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Breaking the Visa Backlog
bart_scriv writes "As anyone who has dealt with H1-B visas can attest, the process can be a nightmare of long lines, waits and inexplicable delays. In this interview, the State Department's Tony Edson discusses what's being done to speed up and expedite the process, ranging from procedural changes to the use of new technology."
The H-1B is a nonimmigrant classification used by an alien who will be employed temporarily in a specialty occupation or as a fashion model of distinguished merit and ability.
http://uscis.gov/graphics/howdoi/h1b.htm#what/
1. Does the applicant show initiative, is he/she proactive?
No. (Give me a call)
2. When presented with a problem, does the applicant find a general solution, or is he/she looking for a temporary shortcut?
Temporary shortcut. (You know what's faster? Hiring an American)
3. Recommendation for hire?
Not recommended.
In the St Louis area, my company has had problems hiring skilled programmers. Only 1 in 10 resumes come from Americans, and those tend to be quite weak. In one occasion, after looking for 8 months we got a single qualified applicant, who just happened to be an H1-B holder. Why not hire him?
Besides, some unemployment is healthy. If you've ever had an actual job, you'd probably know that there's plenty of programmers out there that are so incompetent that they create more work than they do. Those guys SHOULD be unemployed, regardless of their country of origin. Who in their right mind would want to hire a dog like that over someone with talent?
1- fashion model is not a specialty occupation?
2- what defines 'ability' of a model?
3- what about distinguished merit and NO ability models like XXX (insert your own answer)
etc...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
100% employment means that, rather than the plebes fighting one another over who will accept the lowest pay for a given demeaning job, the employers actually need to make honest, fair offers to get good employees, then treat them like humans to keep them.
Less than 100% employment doesn't mean that companies don't have to make honest, fair offers to get good employees. Damned close to 100% of good employees are either already employed, or will be unemployed for only a very short period of time.
100% employment, however, means no incentive to better yourself as a worker. That leads to low domestic innovation, low productivity, low job satisfaction, and eventually economic decline, increased poverty, etc.. Look at the long term unemployment statistics (people in good health, but out of work for more than six months) and you'll have a pretty good ideal of how many people we've got that don't posess the attitude required to remain employed. If we stoped teaching our children that work was that crappyt thing you do between weekends of beer and football, that number would go down. If we stopped handing out H1-Bs, it wouldn't.
You know you've been reading Slashdot too long when you assume the title of this article contained a typo for "vista".
It's not quite as simple as that. I worked as an H1B visa worker for a while (I have since returned home) - there were only about 20 people on the entire planet qualified for the job and they _all_ worked in our department (a highly specialized piece of software). In the bespoke software business, this happens from time to time.
Not only did the company have to spend on the order of $4K or so on the process, I was paid the same salary as my colleagues PLUS an international service allowance; I was around 15-20% more expensive than my colleagues. I'm sure if the company could have trained a US worker in sufficient time they would have because it'd have saved them quite a bit of money.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
One way to reduce the backlog would be to shoot the monkey who designed the forms and processes, and hire someone with half of a brain. Perhaps they tried, but the only candidate they had needed an H1B candidate and gave up. A few of my favourite questions from the application forms... List all countries you have visited in the last 10 years, and the date of the visit. Followed by a box about 1.5 inches by 0.25 inches - enough space to write 'see attached page' Do you have any special skills, eg nuclear or biological. Is this a trick question? By definition, to be applying for an H1B, I MUST have special skills - you have my resume. Do I know how to make a nuclear bomb? no, my special skills are in different areas. Are you a nazi war criminal? (paraphrased but only refers to Nazi war criminals, not others). I would suggest that very few H1B candidates were born early enough to be able to have been Nazi war criminals, why bother asking the question? If you get a 90 year old German applying for an H1B, ask him at the interview, asking 30 year olds this is a waste of time. If the forms are this bad, I would hate to think what they backend processes are like. All government forms are bad, it is one of those universal rules, but INS forms have to rank up there as some of the worst in the world.
Zapsavings: Simply calculate how much energy efficient bulb
Having been through the visa process (and I'm not in a 'high demand' country like India), they do it to themselves mainly as far as workload. Part of the problem is that the people they are accountable to (the US voter) are not the people they serve (the immigrant), and INS and US Embassy jobs seem to attract more of its fair share of jobsworths and "little hitler" bureaucrats who just love to mess people around.
Take for example this. The US Embassy in London rejected my APPROVED visa application (it was an extension to a visa, and the INS in the United States had approved it, and all the embassy was required to do was to stick a new visa in my passport) because one of the forms was "out of date". So I downloaded the new, up to date form off their website. I couldn't believe it when I looked at it - it was absolutely identical to the old form, except the date at the bottom was different!
On a previous application, they rejected my application because the company I worked for hadn't filled out the form right (according to them; according to our international assignments department, generally they find a formula that works with the forms - and the forms will be processed OK by the Embassy for about 6 months, and then without warning they start rejecting them. Then they have to to-and-fro in a trial and error process until the Embassy begins accepting the forms again. And about 6 months later, the forms start getting rejected again - rinse and repeat). I had to go to London, sit in the Embassy for 4 hours.
The Embassy itself was quite interesting. You sit in this large square room, and at the end are a bunch of bank teller style windows. There is a delicatessen-style number system. You are given a ticket and wait until your number is called. Of course, prior experience with the Embassy means that you know for sure if you miss your number, they will NOT call it out again and you will be sent away - so it's incredibly difficult to do something like read a book to pass the time just in case you miss the number. There are these 'newspapers' they leave too, I think they were called "Going USA". The first half of this paper is devoted to how great the USA is (land of opportunity etc., it seemed mainly to be stories about people who wanted to immigrate to run gas stations), and how awful your home country is by comparison. The second half of this paper is dedicated to telling you how you will never, ever get a visa! So anyway, my number was called. The question?
"How long have you been working for this company"
"3 years so far"
"That's fine" (stamp stamp). "You'll get your passport back in about 3 days"
They could have asked me that over the phone rather than incurring the cost of going all the way to London, waiting 4 hours, and then sending me away.
The Embassy is probably even worse now. I've heard that the ones in India will reject your application unless you turn up in a business suit (but that's just hearsay, I can't substantiate that). They have all sorts of petty bureacratic rules they won't tell you - they just reject applications with nothing except a very vague reason, and you have to keep retrying until you satisfy them (and even then, after a few months, forms that were completely satisfactory are suddenly unsatisfactory with more vague reasons for rejection).
Then there's the obvious bias. An Irish friend of mine actually got naturalized as a US citizen. He's a doctor. There was a family in front of him for one of the interviews done by the INS. They got given a real grilling - not in a private interview room, but in front of everyone in the waiting room. When he got there? "Oh, Doctor Smart, yes this is acceptable" >stampstamp. It seemed like if you were a doctor, you weren't subjected to the INS Dehumanization adn Demoralization Programme.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I'd argue that the H1-B program, if properly administered, would increase jobs in the US.
When you are starting a company, or a development team, and you have a choice of places to do it, you do it where developers are (a) cheap, (b) convenient to access and (c) plentiful. Generally speaking, if you are a US company, you can have two out of three. You can go domestic and get b & c, or you can offshore for a & c.
So, a program that moves talent from offshoring centers to the US increases the probability that teams are formed in the US.
The key though is to bring in the best. The top tier US talent is not going to have difficulty in finding jobs, provided there are teams to join. But flood the market with cheap, middle-grade talent and the domestic middle-grade talent is going to feel the hurt.
If I were King of the US, I'd put a billion dollars a year into a McArthur style "genius" program, which would be like a commercial version of the "merit scholarship" programs. Every year, I'd pick the thousand top technologists I can find, and invite them to spend ten years working in the US. Every year they'd get a check for $100,000, in addition to what their employer pays, provided they work for most of the year. At the end of ten years, if they establish permanent residency, they'd get the accumulated interest on the principle as a lump some payment.
What I'm suggesting is a crass and selfishly orchestrated "brain drain".
For less than the cost of a week of the Iraq war, we'd be seeding hundreds of new technology teams annually. It's virtually certain that we'd be bringing in several people who will create new technologies, possibly even new industries. There would be a stupendous multiplier effect in US technology jobs.
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The problem with that is if foreign cultures were actually capable of producing people who could innovate
Yeah, and the Japanese don't know how to manufacture anything that isn't junk, as we all knew back in the 1960s. OK, maybe they could make decent, cheap pocket transistor radio, but not big things like cars.
they wouldn't need to send people here to make money.
This is completely wrong. They send people here to make money because we live in a place where labor is dear and they live in a place where labor is cheap. The problem is that they are starting to look for work at home, because home can no compete with the US.
Furthermore, no innovator is an island. You need a people (skilled) to turn an innovation into a business. Which is the point: you keep the skilled positions here. Finally you need infrastructure: banking, marketing and dsitribution, research institutions, venture capital etc. If the state of these things in the 1970s US was on a par with 1970s India, you wouldn't have had a computer industry develop here, no matter how many geniuses we had.
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Unless we stop handing out H*-* visas entirely, there will be NO opportunity for our children to learn to work, because there will be no jobs available for them to learn to work IN. That applies more to H2-* visas than H1-* visas, but the idea is the same- if you give away all the entry level jobs, there will be no way to enter the workforce.
We've been handing them out for decades, yet we seem to have near record low unemployment... Yet countries like France, which have very protectionist policies, seem to have a serious problem getting their young people into the workforce. Something seems seriously wrong with your theory.
If we don't let US companies hire foreign workers in the US, the companies will move to a country where they can hire those workers. Here's a pop quiz: Which company is likely to hire more US citizens, a company with offices in the US with a mixture of US and non-US employees, or a company with offices overseas?
I suggest you weigh your ideas against some real life data and reconsider your position.