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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

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?
    - pandaman 1y ago
      It's fine to have various aspiration for H-1B but the issue in the topical article is, ultimately, with businesses defrauding the United States and getting away with it. Meta got barred from filing PERM for several months and ended up paying $4.75M, which is probably less than it spends for catering per month. Nobody got disbarred, nobody went on trial, so it's just a tiny cost of doing business.
      - lovich 1y ago
        This is off the cuff game theory, so please feel encouraged to poke holes in it. Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee? I would also expect this to result in massively less immigration for the same reasons companies are loathe to train entry level employees nowadays as they can jump ship as soon as they become valuable
        pandaman 1y ago
        >Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee? I don't see how. As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed? It is already so. Of course, H-1Bs are not the only way foreign labor is imported, L-1s, for example, cannot change jobs and there is no limit on them and every big corp in the US has an office in Canada, where they hire foreigners from all over the world and move them on L-1s to the US, it's much easier and cheaper than H-1B. However, the fraud here is: a) committed by a US business, not a foreigner and b) is not related to any non-immigrant visa such as H,L,or O are. It's a fraud in immigration process. And the immigration is the expected perk of working for a company on a temporary visa. If companies stopped filing for immigration then they would not be able to hire as many temporary visa employees.
        1y ago
darth_avocado 1y ago
This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious. The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work. This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
- mjevans 1y ago
  TL;DR I don't want to compete with under-priced outsourced labor. I gladly accept peers and betters who expand the market by bringing the best and the brightest to the same national team. ~ I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers. Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a tax on hiring non-local labor. That worker should also be either a guest worker OR on a pathway to citizenship at their own discretion.
  - darth_avocado 1y ago
    The job adverts that are being talked about are part of the PERM process that is required for the “pathway to citizenship” for workers that are already here for an extended period of time. What is also part of the process, is the requirement that you pay more than the median wages. Undercutting wages will get this petition denied and the process itself costs thousands of dollars on top of the thousands of dollars it takes to file for the underlying visa. Again, the immigration system doesn’t work as you think it does. Yes there are abuses and those need to be addressed and I’m fully onboard with reforms that fix it. But the first step would be to understand the system and how it works.

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?
  - pandaman 1y ago
    It's fine to have various aspiration for H-1B but the issue in the topical article is, ultimately, with businesses defrauding the United States and getting away with it. Meta got barred from filing PERM for several months and ended up paying $4.75M, which is probably less than it spends for catering per month. Nobody got disbarred, nobody went on trial, so it's just a tiny cost of doing business.
    - lovich 1y ago
      This is off the cuff game theory, so please feel encouraged to poke holes in it. Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee? I would also expect this to result in massively less immigration for the same reasons companies are loathe to train entry level employees nowadays as they can jump ship as soon as they become valuable
      - pandaman 1y ago
        >Would my point B not limit that fraudulent behavior as now the brought in migrant would be free to compete for a better position with higher pay and/or better benefits to the detriment of the company that paid an entry fee? I don't see how. As I understood, you mean that you want H-1Bs to be able to change jobs, not to hang in the country unemployed? It is already so. Of course, H-1Bs are not the only way foreign labor is imported, L-1s, for example, cannot change jobs and there is no limit on them and every big corp in the US has an office in Canada, where they hire foreigners from all over the world and move them on L-1s to the US, it's much easier and cheaper than H-1B. However, the fraud here is: a) committed by a US business, not a foreigner and b) is not related to any non-immigrant visa such as H,L,or O are. It's a fraud in immigration process. And the immigration is the expected perk of working for a company on a temporary visa. If companies stopped filing for immigration then they would not be able to hire as many temporary visa employees.
        1y ago

darth_avocado 1y ago

This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious. The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work. This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.

mjevans 1y ago
TL;DR I don't want to compete with under-priced outsourced labor. I gladly accept peers and betters who expand the market by bringing the best and the brightest to the same national team. ~ I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers. Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a tax on hiring non-local labor. That worker should also be either a guest worker OR on a pathway to citizenship at their own discretion.
- darth_avocado 1y ago
  The job adverts that are being talked about are part of the PERM process that is required for the “pathway to citizenship” for workers that are already here for an extended period of time. What is also part of the process, is the requirement that you pay more than the median wages. Undercutting wages will get this petition denied and the process itself costs thousands of dollars on top of the thousands of dollars it takes to file for the underlying visa. Again, the immigration system doesn’t work as you think it does. Yes there are abuses and those need to be addressed and I’m fully onboard with reforms that fix it. But the first step would be to understand the system and how it works.