Remember, this was shepherded by Stephen Miller and others in the administration whose explicit aim is reducing immigration by every lever available.

People thinking this is some kind of "good move" need to try to remember what administration they're talking about. If you don't understand the play, it's not because you're not being played.

It is politically advantageous for them if fewer immigrants enter the United States, because immigrants tend to vote for the other side. And so they wish to reduce immigration. Like everything else in politics, it is simply about power.

They’re merely suggesting that when considering this immigration policy it should be taken into account that the administration creating it has white nationalists as policy advisers.

> If you don't understand the play, it's not because you're not being played.

For certain technically focused jobs it's easy for other skilled practitioners to tell that you can do it.

A degree is nice but is actually less useful for signalling than concrete, interesting work in the field because the latter is rarer.

I've seen this play out particularly in computer security and low-level software development.

Where lack of qualifications really holds you back is when you're being hired by non-experts. They usually can't evaluate "direct evidence" and must rely on credentials instead. Paradoxically this means you can have an easier time getting hired without a degree at a "top" company than a mid-tier one.

On the other hand if you have a team of domain experts who are passionate about subject "S", they don't actually care about "Q". They care whether you have deep interest, expertise and potential in their domain area. They want to know what you can bring to their team. Now, a lot of times a good candidate will be someone with a PhD in "S", but it's not about the qualification. It's about "S".

"No degree" hires usually don't come in the HR front door as a "fungible human resource". They usually get noticed or referred by someone passionate about "S", for a job doing "S".

I don't actually know if this was the OP's situation; there are other ways this can work. Good recruiters will try to hoover up talent by searching for people with relevant work experience (substituting that for a degree) and throw them into the funnel.

A degree is valuable in some regards, but it is not a mark of quality of candidate. Similarly the lack of a degree is also not a mark against a candidate.

Requiring degrees for doing anything is a big step backward. I'm working for Google and lots of my peers are from non-CS majors (Physics, EE, even literature), but they are all excellent engineers.

>“ Because those required wage increases take effect this week, existing H-1B holders looking to renew their visas might not qualify unless their employers raise their salaries accordingly.”

Copying from my comment below, this is likely to backfire.

Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their visa will just be allowed to work remotely from India or Canada where it's trivial to get a work visa if you have a job offer.

This means the US economy will lose all the taxes and local expenditure in the economy by the family like rent, food, travel, vacations, utilities, medical expenses, entertainment, cars, home sales, etc. etc. And if that works out, the next hire may just be directly hired in India or Canada itself.

If I were in the Canada govt, I'd immediately create a way around the travel ban for workers who's visas didn't get renewed to be able to move to Canada after following a strict quarantine protocol. If the worker was able to work remotely in the US using Zoom, why can't they do the same job remotely in the same time zone in Canada using the same remote working tools? This might be a once in lifetime opportunity for Canada to grow their tech sector, especially if Trump gets re-elected and puts further restrictions.

There is already a small industry in Canada where a company takes a few % of the billing rate in order to sponsor and hold a Canadian visa for people who lost their H1B visas due to increased and inconsistent rejections over the past few years, but whose employer is willing to allow them to work from Canada. This moves a lot of money to Canada.

Also, some tech companies have been outright moving jobs to Canada because they can hire from a global workforce and Canada has been welcoming them. This is going to intensify.

https://www.npr.org/2020/01/27/799402801/canada-wins-u-s-los...

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2020-07-...

There is a reason this regulation didn't follow the normal rule-making and public comment period. Very likely this wouldn't have happened if there wasn't an imminent election.

There's a big assumption in "Since remote work has become acceptable". Some companies are talking about making things permanent, others are already trying to get people back in the office.

And if the remote work swing is both big and permanent, then I think this is less likely a "backfire" situation and more of an "irrelevant" one. Companies looking to save money would hire in the foreign country regardless of the new rules.

It costs companies a lot both monetarily and in time/effort to advertise job postings, get applications, schedule interviews ,hire someone new to do the same job, train them and get them set up and acclimatized until they become productive. If they can still have them working that'd be a big boon for them. Of course this won't happen for all jobs, but is likely to apply to a large fraction.

Someone making a conscious decision to hire in another country takes a lot of effort, but an existing productive employee who is already working 100% remotely for the past 6+ months asking if they could work in Canada or India till the uncertainty around the election is resolved will definitely have a good chance.

You're going to get people who are already productive for the company moving willingly to lower expense parts of the world, while continuing to be identical in disruption to someone moving to Wisconsin.

Companies (more importantly managers) do care about hiring locally, since they have a lot of opportunities to on-board, evaluate and guide - however, once they're all baked in, the shift is less of a concern for the companies.

"Hiring in a foreign country" is different from "We save 18k/employee if they move to Canada and they want to!".

There is at best a 9.5 hour difference between the US and India, which leaves practically no opportunity for real-time cooperative work during normal office hours. Not to mention differences in holidays... and equipment cost... and the cost of doing business in another nation. That all adds up very quickly.

You will not be granted a work permit to work remotely for an American company in Canada.

Canadian Immigration is actually quite strict.

They offer something like 4200 positions every 2 weeks, or about 100k per year.

My understanding is that unless you're at the very top of the list (it's score based) you're likely to be waiting a long time.

Edit: For example the last drawing required you have a score of 471 or above. A 28 year old Indian person with a CS degree and 6 years of job experience who has perfect English scores would only have 441 points.

https://syndesus.com/why-u-s-companies-need-a-peo-to-recruit...

If remote work becomes more acceptable, companies in Canada and EU can also move their jobs outside those countries. Less taxes and laws to worry about.

Sounds like bullshit knife hanging over American tech workers heads. Cut the rope, let's see what happens.

No, that's not the point. If that's what you wanted to achieve then you'd be best off not having any visa system. So obviously this is not what they're optimising for.

If you want to change an existing system, slice the salami thinly.

Whether they intend it or not they are optimizing for moving a lot of work overseas. They seem to think the economy is the same as in 1945. And even to get to 1945 the US imported a ton of nuclear physicists and other scientists.

No. I don't know if you're not familiar with what these terms mean, but by default most people don't have permission to work in the US. That's the default situation if there were no visas.

Visas didn't create this default situation - they're the tool that allows you to get permission beyond the default of not having permission.

If you had no visa system... nobody would have the needed permission. You're thinking everyone would get default permission but that's not the case.

In this article, The Economist covers a study credibly suggesting that a world of free movement would be richer to the tune of $78 trillion a year, suggesting that affected by the competition would do better figuring out how to get a cut of the take.

With these kinds of numbers, immigration by default is the only platform that makes sense. The added economic output could do more than fix the highest budget deficits on record; we could be looking at paying off the national debt, free healthcare, and money left over. You're concerned about negative consequences? We can work something out.

Instead, we fret that this is "bad for local workers", condemning the would-be immigrant and our own nation to linger in mediocrity.

I lived in a country where the biggest export was the (young, competent) workforce.... I still live here, but the country doesn't exist anymore.

This is short sighted.

If an expert is brought in from overseas to do something that local people can't do, then it can create additional employment opportunities on projects and development that would not have been possible without their expertise.

That's the point of the visa.

What I often do see instead are situations where local markets seeking a skill can't or don't want to compete with the labor rates needed for to attract or contract the skills they desire. They instead have to look for more leveraged labor abroad to pass their desired cost savings onto who is willing to accept living in undesired locations, working at below market rates to escape even less desirable situations, etc.

Obviously, this is anecdotal. I'm sure the case does arise where you actually need some highly specialized labor abroad but nothing near the labor pools the H1B program allows. If there are labor supply shortages, you shouldn't need to artificially inflate the market with labor through visa programs. Raise compensation and let the markets adjust to attract talent. This sort of competition is what's forced on the labor market while businesses, yet again, avoid competition when it's against their interests.

If you truly need international labor you should absolutely be required to pay near the top of market rates for the talent is truly that rare. If businesses aren't willing to pay above market rates this talent, it must not be so critical or rare. This should prevent the case of manipulating labor markets under the guise of projected artificial scarcity.

I have nothing against immigration, let people move to this country if they so desire and seek opportunity but let them do so without being leveraged by a business holding their citizenship, freedoms, and future hope of prosperity hostage while suppressing local wages, all to make a quick buck.

But this can take decades.

If Google wants to start a large new compiler project, them opening a job position with a high salary isn't going to convince anyone to go away and do a PhD in compilers, and if it does they wouldn't be available for five years.

If Google want to build a compiler now and they aren't able to hire anyone locally with the skills, what do you want them to do? Abandon the project? That's not great for the US economy is it?

And this can still be fixed by requiring above-market prices for H1B workers (eg. requiring 1.5x average pay for the position needed, so if an average compiler developer in california is paid 100k, you can only get a foreign developer if you pay them 150k - this would force companies to get local talent by raising their pay to 110k, 120k, 130k..., and when they really cannot get anyone, even at 150k, they are able to get someone on a visa).

But if you don't agree, take any example you like that requires at least a few years to come up to speed.

People aren't going to become an expert tomorrow on whatever subject you're hiring for, no matter how much you pay.

If you offered me a million dollars to play the trombone for you I'd love to accept that, but I can't do it until I go away and learn the trombone which would take me years. Offering me ten million dollars wouldn't make me learn it any faster, either.

We say that markets are 'inelastic' - they don't adapt to demand magically.

There are very very few positions, that you can't fill if you offer above-average pay and working conditions, and most H1B visa carriers now, are not unicorns, but usually just someone willing to work for less money than locals (example: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff... )

But in reality, this was never an enforced requirement. It is very common for expensive americans to be fired and replaced with a cheaper holder of an h1b.

It should simply be a fixed number of visas allocated to the highest wage applicants, like an auction, end of story.

1. Being able to hire more people means that local companies can grow bigger and take on more work 2. Merely having more bodies in the economy increases demand for goods in that economy

Rural American towns have extremely tight labor pools and can barely sustain minimum wage.

In banking, you have even more diverse backgrounds than software development.

6 years after that, I was the 2nd hire at amzn, and the rest is history. Does the Trump admin really want to mess with that kind of story?

There is no requirement that you assume good faith. It’s usually a nice (and calming) place to start, but when the evidence is to the contrary it’s reasonable to not give them the benefit of the doubt.

Screwing up details like this could be simple incompetence - the Trump administration is quite bad when it comes to putting “yes men” with little relevant experience in key decision making positions. Or it could be malice - a strongly anti-immigrant policy disguised as something less anti-immigrant. I can easily see it being either one.

> Some of the best software engineers I know

Presumably the best be ok as they'll be able to get in on the O-1 visa for people with exceptional ability? It's everyone else who will be in trouble.

As far as I know there is no actual audit of what the contents of the work are.

This is evidence that H-1B shouldn't apply to those positions, they don't require any skill set that is in actual shortage.