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

"H1-B skilled worker visas"

[sexconker]

H1-B skilled worker visas

Depends on your definition of "skilled".

Re:"H1-B skilled worker visas"

[Tangential]

At 1/3 of the cost, it's rather irrelevant to those who do nothing but stare at the bottom line all damn day long.

With those kinds of demonstrated cost savings measures, even system outages perpetuated by a lack of skills are somehow justified.

This is the BS part of the H1B Fraud that is going on. If you look up the rules around H1-B one of them is:

You must be paid at least the actual or prevailing wage for your occupation, whichever is higher.

If this was being done legally, there would be no advantage to displacing the US workers; it would only be used for skills in short supply as it was intended. This law is being totally subverted by Infosys, Tata, WiPro and everyone of their customers that uses such replacements. I think that they would qualify for prosecution under RICO statutes.

Re:"H1-B skilled worker visas"

[Fire_Wraith]

This, exactly.

These companies, and the companies that hire them, are performing an end run around the restrictions of the law that completely subverts the intent. Specifically, they do this by acting as a middleman, so that a company like Disney (http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/25/technology/disney-h1b-workers/) or SoCal Edison (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-edison-layoffs-20150211-story.html) doesn't actually 'replace' a US worker with an H-1B. Instead, they simply subcontract out the positions (or the entire department) to a company like one of these, who just happens to employ H-1B visa holders working at a cheaper rate.

This is the loophole that needs to be closed. These companies constitute the lion's share of H-1Bs, and make a mockery of the ones who are actually higher-paid expert workers in critical demand.

Rushing to hire?

[tomhath]

There aren't any qualified IT personnel available in the US. Otherwise there wouldn't be any need for all those H1-Bs in the first place.

Uneven

[Tablizer]

An article in the LA Times describes how un-equal our trade deals are in terms of professions. Doctors and lawyers are protected from much offshoring & visa workers due to various laws and trade agreement exceptions, for example.

There's no reason law and medical schools couldn't be set up other countries to train remote and visa workers on US law and medical practices. But our rules arbitrary limit or exclude those schools.

You want cheaper ACA? make outsourcing and/or visa-ing doctors easier. Otherwise somebody who used to make $25/hr at a factory and now making $9 as a Walmart clerk has to pay $200 an hour for a doctor. One is zapped by globalization and one protected from it, creating a huge discrepancy between their service rates. Of course medical care goes up for such people. It's not ACA's direct fault.

If the impact of globalization is spread around more evenly, then perhaps life won't be so difficult for those subject to globalized careers: their wages may go down, but so will their cost of living as others' wages also go down.

Trump may be a babbling blowhard, but he has focused attention on this issue. Let's do it right this time: Spread the "love".

However, something tells me the heavy lobbying money of those professions will buy protection. Blue-collar workers don't have the equivalent counter-bribing force. Lawyers and doctors won't accept a cut without a heavy fight. The rich simply have more weapons.

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.