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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
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.
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
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
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/
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.
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**
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."
the market will work around you.
Yeah, haven't you noticed how doctors, lawyers and entertainers have seen their positions reduced and removed due to professional licensing/mandatory professional membership requirements?
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
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.
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! --
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 job requires physical presence here, it is difficult to outsource. Doctors are safe. Lawyers are safe too. They Indian lawyers cannot represent you in US court.
Computer programmers do not enjoy those protections and cannot. Unless govt mandates that businesses cannot outsource. That is not likely to happen. And if it did, the tech industry outside of US would rejoice. As that would bring an end to the near-monopoly US businesses have in this field.
Sergey Brin wasn't born here, Elon Musk wasn't born here, Steve Jobs' father wasn't born here. On and on and on. At some point you will realize that immigrants and their families make a huge contribution to making the US tech industry the best and the biggest in the world.
Don't be short-sighted and try to kill the chicken that is currently laying the golden eggs.
The tech industry in the US is quite healthy. If you are any good, you can easily find a job. In this economy, if anybody cannot find a job as a computer programmer, well, a blame on H1-B program is misplaced.
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.
Pretty much just like the American citizens I've worked with.
If you haven't taken an internship in software engineering, then I really can't justify hiring you. Sorry
If you're an intern, and have taken some programming courses, and have plans or are in the process of taking some specialized courses, then we absolutely do bring in *paid* interns that way. In my group's case, we look for system software related courses. Operating systems, or embedded, or even digital logic design. We're pretty flexible.
We bring in almost as many Canadian interns (from Canadian schools) as American interns. It's been slim pickings for American interns. Most of our interns from US universities are here on a student visa.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.