not pay for foreign students to take US jobs. And if we tightened up that we might not need so many H-1B visas.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• nickik 6y ago
  Trump is literally a one trick pony. Stop anybody not born in the US from being in the US. This will really hurt their economy. Elon Musk as made the point, really logically countries should advertise and do recruiting for the best people. That is what would allow more technology, production and growth in a country. I just don't understand the logic. I understand the 'poor people come here and take jobs' even if its wrong, but high payed people this clearly isn't an issue.
• akudha 6y ago
  How does this affect people who are already here, working? Are they going to be harassed for even more documentation than they produce today? This sounds good in theory, I'm wondering how well this is going to be executed in practice
• gerdesj 6y ago
  Immigration is a tricky one, regardless of country. Me: UKoGB and an employer: I'm keen on it. My firm only grades pay on function and time served. We also grant shares based on time served. I have an employee who lives in Poland and is Polish. He used to live here in the UK. We came to an agreement when he wanted to go home, have a child, get married and get Britain out of his system! His granddad flew and broke several Hurricanes on behalf of the RAF a few years back. Granddad survived quite a few scrapes.
• mekoka 6y ago
  Maybe there's something I'm missing about the appeal of H1B, but I don't understand why this announcement would be a big game changer in a post-Covid-19 world. Organizations are in the midst of more drastic adaptations and H1B appears as relevant as the DVD in a world of video streaming. My understanding is that it allowed organizations that were more comfortable doing things the "traditional way", show up to work every day and sit in a cubicle, a way to spend money and energy to bring people over, so that they would do just that. Covid-19 forced them into a reality they dreaded and they survived and are adapting. Now that remote is becoming a norm, the new edge will be to do it across wide regions and time zones, which in my opinion is an even easier adaptation than the previous. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I fail to see the point of H1B in that reality. How did remote-first or remote-only organizations used H1B before March?
  • soperj 6y ago
    It's been abused in the past, just because you don't see it being abused in the future, doesn't mean that something shouldn't be done about it.
  • hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    As someone who has worked with lots of remote teams, I'll give you a simple answers: timezones matter. A lot. Especially for relatively early stage companies where tight collaboration on new products is key. I have actually refused, and will continue to refuse, work that requires me to collaborate with someone 11.5 hours different. It sucks for everyone involved. Years ago I had a job when I worked noon-5 and then 10pm-1am to overlap with colleagues in India. At first I thought "Hey, I'm a night owl, this will be great." I grew to hate it pretty quickly, and I'll never do it again. Contrarily, I've worked with colleagues in Brazil who were only 2 or 3 hours off from me, and it worked out great.
  • djsumdog 6y ago
    You do realize this world won't last right? There are a lot of states opening up. Hollywood currently is churning losses because they can't release anything. States are opening up and there are very few fatalities. Some people love 100% remote and choose it, but there a HUGE number of people who do want to be back in the office, at least one or two days a week anyway.
• femg 6y ago
  Great!
• pruthvishetty 6y ago
  https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/10/06/department-homeland-security-and-department-labor-rule-restores-integrity-h-1b-visa https://www.dhs.gov/news/2020/10/06/department-homeland-secu...
• koolba 6y ago
  Step 2 should be banning consulting / contracting services with an H1B workforce. If you're hiring an H1B it should be a full time employee for direct employment, not a pass through body shop. No clue how or if it'd be possible to enforce such a provision.
  • digianarchist 6y ago
    The 50/50 rule was suggested by Senator Dick Durbin. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4893923/user-clip-sen-durbin-defends-5050-rule-stop-h1b-abuse https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4893923/user-clip-sen-durbin-...
• tannerbrockwell 6y ago
  H1B visas have always been about suppressing the wages of tech workers. America can be competitive on the world stage and pay a market rate. It's not true that these workers have skills that are not available domestically. Make the H1B salaries the same as the senior tech employees you're trying to displace and the calculations on firing all your senior employees goes out the window. This ultimately will be good for the foreign workers, as they will be compensated equally. This is equitable and just. anything else is modern day indentured servitude.
  • Aperocky 6y ago
    You do understand that if there is a way to pay half the money for the same work, every single one of the company would have done so right? The only reason that isn't happening right now is because the top talent largely congregated to the USA, utilizing those visas, making finding talent in other markets harder as you usually just can't find the same level of talent out there. That is going to change, especially when COVID eliminated a huge part of inconvenience - everybody is at home anyways, the person on the other side can be 20 miles away or 8000 miles away, it doesn't matter all that much.
• suyash 6y ago
  As an immigrant in US, whose been through the H1B visa I fully support this move by President Trump. It will be a win-win!
• seshagiric 6y ago
  Devil is in the details. For entry level positions the new rule increase min. pay to ~45 percentile and for experienced positions to ~95 percentile. Companies will just stack-rank everybody into the 'entry level' positions. Not so good for candidates but we have to see how the new rule fares.
• yurlungur 6y ago
  I do have a few thoughts on this issue but chief among them is: does this really matter when the election is around the corner and so much instability is in plain sight? I'm not sure I care about a specific policy change driven by this administration when so much about everything may change in the next few months, one way or another. What I am sure is I sure do have my plan B if things don't go my way, and I hope other people have one too if they can afford to.
• ravila4 6y ago
  I feel like this thread has a lot of bias coming from bad experiences in the computer science field. While I do understand the bad practices of many tech companies, I think the picture is very different when you look at careers in other STEM fields, such as biology, chemistry, and physics. H1B visas are very important for foreign students in these fields particularly those hoping to pursue careers in academia. H1B visas are in fact a beacon of hope that brings many talented students to America, with the promise of finding a job here. As a matter of fact, many of these students go on to work on projects that are important for human health, e.g. COVID-19 research. It is convenient for the country to attract and retain their talent, of which there is currently a shortage. Not every H1B holder is an underpaid scrum master. Some are legitimately scientists doing on a postdoc in academia, and working to improve lives. For those of you rejoicing, I just want to ask you to do more research in how this rash policy change may impact the lives of real people.
  • ummonk 6y ago
    If their projects are that important we should be spending more on them so they meet the minimum pay requirements.
    • la6471 6y ago
      Did Covid not teach us anything? How long do you think it will take for your job to be offshored? Maybe few years? This will give incentive to increase offshoring to the companies. Mind you - offshoring is not equal to outsourcing. If you work for a Global company like Google or GE - good luck. Stopping immigration is like stopping oxygen ... this economy will slowly stagnate and be overtaken by other more efficient economies. Either you try to dial back time and go back to the 40s with no globalization OR you have to push forward with globalization to level the playing field for all countries wether it is a developed or emerging country and achieve a parity in salary which makes the American workers competitive in the Global scale. Do we have the guts to make the second choice because certainly we cannot go back to the 40s and aim for global dominance via WW3.
      • lmg643 6y ago
• somurzakov 6y ago
  this is do dumb. People will just leave to Canada/Mexico and pay taxes there and continue to be employed at their current workplace remotely (if this is IT). So jobs will continue to be offshored, this will even accelerate offshorization of high-paid IT jobs. While number of nurses will decrease and healthcare system will suffer in form of poorer service/higher healthcare costs. Trump has good intentions, but his policies do more harm to Americans, than the benefit they make. There are only 85K h-1b visas awarded annually (with advanced degree and work experience required and stuff), while family reunification visas account for tens of millions of green cards. Trump has no idea how to create legislation that works, this is purely populist move targeted at uneducated voter base to get cheap points before the election. Don't fall for this cheap populist move, Donald ia just being desperate to score any cheap points from swing states, given Biden's increasing lead
• download13 6y ago
  Stopped clock
• aloukissas 6y ago
  "The only exception to this rule is for fashion models, who aren’t required to have college degrees." - I just can't stop laughing with how on-brand this is :)
• beervirus 6y ago
  Reddit, collectively: “wtf I hate immigrants now.”
• totaldude87 6y ago
  https://archive.is/mTunw https://archive.is/mTunw - archived version for those who are being paywalled..
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• golem14 6y ago
  I can't access the link, but if the headline is accurate, that's probably a good move. For FAANG companies - they usually pay all their employees including H1Bs pretty well. But it's hard for Google/FB/... to even get a H1B visa for their prospective H1B employees because the cap is filled by a number of consulting companies that imports people from other countries (I think mostly India) and treat those people pretty poorly (bad wages, they might don't have the skills to make it in the regular job market). In the long run, I think this problem will go away because people working from abroad is becoming much more common: these consultancy jobs and other H1B jobs will see a lot of pressure to be outsourced.
  • firstfewshells 6y ago
    I doubt FAAG base pay would be 95th percentile for level 4 Software engineer wage. A sizeable chunk of the compensation is in equity which doesn't count when benchmarking prevailing wage against employee pay.
    • iXce 6y ago
      If it doesn't count for prevailing wage, does it count for the evaluation of the compensation distribution in the first place (genuine question, I'd assume no for consistency of measurement but yes if e.g. W2-reported compensation is used as reference)?
    • golem14 6y ago
      You can doubt it all you want. I was also not claiming that fangs pay 95th percentile wages. I said that in my experience they pay h1bs pretty well (not that different from domestic entry level engineers).
• totaldude87 6y ago
  ok, here is my devil's advocate point - what if more companies switch to even more offshoring? how are we gonna protect the jobs then? Yes there are abusers (& outright fraud - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/telugu-nri-duo-among-four-arrested-for-h1b-fraud-in-the-us/article28274089.ece https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/andhra-pradesh/telugu... ) of system, and on other hand we still need brilliant Computer science engineers ! Secondly, there is no law that currently prevents moving the H1b labor pool to a offshore heaven like India or Philippines or whatever! so what if this actually increases the bottomline of major h1b users? Finally , what exactly is the 45th percentile salary? this is a vital question because the base h1b salary is $65k?! would that be increased to $100k? how many delta jobs that are we talking about? or all is this for the elections?
• kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  People who oppose H1B fundamentally believe that foreign workers should not be allowed to enter the American labor pool thereby depressing the wages here. Fair enough. While on the margin, it is true that if a company can't hire a foreign worker, it _might_ be forced to hire a local worker in the short run. But in the long run, restricting labor this way only increases the chance of that job moving entirely abroad, especially for information workers like programmers. Take this real example. Google has offices in both Mountain View (USA) and Bengaluru (India). The hiring bar is the same and Google employees can easily transfer between offices. A SWE in the BLR office makes ~40K USD (due to the local cost of labor), while the same SWE would make ~150K in MTV if they decided to change teams. USA gets $0 out of the 40K that the BLR SWE makes, while it would make ~55K in federal and state income taxes and even more in payroll taxes if the same person moved to MTV. And I am not even counting the sales taxes, and general velocity of the money that person would spend if they lived in MTV. Either way for Google a SWE is a SWE and if the US made it impossible to hire them in the US, they would just increase hiring in India. How is this a better outcome for the US or its citizens? Unless you ban all outsourcing, you are only increasing the chances of shifting the labor entirely outside the country by having strict immigration control, as opposed to labor that lives in the country and pays taxes. It's ironic that most of the H1B rage is targeted against programmers, one of the MOST remote-friendly professions as COVID lockdowns have re-affirmed. It's also ironic that there is always generic xenophobia against "second-tier programming talent from India" when Indians as a group pay the highest taxes per-capita in the US and are one of the most law-abiding. Historically the US has had the benefit of being a desirable place to live in, due to being a developed country that largely had its shit together. That encouraged the best minds from around the world come and live here, whether researchers or working professionals, even if they had to jump several hoops to do so. It feels like the US is extremely insistent on killing the goose that lays golden eggs. Due to the constant volatility in immigration policies, university toppers and budding researchers across the world are already wary of choosing the US as a place to work or live in. It will be a few decades before the chickens come home to roost for the US, but it will be too late by then.
  • opportune 6y ago
    Are you sure the hiring bar is the same?
• blondie9x 6y ago
  I would hope they are also restricting offshore hiring because otherwise these efforts would be in vain.
• finolex1 6y ago
  A key problem with H1B visas is not just the wage requirements, but the fact that the requirements are ever changing, the fees keep getting higher, and that you can get rejected for some arbitrary reason even if you meet all criteria. This means most companies barring the biggest Silicon Valley employers, banks and Indian consulting companies are simply not willing to stomach the perceived administrative expenses or uncertainty that comes with visa sponsorship. It doesn't help that vested political interests use administrative hurdles as workaround to decrease immigration because they fail to pass legislation. It would benefit all parties to have a system that is more transparent, predictable and administratively simpler.
• Animats 6y ago
  Announced, not implemented. It won't take effect any sooner than 60 days from now. Much the same thing was previously announced back in June. And something similar was announced back in April.[1] Besides, there are still L-1 visas, for foreign companies who have employees working in the US. This is mostly a PR move. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/global/2020/apr/21/trump-us-immigration-ban-pause-green-cards https://www.theguardian.com/global/2020/apr/21/trump-us-immi...
• akhosravian 6y ago
  I haven’t read all the comments, but does anyone have a good explanation for why software engineers in the US (especially in the Bay Area, seattle and New York) make so much more than anywhere else in the world? Even looking at relatively high cost of living / high services places like Northern Europe it is hard to make the comp work out. E.G. levels.FYI says an E5 at Facebook in London averages lower pay than an E4 in the US.
• tuna-piano 6y ago
  I see a lot asking for the specific salary numbers but no answers. I believe (could be wrong) that the required wage increase for old->proposed new H1B requirements changes would be close to the below examples: 1)Software Developer in Chicago - Old $71k->New $105k 2)Software Developer in San Francisco - Old $96k->New $145k My Opinion: 1. Free trade is generally good. That includes things, people and ideas. But the effects of immigration policies are very uneven throughout society. Imagine if the US had 200 qualified TV meteorologists. If the US opens its borders to unlimited TV meteorologists from the developing country of Meteoroligistan, what would the effects be? It's pretty clear that the news networks would be able to hire cheaper meteorologists. Because the meteorologists are cheaper, the news networks would also hire more of them. TV viewers would then get better, more frequent weather forecasts. The networks and the consumers win! But conventional wisdom says that the original 200 qualified meteorologists here lose. But I kind of think conventional wisdom may be wrong. I'm not sure there aren't significant second order effects. With so many meteorologists, maybe the US becomes the world's capital of TV weather people. Maybe because of that, new weather companies are formed and new opportunities arise for those original 200. This really seems to be what has happened in the technology industry. 2. It seems completely dumb bring in some of the most talented students from abroad, train them at our universities and then send them home. H1B is primarily how these students stay in the country. Without H1B most of these bright students will go elsewhere after graduation. 3. And for the humanity of the H1B program. I'm mixed... The worst parts about being in the H1B program: uncertainty, stamping process, delays, the constant fear of losing a job and being kicked out within weeks - serve no benefit at all for any side. But to my most controversial thought which I have no data to support. I see many H1B workers who feel entitled to so much from the US without feeling any sense of gratefulness back to the US. Unlike many of our Grandparents who immigrated here and who seemed to feel grateful for their new country - I get the feeling many H1B workers+current immigrants are here just because it's a good place to make some cash. They don't take the time to appreciate what this country is and what it has given them. Maybe that's fair given that the H1B program also seems to view them as temporary labor. To the H1B holders who have been here for years, had children here, bought a house and just yearn to be part of the American dream - I'm sorry our country hasn't given you the stability that you desired when you arrived. [1] https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=16980&code=15-1132&year=21&source=1 https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=1698... [2] https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=41860&code=15-1132&year=21&source=1 https://www.flcdatacenter.com/OesQuickResults.aspx?area=4186...
• vonwoodson 6y ago
  WSJ showing that “fair and balanced” NWSA leadership bias.
• FilterSweep 6y ago
  Ah H1B. “Let’s pit you tech workers with lower paid foreign tech workers and make you blame the wrong group of people”
• renewiltord 6y ago
  Here we go with the protectionism. If we had SWE unions they would be making sure that all foreigners were evicted. You can read this thread to find out. That's my number one reason to oppose unions: they will be super protectionist. I derive that knowledge from the fact that lots of SWEs on forums like this are pro-union and simultaneously protectionist.
  • Eratosthenes 6y ago
    All I'm hearing are good reasons to support unions.
    • renewiltord 6y ago
      Glad to hear it! I oppose because I disagree but honest articulation of your position is an unalloyed good.
• jupp0r 6y ago
  Can somebody reconcile these points, they seem to be conflicting: - they set the new threshold for acceptable wages at 95% of the distribution for that position - they say that this will affect 1/3 of applicants - they say that h1b workers are underpaid Those can’t all be true at the same time can they? If 2/3 of applicants are in the upper 5%, they’d certainly be earning more and not depressing salaries.
  • dodobirdlord 6y ago
    The distribution is complex because visas are awarded by lottery. Many companies are treating the program as expected, and applying for a small number of high-skill high-wage specialists. Then there are a much smaller number of companies that flood the lottery with thousands and thousands of applications each year on the premise that their applicants are interchangeable and the more applications they submit the larger their share of the visas will be. Because most companies don’t have 100x as many qualified foreign applicants as roles to fill or places to put those people if they unexpectedly got a few more approvals than planned, they cannot avail themselves of this strategy. So H1B holders are a bimodal distribution of very high wage workers and below-average wage workers. Found a cool link elsewhere in the thread. You can see the effect manifest pretty clearly. You see a lot of Cognizent, Tata, Infosys, etc and low salaries, but in CA the largest H1B employer is Google and in WA it’s Microsoft, and in those two states the average H1B wage is much higher. https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/visas https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/visas
    • jupp0r 6y ago
      I can see your point, but I think the effects of this regulation are misunderstood here. Prevailing wage is based on locality. H1Bs in California now have to be in the >95% bucket of prevailing wages for their county. Even FAANG engineers would have trouble reaching that threshold as it only takes base salary into account and not total comp.
• ChicagoDave 6y ago
  In my mind, the benefits of the program have been mostly met. We've helped other countries increase their IT capability. Of course the offshoring of work will only increase with this change. Companies had been bringing work _back_ to the U.S. and now they will be moving it once again to offshore locations. It's not going to do what the administration thinks it will do...unless they started some nonsensical regulatory penalty against offshoring.
  • dodobirdlord 6y ago
    I think you’re missing something essential. There are only a limited number of H1B visas awarded each year, and they are awarded by lottery. Far, far more applications are submitted than slots are available, and most applications are rejected. After this change the number of H1B visas awarded isn’t likely to go down.
    • ChicagoDave 6y ago
      The new rules will work through the end of the year and the entire program is shut down (no new visas). My guess is that corporate America will hold its breath until the election. A Biden administration is likely to be much more H1-B friendly. But if Trump were to win, corporate America would turn to virtual offshore talent moreso than it has in the past. Labor cost is labor cost. If the rules make it expensive here, talent acquisition will happen where it is less costly.
      • dodobirdlord 6y ago
        I think you’re still missing the point. “H1B friendly” or no, the same number of H1B visas are going to be awarded. The application pool is massively oversaturated. A bunch of large and high-paying companies have been lobbying for this change because it will increase the odds that they can bring in their own hires at the expense of hires by low-wage companies. This is going to shift the distribution of H1B workers from a mix of high and low wages to just high wages, but it’s a 1:1 replacement of low-wage workers with high-wage workers. Each slot that might have once gone to an Infosys employee who is now going to be offshored is going to be snapped up by Apple or Google or Microsoft to bring to the US a star foreign employee who is currently stuck working out of an office in their native country or in Canada or another company with more open immigration policy.
• jupp0r 6y ago
  Note that this not only applies to H1B visas but also to employment based green card applications (PERM). This will prevent lots of people from getting their green cards (if not shut down by courts). I’m currently in the process of applying for a green card. This really sucks because I’m relatively young, just moved to the US from Germany 3 years ago and thus probably not in the upper 5% percentile for Staff Software Engineers in my area (surprise surprise). It’s disheartening to see so many negative comments here on HN. This does not apply only to staffing agencies but to most people in tech that don’t have a green card.
  • pm90 6y ago
    H1B related posts on HN will attract the worst kind of crowds. The experience of debating them is futile since their objections don’t come from the facts of the matter but from a misguided belief that immigrants, and h1b holders specifically, are “taking their jobs”.
• johndoe42377 6y ago
  Well, let's work remotely, the way Linux kernel or LLVM or GHC people do. But we will have lots of not needed managers? Well, let the chips fall where they may.
• alexmingoia 6y ago
  Companies should just move the jobs overseas. Expand the offices in India and Eastern Europe, and cut back offices in US.
• nine_zeros 6y ago
  The "wages will rise because we harass foreign workers" camp fails to realize that other countries are either actively working hard to allow companies to set up shop in their country or actively attracting tech workers to boost their own labor pool to sustain a large number of tech companies. All we are doing here is harassing people, businesses and shooting ourselves in the foot by shrinking our labor pool in exactly the industries where we need them to expand: tech, medicine and advanced sciences. For those still not able to wrap their head around it, we are actively shipping away our ability to tend farms by restricting farm hands for short term benefits. This story has played out before with factories. Soon, it will be tech and stem work.
• squidfish 6y ago
  The fixing of the H1B ship sailed 20 years ago. It sailed around the world, came back and set sail again. There is no fixing this cluster fuck of a system. It has raped my industry and my potential earnings for 20 fucking years.
  • dang 6y ago
    "Please don't fulminate." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• chrismsimpson 6y ago
  The United States is turning into a shit hole country, all of its own making. Who would want to work there by choice?
• torgian 6y ago
  This is a good move, I think. If anything, it'll force employers to give higher pay to immigrants, where they typically offer as low as they could go. It'll also give employers a bit of incentive to hire locally, I think. But, who knows. It could just all blow up in our faces too.
• 8note 6y ago
  Moving tech out of the h1b and to something specific with higher pay requirements makes more sense to me. What happens with the non-tech fields that can't find skilled labour, but aren't money printing machines?
• BMSmnqXAE4yfe1 6y ago
  Combined with work from home trend, that will just lead to jobs leaving the US entirely.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• kouohhashi 6y ago
  I know most of tech community believe open USA. But I think that view is heavily biased because most tech guys in Silicon Valley is relatively rich and many of them are even foreigners. In order to understand the problem, I want to know opinion which support H1B visa restriction. Anyone who work for tech and support H1B visa restriction?
  • hiram112 6y ago
    I'm an American who worked for a year in India and another few months for a large H1B "WITCH" company in the US. It was an interesting experience, but it took me about 2 weeks to understand how it was not about "best and brightest" but about US multinationals gaming the system to push down wages and use indentured servants. If it were up to me, I'd set the limit at something like $250K tied to average home prices in the area where the H1B worked. If home prices go up, so must the minimum salary. This would push wages up rapidly for medium IT and software jobs for Americans, including American blacks, hispanics, etc. who Corporate America pretends to care about while employing 80% Indians in their tech departments. Google, Apple, and etc. could still pick the cream of the crop from around the world, while all the banks, IT staffing companies, and others making CRUD apps on AWS would be forced to hire and train Americans at higher wages which would push more smart students into the field and out of law, finance, etc. Companies that play games like opening offices in India or Canada or wherever would eventually be caught by the local cities and states who need that tax revenue more than ever, so I don't fear a huge loss of talent and jobs overseas.
    • codeisawesome 6y ago
      How is opening an office in India or Canada “playing games”? On what authority can local cities and states ban the activity? (They simply can’t.)
    • sg47 6y ago
      The problem with training Americans is that due to at will employment, they can leave as soon as they are trained and can get a better job. Whereas if you can find someone who already knows how to do this job, even if they leave in a 2 years, you get 2 years of work out of them.
• ausjke 6y ago
  Talking about abusing H1B, India took 70% of the H1Bs alone, China, which has larger population, takes less than 10%. For these top 2 consumers, India H1Bs are mostly from India, Chinese H1Bs are mostly graduated in USA directly. The S380 senate bill was trying to get unanimous consent(UC) in senate to give amnesty to India visa holders so they can get greencards without waiting for too long, if that passed, all other countries will have no greencard quotes for at least one decade. We can not reward those who gamed the system, meanwhile, H1B does need to be reformed.
• sisama 6y ago
  I estimated the new prevailing wages for NYC/SF/SEA using z-scores and the new %-iles. For NYC: (I II III IV) = (116,003 137,323 160,321 203,405) For SF: (I II III IV) = (138,283 162,157 187,910 236,155) For SEA: (I II III IV) = (128,082 148,708 170,957 212,639) The level for an applicant is determined by their education + experience. Level I is supposed to correspond to an entry-level role requiring specialized skills in the field. These set the minimum base salary an applicant in the category must be paid. N.b. They reflect _only_ base salary and not stock or bonus compensation. These levels will be unreachable for most; even those at FAANG. More details - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vSeeTD1OnoPTW87SWmpWMMhzGXnOjpskmXr35hBFlfVNIQD7ns_vFkzMIHoLh_rN5vQvnXPck8zM0gj/pubhtml https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vSeeTD1O...
  • paxys 6y ago
    What makes you think these are unreachable? They seem like somewhat standard salaries for SDE/senior/staff/principal to me.
    • sisama 6y ago
      Two points: 1. Unfortunately, the levels dont map neatly to those categories. Someone with a Bachelor's and 1yoe can be filed as Level II. Anyone who is doing supervision with a couple of years of experience is likely to be 3 or 4. 2. Some people will certainly meet and exceed and this bar. But this is the _minimum_ required salary. For anyone other than new grads, there is likely to be significant variation in base pay and so there are those who will fall under.
  • actuator 6y ago
    If I look at the SDE salaries for the first four levels in FAANG and map it to your levels, the salaries seem roughly in line with average FAANG base salaries except maybe Amazon. If you want to extend FAANG club, even Microsoft will fall under. What do the levels you mentioned exactly mean?
    • sisama 6y ago
• known 6y ago
  Indian diaspora is running an Organized mafia in USA http://www.petition2congress.com/20324/expel-indian-americans-from-usa http://www.petition2congress.com/20324/expel-indian-american...
• CommieDetector 6y ago
  Awww so cute to see all the Trump haters loving him when he acts in there interests ..... hypocrites!
• tomerbd 6y ago
  Trump is the 10X President, he delivers and delivers, continuous delivery at scale.
• rustybolt 6y ago
  Honest question: why are articles behind a paywall upvoted?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• aosmith 6y ago
  This might be the only thing Trump has done that I could agree with.
• redditmigrant 6y ago
  So many folks here with a "its a good thing". The challenge that this rule also creates is that there are people in this country who have a spot in the green card line based on the US government approving their petition who have to provide their H1B worthiness every 3 years. Those people now get weeded out. That green card queue is country based. So a Norwegian person who wasnt qualified for the H1B under the new rules already has a green card, but an Indian person is now going to get locked out. This is discrimination based on country of origin, which should be illegal but unfortunately isnt for immigration law.
• iamgopal 6y ago
  This will result in a less people employed, but at a higher pay. Rest of the job will move abroad.
• iagooar 6y ago
  For such a liberal country, the US have a very strict immigration control. In Europe, many countries are rather the opposite - the state has much more control yet immigration matters are much more relaxed. I am genuinely curious where this „tradition“ comes from, maybe some historians or experts in geopolitics here?
  • herbstein 6y ago
    I'd wager the answer is that you're mistaken as to how much control the government exercises over its citizens in Europe.
• jitendrac 6y ago
  This is welcoming move for both sides,qualified individuals will get well paying h1b jobs and Americans will get more home job opportunities which were previously abused by h1b sponsoring companies.
• cryptica 6y ago
  I don't even live in the US but this is a great move and I hope other countries follow suit. It will actually benefit US industry by forcing companies to only select the most highly skilled workers. It will raise standards in all industries. It will even give foreign workers an incentive to improve their skills in order to meet higher entry requirements. This will give people something to work towards. In the software industry, managers and company owners have a false idea that they can get things done faster by throwing more people at the problems and having access to cheaper labor is the solution... Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. There is such a thing as a 10x or 100x developer (companies like Netflix have already figured this out). Unfortunately, most companies will not figure this out on their own while they are addicted to cheap labor. Companies need to be taken to detox. In a normal capitalist environment, these cheap-labor addicted companies would be wiped out at regular intervals, but in our crony-capitalist environment the government is keeping them on life support; so the least the government can do is force them to increase their standards.
• petilon 6y ago
  Larry Ellison, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would be denied visas according to the new policy since they don’t have CS degrees.
  • rjkennedy98 6y ago
    H1-B holders cant start companies anyway. It’s a temporary migrant worker visa.
    • petilon 6y ago
      If they can start a company and hire a few thousand people then why stop them?
      • rjkennedy98 6y ago
        We have that - its an investment Visa (EB-5).
• darthvader_13 6y ago
  Why are not we not looking it from incentives point of you ? It aint a moral question at all. Its all about economics.
• exdsq 6y ago
  I'm currently looking at moving to the US next summer and I can't believe how awkward the process is for me. My partner is starting a 2 year postdoc at Stanford and I can get a J2 visa to go with her, but then need to apply for a work visa which can take several months to process. I currently work remotely for UK-based companies earning around ~$100k including overtime/freelancing work yet I'll have to quit these roles rather than just take them with me. Because I don't have an undergrad degree I'm unable to get a normal work visa or have my employer relocate me. I wish there was some globally accepted visa like what Barbados has recently rolled out where if you earn over a certain salary remotely you're allowed to move there for a finite time period as you'll be able to contribute more than if you were unemployed and waiting for a work visa for a few months. If anyone has any advice on how they did something similar I'd really appreciate it (I'm from the UK).
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • necrodome 6y ago
    You are allowed to work full-time with J-2 without a work visa. But you need to get an EAD ("employment authorization document"). Not sure about the recent processing times, but I usually received mine in ~50-60 days from sending the application.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• TLightful 6y ago
  I expect to be thrashed for this but, so what? Why would anyone, except for personal reasons, want to move to the USA anyway? Absolute non-starter. Fix the rest of the country first, then talk to me about a new visa program. I'll check back in a couple of years.
• krifysoftware 6y ago
  Is it a good decision by Trump administration?
• jsnider3 6y ago
  Trump sucks so much.
• jmpman 6y ago
  Why are the Indian consultancy stocks up today? Are they effectively a cost plus business model, and as the costs increase, so do their profits? Have they transitioned to a US based workforce? Do they expect that their existing H1B employees will remain unchanged, and provide them with a long term advantage as other growing competitors can no longer access the cheap labor? Are they expecting this legislation to be overruled by judges?
  • woofie11 6y ago
    Some work that was done in the US by directly hiring H1B employees will now be done remotely, in India, via a subcontracting relationship. If I'm hiring an Indian, I can reasonably sponsor an H1B. I can't reasonably set up a branch in India to hire Indians and maintain compliance with Indian laws. That's a project out-of-scope for all but the largest tech organizations.
• jason2323 6y ago
  I'm actually curious on the effects of this on international students who come to the US to study CS. One of the biggest reasons international students come to the US is to be able to live and work after graduation. If anything, this will deter international students from studying in the US, thus reducing much needed out-of-state revenue that colleges get from international students, which consequently only raises the costs for in-state students. I see the point of this rule, but I'd be interested in seeing the tertiary effects of it as well.
  • AlphaWeaver 6y ago
    Why would this deter international students from studying in the US?
    • tamcap 6y ago
      Natural "extension" of the OPT program is the H1B... It's even in the rules, where your "OPT visa" (F-1) is on purpose not dual intent - you need H1B if you want to apply for a green card. And that's how most students do it: F1 -> OPT (w/ extension if able) -> H1B -> GC Increasing the H1B threshold makes the next step very expensive, and it will cause more companies to be unwilling to hire w/OPT, therefore reducing the attractiveness of top US schools to the best candidates. Many countries (that I am familiar with) have a very straightforward path to residency after completing education in the country. US makes it on purpose very difficult. And one problem is, in the eyes of the "system", a degree from Stanford/Harvard/MIT is equivalent to a degree from any other school capable of issuing the "same" degree.
  • pm90 6y ago
    There is still the OPT program though, which allows students to work for a few years on a student Visa. I agree though that this would certainly discourage many students.
    • deleted 6y ago
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• anonymouswacker 6y ago
  Trump is doing a pretty good job of trying to earn votes lately. First appealing to the Black vote with promises of $500B of investments, and now going for the Tech vote with these changes in addition to breaking up the monopolies. I think it would be okay for 4 more years at this rate (until the opposition can generate a decent candidate)...
• tmaly 6y ago
  With the trend being remote right now, the first thing that pops in my mind is that this policy change will lead to the offshoring of more jobs. It could also lead to more jobs moving to the Midwest away from higher cost of living areas.
• deleted 6y ago
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• tomcat27 6y ago
  Most of the work these companies are hired to produce is done in India. People on H1B are few and hired to delegate across time zones. It's hard without someone in the US connecting the bridge. This pandemic made it clear. It's a possibility that this new policy has very little implication on the overall budget of projects.. unless the companies are financially strong enough to hire local employees at a high salary. When compared to an employee salary in a developing economy, local salaries look very high! Smaller and mid-sized non-tech companies are hurt during this pandemic. These IT consulting companies work mostly with non-tech companies. Fiscal policy this year has failed to "really" provide loans or stimulus to small struggling companies. They all want tech and that means more work will go to these IT companies that can do at a lower cost. International trade is done on the mutual-benefits equation. Historically the unwritten understanding is that India allows US companies to operate in its local market in return partly for labor market access to its people through a work visa. That these workers are not creating value is a myth looking at the financials of these IT consulting firms. Getting a grocery purchase order database implemented correctly has far more immediate influence than the work of a futuristic researcher. Overall this new policy looks like an election stunt to appease a certain electoral audience given its timing and lackluster fiscal policy. That's called election hacking. Every economy specializes, influences international trade to that end. It's cheaper to manufacture in China, buy corn from the US, write computer programs in India. I feel just so sick to read comments here calling these companies bodyshops, sweatshops, cheap labor.. whatever word degrading in the context. The right question is perhaps: how to help create locally employed IT consulting companies that can compete with Indian IT consulting companies... and the answer is more than bad-mouthing or volatile short-term regulations. Is it even in the country's interest to spend resources to become a leader in IT consulting?
  • nwienert 6y ago
    Whenever lower wage markets are open to higher wage markets, what happens is the higher wage markets lose - especially their up-and-coming developers who normally would get hired and trained, but instead get replaced. This normally happens near the bottom, historically. Low wage workers come and work on farms and at other minimum wage jobs, they do actually have an effect on the labor market that is negative for American workers, but since there are usually many jobs on the bottom it doesn't have a large effect. But at the top - where jobs are far more limited and scarce - it has a large effect. Further, the companies using H1B are almost entirely large companies. Small businesses are not being hurt at all by a shortage of H1B's. International trade is highly susceptible to imbalances. Lower wage workers will replace higher wage workers if not protected against, and it isn't always a win in terms of lower cost goods - it often can displace an entire industry that normally would have done well. Especially industries that are important for America to stay strong in, like manufacturing. It also is highly susceptible to distortionary trade policy - see subsidies in foreign nations designed to take over entire industries long term. Finally, a note on hover governments should work. They should look out for their citizens. That is their modus operandi. There shouldn't be charity, unless the charity in some way truly helps our citizens. And especially, they should care about the average gal. H1B visas are literally taking out a big pool of well-paid jobs that otherwise we could easily be feeding with community college graduates and younger citizens. This isn't even close to hacking anything, by any definition of the word. It's literally what he campaigned on years ago, if anything it's super long overdue.
• woopwoop 6y ago
  It's truly extraordinary to see "dey terk er jerbs" level analysis coming from people who make six figures a year.
• timwaagh 6y ago
  I wouldn't mind this being done in the netherlands. We only have a skills requirement now. One thing to compete against hungarians or polish. They are europeans used to a certain quality of life. We are also allowed to work there. Usually they return after a while because they like their countries better even if salaries are slightly lower. Quite another to compete against a Bangladeshi who is used to getting paid poverty wages back home. They'd code for minimum wage no problem.
• cirenehc 6y ago
  Sounds like this would have a negative impact for startups where the majority of the compensation comes from equity right?
• twayback 6y ago
  Most people don't realize this is just going to lead to a massive amount of outsourcing to India. At least before, the H1B guys were spending their money in the US. Best time to start an outsourcing firm
• deleted 6y ago
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• neycoda 6y ago
  I'm just amazed that companies have been allowed to hire foreigners at the expense of Americans so much for so long... while inexplicably so many people are complaining about illegal immigrants instead "TAKIN ER JAHBS"