U.S. Senate's Big Immigration Bill Seeks Centralized Database For H-1B Jobs

dcblogs writes "The U.S. Senate comprehensive immigration bill, due Tuesday, will allow the H-1B cap to rise from 65,000 to as high as 180,000. The bill, overall, contains some interesting provisions. It will require the U.S. Labor Dept. to create a website of H-1B job openings that employers must post to. The jobs must be posted least 30 calendar days before hiring an H-1B applicant to fill that position. The bill also raises wages for H-1B workers to make them more competitive, although the amount wasn't specified. One provision that will affect India, in particular, limits H-1B visa use to 50% of a firm's U.S. workforce. The provision may prompt India firms to buy U.S. companies to expand their U.S. presence."

Comments

Wrong Solution

[litehacksaur111]

Instead of giving people H1B visas, why don't we just give them green cards, so they have the same employment bargaining rights that US citizens have so it becomes impossible to undercut local wages. Also, for student visa holders who finish school here with MS or PhD degrees we should just grant citizenship for an upfront fee of $8000 so we keep talented people in the US.

Re:why?

[GodfatherofSoul]

Corporate America's solution to unemployment is importing cheaper labor from other countries. I watched mouth agape as Bill Gates suggested this in an interview when asked about his ideas on how to deal with the Recession. Of course, corporate media never challenges their masters when they make these ludicrous statements.

Re:why?

[Mitreya]

Corporate America's solution to unemployment is importing cheaper labor from other countries.

Oddly enough, they have a completely different view on importing cheaper products from other countries
See DVD region encoding, out-of-country textbooks, software, etc.

Not all H1 Bs are bad

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I came in as F1, got a H1B, got green card and got citizenship just in time to vote against Rick Santorum. Hip hip hurrey! But not all H1Bs are good like me. Some of them, gasp, become Republicans.

Re:Not all H1 Bs are bad

[shutdown -p now]

H1Bs get paid good salaries in tech firms, actually, on par with what the native employees are paid - at least based on my anecdotal evidence (as an H1B with plenty of friends on the same). Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook all do that, and they also start green card applications for their H1Bs as soon as they become eligible - which wouldn't really make much sense if the purpose was to exploit the dependent status. Most people which do this see it as an immigration track towards eventual citizenship, and start settling down almost right away - some don't even wait for a green card to get a home mortgage etc.

The places that are really abusing the program hard seem to be the "business consulting" sweatshops like Tata, for whom outsourcing is, essentially, the entire business model and their raison d'etre. Those tend to have predominantly Indian employees, who are not sponsored for green cards, and who are considerably underpaid. Also, since those employees know that they won't remain in the country in the end, they tend to spend money less and save it more, since it will have more purchasing power for them once they return to their home country (so they aren't as invested in US economy, further exacerbating the effects).

Consequently, the obvious solution to this problem would be to ditch H1B as a temp. worker visa, and remake it as a work-towards-citizenship program. This would imply that any person coming to the country on such a visa would has to apply for a green card; and make this process easier and reduce the current (5.5 years and growing!) backlog. It would also be nice to make it easier to switch jobs while still on H1B (I'd say get rid of it entirely, except that you want to ensure that new job has the necessary qualifications - i.e. above prevailing wage, local applicants prioritized etc); most importantly, make it so that changing jobs doesn't reset the green card process, so that employers can't use it as a stick.

Wow more anti-immigration sentiment from slashdot

[t0qer]

Last time we had this talk, I made this comment
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3620197&cid=43374569
One AC response to my comment was sort of scary...

Yeah, I see a white guy standing in a crowd of filth which probably means now you stink as bad they do. Congrats on being a traitor to your country. It was good of you to post that photo so we know exactly what you look like. After the day the people decide wipe the shit stains off our land, we'll turn their attention to those like you who betrayed their race, for special treatment.

What the fuck? I thought this was a site of thinkers, geeks, not of xenophobic extremists.

Rather than waste time on a lengthy post (I am at work) let me just make one simple point...

100% of H1-B workers that I know wish they could live, work, and pay taxes here. The only issue I take with H1-b is the treatment of said workers. This is a country that once prided itself on harboring the best and brightest from around the world, giving them shelter and refuge in exchange for their knowledge and experience. Now we give them nothing for that.

Re:The truth is

[Todd Knarr]

Check your hiring process. I've run into times when we can't find anyone because all the candidates HR sent us were unsuitable (the ones we interviewed flunked on the basic C/C++ skills test despite claiming a minimum of 5 years experience coding in C/C++), and yet I knew there were at least 2 highly-qualified candidates that HR hadn't sent to us to review because I handed their resumes to HR myself. That right there tells me that the problem might be not that there aren't any candidates but that HR's throwing them out before they ever get looked at. Ditto for recruiters, who probably use the same process HR does to screen candidates.

I've thought it might be amusing to bypass the HR process entirely, task some of the developers with attending the various techie get-togethers around town and collect qualified candidates that way, then give the hiring manager their resumes directly in addition to sending them to HR. Then if their resumes don't show up, the hiring manager can send them up from his side asking "This candidate looks qualified and we'd like to interview them but they weren't in the stack you sent down. I know it should be there, I had one of my devs run it over to you personally. Can you get back to me about what happened to it?".