7 ms·

Study: High-Skilled Immigrants Are Neither Better Nor Brighter Than U.S. Workers

38 points by zpk 14y ago

HarryHirsch 14y ago
They determine who belongs to the "best and brightest" by looking at wages. An alternative hypothesis is that in an industry where getting a raise means switching jobs the H1B program is successful in suppressing wage levels of foreigners.
- eshvk 14y ago
  Your alternative hypothesis is interesting. I am not sure offhand how it would go. On one hand, as an H1B employee, it is not that hard for you to switch jobs and find a person to transfer your visa. Tiny companies might have an issue but then again, tiny companies don't pay that well (assumption.). After time goes by though, switching jobs can be harmful especially if you are being sponsored by the company for a green card. This is because your green card application process can slow down as you switch jobs (some things will have to be redone.) On the other hand, there is another factor in place: The wait times for green cards are reaching insane levels (25 + years). In such a climate, maybe the person might just decide to switch jobs more often.
- analyst74 14y ago
  While determining one's skill by how much he/she gets paid sounds ridiculous, this makes sense if you consider macro trends, as this article is talking about. If an industry (like finance) routinely pays multiple times the compensation of another industry (say, engineering) that requires similar skillset, it's rational that more of the top graduates will choose finance over engineering.
  - piyush_soni 14y ago
    No it doesn't make much sense even if you consider macro trends. Bright Chinese or Indian workers will almost always be ready to work for lesser wages than a 'Native American' (if there's something like that) will be ready to work for. There's a macro economics involved here, but it's not what you think.
    - analyst74 14y ago
      Trust me, in a country with reasonable immigration laws, like Canada, highly skilled foreign workers do not make less money than locals. The biggest problem with H1B, which Matloff is critical of, is that it puts foreign worker and local worker in uneven legal grounds, thus unable to demand the same wage.
segmondy 14y ago
They are cheaper. Many people are willing to work for cheaper if that means that a company will file for them to stay in the US. Companies exploit this.
cooldeal 14y ago
The graph seems to be assuming that an immigrant becoming a citizen suddenly makes them America's "best and brightest" and are no longer included in the temporary workers' column. I don't seem them getting filtered out to make the comparison fairer.
wjnc 14y ago
They don't have to be better or brighter to make everyone better off. If there are jobs and they fill them: they create wealth for the US economy. There's no fixed sized pie in the economy. They fill a job: the pie increases. Economics 101 for HN
- rayiner 14y ago
  The size of the pie isn't the only thing that matters. Consider two scenarios of GDP allocation: Scenario A Shareholder: $100,000, Native programmer: $100,000 Scenario B Shareholder: $150,000, Native programmer: $75,000, H1B programmer: $75,000 There are good reasons in a democracy to favor scenario A over scenario B. It just depends on the following premises: 1) the income of non-Americans is irrelevant to American policy; 2) we care more about the income of the median American than the aggregate GDP; 3) we don't not care about the standard deviation of income Econ 101 or not, these are not unreasonable premises.
  - dman 14y ago
    How about factoring in the tax revenue from American enterprises into the equation?
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Corporate taxes are less than 10% of U.S. revenue and falling. Not a particularly compelling reason to push for policies that increase corporate profits.
      - eshvk 14y ago
        Sadly enough corporations have the biggest pockets and that means they will push for cheaper indentured servants to flood the markets.
      - dman 14y ago
        http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205 http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc... appears to suggest that the downward trend in corporate taxes as percentage of gdp is in the process of reversing. Also on first glance the numbers going forward do not appear to be very different than the tax revenue paid by corporations for the last couple of decades.
sonabinu 14y ago
wish someone would look at the human side of the story - you give so many years here, have kids who are citizens, you identify with the country and the culture, you came here legally, you worked hard, you are still waiting to call this home (at the current state with wait times upto 50 years)
- EduardoBautista 14y ago
  Wait times for H1B visas are not 50 years. You can become a citizen after 8 years of having permanent residency.
  - eshvk 14y ago
    1. Wait times for an Indian/Chinese born person under the EB3 quota are varied but the backlog as it stands now looks like it might hit 25+ years. I am not offhand sure about the 50 years number but have heard of it mentioned earlier. 2. One becomes a citizen after 5 years of permanent residency. (3 if one is married to a US citizen.)
  - sonabinu 14y ago
    wait times for permanent residency are 50 years if your filing is in the EB3 category and you are from India or China
- ashwinaj 14y ago
  A few years ago I would sympathize with that; but look, the rules are what they are. When you and I got our H1B, we knew (or should know) what the rules are w.r.t. becoming a permanent resident. If you put all your eggs in one basket, knowing fully well that you're in the India/China/Mexico EB2/3 bucket (assuming that you are or in any country which takes years) and without a backup plan? I don't think you should blame the system. Sure the system needs to improve, but it's not your and my call. Forgive my ignorance about your situation, but we have to be smart about this and stop sulking.
emu 14y ago
This study appears to ignore non-wage compensation (e.g. stock grants). I know that for me, as a H1B worker who graduated from a US graduate program and working for one of the large companies named, that stock based compensation is a substantial fraction of my total pay.
ahmad19526 14y ago
Can we talk about racism? If you're brown or yellow or black... chances are you don't make the company club (as easily) as well, white people... I've seen it with my own eyes... If you're not well networked in a corporation, but still work very well, you don't get a higher wage or as much opportunity to a promotion.. non-white ethnicity is a huge network barrier. It's not like people wanna golf with you and then go have a fancy chicken tiki massala or eat injera. Also, could foreign workers be much more ok with simple lives rather than being ambitious corporate thugs?.. but what's the measure of ambition for higher salary btwn immigrant and native wokers? If I came from a village I'd settle for any salary. Using salaries for understanding is absolutely pathetic..
- eshvk 14y ago
  > Can we talk about racism? If you're brown or yellow or black... chances are you don't make the company club (as easily) as well, white people... I've seen it with my own eyes... If we are going to be pulling anecdotes from where the sun don't shine, I can also point at Silicon Valley with a huge number of south asian/chinese immigrants starting companies. > If you're not well networked, but still working very well, you don't get a higher wage/promotions... Erm... so ? This is life. Popularity and hard work are not necessarily correlated, learn how to network. It is a life skill. This is like a guy saying that he is a good guy but doesn't get any with a girl.
  - ahmad19526 14y ago
    Maybe they don't care to network.. maybe these foreign workers would rather work and do well in their field than suck * to get ahead? I'm not saying they can't network, anybody can indeed over come that... but some people, and maybe foreigner workers fall into this category, don't care about the popularity contest.. they're just trying to work Btw, did you know that women don't make as much as men? maybe female workers are... Salary #'s overlook a lot of cultural things that need to be studied...
    - mindcrime 14y ago
      This is an interesting line of discussion, but it's really orthogonal to one's race/gender/ethnicity/etc. Some people (like|accept|are willing to play) the "networking game" and some people aren't. In either case, it's a simple truth that a willingness and ability to play that game usually corresponds with more money, more responsibility, etc. I know it offends the sensibilities of many hackers that something so important should reduce to something so subjective and uncontrollable as human relations, but in the end, we are all salespeople... we're selling ourselves to others, all the time. And choosing not to engage in that is making a choice to do a poor job of selling yourself. It would be nice if the entire world could just perceive our knowledge, wisdom, skills and experience, and just come to us and evaluate us objectively, but it just doesn't work that way. It's not fair, but who ever said life was going to be fair. Whether you're Indian or Caucasian, male or female, Catholic or Atheist, or whatever, learning to network and sell yourself is something you need to do if you want to advance and be successful. Now if you're content with your current position, salary, lifestyle, etc., then don't worry about it.
InvisibleCities 14y ago
Yes, but they are "cheaper", which is all that matters, unfortunately.
- piyush_soni 14y ago
  Oh, cheaper, and many times better and brighter, contrary to what the article says.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ashwinaj 14y ago
My graduate STEM classes did not have many US citizens. I bet it's the same in most universities. I don't think that H1B workers like myself are brighter or smarter than someone local, but the argument that technology companies are losing jobs to Wall Street as a validation criteria for his hypothesis is absurd. Just because Gates says that we need to keep the "best and the brightest" doesn't mean that we're all Nobel laureates in STEM. We have certain technical skills which cannot be fulfilled by Americans (due to lack of American STEM students in universities). That's all.
- eshvk 14y ago
  This is true for my graduate school experience. On the other hand, I have a rather controversial viewpoint: People trained for four years in an excellent undergrad program are way better than people who came from an incompetent undergrad program and have 2 years of a good grad program. Furthermore, the demographics for undergraduate STEM programs has a huge majority of US Citizens. So I am not super sure there are technical skills that graduate students have that cannot be fulfilled by undergraduate students. I think what has happened is that industry (Computer Science/EE) has become obsessed with people with graduate degrees. I work as a data scientist and most of what is done in this field could be done by a competent undergraduate student with some math, computer science.
  - ashwinaj 14y ago
    But compare the number of undergraduate American students in STEM vs number of students in BBA/pre-med/law/dance/arts/humanities? There in lies the problem.
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      The number of Americans in Comp Sci versus English doesn't matter. What matters is supply of Americans with BSc Comp Sci versus demand for Americans with BSc Comp Sci.
      - ashwinaj 14y ago
eshvk 14y ago
Personally, I think Matloff is rather biased in most of his studies. However, I will say this, I was on an H1B for 5 months or so of my life. I can agree with the perception that one feels like a indentured servant. There is always that worry in your mind's eye that one can get fired and would be kicked out of the country. My company went through layoffs two weeks before my green card interview and that was an insanely stressful experience because I was in the situation where if I had gotten laid off, I would probably have to leave the country. If I left the country, my green card application would have been deemed abandoned which means I would have to start over. If you want real immigration reform, make the H1B visa a portable work visa for 5 years. Of course, this doesn't serve the owners of companies. They would rather have the current situation that probably depresses wages but certainly leads to a situation where the employee can be exploited by unscrupulous managers.
- cema 14y ago
  If you want real immigration reform, make the H1B visa a portable work visa for 5 years. Yes, it would be a good place to start the reform.
  - zmitri 14y ago
    This would be absolutely wonderful! Literally a dream come true.
- pmelendez 14y ago
  Just curious... How long did it take to get the green card once you got the H1B visa?
  - lewstherin 14y ago
    I think it depends on the country. For folks from India, it usually takes at least 5 years.
  - jholman 14y ago
    IANAL. Asking someone else is not useful to you, because there are several buckets into which one can fall, that have different waiting times. As I understand it, there are two questions of timing: how long will an applicant have to wait until given an immigrant visa number, and how long will it take to turn the immigrant visa number into a permanent residency. The latter is, I believe, consistent across buckets but varies over time, depending on the wheels of bureaucracy. It's a year or two, I think? The former, however, depends on your level of training and country of birth. The wikipedia page is pretty good, in particular a few sections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_States%29#Application_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_S... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_States%29#Immigration_eligibility_and_quotas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_S... In the latter, note the difference between EB-3 and EB-2, and note the bolded footer (b). EDIT STARTING HERE: Oh, this helps too: http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/bulletin/bulletin_5885.html http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/bulletin/bulletin_5885.html Depending on country of birth, if you have a BSc you're looking at 5-11 years of backlog. If you have a higher degree or 5+ years of "progressive" experience you're looking at 0 years of backlog, except 5 years for Chinese and 9 years for Indians. If you are doing family-based immigration, some category/nationality combinations are only just getting around to applications created in 15OCT98 (Philipinos and Mexicans are worst off here).
omonra 14y ago
But are they better or brighter than low-skilled immigrants?
zpk 14y ago
If there was a real talent shortage and a real Visa need, then we would allow H1-B's to self sponsor. Let the company elicit one visa and employee, and have the Fed gov garnish 5-10k over the first year from the employees' wages. After that he/shes a free man/woman to look where they choose. Stay employed, stay out of trouble, and pay another 5-10k and get an additional 3 years. The visa is tied to the person, which is the way it should be. That's a semi compromise, but I still would keep the # capped at < 100k new per year. As it stands with 8% UE we had an increase of 110k in 2010 to 129k in 2011 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_Applications_Approved http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_Applications_App....
piyush_soni 14y ago
Shit Article. Since they're earning less wages (or they're ready to work at lesser wages than U.S. workers) that means they are "neither brighter nor better"?
ricardobeat 14y ago
Instead, foreign immigrants have saturated the market, pushing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students onto other career paths This is contradictory. If immigrants are no better than american workers, and there is no shortage of the latter, why would immigrants be hired through complicated and costly processes in the first place?
- JPKab 14y ago
  Because once they are hired, they can be treated like modern day slaves. If they lose their job, they have to leave the country. This lack of labor force mobility makes them immediately cheaper. Why pay a competitive salary if you don't have to compete for this person?
  - y1426i 14y ago
    Well, even if they are not treated that way, the bondage feels that way. The boldness while doing your job well goes away. We cannot ask for promotions since there is no point. I worked with a huge pay cut for years and today I question if my decision to come to US was a right one. I could have been in any of the other open developed countries instead and would have happily settled down.
- eshvk 14y ago
  > This is contradictory. If immigrants are no better than american workers, and there is no shortage of the latter, why would immigrants be hired through complicated and costly processes in the first place? For most middling to large companies in the bay, the "complicated and costly processes" are outsourced to law firms that are on a retainer. For them, the whole process brings a matter of calling a number. Furthermore, the processes are not that costly (Say around $10K for an H1B application ) compared to the benefits of having an employee who can be exploited. Now, I am not saying it happens consciously at the company level. However, I am pretty damn sure it can happen at the hiring manager level.
eugenemor 14y ago
Bingo, study showed that because foreign workers are paid no less than us workers, it is unlikely they are discriminated against. That's a good start. Now it would be nice if they help address the shortage of _skilled_ workers (foreign or not) by reforming the visa system

38 points by zpk 14y ago

They determine who belongs to the "best and brightest" by looking at wages. An alternative hypothesis is that in an industry where getting a raise means switching jobs the H1B program is successful in suppressing wage levels of foreigners.

eshvk 14y ago
Your alternative hypothesis is interesting. I am not sure offhand how it would go. On one hand, as an H1B employee, it is not that hard for you to switch jobs and find a person to transfer your visa. Tiny companies might have an issue but then again, tiny companies don't pay that well (assumption.). After time goes by though, switching jobs can be harmful especially if you are being sponsored by the company for a green card. This is because your green card application process can slow down as you switch jobs (some things will have to be redone.) On the other hand, there is another factor in place: The wait times for green cards are reaching insane levels (25 + years). In such a climate, maybe the person might just decide to switch jobs more often.
analyst74 14y ago
While determining one's skill by how much he/she gets paid sounds ridiculous, this makes sense if you consider macro trends, as this article is talking about. If an industry (like finance) routinely pays multiple times the compensation of another industry (say, engineering) that requires similar skillset, it's rational that more of the top graduates will choose finance over engineering.
- piyush_soni 14y ago
  No it doesn't make much sense even if you consider macro trends. Bright Chinese or Indian workers will almost always be ready to work for lesser wages than a 'Native American' (if there's something like that) will be ready to work for. There's a macro economics involved here, but it's not what you think.
  - analyst74 14y ago
    Trust me, in a country with reasonable immigration laws, like Canada, highly skilled foreign workers do not make less money than locals. The biggest problem with H1B, which Matloff is critical of, is that it puts foreign worker and local worker in uneven legal grounds, thus unable to demand the same wage.

segmondy 14y ago

They are cheaper. Many people are willing to work for cheaper if that means that a company will file for them to stay in the US. Companies exploit this.

cooldeal 14y ago

The graph seems to be assuming that an immigrant becoming a citizen suddenly makes them America's "best and brightest" and are no longer included in the temporary workers' column. I don't seem them getting filtered out to make the comparison fairer.

wjnc 14y ago

They don't have to be better or brighter to make everyone better off. If there are jobs and they fill them: they create wealth for the US economy. There's no fixed sized pie in the economy. They fill a job: the pie increases. Economics 101 for HN

rayiner 14y ago
The size of the pie isn't the only thing that matters. Consider two scenarios of GDP allocation: Scenario A Shareholder: $100,000, Native programmer: $100,000 Scenario B Shareholder: $150,000, Native programmer: $75,000, H1B programmer: $75,000 There are good reasons in a democracy to favor scenario A over scenario B. It just depends on the following premises: 1) the income of non-Americans is irrelevant to American policy; 2) we care more about the income of the median American than the aggregate GDP; 3) we don't not care about the standard deviation of income Econ 101 or not, these are not unreasonable premises.
- dman 14y ago
  How about factoring in the tax revenue from American enterprises into the equation?
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Corporate taxes are less than 10% of U.S. revenue and falling. Not a particularly compelling reason to push for policies that increase corporate profits.
    - eshvk 14y ago
      Sadly enough corporations have the biggest pockets and that means they will push for cheaper indentured servants to flood the markets.
    - dman 14y ago
      http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=205 http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Doc... appears to suggest that the downward trend in corporate taxes as percentage of gdp is in the process of reversing. Also on first glance the numbers going forward do not appear to be very different than the tax revenue paid by corporations for the last couple of decades.

sonabinu 14y ago

wish someone would look at the human side of the story - you give so many years here, have kids who are citizens, you identify with the country and the culture, you came here legally, you worked hard, you are still waiting to call this home (at the current state with wait times upto 50 years)

EduardoBautista 14y ago
Wait times for H1B visas are not 50 years. You can become a citizen after 8 years of having permanent residency.
- eshvk 14y ago
  1. Wait times for an Indian/Chinese born person under the EB3 quota are varied but the backlog as it stands now looks like it might hit 25+ years. I am not offhand sure about the 50 years number but have heard of it mentioned earlier. 2. One becomes a citizen after 5 years of permanent residency. (3 if one is married to a US citizen.)
- sonabinu 14y ago
  wait times for permanent residency are 50 years if your filing is in the EB3 category and you are from India or China
ashwinaj 14y ago
A few years ago I would sympathize with that; but look, the rules are what they are. When you and I got our H1B, we knew (or should know) what the rules are w.r.t. becoming a permanent resident. If you put all your eggs in one basket, knowing fully well that you're in the India/China/Mexico EB2/3 bucket (assuming that you are or in any country which takes years) and without a backup plan? I don't think you should blame the system. Sure the system needs to improve, but it's not your and my call. Forgive my ignorance about your situation, but we have to be smart about this and stop sulking.

emu 14y ago

This study appears to ignore non-wage compensation (e.g. stock grants). I know that for me, as a H1B worker who graduated from a US graduate program and working for one of the large companies named, that stock based compensation is a substantial fraction of my total pay.

ahmad19526 14y ago

Can we talk about racism? If you're brown or yellow or black... chances are you don't make the company club (as easily) as well, white people... I've seen it with my own eyes... If you're not well networked in a corporation, but still work very well, you don't get a higher wage or as much opportunity to a promotion.. non-white ethnicity is a huge network barrier. It's not like people wanna golf with you and then go have a fancy chicken tiki massala or eat injera. Also, could foreign workers be much more ok with simple lives rather than being ambitious corporate thugs?.. but what's the measure of ambition for higher salary btwn immigrant and native wokers? If I came from a village I'd settle for any salary. Using salaries for understanding is absolutely pathetic..

eshvk 14y ago
> Can we talk about racism? If you're brown or yellow or black... chances are you don't make the company club (as easily) as well, white people... I've seen it with my own eyes... If we are going to be pulling anecdotes from where the sun don't shine, I can also point at Silicon Valley with a huge number of south asian/chinese immigrants starting companies. > If you're not well networked, but still working very well, you don't get a higher wage/promotions... Erm... so ? This is life. Popularity and hard work are not necessarily correlated, learn how to network. It is a life skill. This is like a guy saying that he is a good guy but doesn't get any with a girl.
- ahmad19526 14y ago
  Maybe they don't care to network.. maybe these foreign workers would rather work and do well in their field than suck * to get ahead? I'm not saying they can't network, anybody can indeed over come that... but some people, and maybe foreigner workers fall into this category, don't care about the popularity contest.. they're just trying to work Btw, did you know that women don't make as much as men? maybe female workers are... Salary #'s overlook a lot of cultural things that need to be studied...
  - mindcrime 14y ago
    This is an interesting line of discussion, but it's really orthogonal to one's race/gender/ethnicity/etc. Some people (like|accept|are willing to play) the "networking game" and some people aren't. In either case, it's a simple truth that a willingness and ability to play that game usually corresponds with more money, more responsibility, etc. I know it offends the sensibilities of many hackers that something so important should reduce to something so subjective and uncontrollable as human relations, but in the end, we are all salespeople... we're selling ourselves to others, all the time. And choosing not to engage in that is making a choice to do a poor job of selling yourself. It would be nice if the entire world could just perceive our knowledge, wisdom, skills and experience, and just come to us and evaluate us objectively, but it just doesn't work that way. It's not fair, but who ever said life was going to be fair. Whether you're Indian or Caucasian, male or female, Catholic or Atheist, or whatever, learning to network and sell yourself is something you need to do if you want to advance and be successful. Now if you're content with your current position, salary, lifestyle, etc., then don't worry about it.

InvisibleCities 14y ago

Yes, but they are "cheaper", which is all that matters, unfortunately.

piyush_soni 14y ago
Oh, cheaper, and many times better and brighter, contrary to what the article says.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ashwinaj 14y ago

My graduate STEM classes did not have many US citizens. I bet it's the same in most universities. I don't think that H1B workers like myself are brighter or smarter than someone local, but the argument that technology companies are losing jobs to Wall Street as a validation criteria for his hypothesis is absurd. Just because Gates says that we need to keep the "best and the brightest" doesn't mean that we're all Nobel laureates in STEM. We have certain technical skills which cannot be fulfilled by Americans (due to lack of American STEM students in universities). That's all.

eshvk 14y ago
This is true for my graduate school experience. On the other hand, I have a rather controversial viewpoint: People trained for four years in an excellent undergrad program are way better than people who came from an incompetent undergrad program and have 2 years of a good grad program. Furthermore, the demographics for undergraduate STEM programs has a huge majority of US Citizens. So I am not super sure there are technical skills that graduate students have that cannot be fulfilled by undergraduate students. I think what has happened is that industry (Computer Science/EE) has become obsessed with people with graduate degrees. I work as a data scientist and most of what is done in this field could be done by a competent undergraduate student with some math, computer science.
- ashwinaj 14y ago
  But compare the number of undergraduate American students in STEM vs number of students in BBA/pre-med/law/dance/arts/humanities? There in lies the problem.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    The number of Americans in Comp Sci versus English doesn't matter. What matters is supply of Americans with BSc Comp Sci versus demand for Americans with BSc Comp Sci.
    - ashwinaj 14y ago

eshvk 14y ago

Personally, I think Matloff is rather biased in most of his studies. However, I will say this, I was on an H1B for 5 months or so of my life. I can agree with the perception that one feels like a indentured servant. There is always that worry in your mind's eye that one can get fired and would be kicked out of the country. My company went through layoffs two weeks before my green card interview and that was an insanely stressful experience because I was in the situation where if I had gotten laid off, I would probably have to leave the country. If I left the country, my green card application would have been deemed abandoned which means I would have to start over. If you want real immigration reform, make the H1B visa a portable work visa for 5 years. Of course, this doesn't serve the owners of companies. They would rather have the current situation that probably depresses wages but certainly leads to a situation where the employee can be exploited by unscrupulous managers.

cema 14y ago
If you want real immigration reform, make the H1B visa a portable work visa for 5 years. Yes, it would be a good place to start the reform.
- zmitri 14y ago
  This would be absolutely wonderful! Literally a dream come true.
pmelendez 14y ago
Just curious... How long did it take to get the green card once you got the H1B visa?
- lewstherin 14y ago
  I think it depends on the country. For folks from India, it usually takes at least 5 years.
- jholman 14y ago
  IANAL. Asking someone else is not useful to you, because there are several buckets into which one can fall, that have different waiting times. As I understand it, there are two questions of timing: how long will an applicant have to wait until given an immigrant visa number, and how long will it take to turn the immigrant visa number into a permanent residency. The latter is, I believe, consistent across buckets but varies over time, depending on the wheels of bureaucracy. It's a year or two, I think? The former, however, depends on your level of training and country of birth. The wikipedia page is pretty good, in particular a few sections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_States%29#Application_process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_S... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_States%29#Immigration_eligibility_and_quotas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_residence_%28United_S... In the latter, note the difference between EB-3 and EB-2, and note the bolded footer (b). EDIT STARTING HERE: Oh, this helps too: http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/bulletin/bulletin_5885.html http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/bulletin/bulletin_5885.html Depending on country of birth, if you have a BSc you're looking at 5-11 years of backlog. If you have a higher degree or 5+ years of "progressive" experience you're looking at 0 years of backlog, except 5 years for Chinese and 9 years for Indians. If you are doing family-based immigration, some category/nationality combinations are only just getting around to applications created in 15OCT98 (Philipinos and Mexicans are worst off here).

omonra 14y ago

But are they better or brighter than low-skilled immigrants?

zpk 14y ago

If there was a real talent shortage and a real Visa need, then we would allow H1-B's to self sponsor. Let the company elicit one visa and employee, and have the Fed gov garnish 5-10k over the first year from the employees' wages. After that he/shes a free man/woman to look where they choose. Stay employed, stay out of trouble, and pay another 5-10k and get an additional 3 years. The visa is tied to the person, which is the way it should be. That's a semi compromise, but I still would keep the # capped at < 100k new per year. As it stands with 8% UE we had an increase of 110k in 2010 to 129k in 2011 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_Applications_Approved http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_Applications_App....

piyush_soni 14y ago

Shit Article. Since they're earning less wages (or they're ready to work at lesser wages than U.S. workers) that means they are "neither brighter nor better"?

ricardobeat 14y ago

Instead, foreign immigrants have saturated the market, pushing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students onto other career paths This is contradictory. If immigrants are no better than american workers, and there is no shortage of the latter, why would immigrants be hired through complicated and costly processes in the first place?

JPKab 14y ago
Because once they are hired, they can be treated like modern day slaves. If they lose their job, they have to leave the country. This lack of labor force mobility makes them immediately cheaper. Why pay a competitive salary if you don't have to compete for this person?
- y1426i 14y ago
  Well, even if they are not treated that way, the bondage feels that way. The boldness while doing your job well goes away. We cannot ask for promotions since there is no point. I worked with a huge pay cut for years and today I question if my decision to come to US was a right one. I could have been in any of the other open developed countries instead and would have happily settled down.
eshvk 14y ago
> This is contradictory. If immigrants are no better than american workers, and there is no shortage of the latter, why would immigrants be hired through complicated and costly processes in the first place? For most middling to large companies in the bay, the "complicated and costly processes" are outsourced to law firms that are on a retainer. For them, the whole process brings a matter of calling a number. Furthermore, the processes are not that costly (Say around $10K for an H1B application ) compared to the benefits of having an employee who can be exploited. Now, I am not saying it happens consciously at the company level. However, I am pretty damn sure it can happen at the hiring manager level.

eugenemor 14y ago

Bingo, study showed that because foreign workers are paid no less than us workers, it is unlikely they are discriminated against. That's a good start. Now it would be nice if they help address the shortage of _skilled_ workers (foreign or not) by reforming the visa system