Fearing Tighter US Visa Regime, Indian IT Firms Rush To Hire (moneycontrol.com)

From a report on Reuters: Anticipating a more protectionist US technology visa programme under a Donald Trump administration, India's $150 billion IT services sector will speed up acquisitions in the United States and recruit more heavily from college campuses there. Indian companies including Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, and Wipro have long used H1-B skilled worker visas to fly computer engineers to the US, their largest overseas market, temporarily to service clients. Staff from those three companies accounted for around 86,000 new H1-B workers in 2005-14. The US currently issues close to that number of H1-B visas each year. President-elect Trump's campaign rhetoric, and his pick for Attorney General of Senator Jeff Sessions, a long-time critic of the visa programme, have many expecting a tighter regime.

Comments

Trivial to stop the abuse

[tempmpi]

It seems trivial to stop the abuse: Stop the lottery and replace it with a list ordered by salary and give the visas to the applicants with the highest salaries. This would make hiring H1Bs expensive and limit their use to hiring rare very talented foreigners.

At the moment H1Bs are broken: The lottery often prevents bringing in highly talented people, while it doesn't matter too much for companies that just want a random cheap semi-skilled person. They just fill a lot of extra applications to get enough H1Bs granted.

Re:Trivial to stop the abuse

[Guybrush_T]

This is indeed a good solution, though it may have to be weighted depending on the area, otherwise Silicon Valley will get all the H1-Bs.

But yes, those three Indian IT companies are the one abusing the system, and it is their fault if H1-Bs are so hard to get. They prevent other companies from legitimately bringing foreign talents by flooding the system.

So of course they're fearing it won't work long, and I hope it will be the case. I don't really trust Trump to do this smartly, but if at least they can fix the H1-B system, that would be an interesting achievement.

Auction system

[Tablizer]

An auction system may reduce riff-raff and "shortage" BS.

Have a base cap, such as 30,000 skilled visa positions a year, for example. Maybe have another 30,000 slots, but corporations have to bid against each other for them. If there is truly a shortage, they will pay a high wage for them, and select them for actual skill instead of for cheaper bodies who work long hours because they have no family etc. They wouldn't bid on actual people, just the salaries. And perhaps tax some of that to help pay down the national debt.