H-1B Visa Use Soared Last Year At Major Tech Firms (phys.org)

"Even as the White House began cracking down on U.S. work visas, major Silicon Valley technology firms last year dramatically ramped up hiring of workers under the controversial H-1B visa program," reports the Mercury News. Menlo Park-based Facebook in 2017 received 720 H-1B approvals, a 53 percent increase over 2016, according to the National Foundation for American Policy, which obtained federal government data. Mountain View's Google received 1,213 H-1B approvals, a 31 percent increase. The number of H-1B approvals at Intel in Santa Clara rose 19 percent and Cupertino-based Apple received 673, a 7 percent increase.... [E]xperts say the data doesn't show how many additional H-1B contractors tech companies may get from staffing agencies or outsourcing companies. In response to this news organization's inquiries, Facebook said it does not publicly discuss its use of H-1B workers or contractors. Google, Apple and Intel did not respond to requests for information about their use of H-1B workers or contractors....

Amazon chalked up the largest increase in H-1B approvals, with 2,515 in 2017, a 78 percent leap. Microsoft received 1,479 approvals, an increase of 29 percent. Neither company responded to a request for comment.
A distinguished fellow at Carnegie Mellon's School of Engineering at Silicon Valley believes that the threat of a U.S. crackdown on H-1B visas may simply have prompted companies to secure as many visas as possible while they could.

Comments

Get 'um while you can!

[lionchild]

Get 'um while they're still "cheap" and while you can!

This is a loop hole should have been tightened up long, long ago. It should be a tool used to encourage companies to invenst in their own employees, re-tooling them with the skills the company needs; not used as a reason to go looking to effectively off-shore work.

At best, it should be a stop-gap measure while you train up local talent to fill the position long-term.

This is a numbers game, currently, to corporations. If these numbers become less and less appealing, then they'll turn to other solutions that include increasing local skills and building local talen.

Re:Misleading title?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've on the right track, but you've got cause and effect backwards.

The number of H-1B's is fixed, as you've said.

With the recent changes, it's much harder for outsourcing companies and others who were abusing the system to get their applications approved. As a result, they get less of the fixed (well, capped) number of visas.

This leaves more to go to others, which means that Facebook, Google, etc - who's applications will all fit well within the requires - see a higher percentage of their applications approved. What the article fails to mention is the number of applications each of these companies made, which while it might have been higher than past years, almost certainly wasn't as large an increase as their number of accepted applications.

As for a labor shortage, there is not generally a shortage of tech people in the bay area. However there absolutely IS a shortage of skilled tech people, especially in certain fields. It's easy to ignore that distinction. Getting 100 (or 1000) resumes for a job isn't helpful if none of them are qualified...

We get that

[rsilvergun]

but you're still lowering market rates. Supply and demand dictate that. Your presence in the market increases supply, lowering demand. It also discourages training and investment in local talent.

In more left leaning states like Canada and Germany that's not so bad. Your contributions to the economy are spread around in the form of public infrastructure, education and single payer healthcare.

The trouble with us here in America is that very, very little of our tax dollars make it back to us. More than half of them is just wars and servicing the debt from those wars. We aren't gaurnteed health care or an education for ourselves or our children. What's more since employers can access well trained people like yourself without paying the taxes to maintain higher education systems we've been cutting public college funding for 2 decades now, resulting in massive debt burdens. But you don't have a choice but to take on that burden because if you don't have an advanced degree the companies can and will hire an H1-B instead so they don't have to train...

The problem with America is that every single aspect of our lives is predicated on the quality of our jobs. Anything that gets in the way of that is a disaster for us. No, it shouldn't be that way, but it is. So that for the average American bringing in foreign labor hurts us because none of what you bring make it down to us here in the trenches. There's folks who want to change that, but so far they're in the minority.

It's an irrational system, but if you're forced to live in an irrational system then you do what can only be called rational irrational things.