Annual H-1B Visa Cap Met In One Day

CNet is reporting that the door has closed on the H1-B visa application process for this year, one day after it began. The US Citizenship and Immigration Services said that it had received 150,000 applications as of yesterday afternoon. 65,000 H1-B visas can be issued for foreigners with bachelor's degrees. The USCIS will choose randomly from the applications to determine the winners.

Comments

Shouldn't be a lottery.

[jcr]

Those spots should be auctioned off. The more an employer is paying for an H1-B visa, the more highly-skilled the worker in question is likely to be. IOW, we really will be getting those people with skills we can't find here.

-jcr

Re:Shouldn't be a lottery.

[iamacat]

medical fields - a field the US is sorely in need of more skilled people.

Nope, there are plenty of skilled people. We just need to stop suing them so much and torturing them with inhuman work hours.

yet lets the illegals who burden the system walk across the border without fear of repercussion.

Those would be the ones who ensure you never have to worry about affording basic groceries in Safeway.

Re:Shouldn't be a lottery.

[JimBobJoe]

Simply put, an employer does not have to test the labor market before hiring a foreign worker on an H-1B.

It was eliminated for good reason however. Labor market tests are well-known to be a bureaucratic exercise of pointlessness--companies who sincerely attempt the labor market test end up falling prey to an outcome which is "ambiguous" and doesn't necessarily meet the immigration criteria. Companies who don't care about being sincere adjust their said requirements so that only one candidate in a million can fit it (which is of course recommended even to the honest companies to avoid the ambiguous result.)

It's really just stupid for everyone involved. Countries usually use the labor market test as a way of preventing most types of immigration.

The Economic Policy Institute has a great article on this that should probably be submitted to the main page.

Eh. It's an article written by a partisan think tank, and the more I analyze it, the more it hits me as BS. There are much more neutral and realiable sources of info on this rather complex topic. The connection between the fact that Wipro is a major Indian company that does outsourcing and the fact that they have requested the most H1Bs is specious at best. After all, Wipro has expanded dramatically outside of India, and as part of that expansion, they needed a large quantity of North American employees--hence, they were asking for lots of H1Bs. Wipro and Infosys don't need the US employees to outsource to India. They were simply starting new outsourcing facilities in the US.

Re:Shouldn't be a lottery.

[Anonymous Coward]

So his numbers are off.

Your federal income tax if you made:

$25000 is 13.5%
$50,000 is 18.1%
$100,000 is 28%

if you are single

FICA withholdings include social security (12.4%) and medicare (2.9%) are 15.3% for everyone, even the part time burger flippers.

States have various taxes, licenses and fees. Everyone pays sales tax (except Montana and Oregon, who make up for it with higher income tax.) But overall state taxes run around 10 to 15% plus additional requirements like drivers license fees, vehicle registration fees, hunting and fishing fees, etc.

Then, if you own property, you can get hit with up to several thousand dollars, the more you improve your property, the more you pay. Sometimes you just pay more if your neighbors improve their property. Say you have a 1% percent tax on a $250,000 home, that gives you a $2500 bill every year.

Additional taxes on things like utilities, hotels, flights, gas, alcohol, tobacco are not insignificant either, but vary greatly. Just tax on gas alone, in a Honda that takes 10 gallons a week is is over We'll assume a flat $1000 to ease the computation.

So, an individual making $25,000 (after deductions) pays:
13.5% on Federal Income tax
15.2% on Social Security and Medicare
0-10% on State Income tax
0-10% on State Sales tax
10% on Property Tax
4% on miscellaneous licenses and fees

For a total tax of (averaging State sales and income tax at 10%)
52%

The same individual making $50,000 and with relatively increased spending, pays
50.2%
The slightly lower percentage reflects that purchases, property taxes and fees are a smaller percentage of income, even if state and federal income taxes are higher.

If he made $100,000, the total tax would be
55.8%
He get's a small break on FICA because only the first $90,000 is taxed.

If you make over $200,000 you get a really hard hit with income taxes, but other fees go down. The small business owner making between $100,000 and $500,000, but not able to shelter his taxes the way large corporations do ends up paying the most in taxesThese numbers seem a little high, since I live in Washington, a high tax state, and calculated about 45% spent on tax on wages of $62,000 (before deductions). Of course I don't own property, so that's probably the difference. But it reflects the national average, and you hear the media talk about "tax free day" estimated to be late in May (about 45% of the way through the year) for the average tax payer.

Just don't let anyone tell you fat cats pay it all or the poor get off without paying. Even if you get 100% return on income, you've still got 20% or more you pay in FICA and sales tax plus fees. The middle class is huge, and for every millionaire there are hundred of people paying 40% or more of $40,000 in taxes.

Open offices in Canada!

[cperciva]

There's a simple solution to the H-1B visa problem: Open offices in Canada, where a skilled worker who can speak English and has a job offer is practically guaranteed a visa. Vancouver in the same time zone as Silicon Valley, only a 2 hour flight away, and has a lower cost of living than any large city on the US west coast. Add to that two great universities, a moderate climate, and some of the best skiing in the world, in addition to all the usual amenities of a large city, and it's no surprise that Vancouver is routinely rated as one of the best places to live in the world. What are all you guys waiting for?

(This post brought to you by I-want-a-job-and-don't-want-to-move-to-California. )

Re:We need more

[cdrguru]

What the heck is wrong with the idea that Americans can be doing American jobs?

Sure, many employers would rather hire someone that needs permission to change jobs and can pay them something less than someone born in the USA. Why do we want to give them that privilege?

This has nothing to do with illegal immigration. The illegals are being exploited in the US almost as much (but not quite) as they were exploited and abused in their home country. But given that the reward of working in the US is so much higher than any compensation possible in their home country, the risk of dying to get here is perfectly acceptable. It is very difficult to combat that. Maybe in 100 years the economy in Central America might be better so the differential would be so much less that it wouldn't be practical for people to go to the US. But these economies are so rife with corruption and graft that it would take a miracle for such a transformation to occur. So it isn't going to be soon.

Throwing open the borders isn't a solution, it is just a suicide pact. All that does is transform the culture of the US into being another corrupt, graft-driven Central American country.

Way out..

[univgeek]

Pick the H1B candidates according to salary. The people with the highest salaries get H1Bs first. The market will ensure that H1B's go to the candidates most in demand. Spread the cap over every month, with a backlog. This way, companies know the minimum that has to be paid as salary to get a H1B employee.

Also IMO, a lot of this demand is drive by the Indian IT companies - TCS, Infy, Wipro, etc. They have HR teams who apply for as many of their employees as might be required to go onsite in the next year. And since a normal company can't usually afford to apply for, and hire, a person 5 months ahead of his possible entry into the US, the Indian IT companies are making hay.

There are also students who are on their OPT who can apply for a H1B and work on their OPT until they get their H1Bs. These two'd probably be the biggest sets of applicants.

This leaves a lot of companies in the US which might like to bring someone in on a H1 in an impossible situation.

I'm an Indian, in India, and not going for a H1 any time soon. But I've seen a lot of my friends having problems because of H1. And the visa situation and general atmosphere after 9/11 was partially what made me come back after my MS.

Re:The DHS says these numbers are too low

[btarval]

The point remains that people are being mislead by the common suggestion that there's a limit of 65,000 H1-B's in the U.S.. Indeed, you mentioned some of the loopholes used to by-pass it. And there are many other loopholes, such as the L1-B's, which adds even more.

These numbers are staggering; and it's no wonder why new C.S. students find it discouraging to enter the field in the U.S..

It's also interesting that the last number available in the DHS publication is also strikingly close to the number of 400,000 that Bill Gates was pushing for recently (after his original proposal of limiting the restrictions).

Re:US?

[The Great Pretender]

"we're possibly the most welcoming country in the world"

Unless you're English. Try moving to Scotland at the age of ten from England. It's funny how a much crap the Scottish can dish out because they're indoctrinated at an early age by their parents that anyone/thing from England must be the devil in disguise and out to beat the Scotsman while they're down. At 23 I left and came to the US.

Re:US?

[Alioth]

I went to the US to live for several years. I enjoyed it very much, and wouldn't change it for the world.

However, I'm extremely glad that I'm back home now. When I hit my late 20s, I realised that there were things that were a lot more valuable to me than the money I could earn in the US or the stuff I could buy cheaply in the US.

The US isn't awful at all, I go back and visit my friends in Houston at least once a year. But I'm so glad I moved back home. Perhaps some time in the future I'll get the urge to live abroad again, but next time I will choose a different country. Not out of dislike of the US (which I will continue to visit) but just because I've been there, and I'd want to go somewhere new.

Re:numbers, numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been on a software development team in the US that over the last five years has hired 8 foreign workers from Indian, Pakistan and China. It is very hard to get a measure of a programmer's skills. As it turns out, none of those that we brought in know how to bit twiddle (mask, shift, etc.) or how a hashtable works. (These basics I assumed would be covered by their degree, so I didn't ask in the interview; my mistake) When the new hires came in, we gave them a task that should take about a day, then gave them about a week to do it. After two weeks, we started to question more aggressively about what was going on, assuming they were lost in the big picture of our big, ugly, complex project. Nope, in most cases, they didn't understand what we had asked them to do, and didn't come back asking questions. The communication is just so different than what we are used to, that we can't detect when something is going wrong. Even then it is often months before we figure out the the real misunderstanding (in this case that they didn't understand bit twiddling and had spent days with floating point math libraries to isolate bits instead of using a mask).

I realize that there are quality foreign workers. I have met some, but it is very difficult to identify them, due to the communication barriers. I can normally sniff out a fellow American's skills in about 20 minutes.

Joe

Re:US?

[HungWeiLo]

If this happened in India, the succesful group would have been hounded mercilessly and demonized for political purposes.

That's only because there are relatively few Indians in the US. I'm guessing around 50% of Americans have never actually interacted with or even seen an Indian. (Besides, they'd think "smoke signals" Indian, not "dot-on-the-forehead" Indian - sorry). Just like the successful Jews were hounded in Europe 60 years ago, the early Chinese immigrants (who were starting to do well as they starting enterprising into other ventures other than getting themselves whipped or blown up while building railroad tracks out West) were targeted by the Chinese Exclusion Act and had all their assets taken away and kicked out of the U.S. 1 in 8 Koreans are entrepreneurs in their home country, and most of these people have migrated to the U.S. in recent years. It's not too much of a stretch for some hypothetical hate-baiter politician to use Koreans as a convenient statistic for their own gains.

Because of the relative recent prosperity of the U.S., there have been very few conflicts arising from jealousy of groups of foreigners perceived to be "doing better." But off the top of my head, as recently as the 80s, people like Vincent Chin have been murdered for being perceived to take jobs away from the "natives" when times do get bad in the U.S. Or witness the fervor surrounding the debate on Affirmative Action in the last 10-15 years, where an insignificant 1-5% of positions slated for minorities are bitterly fought and debated over and you can see how nasty things can get.