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> I'm not sure why US is so against getting more of the best and the brightest Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fir

> I'm not sure why US is so against getting more of the best and the brightest Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. > H1B/greencard often acquires the very best mind of foreign countries. Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies. It's also responsible for the lack of job training by companies. Why have an employee learn new skills on your dime when you can find a foreigner who got experience at some other company, or perhaps just with the good sense to exaggerate their resumes...

UncleMeat 5y ago
> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. Knowledge workers create jobs. Software begets more software. > Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies. A lot of people desperately want this, but it is tricky to make improvements since any federal discussion of immigration immediately widens to include all forms of immigration.
- civilized 5y ago
  Canada and Australia have point-based systems that roll out the welcome mat for skilled workers. Unlike the H-1B, these systems are not set up as indentured servitude for wealthy tech companies. Too bad the US can't have the same... because of corporate lobbyists as well as anti-meritocracy factions on both right and left, who serve as patsies to the rich by protesting any change to the current system.
ergocoder 5y ago
> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. Following the same logic, my manager up to Sundar Pichai is driving down my wage and stripping me of opportunity. If they didn't exist, I would have been a Google CEO and earned $200M a year? That's absurd
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  H1b pulls in lots of people. The majority get "chewed up and spat out" and go back to their home country. A minority indeed can make it, going to consultant/entrepreneur etc. There's no reason for a high tech American worker to view this situation as remotely in their particular interests. No only does it lower but it allows companies to maintain their grueling coding schedule, a system that burns out a whole lot of people.
  - addicted 5y ago
    The math simply does not add up. There are approximately 4million software developer jobs in the US. There are only 65k H-1B visas given out every year. And not all of them even go to software engineers (doctors, finance professionals, etc. all enter through the H-1B route). And the H-1B visa lasts a maximum of 6 years. Let's be generous and assume all 65k visas are going to software professionals. That means at any point of time, you only have 390k H-1B visa holders (this is not correct, but I will get to that a little later). So your claim is that 390k visa holders are driving down the wages for the 4 million software professionals? More damning is the fact that we are talking about an industry where people can and did work remote and offshore, and there are over 20million software professionals in the world. A software engineer working in Kiev is far more likely to have an impact on US software engineer wages than the 10% who may be on an H-1B in the US. Furthermore, the US software engineer's wage is kept higher by the fact that the same engineer is working for Microsoft for 125k minimum in Seattle, than they are working for Microsoft for closer to 50-60k in Microsoft's massive Hyderabad campus. I did mention the exceptions. 1) Visa abuse. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a lot of visa abuse. However, by the mid 2010s both the Obama and Trump administrations cracked down on this, and it's fairly trivial at this point. 2) EB1 visa holders. Due to the fact that the US immigration system was last updated in 1990, you have a situation where Chinese and Indians are singled out when they have an approved green card petition and forced to wait years and decades. As a hack, on the backs of the approved green card, which the US is unable to actually give them, they are given a much worse offering of an H-1B which has inflated H-1B numbers. But these are not a reflection of the H-1B visa, and more a reflection of the failure of Congress to fix the green card process. This does inflate H-1B numbers quite a bit, but the article is talking about how the administration is missing an opportunity to greatly resolve precisely this issue. The 100k green cards that the administration is wasting instead of giving to already approved green card applicants, would almost certainly reduce the number of H-1B holders by an almost 1:1 relationship almost immediately.
ashtonkem 5y ago
* immigrants. You emigrate from a country and immigrate to another. When speaking of people becoming new residents somewhere they are immigrants who have immigrated.
- klyrs 5y ago
  When speaking of people who have moved out of your country and into another, they're emmigrants. If they've moved into your country, they're immigrants. To their own perspective, they're migrants.
farmerstan 5y ago
My friend who is on H1B is being paid almost $1M/yr TC at FAANG. H1B is not driving the price of wages down.
- effingwewt 5y ago
  That's simply one case where it worked out, out of the how many that are issued? I'd argue only ever hearing about one who made it, as opposed to personally knowing several for whom it did not, further drives the point that it's a broken system. Put simply - anything a business wants is to increase profit and power, never not once have they made a decision to help their employees.
  - ergocoder 5y ago
    I don't think that is odd. In business we aim for all sides to win. Business get more profit and power. Employee also get more money and quality of life.
novok 5y ago
I think L-1 visas are more employer bound. Changing jobs on an H1-B is possible, it's just more paperwork and annoyance. In tech although, most employers are willing to go through that paperwork, so for certain industries that isn't really a barrier in practice as you sit and wait for some lawyers to do some paperwork for you. Getting rid of leetcode would probably do more for people's job liquidity.
- axiolite 5y ago
  > Changing jobs on an H1-B is possible It's possible now (it previously was not), but it resets the H1-B worker's immigration process back to the start as well, leaving them in limbo for years longer. And they are taking a risk that the new job might not work out and if they don't find another quickly, they'll be expelled from the country.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - novok 5y ago
    No it doesn't, once you have a priority number it adds you 'to the line' and might set you back about a year-ish if you change jobs once its your turn to get a green card. It's the priority number waiting period that makes it suck a lot, not the 1.5yrs it take to get a green card from H1B if you don't have any priority number queue waiting. You just need to get that priority number ASAP from the first job, which might take a year or less, and then wait X number of years for it to be 'your turn' and then stay at last the job where you'd actually get your green card for a year or two, which is already pretty typical job behavior already. Most people stay at a job for a year minimum, and once you get promoted up the ranks, they stay at places multiple years. In those X in-between waiting years you can change jobs without it materially effecting your immigration timeline in any serious way. Even then, if you get a good opportunity you can change jobs in exchange for waiting a year or two longer for your green card, which is a choice you can make. It's far from 'indentured servitude', just some annoying paperwork barriers that makes it more expensive for firms to hire you, because it costs money and time to hire an H1B than a person with a green card or citizenship already. And yes, you cannot go work with risky employers, which limits you to big tech and startups at the series B+ stage of funding. There are even cases of successful people who have founded startups with H1-Bs or some other immigration visa with a lot of hassle. Which in the scheme of things as history has shown, has ended up not to be that bad :D
paulgb 5y ago
> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. America controls something like 80% of the world software market (depending how you measure it) with ~5% of the population. I’m very skeptical that this would remain true if domestic companies were restricted from hiring the top talent in the world. There are arguments for and against immigration (full disclosure, I’m an immigrant), but the “steal our jobs” rhetoric is based on the false counterfactual that you could get rid of immigrants but keep their jobs.
- axiolite 5y ago
  > the “steal our jobs” rhetoric is based on the false counterfactual I didn't say "steal", but it's absolutely happening all the time: "Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs." https://www.computerworld.com/article/2879083/southern-california-edison-it-workers-beyond-furious-over-h-1b-replacements.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2879083/southern-calif...
  - paulgb 5y ago
    Sure, but my point is that cases like this are possible for the same reason that the US is able to own 80% of the software market. You can’t expect to have one without the other.
    - commandlinefan 5y ago
      > the US is able to own 80% of the software market. So what you’re saying is that H1B visa abuse allows the small handful of people who own massive software companies to benefit at the expense of the citizenry of the United States?
  - belltaco 5y ago
    Cost cutting is good when it happens in other industries and helps software engineers by driving down costs, like tech hardware. But once it comes to their own, suddenly 100 to 400K salaries are not enough. >The unemployment rate for tech occupations dropped to 1.5% in July, according to the "Employment Situation" report released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals. (#JobsReport). That's the lowest level since August 2019 and is close to the historic low of 1.3%. Aug 6, 2021
paxys 5y ago
> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. That is a myth. Every single study done in this area shows very clearly that skilled immigration helps the economy and creates jobs/increases wages. It's weird that tech employees who make six figure salaries the day they graduate are the ones blaming H-1B visas. Chances are you wouldn't have a job (or at least a much more shitty job) if these immigrants weren't here building the entire US tech industry for the last 40 years.
- axiolite 5y ago
  You should really read past the first sentence before replying. I have no problem with immigration, only the H1-B system.
reissbaker 5y ago
I think H1Bs and green cards are two separate issues. It's incredibly dumb how many smart people the US turns away — especially those who have gone to US schools (which are partially federally funded). H1B visas are toxic, because it's easy for companies to abuse H1B workers since their visa is tied to their employment with that company. But green cards — we should be handing those out to educated foreign nationals like candy.
mpweiher 5y ago
> Because it's being used to drive wages down Silicon Valley salaries are being driven down to half a million dollars a year by H1Bs. Riiiight.

UncleMeat 5y ago

> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. Knowledge workers create jobs. Software begets more software. > Fine, change the H1-B rules so emigrants get full resident status immediately, and can work for any company without any setbacks to their status. Right now H1-B visas are modern indentured servitude, and makes non-residents far more appealing to companies. A lot of people desperately want this, but it is tricky to make improvements since any federal discussion of immigration immediately widens to include all forms of immigration.

civilized 5y ago
Canada and Australia have point-based systems that roll out the welcome mat for skilled workers. Unlike the H-1B, these systems are not set up as indentured servitude for wealthy tech companies. Too bad the US can't have the same... because of corporate lobbyists as well as anti-meritocracy factions on both right and left, who serve as patsies to the rich by protesting any change to the current system.

ergocoder 5y ago

> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. Following the same logic, my manager up to Sundar Pichai is driving down my wage and stripping me of opportunity. If they didn't exist, I would have been a Google CEO and earned $200M a year? That's absurd

joe_the_user 5y ago
H1b pulls in lots of people. The majority get "chewed up and spat out" and go back to their home country. A minority indeed can make it, going to consultant/entrepreneur etc. There's no reason for a high tech American worker to view this situation as remotely in their particular interests. No only does it lower but it allows companies to maintain their grueling coding schedule, a system that burns out a whole lot of people.
- addicted 5y ago
  The math simply does not add up. There are approximately 4million software developer jobs in the US. There are only 65k H-1B visas given out every year. And not all of them even go to software engineers (doctors, finance professionals, etc. all enter through the H-1B route). And the H-1B visa lasts a maximum of 6 years. Let's be generous and assume all 65k visas are going to software professionals. That means at any point of time, you only have 390k H-1B visa holders (this is not correct, but I will get to that a little later). So your claim is that 390k visa holders are driving down the wages for the 4 million software professionals? More damning is the fact that we are talking about an industry where people can and did work remote and offshore, and there are over 20million software professionals in the world. A software engineer working in Kiev is far more likely to have an impact on US software engineer wages than the 10% who may be on an H-1B in the US. Furthermore, the US software engineer's wage is kept higher by the fact that the same engineer is working for Microsoft for 125k minimum in Seattle, than they are working for Microsoft for closer to 50-60k in Microsoft's massive Hyderabad campus. I did mention the exceptions. 1) Visa abuse. The late 2000s and early 2010s saw a lot of visa abuse. However, by the mid 2010s both the Obama and Trump administrations cracked down on this, and it's fairly trivial at this point. 2) EB1 visa holders. Due to the fact that the US immigration system was last updated in 1990, you have a situation where Chinese and Indians are singled out when they have an approved green card petition and forced to wait years and decades. As a hack, on the backs of the approved green card, which the US is unable to actually give them, they are given a much worse offering of an H-1B which has inflated H-1B numbers. But these are not a reflection of the H-1B visa, and more a reflection of the failure of Congress to fix the green card process. This does inflate H-1B numbers quite a bit, but the article is talking about how the administration is missing an opportunity to greatly resolve precisely this issue. The 100k green cards that the administration is wasting instead of giving to already approved green card applicants, would almost certainly reduce the number of H-1B holders by an almost 1:1 relationship almost immediately.

ashtonkem 5y ago

* immigrants. You emigrate from a country and immigrate to another. When speaking of people becoming new residents somewhere they are immigrants who have immigrated.

klyrs 5y ago
When speaking of people who have moved out of your country and into another, they're emmigrants. If they've moved into your country, they're immigrants. To their own perspective, they're migrants.

farmerstan 5y ago

My friend who is on H1B is being paid almost $1M/yr TC at FAANG. H1B is not driving the price of wages down.

effingwewt 5y ago
That's simply one case where it worked out, out of the how many that are issued? I'd argue only ever hearing about one who made it, as opposed to personally knowing several for whom it did not, further drives the point that it's a broken system. Put simply - anything a business wants is to increase profit and power, never not once have they made a decision to help their employees.
- ergocoder 5y ago
  I don't think that is odd. In business we aim for all sides to win. Business get more profit and power. Employee also get more money and quality of life.

novok 5y ago

I think L-1 visas are more employer bound. Changing jobs on an H1-B is possible, it's just more paperwork and annoyance. In tech although, most employers are willing to go through that paperwork, so for certain industries that isn't really a barrier in practice as you sit and wait for some lawyers to do some paperwork for you. Getting rid of leetcode would probably do more for people's job liquidity.

axiolite 5y ago
> Changing jobs on an H1-B is possible It's possible now (it previously was not), but it resets the H1-B worker's immigration process back to the start as well, leaving them in limbo for years longer. And they are taking a risk that the new job might not work out and if they don't find another quickly, they'll be expelled from the country.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- novok 5y ago
  No it doesn't, once you have a priority number it adds you 'to the line' and might set you back about a year-ish if you change jobs once its your turn to get a green card. It's the priority number waiting period that makes it suck a lot, not the 1.5yrs it take to get a green card from H1B if you don't have any priority number queue waiting. You just need to get that priority number ASAP from the first job, which might take a year or less, and then wait X number of years for it to be 'your turn' and then stay at last the job where you'd actually get your green card for a year or two, which is already pretty typical job behavior already. Most people stay at a job for a year minimum, and once you get promoted up the ranks, they stay at places multiple years. In those X in-between waiting years you can change jobs without it materially effecting your immigration timeline in any serious way. Even then, if you get a good opportunity you can change jobs in exchange for waiting a year or two longer for your green card, which is a choice you can make. It's far from 'indentured servitude', just some annoying paperwork barriers that makes it more expensive for firms to hire you, because it costs money and time to hire an H1B than a person with a green card or citizenship already. And yes, you cannot go work with risky employers, which limits you to big tech and startups at the series B+ stage of funding. There are even cases of successful people who have founded startups with H1-Bs or some other immigration visa with a lot of hassle. Which in the scheme of things as history has shown, has ended up not to be that bad :D

paulgb 5y ago

> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. America controls something like 80% of the world software market (depending how you measure it) with ~5% of the population. I’m very skeptical that this would remain true if domestic companies were restricted from hiring the top talent in the world. There are arguments for and against immigration (full disclosure, I’m an immigrant), but the “steal our jobs” rhetoric is based on the false counterfactual that you could get rid of immigrants but keep their jobs.

axiolite 5y ago
> the “steal our jobs” rhetoric is based on the false counterfactual I didn't say "steal", but it's absolutely happening all the time: "Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already lost their jobs." https://www.computerworld.com/article/2879083/southern-california-edison-it-workers-beyond-furious-over-h-1b-replacements.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2879083/southern-calif...
- paulgb 5y ago
  Sure, but my point is that cases like this are possible for the same reason that the US is able to own 80% of the software market. You can’t expect to have one without the other.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    > the US is able to own 80% of the software market. So what you’re saying is that H1B visa abuse allows the small handful of people who own massive software companies to benefit at the expense of the citizenry of the United States?
- belltaco 5y ago
  Cost cutting is good when it happens in other industries and helps software engineers by driving down costs, like tech hardware. But once it comes to their own, suddenly 100 to 400K salaries are not enough. >The unemployment rate for tech occupations dropped to 1.5% in July, according to the "Employment Situation" report released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals. (#JobsReport). That's the lowest level since August 2019 and is close to the historic low of 1.3%. Aug 6, 2021

paxys 5y ago

> Because it's being used to drive wages down and American workers are getting fired from their jobs. That is a myth. Every single study done in this area shows very clearly that skilled immigration helps the economy and creates jobs/increases wages. It's weird that tech employees who make six figure salaries the day they graduate are the ones blaming H-1B visas. Chances are you wouldn't have a job (or at least a much more shitty job) if these immigrants weren't here building the entire US tech industry for the last 40 years.

axiolite 5y ago
You should really read past the first sentence before replying. I have no problem with immigration, only the H1-B system.

reissbaker 5y ago

I think H1Bs and green cards are two separate issues. It's incredibly dumb how many smart people the US turns away — especially those who have gone to US schools (which are partially federally funded). H1B visas are toxic, because it's easy for companies to abuse H1B workers since their visa is tied to their employment with that company. But green cards — we should be handing those out to educated foreign nationals like candy.

mpweiher 5y ago

> Because it's being used to drive wages down Silicon Valley salaries are being driven down to half a million dollars a year by H1Bs. Riiiight.