12 ms·

A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean:

A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it). The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.

casey2 1y ago
You could also "solve" these problems by cutting every social service. That's the only reason H1-Bs are willing to work for less, because their country doesn't invest nearly as much into them. People seem to have a moral problem with cutting social services, I wonder why this doesn't go both ways when hiring foreign nationals who can only work because their country doesn't. They don't even have to be foreign red states have been supplying silicon valley with cheap labor for decades. If you want the pure solution you would have to block hiring from these states too, not just H1B. Do you really want to exploit someone who was taught that the earth is 6000 years old and will also have to uproot their live when they are fired? You can try to classify underprivileged workers and scale compensation based on their class, but any mistakes would lead to unfair wages. The real solution is to increase the standard of living in developing countries and decrease the standard of living in advanced countries starting with relatively wealthy people. Your solution is just a weird soft ban that implicitly buys into the propaganda that there are genius H1B workers when we all know why companies hire them.
kccqzy 1y ago
The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis. The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
- dgfitz 1y ago
  > Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen? Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.” Why?
  - kccqzy 1y ago
    In addition to the U.S. citizens in that graduating class. Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status. Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
    - dgfitz 1y ago
      > The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status. This might be the most amusing thing I’ve read all day.
      - justanotherday9 1y ago
        [flagged]
    - ajcp 1y ago
      > The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status. You can't be serious. On every job application I've ever filled out the last question is always a variation of: "Do you now or will you in the future require employer sponsorship to work in this country?"
- nyolfen 1y ago
  > No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis. larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.
pandaman 1y ago
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas? PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
- yunyu 1y ago
  Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
  - pandaman 1y ago
    It's not just Infosys doing PERM fraud, around 2020 Meta had been barred from filing PERM due to overwhelming fraud. And are there really 85K unique and impossible to find in the US individuals every year? If these exist they will take a small fraction of H-1B allocation and the rest will go to the fresh grads, as it's now.
    - lovich 1y ago
      I’d be fine, as a citizen competing against migrants for jobs, if h1bs were structured so that they A: were the top end pay, so they pushed the pay scale up B: were uncoupled from employment. A company could pay the cost to let someone enter, but that person should be able to jump jobs day 0. I’m not suggesting the specific implementation but I feel like if those two guiding directives were kept, both society and the individual workers would benefit from brain draining the rest of the planet while simultaneously pushing worker comp higher. Has anyone suggested a significant change to the h1b system like this beyond just a close it all/open it all binary?
      - 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
thephyber 1y ago
This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates. I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
- Taek 1y ago
  That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases. The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - thephyber 1y ago
    What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B? Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
    - Taek 1y ago
      Or... those other parts of the economy increase salaries for skilled labor? If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)? And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?
lumost 1y ago
It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids. The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
- ambicapter 1y ago
  That's right. It is in fact advantageous in many ways for companies to prefer H-1B, they have far more control over those workers than they would over americans. They can even be worse than an american and you would prefer it if you were the type of employer who prioritizes control of their workforce over excellence.
  - lithos 1y ago
    H1-B are supposed to be skilled enough that losing their job isn't a problem due to combinations of skill levels, skill combination rarity, and connections. The fact that your statement is a truth indicates a problem with the program.
- overfeed 1y ago
  > It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model... Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers. † Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
  - fuzztester 1y ago
    why did it work out that way in the US?
_heimdall 1y ago
I can't help but expect throwing yet more bureaucratic rules and control at the problem will only make it worse. We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.
franktankbank 1y ago
Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.
- int_19h 1y ago
  What is the problem with green cards?
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    I think we should not give them when there is a backdrop of fraud on the visas they came on.
veunes 1y ago
Yeah, a salary-based allocation would cut through a lot of the noise. If a company really needs top-tier talent and is willing to pay for it, fine... That’s very different from using H-1Bs as a way to fill mid-level roles at below-market rates while locking people into visa dependency
colmmacc 1y ago
H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card. Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely. I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.
- groggler 1y ago
  > But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
  - colmmacc 1y ago
    Completely open borders migration between all countries would be the biggest such market correction. If every development job was open to every qualified developer in the world, I suspect software salaries in the US would be much lower.
    - bubblethink 1y ago
      But they would still be higher than a chemist's salary. This has nothing to do with open borders. If you use money as a proxy, some professions will come out ahead. That's just market dynamics. The only way to avoid that is to create carve outs or normalization by profession.
      - groggler 1y ago
        I don't see how you get there. It's harder to move chemistry work than simple laptop use so chemists in the US would have less pay equalization than developers. Why should we work to lower salaries in professions where we agree the salary is already depressed enough to lose new entrants to an easier and higher paying profession? (I think I can say this since I'm a lazy STEM drop out developer who makes more than twice what I estimated for my preferred path that I also found more challenging.)
zjaffee 1y ago
Except this isn't about H1B this is about the PERM process for EB2/EB3 greencards. The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  "You can only stay in the country if you're sponsored by an employer" creates an environment where workers have low bargaining power, decreasing the pressure for good working conditions (e.g. high pay), which – among other things – has impacts on the working conditions for locals. One might say it "affects what the market will sustain" (personally, I don't think calling everything a "market" is insightful). From a purely economic perspective, the ideal is no borders, and total freedom of movement – but, of course, there are reasons that people don't want that: the real world doesn't run on economics. Pretty much all of these measures are compromises of some description, with non-obvious (and sometimes delayed) consequences if you start messing about with them. Most arguments involving "$CountryName jobs for $Demonym!" ignore all that, and if that leads to policy decisions, bad things happen. (That's not to say there's no way to enact protectionist employment policies, but you'd need to tweak more than just the one dial if you wanted that to work.)
  - AdrianB1 1y ago
    From an economic perspective the ideal is no borders if there are no significant differences between countries that would create an infinite surge in mobility. It's like electrical current, if there is zero resistance and a difference in potential, any short circuit will potentially destroy the entire circuit.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      The "infinite surge in mobility" phenomenon only occurs if we model countries as infinite sources / sinks of people, and assume population movement has no impact on either country. Given both of these assumptions, the predicted phenomenon wouldn't cause any problems. Of course, neither assumption holds in real life; and if you re-do your models with more sensible assumptions, the phenomenon goes away.
jalapenos 1y ago
This is an absolutely perfect and extremely simple solution. But people would have to implement it. Sorry.
insane_dreamer 1y ago
I think we should get rid of H1B altogether. We have EB1 and EB2 for exceptionally talented individuals (and other programs for post-docs, J-visas, L1-visa for companies transferring their own people around, etc.).
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
Applying the American immigration standard that only a small percentage of immigrants can come from one nation to H1Bs might change the situation as well and keep with our priority that immigration should be from diverse countries.
cs_throwaway 1y ago
> It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws. This is still true, right? Overall, the only hard requirement of the H1B seems to be "can you hold down a job 100% of the time, until you choose to depart or receive a green card?" It is quite hard to think of other requirements that are possible to implement at scale, but I do wonder.

casey2 1y ago

You could also "solve" these problems by cutting every social service. That's the only reason H1-Bs are willing to work for less, because their country doesn't invest nearly as much into them. People seem to have a moral problem with cutting social services, I wonder why this doesn't go both ways when hiring foreign nationals who can only work because their country doesn't. They don't even have to be foreign red states have been supplying silicon valley with cheap labor for decades. If you want the pure solution you would have to block hiring from these states too, not just H1B. Do you really want to exploit someone who was taught that the earth is 6000 years old and will also have to uproot their live when they are fired? You can try to classify underprivileged workers and scale compensation based on their class, but any mistakes would lead to unfair wages. The real solution is to increase the standard of living in developing countries and decrease the standard of living in advanced countries starting with relatively wealthy people. Your solution is just a weird soft ban that implicitly buys into the propaganda that there are genius H1B workers when we all know why companies hire them.

kccqzy 1y ago

The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis. The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.

dgfitz 1y ago
> Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen? Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.” Why?
- kccqzy 1y ago
  In addition to the U.S. citizens in that graduating class. Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status. Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
  - dgfitz 1y ago
    > The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status. This might be the most amusing thing I’ve read all day.
    - justanotherday9 1y ago
      [flagged]
  - ajcp 1y ago
    > The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status. You can't be serious. On every job application I've ever filled out the last question is always a variation of: "Do you now or will you in the future require employer sponsorship to work in this country?"
nyolfen 1y ago
> No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis. larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.

pandaman 1y ago

Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas? PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.

yunyu 1y ago
Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
- pandaman 1y ago
  It's not just Infosys doing PERM fraud, around 2020 Meta had been barred from filing PERM due to overwhelming fraud. And are there really 85K unique and impossible to find in the US individuals every year? If these exist they will take a small fraction of H-1B allocation and the rest will go to the fresh grads, as it's now.
  - lovich 1y ago
    I’d be fine, as a citizen competing against migrants for jobs, if h1bs were structured so that they A: were the top end pay, so they pushed the pay scale up B: were uncoupled from employment. A company could pay the cost to let someone enter, but that person should be able to jump jobs day 0. I’m not suggesting the specific implementation but I feel like if those two guiding directives were kept, both society and the individual workers would benefit from brain draining the rest of the planet while simultaneously pushing worker comp higher. Has anyone suggested a significant change to the h1b system like this beyond just a close it all/open it all binary?
    - 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

thephyber 1y ago

This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates. I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.

Taek 1y ago
That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases. The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- thephyber 1y ago
  What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B? Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
  - Taek 1y ago
    Or... those other parts of the economy increase salaries for skilled labor? If we can only bring 85,000 people into the country on one type of visa, doesn't it make sense to prioritize those that will bring the most value (tax revenue, in this case)? And if that's not enough people... raise the limit? And be confident that a raised limit is still keeping a high quality bar on entrants?

lumost 1y ago

It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids. The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.

ambicapter 1y ago
That's right. It is in fact advantageous in many ways for companies to prefer H-1B, they have far more control over those workers than they would over americans. They can even be worse than an american and you would prefer it if you were the type of employer who prioritizes control of their workforce over excellence.
- lithos 1y ago
  H1-B are supposed to be skilled enough that losing their job isn't a problem due to combinations of skill levels, skill combination rarity, and connections. The fact that your statement is a truth indicates a problem with the program.
overfeed 1y ago
> It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model... Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers. † Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
- fuzztester 1y ago
  why did it work out that way in the US?

_heimdall 1y ago

I can't help but expect throwing yet more bureaucratic rules and control at the problem will only make it worse. We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.

franktankbank 1y ago

Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.

int_19h 1y ago
What is the problem with green cards?
- franktankbank 1y ago
  I think we should not give them when there is a backdrop of fraud on the visas they came on.

veunes 1y ago

Yeah, a salary-based allocation would cut through a lot of the noise. If a company really needs top-tier talent and is willing to pay for it, fine... That’s very different from using H-1Bs as a way to fill mid-level roles at below-market rates while locking people into visa dependency

colmmacc 1y ago

H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card. Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely. I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.

groggler 1y ago
> But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
- colmmacc 1y ago
  Completely open borders migration between all countries would be the biggest such market correction. If every development job was open to every qualified developer in the world, I suspect software salaries in the US would be much lower.
  - bubblethink 1y ago
    But they would still be higher than a chemist's salary. This has nothing to do with open borders. If you use money as a proxy, some professions will come out ahead. That's just market dynamics. The only way to avoid that is to create carve outs or normalization by profession.
    - groggler 1y ago
      I don't see how you get there. It's harder to move chemistry work than simple laptop use so chemists in the US would have less pay equalization than developers. Why should we work to lower salaries in professions where we agree the salary is already depressed enough to lose new entrants to an easier and higher paying profession? (I think I can say this since I'm a lazy STEM drop out developer who makes more than twice what I estimated for my preferred path that I also found more challenging.)

zjaffee 1y ago

Except this isn't about H1B this is about the PERM process for EB2/EB3 greencards. The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.

wizzwizz4 1y ago
"You can only stay in the country if you're sponsored by an employer" creates an environment where workers have low bargaining power, decreasing the pressure for good working conditions (e.g. high pay), which – among other things – has impacts on the working conditions for locals. One might say it "affects what the market will sustain" (personally, I don't think calling everything a "market" is insightful). From a purely economic perspective, the ideal is no borders, and total freedom of movement – but, of course, there are reasons that people don't want that: the real world doesn't run on economics. Pretty much all of these measures are compromises of some description, with non-obvious (and sometimes delayed) consequences if you start messing about with them. Most arguments involving "$CountryName jobs for $Demonym!" ignore all that, and if that leads to policy decisions, bad things happen. (That's not to say there's no way to enact protectionist employment policies, but you'd need to tweak more than just the one dial if you wanted that to work.)
- AdrianB1 1y ago
  From an economic perspective the ideal is no borders if there are no significant differences between countries that would create an infinite surge in mobility. It's like electrical current, if there is zero resistance and a difference in potential, any short circuit will potentially destroy the entire circuit.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    The "infinite surge in mobility" phenomenon only occurs if we model countries as infinite sources / sinks of people, and assume population movement has no impact on either country. Given both of these assumptions, the predicted phenomenon wouldn't cause any problems. Of course, neither assumption holds in real life; and if you re-do your models with more sensible assumptions, the phenomenon goes away.

jalapenos 1y ago

This is an absolutely perfect and extremely simple solution. But people would have to implement it. Sorry.

insane_dreamer 1y ago

I think we should get rid of H1B altogether. We have EB1 and EB2 for exceptionally talented individuals (and other programs for post-docs, J-visas, L1-visa for companies transferring their own people around, etc.).

_DeadFred_ 1y ago

Applying the American immigration standard that only a small percentage of immigrants can come from one nation to H1Bs might change the situation as well and keep with our priority that immigration should be from diverse countries.

cs_throwaway 1y ago

> It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws. This is still true, right? Overall, the only hard requirement of the H1B seems to be "can you hold down a job 100% of the time, until you choose to depart or receive a green card?" It is quite hard to think of other requirements that are possible to implement at scale, but I do wonder.