The Trump administration even tried to make it so that if you're working legally while waiting on your extension visa(can take more than 8 months) and it happens to get rejected, they will report you to ICE for deportation proceedings calling the period you worked legally as being illegal, creating a Catch-22 where you're accruing illegal stay after you have to stop working, but cannot leave the country because you're waiting for a court date, since not showing up in a court is another new crime in itself. You have to live without a salary and being able to work at all, and the immigration courts are overloaded and once you accrue 6 months of illegal stay, you can be banned from entering the US for 10 years on any visa.
If you think that sounds too ridiculous to be true, read this:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new-u...
This is the reason that many talented folks prefer to work for companies on a contract through a staffing company that holds the visa that allows for easier job hopping without losing your chance of getting a green card, or getting fired on Friday and accruing illegal stay starting from Saturday. Otherwise, why would you give away 40% to >50% of your hourly rate to a middleman?
In this new environment, if you somehow get caught in an ICE raid while selling your car for pennies and puting all your belongings that dont fit in luggage in the dumpster or whilepacking your bags, you might get shipped to jail inspite of not violating a single law before you got fired.
The companies oppose these fixes because they will less leverage over their employees on visas and they might job hop more if underpaid or overworked.
Fix these problems instead of creating weird custom rules against staffing companies and the problem will fix itself for the most part.
Citizenship questions are illegal but still get asked. Are you going to outlaw asking about an employee's immigration status? Good luck enforcing that.
The biggest leverage the companies have on immigrant labor is the threat of being fired and deported, if you make that less costly and not turn their life upside down in a day, the problem will be lessened and make the job market more fair and competitive for everyone looking for jobs, and also greatly hurt staffing companies. It also lets the employee say "No." more easily when asked to work 80 hours for the fourth week in a row with no extra pay. This is the reason companies lobby against making this happen.
If they want to retain people, Infosys will have to increase their salaries to close to market rate by charging the client more, which means the client is less likely to hire from Infosys. Either way it's a win.
Infosys made almost $11B in 2018. They are not going to sweat the salary of few H-1B engineers. If American engineers, or Indian ones having Green Card, will do the job - liaison the communication between onshore and offshore teams - they will hire those if H-1Bs are not available. Or, your employer might move the whole operation to India, laying off the onshore team.
TL;DR: You are probably barking up the wrong tree. The "cheap" H-1Bs you hear about are hired by American staffing companies, not outsourcers.
Sure. I think that's fair, but getting a work visa should be harder in the first place.
One of my previous companies got IT workers heavily through a big contracting company.
We received folks who: 1) Didn't understand their domain 2) Couldn't communicate in English, neither verbal or written
This person clearly never visited a US Consulate, or if they did, they never were asked to speak English. This is not a complaint about an individual's accent or elementary grammar. This person does not know the grammar period. And no, they were not disabled.
How will USCIS and consulate officers be able to do a better job determining if someone is suitable to work in a company than the company themselves? Why should tax dollars be spent because companies are too lazy or incompetent to filter and vet people they are hiring?
We hire an external company to send us people because they have supposed to have vetted them. We pay for that service.
This isn't just a company problem. Feel free to call the company lazy all you want, but why is someone who has no expertise in an area and cannot speak English allowed to enter the country under a program that lets exceptiobap people in because apparently we don't have talented people here?
So if I understand you correctly, we should let people enter the country without vetting them because its a waste of taxpayer money? Let's say my employer perfectly filtered out this person as soon as they came in the door. Let's say the contracting company employing him lets him go too. So what if he now falls on the social system? It's cool? You're okay to pay for that?
With respect, your logic makes no sense to me. We shouldn't allow unqualified people to goldmine through these programs. There needs to be a much higher bar. Right now there isn't one at all.
What social system burden? H1Bs are ineligible for unemployment benefits even though they are forced to pay for state unemployment insurance. Ineligible for food stamps because they don't have a green card and getting one will take atleast a decade of working. They pay social security taxes but are ineligible for SS unless they keep paying into it for about 10 years and are older than 65. Ineligible till they're 65 for Medicaid even though they pay Medicaid taxes. If they leave the country before that age they get no benefits.
The only burden they may cause if they get very sick or in an accident and get taken to the emergency hospital where they have to legally treat them. You want a society where a fellow human is dying on the roads because you don't want to save a few cents per year for it in taxes because they were born in the wrong place? You want the ambulance to check their papers and finances before administering first aid?
Are there reports of people coming in on work visas and then becoming a public charge? I've seen several people just leave the country if they get laid off and can't find a job. There are much better opportunities and families back home for them than being essentially homeless in the US. Perhaps some start working at gas stations temporarily and the like.
Even if they had hired something directly, the government program is only responsible for checking the educational degrees, the level of security risk they may pose and not much else. Ever go to the DMV and not feel like everything can be a hundred times better if they tried a bit more? That's how efficiently and effectively government bureaucracy typically runs. There are really bad examples out there happening in overseas consulates. There was a guy whose passport was returned unstamped four times over a time period of 6 months although he was granted the visa.
You want the government to conduct knowledge tests(what kind of knowledge test?) and language tests for everyone that companies want to hire? Why should competent companies that can make proper hires be punished by even more bureaucracy and delays because a few companies cannot be bothered to be competent in choosing employees to hire or good staffing companies?
If you think it works well, why not extend the same govt run knowledge tests to citizens before companies hire them locally? If the government is good at scouting for talent overseas and then spoonfeed them to companies, why can't it do the same locally so companies can save HR costs?
The government via the H1B program does not promise vetted and amazing talent to companies. All it does is say "If you're having difficulty hiring citizens locally but find someone talented who is not a citizen, we will provide a way for you to legally hire them as long as they have a four year bachelors degree".
Anyway my point was that the free market solution is being held back because of the power that staffing companies and regular companies hold over their immigrant employees. Reduce or remove that power and natural market forces will kick in and automatically hurt staffing companies and normal companies that are trying to game the system by paying less or making people work more or stick with their jobs for years on end. You cannot imagine the levels of stress and anxiety immigrants go through in fear of being legally out of status within an hour and subject to deportation. I think everyone how bad it feels to get fired or laid off. Now multiple that by ten because you have no legal status anymore. It is so bad that some were seeking psychological help, therapy and counseling when Trump got elected because of panic attacks.
Even if companies find only talented people, what's stopping companies from overworking and underpaying them, and not giving them pay hikes as their experience goes up? The same abuse that reduces labor power in the market will still happen.
Companies will be forced to pay more and treat them well by not overworking them, or else immigrants will switch jobs sooner than later. If any of the above happens, they'd hire from overseas less or stop doing it because it's not as profitable anymore compared to hiring local citizens, unless they need really someone talented that they cannot find locally, in which case competent people that were selected via interviews will come in, instead of incompetent people.
This would be a huge blow to the third party placemtn body shop business model which is where a lot of abuse happens. It'd go belly up overnight unless pay rates goes up. Why would someone stick with them instead of joining the clients directly.
If a company brings in someone incompetent, they pay the price for having a bad employee compared to their competitors. Even if they fire them, that company just wasted a lot of time and money in fees and salary etc. onboarding someone they had to fire.
If people are fired, let them stay legally stay for a few months trying to find a new job and then start accruing illegal status after that time. What purpose is served by kicking people out immediately causing them to violate rent leases and sell their possessions in a big rush? If anything, it helps the local economy a bit.
Remember how Google, Apple, etc. etc. got into deep trouble for no-poaching agreements and were dealt a heavy fine for hurting the labor market? There is a similar effect going on now with tying visas to companies and making it hard for immigrants to switch jobs. Having vetted and talented people stuck in jobs for years at low pay rates and high work hours isn't going to help the situation.
The government is offering a program to bring in the best and brightest to fulfill jobs that we can't otherwise fill. It needs to do a better job regulating that program, because it's clearly being abused. If it can't afford to regulate it or doesn't believe that regulation is affordable or a good use of tax payer money, than the government should rescind that program.
It's really that simple.
Show me where the H1B program or mandate says anything about the best and brightest. Perhaps you confused H1B with the O-1 visa program or the EB-1 priority green card employment category?
>or doesn't believe that regulation is affordable or a good use of tax payer money, than the government should rescind that program.
The program isn't run from tax payer money, it pays for itself and then some.
>How is the Uscis funded?
>Funding. Unlike most other federal agencies, USCIS is funded almost entirely by user fees. Under President George W. Bush's FY2008 budget request, direct congressional appropriations made about 1% of the USCIS budget and about 99% of the budget was funded through fees.
On top of the application fee that funds USCIS, there is a visa fee to fund the consulate visa process. And top of that there is a $500 anti-fraud fee per application. On top of that there is another large fee that is used to fund job training for citizens which has raised billions of dollars so far that has been used to help train citizens. On top of that some types of employers are charged another large fee to fund.... border security with Mexico! shrug. Just the fees can cost $4000 to $5000. There is also yet another $1400 on top of all this to process the application faster, otherwise it can take 8 months to more than a year. Google it if you want to find out the details.
Sorry, but it is clear from our conversation that you don't have the first clue about anything related to this topic. I won't be replying anymore until you try and bring yourself up to speed on what you're ranting and raving about based on one off anecdotal bad experience.
I thought the whole intent was to bring in people to work jobs because we don't have talented people to fill those positions? Or has that definition shifted according to your perspective?
>The program isn't run from tax payer money, it pays for itself and then some.
It allows companies to flood the market with extra talent to keep wages suppressed while also holding leverage over folks who can either shut up or go back to Hyderabad. Someone is making money off of it, for sure. I don't think it's in the best interest of the job market and specifically earners, and you haven't convinced anyone that it is.
>Just the fees can cost $4000 to $5000.
Is $5,000 that much money to you? I would argue the cost of H1B's are much higher, especially when you consider the number of folks coming in who are unqualified and simply holding a job so a bunch of middle men can take a cut of their pay, not to mention the extra paperwork and headache it causes someone like me because I can gamble on an H1B contractor through Infosys or Larsen and Toubro or find an alternative means to fill head count.
>Sorry, but it is clear from our conversation that you don't have the first clue about anything related to this topic. I won't be replying anymore until you try and bring yourself up to speed on what you're ranting and raving about based on one off anecdotal bad experience.
My experience is with all the people previously in multiple non-tech companies and then two of FANGs, including my current one.
>I won't be replying anymore until you try and bring yourself up to speed on what you're ranting and raving about based on one off anecdotal bad experience.
Your responses get more and more emotional, which (I could be wrong) makes me think you're an H1B yourself or have an inherent bias towards H1B's because of family or other connections.
FYI - Showcasing your frustration that we don't believe you at your word and throwing a hissy fit doesn't convince anyone you're correct. If that's your method of convincing people of your ideas, you won't get very far and if you do, the people you work with will jump ship because of you.
When that happens, the company takes a hit and is less likely next time to bring in more people because of the associated costs of HR, interviews , visa fees, immigration lawyers, onboarding, time wasted on getting them up to speed on the project etc.
It would be a huge blow to body shops.
This results in fewer people coming in unless they are really needed.
Right now H1B employees are stuck in jobs without normal pay hikes for years and can be forced to work longer hours. That's how the companies make their costs back and much more.
It shouldn’t be surprising but it kinda shocks me how many American tech companies keep making these mistakes. The ones that avoid them seem to be ones whose execs have prior engineering background.
Can you clarify this? Of the dozens of jobs I've had in the United States, every one required me to prove that I'm a citizen or eligible to work in the country.
The most idiotic thing here is giving a visa to a company based on lottery. As the original comment pointed out, there should be a point system where you are graded based on education and experience.