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Computer Programmers May No Longer Be Eligible For H-1B Visas [Update] (axios.com)
Two anonymous readers share a report: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services quietly over the weekend released new guidance that computer programmers are no longer presumed to be eligible for H-1B visas. This aligns with the administration's focus on reserving the temporary visas for very high-skilled (and higher-paid) professionals while encouraging low- and mid-level jobs to go to American workers instead. The new guidance affects applications for the lottery for 2018 fiscal year that opened Monday. Companies applying for H-1B visas for computer programming positions will have to submit additional evidence showing that the jobs are complex or specialized and require professional degrees. From a Bloomberg report, which has confirmation: The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services department issued a memorandum that makes it harder for companies to bring foreign technology workers to the U.S. using the H-1B visa process. The new guidelines, issued late Friday, require additional information for computer programmers applying for the work visa to prove the jobs are complicated and require more advanced knowledge and experience. The new policy is effective immediately, so it will change how companies apply for the visas in an annual lottery process that begins Monday. Indian outsourcing firms, which have faced the most amount of criticism, stand to lose the most. The changes don't explicitly prohibit any applications for a specific type of job. Instead, they bring more scrutiny to those for computer programmers doing the simplest jobs.
.. to meet the requirements?
"Companies applying for H-1B visas for computer programming positions will have to submit additional evidence showing that the jobs are complex or specialized and require professional degrees."
So I can expect my salary to go up $20k a year overnight now right? Now my fellow foreigners are no longer allowed in it's going to be land of milk and honey for all us developers... right?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Making America great again by "encouraging low- and mid-level jobs to go to American workers"? How about "enabling American workers to fill highly qualified positions"?
Stephan
Also min wage 80-150K based on COL with maybe an OT add on if they work over 60-80 hours a week more then 40% of the year at that level.
After reading the recommendations, computer programmers as a profession are not being limited. Programmers who only have an associates degree will be limited. I'm not sure how many H1-B holders only have associates degrees, but I haven't met any.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
The purpose of H1-B visas is to fill positions that companies can not fill with American workers, regardless of price. Greed CEOs, of course, promptly abused the system to use it to pull down wages and increase unemployment for US workers, such as when Disney forced US workers to train their lower cost H1-B replacements (nytimes link).
Trump is doing the right thing here. The actual memo (PDF file) spells out the new policy: just because the position needs a computer programmer, we can automatically have an H1-B fill the position.
I am no supporter of Trump and voted for Hillary last November, but I am not blinded by partisan politics; he's doing the right thing here: Protecting hard working Americans.
USCIS has already considered Computer Programmer positions more skeptically. to qualify for an H-1B, the position has to require at minimum a bachelor's degree in a specialty field, or the equivalent. some Programmer positions are complex and require this, some do not.
the weird thing is, USCIS should already know this: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/comput...
seems like USCIS officers are about as well trained as TSA officers
How does somebody become a qualified expert?
Foundational knowledge + experience.
Acquiring the necessary foundational knowledge isn't the hard part. There are many colleges and other forms of training available to American students that can help provide that.
It's experience that takes somebody from merely having knowledge and helps make them a qualified expert.
Do you know how you get experience? You start off at an entry level position, do work, and over time you'll gain experience. Then such people can move on to mid-level positions with greater responsibility, and get additional experience. Finally, after a long time of doing this, at least some of those people will become qualified experts.
But that progression can't happen if Americans can't even get the entry level experience due to employment market distortions caused by broken government programs that essentially import unreasonably cheap third-world labor into America.
Starting at the bottom is the most sensible thing to do. Yes, it will take time, but by allowing Americans to again get entry level experience it will eventually allow them to become the experts that America so desperately needs.
The company I work for is a light user of H-1B visas, mainly as a way to get foriegn workers into the US to work on different projects. From what I've heard, there's already some sort of "Labor Certification" process that is basically a bunch of hoops to jump through. I'm not sure how this would be different -- the lawyers filing the requirements just make up the information on those requirements. This is the kind of stuff where you see companies posting jobs in some obscure newspaper classified section with absurd requirements, designed to show that they couldn't find any US citizen willing to do the job.
I can definitely see "computer programmer" applications changing to "IT Architect" or "DevOps Engineer" or "Systems Engineer" quickly -- which still leaves us IT folks out of any reform. I've said before that I think the program itself is OK as originally intended -- a safety valve to bring in someone with known skills. The problem is the body shops and large companies who use it to fill low-end positions cheaply. As someone who's "older" and enjoys teaching newbies how not to screw up in IT positions, I really don't want to see the end of low-level employment in IT. How do you ever get up to the level of experience you actually need to be a senior guy if you don't have a ladder of low-level jobs to start with? I've done help desk, desktop support, data center operator monkey, sysadmin and I'm finally in a good engineering spot. If we don't have a pipeline of newbies, no one is going to understand the nuts and bolts you need to know to progress.
Thank you Trump for making America great again!
Can't wait to see some of my coworkers go back to where they came from :-)
While I'm not a Trump fan, our immigration laws regarding H1-B visa applications have been ignored by the Obama administration in the interests of big business (especially Google and Disney). We are supposed to be protecting American jobs and we have plenty of qualified IT professional (some unemployed). Companies were illegally hiring foreign (Indian in particular) professional to replace IT workers at a reduced salary. It's not to say that foreign IT workers are bad, but citizens come first. The procedures are clear: Show you are unable to find someone in the USA (you are supposed to show job postings and let a reasonable amount of time and show lack of qualifications of the applications) before you apply for a foreign worker visa.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
This is good news, getting some real progress for american tech workers instead of cheap outsourcing jobs that destroy our economy. Go Trump!!!
You could always apply for a job in India. Oh wait, no you can't. They would never hire you because they hire Indians first. Unlike the rest of the world governments that look after the interests of their own citizens first, it is considered racist in the USA to hire black and white citizens before you hire foreigners.
It is one thing to help out other countries and peoples, but it is another thing entirely to feed the neighbors kids before you feed your own. This is what we do in the name of political correctness.
Since when is software development NOT a complex, specialized job requiring a high level of skill?
Sort the applicants by salary offered, from high to low and award based on that list. That will at least weed out those TCS Cognizant Wipro Infosys crowd that offer 65K but apply for thousands of position to game the lottery system.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Setup a noise isolated room.
No internet access.
Full faraday cage surrounding the room.
Fully wrapped with high-density polymer to prevent light transmission (laser communications).
Test terminal wrapped in clear, high-density polymer, reason disclosed later.
Attach elecrtodes to applicant, sponsor and ceo of contracting company that provided the applicant.
If they get one answer wrong, a mild 20,000 volt shock is administered to the ceo.
If they get two answers wrong, a not-so-mild 40,000 volt shock is adminstered to the CEO and the sponsor.
If they get three answers wrong, shotgun blasts to the back of the heads of the person who sponsored the applicant, the applicant, and the CEO of the contracting company that provided the applicant.
Turn off power to testing room.
Hose down brainsplatter from terminal, prep terminal for next applicant/sponsor/contracting source trifecta...
How many H1B visas will be "sponsored" after this change?
Exactly 0 - Zero - Nada - Zilch - Zippo
There's a big difference between someone cranking out .NET or Java code for some corporate website, or writing a front end in one of the trillions of JavaScript frameworks out there, and an embedded developer writing in C trying to fit something incredibly complex into 16K of memory.
when i worked at a major telecom all the Indian 'developers' had Master's degrees at the minimum. This would qualify them for 'highly skilled' technical jobs as the degrees themselves state as much.
Now they couldn't code worth a damn, the libraries they included in the code ballooned the code base, and god help you if you needed documentation. They were some of the worst 'developers' I've ever met and 1/10 was decent enough to not build code that didn't melt the servers down. The whole reason we had a team of 5 System Admins supporting 2 floors of developers was because of their shoddy coding skills. It was great job security.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Sure, but even the former requires considerable skill to do well. This attitude that software dev is some sort of low-skill trade that anyone can pick up in a few weeks is, I think, part of the reason why we have so many shitty, infuriatingly buggy corporate websites.
I've worked in companies where we couldn't hire H1-Bs and there was very acute shortage of qualified candidates, despite being within a 5 mile radius of a major university. I realize there is some abuse but I think there are ways to address that without crippling the whole sector. One thing could be to limit the number of H1Bs a company can hire to say 10% of the company's workforce. I've heard a handful of large Indian consulting companies get a large share of the H1Bs that are allocated. Another measure would be to require companies applying for H1B to pay a large fee but make the visa very portable so that the worker can switch employers at will once they have the visa. That should ensure that the workers are paid market rates and not exploited. I knew a H1B, a US college graduate, who was expected to work 10 - 11 hours a day and his functions were expended greatly compared to the position he was hired in but couldn't do much because his visa was not portable.
Why are there so many H1-B stories on Slashdot? Why are you guys fixated on H1-B?
If you create artificial scarcity by cutting off supply, the market will work around you. You remember what happened to manufacturing jobs?
In the short term, your salary may rise because there is a shortage of computer programmers. But businesses will accelerate moving those jobs out to cheaper geographies. This is already happening. You're just trying to make it more of an urgent issue.
All this memo is saying is that since the Nebraska center is now processing H1Bs like it did during the Y2K rush it needs to do so at the existing standards (4 yr degree needed) instead of the Y2K standards (No degree needed to get H1B). Nothing to see here. keep walking.
From 2006 onwards only the Texas center has processed H1Bs and the standard has been a 4 year degree is needed.
**Life is too short to be serious**
These kids I interview often don't have CS degrees (I'm a team lead and I screen many candidates). 10 years ago, many people were telling American kids not to go for IT degrees because it wasn't considered a stable career. That the dot-com growth was temporary and that the jobs would soon be outsourced. This has been partially true, but we've been able to hold onto them through H1-B visa programs as well. But without graduates with the necessary qualifications, and with the current aging generation of programmers frequently switch to more flexible time as consultants or moving up into management and architecture, there is a lack of new blood if we strictly hire American citizens.
It will be trivial to include proof that we can't hire Americans to do these jobs, but the proof will become very repetitive and I am concerned that it will be rejected on the spurious belief that duplicate reasons in applications means it is fraudulent.
The options are to only hire Americans, pay guys like me twice as much to do it, and work me twice as hard (which I'm not really willing to do). Or open offices outside of the US, and have guys like me telecommute to those offices until they can find a way to get rid of me. (or I semi-retire early)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
H-1B Visas were always meant for positions not readily filled by current residents or citizens. As the article and summary state, a computer programmer doesn't get automatic approval; the company must prove why the requirements are not met by people already here. I just expect an updated buzzword BINGO card. I do wonder if USCCIS knows the difference between a computer programmer and software engineer.
According to the US code:
https://www.nafsa.org/_/file/_...
"Based on the current version of the Handbook, the fact that a person may be employed as a computer programmer and may use information technology skills and knowledge to help an enterprise achieve its goals in the course of his or her job is not sufficient to establish the position as a specialty occupation. Thus, a petitioner may not rely solely on the Handbook to meet its burden when seeking to sponsor a beneficiary for a computer programmer position. Instead, a petitioner must provide other evidence to establish that the particular position is one in a specialty occupation as defined by 8 CFR 214.2(h)(4)(ii) that also meets one of the criteria
at 8 CFR 214.2(h)(4)(iii). Section 214(i)(1) of the INA; see also Royal Siam Corp. v. Chertoff, 484 F.3d 139, 147 (1st Cir. 2007).8."
Now you must offer more than a 2 year degree and no experience. You must somehow substantiate that you possess expertise. You should be "prominent", or a "recognized authority", or expert (as demonstrated by referreed publications or a thesis).
Your occupation must "require theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge in fields of human endeavor including, but not limited to, architecture, engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, social sciences, medicine and health, education, business specialties, accounting, law, theology, and the arts, and which requires the attainment of a bachelor's degree or higher in a specific specialty, or its equivalent, as a minimum for entry into the occupation in the United States."
Gotta check the legal fine print on this one. Haven't most positions been retitled from "Programmer" to something else a while back? It's easy enough to talk around the skills and call the job something else.
What an interesting contrast with a previous news
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...
I'm waiting to see how many of those out of work coal miners from places like Kentucky move to silicon valley and start writing code using one of those newfangled programming languages for $20k per year.
How would you know? No one outside of India wants to work in India for 50 cents a week, and then have to bathe in a polluted river and shit on the street.
if you believe there to be a free market.
What does religion have to do with this?
I thought economics was a science
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Now to train those out of work coal miners in object oriented threaded transactional mobile database security.
IIf(COAL::Empty(),Stack::Overflow(),Stack::Fill())
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
About damn time. My entire neighborhood is filled with nothing but Indians, and a vast majority of jobs at my workplace are also Indian. EXTREMELY unbalanced.
>> require additional information for computer programmers applying for the work visa to prove the jobs are complicated and require more advanced knowledge and experience.
You know its blindingly easy to make up some bullshit reason why some cheap indian guy happens to be the worlds expert in something obscure, like the hello world app he just wrote.
Establishment pols in BOTH parties have, for decades, claimed they would implement "job re-training programs" for the middle class folks displaced by all the trade and/or envirnomental policies that wealthy donors bribed them to implement. That training never actually happens of course, they just assume you will go broke and retire, the die peniless. That part of the plan is implemented by both Ds and Rs who are part of the Washington DC establishment - the crowd that despises Trump.
Obama went after the coal miners with great enthusiasm, loudly proclaiming his desire to destroy their jobs, and occasionally paying the usual lip service to "job re-training" for the "jobs of the 21st century". Just how many of the coal miners layed off in the past 8 years got re-trained to program computers?
The Indian companies dont really want to file for H1Bs. They want to take the work offshore. They file a large number of H1Bs and dont use all of them. But this way the client companies who dont plan visas years in advance dont have a visa available when they do give up on searching for local candidates and are willing to settle for a visa candidate. At that point they have 2 choices wait a year or hire as contractor from the consulting firms.
This is bad as students graduating in the winter semester cannot get H1s as they havn't landed their jobs by April. Companies cant do direct hire and have to hire from consulting firms and people working on H1s dont get paid as much as they could as the Consulting firms have to make their cut as well.
An unlimited quotaH1B with a 100K salary minimum would be a much better solution and push the consulting firms out of the visa hoarding business.
The H1 visa is already portable. What is not portable is the Green Card priority date. The dates for Indians are seriously backlogged to 10 years.
The countrywise cap on GreenCards needs to be eliminated - currently the cap for a country with a billion people is the same as for a country with 50000 so the backlogs for India and China are by design. This would right a historical wrong where Indian and Chinese immigrants were denied citizenship before WW2 even if they had the same or better qualifications than European immigrants. (Before WW2 you did not need any qualifications to immigrate to the US other than getting on a ship. There were no visas. For becoming citizens however you had to be white so only the next generation could become citizens)
**Life is too short to be serious**
If you are required to train your replacement, then you don't need to be replaced and the H-1B should not be allowed in.
Same for outsourcing. If you require your people to train the outsource company's employees, then the laws should make outsourcing extraordinarily difficult.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Americans get to keep low paying software jobs (unless they can be shipped overseas), and the people coming in on H1B visas will have to take high paying jobs (like overseeing the programmers or late night talk show hosts). I'm not quite why I don't feel better about this victory.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
As an America, I'm sure glad they're only giving the high skill level high paying jobs away to non-americans!
This keeps people from sending family members over as "programmers" when their only job could be turning the office computers on.
Seriously, anyone who claims that the H1 visa program is not used as cheap labor pool is a damn liar.
I have many large customers in the US. I am located in the the EU, so I dont have a vested interested in your visa program.
Anyhow, these are huge firms in the automotive industry. Very often things come up during the phase of a project and management first questions is, can we have someone in India do that work for us and if not, can we get some Indian guys over here?
Ever been in Michigan? There are so many damn Indians there now, you would think you were living in India. Call me racist if you like, but if you are telling that there are no qualified people in the US to work in those design centers that you need to fill whole the joint with Indians, I say...you are fucking liar.
The best thing which could happen to the US would be be to completely scrap the entire H1 VISA program.
There are no unused visas - my understanding is that they all get assigned. If H1Bs are limited to 10% of the company's payroll, more companies will be able to get visas and the sweatshops will be eliminated. The H1B visa is kind of portable but not really. The company that's hiring the H1B holder still has to apply for visa and go through the whole process. That's complicated and expensive so a lot of companies don't do it thus making it much harder for a H1B employee to jump ship.
While you're not wrong about India being a shit hole, but if your business was trying to sell into India, you'd understand the GP perfectly.
Fuck, even Apple is forced to build local factory.
As a socialist, with decent enough training to snap your neck in self defense, have fun with that!
You must not be from the US, or have never applied to a number of US colleges. They certainly do NOT admit everyone that submits an application.
Depends on which college. MIT and Harvard, no. Podunk Branch of Big State U, and Whassamatta County Community College, yes.
Pretty much just like the American citizens I've worked with.
Much of the H1B law already prohibits the abuse we see, but the government specifically chooses to not enforce and punish the illegal activity.
Greed is the root of all evil.
Too late. Way, way too late.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh, it certainly can be.
But it's never required a degree. That is just a mechanism to keep qualified people -- by which I only mean, they have the skills to do the work -- from being considered for employment. It's so widespread that it is rarely questioned. By keeping the barriers as high as possible, they are able to claim "can't find skilled candidates", which of course is 100% utter bullshit. But it gets them onto the cheap foreign employee wagon, which is where they want to be.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I am for making it harder to apply for visas but what would help even more would be to require a sponsor to get the visa but once granted the worker is free to move about from company to company for the duration of the visa. That would do 2 things:
1) Companies will ask "Is it really worth the expense if this person can find a better job once here?"
2) This would allow wage market forces to come to bare on these workers so they are not suppressing wages in the market.
I'm happy this is happening.
Not sure Trump's logic behind this policy, and I am by nature anti-GOP and anti-Trump, but if they want to do something that helps US workers I will take it.
I give no credit to Trump, none...this is the right policy and anyone should do it.
Obama was heading towards changing the H1-B as well.
Too bad Trump doesn't follow Obama's policies on tech more often.
Thank you Dave Raggett
The month after trump took office the unemployment figure of 5% went from fake to real. There is instant change
The countrywise cap on GreenCards needs to be eliminated - currently the cap for a country with a billion people is the same as for a country with 50000 so the backlogs for India and China are by design. This would right a historical wrong where Indian and Chinese immigrants were denied citizenship before WW2 even if they had the same or better qualifications than European immigrants.
It only makes sense to eliminate country-based quotas on immigration if there is no limit on the total number of immigrants from anywhere. Otherwise, immigration privileges become perverted like the H1-B lottery by having certain countries swamp out others. The current law says that at most 7% of visas in a current year can be allotted to one country. Only India and China hit their 7% quotas. Well, Mexico also hits its quota, plus some.
(Before WW2 you did not need any qualifications to immigrate to the US other than getting on a ship. There were no visas. For becoming citizens however you had to be white so only the next generation could become citizens)
Well, sort of, aside from certain laws such as the Chinese Exclusive Act, various national origins laws, etc. It was much easier if you were white, and not Jewish or from southern or eastern Europe. If you were Asian, you weren't welcome. The Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't repealed until 1943, and national origins was only repealed in 1965.
My point exactly. There has been enough discrimination against Chinese and Indian immigrants. Time to get rid of the 7% cap to prevent artificially holding down immigration from these countries. USA is a nation of immigrants , about time it started behaving like one instead of behaving like a nation of white only immigrants.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Big deal. My last raise was twice that.
My point exactly. There has been enough discrimination against Chinese and Indian immigrants. Time to get rid of the 7% cap to prevent artificially holding down immigration from these countries. USA is a nation of immigrants , about time it started behaving like one instead of behaving like a nation of white only immigrants.
It isn't a matter to allow immigration or not. It's a matter of which immigrants to admit. Admitting more Indians and Chinese (and Mexicans) means fewer immigrants from the rest of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Here's a list of the top 10 countries for US immigration (based on 2014 numbers). Which of those countries should have its immigration restricted to allow more Indians and Chinese into the US?
Country 2014 %
Mexico 134,052 13.2%
India 77,908 7.7%
China 76,089 7.5%
Philippines 49,996 4.9%
Cuba 46,679 4.6%
Dominican Republic 44,577 4.4%
Vietnam 30,283 3.0%
South Korea 20,423 2.0%
El Salvador 19,273 1.9%
Iraq 19,153 1.9%
Total 1,016,518 100.0%
TCS career website for US: only experienced engineers category and it does not work. For India they also hire entry level and the site works like a charm. Why is that?
And you thought The Simpsons was fantasy. Homer really is going to be in charge of nuclear safety soon.
Your employer decides to hire a contractor. The contractor can't find anybody available to do the job. Obviously you don't qualify because you aren't yet unemployed -- you are not available. You will become available after the contractor's people are trained and doing the job you had, but by then it is too late to hire you.
...that if only the US hadn't stolen all those geniuses from the developing world, it would have developed so much faster?
Or, alternatively, that if only the US hadn't imported all those fake "geniuses" that the US would have already colonized the solar system?
Seastead this.
Pretty much anything you need to know is in a textbook you can buy on amazon or on arxiv
Foreign workers don't have to repay student loans, that's one of the reasons why they are cheaper. Ask your H1Bs how much did they pay for their education.
Also, aren't computer programmers in high demand? Have you had any problems getting a job?
I don't get why people is so afraid of foreign workers taking their job's when there are lots of job positions available. You are not Mc Donald's employees, you are software developers!
Germany has good unions and a good trades system.
If the usa can just get one of them things would be so much better.
Compared to the Indian government, the US Government is amateurish when it comes to red tape and regulations. Indians are by necessity masters of getting around rules, finding workarounds and to use their own favorite phrase, "doing the needful". Anyone who expects Wipro, Infosys or Tata to be stopped or even slowed down by this new rule is fooling themselves. The Indians will lie about the duties of the jobs, the qualifications of the candidates, rotate people and work sites around in a shell game to frustrate any attempts at inspection and whatever else they can think of and you can be sure that Indians are most clever and inventive when it comes to bending or breaking the rules.
That's really, really low pay for LA. A good secretary makes way more than that. It's barely enough to live indoors.
So yeah, if you're getting lots of interest at that shitty wage, then the market in socal must be flooded.
Most Americans can only think in binary, good or evil, black or white, the entire notion that a policy can be good and bad at the same time, that good behavior needs to be incentivized and bad behavior disincentivized is lost on the folks who can keep on arguing one side v/s the other for eternity. The fact is H1B is very much needed and H1B is exploited at the same time. Trump is bought and sold by Corporate America, so anyone who expects any real change is naive. It is very easy to fix H1B if anyone wanted.
1. Set a quota of 1000 per employer, and make the H1B fees $10,000 for employees beyond the quota. This covers American employers and disincentivizes bad behavior by Indian companies.
2. Increase the minimum salary to $75000 which should cover a starting salary everywhere in the US, including obscure places that do not pay the Bay Area starting $120,000 salary.
So you're saying President Trump may need to impose capital controls, if the megacorps don't want to play by fair rules and try to expatriate wealth looted from the people? Sounds a-okay to me.
> While the script is running, I'm posting comments on Slashdot.
Wait, what? Your script takes so long? What do you write that in, VB?
Now the jobs will go to India and they will get to stay home and they communicate via the Net,
Let's be real. People like to act like this is such a terrible thing. The fact is, many countries do this very same thing. For example, for me to work in Mexico on a visa I have to prove with difficulties, that my job could not be done by the average Mexican citizen.
When you are just slapping HTML tags around using Javascript. Stuff high school kids do in computer lab. People call that "coding" and "devops" these days. /shrug
Since businesses don't want to pay for someone who can do something complex or specialized. They say that anyone can do it, it's a commodity, and don't want to pay programmers a living wage. Are you new around here?
Glad to see this...campaign promises fulfilled.
There is no proposal to hold any other country down . Just do it first applied first approved. Right now Indians are waiting 10 years while other country citizens re waiting months.
**Life is too short to be serious**
There is no proposal to hold any other country down . Just do it first applied first approved. Right now Indians are waiting 10 years while other country citizens re waiting months.
It's not just a proposal, it's the law right now. There is a quota for total immigration as well as a 7% quota per country. If the numbers for Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians go up, it will be at the expense of other countries. By law, it's a zero-sum game.
It's not a good situation for Indians, Chinese, or Mexicans. But there are only two ways to change the current situation: Change the law to increase the total immigration quota or increase the quota for one country at the expense of another.
How about when you go to the movies and there is a queue for tickets the movie theater announces that they will sell 10 tickets at a time with 1 reserved for each person with a 3 character first name, 4 character first name so on till 12 first names. So if you are a Joe or a cristopher you get your ticket immediately but if you are a Sloan or a James or a Stanley you have to wait because most names are 5-7 characters long.
Now if this system was in place and then you said no its first come first served than yes the number of tickets being issued to Joes and Christophers would go down and those issued to James' and Stanleys would go up.
This however does not mean we are reducing the tickets issued to Joes and Christophers. We are merely correcting an unfair current situation.
And yes you are correct the basic problem is that the theater is only selling tickets for half the seats. The US could easily sustain 5 million net immigration instead of 1 million - most of the Mountain west is pretty much empty forests even today and the midwest is open fields. There is no shortage of space in the US. What is needed is open unlimited immigration for qualified folks and these folks need to be pushed out into the heartland instead of clustering on the coasts. The reason immigrants tend to stick in cities are threefold - one the jobs are in the cities, two the welfare network is in the cities, three the heartland is predominantly white and immigrants fear discrimination. Solution strong enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and bar first generation immigrants from any welfare -CHIP,Medicaid,Section 8, bus passes,food banks in cities and also remove minimum wage restrictions for immigrants in the heartland (keep them in the coastal cities). This way immigrants will move away from the crowded coasts.
**Life is too short to be serious**
The US could easily sustain 5 million net immigration instead of 1 million - most of the Mountain west is pretty much empty forests even today and the midwest is open fields. There is no shortage of space in the US.
This is the crux of the problem, including the original H1-B issue of this thread. Yes, the US can sustain annual immigration in the 5 million range. In fact, if the criterion for a successful immigration policy is that no one dies as a result, then the US could sustain annual immigration in the hundreds of millions. However, severe economic hardship for the current US residents would ensue. That's why the current immigration is capped. And that's also why H1-B visas are capped. And that's also why many current US residents think the cap as currently used/abused is already too high. The US laws are structured to consider the impact on current US residents as more important than the impact on immigrants.
So how come current US residents were not a concern when allowing unrestricted white migration but becomes one when the migration is from brown or yellow countries?
**Life is too short to be serious**
So how come current US residents were not a concern when allowing unrestricted white migration but becomes one when the migration is from brown or yellow countries?
Good question. My understanding of US history is that the current residents always put up restrictions on new immigrants that are demographically different. In this regard, the US is no different than most other countries in the world. Explicit restrictions targeted at a specific country are rare, e.g., the Chinese Exclusion Act. Much more common were indirect restrictions such as the idea of allowing future immigration based on national origins of the current residents. This latter exclusion was targeted at southern and eastern Europeans, who were the undesirables of the latter 1800's and early 1900's.
The current H1-B situation not only has this aspect of pushback against immigration that differs from the current resident demographics. It also has the added problem of being heavily dominated by a single country, to the detriment of potential immigrants from other countries.