6 ms·

Companies lay off thousands, then demand immigration reform for new labor

96 points by pointillistic 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tenpoundhammer 13y ago
Competitive == Cheap
kailuowang 13y ago
The H1B visa actually requires that the immigrant applicant being paid no less than American employees for the same type of position. Of course there could be loopholes, but the high cost of going through the immigration process currently places immigrants in a disadvantaged position in terms of financial costs to employers. If you believe in free market, this is unhealthy to the economy. American companies should be paying duties to country through tax, not hiring discrimination against nationality.
- malandrew 13y ago
  "the immigrant applicant being paid no less than American employees for the same type of position" AFAIK it's very common to manipulate the immigrant employee's job title to get around paying them the same as an American equivalent.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    Yes, it's common in game companies to hire people with strong engineering experience into basically QA positions, where they—surprise—end up "helping out" on stuff above their pay grade. A way of avoiding this would just to be to have an absolute salary threshold. Say, all H1B job offers must have an $100k+ salary. That would allocate them to the parts of the economy where workers are actually severely lacking, and valuable enough to the companies that they're willing to pay premium prices to get them. Alternately, make it a bidding system instead of a fixed number: there are 50,000, or 100,000, or whatever H1B visas, and they go to the companies that offer the highest salaries (thus indicating the highest demand). If you claim that there is a lack of workers in an area but you aren't willing to pay more than $60k, then I'm going to be skeptical about just how much of a critical skills shortage there is.
    - jacalata 13y ago
      I agree. I was pretty surprised to see H1B applications for salaries of $25,000 in this post yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361656.
    - hga 13y ago
      Hmmm, perhaps it was less of an coincidence that the very smart Jamaican EE who I worked with in 2001 at Lucent was in QA. He was making $48K to my $80K (we all knew the former because it had to be posted).
  - kailuowang 13y ago
    Is there any data to support that? My experience convinced me that other way.
- jmcintyre 13y ago
  There's also this fee among a lot of other fees while applying: In 2007, the US Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (ETA), reported on two programs, the High Growth Training Initiative and Workforce Innovation Regional Economic Development (WIRED), which have received or will receive $284 million and $260 million, respectively, from H-1B training fees to educate and train US workers. According to the Seattle Times $1 billion from H1-B fees have been distributed by the Labor Department to build up US workforce skills since 2001. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_fees_earmarked_for_U.S._worker_education_and_training http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_fees_earmarked_f...
- mprovost 13y ago
  True but the H1B scheme is used by companies to drive salaries down across the board. I would argue that this is its primary goal. So if American workers want $60k for a position, but you have a stack of pending H1Bs, you can offer it at $50k and then when no Americans take the position you hire an H1B instead. But now the standard rate for that position in your company is $50k and that's what Americans would have to work at, so technically there is no discrimination. Do that at enough companies (look at the list of signatories) and you can redefine the salary range of an entire industry. Someone should (I can't find any references) calculate what the true, competitive salary for programmers in SV would be without companies using H1Bs to drive down prices. I would bet it would be significantly higher than it is now.
  - kailuowang 13y ago
    You are assuming that the industry can fill all such positions with immigrant workers. In reality, the supply of immigrant workers is no where near to satisfy that assumption especially if you consider the annual quote for H1B approvals (often than not such quote was exhausted the first couple of weeks when it became available).
  - goatforce5 13y ago
    My wage as an E3 (ie, it's just like a H1B, but only for Australians) employee in the States was quite a bit higher than the prevailing wage at the time, FWIW. Note that the wages being offered are supposed to be pretty much common-knowledge: http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm "On or within 30 days before the date the LCA is filed with ETA, provide notice of the employer's intent to hire H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3 workers. The employer must provide this notice to the bargaining representative of workers in the occupation in which the H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3 worker will be employed. If there is no bargaining representative, the employer must post such notices in conspicuous locations at the intended place(s) of employment, or provide them electronically." We did spend a fair bit of time looking for the least conspicuous of all conspicuous places within the office to post my wage though. :)
malandrew 13y ago
I'm wondering what would be the pros and cons of having an immigration bill that functions on a tit-for-tat basis like the following: Your company gets one H-1B visa for your company for each unemployed American that you retrain and employ. The catch is that the American you retrain and employ must be out of work 6 months or longer. If an American worker you retrain and employ doesn't work out, you can fire them, but only after you have replaced them with another out-of-work American. Another interesting approach is to make companies inelligible for H-1B visas for a probationary period following any layoffs in excess of X number of employees or Y percent of your workforce. e.g. if you layoff 1000 employees or more than 5% of your workforce, you cannot receive any H-1B visas for 1 year following the termination of the last of the 1000 employees. The only exception I can see conceded here would be the divestiture of an entire business unit from soup to nuts (as opposed to a layoff comprised of a general workforce reduction across all business units) The main thing I want to see fixed in the H-1B process is making it easier for H1-B holders to change jobs after about 1 year of employment with the original sponsor. Right now H-1B visas are like handcuffs that leave the H-1B holder in a position akin to that of an indentured servant.
- masklinn 13y ago
  > Right now H-1B visas are like handcuffs that leave the H-1B holder in a position akin to that of an indentured servant. Which is why it'll never change, as the companies with clout sure as hell wouldn't want H-1B to be anything else.
  - netc 13y ago
    There is so much misinformation flying around. Most H1B can change job in 3 months or so. Many do.
    - rbanffy 13y ago
      IIRC, the second company must get another H1B for the worker.
kingmanaz 13y ago
First they came for the janitors... http://www.vdare.com/print/17686 http://www.vdare.com/print/17686
quaffapint 13y ago
Just at a time when ... "The income gap between America's richest 1% and the rest of the country widened to a record last year. The top 1% of US earners collected 19.3% of household income in 2012, their largest share in Internal Revenue Service figures going back a century." Apparently they want more - no surprises there.
pg 13y ago
This article embodies a sleight of hand: it assumes that the jobs the companies want to hire immigrants to fill are the same ones they've laid people off from. Is there any evidence that is the case?
- Jayschwa 13y ago
  Even if it were the case, does it matter? Competition is becoming increasingly globalized. I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. Protectionism in the form of onerous immigration regulations is a losing battle and only delays the inevitable.
  - gaius 13y ago
    The question is really, what is a government for? If it is not to look out for the best interests of citizens, why are they paying its taxes snd obeying its laws? It is not protectionism at all to level the playing field, America was built on immigration, but the H1B is indentured servitude.
    - Jayschwa 13y ago
      > If it is not to look out for the best interests of citizens, why are they paying taxes? It's in the best interest of the person who has to compete with the immigrant, but it's not in the best interest of anyone else - citizen or otherwise. Immigration benefits other citizens in the form of cheaper products and services. Immigration also benefits the immigrant (if it didn't, they wouldn't be trying to get in). This issue is somewhat personal for me because I have foreign friends who are good engineers and would like to work here, but can't because of the regulations. > It is not protectionism at all to level the playing field This isn't leveling the playing field, this is refusing to let other (potentially better) players on the field because we have less capable players (who happened to be here first).
      - gaius 13y ago
        Not true, unless said "better" players have Green Cards. And there is already a process for that. The only purpose of H1B the legal construct is to erode workers rights.
tn13 13y ago
If American government is serious about protecting the interests of American workforce; implement the following simple rule. 1. Let H1B be independent of the employer. Current H1B rules are modern day equivalent of bonded labor. Let a person obtain H1B from the employer for the first time, after that make it independent of the employer. For example a person on H1B may resign on day 1 and simply join another American company. Remove all the nonsense about salary limits and so on.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  Even simpler would just be eliminating most economic non-visitor, non-treaty-based visa categories in favor of a single, category for all non-prohibited entrants who either are not qualified for a family, political (refugee, victimization-based, etc.), etc. visa, or who are qualified for such a visa in a category for which there is a waiting list to enter and remain prior to moving to the head of the list, which carries a substantial basic annual fee and requires supplemental income tax on any wages income earned in the US during the period they are present on the visa.
  - jacalata 13y ago
    I'm already paying you for social security and medicare that I will probably never be eligible to benefit from, and you want me to pay extra 'fuck you' taxes as well? Thanks but no thanks. Aside from that, this wouldn't be simple at all because changing the visas available would in many cases involve renegotiating the deals that they made with other countries that got those visas created in the first place. Sure, it would likely be possible to tell all the other countries to get stuffed, but good luck getting US citizens a visa to travel anywhere if you keep doing that.
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > I'm already paying you for social security and medicare that I will probably never be eligible to benefit from, and you want me to pay extra 'fuck you' taxes as well? This was in response to a suggestion about what the government would do if it was interested in serving its citizens. If you would be paying the fees, serving you is very much not the point. Though I'll point out that, by moving from employee sponsorship and charges (and pay limits, etc.) on employers for things like H-1B to charges to the prospective entrant, it means that the entrant has substantially more freedom (and potentially greater net income after charges, too, since instead of the employer paying a fee and dealing with wage limits, the employee pays a flat fee and a share of income, but isn't burdened by salary limits.) > Aside from that, this wouldn't be simple at all because changing the visas available would in many cases involve renegotiating the deals that they made with other countries that got those visas created in the first place. By definition, changing the non-treaty visas, as I specified, would not require that, and many economic visas (including the H-1B) are not treaty-based. Obviously treaty-based econonmic visas like the H-1B1 (Singapore or Chile), TN/TD (NAFTA), E-1/E-2 (Treaty Trader/Treaty Investor) etc. are a separate issue, but at least in theory the government is serving citizens interests with those because of the reciprocal benefit US citizens have with regard to economic entry to the countries involved.
diego 13y ago
"It is difficult to understand how these companies can feel justified in demanding the importation of cheap labor with a straight face at a time when tens of millions of Americans are unemployed," writes the Center for Immigration Studies Maybe the Center for Immigration Studies should fire the person who finds this difficult to understand. If they have a hard time hiring a replacement who does understand it, they should be open to hiring someone on an H1B visa.
mynameishere 13y ago
Well, if the philosopher kings at The Cheesecake Factory say so, I guess we have no choice. More workers and more customers both raise the price of assets. The same Walmart that served 25,000 people in an area will do even better serving 30,000. That's the basic thinking, though at some point it will break down and hurt (almost) everyone, not just workers and customers.
grecy 13y ago
I'm an Australian who recently became a Canadian Permanent Resident using a "sponsorship" process not unlike the H-1B. I've also had a few work visas for the USA, and applied for a H-1B (The rules changed before it could even be looked at). I personally think the idea of bringing in foreign labor is a very bad thing for the sponsoring country. For example, where I live in Canada has a very high cost of living (very far North), but stupidly the minimum wage is lower than other parts of Canada. Many local businesses pay $14-$18 / hr as a starting wage for menial jobs, even though minimum is legally ~$10/hr, because otherwise nobody would do the the job up here. When Walmart, McDonald's, KFC, Canadian Tire, etc. (who all have a pre-approved process with the govt. BTW) want to hire someone cheap, they just bring in a foreigner from a second world country. Those foreigners live 20 to a house and make $10/hr. They can't work anywhere else, and if they quit they are deported. So those business can bring down the overall standard of living here by paying less than an average Canadian would actually be willing to do the job for. If supply/demand was allowed to run it's natural course, those companies would have to pay a little more ($14-$18/hr), their profits would go down a little, but Canadians would be employed and the overall standard of living would not decrease. Make no mistake about it, bringing in foreigners lowers the quality of life for the original citizens, and only helps increase corporate profits. (Yes, I know I'm not supposed to bite the hand that feeds me, but I think I have a good perspective on the situation, given that it just happened to me)
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > they just bring in a foreigner from a second world country Since the end of the Cold War, the "Second World" (which was a geopolitical rather than an economic distinction) is largely meaningless (First and Third World, from the same model, have sort of migrated to mean "developed" and "less developed".)
  - cantankerous 13y ago
    That's to say, the second world referred to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. None of which really exist in that form any more. Being from Australia/Canada, the OP was still part of the First World by the old nomenclature.
rayiner 13y ago
Increased immigration is just another one of the public subsidies to which corporations think they're entitled. The demand for subsidies is easy to see with oil companies, who lobby for tax breaks and for the U.S. government to fight foreign wars to maintain their access to foreign oil sources. However the basic dynamics are present in the tech industry too. How often do tech companies talk about the need to produce more STEM graduates? Throwing aside the warm fuzzy ideas attached to public education, this is a naked demand for subsidy: train more workers for our industry at the public expense. Increased immigration is in the same vein. It would be expensive to retrain all those expensive workers (this goes to pg's point elsewhere), so better to let India and China subsidize the education, and the U.S. subsidize the process of acculturating and integrating the new immigrants. I'll offer a potentially controversial statement: immigration policy should have nothing to do with transient labor demands. It is simply an orthogonal issue. Immigration is deeply and inextricably tied up in questions about culture and acculturation, democracy and the composition of the body politic, the long-term, sustainable, growth of the population, etc. Immigration limits and the countries from which we take immigrations should be based solely on those issues. Immigration limits and targets should not be based on what particular industries want as labor inputs. That's a sop, that's a subsidy. That's the public undertaking an obligation in order to subsidize private profits. It's a long-term fix to a temporary problem. This is not an opposition to immigration, mind you, but rather an opposition to the criteria being used to evaluate how much immigration we should have.
- Jayschwa 13y ago
  > Increased immigration is just another one of the public subsidies to which corporations think they're entitled. Removal of an artificial barrier isn't a subsidy.
  - cantankerous 13y ago
    Corporations themselves are artificial. Looks like an artificial thing wants a change in another artificial thing, then. Either way, the change has externalized costs that the corporations themselves won't have to bear in a society that upholds the laws that allow them to exist in the first place. To me it sure sounds like a subsidy.
openforce 13y ago
The number of layoffs the article mentions is worldwide numbers. Not just inside US. H1b employees are cheaper, decently trained. A lot of companies favor such employees which add to the local workforce which in turn means shipping less jobs to India and China.
huherto 13y ago
Why do companies use the H1B process if they can use the Green card process? Is it just that they have more control over the employee? Or the process is actually easier or cheaper?
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Why do companies use the H1B process if they can use the Green card process? The immigrant visa ("Green Card") process for employment-based categories, as for family-based categories, uses both global and per-country limits which apply after candidates are qualified (including having a sponsoring employer!) but limit the rate at which visas are granted, which means that for countries from which there are the most qualified applicants in many categories face the longest delays from the date they become qualified to the date they actually are granted a visa. The most oversubscribed source for employment-based immigration, India, has categories in which the delay is 10 years, and there are certain categories where the delay for any country is over 3 years. (And this is still better than family-based immigration, where the longest waitlist country/category combination is 23 years!)
abhiv 13y ago
There are really two different types of H-1B employees: those who've studied at a US university but are foreign citizens, and workers brought in from outside the country directly to fill a position. There is very little distinction made in the public discourse about the difference between these two categories of employees, but they are very different. The overwhelming majority of H-1Bs directly employed at large American companies will be of the first type: they came to the US to study or at an early age, and were hired while they were already in the US. These employees are likely to be treated identically with American citizen employees and paid exactly the same in the same roles. They are not "cheap foreign labor" -- they are employees who just happen to be foreign citizens. They are very mobile because their skills are in high demand, and other employers are more than eager to transfer their visas over. However (and this is where the rhetoric comes in), the majority of H-1B visas go to outsourcing/offshoring companies that bring in workers by the thousands to fill mostly lower-end positions in IT or back office departments at American companies. These workers fit all the H-1B stereotypes: low-paid, bound to a single company, living 10 to an apartment etc. There are significant violations and gray areas in the way these workers are brought in and paid. The problem is that both sides of the H-1B debate do not define which group of workers they are talking about. Google, Microsoft etc are correct when they say that they do not want more H-1Bs for cheaper labor. In the employee pool they are looking at (foreign citizens already in the US), this is true: they pay all employees identically irrespective of whether they are foreign or US citizens. The opponents of more H-1Bs are also correct when they say that H-1Bs are being used for cheaper labor: the types of employees that offshoring companies bring in are indeed being chosen because they are willing to work for lower wages than workers already in the US. The solution is clear: have separate visa categories for employees brought in directly from outside the US, and foreign citizens who are already in the country. Make it as easy as possible for the latter group to stay in the country, through a quicker green card process or other methods; at the same time, have higher scrutiny for the separate category of visas that apply to foreign workers brought in directly from outside. It sometimes amazes me that even on a relatively knowledgeable forum like HN, this distinction isn't made often or at all.
- potatote 13y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. There is a huge difference between two pools of H-1B labor
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

96 points by pointillistic 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tenpoundhammer 13y ago

Competitive == Cheap

kailuowang 13y ago

The H1B visa actually requires that the immigrant applicant being paid no less than American employees for the same type of position. Of course there could be loopholes, but the high cost of going through the immigration process currently places immigrants in a disadvantaged position in terms of financial costs to employers. If you believe in free market, this is unhealthy to the economy. American companies should be paying duties to country through tax, not hiring discrimination against nationality.

malandrew 13y ago
"the immigrant applicant being paid no less than American employees for the same type of position" AFAIK it's very common to manipulate the immigrant employee's job title to get around paying them the same as an American equivalent.
- _delirium 13y ago
  Yes, it's common in game companies to hire people with strong engineering experience into basically QA positions, where they—surprise—end up "helping out" on stuff above their pay grade. A way of avoiding this would just to be to have an absolute salary threshold. Say, all H1B job offers must have an $100k+ salary. That would allocate them to the parts of the economy where workers are actually severely lacking, and valuable enough to the companies that they're willing to pay premium prices to get them. Alternately, make it a bidding system instead of a fixed number: there are 50,000, or 100,000, or whatever H1B visas, and they go to the companies that offer the highest salaries (thus indicating the highest demand). If you claim that there is a lack of workers in an area but you aren't willing to pay more than $60k, then I'm going to be skeptical about just how much of a critical skills shortage there is.
  - jacalata 13y ago
    I agree. I was pretty surprised to see H1B applications for salaries of $25,000 in this post yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6361656.
  - hga 13y ago
    Hmmm, perhaps it was less of an coincidence that the very smart Jamaican EE who I worked with in 2001 at Lucent was in QA. He was making $48K to my $80K (we all knew the former because it had to be posted).
- kailuowang 13y ago
  Is there any data to support that? My experience convinced me that other way.
jmcintyre 13y ago
There's also this fee among a lot of other fees while applying: In 2007, the US Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (ETA), reported on two programs, the High Growth Training Initiative and Workforce Innovation Regional Economic Development (WIRED), which have received or will receive $284 million and $260 million, respectively, from H-1B training fees to educate and train US workers. According to the Seattle Times $1 billion from H1-B fees have been distributed by the Labor Department to build up US workforce skills since 2001. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_fees_earmarked_for_U.S._worker_education_and_training http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#H-1B_fees_earmarked_f...
mprovost 13y ago
True but the H1B scheme is used by companies to drive salaries down across the board. I would argue that this is its primary goal. So if American workers want $60k for a position, but you have a stack of pending H1Bs, you can offer it at $50k and then when no Americans take the position you hire an H1B instead. But now the standard rate for that position in your company is $50k and that's what Americans would have to work at, so technically there is no discrimination. Do that at enough companies (look at the list of signatories) and you can redefine the salary range of an entire industry. Someone should (I can't find any references) calculate what the true, competitive salary for programmers in SV would be without companies using H1Bs to drive down prices. I would bet it would be significantly higher than it is now.
- kailuowang 13y ago
  You are assuming that the industry can fill all such positions with immigrant workers. In reality, the supply of immigrant workers is no where near to satisfy that assumption especially if you consider the annual quote for H1B approvals (often than not such quote was exhausted the first couple of weeks when it became available).
- goatforce5 13y ago
  My wage as an E3 (ie, it's just like a H1B, but only for Australians) employee in the States was quite a bit higher than the prevailing wage at the time, FWIW. Note that the wages being offered are supposed to be pretty much common-knowledge: http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm http://www.dol.gov/compliance/guide/h1b.htm "On or within 30 days before the date the LCA is filed with ETA, provide notice of the employer's intent to hire H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3 workers. The employer must provide this notice to the bargaining representative of workers in the occupation in which the H-1B, H-1B1, or E-3 worker will be employed. If there is no bargaining representative, the employer must post such notices in conspicuous locations at the intended place(s) of employment, or provide them electronically." We did spend a fair bit of time looking for the least conspicuous of all conspicuous places within the office to post my wage though. :)

malandrew 13y ago

I'm wondering what would be the pros and cons of having an immigration bill that functions on a tit-for-tat basis like the following: Your company gets one H-1B visa for your company for each unemployed American that you retrain and employ. The catch is that the American you retrain and employ must be out of work 6 months or longer. If an American worker you retrain and employ doesn't work out, you can fire them, but only after you have replaced them with another out-of-work American. Another interesting approach is to make companies inelligible for H-1B visas for a probationary period following any layoffs in excess of X number of employees or Y percent of your workforce. e.g. if you layoff 1000 employees or more than 5% of your workforce, you cannot receive any H-1B visas for 1 year following the termination of the last of the 1000 employees. The only exception I can see conceded here would be the divestiture of an entire business unit from soup to nuts (as opposed to a layoff comprised of a general workforce reduction across all business units) The main thing I want to see fixed in the H-1B process is making it easier for H1-B holders to change jobs after about 1 year of employment with the original sponsor. Right now H-1B visas are like handcuffs that leave the H-1B holder in a position akin to that of an indentured servant.

masklinn 13y ago
> Right now H-1B visas are like handcuffs that leave the H-1B holder in a position akin to that of an indentured servant. Which is why it'll never change, as the companies with clout sure as hell wouldn't want H-1B to be anything else.
- netc 13y ago
  There is so much misinformation flying around. Most H1B can change job in 3 months or so. Many do.
  - rbanffy 13y ago
    IIRC, the second company must get another H1B for the worker.

kingmanaz 13y ago

First they came for the janitors... http://www.vdare.com/print/17686 http://www.vdare.com/print/17686

quaffapint 13y ago

Just at a time when ... "The income gap between America's richest 1% and the rest of the country widened to a record last year. The top 1% of US earners collected 19.3% of household income in 2012, their largest share in Internal Revenue Service figures going back a century." Apparently they want more - no surprises there.

pg 13y ago

This article embodies a sleight of hand: it assumes that the jobs the companies want to hire immigrants to fill are the same ones they've laid people off from. Is there any evidence that is the case?

Jayschwa 13y ago
Even if it were the case, does it matter? Competition is becoming increasingly globalized. I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. Protectionism in the form of onerous immigration regulations is a losing battle and only delays the inevitable.
- gaius 13y ago
  The question is really, what is a government for? If it is not to look out for the best interests of citizens, why are they paying its taxes snd obeying its laws? It is not protectionism at all to level the playing field, America was built on immigration, but the H1B is indentured servitude.
  - Jayschwa 13y ago
    > If it is not to look out for the best interests of citizens, why are they paying taxes? It's in the best interest of the person who has to compete with the immigrant, but it's not in the best interest of anyone else - citizen or otherwise. Immigration benefits other citizens in the form of cheaper products and services. Immigration also benefits the immigrant (if it didn't, they wouldn't be trying to get in). This issue is somewhat personal for me because I have foreign friends who are good engineers and would like to work here, but can't because of the regulations. > It is not protectionism at all to level the playing field This isn't leveling the playing field, this is refusing to let other (potentially better) players on the field because we have less capable players (who happened to be here first).
    - gaius 13y ago
      Not true, unless said "better" players have Green Cards. And there is already a process for that. The only purpose of H1B the legal construct is to erode workers rights.

tn13 13y ago

If American government is serious about protecting the interests of American workforce; implement the following simple rule. 1. Let H1B be independent of the employer. Current H1B rules are modern day equivalent of bonded labor. Let a person obtain H1B from the employer for the first time, after that make it independent of the employer. For example a person on H1B may resign on day 1 and simply join another American company. Remove all the nonsense about salary limits and so on.

dragonwriter 13y ago
Even simpler would just be eliminating most economic non-visitor, non-treaty-based visa categories in favor of a single, category for all non-prohibited entrants who either are not qualified for a family, political (refugee, victimization-based, etc.), etc. visa, or who are qualified for such a visa in a category for which there is a waiting list to enter and remain prior to moving to the head of the list, which carries a substantial basic annual fee and requires supplemental income tax on any wages income earned in the US during the period they are present on the visa.
- jacalata 13y ago
  I'm already paying you for social security and medicare that I will probably never be eligible to benefit from, and you want me to pay extra 'fuck you' taxes as well? Thanks but no thanks. Aside from that, this wouldn't be simple at all because changing the visas available would in many cases involve renegotiating the deals that they made with other countries that got those visas created in the first place. Sure, it would likely be possible to tell all the other countries to get stuffed, but good luck getting US citizens a visa to travel anywhere if you keep doing that.
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > I'm already paying you for social security and medicare that I will probably never be eligible to benefit from, and you want me to pay extra 'fuck you' taxes as well? This was in response to a suggestion about what the government would do if it was interested in serving its citizens. If you would be paying the fees, serving you is very much not the point. Though I'll point out that, by moving from employee sponsorship and charges (and pay limits, etc.) on employers for things like H-1B to charges to the prospective entrant, it means that the entrant has substantially more freedom (and potentially greater net income after charges, too, since instead of the employer paying a fee and dealing with wage limits, the employee pays a flat fee and a share of income, but isn't burdened by salary limits.) > Aside from that, this wouldn't be simple at all because changing the visas available would in many cases involve renegotiating the deals that they made with other countries that got those visas created in the first place. By definition, changing the non-treaty visas, as I specified, would not require that, and many economic visas (including the H-1B) are not treaty-based. Obviously treaty-based econonmic visas like the H-1B1 (Singapore or Chile), TN/TD (NAFTA), E-1/E-2 (Treaty Trader/Treaty Investor) etc. are a separate issue, but at least in theory the government is serving citizens interests with those because of the reciprocal benefit US citizens have with regard to economic entry to the countries involved.

diego 13y ago

"It is difficult to understand how these companies can feel justified in demanding the importation of cheap labor with a straight face at a time when tens of millions of Americans are unemployed," writes the Center for Immigration Studies Maybe the Center for Immigration Studies should fire the person who finds this difficult to understand. If they have a hard time hiring a replacement who does understand it, they should be open to hiring someone on an H1B visa.

mynameishere 13y ago

Well, if the philosopher kings at The Cheesecake Factory say so, I guess we have no choice. More workers and more customers both raise the price of assets. The same Walmart that served 25,000 people in an area will do even better serving 30,000. That's the basic thinking, though at some point it will break down and hurt (almost) everyone, not just workers and customers.

grecy 13y ago

I'm an Australian who recently became a Canadian Permanent Resident using a "sponsorship" process not unlike the H-1B. I've also had a few work visas for the USA, and applied for a H-1B (The rules changed before it could even be looked at). I personally think the idea of bringing in foreign labor is a very bad thing for the sponsoring country. For example, where I live in Canada has a very high cost of living (very far North), but stupidly the minimum wage is lower than other parts of Canada. Many local businesses pay $14-$18 / hr as a starting wage for menial jobs, even though minimum is legally ~$10/hr, because otherwise nobody would do the the job up here. When Walmart, McDonald's, KFC, Canadian Tire, etc. (who all have a pre-approved process with the govt. BTW) want to hire someone cheap, they just bring in a foreigner from a second world country. Those foreigners live 20 to a house and make $10/hr. They can't work anywhere else, and if they quit they are deported. So those business can bring down the overall standard of living here by paying less than an average Canadian would actually be willing to do the job for. If supply/demand was allowed to run it's natural course, those companies would have to pay a little more ($14-$18/hr), their profits would go down a little, but Canadians would be employed and the overall standard of living would not decrease. Make no mistake about it, bringing in foreigners lowers the quality of life for the original citizens, and only helps increase corporate profits. (Yes, I know I'm not supposed to bite the hand that feeds me, but I think I have a good perspective on the situation, given that it just happened to me)

dragonwriter 13y ago
> they just bring in a foreigner from a second world country Since the end of the Cold War, the "Second World" (which was a geopolitical rather than an economic distinction) is largely meaningless (First and Third World, from the same model, have sort of migrated to mean "developed" and "less developed".)
- cantankerous 13y ago
  That's to say, the second world referred to the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. None of which really exist in that form any more. Being from Australia/Canada, the OP was still part of the First World by the old nomenclature.

rayiner 13y ago

Increased immigration is just another one of the public subsidies to which corporations think they're entitled. The demand for subsidies is easy to see with oil companies, who lobby for tax breaks and for the U.S. government to fight foreign wars to maintain their access to foreign oil sources. However the basic dynamics are present in the tech industry too. How often do tech companies talk about the need to produce more STEM graduates? Throwing aside the warm fuzzy ideas attached to public education, this is a naked demand for subsidy: train more workers for our industry at the public expense. Increased immigration is in the same vein. It would be expensive to retrain all those expensive workers (this goes to pg's point elsewhere), so better to let India and China subsidize the education, and the U.S. subsidize the process of acculturating and integrating the new immigrants. I'll offer a potentially controversial statement: immigration policy should have nothing to do with transient labor demands. It is simply an orthogonal issue. Immigration is deeply and inextricably tied up in questions about culture and acculturation, democracy and the composition of the body politic, the long-term, sustainable, growth of the population, etc. Immigration limits and the countries from which we take immigrations should be based solely on those issues. Immigration limits and targets should not be based on what particular industries want as labor inputs. That's a sop, that's a subsidy. That's the public undertaking an obligation in order to subsidize private profits. It's a long-term fix to a temporary problem. This is not an opposition to immigration, mind you, but rather an opposition to the criteria being used to evaluate how much immigration we should have.

Jayschwa 13y ago
> Increased immigration is just another one of the public subsidies to which corporations think they're entitled. Removal of an artificial barrier isn't a subsidy.
- cantankerous 13y ago
  Corporations themselves are artificial. Looks like an artificial thing wants a change in another artificial thing, then. Either way, the change has externalized costs that the corporations themselves won't have to bear in a society that upholds the laws that allow them to exist in the first place. To me it sure sounds like a subsidy.

openforce 13y ago

The number of layoffs the article mentions is worldwide numbers. Not just inside US. H1b employees are cheaper, decently trained. A lot of companies favor such employees which add to the local workforce which in turn means shipping less jobs to India and China.

huherto 13y ago

Why do companies use the H1B process if they can use the Green card process? Is it just that they have more control over the employee? Or the process is actually easier or cheaper?

dragonwriter 13y ago
> Why do companies use the H1B process if they can use the Green card process? The immigrant visa ("Green Card") process for employment-based categories, as for family-based categories, uses both global and per-country limits which apply after candidates are qualified (including having a sponsoring employer!) but limit the rate at which visas are granted, which means that for countries from which there are the most qualified applicants in many categories face the longest delays from the date they become qualified to the date they actually are granted a visa. The most oversubscribed source for employment-based immigration, India, has categories in which the delay is 10 years, and there are certain categories where the delay for any country is over 3 years. (And this is still better than family-based immigration, where the longest waitlist country/category combination is 23 years!)

abhiv 13y ago

There are really two different types of H-1B employees: those who've studied at a US university but are foreign citizens, and workers brought in from outside the country directly to fill a position. There is very little distinction made in the public discourse about the difference between these two categories of employees, but they are very different. The overwhelming majority of H-1Bs directly employed at large American companies will be of the first type: they came to the US to study or at an early age, and were hired while they were already in the US. These employees are likely to be treated identically with American citizen employees and paid exactly the same in the same roles. They are not "cheap foreign labor" -- they are employees who just happen to be foreign citizens. They are very mobile because their skills are in high demand, and other employers are more than eager to transfer their visas over. However (and this is where the rhetoric comes in), the majority of H-1B visas go to outsourcing/offshoring companies that bring in workers by the thousands to fill mostly lower-end positions in IT or back office departments at American companies. These workers fit all the H-1B stereotypes: low-paid, bound to a single company, living 10 to an apartment etc. There are significant violations and gray areas in the way these workers are brought in and paid. The problem is that both sides of the H-1B debate do not define which group of workers they are talking about. Google, Microsoft etc are correct when they say that they do not want more H-1Bs for cheaper labor. In the employee pool they are looking at (foreign citizens already in the US), this is true: they pay all employees identically irrespective of whether they are foreign or US citizens. The opponents of more H-1Bs are also correct when they say that H-1Bs are being used for cheaper labor: the types of employees that offshoring companies bring in are indeed being chosen because they are willing to work for lower wages than workers already in the US. The solution is clear: have separate visa categories for employees brought in directly from outside the US, and foreign citizens who are already in the country. Make it as easy as possible for the latter group to stay in the country, through a quicker green card process or other methods; at the same time, have higher scrutiny for the separate category of visas that apply to foreign workers brought in directly from outside. It sometimes amazes me that even on a relatively knowledgeable forum like HN, this distinction isn't made often or at all.

potatote 13y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. There is a huge difference between two pools of H-1B labor

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]