- I doubt that. It's "easier" to hire because they "agree" to lower wages and its easier to retain them, because their visa status is tied to the employer. The employers have H1B workers on a leash.

The process of hiring an H1B worker in short.

- Hire an immigration lawyer.

- Post an LCA.

- Apply petition to USCIS.

- Pay petition fees (higher for fast track process)

- Respond to USCIS queries.

- Get petition approved.

- Done

- Its a different game if the employer wants retain the H1B worker after 6th year of H1B.

So hiring is not easy. But retaining and paying them is "easy". So why do these corporations take this much pain in hiring H1B workers ? No its not the skills they are after. (after all H1B is lottery based not skill based right ? )

- Post representative salary data, including the last few (5?) hires to this position.

- Publish the job position locally, so it can be filled by local workers preferentially, and then only by H1B if unfilled.

- Ensure the worker is initially paid a salary similar to other existing hires in that position.

I don't understand how people make the leap that H1B is used to lower wages. It's an awfully complex, risky and inefficient way to suppress wages. You would need to lie about "prevailing wages" in order for this scheme to work, which is illegal and would put you and your company into deep trouble.

Publishing the position locally is easily skirted: It's not published in places that people look at, it's not written in a way that makes it sound appealing, and often has some nonsensical requirements: In practice, you don't get local workers applying to them.

Then, there's how you hire for positions as junior as possible, and you keep the person there for 6+ years (the green card process can take pretty much forever if you are mean enough to your employee).

I was an H1B. My compensation was pretty fair when I started compared to the US employees around me, but as years went by, I kept taking on more responsibilities, but my salary didn't change to match. Once the green card process started, changing jobs became extremely unappealing, not just because risks of having to restart the green card process, but because to apply for a green card, my employer asked me to agree to pay attorney fees and costs if I left before the green card was awarded plus one year. Any job worth applying to would have been higher responsibility than the paper job I had been hired for originally, so would I be able to transfer by PERM filing across employers in the first place? Not guaranteed. So I kept the job: Being European in the early 2000s, there was a signifiant green card backlog for me, but not a decade long, so I could wait. All in all, I was an H1B for 8 years.

In the next 3 years after I got the green card, I changed jobs a couple of times and my salary more than doubled: I went from being called a plain engineer that just happened to report to the CTO to becoming principal engineer at a Fortune 500 corporation. It's 5 years later, and last year I made 5 times what I was making in my last H1B year: That level of catch-up doesn't come from me improving that much in the last few years, but total catch-up from where I started from.

Imagine what the big outsourcers, who handle many thousands of H1B applications a year, can do to suppress wages further.

It's depressing to think about the stress and anxiety this might cause someone who is literally facing deportation if he doesn't "suck it up" and keep working at a sweat shop for the same salary they were hired at 5+ years ago.

If you don't qualify for the family-based or refugee route, employment-based immigration is the only viable pathway. The amount of hate I see piled on people trying to come here via the employment-based immigration seems insane to me. These people make it seem like employment-based immigration is not as respectable or legitimate, compared to refugee/asylum and family-based immigration.

The problem with requiring higher wagers is that for people like me, who were students in US -- it's very hard to get an ultra-high salary for the first job out of college. I was a student (on an F-1 visa), and my first job out of college offered me $60,000/year. On my first job on my H-1B visa (in NYC), I was offered $85,000 a year (got slightly over $100,000 with bonuses). Then, just about a year and half later, I was paid (mostly through lucky bonuses) slightly over $200,000 in a single year.

If you raised wage requirements, you'd basically be not allowing people like me to continue to stay and work in the US (after graduation from college), and would instead only allow people from outside who have lots of experience (and skill) and can command a much higher salary upfront.

What is wrong with wanting to prioritise people who have lots of experience and skill?

I think we should just eliminate the limits on employment-based immigration entirely, with the only restriction being that such immigration does not depress US wages (which is already implemented as the LCA today). At the very least, use qualitative limits, not quantitative limits.

But even better, just let peaceful immigrants in. Before 1921, if you were white, there were no restrictions on you moving to the US. So, let's go back to the pre-1921 immigration policy, with the slight modification that non-white people are not banned. The Libertarian Party makes a good argument: https://www.lp.org/issues/immigration

> But even better, just let peaceful immigrants in.

How would the US absorb the hundreds of millions who would come?

Obviously, only a fool would stay here if their condition of living is worse here. If their life is worse here, they'll just move back! Duh! Immigration dropped sharply during the Great Recession, and large numbers of immigrants were actually leaving the country.

The one restriction I support personally is: No welfare or any kind of public support for immigrants. We don't want moochers. Also: don't allow them to sleep on the streets and stuff. We don't want the poor from the whole world flooding our streets, and asking for hand-outs. Kick them out. If someone can't be economically successful in this country, and make enough money to support themselves (i.e. through a job or a business), don't allow them to stay here. That's a reasonable restriction.

Economics will become a natural regulator of immigration. Those who can be successful here will stay. Those who can't will leave. I can predict that, under such welcoming immigration laws, the country's total GDP will grow massively.

On another note, people with facetious concerns about there only being a limited supply of jobs should read up on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

We had an insane level of immigration during the 1880-1921 period, and have we been poorer as a result for it? The US per capita GDP is exceeds that of most Western countries. (I guess one of the downsides is that NYC is now littered with pizza stores everywhere. Thanks Italian immigrants who flooded this country in the early 1900s!) This book covers this history in detail: https://amazon.com/gp/product/0809053446

I'm utterly and thoroughly opposed to those anti-free-market half-loosers who want to "protect" their jobs by preventing competition from others. This is just like the folks who want to require a license for everything, and want to use the power of the state (i.e. the threat of violence) to limit competition from others. With respect to immigration, I very reluctantly (partially) support mandating that immigrants be paid at least as much American workers, as this will prevent wage depression (even though this is an un-libertarian position). Our existing immigration laws already require this with every employment-based visa application. It's called the LCA (Labor Condition Application).

However, from a principled libertarian point of view, if another person else is willing to do your job for less money, well then, that's how much your work is worth. It's bad for society on the whole, for you to artificially inflate your pay grade by limiting the supply of available workers in your field.One of the reasons why medical costs are so high in the United States is that the supply of doctors is severely curtailed by regulation. It drives up cost for everyone, and it a net drag (or a tax) on the rest of people who need medical care. Government-imposed regulatory limits (on professional licensing, trade, immigration, the right to work, etc) protect various small interest groups at cost to everyone else, and are generally bad on the whole.

The problem is hundreds of millions of people have a very low standard of living; an order of magnitude lower than the average American.

5 people living in the same room earning half of the current federal US minimum wage is a huge increase in quality of life for hundreds of millions of people.

You aren't explaining how an increase in supply for low level jobs, an increase in the demand for housing, an increased demand on infrastructure (police, roads, etc), etc is a benefit to US citizens and will result in a better quality of life for them.

> However, from a principled libertarian point of view

And why should we care about a principled libertarian point of view?

They tend to be ideologues who care more about reasoning from principles than actual real world outcomes.

As I stated before, I support requiring that immigrants be paid at least as much as U.S. workers for the particular job they take up. For example, if an immigrant is going to do X job, require that they be paid at least as much as what U.S. workers doing that job earn. Our existing immigration laws already require this with every employment-based visa application. It's called the LCA (Labor Condition Application). In terms of where the wage data comes from--the Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts wage surveys of almost every job in the country.

To clarify: I'm stating here that I support the principal underlying the LCA, I'm not talking about its implementation. Implementing the LCA properly, and ensuring that it isn't circumvented is not the topic of discussion. Some unethical employers circumvent the LCA today by using a lower-wage job title (like calling a senior developer a QA person) to pay a lower wage. But that's a problem of implementing the law--the law itself is fine, it's the onus of the Executive Branch to make sure it is implemented properly (and not circumvented). We're not discussing that here.

> You aren't explaining how an increase in supply for low level jobs, an increase in the demand for housing, an increased demand on infrastructure (police, roads, etc), etc is a benefit to US citizens

This is one of the most idiotic and brain-dead things anti-immigrant people say. You are assuming that new roads cannot be constructed, new houses cannot be built, and most of all (the biggest mistake people make) that there is only a fixed number of jobs in a country. Please read up on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Since the founding of this country, we had a century and half of mass immigration from Europe. Just think of what's happened. New towns were built, cities expanded, and new infrastructure was built to support the booming population. The economy expanded. Your theory implies that the number of jobs, houses, roads, etc would remain fixed to the number they were in 1789. What an idiotic theory.

The least bit of economic investigation shows that it is false. A bit of common sense also shows it is false. Immigrants typically add to the economy of the country. Numerous studies have measured the economic impact of immigrants on the U.S. economy, and have shown it to be a huge net benefit for the native (US citizen) population. For an excellent study, see The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/23550/the-economic-and-fiscal-co...

This stupid fucking theory is so brain-dead, and has been used over and over by anti-immigrant people (like Jeff Sessions) as an argument to effectively ban all immigration, that it makes me want punch the face of the person repeating it. At this point, I automatically assume that the person saying it must be using it knowingly as a straw man argument to ban all immigration, and their real motivation is not based in economics, but rather in xenophobia and/or racism.

We have strong evidence that price fixing doesn't work. You can't double or triple the supply and use a half baked law to keep the price high.

I don't know why you think basic economics doesn't apply to labor.

> But that's a problem of implementing the law--the law itself is fine

That is naive. The truth is these kinds of laws are very expensive to enforce.

Should each immigrant put up a $20k bond?

> You are assuming that new roads cannot be constructed, new houses cannot be built, and most of all

Stop creating strawman arguments.

Adding and expanding infrastructure to a dense city is incredibly expensive. It cost my local government $100 million to widen a few hundred meter stretch of road.

> and most of all (the biggest mistake people make) that there is only a fixed number of jobs in a country

Again, stop creating strawman arguments.

I am arguing that a lot of the working poor will be worse off under your economic free for all. You haven't provided a shred of evidence as to why that won't be the case.

I don't believe there are a fixed number of jobs but I also understand how difficult it is to change fields even as a well educated reasonably wealthy individual.

We have a huge amount of evidence that the working poor struggle to adapt to changing labor markets.

The way you jump to claims of racism and xenophobia despite having put up a very weak argument is telling.

> Should each immigrant put up a $20k bond?

Compliance with wage requirements is the duty of the employer, not the employee. According to your logic, we would punish U.S. workers who are not paid the $7.25 federal minimum wage by asking them to pay $20,000 instead of taking action against the employers who fail to comply with the minimum wage law. So your statement is illogical and invalid.

> Adding and expanding infrastructure to a dense city is incredibly expensive. It cost my local government $100 million to widen a few hundred meter stretch of road.

If your city overspent on roads, that's a result of corruption and/or government inefficiency -- a different and unrelated problem. The cost of increasing infrastructure is paid for by the taxpayers. Immigrants pay taxes, and thus increase tax revenue. If there is a gap in the additional cost and the additional tax revenue generated by immigrants, that is a result of government inefficiency and possibly corruption.

The solution to that problem is to fix government inefficiency, the solution is not to ban immigrants. So your argument here is also invalid.

> I am arguing that a lot of the working poor will be worse off under your economic free for all.

According to your theory, the working poor should have been decimated by the mass immigration from Europe that occurred during much of US history. It wasn't.

Immigration contributes to economic growth. The poorest and least-skilled US workers might be impacted, but that is not the issue at hand here. We're discussing the immigration of educated, skilled immigrants.

For evidence on how immigration contributes to economic growth, see this study: https://www.nap.edu/catalog/23550/the-economic-and-fiscal-co...

---

To recap: you made a straw man argument about your city's extreme inefficiency at building roads. Then you mentioned something about putting up a bond, perhaps as a joke. That's why I brought up the possibility of xenophobia and/or racism, since these sort of comments make me wonder what the real motivations behind this is.

From a libertarian point of view, the problem I have with immigrant-hating people is that they're advocating for the use of violence (i.e. "immigration enforcement") against peaceful immigrants. Libertarians believe the use of violence against peaceful immigrants is wrong: https://www.lp.org/issues/immigration The Libertarians whom you dismissed as "ideologues" are people who are motivated by a strong sense of right and wrong. I know people who were brought here as young children, who've lived here their whole lives. Not that I think this makes them more deserving of being allowed to stay -- any and all peaceful persons should be allowed to stay. But anti-immigrant folk want to send men with guns into their homes, drag them out forcibly at gunpoint, throw them in a cage at some detention facility, and then ship them off to some random country. And for what? They were living peaceful and productive lives here. These anti-immigrant people want to use violence to destroy the lives of peaceful immigrants. I find this evil and immoral.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Interestingly, companies can provide their own wage surveys in order to justify the salary on an LCA. They aren't required to use the DoL wage data. [0]

"For the H-1B, H-1B1, and E-3 programs, employers have the option of using one of three wage sources to obtain the prevailing wage: (1) requesting a prevailing wage from the NPWC; (2) using a survey conducted by an independent authoritative source; or (3) using another legitimate source of information."

Larger companies are using #3. Since it is so vague and there isn't any oversight within the program they are able to manipulate the survey to provide results to their benefit while still claiming "We pay the prevailing wage! (according to our shady wage survey)"

[0] https://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/pwscreens.cfm

Yeah, we all know a huge corporation would never lie, especially not such a shining beacon of progressive virtue as Oracle, where profit always takes a backseat to human decency. I mean, it's not like such a huge company can spare a few hours of paperwork drudge to set up such a scheme; they certainly don't have legions of Romanian dudes ready to file any form they're told to file to keep their job.

TBH, you don't even need to lie. How many government bureaucrats are deeply familiar with wages of a Fusion Enterprise Foobar for Middleware Cloud Baz Devop Ninja, a position that likely exists only in Oracle itself? Just make sure the position is properly "jailed" internally so all hires are consistent ("we don't have any DBAs here, we only have BigData Deployment and Maintenance Specialists for the Cloud Grid, totally different thing") and publish the job "locally" in places nobody will ever pay attention to, or on an intranet job-site where no application will ever be reviewed or actioned.

> It's an awfully complex, risky and inefficient way to suppress wages.

I agree that there are easier ways, like relocating all your operations in cheaper countries - something Oracle has already done almost 100%. But half the developing world seems to be on fire at the moment, and the other half "suffers" wage inflation at increasingly rapid pace, so watchagonnado...

It's because immigration has been politicized in the U.S., and the average citizens' understanding of immigration is what they read in the news.

Which is fair, because immigration is a bureaucracy that the average citizen doesn't need to be an expert at, but this complexity makes it easier for misinformation to spread about it.

Whenever I get dicked around in the interviews by a potential employer, I start to suspect ulterior motives. One time, for my own amusement, I asked to see their H1B public records. The company immediately got very defensive, and got their lawyer involved just long enough to hastily research what I was talking about, assemble the records, and set up all the flaming hoops I would have to jump through in order to see them. It was almost like they were hiding something. I didn't actually want to see the records, I just wanted to see that they were willing to show them (or that they didn't have records because they didn't have any H1B employees).

It was a lot like asking a toddler who ate the last cookie in the jar, and watching them hide their hands from you as they say, "Maybe it was the invisible ghost ninjas." I don't need that level of immaturity in an employer.

I suspect there are other reasons why you're being rejected. This seems like paranoid thinking. Most companies won't provide a rejection reason as a matter of policy.

I only asked after it was already clear I was no longer being considered, and I (politely) asked for some feedback on the interview. They wouldn't say one thing about it, good or bad--wall of silence. So, as is common with whiteboard interviews, I threw out something unexpected to see how they would react. The fact that they reacted so poorly made me feel better about their rejection. It's not me; it's them. I didn't just fail to impress. Instead, I unknowingly avoided a future disaster.

I naturally proceed under the assumption that there is nothing actually wrong with me, as a person or as a candidate for employment. From my perspective, I am a normal person, and a competent software professional. I can be pleasant and sociable. I have been on enough interviews to get a sense of what is "normal" and what is strange--even strange for a tech interview. Usually, that determination only happens after the fact, or very late in the process, but I can still eventually tell when something was out of place.

So when I haven't done anything that would make it clear to me that I have blown the interview, and the company won't give me a reason for rejection, or even suggest one thing that I could improve upon, I naturally take that to mean that there is something wrong with the company. At the least, they are simply too rude to give a candidate any kind of (possibly helpful to them) feedback afterward. But they could also be concealing an unethical hiring practice behind a wall of corporate policy and plausible deniability. There's no way for me to know, and I don't really care by the time I get to that point. There are way too many other companies out there willing to go out on a first date to sit and stew over the ones that won't return your phone calls.

I can't even remember the name of the company now. Which is unfortunate, because I'd have to search through old e-mails to avoid accidentally applying to them again.

At the time, I was toying with the idea of using a company's public H1B records as a way to give me an advantage in salary negotiations. After seeing the reaction of this one company, I decided not to do that.

Their new employer has only to file the paperwork to transfer their visa, so your assumptions about retaining H1B workers are not very accurate.

In one workplace & location in the US: The H1B workers were...not very good. Adequate, and hard working, but not highly skilled and they were brought in mainly because the location didn't want to/couldn't pay wages good enough to hire skilled US-based talent. There the H1B workers were (in general) fearful and unwilling to complain, because they knew their personal odds of getting another US gig were NOT guaranteed. This left me understanding the various H1B complaints, as the workplace was terrible.

In another workplace in a different US location, the H1B workers were equal or better than any US-citizens working there. The workers were highly sought after and were interested in speaking up to make the workplace better. Switching jobs for them WAS a hassle, but a very doable hassle, so the workplace had keep them as happy as non-H1B workers. This left me understanding the OTHER side of the H1B issues, as these workers raised up rather than lowered their workplaces.

I've had multiple friends spend months uncertain if their visas would be renewed (Most companies seem to employ offshore lawyers to handle the visas on the other ends, and I've heard some horror stories about those lawyers sometimes vanishing, or misfiling). Also, I've had friends that had to stay put in a job during a certain phase of getting their green cards - a change in job title would reportedly move them back to the end of the queue of that step. (No idea about the specifics)

All in all, I've found it pretty hard to generalize about H1B workers and the process as an entire whole.

The former H1B workers probably were in the US as an onsite assignment or through a consultancy/contractor. Most Indian consultancies view people as warm bodies on the chair. Which is why you find people with fewer skills.

The latter workers are most likely people who relocated to the US for education or were hired from India from a US employer because of their skills.

It's odd that the suit alleges that white people are discriminated against relative to Indians yet those that are hired are paid more.

Citations from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa

Wow. Why do you think someone on H1B will agree for a lower wage assuming he/she has a good skill set to get into oracle or similar company?

Changing to a diff job on H1B involves some paper work which everyone is used to do now. If we are talking about Indian consulting companies getting low wage employees, it might be partially true.

People in the country on an H1B lose their lawful status immediately after their employment ends, which means being unemployed for any period of time carries risk of deportation. Most people don't want a change in their work situation to translate into being forced to leave their country of residence.

Between these two points, I'd expect people here on an H1B to have a narrower field of jobs that seem attractive - high-risk startups aren't going to be appealing to most, and to generally be less mobile than those who don't fear deportation if a new position doesn't work out. Because of this decreased mobility, employers can get away with paying less.

I hate this argument. All immigration has a first-degree effect of lowering wages, because it increases the supply of labor.

Believe me, foreigners do not like H1Bs, its a piece of shit, and would wish for free passage or as easy as it can be. And if that happened, that would lower wages of everyone, and raise theirs. Reneging that h1b allows to hire cheaper people is reneging immigration.

You want to raise the wages of foreigners, just give them more freedom to change companies, so the parent company will not have as much leverage. But thats not the compnies fault, thats the governments fault. Its the government that suppresses wages in a very negative way.

> Can the DOL back up this claim with salary data to see if Oracle is abusing the H1-B visa system by purposefully keeping wages low?

Readers should note that this is purely your own conjecture. The H1-B visa system is not relevant to this story.

vs

what it says in https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/ofccp/ofccp20170118-0

"The suit also challenges Oracle’s systemic practice of favoring Asian workers in its recruiting and hiring practices for product development and other technical roles, which resulted in hiring discrimination against non-Asian applicants."