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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.
Why is America even taking these in instead of training their own?
The description above clearly states "those holding advanced degrees granted by U.S. institutions", so not advanced degrees from overseas countries.
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.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
1) A PhD or Masters is not a course. Its a research program. There are "Masters by Courseworks", which is slightly different, but generally when someone is doing a Masters or PhD its because they are researchers. And unless someones got a sneaky phoneline to God, theres nothing to "rote" memorize.
2) I hate to break it to you, but US Universities are not generally the highest categories. There are some, but the stats aren't great. 1.7% of US universities fit in the "Top 100", versus UK with 2.5% and Australia with 3.1% I should observe US figures are highly tainted by the proliferation of bogus universities (Liberty University, and other dodgy thinktank feeders). Sure you have things like Caltech or Stanford , but for every Caltech, you've got a hundred busted ass rural universities or "Praeger mail order university where you get a doctorate for declaring the world is flat" type places.
Don't be so arogant, and consider traveling.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
H-1Bs were created in response to a trend that research turned up. More and more U.S. college and university graduates were accepting jobs overseas, resulting in a net drain of skilled graduates out of the country. The idea behind the H-1B was to make it so that a well-educated foreigner could get a job in the U.S. more easily, countering that trend. Many other countries run a similar visa program for skilled workers. It also gave another option for foreign students who recently graduated from college in the U.S. to get a job here after their student visa expired. So more of those foreign students could stay in the U.S. after graduation instead of returning home, again countering the trend. The long-term idea being that the H-1B would be a first step towards U.S. citizenship (meaning the skilled worker stays here permanently).
Unfortunately the program got exploited by companies trying to (ab)use it to hire cheap foreign workers to replace Americans. Those job listings you've seen with a ridiculously specific list of required qualifications are mostly H-1B visa jobs. The listing was carefully crafted to exclude anyone from qualifying for the job except the person they wanted to get the H-1B visa for. Companies are required to advertise those jobs for a certain length of time to prove that no American is capable of doing the job. Adding skills or certifications which aren't really necessary for the job but possessed by the foreigner they have in mind for the visa is one of the tricks to pass the advertisement requirement without "finding" any qualified Americans.
Favoring graduate degree holders to receive H-1Bs is a step in the right direction. There are a lot fewer of them than graduates with a bachelors degree. And their field of research tends to be a lot more specialized and thus legitimately harder to find a qualifying American.
Because they are importing 85,000 people a year to dillute and reduce salaries in the US. It's all about avoiding paying fair wages.
America, by itself doesn't want them, as we have more than enough people, and we have colleges and skills churning out CS majors by the legions.
H-1Bs are wanted by business because of pure money and power. A developer will wind up with a $40k salary, who normally gets 80-100k, and there is also the control aspect. If a H-1B gets fired, they get deported, so they wind up working 100+ hour weeks and putting up with malfeasance that no US citizen/resident would tolerate.
The H-1B program is basically a violation of national sovereignty for business profits.