"Oh, but we can't afford to pay them a lot of money, that's not fair!" isn't the sort of argument that tends to evoke much sympathy. We're talking about empowering corporations to bestow US live and work rights on an employee of their choosing, in an end-run around normal immigration procedures.
Honestly, if the salary isn't really high, I'm skeptical about whether this visa is being used properly.
How high? Why is 100k a magic number? 100k isn't even a big deal in SF or NYC. While a high skilled scientist working in say, Corning, NY at Corning Corp or Niskayuna, NY at GE's research labs, 100k enables a king's life. How would you adjust for experience? Perhaps a company sees immense potential and cultural fit in an employee and wants to groom them for future roles? The wages of a 30-year industry veteran would kick the promising young star out of the H1B pool, etc. etc.
Setting a wage threshold without considering other factors is unfairly simplistic.
Besides, companies pay wages based on industry and market averages. You can't suddenly expect them to peg wages to outbid competitors on H1B. Why would Procter and Gamble or Dow or Caterpillar pay university, Facebook, McKinsey, or hedge fund wages? Why should they?
Caterpillar shouldn't pay hedge fund wages; they should pay high-for-the-area wages to draw Americans out there rather than use up competitive slots reserved for the most economically valued immigrants.
[1] Of course, there are land use restrictions etc.
Highly skilled workers do not receive cost of living adjustments. I've been recruited for jobs in low cost of living and high cost of living areas. The pay is the same in both when there is a true shortage of labor.
This is why the auction system is great. If Company A wants to pay Engineer X $500k and Company B wants to pay Engineer Y $50k then clearly Company A has a greater need.
I'm not convinced that jobs in the Midwest generally pay less than in California because of cost of living. It may well be that SWE openings in the Midwest are generally for less-skilled SWEs precisely because it's not worth paying California salaries for those roles.
This rings true to me because, well, there are companies in the Midwest that will pay mid six figures.
Obviously a mom and pop flower shop will not hire a fulltime developer and pay them $500k. They just don't need to pay that much to meet their requirements.
If you're still interested, I suggest that you speak to a headhunter. It's their job to place people and I'm not interested in breaking anonymity.
Policy cannot be determined by anecdotes.
> Company A wants to pay Engineer X $500k and Company B wants to pay Engineer Y $50k then clearly Company A has a greater need.
Hardly a forgone conclusion, there are numerous confounding factors. For example company B might not have the resources/revenue to outbid company A.
Another counterexample of many for why an auction system is terrible: employee y could be a research scientist in industry contributing to the foundation of a new industry. An auction system would give their visa to a fullstack developer hired by a startup flush with funding.
If Company B doesn't have the resources to outbid Company A then we've decided, as a society, that whatever Company A is doing is more important that what Company B is doing.
> Another counterexample of many for why an auction system is terrible: employee y could be a research scientist in industry contributing to the foundation of a new industry. An auction system would give their visa to a fullstack developer hired by a startup flush with funding.
That sounds like a problem with the way that we fund science and not a problem with immigration.
Also, anecdotally, there is no shortage of scientists. I know plenty of people who had to go into tech or finance because they couldn't find science jobs.
Congratulations, you've invented oligarchy!
Many tech startups are able to bid up wages not because they're "creating value", but because they have access to the pockets of a small number of venture capitalists. Which means that if you make VC-backed high salaries a necessary part of doing business, you've handed those VCs the literal authority to regulate commerce and decide who does and doesn't get to be in the market.
And last I checked, "have a small group decide which businesses are allowed to exist" is not considered a free market.
Very true. That's why we need to tax the VCs very highly and break up monopolistic firms.
All of which has nothing to do with the immigration system for skilled workers on temporary visas.
The question being - has that been decided in a fair manner?
VC's don't have access to a significant chunk of US GDP. Sure, some things are over allocated, but Wall Street is limited to the amount of money invested by other people.
As previously stated, the intention of H1B is for ALREADY SKILLED workers in short supply. If they want to groom someone, they should be hiring a US citizen, not going to the H1B pool to find a low-cost foreign alternative.
As to just DBA, like programmers there is a long tail salary range but, the majority make under 150k.
PS: At various times you hear things like the Teaching shortage, or the Nursing shortage. But, that just supply and demand working as intended when a job does not pay very well few people are going to do it. However, when a job does pay well and you can't find people that's a separate problem.
Politicians only want to allow high skilled immigration, since low skilled immigration takes away jobs or at least constituents seem to think so.
For the purpose of a green card application you actually have to show that you tried to recruit a US person for the position, but that system is slow and easily gamed as well: You just make requirements up that only one person in the world can fulfill, the person you are trying to hire.
If you define it based on salary you exclude people who are skilled but in locations, industries or professions that don't pay well, say barbers or teachers as an extreme example. Is that fair? I don't know.
Also, the system kind of takes a simplistic view that there are X number of jobs and Y number of people who are qualified to do that job. It doesn't consider that some people are better at the job than other and that job requirements can be fluid.
Shouldn't this be first class evidence that there is no shortage of barbers or teachers? If there were a shortage then you would pay them more.
Good point. How about high-skilled scientists get paid double that! Besides, the government has to run itself, including the immigration authorities, by taxing these salaries. Best they be high.
US workers be they foreign or domestic benefit from US infrastructure like relativly low corruption, clean water etc. Companies want to benefit from that without paying the associated costs.
Economic liberalism got too far ahead, and failed to distribute the wealth back to society as was promised.
Finally stung, the people turned their back on economic liberalism (for now), and will continue to until they can say "Yay, we destroyed those jobs, now no one needs to do them!".
I'm a natural-born citizen with plenty of friends who were unlucky to be born elsewhere. I want to work with them.
Can't the government accommodate my simple desire to work with my friends locally?
Some of foreign countries have free education. Why not hire their best graduates? They don't have to pay back student loans and can therefore comfortably accept lower salaries than their US counterparts.
Isn't the high salary the corporation would have to pay a local worker just a sign of supply and demand in action?
Why do we now want to interfere with the high-demand worker's ability to negotiate a really freaking high salary? Isn't that exactly the thing we want, for people to be able to charge a lot for their rare and unique skills?
I'm not afraid of regulating business, but this just seems laser-focused to screw the American worker, no matter how you cut it. At the end of the day, if a business can't afford to pay the going local rate, then they don't have a viable business model.
What is wrong with that ? Honestly I dont see why getting Indian and Chinese workers as cheap labor is bad either.
Whatever regulations drove out manufacturing sector from USA mgiht drive out tech from USA too.
Further, if you use H-1Bs to fill positions that you could have filled with local talent, then you're taking that visa away from another company that might legitimately need it. Making H-1Bs dependent on bidding or pay seems a plausible way to ensure that they are going to companies with real need and not just companies that are trying to undercut the labor market.
Such a system seems like it works for the large Facebooks and Googles of the world as well as smaller startups and companies in areas of the country with lower CoL. It also works for citizens, green card holders and H1-Bs, since it encourages employment of non-H1-B employees and similar wages for all types of employees. It would only penalize the body shops, those that underpay H1-Bs and those companies that rely on too large a percentage of H1-Bs for their workforce. The only thing you'd have to do is ensure that the local employees are roughly the same job function as the H1-Bs, so that companies couldn't offset underpaid H1-B engineers with similarly-paid customer support or similar gaming of the system.
p.s.: Just in case you're wondering, I'm an immigrant and I left the bay area exactly for the reasons I'm highlighting.
There is no good reason for most of the bay area to be strip malls apartments and 2 story apartment complexes. There are more than enough examples of cities(Barcelona, Paris) with character, history and more vertical housing.
https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/26/youre-not-crazy-the-bay...
> About 10 percent of the LCAs approved last year, or 53,500, were for jobs in Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
But, it also adds that:
> More than one employee can be attached to an LCA, and there’s no limit on how many a company can submit. As a result, the number of LCAs accepted by the Department of Labor often far exceeds the number of H-1B visas issued.
Furthermore, when a person on H-1B already living in SJ or SV change jobs, they file a new LCA. This gets counted in the 53,500 number from the article.
Thus, IMO, it is incorrect to claim that "more than 50k people" moved into Bay Area on H-1B in 2015. Please correct me if I am wrong.
You're also skipping over the fact that H1B people have families and tend to bring family members into the area.
Overall I'm comfortable to say the number is still probably in the right ballpark until I'm shown evidence of the contrary.
We have to agree to disagree on this, I guess. I find no evidence to support the claim that H-1B workers have any significant effect on the Bay Area housing situation.
H-1B is supposed to be for hiring top notch people with valuable, specialized skills. Those people should be making a lot of money.
H-1B is not meant to bypass the regular supply and demand of the job market that usually helps adjust salaries.
I'm not convinced there would be a huge demand for H-1b visas if companies couldn't underpay them relative to people with green cards or citizenship. Certainly on the margins there are companies that are looking for specialized skills, but for the most part the industry likes high H-1b caps because they depress wages.
Also, this would handicap companies in low-cost-of-living regions of the US. This includes a massive chunk of the economy in solid economies with low costs of living like Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia.