H-1B Visa Lottery Will Now Favor Masters, Doctorate Degree Holders (sfchronicle.com)

McGruber shares a report from The San Francisco Chronicle: The Department of Homeland Security announced a rule change Wednesday that will transform the lottery that decides who gets the 85,000 H-1B visas granted to for-profit companies every year. Previously, an initial lottery granted 20,000 visas only to those holding advanced degrees granted by U.S. institutions -- master's degrees or doctorates -- and then a general lottery granted 65,000 visas to all qualified applicants. The Department of Homeland Security switched the order of these lotteries, it said in a notice of the final rule change, which will bolster the odds for highly educated foreign nationals. The change reduces the likelihood that people with just a bachelor's degree will win in the general lottery, said Lisa Spiegel, an attorney at Duane Morris in San Francisco and head of the firm's immigration group. The program shift could hurt technology staffing companies, also known as outsourcers, who have a reputation for flooding the lottery with applications. Three Indian firms -- Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro -- often account for a majority of the H-1B applications, an analysis of government data shows.

Comments

masters, even doctorate, means nothing

[TheGratefulNet]

if its from various overseas countries.

its well-known that many cultures encourage rote memorization and that passes for 'learning'.

is THAT what we really want? have you not seen enough of that from people you work with?

this is bullshit and we all know it.

Re:masters, even doctorate, means nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is America even taking these in instead of training their own?

Re:masters, even doctorate, means nothing

[MightyYar]

It's absolutely nuts to train the smartest people in the world at the best schools in the world... and then ask them to kindly leave.

Re:masters, even doctorate, means nothing

[hey!]

Well, you shouldn't be able to get a doctorate from an accredited research university just on rote learning.

You shouldn't be able to get a master's degree or even a bachelor's either, but programs vary in quality. Now I worked on place where management was keen on Indian H-1Bs, often with master's and occasionally PhDs. The impression I got is that a masters' is much more common in India; I believe it is a prerequisite at some Indian universities for PhD candidates. Anyhow, the quality of those people were all over the place, from everything you could wish for, to one guy who was exactly what you're talking about: he had the UML of the entire Gang of Four book memorized and could give a convincing-sounding chalk talk about any of them, but in fact he just had a prodigious memory. There's no way he should have qualified to *enter* an master's program, much less get out with a degree.

I don't blame Indian culture; I've worked with Indians I'd hire again in a heartbeat. I blame certain US universities that have converted the popularity of masters's degrees with Indians into low quality cash-cow programs -- usually not in CS, but in the fuzzier and less mathematically rigorous "IT" field. If someone came to me with an MS/IT I'd automatically treat it the same as a bachelor's, just from my experience with graduates of such programs. The good people coming out of those programs were good going into them.

Re:masters, even doctorate, means nothing

[MightyYar]

It's absolutely not worth the societal cost of driving our education costs up to the moon if we aren't going to retain these people. Either let them in or don't, but don't make our local education market for all into a global market for the elite without realizing some benefit.

Re: masters, even doctorate, means nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

The US has problems with guns, but you are grosly mistaken if you thing a thousand serious gun crimes is that much in a country of 350,000,000.

It's like saying five guys got stabbed in London shows that everyone in the UK is going to be stabbed at some point or another. You'd be an idiot to think that and to not think that there are places of high crime and places with low crime.

In fact if you want to compare stats, do violent crime stats. Americans tend to have slightly more crimes involving guns and a lot less crimes involving knives and everything else. The reporting on it gets so skewed in fact that people don't understand that the reason Americans are largely more polite in public in many areas, is because gun ownership is so high there as well. Nobody picks a fight with a scrawny man who's carrying a firearm in those places. Or a woman. Everywhere else though, they do. And claim it's "safer" in those areas as well.....

favor

[fluffernutter]

Weren't H-1B's supposed to be to get people who had skills not available locally... which would be people with higher education? Now we have fallen back to simply 'favoring' those people.

Re:Still being done wrong

[imidan]

H1Bs were never meant for bringing in most of the people companies are using them for today. The purpose was to be able to bring in high-skilled workers, temporarily, for the purpose of doing one job at one business and then going back home to their country. I support H1Bs used for such purposes, and I think the program should continue with a drastically reduced number of available visas and strict requirements for unique expertise and well-above average pay.

It seems like most businesses using the H1B program today want to bring in groups of foreign low-to-mid-level coders so they can treat them as indentured servants for a few years and then send them back when they're used up. I'm not sure we should even have a visa program to support that goal.

Chalk one up for the Orange Guy

[Tablizer]

I disagree with a vast majority of "his" policies, but this one he got mostly right. H1B's were being used for IT "bodyshops" of de-facto indentured servants instead of what they were intended for: hard-to-find specialists. Kudos to the obnoxious wall-less one.

I wouldn't chalk one up to him yet

[rsilvergun]

Missing from the stories I've read is that the cap was 65,000 2 years ago. Trump's Admin raised the cap by 20,000, which is where those newly favored Master's and Doctoral candidates land.

Meanwhile he still hasn't undone the Obama era executive rule that allows the spouses of H1-Bs to work in this country even though a) doing so would be consistent with the cries of abuse of power we heard for 8 years during the Obama admin and b) He promised to during the campaign.

Donald Trump is a man who consistently hired illegal immigrants for his golf courses. There were interviews with angry Americans who wanted to but couldn't get hired to work his courses. Don't be fooled. He's after the same thing all the GOP is: Cheap Labor.