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H1-B Administrators Are Challenging An Unusually Large Number of Applications (bloomberg.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader decaffeinated quotes Bloomberg: Starting this summer, employers began noticing that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was challenging an unusually large number of H-1B applications. Cases that would have sailed through the approval process in earlier years ground to a halt under requests for new paperwork. The number of challenges -- officially known as "requests for evidence" or RFEs -- are up 44 percent compared to last year, according to statistics from USCIS...
"We're entering a new era," said Emily Neumann, an immigration lawyer in Houston who has been practicing for 12 years. "There's a lot more questioning, it's very burdensome." She said in past years she's counted on 90 percent of her petitions being approved by Oct. 1 in years past. This year, only 20 percent of the applications have been processed. Neumann predicts she'll still have many unresolved cases by the time next year's lottery happens in April 2018.
"We're entering a new era," said Emily Neumann, an immigration lawyer in Houston who has been practicing for 12 years. "There's a lot more questioning, it's very burdensome." She said in past years she's counted on 90 percent of her petitions being approved by Oct. 1 in years past. This year, only 20 percent of the applications have been processed. Neumann predicts she'll still have many unresolved cases by the time next year's lottery happens in April 2018.
The H1B visa program is used intentionally as cheap labor to replace the American worker under the guise of 'we just can't find anyone skilled local'.
It's more about finding a worker who will work for 1/3rd the salary.
Oh no, they'll have to pay higher wages instead of using foreign labor! Won't somebody think of the corporate profits?
There are valid situations where there's nobody with that skill available in the US. That is not the case for 90% of H1-B visas.
H-1B visa abuse is pretty commonplace. Even B-1 visa abuse is commonplace where people from offshore wind up working here in the US for 90-180 days, then get rotated out, and another batch of people from Kerala or Bangalore moved in. The fines for that are so cheap that it is written off as a cost of doing business.
The problem is that there are many tax incentives to abuse the visa system. For example, I can pay the payroll tax for 20 FTEs, or I can pay some contracting firm that hauls in people fresh off the boat, and don't have to pay a dime. As an added bonus, I can tell them to punt someone I don't like because I feel like it, and the contracting place removes them. No separation, no work on my side other than locking some accounts. Plus, I don't have to worry about HR and interviews.
So, until the system is fixed that encourages outsourcing to H-1B abusing contract firms, we will see this shit continuing. The H-1B program needs to be tossed, or modified where for every dollar paid for an H-1B, another dollar gets paid to the US government earmarked for education, with a minimum salary of five times the median income.
In British Colonial times, the British traveled to India to set up companies there and exploit the most talented natives.
In US Colonial times, the most talented come voluntarily to the US to be exploited.
Strange times, eh?
H1-B is total crap and needs to be eliminated ASAP. Oh, but that lobbyist money from Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.
Your Congress Critter cannot argue with that money!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The H-1B visa program is yet another means for potential terrorists to enter the United States. Anything that reduces the number of H-1B Syrian refugees entering the United States reduces the number of potential terrorists. The H-1B program is a threat both to American jobs and to national security.
ORLY. What percentage of people who committed terrorist acts since, say 1990, have held H1-B visas at one time?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
There is plenty of available skilled labor here in America. We should not be importing labor.
You know the likely result of this? "Oh crap, we need to hire more Americans!" followed shortly by "damn we need to invest in and train our people, hiring is too expensive these days!"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Both were hit with RFE. Guidance from the lawyers were:
They seem to be cracking down on the practice of finding unusual combinations of qualifications in the candidates (like BS in accounting, fluency in Kannada language and truck driving license), putting them all as necessary qualifications making it impossible for anyone else to apply.
We only hire people with Masters or PhDs from top American schools. We were at a very heave disadvantage in the earlier loose era. TCS, Wipro and the assorted Indian body shoppers would grab the H1Bs and our candidates had to live through lottery. But now, we can easily meet the law, in spirit as well as the letter. Personally I welcome such strict scrutiny. It should have been like this from day 1.
US high school grads with 1 or 2 year training is enough to do most jobs done by the Indian Body shop imports. They should not even be considered for H1B. Simple coding is all they do, and they were gaming the system. They should restrict H1Bs for Graduate degrees from US universities. That will curb the rampant resume inflation and outright lies in the resumes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You know the real agenda isn't to "encourage" companies to hire domestic talent, it just happens to coincide with their mission to Keep the Brown People Out.
There are very good economic models that suggest that importing labor is bad. There's some statistical evidence that immigrants that don't take up the new culture are a safety risk due to increased crime, and that immigrants use more social services than citizens.
Other countries have extreme immigration policies, and several countries don't allow immigration at all (such as China, where you can't immigrate even if you own a Chinese business and are married to a Chinese citizen), and many have strictly controlled borders. Would the US be exceptional if we did the same?
Furthermore, very few people in the US are actually racist. Ignoring the "all whites are racist" bullshit and looking at the actual statistics, it's estimated that there are only about 2000 actual white supremacists in the US. The hair-triggered left reports of a banana peel signifying racism notwithstanding, it's not a real issue. Whites simply don't care what someone's color is. (Behaviour, on the other hand, is an issue.)
Black lives matter is, statistically speaking, completely off the mark. This does not imply that there is no problem and that things couldn't be made better, but it's false and ineffective to address that problem first, before the elephant in the room.
And yet, despite all the statistical evidence to the contrary and lack of contrary evidence, you have insight into the *real* reason we want to limit immigration: it's because secretly, down deep, we want to "Keep The Brown People Out".
(And your insight does not stem from the very good evidence that immigrants vote en-masse for a certain party.)
Despite not consciously being racist, not really caring about the race of whoever we interact with you're here to tell us the real reason we act the way we do?
Because you're somehow smarter or better informed than us?
Even if it wasn’t the author’s intent. From TFA:
”For Centro, a company in Chicago that makes technology for ad agencies, the problems started this summer. Centro had applied for visas for three young employees who already had the legal right to work for a limited time after graduating from college. One of the applications had been chosen in the H-1B lottery. Emilie Clark, the company’s director of human resources, happily called the employee to tell him his immigration status was settled for the next three years. ”
H1-B is supposed to be used for special cases where there simply aren’t enough Americans available with a particular hard-to-find skill set. There’s just about zero chance that some young recent graduate has such a background. But just for the sake of argument, what were the skills in this case? Again, from TFA:
”... which consisted of writing algorithms and required knowledge of multiple programming languages as well as a solid understanding of relational data storage systems ...”
Seriously? The company needed an H1-B for that?
#DeleteChrome
As somebody who has been through the USICS process with a relative I don't think you really capture the situation at all.
An RFE isn't a "challenge." I received an RFE myself. It is what it says it is: a request for additional documentation. The person who decides to send an RFE or not isn't a person who has "reasons," or an "agenda." They are basically a police officer. Their title is Immigration Officer, and their job involves not only investigating the paperwork to see if it is naughty, but also chasing down and arresting people who don't have the right paperwork. This is not some sort of political appointee, these are the same career professionals who were doing the job last year, the year before, the year before. Whatever personal agenda they might have, it isn't changing from year to year.
What changed is a policy, relating to how much paperwork they have to find in the application before approving it. In the past they had instructions not to really investigate the H1B applications in the same way that they process other types of application; now they're applying the same type of evidence standards that other applications require, and are in fact called for in the laws authorizing the H1B program. That's what they're going to do. Naturally, these companies were submitting the least evidence they needed to get approved, because in a "rubber stamp" regulatory environment you don't want to submit extra stuff that might get examined. But as here, when they suddenly switch to the actual system that the law set up, now those applications don't have all the required evidence, and so of course they're going to get RFEs.
If their situation is like mine, and everything is in order the Officer just wanted additional evidence, then they'll have no problem. If in fact their application doesn't meet the standards in the law, and they only even submitted it because they anticipated getting rubber-stamped, then they'll get rejected. Rightfully.
Your idea is silly because it would require there to be a bunch of new appointees running things, but actually that isn't the case. They're not involved in considerations like trying to encourage companies to hire domestic talent; they're concerned with the paperwork involved in documenting the required steps in the law.
These aren't the immigration cops who arrest brown people for being near the border; these are the immigration cops who wake you up at 6am to make sure you're really married and sleeping in the same bed! They don't give a rats ass what color her skin is; most people whose applications they approve are going to have brown skin, because we're on planet Earth.
But I don't trust the authority that you reference in your "argument from authority". Can you point to some actual evidence?
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Just to be clear: This action is NOT reducing the number of H1-B visas issued. It is reducing the INPUTS to the lottery, not the OUTPUTS. So the same number of visas will be issued, just to different people.
You'd think the comments on Slashdot would focus on the story of our government propping up Drug Warlords in Mexico, Fixing Mexican Elections, Distributing Pamphlets in Mexico telling Mexicans to come here illegaly and in general messing with Mexicans all in an effort to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor for the H1B and NAFTA Programs. H1B in particular is done mostly to import 4-6 million poverty-stricken human beings every year who mostly pick crops at under minimum wage or change the sheets in hotels. You'd think the public would get wise to the never-ending propaganda on how this is "charity work" nobody else wants to do, how the 1 cent protesters are just ungrateful foreigners, and wise up to the fact Kroger Execs will stop at nothing to ensure their never-ending parade of hookers and blow continues un-abated. Fact is, this program should've ended decades ago; plently of poor rural folks and people in cities who'd do fine in a small town making a decent wage picking and sorting crops and frankly, that should be a decent paying job.
Instead, we get comments containing self-victimizing BS that serve to do nothing but stroke a flamewar with thinly veiled racism that doesn't meet any logical criteria for an arguement. Stop victimizing yourself; you want something, earn it. Otherwise, GTFO.
Probably the paperwork requirements are just BS, but simply putting obstacles in the path and making it more of a hassle to get these visas actually makes sense. In principle, you have to try to recruit US citizens first, but there are ways around that requirement. For example, you advertise an entry-level job with a low salary, reject applicants for not having some very specific job experience or skills, then hire a highly experienced overqualified foreigner at the same low salary. I'd be very surprised if it weren't true the in a majority of cases, H1-B holders were sought because they're younger and cheaper, not because they have special skills. What the government really ought to do is have an auction for these visas instead of a lottery, If Google, Microsoft et al. really need these people, they shouldn't mind paying $100,000 or more bounty to get them. Use the money to fund scholarships for US students in fields where there are supposedly such dire shortages, instead of saddling them with $100,000 of student debt.
Because they want young people who are too naive to question stupid fads so that PHB's can get and brag about eye-candy apps.
USA ran out of naive young people.
Table-ized A.I.
Because the talent here doesn't want to live in those bits of Silicon Valley that an entry level salary could afford. The first requirement is that they can live and work somewhere where they can walk to shops at lunchtime and the evenings. Just being three miles from a downtown street is either a one hours walk or a 30 minute car drive. The only places that really match that profile are San Francisco, Menlo Park and Palo Alto.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Stop it. You're harshing their nativist buzz.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As an aspiring immigrant, I feel this is great. Instead of a situation where immigration to US sort of works, sort of doesnt, is a hassle, but not really a bad one, a lot of companies were still keeping major offices in US.
Now that Americans have made up their mind that they dont want immigrants, companies will spend more money on opening engineering centers in immigration friendly countries (Canada\west Europe\Australia(maybe),etc) which from a personal perspective are great countries for me to immigrate to. And this time I might would be able to catch the first wave of immigrants (who get to convert to citizens) if there is a genuine boom in jobs in such countries (unlike US where its near impossible for an EB2 immigrant to get citizenship if moving today)
they had an amazing, unreplicable skill set of the above and the ability to work on 15k per year.
I've worked with a number of these so-called "highly skilled" H-1B's and they should have been more heavily scrutinized to begin with. Many of them are misrepresenting their abilities. I've worked with enough of them to have real, factual evidence from direct experience to back up this claim. In all the instances that I've observed, they were all H-1B's from India. That's not to say that all H-1B's from India that I've worked misrepresented themselves but it's definitely the overwhelming majority. There is a Technical Scrum Master at my work that is exceptional. It is valid to question why we see many H-1B's that are quite frankly worse than college interns to get to the bottom of it. I think it's great that the US Government is doing that. If we're going to hire H-1B's we need to make sure that the ones we're hiring are truly the best of the best. That's what the program was designed to do.
We'll make great pets
I was wondering how quickly some MORON would bring Trump into this as if this program has been anything other than a shameless abuse of power and exploitation by people just like Trump.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You made a very good point, using only evidence in the article to highlight the hypocrisy in the visa system. Obviously we don't need to import job seekers who cannot have qualifications beyond what every American computer science graduate has.
For positions which are not entry-level, one way that companies are getting their cheap H1B labor is by exaggerating the 'particular hard-to-find skill set', creating a combination that no one in the industry would actually have. But miraculously, the "consulting" company finds just such applicant overseas.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
God forbid we actually look at these applications and require they prove they are qualified for the job and are going to obey our laws.
The Law-abiding! *Gasp*
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
H1B visa holders aren't the creators of culture here because they don't get to stay permanently. It's a visa, not asylum. Therefore regardless of what color they are, I am not as worried about their presence as I am about the effect their willingness to work cheap has on the rest oft he labor market.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
should have always been burdensome...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
or favoritism unless they're actually reducing the number of H1-B visas granted. There's so much demand for these visas among employers that they could challenge 90% of them and still hit their caps.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The problem with H1Bs, is they allow the company to have a leverage over their employees beyond just mere payment. Your employer can essentially deport you at will. Not just fire and cut off income, but literally cut off residency. This leads to a terrible power imbalance, that of course the employers would seek.
Some people encrypt by using rot-13 twice. I prefer the more secure method of using rot-1 a total of twenty six times.
Don't think you'd like Canada, it's one of the coldest countries in the world. Australia is nice though, lots of kangaroos. Who doesn't like kangaroos?
Global worming.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
off. Typically we aren't given anything longer than a long weekend, but they often ask two to three weeks off contiguous. I understand that tickets home for them and their families are expensive and take a lot of time there and back, but it just sucks that we aren't allowed time off since they need so much time off. Haven't had a real vacation off since 1986.
Just being three miles from a downtown street is either a one hours walk or a 30 minute car drive.
Time to upgrade your 6 mile per hour car. I hear the Ford Model A can get up to a whole 65 miles per hour.
"His name was James Damore."
There is nothing to stop a foreigner from working for an American company, and that's as is should be. It is the government's responsibility to protect America, both by protecting it from attack and by protecting the American culture (by which I mean people with philosophies such as "All non-Muslims must die" should be rejected, and that large numbers of people unfamiliar with what freedom requires cannot be rapidly assimilated.)
Non-Americans no not have the right to be in America, and they certainly don't have the right to work here. It's not America's responsibility to provide a living for anyone who chooses to come here, and a successful attempt to remove all restrictions from entry into the country will destroy the country.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Which is just sad. I've worked for Microsoft since June 1993, but I haven't gotten a real vacation off, but many of my H1-B coworkers have gotten two+ weeks off.
No mod points to give, but thank you for your experience.
The rest of the comments are garbage.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
A Free Market permits the monopolists, either singly like Micro$ or jointly like the Google, Amazon, Micro$ conspiracy, to dictate economic outcomes in favor of no one but the monopolists (ex. wage fixing by a conspiracy to suppress wages by prohibiting employee mooching)
That is what Trump is selling so yes, he is a Capitalist
Just let the free market sort it out. It fixes everything. Rape, murder, slavery, domestic dispute, every thing can be solved by the free market. In fact, the free market is not just an economic issue, its a moral cornerstone of society.
Ahh, what?
Please tell me the Sarcasm flag is set
Else....what?
Free Market = slavery, with every ill you named included and sanctioned
There's plenty of goddam search engines, why the fuck speculate?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The industries are not going bankrupt.
Governments should maintain a certain quality of living and upward mobility potential for citizens. In this regard people are owed jobs. If wealth trends towards being concentrated towards fewer and fewer people, the government isn't doing its job.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That's not what he said. They need to follow the process and meet the requirements.
What we have are companies claiming they can't find qualified people, then bring in people that are equally as unqualified, but measurably cheaper.
if you are going to have rules, fucking enforce them.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
One guest worker is one too many.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
For those who just can't pass up the opportunity to make everything political, grow up and spare this respectable forum your empty vessel clatter. For the immigration lawyers who are complaining that it isn't as easy as it was - so you actually have to do some *work* for a living? Breaks my heart. Get a grip people and earn your achievements.
Many if not most H1-B's I've worked with are not "highly specialized experts". I'm not putting them down, they are nice people who want to make a living. But it's nonsense to suggest a local could not be found to do what they are doing.
In typical hypocritical fashion, Trump expanded the H2B by 15000 this year and even hired 70 workers at Mar-a-lago
Every job in that H2B category depresses wages for American workers. If these were immigrants, at least they would be engaging in the economy buying houses, cars, etc. The guest worker hunkers down, saves money and takes it out of our country.
How does he get away with this?
The problem with H1Bs, is they allow the company to have a leverage over their employees beyond just mere payment. Your employer can essentially deport you at will. Not just fire and cut off income, but literally cut off residency. This leads to a terrible power imbalance, that of course the employers would seek.
You're right, but also wrong.
Yes, H1-B gives a company more leverage over the employee as would be the case with regular U.S. Citizen/LPR employees. However, they are not entirely at the mercy of their employers since an H1-B petition can be ported to another company. Yes, they will have to file the petition and USCIS will need to approve it, but essentially an H1-B can move companies.
In practice, most H1-Bs do not, because they are waiting for their greencards. Let's be honest here: most H1-B visa recipients are from Indian origin. Regardless of how you feel about that, since India is an oversubscribed country in terms of immigration visas available, it takes many, many years for most Indians to get their greencards. Switching employers while having an approved I-140 (and waiting for a greencard to be available) is not so easy. That's why most Indian (and thus the vast majority of) H1-Bs stick with their employers, not because their employer can deport them at will.
In the case of the L1 visa, the story is true. An L1 cannot be ported to another company, and thus termination of employment means termination of residency.
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
I feel bad that people from India or China or wherever are getting caught in the crossfire, but if this is a headache for the tech companies that are exploiting them and keeping actual Americans jobless... good. I figure Amazon/Google/Facebook are way too powerful to actually allow the H1-B program to end, but maybe we can at least make it as difficult as possible for them. I know I shouldn't be satisfied with half-measures like that, but that's sadly the world we live in.
"Trump ran his campaign on putting Americans first, and the Dims can't manage to wrap their tiny brains around the fact that Trump is keeping his campaign promises, and putting Americans first, as demonstrated by a 70% reduction in approved H1B Visas according to the article."
Trump puts Trump first, as also noted by Mar-A-Lago bringing in all H2B labor instead of hiring locally. Not to mention building Trump tower out of Chinese steel by a substantial illegal immigrant workforce.
But that's different, right?
The good news is there's only 44 million of them.
It is good for you that you are an actual capitalist (somebody who earns a living from accumulated capital), but a lot of people are not capitalists - they earn money by working for a company.
Importing cheap labor lowers prices (hopefully) and helps the consumer in the short term, however, it hurts the economy in the long term. If the locals are unwilling to live in the low standard of living that the foreigners are accustomed to (10 people sharing a room etc), then it places a definite minimum on the salary they are willing to accept (it should at least pay for rent and food). If you want to lower the salary even further, then they just might stop working and live on welfare.
Then you will still be paying them (from your taxes), but they won't do anything useful to you. And they won't have enough money to buy your luxury goods.
So, I guess, true capitalists would like a country where vast majority of locals are on welfare, foreigners doing their jobs for small salaries and living in bad conditions, while the banks and corporations rake in profits by selling their stuff to other countries (since nobody in the USA can afford them).
The H1-B visa system is completely broken, a pizza cook can be granted for working at a Papa John's location. A H1-B visa holder falso used the immigration to get his back pay, the entire time the US government did not even question whether a pizza cook should even have a H1-B visa at all. Took some digging around but SRV Pizza is just a holding company for Papa Johns franchise.. https://cis.org/North/Governme... http://www.all-pizza.com/phila...
Modded down. Whatever.
Either the moderators are poor at reading comprehension, or there really are people out there who think that the H-1B program is some kind of welcome-mat for terrorists.
One may argue that H-1B visa-holders displace American workers, but are they terrorists? I think not. H-1B visas are very hard to get. It's much easier to get a student visa, like the 9/11 hijackers did. And let's not forget that most of the people who have committed terrorist acts since 9/11 have had strong ties to the USA already, some being born or raised here.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It certainly is used to fund terrorism. Most funds paid for H1Bs exit the country. Frequently to hostile countries.
Okay, that's just a load of crap.
Funds paid "for" H-1B visas are paid to the US government. They don't exit the country.
Funds paid "to" H-1B visa-holders are spent mostly within the USA, in the form of taxes and living expenses.
Most people here on H1B Visas are here illegally, per the terms required to allow their entry in the first place.
If that's true, then it's the fault of their sponsors, not the visa-holders.
Additionally, many studies have concluded that there has never been a lack of tech labor but simply a lack of companies willing to pay fair market wages. Which in turn has turned people away from what would otherwise be a well paid field.
I'd like to see some citations for those studies. In any case, there are a limited number of H-1B visas made available every year. It's not like all of the tech needs of the USA can be supplied with H-1B visa-holders.
Show me someone who supports H1Bs and I'll show you a scumbag.
Then you'll have to include practically every university in the USA.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
In traffic at that!
Real capitalism simply means the right to contract with who you want, when you want, for what you want, and to be secure in your person and property, and have the right to use your own property for whatever you wish and to do business with whoever you wish, so long as you do not initiate aggression against the person or property of someone else.
That fails on a large scale just like communism fails on a large scale
Real free market needs there to be a lot of sellers who offer similar goods, and it also requires everyone to be well-informed and acting rationally. In practice, there are huge costs to enter some markets (say, the CPU industry) just because of the technologies involved. That results in those markets being dominated by one or two companies (how many spinning hard drive manufacturers are there?). This then results in the buyer having little to no choice, especially if the few companies make some sort of agreement to fix prices etc.
Similar in the job market - the employer usually has more power than the employee, unless the employees form a union or something like that. Since there are fewer employers than employees, especially in some industries, the companies can make an agreement to, say, force the employees to work 16 hours per day without vacation days. Regulation is needed here too - I do not think that you would want to work in a factory the way people did 150 years ago, after all, the regulations came into effect after the businesses proved that they could not regulate themselves.
Another interesting bit of history I read - early railroad companies did not care about safety, since they saw maintenance as an expense that could be reduced. So what if a rusty boiler explodes or there is a train collision because the signalman was not supplied with fuel for signal lamps? It may be cheaper than maintaining all locomotives etc. Another example is the US railroad companies continuing to use older style couplers that were very dangerous even when a safer design was available. Why? Well, it was cheaper to hire new employees to replace the ones who were killed or maimed by the train than to replace all couplers.
We see similar things now with information security.
There’s just about zero chance that some young recent graduate has such a background.
That's a funny thing to say in an industry where drop-outs create world-changing companies. What exactly are you hoping to achieve by deporting skilled, educated workers?
You presume the employee can quickly find a new sponsor when that just isn't the case. Such moves are also high risk because the foreign worker may have to leave while continuing to find a new sponsor which makes interviewing far more difficult.
The employers really do have considerable leverage. While they have no authority to directly deport someone, they understand cases with high probability of deportation and they leverage those employees even more. I know a lot of H1Bs in the medical field (just had a night out with them). They earn a fraction of what their peers earn (around half salaries in many cases). They know they're leveraged and they only allow it seeking a greencard. Everyone I've spoke too cannot wait to get citizenship to leave their current exploitative employers on the spot for higher, competitive salaries with their peers.
Just about everybody gets the current state of H-1B workers wrong. There are two pools of H-1Bs, who are here under the same visa but in totally different situations.
The first are people who are actually filling jobs they couldn't find Americans to fill. These are often STEM professions that not enough Americans want to go into in the areas that need them -- like civil or mechanical engineering in unsexy areas (like wastewater treatment), or physicians in underserved areas. Americans with talent and interest in STEM tend to go into more glamorous jobs in more glamorous areas. Think biomedical engineering, neuroscience, etc. etc..
The second category are the ones who are here to displace American workers through mass hiring by shady outsourcing and consulting companies.
It's not really hard to differentiate them. If an engineering firm is hiring one Indian engineer on H-1B to join a large workforce, it's probably legit. If a retailer is hiring 1,000 call center workers on H-1B, it's probably not.
Most of us posting here have computer related jobs... and like it or not ...Cutting these Visas bring jobs back to american workers,
America has had a couple of very successful waves of immigration as you alluded to, but under very diffrernt conditions and with VERY different rules.
First, during those earlier waves, America was mostly un-populated. People were imported to fill a largely un-filled nation and take advantage of vast untapped natural resources. Now, the nation is already populated and political forces have been building for decades to prohibit the tapping of those natural resources.
Second, in the most-famous wave of European immigrants the immigrants, a whole series of things aligned:
1. they were nearly all Christian or Jewsish and they were coming into a mostly protestant Christian culture. There were many cultural differences but the moral principles of the new-comers aligned with the culture they were entering this is often not true today.
2. they were screened at Ellis Island. Those who had illnesses or disabilities were turned around and sent home, not as an act of eugenics but as a protection for the physical and economic health of the American people. Those who were unable to support themselves were not admitted; they were not allowed to become a burden on the taxpayers. With modern "chain migration", many immigrants bring in a bunch of relatives often including elderly relatives, who immediately become eligible for taxpayer-funded benefits. Other do the reverse: essentially throwing their under-age kids over the border like living grappling hooks and then counting on the gullible and empathetic public to look the other way as the parents and grandparents are pulled-in later by bureaucrats approving papers.
3. At the time of those earlier waves of immigration, there was no taxpayer-funded safety net. No welfare, no foodtamps, no umeployment, no social security, no medicaid, no "obama phones", no "obamacare" - NONE of it.
In the past, when cheap workers entered the country they took low-end work and worked their butts off to build a better life for their kids, and while they certainly affected citizens by suppressing wages, that was the limit to the damage. The new wave not only pushes down wages, but they and their dependents consume many taxpayer-provided social services thus becoming a double-whammy on the citizenry while the employer cheeerfully makes a killing. Ever wonder why the gap between the rich and poor grew so dramatically under Obama????? (and to be fair was getting pretty bad under establishment meat-puppet Bush)
You cite CATO, and anti-American globalist libertarian thinktank... so I'm gonna go with "fool" (or "useful idiot")
Here's the problem:
You talk about a "free market" but then ignore the meaning of the term "market". A market is a defined space with a uniform set of trading rules. That's why it works. Everybody can trade in a marketplace because there are rules and those rules are enforced. America is a marketplace. China is a market place (albeit with different rules, of course). France is another marketplace, as is Japan. Again, wiuth different rules but rules that work in those places and cultures.
What rat bastards like CATO support is a quasi-anti-marketpklace. They want stable rules, currency, etc in the US but with an escape hatch to go use the rules of a totally different marketplace for only one portion of certain activities and only for those who are rich enough to use the hatch. If "bob the barber" in small-town USA wants a slave from Namibia to sweep his floors for 10cents a day, CATO is not for that but id bazillionaire Bezos wants to make another billion selling trinkets assembled by foreign slaves who work for 10cents a day good for him!. Oh, but id Bezos or Gates or Cook or Buffet want to life safely somewhere and have safe food and medicine and police and fire and juries for trials in public courts and government-run prisons to hold anybody who tries to rob them or kidnap their families etc.... then they want the US Taxpayer funded marketplace. hhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmm....
The libertarian dream of doofuses like the CATO crew are irrational. A "global marketplace" with no national boundaries would not work without a one-world government (since a government MUST exist to establish and enforce the rules of the marketplace and deter and punish violators of the marketplace rules). A one-world government is problematic on MANY levels; first, many would reject it so it would have to be established by force. Anybody familiar with the works of Hayek would see the problem here immediately: to force it into being against the will of so many millions would require a tyrant willing to be evil, and that would mean giving power to a globalist government run by an evil tyrant. Who saves the world from a global Hitler or a global Stalin or a global Chairman Mao who controls all the power on Earth???
The swine at CATO are actually anti-American; they have repeatedly argued against borders and border enforcement. Without borders and border enforcement, you have no nations and with no nations you have no America. Without America you have none of the American concepts that were spread around the globe like a guarantee of "free speech" and right to freedom of religion (including a right to have no religion). Even a great place like the UK does not, strictly speaking, have these things and thus would not have promulgated them across the planet.
The scrutiny of immigrants to the US is probably going to set in a the new normal. So immigration lawyers gravy train as the gatekeepers of all the non-traditional immigration to the US is probably coming to an end. Their best bet is probably to requalify as labor lawyers. The relationships between employers and employees is very rapidly changing. So there should be more work in negotiating new norms in that arena than there is in filling out the paperwork for new waves of highly-qualified indentured servants trafficked into the country.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Forget "cheap". They are willing to work in abusive working conditions... although, I guess, you can demand extra compensation for these working conditions if you are not afraid of deportation in case of firing.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
There are a whoping 51 naturalized Chinese citizens who got Chinese passports through means other than marriage. ~40 of them are former Hongkongese, and I believe all of these did get Mainland citizenship in order to hoard real estate in Shenzhen
it may hurt some workers, but also immensely benefit the American consumer.
Somehow, you fail to notice those are the same people.
Look at news services that rely on something other than his tweets or press releases for the accomplishments. As far as the hand over heart- we donâ(TM)t care. We all get busy and wrapped up in things and many have wanted the president who puts appearance and listening to pollsters at 20% of his job rather than 100%. Our current political class uses how close someone is to 100% uncontroversial and polished as itâ(TM)s currency, the American people arenâ(TM)t too dumb to realize this, they are often just too busy to care. You want to show yourself as not being a politician like Trump did, show yourself as having very little or none of that currency and make it clear no one in that crowd would back you.
If America had not given me an F1 in 1990 and a H1B in 1995, I would have joined a similar team in England, Germany, Japan or Korea and helped create that 800 high paying upper middle class jobs and two dozen millionaires there instead of here. I estimate my skills created jobs that collectively pay 15 million dollars a year, not counting my pay check.
But law of large numbers and the regression to the mean is relentless. My kids, our kids, are not as smart as we are. We are appalled by the abuse of H1B that puts our kids at a disadvantage. But we know what is good and what is bad about H1B and listen us, we are Americans, our wealth and our children are in America. We want America to prosper and succeed.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We sponsor for green card all the H1Bs we hire. We hope to keep them in our company for the next 30 years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A number of years ago, USAA Insurance replaced its IT staff with H-1B replacements from India. US employees were required to train their replacements as a condition of unemployment benefits. Local news caught up with the incident and the story made the newspaper and was broadcast on local TV. USAA senior vice president argued on TV that Hindu replacement workers bring skills that do not exist anywhere in the US. They got those skills from the US citizens who were fired in their favor. According to the news, a while back, Tata Corporation has the capacity to send an additional 10 million [indentured] H-1B replacement workers as fast as the airlift and sealift can transport them. If Hillary had been elected, this would be happening already. The solution is to terminate the H-1B program and repatriate replacement workers back to India. H-1B advocates argue that they would retaliate by increasing offshoring from India (never mind they already do this).
Especially the company of the person quoted in the article.
A 40% increase in challenges leads to a 70% reduction in success?
Sounds like exactly the type of mill that's skirting the law is what's being shut down here.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The problem with H1Bs, is they allow the company to have a leverage over their employees beyond just mere payment. Your employer can essentially deport you at will. Not just fire and cut off income, but literally cut off residency. This leads to a terrible power imbalance, that of course the employers would seek.
You're right, but also wrong.
Yes, H1-B gives a company more leverage over the employee as would be the case with regular U.S. Citizen/LPR employees. However, they are not entirely at the mercy of their employers since an H1-B petition can be ported to another company. Yes, they will have to file the petition and USCIS will need to approve it, but essentially an H1-B can move companies.
In practice, most H1-Bs do not, because they are waiting for their greencards. Let's be honest here: most H1-B visa recipients are from Indian origin. Regardless of how you feel about that, since India is an oversubscribed country in terms of immigration visas available, it takes many, many years for most Indians to get their greencards. Switching employers while having an approved I-140 (and waiting for a greencard to be available) is not so easy. That's why most Indian (and thus the vast majority of) H1-Bs stick with their employers, not because their employer can deport them at will.
You are mostly right. However, majority of indians stuck on green card will die before they can become eligible to get GC. Many don't know this truth. USCIS continues to grab new applications, while a simple calculation can tell them, these people will die and their kids retire by the time they process their applications. These waiting H1Bs (like me, working for FANG company) will continue to depress wages for everyone, because they change jobs less.
The employer can essentially deport an employee.
I there are many classes of jobs where it's practically impossible to get a new one in a short enough timeframe.
I'd call that an extreme skew of power to the employer.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Nice try at changing the topic, but I notice that you did not refute or even try to contest my facts. And all you have is confirming that in the past, Trump did what was best for his company within the current law JUST LIKE EVERYONE, EVER. How many times did you not take all the deductions you were allowed to on your tax forms (to help out the federal government?) No one ever does because it is not in your self interest, and you are legally within your rights to keep that money. If you don't like the rubber stamp worker visa programs, you should be thanking Trump, since he has killed the rubber stamp BS. Was it Trump's fault 8 years ago that the federal government was flooding the labor market with cheap foreign workers? No, so STFU already...
Regarding the Chinese steel, as a business, you get quotes and, assuming the vendors can all deliver the same quality, you go with the cheapest quote. If Trump hand not gone with the Chinese steel vendor since they were the lowest bid, you asshat partisans would have been calling him a racist. I refuse to play your bullshit heads I win, tails you lose game.
Also, pretty sure hiring illegals is it'self illegal, and since Trump hasn't been charged with that particular crime, your BS claim is in reality that Trump hired legit sub contractors who in turn hired illegals, which makes your clam 100% false and libelous. That is like you paying Home Depot $2000 to replace your carpet, and then the sub contractor that Home Depot hires out to uses illegals, who then show up at your house to actually do the work. You have no idea and no connection to the illegals, and only an idiot who is looking to conflate truth for political gain would say that you hired illegals.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
"No one owes you a job."
False.
Politician, who promised you to keep your job, and whom you voted in, owes you a job. And if that means stopping your employer from replacing you with a cheaper foreign worker (through abusing a program that is meant only to allow import of talents that are lacking domestically, never intended to replace existing employees), stopping your employer from abusing that program is doing exactly what he owes you for your vote.
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equally as, or less. It's frequent the employee that is to be let go must TRAIN the H1-B replacement.
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The framers of the Constitution also gave Congress no power to enact national wealth redistribution programs so immigrants really created little or no burden on the Federal government as there was no Federal Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, TANF, Food Stamps, EITC, or Housing Assistance. The framers also gave Congress no power to enact rules requiring states and businesses to provide health care to individuals regardless of their ability to pay (see the unfunded mandate in the form of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act).
So, we have a situation now which the framers no more envisioned than they envisioned nuclear weapons when crafting the Second Amendment (although, contrary to popular belief, automatic and semiautomatic arms existed at that time).
When bridging paradigm shifts, it's pretty hard to speculate accurately on how the founders would have come down on related issues if faced with them.
" but essentially an H1-B can move companies."
Except who's going to hire a H1-B employee, who was fired from a previous job? What sort of references does this make?
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Easier solution...
First, Impose a Federal payroll tax of 33% on the employer of every H1-B holder and use these funds, first, to clamp down on abuse of H1-Bs (esp. not paying prevailing wages). Funds left over after expenditures for rigorous enforcement of the program's rules should be spent on education and training programs to address the "native" shortfall in skills that the H1-B holders are filling (currently, mostly STEM).
Second, set a very low tolerance for abuse of the H1-B program and if a company is found guilty of abusing it, they must dismiss all their H1-B workers within 30 days, pay stiff fines, and may not apply for another H1-B for five years.
Third, ban "job shops" from using the H1-B program.
Employers are most interested in their bottom line so once an H1-B employee, due to the H1-B tax, costs more than a "native" employee of similar skills would cost and the risk of losing all your H1-B employees nearly overnight if you screw up would disrupt your business, the problem (if there is one) will self-correct.
Having, over many years, been responsible for filling software development positions at various companies, I beg to differ. There simply are not enough skilled and motivated developers in the US.
Of course there are plenty of programmers -- if you just need warm bodies for a government contract or something like that, but that's not what I need.
Perhaps 1/3 to 1/2 of my employees started working in the US on an H1-B (some subsequently got their GC or became citizens). These were among my most valuable employees and, overall, were the highest paid. In one recent job, the top two highest paid people in my group were on H1-Bs -- they were that good and I paid for performance. I would much rather hire an "American" worker for every position -- it saves me the hassle of H1-Bs and related pain and I know that developers are staying around because they really like the work rather than just because it's too much of a problem for them to switch jobs. Yet, because I needed quality developers, I happily hire the most qualified person and that's often the H1-B candidate.
(That said, I've also seen horrible abuses of the H1-B program at other companies and, at one company I worked at, mild abuses -- none of my H1-B's were subject to those abuses at that latter company though).
Just to be clear: This action is NOT reducing the number of H1-B visas issued. It is reducing the INPUTS to the lottery, not the OUTPUTS. So the same number of visas will be issued, just to different people.
As it should be. Remember, the complaint is about the abuse of the H1-B visa.
Imagine you're running a lottery for seats in a certification program--all entries are supposed to be for people who meet the qualifications, because there's several times as many people applying for the program as there's seats. You've got a total of 50 seats in the program, 500 qualified applicants, and anybody who wins automatically gets a seat reserved for them. The odds of any applicant getting in is 1 in 100.
What happens to the odds of the qualified applicants for getting a seat in the program, if the 4,500 applicants who didn't meet the qualifications are included in the lottery anyway?
Is it fair to the people who actually meet the official qualifications for an H1-B visa to not ensure their chances of getting one are as good as possible, by failing to properly check the applications?
There’s just about zero chance that some young recent graduate has such a background.
That's a funny thing to say in an industry where drop-outs create world-changing companies. What exactly are you hoping to achieve by deporting skilled, educated workers?
Offhand? Their home countries being able to join us in the information age on a larger, better scale, with local labor able to build, maintain, and expand their infrastructure. It's more likely to happen if locals can do it, than if it is necessary for foreigners to be imported.
Seriously, the 50K H1B should be replaced by adding some more VISAs, say 10K / year and geared ONLY for jobs in demand.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why are there so many, that just can't accept the fact that Trump is the legally, democratically elected president? Why do you find it so suspicious that majority of people support whom majority of people voted in? Personally, I'm finding it bizarre, that for the first time in the USA history, supporters of the losing party are treating the winner as illegal usurper (including protests and riots), instead of just shutting up and accepting it's the Republicans' turn at the helm. And why don't you try to clean up your house (e.g. assuring that DNC is impartial when picking candidates, instead of using dirty tricks to cheat half of their own electorate out of voting their candidate just to push the one DNC is literally owned by).
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And yet denying job basing on race, gender or religious background is illegal. It's only legal to prioritize semi-illegally imported foreigners over legal citizens. Are you implying the government should also remove the anti-discrimination laws?
The firms are still free to replace their employees with better employees that are legal citizens. They are also free to make the employees redundant, vacating the workplaces altogether. What they are not allowed is abusing law that is meant strictly for filling up shortages of highest tier professionals, to import under-qualified cheap labor replacing current employees.
While communism and socialism were a disaster, so was untamed, bloody 19th Century capitalism, where the employee had no rights. Restricted immigration in general are one of methods of indirectly protecting rights of employees - in the standard capitalist supply-demand-price triangle of the job market, it prevents the employers from inflating the supply side artificially, reducing the price for own profit. H1-B is a concession that would help employers in case supply is so low they are unable to fill the demand, no matter what price. But it's being abused - inflating the supply unreasonably.
How is it wrong to enforce it?
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Is H1-B auction different from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
I don't recall Republicans rioting in the streets and setting cars on fire over the past 8 years.
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They began finally doing their jobs.
By that, the quantity of H1B's requested increases the tier you are in.
So if you request a single H1B Visa, you are in the Tier 1 Lottery Pool. But if you request 2-10 you move into Tier 2, 11-100 and you're in Tier 3, 101-1000 and you're in Tier 4, and 1000+ you are in Tier 5.
Each pool has an additional tax profile. So basically, if you only need one specifically skilled individual, then it is minimal impact. But when you start hiring 100 or thousands of H1B Visas, then the there is a penalty tax of sorts up to 30% of salary.