The computer science that matters the most today —- machine learning, vision, NLP —- is open access without the fees because the main confs are not ACM. (Vision has some in IEEE.)
I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI summaries.
More money, more income. That's why flood of foreign money is good for a university. But, it is a fallacy to think that this has no cost.
In my experience, the large influx of foreign students are typically at the masters level. MS classes are typically (not always lol!) more advanced than undergraduate classes. So, you need more qualified instructors, such as your tenured/tenure track faculty to teach them. When you take T/TT faculty out of undergraduate classes and replace them with teaching faculty, you lose a lot. (Let me know if you need what's lost to be spelled out.)
I don’t understand why we cannot just blacklist these consulting companies as a first step. The 100K fee may effectively do that so it sounds good to me.
The "kids" in the original article are likely PhD students. They are not paying tuition. You and I are likely paying for their education with taxes. (This is likely a small part of the overall higher education picture.)
I think a lot of people arguing about the H1B visa are talking past each other.
- There is no doubt a large volume of abuse by tech consulting companies. It's likely even worse than it looks, because the H1Bs in the U.S. are to support even larger teams offshore. I don't understand why we can't just blacklist these companies.
- Some of medium-skill hires, e.g., did a 2 year MS degree from random university in the U.S., are also a bit sus, in my opinion.
- I'll bet several of Zuck's recent $10M Superintelligence Team hires were at least briefly on an H1B before getting their EB-1A Green Cards.
- Same for a lot of faculty in computer science -- you can get an EB-1B Green Card quickly, but you have to spend some time on an H1B. You cannot convert directly from a student visa. The O-1 exists, but is not on most people's radars in academia. I think likely because the legal fees are prohibitively expensive. (I have heard $40K+)
To add lot of people don't seem to have read the full announcement. It says Secretary of Homeland Security can grant exception. That means companies like Tesla are more likely to get a pass - because manufacturing jobs and what not.
Also, HN is hyper focused on tech consulting. H1Bs are used by doctors too especially in rural America. Doctors apply for J1 waiver and then get H1B for work. From what I have heard some places the only available doctor is an immigrant on H1B. This is going to devastate medical teams.
I'm pretty happy that my continued existence isn't subject to selective enforcement by some US bureaucrat. After all, given the last six months that sounds like a pretty stress inducing thing to have to be subjected to. They seem to err on the side of maximum harm, rather than caution.
Yes, it's a shakedown. If you're a good little poodle and grease the right palms you get a carve out. If you rock the boat or are too small to matter - well, I'm sorry, that's the law now, and no one is going to change it for you, etc.
Yes. As far as I understand it, the EO is not a rule, but will impact upcoming rules. H1B already has exceptions, so there is nothing new being said. It already has a cap exception for doctors and professors, so why not for critical private sector industries.
> - There is no doubt a large volume of abuse by tech consulting companies. It's likely even worse than it looks, because the H1Bs in the U.S. are to support even larger teams offshore. I don't understand why we can't just blacklist these companies.
I wish we could ban offshore IT consultancies dumping "talent". Unfortunately politicians will not support such ban, because those consultancies help corporate donors keep the wages down. If the government banned suppliers who use offshore consultancies from bidding for government contracts those outfits would disappear overnight.
This fee doesn't make any sense to be honest. It's another "simple solution" by the current regime. Just like tariffs and "illegal immigration bad" . It's insane what Americans will put up with. Everything's a nail when you have a sledgehammer I guess.
I was not accurate in my previous post. The O-1 isn’t on an academic’s radar because they are not subject to H1B caps. So might as well do an H1B with minimal effort.
Curious what this will do for faculty. Common to use H1B as a bridge for a few months before green card. New CS faculty salaries cap out at 180K at the high end.
This won't convince anyone who wants to pause all immigration.
However, if you want to allow some immigration, you can make a case PhDs in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, which is what he's talking about.
These are kids who were already world-class coming in and become even better by the time they graduate. It is paid for by taxpayers, for which they should be grateful, and it is done in a context that builds admiration for the country.
> It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
This is still true, right?
Overall, the only hard requirement of the H1B seems to be "can you hold down a job 100% of the time, until you choose to depart or receive a green card?" It is quite hard to think of other requirements that are possible to implement at scale, but I do wonder.
I guess the ACM fees are paying for stupid things like the new AI summaries.