I'm glad our government has introduced the H1B program to help out employers like you who are dealing with a shortage of tech workers (who will work for 2/3 market and will do anything you say because if they get fired they'll be deported).

H1b should be a bid salery to play not first to apply. That is we will allow x of them, when you sponser someone you commit to paying them some salary for the full term - no layoffs (you get fire for cause but that is a legal thing they can take you to court for , and the courts can force you to give back pay if it wasn't a good cause) , you should know your budget can afford them. , someone who really is the best , offer them a million dollars to be sure they get in , just a warm body , if they don't get in who cares.

There are ways to abuse the above, but note they can always quit.

Add "automatic green card at the end of three years if sponsored again by the same employer".

Otherwise, the job would just be extremely cushy. Work the absolute bare minimum not to give cause for dismissal, and you're untouchable for the duration.

...If your goal is to force companies to hire native citizens wherever possible, and only h1b workers when absolutely necessary, that might be the point.

Companies should vet their emplopees better than that before hiring. Though there is potential to fire for cause if someone who should be able to do the work in 40 hour weeks isn't getting it done.

note that I added a 40 hour work week qualifier above.

This means small companies may not get good talent that value things besides salary (wfh, perks, fun project) and will have to compete with corporations for people who only cares about money. This may (or may not) impact startups

Same as ever though, this is tangential to H1B.

Stop it, no one "values things besides salary", and you know it.

If you people only valued salary you'd all be in sales :)

I value a good manager, a fun team, an actual PTO policy I can use, and cool projects to work with at about $40,000 a year. Salary is valuable but it is not the only valuable thing.

Salary is the most valuable thing, however. Because I would happily take a salary of 1 billion dollars with an awful manager and a no-fun team. And, conversely, I would never take a job with the best people on planet earth for a salary of one dollar.

If you were offered a job with an awful manager and a no-fun team for $250,000, and a job with the best people on the planet for $249,999, which one would you choose?

Right, naturally the extent matters, but it's still the most important statistic when doing cost analysis.

Also, other statistics are just wage in disguise. Work-life balance refers to working less, which means a higher wage. PTO is also just working less, which is a higher wage. WFH means less driving + lower cost of living, which is an effective higher wage.

Well, of course, you can make up hypotheticals. I used to say that you couldn't pay me enough to work in NYC. But of course I didn't literally mean that I wouldn't take FU money for a couple years to work there (not doing anything criminal etc.). But that wasn't going to realistically happen.

If you can't live off of $40,000 a year, you are not taking that job. I'm not saying there aren't people already independently wealthy and "working" for fun but those are an infinitesimal exception.

I think they mean that they will take a job with those benefits for 40k less than a job without. I assume generally they are looking at positions that pay substantially more than that.

I get your point, but if that were completely true, no one would work in the videogame or embedded software sectors. They pay dramatically less, especially early in career.

That's only 99% true, but the 1% of exceptions will get an egregiously disproportionate amount of attention and concern.

I hired a developer who just wanted a cushy job and I offered him a cushy job.

I offered 4 day work week, no on-call, no overtime, but paid less than their previous employer (because I couldn't afford it).

I am sure lots of people value things besides salary.

Changing the work hours doesn't technically affect "salary" but it's a change in wages. I think your example mostly reinforces the point, but we should be using the word "wages" to be clearer.

You effectively offered them a higher dollar/hour rate. And depending on how much they value their free time, that's more $$ in their figurative bank.

I don't think I even paid them more per hour. The problem was that all the other companies only want to hire full time programmers, so I was able to hire them by offering a job with fewer hours.

Also, they complained that their previous job was super stressful because the sales people kept making promises to customers that were really hard to keep ("of course we'll implement this in two weeks") and so they were constantly scrambling to meet impossible deadlines.

Are you serious? I know quite clearly that people do value things besides salary!

Of course people value things besides salary, but if there was no salary or the salary would not be enough to live off, none of those things matter in any way. So first and foremost (unless you're a billionaire's son) is salary, for everyone.

Perhaps so, but in our industry that is a very low bar. Your point may become technically correct, after you have sliced it so finely, but it is no longer very interesting.

I mean, that's not entirely true.

Mostly true, yes. A monthly pizza and beer party won't make up for lack of salary, but extra PTO that I can use can.

Like...if I had the choice of a job that offered $200K/year but only 2 weeks PTO, and another offered only $185K but 5 weeks PTO, I'd take the latter.

Honestly I'd love a company that gave 4 weeks PTO with the option to take up to another 4 weeks unpaid.

Fidessa is pretty famous on Wall Street for paying lower salaries but being much more fun to work for. They have tons of at-work and after-work events (with and without alcohol). There are lots of people who stay at Fidessa for much less money than they could make at another firm.

I'd argue that most workers value several things over salary. Very few people are trying to maximize their income at the expense of everything else. They tend to limit their job searches to places near their families. They apply to jobs they'd enjoy doing or at least wouldn't mind vs jobs they'd hate but which pay better. They don't apply to jobs that pay well but are also highly dangerous. etc.

Money > everything just isn't how most people see the world.

Maybe software-adjacent people applying to startups, but in general, this obviously can't be true. Relatively low-paying but high-status jobs, like FBI agent, military officer, elected official, judge wouldn't exist, nor low-paying passion work like social worker, wildlife conservation, most non-profits, low-paying jobs that are simply fun like most musicians, pro athletes in unpopular sports. Plenty of capable, talented people who could be making more money choose not to.

Not sure if it meant to be joke but I do value things besides salary. I literally accepted offer with 40% drop recently. Salary is important and it doesn’t make sense to work for free. But after some threshold increase is salary doesn’t change life drastically. But not spending 40 hours doing boring stuff changes life a lot.

You're halfway there. H1Bs should also require payment to the government of $250k/year. Style it as a fee or a tax or whatever.

one possible option to prevent ghost job posting for visa is to force employers to share the hiring month, salary, qualification and annonymized resume of the H1B/GC employer with all those they interviewed or applied. This will give closure to those applicants that didn't get the job.

In 2023 there were 755,020 H1-B admittances. Why was it much easier to get a job in 2021? Because there were only 148,603 [1]. Notice that even though Republicans talked about immigration, neither party is talking about reducing H1-B filled roles. The kicker is if you’ve had a gap doing your own thing or because you were laid off and you apply for a job at a discount salary, you’re still not competitive against an H1-B worker because employers know you’d be able to trade up once you’ve been working for a few months.

[1] https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/h1b-visa...

These numbers probably don't mean what you think they mean. Certainly, the number of H-1B holders in 2021 and 2023 is about the same.

An "admittance" is someone with a H-1B visa appearing a port of entry like an airport to enter the US. If a single H-1B holder goes on (say) 3 international trips in 1 year, that will count as 3 "admittances" in that year.

The reason why the number is so low in 2021 is that the US government had a COVID non-immigrant travel ban. People with H-1B visas couldn't re-enter the US from many countries e.g. most countries in Europe. Many people in H-1B status (like myself) simply didn't take international trips that year.

Great point. The H-1B receipts total[1] is probably what most are looking for

2020: 427,200 2021: 398,300 2022: 474,300 2023: 386,600

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/f...

Yes! Great find.

(Although, even these statistics are not as simple as they seem! E.g., when an H-1B status holder changes employer this counts as a new receipt even though the number of H-1B workers hasn't changed. In periods of time when there is lots of churn in the labor market, like in 2022, you would see higher receipt numbers just from the churn. It's complicated!)

Thank you all for clarifying. So 80k/year is the key number.

And for how long they stay and how many get green cards.

But if I bothered to look up what the words mean about complex administrative questions, I forfeit my right to be outraged!

By law, the number of H1B visas issued per year is capped at 80k, and that's how many have been issued every year for the last twenty years.

"Admittance rates" measure how many H1B people travel internationally and then return to the USA. Unsurprisingly, in 2023, more people traveled internationally than in 2021, when almost all countries closed their borders.

India is exporting its poverty to the entire world. We have kids getting out of school that don't have a chance because of the H1B program. Need to get rid of the whole H1B program and repatriate all those here.

Any offspring also doesn't qualify for citizenship.

>Any offspring also doesn't qualify for citizenship.

Literally anti-constitutional.

"My moral compass is whatever the law says" also it is a amendment to it.

Right, and while the fraudulent H1-B hires (taking jobs where there are qualified unemployed Americans who would like them) are taking jobs from Americans, the illegal immigrants, about to be deported, are not (even if we taxpayers are paying $500/night to put them up in NYC hotels etc).

I don't think Trump give a crap about helping American workers, anymore than his buddy Elon does - the anti-immigrant thing was just that.

I hope you aren't suggesting it is hypocritical to not oppose legal immigration when opposing illegal immigration.

What makes you so sure the job wouldn't just exist somewhere cheaper like Europe if they couldn't hire for 2/3 in the US?

Because it’s hard to fire someone in the EU. Eastern Europe is cheaper and so is India.

I worked at a globally remote company. Most of the European devs worked for a one man consulting company, that my employer then "contracted" out to. I'm not sure if that nullifies all the protections, but I'm sure it did a lot.

Wealthier European countries seem to be moving towards clamping down on this kind of consulting. See IR35 in the UK as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IR35

This is still possible in many European countries, especially less wealthy ones.

I mean, IR35 happened because you could avoid a lot of tax as a contractor. In Ireland however, being a contractor is fine, but you end up basically paying the same tax as an employed person, so the tax authorities don't mind.

Using agencies largely solves the "hard to fire someone" problem.

That's a myth. How is it hard to fire someone?

I live in Austria and you can fire people for pretty much any reason. You have to give them 6 weeks notice, and there are some extra protections for people who are old or who have disabilities and who have been working for your company for a long time, but even then you can fire them.

You can even fire people for getting sick a lot.

And that's assuming you directly hire them as employees in the first place. Many people work via agencies or as contractors, and they have practically zero protections.

Wow, I am genuinely shocked by this post. I had no idea. Honestly, I assumed that most central European countries have reasonably strong labour laws that make it difficult to fire employees. Let us assume that your post is (mostly) true. How does Austria have such a large, robust, stable middle class without strong labour protections, or a wide/deep social safety net? Or does Austria have the equivalent of "Flexcurity" from Denmark (easy to fire, but wide/deep social safety net for a moderate period of time)?

Labour protections doesn't mean you are protected from being fired.

You have to pay people the minimum salary depending on their trade, you have to give them 5 weeks of vacation, pay overtime, pay for health insurance and so on.

Employers can't exploit their employees, but employees still have to do their job.

But there is also a big area of the economy where employers ignore the law and treat employees like shit. For example, service workers are not generally treated well in Austria, and many are afraid of losing their job so they don't complain to the authorities.

>That's a myth. How is it hard to fire someone?

Maybe the statement isn't true for EU as a whole, but some member countries have far higher bar than what you describe. For instance in Spain the company must provide justification to the government before firing someone.

https://www.rippling.com/blog/termination-in-spain

I don't know about the situation in Spain, but what a lot of people in Austria mix up is that there are different types of terminating contracts.

In Austria, the employer can terminate a contract immediately if the employee behaves in a manner that would harm the employer.

If the employee does nothing wrong, the contract can still be terminated, but you have to give notice 6 weeks ahead (or longer if the employee has worked at your company for a long time).

People get these things confused and think employees generally can't be fired without a reason, but that's not true. They just can't be fired on the spot without a reason.

That's a low bar for "hard".

Is there any evidence H1B workers in tech have lowered wages?

I have only seen anecdotes while the law explicitly states H1Bs should be paid the prevailing wage or above.

It's what I would naturally expect to happen in the absence of consistent heroic efforts by the authorities to prevent it.

If that is happening widely, surely there will be some data to support that right?

Authorities do enforce H1B provisions proactively.

https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...

https://cis.org/North/Apple-Hit-25-Million-Penalty-Favoring-...

https://www.mercurynews.com/2024/11/06/h-1b-visa-fraud-leads...

> absence of consistent heroic efforts

Will that apply to every law in society or just to H1B laws?

Despite absence of consistent heroic efforts, we don't see widespread criminal activities.

You seem to be genuinely curious, which is commendable.

>Will that apply to every law in society or just to H1B laws?

The H1B laws are harder to enforce than most laws -- or so it would seem to me -- because the question of whether there are Americans that are able to do a particular job at a particular workplace depends on many fiddly details that only the managers of the particular workplace (the prospective defendant in any enforcement action) would know.

When lawyers working on Capitol Hill are serious about stamping out a behavior, they write laws that are easy to enforce (unambiguous, not relying much on human judgment). Something as vague as, "as long as there are no Americans qualified to do the job," suggests that whoever wrote that just wants to reassure critics of the H1B program without caring much whether H1B workers actually displace American workers.

> The H1B laws are harder to enforce than most laws -- or so it would seem to me

Most laws are like this. Do you know criminality laws require intent and yet we do fine without mind reading devices.

Most H1Bs are in software and wages in software have been rising along with number of people in software engineering over the long term.

This is the lump of labor fallacy. People are both consumers and laborers; by bringing someone new into a labor market you marginally decrease demand for their skill set but you also marginally increase demand for all other labor. If H1-B visa holders all worked in the same industry, it could conceivably lower wages in that industry but they don't. They work in everything from healthcare, to IT, to education.

66% of H1-B approvals are in computer related positions. https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/OLA_...

Look up that "prevailing wage". It's a deep discount compared to the real world.

Minimum for a Software Developer in SF: $113,444 https://h1bgrader.com/

What do you think that is wrong?

H1B devs at FAANG companies are paid far more.

The same FAANG companies found guilty of depressing wages through collusion? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Your question is why is it wrong to depress wages? Yeah, really tough question.

Now consider OPT visa workers which are being paid even less, plus companies get an extra 8-10% discount because they don't have to pay Social Security and Medicare. There is no shortage of skilled workers here. Only corporate greed.

Define “real world” and how it differs from actual data used to compute the prevailing wage.

Just speaking from my experience -- if the company is a big corp, usually the wages follow average market rates (I was paid market average wage in a top advertising corp in the world and I got my green card there in 6-7 years). Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out average market rates for each job category and the H1B sponsor has to match or pay above that to get the H1B application approved. I was also checking out my market rates (i.e., applying for other companies that allows H1B transfer) constantly during my H1B time because I can move to another job if my current company was paying me lower than average wages.

On the other hand, for some shady companies that are set up as contract shops, then I'd not be surprised if the wages are lower than average market rate, but I have never worked at one, so I might be misleading by even mentioning this here.

Source that prevailing wage is 2/3 of the market?

I thought that number was conservative. I was hiring at 1/2 and 1/3.

So source: “trust me bro”?

This is an incredibly obnoxious response. This isn't a court. People can site their professional experience in an informal conversation.

You know what’s actually obnoxious? spreading nonsense for internet points. This is all public data btw so you can easily go on DOL website and pull those apps with real salaries.

If we are trading anecdotes here I personally dont know any h1bs who are making less than 300k total comp. Hows that for obnoxious?

I thought the same, I wasn't going to feed the troll so remained silent.

Fwiw they're probably just making a point to protest the phenomenon.

How do we have ghost jobs and simultanously not have enough tech workers that we need to import them?

I am seeing lots of qualified commentors (according to them) say they won't even get a call back...

Corporations know the H1B scam and they only look to hire those who they can get under that indentured-servitude type contract.

Wait, this isn't clear to me. Are the interviewees citizens? So you're interviewing citizens to prove that there aren't any who can fill your jobs but even when they clearly could fill the job you don't hire them? Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce

Yes, h1b hiring practices have been shady at best for atleast a decade. For everyone that just doesn’t want to fire a coworker there is someone taking advantage of cheap labor that is easier to control under the threat of deportation.

The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.

A long time ago I read an hn comment that suggested h1b visas should go to the highest paying jobs, with the logic being that if they are such a rare talent they should probably be getting paid more.

> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.

Incorrect - such people already qualify for green cards under the "alien of extraordinary ability" criterion. At least in theory, anyway.

There is no "normal visa line" btw, unless you mean the green card diversity lottery, which people from eg. India and China don't even qualify for.

> A long time ago I read an hn comment that suggested h1b visas should go to the highest paying jobs, with the logic being that if they are such a rare talent they should probably be getting paid more.

This is in principle a good idea although I suspect that if actually implemented employers would figure out how to game the system just as they do now.

You’re right, I was a bit hyperbolic there. Though it is supposed to be for skilled jobs that a capable american is not available to do.

> Though it is supposed to be for skilled jobs that a capable american is not available to do.

No it's not. The H-1B program has no requirement for a labor market test (i.e. showing that there is no citizen that can do the job). The Immigration and Nationality Act, which is the source of the H-1B program, does not have such a requirement. The only big requirements are that the job require a degree (except for fashion models) and that it pays the prevailing wage.

The labor market test is usually required to upgrade to an employment-based green card from a H-1B, though, hence the frequent confusion.

It is 100% required for employment-based green card from a H1B. Anyone that has gone through this process knows this as their own job had to be posted to several job posting sites and each and ever candidate had to be reviewed and discounted in some ways (my company added crap to the posting such that it was simply impossible for someone to be as qualified for the job as me unless they sat next to me and did what I did for 5+ years…)

Nope, it's not 100% required, there are exceptions for certain job categories like nursing and there's also the extraordinary ability exception.

(Not trying to be pedantic but US immigration law is full of random loopholes and people who qualify for them, or might be able to qualify with a bit of work, often aren't aware.)

I should have been more clear - I am talking about IT/Dev/… jobs, not other professions.

Not sure if it’s still the case but extraordinary ability green cards used to be surprisingly easy to get for software engineers! Get your name on a patent (not as hard as you think, companies love adding to their IP portfolio), get accepted to do a couple of conference talks, and you’re most of the way there. Or so I was told a few years ago by someone trying this route.

huh I thought the “good faith steps to recruit U.S. workers” part was for every company, but apparently it’s only for certain companies receiving money or who have already got in trouble.

I would have been more against it if I realized that.

Yeah. To be clear I think it's fair to be critical of the current shape of the H-1B program (personally, I think the way it's used by outsourcing companies is pretty bad).

But there's a logical fallacy in these discussions in which people criticize the current H-1B program for not being compliant with some made-up version of what the H-1B program is. If you don't like the current program, the solution is not "we need to do what the law says" because in fact the current program is 100% compliant with the law. The solution is to change the law.

America is a big country. There will always be someone capable of doing the job if you take price out of the equation.

I get that people like semantically and logically simple ideas, but the world doesn't reflect that.

Cost is an inherent part of the H1B program

> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation.

This is false. O-1 is the visa for the "people at the top of their field". H-1B is for regular employees.

Well, it's been shady for at least 2.5 decades.

the grandparent comment states that they were interviewing for a position that was held by a green card applicant, not h1b visa holder.

> The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line

H1B is the normal visa line.

I've been programming since the early 90's, and back then pretty much all my coworkers were other US citizens. I started to notice a shift toward the mid 90's and then, by the late 90's, they were practically all Indians on H1B visas. Nobody from Russia, China, El Salvador, Brazil, Japan, Botswana, Ethiopia or even Bangladesh or Pakistan - virtually every programmer I met was an Indian citizen in the US on an H1B visa. I saw this across ten employers in two different states. Every tech conference I went to, regardless of city, was full of Indian citizens with heavy accents, and me.

There's a prevailing belief that US employers prefer H1B visa holders because they'll work cheaper and not complain about poor working conditions but if that's true... why computer programmers, specifically? Why are there _any_ Americans in the organization? Surely the product owners, project managers, scrum masters, HR staff, janitors, facilities maintenance, receptionists, directors, VPs and CEOs could be filled cheaper and less complainier by an H1B visa holder too?

I have yet to find a plausible explanation why specifically computer programming (and no other career) is dominated specifically by Indian citizens (and no other nationality).

1. India has ~130 million English speakers, second only to United States.

2. IIT.

3. Culture matters, both on the recruitment side and demand side. Indian outsourcing built a pipeline decades ago so it's now a well understood career path in India.

4. Non-technical positions tend to require greater social competencies in the hiring/customer culture. US programmers already complain about the cultural tendencies of their Indian colleagues. The social and political aspects of other careers are less amenable to dropping in a rando with limited understanding of the culture.

Computer programming is easily verifiable, the code works or it doesnt. so you dont need good english, and your education doesnt really matter since either you write working code or you dont. its also a massive cost on businesses. theres like a thousand reasons

At the last startup I worked at, our CTO was on a visa.

To satisfy the "no one in the US can fill the CTO role", they took out an advertisement in a San Francisco newspaper classifieds so they had evidence that they attempted to find a US citizen / permanent resident CTO.

Obviously there were no applicants.

This used to be fairly common for H1B roles of any level - I don't find it surprising almost no one wants to fire a colleague ultimately, so doing whatever you could to reduce the number of applicants while still paying lip service to the rules is the logical outcome, rightly or wrongly.

For what its worth, towards end of 2010s USCIS were starting to clamp down on this and where being a lot stricter about the job being advertised appropriately for the role (you submit evidence of the advertisement during the PERM process).

A tell for fake firms in my local newspaper is they ask for a snail mail resume. These appear to me to be more like shell companies submitting multiple H1Bs as far as I can tell though, not legit firms saying they cannot hire any US.

real firms do this too.

Pick up a local newspaper that is not well known.

CTO actually makes sense for an h1b though, it’s a high paying job that can depend greatly on the technical and creative skills of the individual and how they mesh with the company.

The problem is when it’s someone pumping out code, or doing tech support for half the cost of the local competition.

No, this is backwards

CTO is not such an exceptional role that you can convince me that a company couldn't find a single person in America who would be qualified to take it

It's also a highly sought after role, so people would generally be willing to relocate for a role like that

H1Bs are designed to fill labour shortages, where your local labour market is saturated and you are struggling to find local talent or attract talent from further away, so you can import workers

Using a visa designed to fill labour shortages for an executive position like CTO is frankly an abuse of the system

But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.

Like if Google is struggling to hire L3 entry level engineers, can't they just offer $1 million/year salary? Then of course they will get the people they want.

To me, the point of H-1B and similar programs isn't "we can't get the individual staff we need". It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary. And I feel that the success of Silicon Valley kind of shows this: if we didn't have any immigrants to the US, maybe the salaries would have been higher, but there is simply no chance SV would have reached the scale it has.

>> But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.

Yes, like a lot of immigration, it is entirely about wage suppression to benefit owners and shareholders.

>But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages.

In the long term perhaps, but not in the short term. Bidding wars over an inadequate supply of suitably-skilled labour are good for those workers, but they aren't good for the economy or society as a whole.

> It's rather that at a society-wide level, having more software engineers at an overall lower salary can be more beneficial to the country than fewer engineers at a higher salary.

Beneficial to owners of capital in said country. Not so beneficial to non owners of capital (also usually labor sellers) in said country.

It's not so binary. Economic growth and prosperity does benefit a broad swath of society.

btw the actual couch used by Marie Antionette is now on display at the San Francisco Legion of Honor.. a very expensive couch! at least a dozen people must have benefited economically from that couch.

They most certainly did! However, that is a pretty tortured comparison if that was the case.

I think I would be harder to make such a cynical zing about the net benefit of allowing 10,000 doctors to immigrate.

That’s true, but in reality, the US chains the engineers and doctors with the specter of losing their visa and arduous paperwork over their head so that they are coerced into selling their labor at an even lower price.

I'm the first to admit it isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean there is no net benefit. hundreds of thousands of people are paid market wages on H1B visas and many get green cards. On balance, this is good for consumers and citizens.

I feel like people have a gut reaction to injustice and harm where they want to trash the whole system, not realizing that would be an even greater injustice and harm.

It is a counterproductive distraction to real change and improvement. It just scratches the emotional itch of moral outrage and superiority.

I do not want to "trash the whole system", but when I see laws crafted specifically and solely to depress labor prices, it is reasonable to get emotional and feel morally superior. Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B?

See also lower minimum wages and separate labor standards for poorer Mexican immigrants in agriculture, not to mention the complete lack of requirement for employers to ensure legal work authorization, and complete lack of consequences for employers that employ people without work authorization.

> Why else would we give work authorization to a person, but then restrict them to a single employer such as with H1-B?

H1B visas are not restricted to a single employer. The catch is that the new employer is required to demonstrate the new role is valid for H1B work.

This is a control to make sure that H1-B visa holders are not underpaid or doing abusing the system.

It is a genuinely tough problem. You could decouple the H1B visa from the employer position, but then you have people entering for one type of work at market rate, and doing any type of work and undercutting salaries.

The whole employer requirement is an attempt to protect native workers. Letting H1B workers enter decoupled from a job and salary requirement would be much better for employers. They could pay them minimum wage and hire them into any role they want.

Im curious to hear ideas for how it could be structured that is better. Im sure there are options. Maybe the workers themselves could submit the info for change of employment, but I dont know how they would prove the work is at prevailing wage.

not to dispute but rather to refine.. go to a third order effect. Imagine that Injustice is remedied (somehow involving policy), negotiations with the growing remedy system rely on growth of remedy so cleverly take advantage of the shared desire for remedy and easy public political speech win of emphasizing remedy, such that negotiations then stretch out the timeline, and add a tax, and some supervisory positions with regulatory oversight in yet another group, to be fair.. the remedy system is less remedy and more frameworks.. the Iron Law of Bureaucracy sets in.. other noise or inefficiencies or internal contradictions, grow.

Private companies play their part in implementing this remedy of Injustice and Good Policy, yet private companies exist to profit first and foremost. Management practices of labor have a sordid history, going way back.. A worker in a private company with a lottery work permit must play out the life under management in that company, whatever that may be.. And that management will also change, not always for the better.

Now its 2024.....

For non-workers the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, while for workers the disadvantages outweigh the benefits.

If your income is from owning capital or from real estate value increase or from government benefits, then anything that can reduce the price of things you want to buy is a benefit. This is a large part of the population.

If your income is from working and producing goods and services, then getting paid less is a negative that is far worse than the positive from cheaper things.

Many people have their foot in both camps. Their main source of income is from their real estate appreciating in value, while working is just a means to pay off the old mortgage so that they soon can get a new cash out by mortgaging at a higher value.

It's very much also economic warfare waged by the elderly against the young. The elderly own almost all capital and are interested in increasing it. Keeping the young as poor as possible is excellent for them, so as to keep them from being a threat to their wealth and power.

Workers aren't monolithic.

I'll be the first to admit that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits for specific workers. NAFTA sucked for autoworkers. H1B visas suck for IT and software workers.

I think other types of workers benefit more than the portrait you paint, and not just the capital owners.

Unless you are a utilitarian (I'm not), I agree there is a valid debate on how much policy should disadvantage a small group for "the greater good".

> H1B visas suck for IT and software workers.

H1b only sucks for short sighted people. Places like India would in any case have more software engineers available, than the US. Moving and hiring best of Indian engineers in the US kept teams operating in the US from being offshored wholesale.

Software isn't a car, doesn't require physical transportation.

An understaffed team in the US would be worth less than an offshore team with offshoring overhead.

I am an individual not a corporation, our interest don't align in this manner.

They are saying that your individual salary would be lower without the additional talent.

Sure, I benefit that a washing machine costs $600 instead of $6000. That benefit is small in comparison with if my yearly income would be double. In almost all possible scenarios, higher wages are better than cheaper goods. You cannot improve your economic situation by purchasing cheap consumer goods, but you can do it with higher income.

Sure, but $600 washing machines for 300 million Americans is a hell of a lot more benefit than your one income.

And double yearly income for 150 million working Americans is a hell lot more benefit for them than the $600 washing machine.

Indeed. And we should absolute pick that if we are presented with those two options.

All market effects are exponential. Of course a doubled salary is unrealistic, but not ridiculous. The generation of people who are elderly today, had more than double the salary of anybody who is a worker today. Yes, they had more expensive consumer goods, but they could instead afford the important things: land, houses, vehicles and have a surplus to invest.

> But arguably any labor shortage can be fixed by just having way higher wages

Not even remotely true, outside of unskilled labour work

> Like if Google is struggling to hire L3 entry level engineers, can't they just offer $1 million/year salary?

They can, but that won't suddenly make more people who are qualified for L3 entry level engineering positions to sprout into existence

It may cause people to re-skill to try and chase those positions.

It probably will have engineers from their competitors come to work for them

But then their competitors are in the same position facing a labour shortage. The shortage hasn't gone away!

the person applying for the green card already works for the interviewing company. the job opening is THAT green card applicant's job requirements.

the lawyer/law firm handling the green card application process has to prove that there are no US citizens who are qualified to do the job.

if there were qualified applicants for the job, then the green card applicant won't be given a green card, I assume. But that green card applicant is already working in the country via some other visa, so there is no job opening to fill typically.

the current person in the job is performing well, otherwise, why would you be trying to get a green card for them?

i've never heard of any green card applicant getting denied a green card due to a qualified US citizen applicant.

If the labor market test yields a candidate, the petition isn't filed. So there is formally no rejection from the USCIS. But application processes fail at this step all the time.

You explained it perfectly. I’d never lie, if I interviewed someone comparable the process ends immediately internally. But the employee (who is still an amazing employee, exceeds, promotions, Etc) is not fired

After reading it a few times my understanding is this:

An H1B job holder applies for a green card. OP then must interview to prove the role can't be filled by a citizen. An interviewee knocks it out of the park, failing the check and so the green card application is denied. However the person holding the job is still legally allowed to work for 2-3 years in their H1B. So they're kept on for that long even though the check failed for the green card.

It is. Best case scenario H1Bs allow companies to avoid training citizens. Worst case (and most common) H1Bs are more exploitable labor compared to citizens.

H1Bs etc just suppress citizens wages and increase profits of capital holders. There’s a very very tiny % that actually aren’t replaceable domestically.

This is an excellent point and a real litmus test. If there really were a labor shortage companies would be providing training programs to build that labor force.

Instead they post job descriptions so niche only a liar could technically qualify.

Fist - it is not companies' responsibility to train anyone. It is not their business.

Second - H1b are exploitable, because the system allows it.

H1b has demonstrably not suppressed software engineering wages at all.

Non-competes, have - on the other hand.

> H1b has demonstrably not suppressed software engineering wages at all.

That's simply impossible; it's basic economics.

The lump of labor fallacy is usually covered in “basic economics” classes. There are multiplier effects from clustering of certain types of skilled workers. This increases overall demand and thus overall compensation for everyone in the market.

This is why ending the H1B program like posters propose here would be profoundly stupid - if companies can’t staff their teams here, they will staff them elsewhere, and either stop hiring here or close up shop entirely. This will lower salaries and increase unemployment in the relevant fields.

You already see this in microcosm due to real estate costs serving as a brake on internal migration, many companies have moved all net new hiring out of the Bay Area.

Now admit too many foreign workers at too low wages and you will hit diminishing returns, but we are way short of that point, especially if we can manage to curb abuses of the existing program.

> Best case scenario H1Bs allow companies to avoid training citizens.

Best for who? Companies should train their workforce. Or get kicked out of the market, meaning that they should get kicked out of the nation.

> Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce

Correct. It's pure theatre.

> Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce

It's extremely easy to enforce with taxes that ensure the company is paying at least 1X0% of the highest market rate for the position. If they don't find an alternative to paying it is a necessary hire.

The requirement to pay market rate already exists and it's very easily gamed, eg. by under-leveling people or hiring them in under a related (but lower paid) role that doesn't reflect their actual responsibilities.

There's no premium financing proper adversarial regulatory agency there. If the IRS is not taking its special ~30% of 300+ workers salaries there's a best effort by a regulatory body that's viewed as a waste of tax payer money if it just checks a few technicalities.

The requirement you mention is for filing a green card application.

If I find a good citizen, I don’t file the application, that’s the law. But the employee does have h1b or OPT and is still allowed to work in the US, nothing wrong with that. If the government wants to stop giving those out workplaces will adapt

Hence why there are so many h1bs.

This has been going on for decades. My first job out of university was at a dotcom consultancy with over 90% of software engineers there on H1B visas. The company was not at all shy about the fact that they only hired citizens/permanent residents if they had no other choice. I was hired because I had experience with a particular obscure RTOS that they couldn't find anyone on a visa who could do the work on a project they already told a client we were experts in.

Our VP of Software Engineering (here on a visa himself) stood right next to my desk telling one of our programmers not to worry about his visa expiring because they'd post his job for 24 hours on the company website, accept resumes for one week, and then declare the job unfillable by local talent so he could get his visa renewed. This was in 2000 and this type of thing has been practiced openly and with no fear of there ever being any consequences for violating both the letter and spirit of the law regarding using labor visas.

These threads end up fire hosed with people claiming hiring visa holders over citizens and permanent residents doesn't happen nor does it push down wages. They know these are lies and have been lies for decades. But since there are no consequences, legally or socially, it continues to be the default behavior. This in turn warps local talent development as more and more kids see that there's little reason to go into a career field where the government and business openly collude to disadvantage locals in favor of visa labor.

> These threads end up fire hosed with people claiming hiring visa holders over citizens and permanent residents

They apparently also get fire-hosed with comments on the horrors of H1B hiring in a thread that is on green card application rules, i.e., all youb commenters on H1B did not even read the GP post. Those rules require advertising for a filled position, but don't require firing the current holder when you find a good candidate.

I think you've managed to explain why H1Bs shouldn't exist pretty convincingly.

I agree. I did hire someone on an H1B in the early 2010's and he was, to put it mildly, the perfect candidate for the job and I don't think I could have found anyone anywhere to do it. Someone else at the company was hired, into sales, and they were pretty good for the job (a Japanese person to service the Japanese market), but you could argue that citizen speakers of Japanese do exist and should have been given priority.

I would be happy if the H1B program was killed.

My one hope for the next administration is that they crack down hard on this sort of thing and pursue comprehensive immigration reform. A company that relies on labor from people who don't even have permanent residency rights probably shouldn't exist, and yes, I'm including agriculture in that statement. We should have a points based system like Canada with some carve outs for lower skilled ag workers.

lol you think immigration is a real concern? remember the convoy, or the W Bush era?

half of US farms, meat packing, restaurants, construction, etc. rely on undocumented labor. the GOP owned the house and Senate for years, and could have crushed it well before now.

they don't because a lot of big business want these illegals, and the same folks backing the new administration -- aka tech bros like Musk and Thiel -- are totally down with H1Bs

The thing with H1Bs is you can be against them whether you’re bothered about immigration or not.

Pity it wasn’t on the ballot.

For those who come across this type of fraud, reporting is straightforward. You can report anonymously.

https://www.uscis.gov/scams-fraud-and-misconduct/report-frau...

https://www.uscis.gov/report-fraud/uscis-tip-form

I would also report as securities fraud to the SEC, but that is a higher hill to climb.

https://www.sec.gov/submit-tip-or-complaint/tips-complaints-...

(not calling OP out specifically, general guidance when you come across illegal labor practices)

So basically you're wasting the interviewees time and breaking the law by admitting that you won't hire a citizen who would do the job just as well.

The law says I can’t submit the I-140 application, which I follow the law and I don’t submit it.

As a people manager it’s a heartbreaking conversation to have - to tell a report their dream of staying beyond their visa is gone

The law says every line manager needs to do their own industry pulse check every time an i-140 is submitted. And this is the only legal way to pulse check (advertise a ghost job). It would be much easier if the federal government did the pulse check one time for everyone and decided if engineers are or aren’t missing in the industry

So… the interviewee doesn’t get the job even though they knocked it out of the park, and the H1B doesn’t get their visa because the other interviewee did well. Basically nobody wins, and the H1B person is out of a job in 2-3 years?

Yes, this is precisely what the comment thread is saying. Shmatt’s original post should shock you with its conclusion because everyone loses including shmatt.

I’m not necessarily shocked but more appalled. I’ve always wondered this - in tech there’s very little reason to believe that you need to import talent. Learning is mostly democratized these days, and I find it hard pressed to believe that there isn’t a US Citizen for literally any tech company. But they cost more hence they try to do the whole H1B process… which then comes to bite them back.

I literally quit my previous job, because people were hired after "a few Coursera courses".

Sorry, if you "learned online" and haven't spent a few years building software - you aren't immediately as qualified as a graduate from IIT.

You don't go abroad and "import talent", but rather hire the intern that just graduated or have someone apply with a high recommendation from a high performer and now your in an H1B situation. They aren't posting the job on physical boards in india hoping to snag someone to come to the US (At least for FAANG).

Exactly, and I don’t understand the fraud comments because this is exactly how US lawmakers intended the system the work. Easy to come for 3-6 years, hard to stay forever

It would be better if the “replaceable” part was determined on the federal level and not on the team level. That would get rid of all the ghost jobs

> Basically nobody wins

Business wins.

I dislike this system as much as you do. Clearly the PERM cert is flawed. I suppose the system is working as intended, and I'm not sure what the drama is, although of course, from a human empathy point of view, I feel like the story is making you look like the worst actor in this scenario.

That is unfair, but forgive me: you hold all the cards and occupy the most powerful position in the story, and you are framing it in absolutes, trying to make yourself a victim, talking about it as though you are powerless.

is this the situation of POSIWID

I’ve only had very limited experience with colleagues on OPT and my role as a hiring manager with an OPT visa holder.

There’s a big difference between a tech enabled agency, sometimes called a “body shop” - where you are B2B, you are someone’s lower cost option, you are a middleman - and a startup, where whatever you are developing - seemingly B2B, social media apps, hardware, biotech - in some form or another, your core business is capturing 90%+ margins on the LTVs of end users. With experience only in the startup style business, you ought to structure the economics of the deals to your employees such that they can buy what they want if everything works out, and all the incentives align.

So to me, it’s not super material, green card this, PERM certification that: if you make a ton of money, you can surmount any bureaucratic obstacle in this country. Is that the purpose of the system? A complex administrative problem like UCSIS policy and related politics cannot defeat the power of the almighty dollar. So for people who have agency, like startup CEOs, it’s possible to sincerely offer a path to citizenship in the US, in light of things like O1, E1, marriage, etc, that doesn’t break any laws, but only costs money.

Don't you have to demonstrate that there is no qualified US worker? I find this unbelievable and outrageous.

>> As a people manager it’s a heartbreaking conversation to have - to tell a report their dream of staying beyond their visa is gone

If an actual citizen could have done the job, they shouldn't be in the country in the first place.

This is not a constant fact, though. In 2021 there were not enough qualified US work eligible candidates to go around. Right now is going to be a very different story for many roles.

>> In 2021 there were not enough qualified US work eligible candidates to go around.

That is only ever true at a certain salary level. If they (hypothetically) 10x-ed the salary, do you think they would still have a shortage?

Probably. Poaching an employee from somewhere else still creates an opening that can't be filled.

Finally I understood, thank you.

> The law says I can’t submit the I-140 application, which I follow the law and I don’t submit it.

Sorry, I'm still unclear. What rule says you can't submit your employee's green card application even though you've determined that you won't hire a citizen to do that job?

it's okay to break stupid laws as long as you don't get caught

Break stupid laws/don't get caught | Civil disobedience/face consequences

------------------------------------|----------------------------------------

Don't break any laws/get SWATed. | "It's never okay to break any laws ever"

____

I feel like this model could be useful somehow.

So, you are effectively committing fraud!

I work for <megacorp> and the way they get around this is by only hiring contractors. Because then the liability for that is on the vendor.

No. Following the letter of the law cannot be fraud. I think you don't understand the rules.

Just wanted to say thanks for sharing this, dude -- a lot of other replies are complaining (because this does suck for US citizens), but I imagine it also sucks for you, since (IIUC) you just want to keep your good developer and also not lie to the government. It's not fun to hear about but it's better it's said out loud, right. Sorry you're in this situation

So when interviewing, perhaps I should skip more places that say citizenship required on the req, to avoid wasting my time?

No. Many (especially smaller) companies don't want to hire people who need visa sponsorship because it requires a decent amount of overhead. The company needs to have an immigration lawyer to prepare and submit paperwork, which many smaller companies don't want to bother with.

FWIW it's illegal to require "US citizenship" in a job description. You can, however, say "eligible to work in the US". (The former would be discriminatory against non-citizen permanent residents). Although I'm also not a lawyer.

is it illegal to put that phrase? i don't think so. There are a lot of shops that includes that and they usually come with clearance needed.

There are actually situations where U.S. citizenship can be a requirement, e.g., cleared jobs but there needs to be a really good reason like not being able to obtain clearances.

SpaceX has been through the wringer on this one, so just copy & paste from their listing:

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.

The SpaceX case was centered around ITAR regulations. ITAR jobs do not necessarily require security clearance. As the person you responded to mentioned, you have to be a citizen to get security clearance and related jobs. Asylum seekers and refugees can't get clearance.

> Learn more about the ITAR here

ITAR, defense, and clearances are completely unique worlds compared to the rest of the job market.

Yeah, SpaceX needs to conform to ITAR for most of their jobs given their industry but any cleared roles require US citizenship.

That said, if Elon used Tesla employees for Twitter business, what to say that he doesn't do the same for SpaceX business?

You're largely correct, as I understand it.

You cant discriminate in favor of citizens vs permanent residents unless the job legally requires citizenship.

    > unless the job legally requires citizenship

Can you provide any examples?

Defense.

> FWIW it's illegal to require "US citizenship" in a job description.

nonsense

tons of jobs advertisements required "US citizenship", because there is a security clearance attached

Those companies are breaking the law. SpaceX was prosecuted for doing that.

Now SpaceX says:

To conform to U.S. Government export regulations, applicant must be a (i) U.S. citizen or national, (ii) U.S. lawful, permanent resident (aka green card holder), (iii) Refugee under 8 U.S.C. § 1157, or (iv) Asylee under 8 U.S.C. § 1158, or be eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State. Learn more about the ITAR here.

Non-US citizens can't get a security clearance. Permanent residents can at most get a limited access authorization. The SpaceX case involved ITAR, not clearance.

> Those companies are breaking the law.

If the position requires a security clearance, they are not breaking the law. Language like this is standard on defense contractor postings that require clearances (this from Lockeed):

> Security Clearance Statement: This position requires a government security clearance, you must be a US Citizen for consideration.

> SpaceX was prosecuted for doing that.

SpaceX was prosecuted for excluding refugees and asylees from export-controlled positions, not cleared positions.

Without cause, you can't discriminate for citizenship.

Just like you can't discriminate by race, unless you're a film director you want a black actress to play Rosa Parks.

No, because most places don't want to go through the hassle of sponsoring a visa.

Though once a place does want to go through the hassle, it seems to be the only kind of work they hire because they get a huge discount on labor. Of everyone I know IRL on work visas, almost all of them work in companies/teams that are 99% work visa.

The H1B system is so rife with corruption at every level and needs to be stopped.

Dumb question: why are you interviewing for a position that’s already filled? Does an h1b renewal require you to go through this exercise again anyway?

> So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it,

I might be missing this in the thread. What is the reason that you deny their green card application and not submit?

He found another candidate which could do the job. This finding makes it a federal crime to recommand the current H1B employee for a green card.

What makes it worth the extra trouble?

I guess the "green cards" really work cheap?

We interview without knowing sponsorship status. If someone requires sponsorship that happens after we decide they were the best interviewee

I wish it wasn’t this way but in the vast majority of interviews, the sponsor required person is the best one

Well.... DUH!

You're comparing the vast swathes of mediocre talent to the best from the rest of the world. Of course the top talent from elsewhere is going to beat the average talent from the US.

That sounds ethical.

Good to hear that H1B programme isn't being abused.

He found another candidate which could do the job. This finding makes it a federal crime to recommand the current H1B employee for a green card.

I understand now. See above.

Omg 80% of comments in this thread are so confidently wrong it’s insane. Fyi tp is actually doing everything by the book

Yes, it's been better explained now.

I guess this is a case of "don't hate the player, hate the game." although the question remains why they filled the role with an H1B candidate in the first place if they could find locals that could do the job. That piece is clearly unethical and done only for wage suppression.

More like a case of “perhaps dont make judgements if your knowledge on the subject is aprox zero”. Again, same question as upthread - show me how prevailing wage is suppressing the market. The h1b could also been issued years ago like in 2021 for example

Have you heard of "Supply and Demand"?

Ah yes, if only we could mint experienced devs from thin air, your model would be perfectly sound!

Or maybe, devs could move from Company A to Company B that would pay them more money. What a terrible world that would be to live in.

Or companies in, say, SF could let people work remotely from Pittsburgh.

And what would company A do at that point?

> Or companies in, say, SF could let people work remotely from Pittsburgh.

Hold up, didn’t you say it was “clearly unethical” if local devs are available?

OMG - there would be a bidding war for developers! VCs and Shareholders might have to take less profit so they could pay their developers more!! What a dystopian future.

And as far as I can tell, Pittsburgh is in the same country as SF.

According to gadders the definition of ethical is apparently “what’s good for gadders personally”. I don’t see anything ethical about your take - i see nationalism and greed. Misguided at that btw because skilled immigration demonstrably is good for us and good for wage growth. I asked you to prove otherwise and you just gave me some econ 101 vibes crap

>>According to gadders the definition of ethical is apparently “what’s good for gadders personally”.

According to gadders the definition of ethical is apparently “what’s good for the host nation's developers”. Fixed that for you.

I don't think workers wanting to maximise their pay is greed.

Oh relative scarcity only works for corporations, I understand your worldview perfectly now! jackass

usually, they find this local person later. But is it right to replace then? Wage suppression but usually H-1Bs and other work immigration visas are not lower paid at big tech co

An understandable situation. But by admitting this, your company is admitting liability for citizenship discrimination (8 U.S.C. § 1324b).

Even though you are not submitting a PERM and running into potential issues with fraud there, the underlying act of rejecting US citizen/LPR applicants is the same, so I don't see how this would be any different than, for example, the Apple case last year (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-25...) with a $25M settlement.

In the Apple case, the company did actually obtain PERMs for some of the positions, but they were only charged with discrimination against the un-hired applications, not anything to do with the the hiring/sponsoring of the foreign workers. Furthermore, the case did not even allege actual tossing out of US citizen resumes, but merely making the applications deliberately inconvenient to avoid actually receiving any unwanted "real" applications.

Is there someone who we could report this comment to? Get an investigation opened.

It would go to the Immigrant and Employee Rights Section, Civil Rights Division, USDOJ. I think they only take formal complaints from those who applied though (it is different from the regular EEOC process though--the government itself acts as the complainant). You could try just sending them an email.

I don't think you interpret the Apple case correctly. They got fined for advertising PERM job postings differently from regular job openings, distorting the test in the view of the agency. That has nothing to do with the post you are responding to.

I am not a lawyer and don’t know the relevant laws or legal precedent, but what the OP is describing is very different that what Apple got in trouble for.

> Specifically, the department’s investigation found that Apple did not advertise positions Apple sought to fill through the PERM program on its external job website, even though its standard practice was to post other job positions on this website. It also required all PERM position applicants to mail paper applications, even though the company permitted electronic applications for other positions. In some instances, Apple did not consider certain applications for PERM positions from Apple employees if those applications were submitted electronically, as opposed to paper applications submitted through the mail. These less effective recruitment procedures nearly always resulted in few or no applications to PERM positions from applicants whose permission to work does not expire.

I was always wondered who audits this. Why should you even deny the green card?

You have to prove you tried interviewing and couldn’t find anyone to replace them. My company isn’t a super popular employer so we don’t get the best candidates. This might be a bigger problem at Google, Meta, etc

I can't imagine why they're not a super popular employer.

This is just plain fraud

He found another candidate which could do the job. This finding makes it a federal crime to recommand the current H1B employee for a green card.

My definition of fraud doesn't begin and end with what the current law says.

Maybe if someone is “amazing” you should get them a green card.

In this example the amazing engineer is a citizen or permanent resident already

If my superiors would give me extra unexpected budget I’d be happy to. But if I find a citizen that is just as good as my opt employee, my only path forward is to either fire the opt or let them continue on the team but not submit their GC application (because I have to swear I couldn’t find a citizen that is just as good)

…because if you grant them the green card they will up and get a new job? The incentives here are so screwed up for everyone, it effectively codifies a caste system of immigrant workers.

I took the implication to be that GP already had a good employee who was hired legitimately under the terms of the H1B, but that, to convert to a green card, you have to see whether a US person could do the job. So you have to put out for interviews to see, but you don’t have to act on that information.

If the interview process yields a US person equally qualified, GP can’t (and doesn’t) certify the guest worker’s green card application. But that doesn’t mean they have to fire them and send them home early: they can let the guest worker work out their contract if they want to (which they probably do, it probably pays well compared to other options). And an experienced, already-trained, good employee is probably more valuable to the business than an immediate, unplanned new hire anyway.

So yes, certainly screwed up incentives—but I don’t see how it would be better to require guest workers to put their jobs in immediate jeopardy just to apply for permanent residency.

exactly that. you actually want/need a few years of warning if your greencard is going to be accepted or not. having to put out a ghost job in order to find out if the greencard is going to be accepted is really the problem (for the ghost candidate)

No, you're missing the point.

To extend the visa they have to swear they couldn't find a citizen to do this job, and aren't willing to lie.

(this clarified the situation for me, thank you)

Caste systems are extremely convenient.

Companies can't just do this.

It'd be fabulous if this was an option, but green card applications have all sorts of caps and aren't even just "wait in a line for N years." They are random every year and every year you fail to get approved you get no closer to being approved.

The effect is that you can have excellent engineers who've been in the US for a decade+ who are still in this liminal space where they don't have legal permanent residency.

should vs. could. vs. ought. vs. can

Strikes again

So you are simultaneously screwing over the ones applying to the job, the government, the guy already working for you and yourself? Geez, it must be amazing in your department, a lose-lose-lose-lose

Isn't it lose-win-lose-lose? The government is requiring this.

So you have zero integrity. Thanks for sharing.

Not a certain conclusion, they could just operating from a different set of values than yours, but adhering to those with integrety.

Rage baiting?

Doesn’t appear so, the OP seems genuine

This will than probably change with the new American government and its anti-immigration stance. Less h1b, less ghost jobs.

Not likely. The new government is not interested in harming the interests of the big employers.

Yes, the depression the administration’s tariffs (and other policies) will produce will eliminate the jobs done by H1B workers, among others, and eliminate the incentives for economic immigration.

I wouldn't count on it. But there will certainly be tons of new part time jobs with no benefits and no health insurance.

Just like how the last Trump government fixed it?

House and Senate this time baby!

Just like last time!

Same as last time.

One can hope for a silver lining.

I actually couldn't begin to guess. The only thing I have to go on is, I think the administration is angling to do a sort of bust-out rather than enrich anybody, even those 'on their side'. If that's so, then much like with the FDA, there'll be some funny choices that lead to alarming outcomes.

I just don't know whether that would mean more h1b and ghost jobs, or less.

Trumps has talked multiple times about “stapling green cards to diplomas”. His rhetoric on illegal immigration is going to result in illegals who have committed a felony being deported and that’s it (just like every other neocon).

Making America better for Americans won’t happen until both sides realize neither party is looking out for the interests of American people and uses social issues etc to keep us divided.

And here's the source https://x.com/USTechWorkers/status/1803926021542154323

As someone who went though the legal means when he was in the office last time, he will primarily hurt the legal immigration... because that is the easiest thing for them to do - grind USCIS to a halt.

Unlikely. "Staple a Green Card to their diploma" is what Trump had to say about students from other countries that graduate from US universities. Since out of country students pay the highest tuition rates, universities love them and give them preferential admissions. Though not as bad as elementary and high schools, universities suffer from grade inflation and are reluctant to kick out paying customers, especially those paying the highest tuition. As a consequence, academic standards are being reduced at a rapid rate.

If you want to come to the US to get a professional job, attending a US university instead of a domestic one is going to be worth the extra cost when it guarantees you a Green Card.

There might be a reduction in the flow of low skilled labor, especially for those looking to hire workers without legal status, but up the middle class portion of the labor market, expect the system to continue to favor cheap imported labor over domestic labor.

STEM grad student tuition is paid by government grants

Generally not for Masters' programs though, which is the most popular and easiest way to get a temporary study visa. Then they pay out of state tuition rates.

That's in no small part for the benefit of the US university, though, not just a personal benefit to the student. In some sense, grad students are a bit like faculty in that they are "part of" the university and contribute to its prestige and academic output in a way that undergrads don't. Not providing them with grants, and thus decreasing the success in recruiting them, would lower the prestige of the university and the accomplishments of its PI's labs.

Undergrad selectivity/quality does affect rankings too, but it doesn't probably doesn't affect faculty recruitment (except for the rare faculty that care a lot about teaching), but grad student recruitment absolutely does. Even a pathological case of a selfish PI who doesn't care about the students themselves and just cares about his own prestige/publications is going to be very interested in the quality of grad students coming in each year. Even state institutions that favor in-state heavily for undergrad generally don't do so for grad school.

Likewise, having an international faculty and grad student base is typically considered an ipso facto positive thing for a university, which has a inherent role of exchange of ideas and thus also of the people that hold them. Some countries even offer grants to arguably more generous grants to foreign students (ex. the MEXT scholarship in Japan) for that reason--having quality international students is an essential part of the prestige of their unis and one that they by definition can't improve through their own students.

Re: your point about costs, even with tuition grants, the costs of grad school in the US due to double effect of the strong dollar and high cost of living is likely to be just as high as a domestic school with higher tuition but potentially free room and board, and much lower food/transit/etc costs.

>Not providing them with grants, and thus decreasing the success in recruiting them, would lower the prestige of the university

You have a very idealized picture of what happens when a university is required to confer a certain amount of PhDs to maintain (formerly) R1 status and has to rely on F-1s to do it.

Sending this to Elon...

And quoting to capture the illegal activity:

'''shmatt 47 minutes ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost J...

I have to put out a ghost job req and interview every person applying within reason for every green card a direct report is applying for. I have to show there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job The main problem is: even if the interviewee knocks it out of the park, is an amazing engineer, I still am not interested in firing my OPT/h1b team member who can still legally work for 2-3 years. So while I will deny their green card application and not submit it, I also won’t hire the interviewee'''

> Sending this to Elon...

Wasn't he recently accused of bending the rules quite a long way in the way to getting work permission for his first startup? I imagine he would probably agree that this is a flaw in the system, but sympathize with OP's way of "solving" it.

You should probably stop breaking federal law.

I can’t tell if this is satire or actual comic book villain behavior. I guess not really villain behavior, but certainly gaming a clearly broken system

Willingly admitting to fraud is a strong move.

This isn't ethical. It shouldn't be legal. But it is. Welcome to America.

It’s neither ethical or legal, it’s fraud.

> It shouldn't be legal. But it is.

How is that legal? If you think the local applicant can do the job, you legally can’t hire the H-1B over them, right?

OP already hired H-1B in the past and that person is working for them now. OP is now in the process of doing a green card application for said employee. They can't move forward with the GC application because there are other qualified citizens/residents, but they don't have to fire the existing H1B employee.

That's how I understand OP, if that's legally true or not, I don't know.

You're correct that they are under no obligation to fire the employee on the H-1B. (In theory, they are applying for a "new" job, and them not getting it for whatever the reason isn't an issue for their current job and status.)

However, what OP is missing is that rejecting the US citizen application based on their citizenship is still likely a prohibited discrimination case regardless of what they do with the existing employee.

OP isn't rejecting the US citizen application because they are a US citizen - they are rejecting all candidates applying for the position regardless of ability to do the job or not since the position is already filled. There was no intent to fill the position to begin with - just a test to see if they can sponsor the current h1b employee for their greencard or not. There is no discrimination if no applicant had a chance of being hired to begin with.

They might be running afoul of discrimination laws if they only interview US citizens to cut down on their workload for fake interviews, but I'd guess someone this careful (e.g. not actually submitting the greencard sponsorship where many employers would with a wink and a nod) is likely careful enough to not filter candidates on such obvious things either.

It's a problem with the h1b (and green card) program itself, not OPs behavior. If anything, OP is probably in the top few percentile of ethical businesses/managers if they are actually denying the sponsorships because they made a good faith attempt to test to see if the local market had appropriate candidates.

I think the issue is that they would hire at least one noncitizen if they apply (the "target" employee). So the odds are absolute zero for citizens, and higher for noncitizens.

As for actually submitting the application--as I understand they actually audit the job ad responses and your decisions--so if you didn't even pretend to have a reason for not hiring them, you would automatically be in a lot of trouble. The game is to come up with flaws in the citizen candidates by requiring highly specific experience--e.g. "JDK v17.0.9 Programming" vs "experience with Java" to justify your target being the only one qualified. That would ultimately be for the court to decide.

Only interviewing citizens to the exclusion of PR/EAD card holders as in your example as written would be a violation.

What I think you meant though, which is not interviewing those who don't have permission to work (without your future attempt to get it for them) is normally completely fine; however, this situation is a little different since you would be willing to provide that for the "target" employee but not the other applications. However, I still don't think it would run afoul of this particular law.

The problem is that it’s hard to prove they did that. Until the law is changed the show will go on.

Yes, to really prove it, one would need an admission from the employer. But isn't the above comment such an admission?

Ok, present the HN handle to court:)

Interesting. So practically, they would have to hire the new applicant and then let go of the h1b worker because presumably they don’t have the budget for it?!

Something is only as illegal as the enforcement put into it.

So you’re just using your own definition of legal/illegal?

Is this a serious comment? Use your intelligence.

Yes, this was serious. If someone says:

> This isn't ethical. It shouldn't be legal. But it is.

It actually means „ok, it actually is illegal, but it’s not properly enforced“?

Dawg, not every sentence someone says is 100% literal all the time.

Can you guys stop shitposting?

it's a loophole, and loopholes are legal

If there are qualified citizens, why are hiring h1b?

Are you claiming the government requires you to lie to applicants to the "ghost" job?

Do you have evidence for that claim?

How did you hire the H1-B in The first place if you have direct direct personal evidence that citizen labor is available?

From the discussion in the rest of the thread, this test isn't required for hiring someone in a H1B in the first place, but it is required to upgrade it to a green card.