most smart companies that use the H1-B visa program only hire those with masters degrees. This does 2 things:
- They can first bring them on as "interns" under the F1 visa, which can be extended quite a bit. They are paid peanuts while the firms weed out the absolute duds.
- This avoids the requirements on firms for extra reporting if a certain percentage of their staff are H1-B don't have masters degrees.
This creates a nice little loophole where smaller colleges have massive massive STEM programs with an insane majority being foreign students. The students get their foot in the door to play the game and the colleges get paid.
Take UT Dallas for example: http://ecs.utdallas.edu/academics/assessment-docs/2014/2014%...
The CS Masters program is bigger than the CS undergrad program, only 4% of graduating CS undergrads are international, where as 93% of FT CS Masters students are international. That should be odd to anyone.
And these foreign students usually take education loans(around $35k on average) back in their countries. So when they fail to get a job after completing MS degree, they go to the same outsourcing firms and work on F1 visa as contractors for substentially lower salaries again with getting their foot in the door mentality. Outsourcing firms know and exploit the strong tendency of these students to avoid having to go back to their countries where salaries would be insufficient to pay back their student loans fast enough.
And I'm not questioning the work that CIS does; I'm just saying that it's very, very difficult to say someone is not working in a managerial capacity based on false documentation. There's no way they can tell false documentation from real documentation. But for L-1 visas there is no salary parity requirement, only a requirement that the company cover all expenses for the employee while they are in the US. So the IT body shops take advantage of this, and it leads to entire divisions of large companies being laid off and replaced by cheap labor.
This is easily gamed by creating "new" positions with trivially different responsibilities than the old positions you want to get rid of. Now you don't have an established salary history to work with. That's on top of having H1B's by the shorthairs because its so difficult for them to switch jobs, thus the 60+ workweek the domestic workers rightfully balked at is achievable by cost-cutting managers.
That's on top of what Disney did, which was just outsource an entire department to a provider, which side-steps all the paltry protections in the H1B program.
>The majority of H1-B recipients these days are foreign nationals who attended American universities, often with masters degrees. Those are the kinds of foreign nationals we want participating in the US economy.
Frankly, in IT/CS a lot of higher degrees are little more than adult daycare. If you can't figure out how to code via a 4 year degree then another 2 ain't helping you. Even if Disney got MS holders because their workforce needed MS's for some weird reason, which sounds highly questionable to me, some nerds straight out of school aren't going to do a good job running operations with zero professional experience and 10 hours of training from the previous guy. Its clear they did this not for better outcomes but for cost savings.
Its likely an H1B has an undergrad degree for a foreign university that's little more than a diploma mill anyway.
Its hilarious that we bemoan the lack of people, especially women, in STEM, when many STEM jobs can be eliminated with the blessing of the federal government via whats essentially bought and paid-for legislation by large companies looking to cut IT costs. No wonder law school enrollments and finance higher ed degrees have been so high. The smart guys, and women in general apparently, know tech is a ripoff precisely because of shit like H1B's stealing their jobs. Lets stop excusing the H1B program. Its designed to take American jobs from Americans and everyone knows it.
Yeah, this is unfortunately the case. There are only a few internationally reputable universities in India, so if they were unable to get into one of the top schools in the country, they usually have to follow up with a masters from a reputable US university if they ever want to work outside India. I just view someone with an undergrad degree from India and a masters in some technical discipline from a US school as being about the same as someone with an undergrad degree from a US school.
Your problem is opportunity hungry people in developing nations who will do anything for whatever salary offered.
Every thing else is a side effect of this. Do you think cutting down on L1 visas will change anything at all? In an era of communication being super cheap, and means of collaboration getting better and better, you can regulate as much visas as you want, those jobs will continue to be outsourced. The cost benefit is simply too enormous.
The problem today are the L-1 visas, which are relatively unregulated. L-1 visas are for foreign nationals in a management capacity whose companies wish to transfer them to the US. These visas only require that the employer pay the employee's living expenses, and the employee receives the normal salary they would make in their home country (!).
All of this is fine until you start to stretch the definition of "management". Which many consulting companies (Tata, Infosys, Cognizant, etc) have started to do -- they can take a person from India who is paid ~$25,000/yr (a good engineer's salary in India), fly him to the US on an L-1 visa, and charge him out to the client at $100/hr. An equivalent US-based contractor rate for the same position would be $125/hr and have margins around 10-15%. But the offshoring firms can undercut US-based contractors by 25%, eat all the travel/housing expenses, and STILL make well over 100% margins.
L-1s are actually the problem. There's no salary parity requirement, there's no requirement to look for US-based candidates of equivalent positions, just a requirement that the person is "acting in a management capacity" and has worked for the company for at least 1 year. It's hard to prove that someone is not "acting in a management capacity" -- many of the companies outright lie on the visa applications. What's worse, this type of dishonesty is considered fair game when dealing with corrupt bureaucracies in India or China. But L-1s are fueling the latest wave of offshoring: they allow companies to bring people to the US at offshore prices.