I'm all for importing top talent to work at American companies. In fact, I think H1-Bs should be allowed to start businesses and move from job to job like anyone else. If it's about innovation, why force them to stay in one job while they're here?
When Microsoft does layoffs and then mass H1-Bs, is that shedding low-skill Americans for top Indian talent, or just labor arbitrage? Is a country of 340 million really lacking talent, or do we just want cheaper and controllable labor?
If they wanted cheap labour, they would outsource. H1Bs are an important source of talent. That does not mean it is abused by outsourcing companies to bring cheap talent to America and profit from the arbitrage.
>That does not mean it is abused by outsourcing companies to bring cheap talent to America and profit from the arbitrage.
It doesn't have to follow directly; the problem is often indirect. H1Bs are much better behaved for employers because they are nearly powerless to say no, and can be slow-walked for raises, promotions and squeezed for high hours worked to reduce effective wages. There's also cultural migration issues - India is 70%+ of the H1B program. Does India have a monopoloy on top global talent, or is it just a process vulnerable to political capture and top execs' whims?
Talent exists everywhere, but when one country absolutely dominates a process, it suggests the process has been captured.
>Big tech is not the one abusing this program.
Did they promise that in a press release or something? Compared to Microsoft, TCS and Infosys are bottom tier tech, but the H1B program in general is sketchy based on the accusations the biggest players have had over the last decade.
Not the H1Bs at Amazon who were paid less and guilted into working weekends. Not my Mexican girlfriend who works for $50k as an oil rig chemical engineer in Houston at a company that only hires visa workers on the cheap. Not my Indian neighbors I befriended making $60k in software at Chase bank in Houston on their all-visa teams.
SLB is a good example, where I met my girlfriend. Entry level American chemical engineer: $120-150k. Visa chemical engineer imported to work on the same team in the same position: $50k. Guess which part of the pie chart grew while I worked there.
But I'm not supposed to notice any of this. And until very, very recently it was a faux pas to mention it at all.
If we're going to give anecdotal data, when I lived in NYC I was hired as an H1B, and every single other H1B I knew was paid way more than the median wage. But these were companies not trying to abuse the system. I do not doubt that there are bad actors.
I do agree that there should be minima to prevent abuse. I do not agree that every H1B hire was to abuse the system.
In the early 2010s there were hiring shortages, the startup that hired me would have probably preferred saving on the attorney fees and the 6+ months it took between the offer and the start date. For a new H1B you have to prepare the paperwork in March at the latest, apply the first week of April, for a start date of October 1st. And not only that, but with the quotas and the lottery you're absolutely not guaranteed that your hire is going to make it. All things being equal without a shortage or the ability to underpay, it is not an attractive solution.
H1Bs do push salaries down, because there is more "supply" of workers, so it should probably only be used for hiring for areas with shortages, but even then you can have downturn like what we're having in tech, and some companies may keep their H1Bs over FTE because they are less of a flight risk and can't negotiate their salaries as well. Even with a shortage, this means that employees with that specific skill will be paid less, now it's more of a matter of which one is better for the economy/society.
It's basic economics that more workers with fewer rights lower wages across the board. "They make what Americans do" when there is a continuous flow of competing labor. Sure. What would companies pay if they didn't have these exploitable workers? Would the companies have opened new office closer to where Americans are educated? Certainly, one of those two would happen.
But this is why the government should enforce existing laws and include provisions like must pay x above median average salary for the role to discourage fraud.
But it does negate the claim that H-1Bs are paid the same wage.
If your claim only applies to a subset of visa workers in a subset of companies, then refine the claim to use a word like "some", and it will be a trivial claim that I agree with.
> If it's top talent, then they should be forced to pay them the wage of a US worker, if not more.
They are forced to do that, and they in fact do that.
Source: I was hired by one big tech company as an H-1B worker (I was a new grad) over a decade ago (2012), my salary was ~15% higher than what the chart says for "class of 2014".
I will go a step further and suggest that you, an HNer, were probably even a world class talent back then who mogged your US cohort so badly they offered you 15% more to snap you up.
It's just evident that's not what's happening across all H-1B positions in the US, and those are the ones worth talking about here.
For every one example of "you" I have seen 100 or even 1000 of the other kind of "warm body" type of example. 2012 is already a long time ago. What has happened since is that the US reached some kind of critical mass situation where the number of those "warm bodies" brought in to do cheap work has finally killed the golden goose and now not only is it nearly impossible to find a job, the cost of living has also skyrocketed! We're closing in on the endgame here, mark my words. It will be ugly before it gets sorted out somehow.
I worked for a couple of very "household name" big companies as a tech lead. I trained probably dozens of H1Bs over the past 15 or so years. I've seen it all. I decided that I would help anyone who wanted to improve their skills regardless of their origin or employment status, and that's what I did. I got mistreated terrible at times, in particular by a Venezuelan woman, but generally speaking, I helped raise the bar for a lot of people who maybe otherwise would have been ignored because big companies don't care about training people at all. As I look back on what my career was, I think that all the informal mentoring I did was probably my biggest contribution. I just wish it had turned out better for everyone involved. I saw a lot of absolutely heartbreaking situations arise over the years. And now my situation is kind of heartbreaking as well. We were all in this together, but nobody spent a single second thinking about that.
as an American who worked in Silicon Valley for years, but is not from there, i'd say it's also "captive real estate customers" created by H1-B people.
I once asked an (American) director where i worked just this question.
He said what you surmised: while there are plenty of qualified American engineers in the United States, citing Motorola headcount reductions as an example, it was a challenge to convince them to move to California's cost of living.
Seriously. All I needed to do to be filthy rich was move to Silicon Valley back in '97 when I got my MS, then eventually have bought a house or two out there. That's it.
To recap:
1. Move to the Bay Area circa 1997
2. Buy houses
3. Profit enormously in the 2020s
Exactly. It's not about talent at all. It's about using the strong arm of the government to give large multinationals an advantage in the tech market. Total grift and corruption!
But if it's a replacement for supporting domestic education and a source of cheap skilled labor, no thanks.
If FAANG were screaming at Congress about their inability to hire and the solution was better primary and secondary education programs for people at home to create that skilled workforce, we probably wouldn't have such an aggressive urban/rural political divide in this country.
The fix may take a long time, but the bigger problem is there are no workable ideas for a fix. It's not like better education hasn't been thought of, attempted, and tons of money dumped into it. Results have been mixed at best.
If you want the British to take back control of the USA so that the British can enforce the superior* British education system onto the USA, that would be very very funny to watch, but I don't think it would be "easy" — especially when people realise it means no guns in schools or anywhere else.
* The British system may not be superior, I left uni in 2006 and the UK in 2018, and UK politicians have been fiddling with education seemingly forever.
But that just means you should substitute whichever country is doing education best at the moment; the point is, even obviously correct things are still hard in the world of politics.
If you are referring to the statistics for "computer-related" positions and trying to equal "computer-related" to "software engineers", I have nothing to say other than you are just trying to push your agenda.
Yup, if you take the restrictions off, none of these companies would want them. They love the restrictions. Americans can just up and quit on them, but not temporary workers.
How would you prevent people from getting an H1-B visa for a job just for the sake of moving to a different job in a sector that doesn't need a lot of workers? And if they are going to start a business, they could start a business in tech that is actually successful, and then fill a few extra positions with friends/family/contacts/people willing to pay, and then those people could move on to other jobs for which they are more suited.
Fact is, immigration systems in all of the richest countries are already bursting with abuse from certain countries with very ingenious schemes and you gotta have some ways to protect it unless you want a free-for-all.
I would encourage you to actually read up about the hoops that people with H-1Bs have to jump through just to stay in the country. It is a demeaning and abusive process, and not usually one that people engage in frivolously.
Additionally, you can already today legally switch jobs as an H-1B, but it is a process that gives undue amounts of power to the employer, which makes switching difficult. Finally, regarding switching fields, it's not that easy. You have to show that your new field is related to your degree and experience.
So please, instead of making up imaginary bogeymen, learn more about the immigration system.
I never said it should be as difficult as it is, which you seem to imply that I did. I only said meant to say the system shouldn't be too easy, either.
You know the answer! It's veritable slave labor is why. I've seen it a thousands times at major US companies and how it plays out. It is a horrible form of leverage they have over their "assets."
I used to be but that's not how any of these immigration programs are used. Often they've been used to crush domestic workers and even change demographics and voting patterns.
At this point it doesn't look like allowing anything other than net emigration is practical. You just can't trust the people involved to do anything else.
That's a great point: immigrants are great for the existing voting populace. They count for the census, but if you keep them on a program like H-1B, they'll live their whole lives without being able to vote. The existing voters have their votes count more and more with H-1B population growth. A great gig when you've got something like Prop 13 making sure the newcomers pay most of the taxes too. What a racket!
