- An international student graduates at the top of their class in Stanford in CS, and goes to work for a tech company. What visa do they use?
The correct answer is F1 (OPT) for one year, with OPT STEM extension for 2 extra years, while they apply for H-1B. If they weren't a STEM major, regardless of their actual role, they have a single year to apply for H-1B, with a ~30% chance of success, before being asked to leave the country. Regardless of their qualifications.
We all know the H-1B is susceptible to abuse. But it is also the main feasible channel for any international to work in the United States. (Excluding country-specific visas, transfers.)
But shouldn't qualified H-1B applicants be supportive of immigration reform?
I would, if I had any confidence that it would be done well. As things are, changes almost always end up hurting the applicants. See: the recent flood of RFEs. See: the suspension of H-1B premium processing.
The entire lives and livelihoods of immigrant workers, even exceptionally high-skilled ones, hinge upon delicate archaic bureaucracy and paperwork, not to mention politics (see: the fear of the government unilaterally suspending the OPT STEM extension). Introducing further uncertainty to the process almost always makes things worse, and that's why many of us are nervous about any proposed changes.
And if you look at the massive absusers of the system(Toptal, Wipro etc), that use it to lower pay, I feel as though many of those jobs would have instead been outsourced oversees anyway. So at the very least, for a US perspective, the taxes and consumer spending are still partly captured in the US as opposed to another country.
This is what the H1-B is/was supposed to be like. It does seem that it has been abused.
That's how the program is sold and it's incredibly easy to game. Require 10 years of Swift experience and suddenly the candidate pool is dry. Generally most, if not all, IT job postings list an unrealistic and fictitious skill set.
> I was also paid more than the employees at the company I was contracted to work at
The cost of a Full-time Employee is usually something like 140-160% of their salary. So a contractor making 120% more than an FTE is still cheaper for the employer.
Can't such abuse be avoided by requiring the "winning" candidate to show that he indeed has 10 years of Swift experience?
Every economist believes in supply and demand curves. If there are any H1Bs being awarded to replaceable programmers (as opposed to specialized programmers with no American counterparts, as was the intended use of the system), then wages are being depressed. It's practically a law of physics.
However, this assumes that employment is fluid, and that people are allowed to choose a profession or trade that aligns with market signals and their own personal interests and preferences. In short, every citizen who considers becoming a developer int he valley is also free to become a plumber in Duluth or a lawyer in New York City. Or open a scented candle shop, or a surfboard shaping business.
The point of the H1B visa is to create a system where visa restrictions and sunk costs create a pool of workers who aren't allowed to make those choices, and are limited to a few fields where Silicon Valley CEOs have declared a "shortage".
And, astonishingly, many people talk about this shortage without discussing wages, work conditions, career stability, and the other options available to highly skilled people who can choose other professions (you know, those pesky free folk who just won't become developers in the valley at the rates tech CEOs have decided they should).
The US has a really grim history of creating non-free worker classes in order to undermine free labor markets. This is another installment of it, though the H1-B abuses, clearly documented and really bad, are nonetheless minor compared to some of these historical horrors.
You incorrectly imply that tech jobs will expand organically in a frontier-like or exponential fashion as happened in the past. That doesn’t actually happen in the tech sector. Tech companies seek to exclude alternative hire options from other STEM fields (engineering, science, etc.) because those alternatives would not be as cost efficient. Instead the tech jobs grow linearly (like most mature industries and systems) and only by the annual cap on visas being granted.
How you can tell that there is no absolute shortage of tech labor is that the number tech jobs never grows beyond the visa cap. If there were a shortage, companies would find more creative ways to exceed the cap limits like the above mentioned alternatives or creating training factories to increase the supply to meet organic needs/demand.
So while this mature system is not necessarily a fixed lump of labour, the mature constraints that apply seem to limit any organic growth to the current regime we find ourselves in. That is to say that companies constrain the tech labour system to their very skewed preferences instead of organic growth, and as a result the economic pie is growing less and less, and there is more and more competition over slice distribution. Incumbents are absolutely in direct competition with foreign labour and there is less overall growth to share equitably. Again, not a fixed lump of labour, but increasingly competitive to the point of very limited growth from within.
What that translates to the H1B loving crowd here, is that the second the H1B visa and all the other ponzi scheme tactics are no longer profitable to the ruling elite, like if the cost of an H1B were doubled and tripled, as they should be (e.g., must pay the H1B holder triple what a domestic employee would receive, and tax the employee at double the going tax rate, while also paying a $200,000 employment tax along with $200,000 annual visa maintenance costs), you would not see any H1Bs or any immigration. The ruling class are pillaging the working and middle class USA through a kind of leveraged buyout type of con job where they are getting their own people to finance and support their own pillage. It's why the ruling class is so in support of "immigration" because "immigration" makes the ruling class wealthier and more powerful as a matter of marginal increase through every "immigrant" that is imported to pillage wealth and opportunities from the native population.
But I get it, as long as people here are largely benefiting and getting wealthy from the exploitation, the exploitation is invisible to most. Not even to mention the detrimental effects of skill concentration by extracting and draining the most driven and motivated and educated from their respective countries, whether they are Nicaragua or France. All but the centralizing power are degraded by immigration and no rationalization or delusion will change that reality.
You realize the « native population » of the US was victim of a genocide right ?
There definitely is inertia on moving companies for higher wage. However in my experience the public posting of title and salary has lifted net wages as it provides transparency on wages that otherwise would be kept hidden from employees.
No one should have a privilege to employment. You and your potential employer shall have the right to associate freely.
They should be seen just as regular competitors [with really hard barriers of entry]. If anything, blame the state agencies for making their lives worse and yours more unpredictable because by the blink of an eye, they can make the market go one direction or another, unjustly.
We should end these artificial barriers. Not blame the victims (that includes not only the immigrants but also locals who can't figure out the real market forces both to plan their careers and to make hiring decisions).
Speaking as a non-American:
I have issues with the intent too, because I am not happy about the fact that this is a country developed by immigrants, yet there is anti-immigrant sentiment. People have to 'prove' themselves to get in, and even there's no guarantee of success there with clear goalposts, and only extra-ordinary ability people (O-1 visa) can get in without much headache. A bit like locking the door behind you IMO.
I want to say that I understand the problems unrestricted immigration will place on the country. However, there is a position that will allow many more immigrants than current immigrant visa system allows for, and we are not close to that.
I believe the reason is that people aren't comfortable possibly having their salaries drop by a small percent. The hypocrisy is what really gets to me though. America is touted as a free market economy, especially by the Republicans who fight for less government intervention in business, yet they're the ones advocating for tighter immigration controls which is the opposite of free market.
Apologies if this seems like a rant. You might not get what I'm trying to convey because you probably not know the feeling of being dealt the shitty hand of being born in a place that isn't a first world country.
There is also another way of looking at it, that I actually believe, which is that immigrants create more jobs than they take in the long term (not talking generations). If you look at the big startups right now and even the Fortune 500, you'll find that many are founded by first generation immigrants, and a lot more second generation immigrants.
However, your Joe six-pack doesn't see that far, and neither has the long term health of America in mind, because if he did, he would venture out to think more critically. He's worried about what is going to happen to his job a year or two from now. Unfortunately, that affects policy to a greater effect, because that affects who he votes for and what political platform he agrees with.
I'll end this discussion with my opinion that specific immigration policies like the H1-B can hurt avg. salary because they tie the employee to the company. And the company can abuse this by paying a lower wage than market rate.
The solution to this is to allow free movement within companies without fear of being kicked out, and you won't see the abuse everyone brings up when they talk about H1-B. I haven't seen a proper discussion about this on HN. The discussion almost always oscillates between two entirely different topics, one of which is if we should allow immigrants to come in and work at all, and the other topic being how staffing companies abuse the lottery system and inflexibility of the H1-B visa.
I used to make just USD 5-10 an hour as a senior software engineer before joining a company in another country. I have no sympathy for people who were born in a developed country and feels entitled to get a job I could possibly get just because I wasn't born there. Sure, locals should be valued, but that doesn't mean you should forbid people from outside a geopolitical area to compete with fairness.
Mind your own business instead of tyring to regulate other people businesses through the government as you were a soviet. If you like communism so much and want to have the state control the employement market, why don't you move to North Korea?
Now, instead of trying to show how a heartless libertarian am I, what about if you expose why you think you have a right to force people to hire you instead of letting them choose between you and me?
With that said, you made an awful lot of assumptions based on a single comment. I am honestly curious about what (if any) regulations you feel are necessary and which you do not.
I'll help make the discussion easier. Trimming the snark out of your comment, it sounds like you'd rather favor a merit-based immigration policy. What do you think is the best way to implement that?
I don't favor a merit-based migration policy. I favor free markets. Free trade or free migration should be the norm. I don't believe in the central government. This isn't something to be 'implemented'. In actually, most the state does is to hinder immigration by those who would provide great value to the society. If you are uneducated and have not much to lose, it doesn't make much difference for you to migrate to somewhere where you will end up with the lower-income jobs, and there is nothing bad with it. You even freed a person born in a wealthier place to go work on something better for themselves. This is how you end up seeing people from some ethnics working as janitors more often than even americans, in the USA. This is good for both the immigrant [who are willing to spend, say, ten years working illegally] and to the local people. However, the people with higher education will likely just go somewhere else (like me) if you don't let them work legally there, then you have something like a brain drain. The only difference is that the brains weren't there in the first place, so you won't notice much what you are losing [1].
Related: [1] That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen Frédéric Bastiat http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html
I can tell this discussion is very personal to you but it doesn't help discourse to jump to such conclusions.
The staunchly libertarian stance ironically seems to have some of the same shortfalls as those holding the communist perspective that you railed against. Namely, they only seem to work well in theory rather than practice. There appears to be some pushback in countries where constituents feel they have too loose of an immigration policy. In those cases, many have not felt liberated by the influx of immigration like your comment predicted. So I was curious if you had a nuanced perspective on where the appropriate balance lies.
For those without a nuanced vantage point (to quote HL Mecken), "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Unfortunately, it seems like there are people on both sides of the debate lacking that understanding.
I mean why should ANY worker want to make less and thus have lower standards of living. Just doesn't make much sense to me.
In the words of the Copley First Amendment Center, "People have the right to appeal to government in favor of or against policies that affect them or in which they feel strongly. This freedom includes the right to gather signatures in support of a cause and to lobby legislative bodies for or against legislation"
Having said that I strongly think that people usually exaggerate the effects of h1b on wages and employment for natives in general.
However, I see now that such an argument is shortsighted. There is no evidence outside of my own conjecture to support such a thing and my frustration with my own experiences in the industry is causing me to scapegoat H-1Bs instead of taking an objective look at the problems in our industry. While I still may not agree with H-1Bs, it is because I believe that there are qualified Americans that could take those jobs, not because they're harming our industry as a whole.