EDIT: In response to the downvoters, Im Indian myself and I know the quality of candidates these bodyshopper/outsourcing companies bring in. They are pretty much the bottom rung if the Indian education system. Most of them barely even speak/write English legibly. They also bring an incredibly bad name to the rest of the Indian developer community.

One of a few reasons I'm glad to not be in the .NET world any more.

>IT service firms use H-1B workers in offshore outsourcing contracts. IT workers affected by offshoring decision will typically train their replacements as a condition of severance. This has been the situation, for instance, at Northeast Utilities in Connecticut, which late last year announced plans to outsource some its IT work to Infosys and TCS and cut around 200 IT workers.

>"The offshore outsourcing firms are once again getting the majority of the visas," said Ron Hira, a public policy professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. "The program continues to promote the offshoring of high-wage American jobs." http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247241/Offshore_firm...

Canada has been a regular "holding pattern" location for Europeans trying to get to the US. It's about time Canadian authorities realised they could exploit this for their own economic gain.

If it were me I'd rather be king of the hill in my home country over putting my life on hold like that.

Not many people consider Vancouver as a first choice, but a lot of people who come here are happy with it and realize that it's a pretty good place to be. Outside of the SV echo chamber you can often get a better picture of what the world actually wants, vs. just what people in SV (though appealing to the SV echo chamber is what gets you the VC funding and buyouts).

Besides that, the weather is nice, the people are friendly, the cost of living is affordable for people in tech (especially compared to SV), nature is just outside the door, etc.

On top of that, it's easier to get talent; partly because people can get visas, but also partly because not every single startup and tech company is competing for the same pool of people. You won't earn a six-figure salary quite so easily, but you also won't have your employees poached away the instant it looks like a buyout isn't just over the horizon.

Thinking of it as some sort of holding pattern purgatory where people are cooling their heels staring through the bars at the Promised Land on the other side of the US border is a huge mischaracterization. SV may be the theoretical ideal, but the lifestyle is much better out here.

King of the hillock you mean?

Seriously, why do so many people go through the utter shit that is the US system, rather than go/stay back home?

There is only one Apple, and it is in California. So say all their products. Comparing it to any other company in the world is like, well, comparing apples to oranges! You may have made your peace with eating oranges, not everyone is willing/can/ready to give up that easily.

It's actually a nice place. Many friends of mine are doing the "holding pattern" thing and quite a few decided they'd just stay.

> If it were me I'd rather be king of the hill in my home country

It all depends on the size of your hill and the company you keep. Also, the hill gets lonely after a time. I like to surround myself with people smarter than myself and that becomes increasingly harder with a fixed size hill.

I'm not sure that's actually true. They want to work for Apple/Google/Facebook/Tech Giant Inc. - they must live in the US to do so. If Canada is smart it'll give companies incentives to build permanent bases in the country - then people won't always be waiting to move south.

Of course.. the U.S. has far more cultural influence worldwide so most foreigners hear and see more about it than Canada.

  The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa in the United States... [that] 
  allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in 
  specialty occupations.

  The regulations define a "specialty occupation" as requiring 
  theoretical and practical application of a body of highly 
  specialized knowledge in a field of human endeavor including 
  but not limited to biotechnology, chemistry, architecture, engineering[...]

One answer is well why should there be a cap. Well there is a cap and one reason is probably because opening the gates wide open will skew the job market in US. For better or for worse it is hard to say but if you ask those in US they might say for worse.

So there is a cap. (And obviously it is being pushed against, there is demand, you wanted to work for Apple, others want to work for other companies and so on). So how to you fix the problem?

I can see these things as possible solutions:

1) First come first serve. That would be interesting, each year on a midnight of a particular date. Some server or some office in DC will will swamped with thousands of instantaneous requests. In less than 1 second it will all be over. Those with servers closer to the facility or those that have better synchronized clocks will win. Or put everyone in a long queue maybe and just wait year to year. Watch the queue extend for decades.

2) Make it an auction. So now each spot initially costs some processing fee to handle. Then well do first come first serve but increase the fee according to the demand. Maybe it takes $2k for initial spot. And $200k for last available.

> Since the job required me to be in Cupertino, the deal simply fell through.

Shouldn't you also blame Apple here too, at least just a bit. Presumably if there is this huge talent pool abroad they would at least consider opening an office in EU or let you work remotely in some capacity. Tech sector is interesting because that becomes possible (and has been done). I don't quite understand their position either. Here is a global company that they found a top person they want to join their team but well, they can't win some stupid lottery. Well fuck it, maybe they can do something more than just drop the deal? Wondering, what are you thoughts on Apple's position?

There's no need to raise the cap and all the Apples and Googles get all the applicants they want. Today the majority of H1-B visas go to Wipro and Infosys and the like for low paid tech grunts; Apple won't have any trouble outbidding them. And those tech grunt companies aren't doing anything valuable for the USA so it won't be any loss to have them struggle.

In fact, we should be able to drop the cap to a more reasonable 30-40,000 instead of the recent 85,000.

And we should be able to eliminate almost all the paperwork. In the current system, a US government bureaucrat tries to determine if you're qualified when you apply. Applicants hire lawyers to fake, translate, fabricate, apostille, and make up education and work experience that USCIS expects. If applicants are paying cash, we can presume they're qualified and reduce the application paperwork to one page.

The big companies that need highly skilled employees can afford to pay en masse.

Now if you are a US based small business and you found a dream employee in say Australia. Either this employee is so valuable that you would be willing to shell out something like 50-100k to bring him/her over, or what is more likely you become flexible and let him/her work remotely.

I do not foresee many small businesses who would actually need to bring a foreign employee in for a constant presence in US. Does a barbershop really need to bring a foreign born barber. If it does then that barber would probably qualify as an alien of extraordinary ability...

My views is biased as a European who programs for a medium sized US business and sees no need to visit US more than once every year.

A small business that's small because it's a niche can afford to have a dream employee work remotely. A small business that's small because it's not-yet-large in a fast-changing market will be slowed down dramatically by the timezone differences, and probably lose out to competitors that colocate all their people.

If your small company wants to employ someone then you have to be willing to pay as much as a big company will for the same employee. And that goes whether you're just paying salary or paying salary plus visa price.

The only disadvantage I can see to small companies is that a big company could afford to buy visas in bulk at the start of the year and figure out what to do with them later, while a small company wouldn't buy visas until it had a specific employee in mind. So I'd make the auction monthly, not annual.

Whereas a large company can make a better case for paying say $100K on a visa for a $200K/year job, this is much harder for a startup paying e.g. $100K+1% equity for said job. If I have only $1MM or so in funding as a startup I am limited to what I can pay and couldn't reasonably waste a year's worth of salary on a visa, whereas a $50,000MM revenue company might have more leeway. No?

I'm sure that was proposed as ridiculous, but you have to keep in mind that there's only a programming labor shortage in two, maybe three cities on the coasts.

For a national program like this lottery, every non-citizen the .gov lets thru will result in many social program costs not only for the one citizen who won't be employed and at a higher pay rate, plus all the downstream effects of lower salaries and less jobs for citizens leading to lower economic activity leading to lower tax revenue.

A $100K cost per immigrant is below the low side of what it costs .gov to take care of the local citizens.

What I'm claiming is the program is a stereotypical crony capitalist "socialize the losses and privatize the gains" scam. Screwing the program up or limiting it or making it very expensive to participate in is a net economic gain to the country. "Fixing" the program would be a net economic loss to the country. Furthermore the program is literally inhumane, a real wage for a human with real working conditions is X, but as a psuedo-slave psuedo-indentured servant you are less human than a real human so we'll only offer you 50% of X and treat you like dirt because thats highly profitable and helps rich guys get richer at the expense of everyone else. Its disgusting that the program exists on several levels.

Besides Canada has better medical system, better crime stats, arguably better recreational opportunities... I wouldn't necessarily describe being "stuck" in Canada as much of a punishment. Its not exactly like being trapped in Somalia.

I don't think F1/H1B visa holders are entitled to ANY social programs. They HAVE to pay medicare/social security, but they cannot avail any of the benefits.

Its fundamentally a zero sum game, actually its a declining sum game for anyone middle class or below. So a guy from Canada or India or whatever gets a job, that means the local who would have gotten it is unemployed, mom and kids on welfare, etc.

Also there's a local utility who advertises for a $60K CCIE as part of their H1B program and aside from the $100K+ local who now has to work at walmart or pull cable or something, there are secondary effects on the local marketplace such that the $60K H1B can't participate in the local economy from retail to home construction quite like the now unemployed formerly $100K local. So that's $40K/yr not going to walmart / real estate developers / whatever. True, every penny of that $40K goes to the execs bonuses, but they might not live in that area (or even in that country) and there is a declining economic effect as fewer people have money (A poor dude with his first $100 bill contributes toward more economic activity (velocity of money, etc) than a rich dude with his millionth $100 bill)

Nah. They can bid with salaries rather than fees. Better to just collect the income and payroll taxes while giving the visas to the most valuable guest workers possible.

Maybe.

One of the factors evaluated for h1b approval is whether or not the immigrant's salary is higher than the mean wages for U.S. citizens working in the same SOC category in the same area.

"Opening the floodgates" would only serve to skew the average salary upwards for citizens, which is good for skilled labor.

You can make many valid arguments for loosening the American immigration laws; but driving up the average wage because that's what the government mandate assumes that companies are irrational. A profit-maximizing company is only going to hire a H1B if they are cheaper than a US citizen per unit work.

(You could make an argument that increased immigration drives up wages by generally increasing economic activity in the destination country, sure... but that's a rather different argument.)

Not true. What if the company can't find a qualified candidate? Then what they pay will likely be higher than the average worker in that industry. That's how salaries go up.

And you can't say "there are no US citizens available". Of course there are... for the right price.

Now you've got a question. Is the price excessive because there are too few US citizen workers available in that field? Or are the companies just being cheap and trying to drive down the price of skilled workers? In an environment of heavy lobbying, with very persuasive people trying to make their case, how can the government objectively tell which is going on?

Sure, if you attract them away from their current job. Then what happens to the company that had their employee taken away?

My point is that an immigrant isn't necessarily cheaper. I'm one of those immigrants on an H1B working in the US that isn't cheaper than an equivalent US worker.

As a hiring manager? that is not my concern. But from a societal perspective, there are a few things the company that is outbid can do.

1. they can raise their own wages.

Note, this does increase the availability of workers through several mechanisms. most obviously, more people will enter the field as wages go up, but that takes a while. More immediately? you have people that have the skills who can also do another job.

For example, my partner does embedded linux development, mostly on arm. But, my partner could also do my job (I'm a SysAdmin) - and usually do it rather better than I am. Right now, the embedded stuff pays about 10% more than the sort of sysadmin gigs I can get, reflecting the required skills. But if there were suddenly more demand for SysAdmins? if you paid enough, I'm sure you could get my partner to take a SysAdmin job.

This is an important part of how Capitalisim allocates labor efficiently. Yeah, I could work as an apprentice motorcycle mechanic. I'm probably pretty good, I mean, for an apprentice. I'm not at journeyman level yet. If being a motorcycle mechanic paid better than being a SysAdmin? I'd probably spend the time and effort to get my motorcycle repair skills up to snuff.

2. they can train.

This increases the pool of workers rather more quickly than increasing wages. This is what I do when I need to hire technical people, and I can't afford market rates. Find people that you think have the attributes to do the job, once they have some help and practice.

From a corporate perspective, both of these things are just a matter of money. And so is going through the work to get a H1B.

Yeah, this hasn't been my experience. My experience is that outside of the contracting houses[1] or teams where you have a bunch of H1B types from the same place - if the same people that hired the Americans hire a single H1B on to a team of Americans, either the H1B is technically better, or he or she is willing to work a lot harder under worse conditions, or he or she is willing to take less money. Otherwise putting up with the paperwork and language barrier is not worth it.

It makes sense that someone working under a H1B would be willing to work harder; My understanding is that if you are fired, you have 15 days to find a new job or leave the country. Regardless of your financial ability, that sounds like a real pain in the ass.

[1]The only rational explanation for the high price and low quality of contracting houses that I can see is that someone is getting pretty huge kickbacks.

Many skilled positions have scarcity, and employers are willing to pay more for an immigrant if their skillset is a better fit and/or can fill the position immediately.

Oh come now. All of us are fungible. None of us are irreplaceable (at least not to our employers.)

Can a janitor do your job? No? Then your labor is not fungible.

Can you do a janitor's job? Yes? Then that's fungible labor.

Most blue collar labor is fungible - meaning that just about any person who is not incapacitated can do it.

I think you underestimate the skill and training required for many blue-collar professions.

I probably have apprentice-level skills as a plumber, an electrician and as a mechanic. I know enough to say with some authority that it would take years for me to get to journeyman level. I don't think the average person could be a really good programmer, and I don't think the average person could be a really good master mechanic, either.

Rather than ask J Random Dude in the US, you should probably ask someone with a modicum of expertise in the matter, such as an economist, who will tell you that adding people is generally a net positive, rather than a negative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

60% of the largest high tech companies were founded by immigrants or their children: http://pando.com/2013/05/29/mary-meeker-highlights-us-immigr...

The fact is the H1-B visa program is completely abused in order to bring in cheaper employees at the expense of the rest of the community. These H1-B employees have little recourse, limited career potential and supress wages. The uncertainty of their immigration status means they don't buy houses, start families, or participate in the community. The benefits economists suggest don't materialize.

Futher, the H1-B program has a negative effect on higher education. The H1-B program allows employers to avoid the H1-B dependent designation if they hire immigrants that possess a masters or higher degree from a US education institution. It is a well known backdoor into the US and drives up the cost of education and pushes the citizens of the US out of the classroom. The employers list a masters degree as a requisite which the citizen doesn't have because they couldn't afford it. Take a look at the UT Dallas enrollment numbers [0]. Nearly 90% of the CS masters students are international, and of the entire engineering school 84% of them are international.

It's a mess and it needs to be fixed.

[0] http://ecs.utdallas.edu/academics/assessment-docs/2013/2013F...

Because for an employer to sponser an h1b immigrant, they need to be paid more than the prevailing wage for their job in the area, which is a combination of salary, benefits, and other factors.

And how is it ruining higher education? Isn't the point to have a better educated workforce?

If a public school accepts so many international students for their CS Masters program, isn't that a problem with the state school, not the immigration system?

So, US citizens can definitely afford a masters or doctorate - but they are in so much debt from undergrad that they prefer to work than study further.

Among many changes, one of them should basically be a fast track to citizenship for H1-B holders, and not have it be tied to the employer. If they are that smart and that needed we should make it easier for them to stay.

American here. I definitely wish it was easier for high-skilled people in other countries to obtain documents for working here.

Plus, as a foreigner in Switzerland, you will always be looked down upon. It is hard to get accepted as equal.

Spain is just wanted due to the proximity to Africa and a lot of African immigrants/refugees using this vector.

> There are simply better ways of dealing with high immigration demand than "dump everyone into a pot regardless of education/experience/viability/urgency and randomly select a few".

We Germans deal with asylum seekers by putting > 2.500 people in camps designed for 1.500 MAXIMUM occupants (Munich, "Bayernkaserne" camp), blocking them from work and giving them free food and 140€ per month as pocket money.

Needlessly to say, that ain't fucking enough for non-food expenses in bigger cities, and what happens if the only thing they do is drink, smoke and fight (as asylum seekers you must not travel around the country, you have to stay in your processing city!) is basically a fucking violation of human dignity.

Of course it also leads to vast criminality - not just the fighting between asylum seekers themselves, but also massive amounts of theft, pot dealing (hello Berlin Görlitzer Park) and other criminality. In order, Nazi-parties and other right-wing extremists gain excellent popularity with "Kick em out" messages.

I hear this from time to time, but data paints a radically different picture. What you describe is only the case for sub-Saharan immigrants who are just a tiny, tiny minority of the inmigrants coming to Spain. Most inmigrants come from:

1-Romania (for which Spain is obviously not in the path to any other country)

2-Morocco (the vast majority of whom arrive legally since the late 90s)

3-UK (and contrary to popular belief, only 21% of them are over 65 years old)

Then, the largest component of immigration is from the former colonies, due to the shared language (so, again, not being used as a vector)

All of this data is available online on the INE (national institute of statistics)

My opinion is that the world seriously needs a new refugee convention to prevent economic migrants from abusing the refugee system. The governing idea should be that you can't use refugee status to move from a poorer country to a significantly richer one. If you're a genuine refugee then moving to a safer country with similar per-capita-GDP is something you should be happy with.

Meanwhile, Yazidi and Syrian refugees will have to pay thousands to smugglers or scale barbed wire fences to enter a safe country.

However you'll find most of these countries have opted to sell residency, albeit through business and job investments. Generally skilled workers have to be sought for locally before they get someone over.

Using a "lottery" system just sounds crazy. It's still possible to buy citizenship, yet everyone else has to sit on the side-lines and take a number. Sounds like a weird plan created on a whim..

As for the lottery, how else could it be done? There is a cap on H1-B visa each year. The USCIS receives more applications than spots the first day you can apply.

[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/153992/150-million-adults-worldwi...

Now adjust those numbers to the population of those countries... oh look, the UK all of a sudden came out ahead.

All of these studies comparing numbers usually just boils down to "The US is big". It has been brought up elsewhere that Canada, for example, has more immigrants as a percentage of population. But of course when comparing absolute numbers to the US, it will look like peanuts.

> Contrast that with how things work in the US (which I don't have time to get into in an HN comment), and you'll see why it deserves to be singled out for this.

I don't think anyone is questioning that other countries have much more lax policies. The question is what is your solution?

As someone who is a US citizen, held visas in Germany/UK, and has a Belgian technical co-founder trying to get the US, I understand this situation very well. But I simply can't sympathize with people who simply say "Why can't they just let me! It works elsewhere!" and offer no real solution that takes into consideration anything other than a "why not me" attitude.

[1] - http://247wallst.com/special-report/2013/09/25/countries-wit...

But I digress. The problem with the existing system is that it is insane and a waste of resources. One has to get a lawyer and wait for a long time with no certainty in the outcome while dealing with an extremely opaque bureaucracy where anything can go wrong at any time.

This has nothing at all to do with volume. Indeed, a simpler more streamlined and less opaque system would help with volume.

Say a system like the Canadian or the UK one. There's a point scale. You can compute the number of points you get ahead of time, now there's a simple web form actually. If you cross the threshold you will get in. There are known wait times, you can just call the embassy. There are points for things the country needs (particular jobs), for certain qualifications (degrees, etc), for language proficiency, some regional tweaks, family, and having an employment offer.

And extremely importantly. You get permanent resident status (green card), not an H1B. What Americans don't realize is that you want to hand out green cards. H1B lower both your salaries and ours. The H1B restricts immigrant mobility, can't move to a better job and raise the average salary, and encourages people to go home with all of their newly gained knowledge and money.

I'll give you a personal example of the difference between a sane and an insane system:

As an 11 year old I filled out all of our Canadian immigration paperwork (my parents checked it but it was correct and they didn't change it). We knew we would get in based on our points. The embassy told us the timeframe in which we should expect our paperwork to go through. It went through a bit early. We moved to Canada.

Now for the US. As a near-30-year old with a US PhD working at a top research institution I have to pay a specialized law firm several thousand dollars, spend weeks getting paperwork, bugging people in several countries to write absurd letters, building a case, etc. All of this to basically the same thing. And in the end, who knows what will happen because there are no standards, no appeal, no one to discuss anything with. Oh, and I have no idea what the processing time is.

So no. It is not an issue of "why can't they just let me in". It's a system that hurts your salary by restricting my mobility, hurts me by making me pay lawyers needlessly, hurts the image of the US by creating disgruntled people, and hurts the economy by routing business and increasingly prestigious conferences elsewhere. It just makes no sense.

Example: the DMV. In both Australia and the US the procedure for getting my licence renewed is the same. I go into an office, I fill out a form, they take a picture, and I get a licence. The difference is that when I did this in Australia I waited about five minutes and they printed my licence on the spot, whereas in the US it for some reason takes one or two hours and they print the licence in six to eight weeks. It's not that the California DMV appears to have fewer staff per customer or anything, it's just for some reason their procedures make no sense and nobody is able or willing to fix it.

Other examples: immigration and the TSA, but let's not even go there.

Exactly this. There's a myth that the US is less bureaucratic than Europe, for example, and while in Europe you have the things like Italy which are horrible (in Bureaucracy terms) a lot of things are simpler.

I have had driver licenses from multiple US states. My experiences on the matter vary in extreme measures from one state to the next. This is mostly based on local laws, resources, and demand.

One time, it took hours but I had license in hand before leaving the building. In another case it took around twenty minutes and I had license in hand before leaving the building. Things are different in different places.

Then again, I've never had a license from California so that's a pain I haven't endured.

Now, I'm not saying this is right or wrong; it's a complex issue, and I am personally undecided. But you seem to be missing a major argument against the "points system" you describe.

The Canadian system explicitly biases the system in favor of the wealthy and well-educated. That's exactly what the "points" system is meant to do. Now, many people think this is a good thing; their argument is that wealthy and well educated people bring good things in to the country. I'm not saying they are wrong, I'm just saying that you should understand how some people feel that is unfair.

The US system does this to some extent, too, for instance the H1B visa is biased in just that way, and even for the lottery, we set minimum "you can likely support yourself" levels, And we have special ways for really wealthy people to jump the queue, and of course, the way the lottery is set up, one could argue, is quite racist. But you can also make the argument that the US lottery system is a lot more fair to people that have the ability to support themselves, but maybe weren't wealthy enough to get an advanced degree.

Of course, in many countries the ability to get an advanced degree is not very dependent on being wealthy

I... find your assertion to be unlikely. Of course, I could be wrong. Do you have statistics? Is there a country where there is not a very strong correlation between high parental income and advanced degrees?

Which results in a situation where the higher socio-economical status of your parents makes you much more likely to have an advanced degree, even though there should be no correlation.

Being educated does not imply being wealthy.

The most relevant statistic in the link you reference is "Pct of population" with the US at 14.3% and Germany at 11.9%. Two and a half percentage points does not seem like such a big difference in scale.

My attitude isn't "why not me" but "why is this so absurd"? I got in to both countries, but one was a total clusterfuck and one wasn't. Obviously one of them is doing something better than the other. I'm positing that the ultimate solution to demand (if one exists), is more in the direction of the German system than the random lottery of the US.

Germany hopes for 1-3 months: http://www.germany.info/Vertretung/usa/en/05__Legal/02__Dire...

(Coincidentally, I'm trying to relocate to the UK -- or an English-language friendly part of the EU, like the Netherlands or maybe Berlin -- so that I can be with a lovely girl. Haven't even gotten to visas yet, but I am really really glad that I'm not trying to go the other way...)

Easier process than in the US, but not exactly an easy one.

In the US, the process is something like 6 months, although apparently there was/is a backlog, and they were taking something like a year to process applications for spouses.

It gives you an idea of how screwed up the system is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/us/program-benefiting-some...

They don't seem like edge cases, either, they just hit a slow spot in their processing.

You call them, ask them, plead with them. Nothing. "Your application is in the system and is getting processed."

Nine months into it, it turned out that they lost my digital picture taken at a USCIS facility. How in this day and age one loses digital pictures is beyond me.

There are no limits apart from that.

Plus, the partner who's not working has some very real imputed salary value. In fact, the economic value of a non-working partner is much higher in a high cost of living area than a low cost of living area. If they save you from paying for professional childcare, the expense saved may be $4K/month rather than $500/month. Ditto for other services, especially meals at home.

As a Canadian who did three years of immigration horseshit in the US with a non-working spouse, the real issue is that your spouse is making a huge sacrifice of their freedom. Being a kept person can chip away at your sense of self-sufficiency and self-worth. The people I met in my situation all left the country (the majority) or had kids (one couple).

Like I said before, I agree with you general sentiment that the couple should be able to make that decision.

Simply being curious here - didn't Apple provide you with the case ID? Typically, when you submit an Application to USCIS, you get an ID that allows you to check your status online and maybe you would have been able to know immediately that your application was not selected.