The original headline is written by someone with an axe to grind, because this change does not hurt Indian IT professionals at all. Restrictions on importing low-cost labor will raise wages for workers in India. The restrictions will also raise wages in the United States for obvious reasons as well.
Will it really? I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, but I can also see an argument that fewer Indian IT workers in the USA means that more IT workers will stay in India and look for jobs. More job seekers could drive wages down, even while the Indian companies are getting higher skilled workers.
There's a reason they flock over. Millions of engineers can't find jobs in India. Less than 10 percent of graduates are employed because there are too many schools and they pump out low-quality students. Combine this with the fact that there is a very severe shortage of jobs.
I don't see how that makes sense. Presumably if you've worked in the US for 5 years you'd like to stay there. Canadians often try for an H1B while they are on a TN because with an H1B you get immigrant intent and can apply for a green card.
Canadians still have it easier since you can work on a TN and try the lottery many times.
The number of attempts to get on an H1-B is now exceeding the validity period of the initial TN visa, increasing the probability the TN will be rejected at the border.
Immigration is starting to reject renewals - ref Canadian nurses working in Detroit [1]. I have family members who are being refused TNs.
Personally, I get worried crossing the border and I'm on an H1-B.
Not GP, but presumably making an H1B harder to get would decrease yazaddaruvala's competition for a job. I'll admit that this next thought is racist, but I think a lot of companies would prefer hiring a Canadian over someone from another country (assuming they have the same skill). Canada has a very similar culture to the USA and they usually speak English as their mother tongue.
I don't get why it's racist to not prefer Indians and Chinese H1Bs because of bad language skills. At my current company I can say with 100% confidence that the source of many bugs is bad communication in part because of Chinese H1B's misunderstanding w or x or failing to clearly communicate y or z.
Preferring one group of people over another based on the color of their skin or where they came from is pretty much the definition of racism, regardless of whether a stereotype about a particular person is true.
I'm not saying my thought was controversial or even wrong (the thought being that predominately white Canadians fit in better with predominately white Americans), but I'll bet most HR people would deny that it has any influence on their hiring practice.
Canadians can enter and work on a TN visa, which has similar requirements to an H1-B. However, the number of visas granted is unlimited. They are renewed every time you cross the border, and can be rejected for any reason. They're very temporary and you end up feeling worried crossing the border.
It explicitly does not allow a path to citizenship, so you have to transfer to an H1-B to get a green card. If your intent is to attempt to get a green card, you are in direct violation of a TN visa and can be deported.
Unlike those jammy Australian bastards (they get a visa that looks like an L1! So jealous), spouses cannot work on the TD (visa for partners/dependents of TN holders). This means your partner cannot work if you're on a TN until you first transfer to a H1-B and then transfer again to a green card. For a Canadian, the process is probably 2-3 years to get an H1B, and then another 2 years to get the green card. Reducing the competition for an H1-B will reduce the length of time spent in the first step of this process.
Indians and Chinese people have it much, much worse. The length of time after their green card approval to when they are granted one is quite literally measured in decades.
The inability for spouses to work causes a lot of stress on relationships. Spouses get depressed, angry and feel a complete loss of independence. They no longer have a career nor their "own" money.
Well, my partner's not Canadian, so they can't get a TN. This problem would also affect Canadian partners without university degrees, a good moderate indicator of TN eligibility.
However, the ability for spouses to work also affects all H1-B holders, and they're a much, much larger group for a much longer period of time.
The mistake with this bill is it assumes that tech workers excluded from the US will just disappear. They won't. They'll set up shop in other countries, and those companies will compete with US companies. It will also encourage larger US companies to set up dev offices in foreign countries.
One way or another, those workers will be competing with US workers regardless.
Please remember - for every so-so developer from Infosys and Co., there's a mediocre sore losers like yourself, who would get thrashed in a globally competitive market.
Personal attacks will get you banned here. Just because someone else posts a bad comment doesn't mean it's ok for you to post a bad one, let alone one like this, which is the sort of thing we ban people for. Please don't do this again.
Could you please not post unsupported generalizations that put other people down? Assuming you're right doesn't make this a substantive HN comment, or a good one, and the last thing we need is more flamebait on inflammatory topics.
This was in response to a post worrying about the people who are impacted by this rule going to other countries and the US therefore missing out. It's pretty well known that a significant part of H-1 visas are used by companies like Infosys to get in cheap developers. If these people are not able to get a 90k offer in the US they are probably not worth much which matches my personal observation.
There are plenty of very good people who can't get an H-1 because the quota is used for cheap people. I came here on an H-1 myself and it was quite difficult because the quota got used by bodyshops. My life would have been easier if they had set a minimum salary.
That is the case even today; American engineers compete with foreign engineers housed across the world. The difference here is that there is some benefit in having workers come domestically - communication and collaboration among other things improve. American employers will hopefully be driven to pay better wages to Americans already here instead of importing cheaper labor.
Or more likely those companies will now be unable to compete with foreign companies employing those people. No country has ever produced domestic prosperity by restricting trade.
Yes. And I hope India will increase its protectionism as well. I don't see why Flipkart has to compete with Amazon. Why do we need Whirlpool or GM when there are Indian companies that will help create jobs in India?
> No country has ever produced domestic prosperity by restricting trade.
Correction, all countries that have ever existed restrict trade, and all of the most prosperous nations today heavily control their trade across nearly every industrial segment. The sole variance is the level of restriction or tariff that they utilize depending on their context or skill at trade & production.
That includes present day Germany (a big restrictor of trade, heavily tilting their export/import ratio to a $300 billion trade surplus), France, Britain, Japan. Even while the US market is more free than most when it comes to trade, it also heavily controls & restricts trade using tariffs and global trade bodies.
That particularly includes China, which has dramatically restricted trade into their nation. They've done so on purpose in order to buy time to build up their domestic giants, which has worked extremely well for them. They've been allowed to have their cake and eat it too for decades.
By itself, China proves that you can get extraordinarily prosperous utilizing trade restriction policies under the right circumstances.
This is an extremely uninformed opinion. First world countries restrict trade all the time. It's a mantra disseminated by first-world economists to justify breaking down trade barriers in third-world countries and set up shop more easily.
It has been seen time and time again. It would be great is this meme were put to rest.
Those are a bare few data points that don't contemplate the history of technological and economic development. Historically, countries which want to develop their local industries protect them heavily when they're in a phase where they cannot compete against external forces until such point at which they can actually deal with the international market.
This has been one of the ways in which China has improved technological innovation at an incredibly fast pace.
You could say the same thing about any law aimed at increasing wages/workers rights. Minimum wage encourages companies to move/setup overseas. Same with workplace safety laws.
Meh, 60K engineers won't be much competition. if anything, this is good for the US as it will make room to allow the US to drain more 90K+ engineers from other countries.
This rule was long in coming. Low wage body shops wasn't doing anyone any good.
I don't think the purpose of the bill was to address that concern. The US will award a constant number of H1Bs no matter what the salary requirements are.
I think that the main benefit is to have higher quality H1Bs. There are many talented temp stays who lose the lottery to less talented people and have to leave the US. Salary can be used as a heuristic for talent.
I can see the other replies but you are entirely right . I work for one of the big 4 and the overseas office where I am is growing rapidly . I hear one of our peers is doing the same .
Of course they aren't making too much of a noise about it as they're smart.
These policies are already backfiring.
If that means companies discover that you don't have to be in California to do tech that would be a good thing . Bring on the foolishness I say .
I would like to add that I'm not talking about this policy in particular but the growing sentiment against even skilled immigration.
Do you actually believe that H-1B slots will no longer be filled at 90k/year?
I would wager a great deal that not only will all slots still be allocated but that demand will continue to far outstrip supply. The number of workers excluded from the US will be identical as to that under the previous rules but those granted H-1B visas will be paid closer to what their American colleagues are.
Big companies already have the option of opening offices anywhere in the world. Wonder why they don't already take advantage of all this "cheap and good labor" out there, as you put it?
They do actually, for example Microsoft has substantial R&D operations in India and China among others. But they also use H1Bs. Most big companies do both, but unlike the body shops, aren’t going to be affected by this very much.
> Wonder why they don't already take advantage of all this "cheap and good labor" out there, as you put it?
what makes you think they aren't? I work for Red Hat. It is an amazing company to work for. But our main technology center is in the Czech Republic, where the cost of living is 40% lower than the US. Those are absolutely great engineers to work with, and despite some of the alarming comments here they are absolutely as high quality as any US engineer if not more so. But the fact remains that their salaries are spent overseas and not here in the US.
This is why the point of free trade is to raise the standard of living in those nations so that not only does life get better for everyone around the world, but also other nations no longer act as a cheap drain for jobs that pay artificially higher wages domestically. It's a huge idea that has worked in many ways, raising US GDP vastly beyond what it could be under heavy protectionism (think: the whole world as your customer base as well as your production base vs. just the US). But it also failed spectacularly in that it isolated low skilled workers in the US who became even more resentful of foreigners than they already were, who then went ahead and elected a facist government. Whoops.
Its a matter of scale, not anecdotal stories. Saying “my company does it and is successful” and “big companies don’t do it at scale” are equally right and factual. If there was a suppky of cheap talent outside the US the big companies are already utilizing it. There are benificial network effects to moving some of them to the US.
I was responding to a poster who claimed it was not happening at all. Also I think it's a great idea to build tech centers all over the world, to raise the standard of living in many places and to further the practice of working with a mix of disparately located and remote workers.
Its true that you cant forbid it, but if its provokes any change in structure for the companies it will still have an effect on all parties.
Id take it for granted that eliminating H1B visas would increase wages for software engineers: obviously at a cost for everyone else. Anything else in the middle to that will have a proportionate effect.
Deliver on a promise to curb foreign competition on American soil and forward a protectionist agenda? I see this move as accomplishing the opposite of the stated goal, or at least being a wash with respect to it. Not that I’m complaining, but I’m sure even a despot would do some things we all nominally agreed with. There can be little doubt that Trump has been slowed in implementing his agenda by a lack of either familiarity or willingness to work with the bureaucracy in Washington.
I only see an overall labor shortage in tech fields. I’ve never heard of even mediocre developers having trouble finding work, except for a brief period in the early 2000s. I think wage suppression is only contributed to in very small part by the oft-exploited labor coming here from overseas on the H1-B and similar programs. I see this as trying to make the program function more according to its stated intention and bring in skilled labor.
It's the mediocre developers or developers in areas where the overwhelming majority of the jobs are mediocre that are hurt by this. Generally speaking they're not being replaced with better workers, they're being replaced with cheaper foreign mediocre workers.
Wages are flat due to inadequate wealth redistribution leading to a sluggish, understimulated economy. The minimum wage is many years overdue for a major increase - people at the bottom of the wage scale spend virtually all their income back into the economy. Billionaires hoarding enormous sums of US generated wealth in overseas banks do not.
>There can be little doubt that Trump has been slowed in implementing his agenda by a lack of either familiarity or willingness to work with the bureaucracy in Washington.
Both being, ironically, the qualities his base finds most appealing about him, and which probably got him elected to begin with.
Regardless of whether or not you think the bill is a good idea, I don't think the opponents arguments against it quoted make sense.
As long as the new minimum still clears the market and all spaces are still filled (I think they would be), all this bill does is replace the pool of H1-B visas awarded with a higher-paying one.
The quote "It also could disrupt the marketplace, threaten thousands of US jobs, and stifle US innovation" would only make sense if one would expect that lower-paid workers on average contribute more to US innovation, and are less likely to displace Americans. I would predict the opposite, or at least no effect. One might hope that the people companies are willing to pay top dollar for are the higher skilled ones that companies have trouble hiring enough of in the US.
It's interesting that the bill is a half-measure in that it doesn't take the idea to its logical conclusion and eliminate the lottery and sort applications by salary and take the top N, but I imagine that would be politically unpopular.
I think you could possibly argue against this bill perhaps for some kind of fairness reasons, but I think the arguments quoted don't make sense.
There's basically no way it threatens U.S. innovation because underpaid H1B workers are mostly at banks, insurance companies, etc. Maintenance engineers, or hardly anyone for that matter, at massive corporations aren't exactly doing a lot of innovation.
My understanding of this is that it's not much lower than other entry level pay, but they tend to get no raises or smaller raises because their immigration status is tied to their current employment so they can't easily switch jobs. Often times low cost H1B workers have been used to replace more senior people too. There was a big wave of this around the time of the last recession as a cost savings measure.
I'm not super familiar with data on the topic though, that would definitely be nice to see.
Consider the Brain Drain argument that is used to explain why poorer countries have a hard time catching and keeping up with already-developed countries.
But someone that could provide enormous value in the future, might not qualify today. It is also a harm in the terms of brain drain. There should be very little doubt on the fact that any restriction will harm everyone in that 'ladder of skill'. It particularly harms those who would acquire those skills later on and dont have them today.
Those skills are more in demand and probably much rarer. It makes more sense that employers would need to look beyond US borders to fill those positions.
ORRRRR....maybe they should pay higher wages to stimulate demand for people to enter in those occupations.
I can't help but think that the H-1B VISA program should be tightly restricted by industry and time-limited.
If we can't find programmers, our immigration policy should be to recruit them abroad and then find a way to put them onto a fast-track to citizenship. NAY...we should COMPEL them towards the process of citizenship lest they forfeit some amount of tribute.
In no way or shape should our immigration policy serve to distort the labor market here to corporate benefit. We should be seeking every possible mechanism to help our economy grow via the increasing demand for skilled labor here in the USA. That doesn't happen when you collapse demand for entry-level positions in the USA like H-1B has ben demonstrated to do.
We should also BAN in the strongest possible terms the practice of forcing an employee to train their replacement or put it under such onerous terms that no corporation would do it. I'm talking about the equivalent of a years salary in severance or more. If you can't do the job on day one, you have no business replacing a native worker who is doing the job.
Counterargument: this would lead to the H1B visa allotment being taken almost entirely by tech and finance companies in HCOL areas.
Universities, for instance, would have real problems. Universities can often use other visa classes, but not always -- eg the J1 visa can't be renewed after five years.
Well...sure....but you could argue that universities shouldn't be competing for H-1B VISA slots anyhow.
The whole point of restricting immigration is to avoid the sort of race to the bottom that accompanies the corporate directive to get the best possible labor at the cheapest possible price. You only get that when you're able to cast a very wide net and allow in a population of people who can exploit geographic arbitrage to earn money in one area while planning to spend it in another. I'm specifically talking about people who have zero intention of ever relocating to the USA long-term.
It only makes sense to reserve the benefits of this country to those who invest in it. I'm specifically including corporations in that calculus. The goal of our immigration policy is to balance the needs of private industry against the interest of the state to compete on a global basis.
Universities are cap-exempt, but yes, this will harm industries that have lower salaries on average. As an alternative, they could normalize for the median salary in the applicant's industry.
Salary can be gamed hard tho. For example, you can offer higher salaries and lower equity (or no equity), to make sure you make the cut.
As a foreign prospective employee you are willing to let go of almost anything to get your nominal salary up high enough to be on the list. Its still a perverse incentive.
Yah, but this doesn't seem like a big problem to me. Sure H1B employees will get a different salary/equity/bonus split than normal employees, but assuming total compensation is similar, what does it matter? At least when I value offers I just add up the salary+bonus+liquid equity and look at total compensation.
It matters so much that its part of the fuel of why some people think the situation of the bottom of the h1b's today is so heinous.
Companies can make second class citizens within: higher intensity and time of labor + lower benefits.
You can reduce PTO, you can reduce the quality of the healthcare plan, you can increase working times (ex. be on call on saturdays), you can assign the even worse and worse quality job opportunities (lots of current H1B's do bank-jobs, maintenance and dying tech jobs) etc.
If it were just the same, then what you need to pass is a law that bans all these other instruments like bonuses and equity. Id like to see americans in general say "it doesnt really matter, because I always looked at total compensation".
This just harms the poorer immigration in favor of the richer immigration. Its an active ingredient of inequality. For whose benefit?
That's a reasonable criticism, it would indeed create an unfortunate incentive to trade benefits for salary. It's not ideal, but I still think it would be better than the status quo since it would still be voluntary. I wouldn't take a high-stress poor quality job even if it payed really well. The companies wanting to hire people do have to pay enough to win the lottery, but still have to offer enough benefits to entice the in-demand worker.
It would increase inequality (marginally, H1B pool is still small), but I only think inequality is bad insofar as the poor are worse off. This just creates more wealth since in theory Google would only pay $200k+ if they're at least that productive at developing new useful things people want to pay Google money for. The US also gets more tax dollars, and more "innovation" insofar as that is a thing.
You could still argue it's better to give the large salary increases to poorer people though. I wrote another comment elsewhere with a list of reasonable potential arguments against top N sorting and this was one of them.
I assume that you are not a foreign worker. For us,
>I wouldn't take a high-stress poor quality job even if it paid really well
isn't really an option when doing so risks upending our lives. Even if we don't plan to stay here permanently (I don't), the risk of having the application denied creates an enormous pressure for us to maximize the salary number.
Another angle that is overlooked is that the H1B program isn't just for tech and finance people. I have friends in the creative industry who are on H1B too, and their salary is never as high as ours. In that sense, abolishing the lottery and prioritizing by salary would absolutely deny them any chance of working in the US. Now, if you take the absolutist position that the H1B program is only there to fill positions that are not filled by Americans, then perhaps you'd be OK with that scenario, but I think the diversity (in terms of industry and skillsets, not demographics) provided by the lottery scheme is an important benefit of the program.
Like I said, I wrote another comment where I write about arguments I think are reasonable, including that H1Bs only going to tech and rich people would be unfair.
I was writing what you quoted from my perspective, I'm a Canadian student who would like to emigrate to the US after I graduate. I have offers from companies in the US that are significantly larger than the still quite good amounts I could earn in Canada.
These offers are already large enough they could probably win a top N salary sort, if the bonus/stock was reallocated as salary. But, if they tried to make the job high-stress or low-quality in order to compensate for additional salary to win the sort, I'd just not take the job and stay in Canada. I imagine most people who could win top N salary sorts are also in enough demand in their home country that they could do well there (if not as well as in the US).
Like I said though, top N sorts would be politically unpopular , because among other reasons, people like me aren't good humanitarian targets for charity, and fair enough.
Ideally I'd say decide who immigrates based purely on economic reasons and use the marginal tax revenue of approving higher-paid people to increase aid. Back of the envelope math suggests that if you did that you could save ~7 children from dying horrible deaths by malaria every year of their career for every marginal top N immigrant rather than lottery immigrant. That helps a lot more poor people. But, I know this kind of thing also isn't politically feasible.
> [eliminating the lottery] I imagine that would be politically unpopular.
Why? I'm in the US with a work visa and the idea of having a lottery to decide who is allowed to work in the US is absolutely insane for me. It just does not make sense.
No doubt about that, but which is the reason to make a lottery out of it? "An engineer with Harvard education making 150k against an engineer from a lesser university abroad making 60k. Mmmm... impossible to decide. Let's flip a coin."
Basically for the reason someone else mentioned in a different thread: It would probably mean the visas would entirely go to Silicon Valley.
There's a lot of angles that people could get mad about:
- The "one percent" angle: The visas would help well-off people like me to earn extremely large amounts of money instead of merely large amounts of money in our home country. Instead of people from India/elsewhere who aren't as well off.
- the fairness angle: Almost all the visas would probably end up going to Silicon Valley, which may seem unfair to other industries and locations.
- lobbying angle: As someone else mentioned, the industries that profit off of cheap H1B workers, as well as industries outside of tech that couldn't pay enough, would lobby and advertise against such a change.
These same arguments all apply to raising the minimum salary, but just to a lesser extent.
I mean, I'd be in favour of sorting by salary, both from a selfish perspective (It would make it easier for me to get a visa) and because I think it would be better for the US in terms of bringing in highly skilled labour that is least likely to be competing with Americans (if you could hire an American, why would you pay a huge amount to win the visa salary sort?). I think there are much better immigration policies, but as far as tweaks to H1B go its solid.
But, I think it would be unpopular both among Democrats and Republicans.
This is a good thing, but mostly because it will help those who went to school in the united states, and struggled to win the H1B lottery during their time under F1 yet are able to command salaries well over the new 90k minimum.
It always makes an impact. These are voluntary arrangements, both parties think they win doing them, even though the processing costs are in the 10k's of thousands!
Title of the story linked-to is quite sensational.
I'm not a fan of the current administration at all, but as a former (Indian) H1-B visa holder myself, I welcome this move. It's clearly aimed at the top 10 H1-B visa abusers, almost all Indian Companies - think Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant Technologies, Wipro, Tech Manhindra etc - who grossly underpay the Indian software engineers and abuse H1-B visa program.
Now these crooks won't be able to file Labor Certificate applications with very low prevailing wages, and I think this will help real startups and software companies everywhere in the US, who can't find top engineers in US for new technologies, hire people from Europe, Asia and other parts of the world who are qualified, and not just from India.
Code-monkey Indians and the companies that try to bring them in on low wages will automatically get filtered out.
If the limit of visas was tripled then there would not even be a concept of "visa abuser".
Crooks? The crooks sir are on the other side of the table, that feel powerful enough to tell people all both within and outside the country that they have the right to tell them where they are allowed to go.
How else would you call companies that take the majority of all H1-Bs issued, then turn around and resell newly minted immigrants' services to other companies?
There're a lot of companies of different sizes that legitimately bring foreigners to fill the gaps not filled by local workforce, but bodyshops named in GP's post aren't those companies.
It's not a ridiculous term. Many companies abuse the H1B visa program to keep wages down at the expense of pretty much everyone but corporate interests that save a little money. It's terrible for the visa holders as well, they get stuck in shitty positions with low pay.
And yes, the government does in fact have the right to say who can come and work inside the country. That's sort of a fundamental right of a nation. If you don't have that, you essentially don't have a nation at all.
- The law which put an end to all prosecutions against witchcraft, which put it out of any man’s power to gratify his own malice by accusing his neighbour of that imaginary crime, seems effectually to have put an end to those fears and suspicions by taking away the great cause which encouraged and supported them.
The only reason why anyone even thinks of the term H1B abuser its because there are more people that apply to it than it allows: because it has constraint supply. If it didnt, the concept would not even exist (as it is for B1 abusers, or F1 abusers, etc).
> And yes, the government does in fact have the right to say who can come and work inside the country. That's sort of a fundamental right of a nation. If you don't have that, you essentially don't have a nation at all.
It depends on your interpretation of a country, US or its constitution. The government has the capacity to do all that. The 'right' is an entirely different matter.
It seems your point is that people should have freedom of movement and freedom to work in the US, and that is a laudable goal I think many here are sympathetic to.
But that is not the issue being discussed. Visa abusers are companies that use the poor design of the H1-B visa system to underpay engineers (which many argue suppresses wages in the market at large). Because H1-B visa holders cannot easily switch employers while keeping their visa, their employer has extreme leverage over them, which they use to underpay pay them.
> But that is not the issue being discussed. Visa abusers are companies that use the poor design of the H1-B visa system to underpay engineers
It is the very H1B limit that underpays engineers, by making it harder to foreign engineers to pick employers appropriately. All the restrictions on H1B lower their wages by design.
It is not the goal of this change in policy to help foreign engineers. They dont have a voice or a vote here.
It is not the goal of this change in policy to help americans. Providing cheaper labor will either cheapen or widen products offered, much like the importation of anything else.
It is not the goal of this change in policy to help or harm companies. It harms some as much as it benefits others. Its just picking different.
It is not the goal of this change in policy to help american software engineers. The corollary of the one above is that if higher talent comes, wages of higher talent will go down, and wages of the less skilled will go up.
Let it be very clear that in any effect, the only true effect of a change of policy like this is to provide a warm filling in the chest of those who do not understand the economic implications of it.
Also should mention these companies are openly tolerated by the government for their extreme racist hiring policy, violating every conceivable US law, hiring upwards of 98% Indian race only in the United States. But it's alright because it's just "engineers" not important people, right?
Cheaper & it looks better to get an indentured servant from India to fulfill a contract than an American, causing requirement inflation and wage stagnation for everyone involved.
Racism is defined academically as 'privilege + power,' so if you say "I am an Indian and will only hire Indians," that has historically been just fine. This definition is interpreted as "you need to be White to be racist."
Diversity is mostly just defined as "not White," so majority Indian, Black, etc. companies, are "diverse," they exist, and no one goes after them.
This is why you have those majority-xyz-race companies, but Apple's chief of diversity was fired for saying Whites can also be diverse if they come from diverse backgrounds.
That's why everyone should be treated as equals regardless of race, gender, religion, etc.
This convoluted system of privilege is concerning. Consider a poor White born into an abusive family, in a rural area, with no inheritance. This qualifies as "privileged" under current dogma. They pretend like these kinds of people don't exist.
It's more of a class war being disguised as a race war.
It's my opinion that it is interpreted that way all over Silicon Valley as well as in the US legal system. Ok shrug, it's an opinion that appears to be relevant to the topic.
I'm Indian calling my own people 'Code-monkey Indians'. My friends have told me that this makes me a 'reverse racist' i.e. racist on my own people. Not sure if that makes sense but it's funny and I whole-heartedly embrace that title :)
I realize (because you say it below) that you're Indian so it feels ok to say this. That might be true in person, but not here. You're broadcasting to a far larger audience with far less information about your intent. In this context, subtleties with slurs (such as 'it's a self-slur too, so that's ok') aren't really possible. If you casually drop the slur in anyway, you're damaging the container that protects what little kindness we have here, so we'd appreciate it if you'd not do this sort of thing.
I wonder what would be the impact these artificially determined salaries.
I would have loved to see some de-regulation in the employment effectively removing the reasons of foreign talent being lock in to a company, thus not having a negotiation power which results in lower salaries.
In my opinion nationality based employment opportunity differences are no different to race or gender based ones.
Don't get me wrong, I actually don't advocate global free movement of labour, I just highly dislike artificial ways like salary caps or employer lock ins to manage it.
This is a good thing for just about everyone except for Infosys and Cognizant and the like. I really hate how close the H1B program comes to indentured servitude, feels extremely unfair and imbalanced.
One bright spot for workers from Infosys et al that survive this change is that now they can look forward to a 50% raise for their servitude. Compared to most wages in India working for USD90k for a few years under onerous conditions might be palatable (definitely much more so than USD60k).
Added that this bill closes the loopholes for replacing local US workers mean that for a greater number of workers this is a much better situation.
> I really hate how close the H1B program comes to indentured servitude, feels extremely unfair and imbalanced.
All rules imposed by the government, not by Infosys and Cognizant. If those two companies can no longer hire these indian developers, then the indian developers will suffer along with Infosys and Cog.
As someone on H-1B, but NOT employed by one of these low-paying consultancy firms, can't these employees find a new employer in the US and switch over? H-1B doesn't prohibit that. That is, unless most of these workers are not skilled enough to find alternative jobs easily...
Generally low skill uneducated workers that would never pass the interview bar at any major company. They are touted as "just as good but cheaper" solution but that is never the case.
I've responded to similar articles in the past. I welcome this motion. Only thing that bothers me is the fact why it was not enforced earlier. I'm a H1B holder and I support this move.
From my reading I can't tell if this bill is solely limited to tech applications. The usual qualm with this debate is that the H1-B usage extends far beyond tech and while this increase wouldn't really matter for tech workers, it will make a huge impact on other industries/people where 90k isn't the norm as in tech
This raises a pretty interesting idea: Why don't we cap the number of H1-B slots at N and let companies bid for how much they would pay the employees with the top N bids being accepted?
It's not unheard of. Instead of putting a hard limit and playing the random number generator game with peoples' lives, maybe approve visas on a case-by-case basis...?
To me that sounds like it would make the situation much worse than it already is. Instead of a lottery there would be a waiting list that is hundreds of thousands of entries long and backlogged for years. They'd have to sort by salary or something so that companies don't have to wait for years to hire highly qualified people
Why does it matter who they're hiring or where? The amount that you are willing to pay someone is a(n imperfect) reflection of how much value they're giving you. People who benefit the most from these immigrants should be able to get them. I agree that it's imperfect, but surely it's better than literally distributing them randomly.
A simple rule change that will appease the nationalistic desires of software engineers while reducing the harm to strong lobby big-shot companies like facebook/google/amazon.
I have seen companies in DFW hire what seems like 1000's of H1B's and offer to work on their Green cards. These aren't highly skilled jobs, these are jobs that would typically pay more than the 50k that companies are using H1B's so they can pay less. The New Toyota HQ in Plano has more Indians and H1B's than US employees from what I heard. There are many more like them that I won't mention.
India is exporting it's poverty all over the world and taking advantage of the US.
I don't feel like I violated any guidelines. I just basically spoke the truth which might be hard for some to accept.
We can't all just close our eyes and let them keep coming here and taking jobs that pay 30%-40% of what a fellow US employee gets payed.
Just look at Sabre Systems, Toyota, etc in the DFW area. There are more Indian employees now on H1B visa's than there are American employees. It's in the 1000's and I'm not kidding all because they can work them like dogs and threaten to fire them at any moment and pay the what a office admin would earn.
How does this benefit the USA other than decreasing labor costs for corporations at the expense of American jobs.
I would like to scrap the whole H1B program all together, it would only be good for American Employees.
What an insane proposition. Its exporting its labor, and us is buying it. And its a better price for both the US and for the Indian person to bring the labor into the US than to keep it there or not have it at all.
> India is exporting it's poverty all over the world and taking advantage of the US.
indians (and everyone else on the planet) simply pursue what looks to be a good option. it seems goofy to blame a person for pursuing decent options available to them, so they can better provide for themselves and their family.
your whining should be at the legislators who enact policies you disagree with, not with people just trying to live a decent life.
This isn't a minimum in the salary of H1B workers. The current "minimum" is $60k. It is perfectly possible to hire employees on an H1B under that limit, you (as an employer) will simply be under more scrutiny.
It relates to H1Bs that are contracted out to other employers where those H1Bs are at least 15% (slightly higher thresholds for employers with under 51 employees) of an employer's workforce. They are colloquially known as Body Shops. The legislation as it stands allows the DoJ and DoL to investigate/prosecute these employers unless the employee makes a certain minimum salary OR has a masters degree. This is a good thing since it specifically targets the abusers of the H1B program while leaving most employers alone. The minimum salary will go up to $90k and the threshold will go up from 15% to 20%.
Yes, it does. It allows body shops to import tons of Indian-educated masters degree holders at $40-50k a year and then bill them out to other companies at much higher rates.
The headline and lede don't accurately portray proposed changes. You need to go down a few paragraphs to find this:
" The bill prohibits H-1B dependent employers from replacing American workers with H-1B employees, there are no longer any exceptions. It also lengthens the no-layoff policy for H-1B dependent employers and their client companies for as long an H-1B employee works at the company, which means they cannot layoff equivalent US workers.
For H-1B dependent employers to be exempted from the requirement that US workers be recruited first, the Protect and Grow American Jobs Act dramatically increases the salary requirements for H-1B workers. "They must pay the lower of USD 135,000 which is indexed for inflation or the average wage for the occupation in the area of employment, but with a floor of USD 90,000," said a media release issued by the House Judiciary Committee."
This proposed changes would only apply to H1B dependent employers, which are employers with 15% or more of their workforce on H1Bs. Furthermore, there isn't currently and won't be if the proposed language becomes law, any minimum salary for H1B visa workers. Instead the salary mentioned acts as a safe harbor for H1B dependent employers to avoid certain steps they'd otherwise have to take in order to file additional H1B employee petitions beyond the 15% level.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] thread"Those damn hicks, they're so selfish and backwards, and quite possibly racist...
...ah yes but let's cut down on the foreign IT workers bringing down my own salary"
Instead, the consultancy companies would have to raise their wages by 30k if they wanted to keep on submitting tens of thousands of H1B applications.
I wish they made getting an H1B even harder to get.
Canadians still have it easier since you can work on a TN and try the lottery many times.
Immigration is starting to reject renewals - ref Canadian nurses working in Detroit [1]. I have family members who are being refused TNs.
Personally, I get worried crossing the border and I'm on an H1-B.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/canadian-nurses-workin...
I'm not saying my thought was controversial or even wrong (the thought being that predominately white Canadians fit in better with predominately white Americans), but I'll bet most HR people would deny that it has any influence on their hiring practice.
It explicitly does not allow a path to citizenship, so you have to transfer to an H1-B to get a green card. If your intent is to attempt to get a green card, you are in direct violation of a TN visa and can be deported.
Unlike those jammy Australian bastards (they get a visa that looks like an L1! So jealous), spouses cannot work on the TD (visa for partners/dependents of TN holders). This means your partner cannot work if you're on a TN until you first transfer to a H1-B and then transfer again to a green card. For a Canadian, the process is probably 2-3 years to get an H1B, and then another 2 years to get the green card. Reducing the competition for an H1-B will reduce the length of time spent in the first step of this process.
Indians and Chinese people have it much, much worse. The length of time after their green card approval to when they are granted one is quite literally measured in decades.
The inability for spouses to work causes a lot of stress on relationships. Spouses get depressed, angry and feel a complete loss of independence. They no longer have a career nor their "own" money.
If they're canadian, why don't they just get their own TN?
However, the ability for spouses to work also affects all H1-B holders, and they're a much, much larger group for a much longer period of time.
One way or another, those workers will be competing with US workers regardless.
Please remember - for every so-so developer from Infosys and Co., there's a mediocre sore losers like yourself, who would get thrashed in a globally competitive market.
Your argument would hold more weight if you actually gave a counterpoint instead of attacking someone you don’t even know.
There are plenty of very good people who can't get an H-1 because the quota is used for cheap people. I came here on an H-1 myself and it was quite difficult because the quota got used by bodyshops. My life would have been easier if they had set a minimum salary.
This sentence feels dogmatic to me. I would like to see a bunch of citations, and even then it would be hard to prove the negative.
In any case(!), the economic principle at work here is the law of comparative advantage.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/comparativeadvantage.as...
To claim that protectionism improves prosperity is to claim that the law of comparative advantage is incorrect.
Of all the purported liberal ideas the U.S. thinks it embraces, restriction of immigration is one of the most baffling.
Protectionism is building prosperity in China today.
I'm not saying protectionism is always right, I'm saying do what gets results. Sometimes that's free trade. Sometimes that's protectionism.
Did you know that New York City was founded to get out from under protectionism, and became the economic capital of the world?
Correction, all countries that have ever existed restrict trade, and all of the most prosperous nations today heavily control their trade across nearly every industrial segment. The sole variance is the level of restriction or tariff that they utilize depending on their context or skill at trade & production.
That includes present day Germany (a big restrictor of trade, heavily tilting their export/import ratio to a $300 billion trade surplus), France, Britain, Japan. Even while the US market is more free than most when it comes to trade, it also heavily controls & restricts trade using tariffs and global trade bodies.
That particularly includes China, which has dramatically restricted trade into their nation. They've done so on purpose in order to buy time to build up their domestic giants, which has worked extremely well for them. They've been allowed to have their cake and eat it too for decades.
By itself, China proves that you can get extraordinarily prosperous utilizing trade restriction policies under the right circumstances.
All the richest countries we have today have been among the list of richest since before and after great changes in their protectionist policies.
It has been seen time and time again. It would be great is this meme were put to rest.
That's true. That doesn't mean it produces prosperity. Consider that those same countries impose sanctions on other countries to punish them.
How is a sanction different from protectionism?
Consider also a more comprehensive implementation of protectionism - Smoot-Hawley, which is credited as being a major cause of the Great Depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Ac...
This has been one of the ways in which China has improved technological innovation at an incredibly fast pace.
This rule was long in coming. Low wage body shops wasn't doing anyone any good.
I think that the main benefit is to have higher quality H1Bs. There are many talented temp stays who lose the lottery to less talented people and have to leave the US. Salary can be used as a heuristic for talent.
Of course they aren't making too much of a noise about it as they're smart.
These policies are already backfiring.
If that means companies discover that you don't have to be in California to do tech that would be a good thing . Bring on the foolishness I say .
I would like to add that I'm not talking about this policy in particular but the growing sentiment against even skilled immigration.
I would wager a great deal that not only will all slots still be allocated but that demand will continue to far outstrip supply. The number of workers excluded from the US will be identical as to that under the previous rules but those granted H-1B visas will be paid closer to what their American colleagues are.
Almost 199k applications for 90k slots.
what makes you think they aren't? I work for Red Hat. It is an amazing company to work for. But our main technology center is in the Czech Republic, where the cost of living is 40% lower than the US. Those are absolutely great engineers to work with, and despite some of the alarming comments here they are absolutely as high quality as any US engineer if not more so. But the fact remains that their salaries are spent overseas and not here in the US.
This is why the point of free trade is to raise the standard of living in those nations so that not only does life get better for everyone around the world, but also other nations no longer act as a cheap drain for jobs that pay artificially higher wages domestically. It's a huge idea that has worked in many ways, raising US GDP vastly beyond what it could be under heavy protectionism (think: the whole world as your customer base as well as your production base vs. just the US). But it also failed spectacularly in that it isolated low skilled workers in the US who became even more resentful of foreigners than they already were, who then went ahead and elected a facist government. Whoops.
Id take it for granted that eliminating H1B visas would increase wages for software engineers: obviously at a cost for everyone else. Anything else in the middle to that will have a proportionate effect.
There never was a skill shortage. Only a pay shortage.
Wages have been FLAT vs rising inflation for ages, mostly due to labor over-supply.
In software engineering? Are you kidding?
Both being, ironically, the qualities his base finds most appealing about him, and which probably got him elected to begin with.
As long as the new minimum still clears the market and all spaces are still filled (I think they would be), all this bill does is replace the pool of H1-B visas awarded with a higher-paying one.
The quote "It also could disrupt the marketplace, threaten thousands of US jobs, and stifle US innovation" would only make sense if one would expect that lower-paid workers on average contribute more to US innovation, and are less likely to displace Americans. I would predict the opposite, or at least no effect. One might hope that the people companies are willing to pay top dollar for are the higher skilled ones that companies have trouble hiring enough of in the US.
It's interesting that the bill is a half-measure in that it doesn't take the idea to its logical conclusion and eliminate the lottery and sort applications by salary and take the top N, but I imagine that would be politically unpopular.
I think you could possibly argue against this bill perhaps for some kind of fairness reasons, but I think the arguments quoted don't make sense.
I'm not super familiar with data on the topic though, that would definitely be nice to see.
This is exactly what should happen.
It's the other side of that.
I can't help but think that the H-1B VISA program should be tightly restricted by industry and time-limited.
If we can't find programmers, our immigration policy should be to recruit them abroad and then find a way to put them onto a fast-track to citizenship. NAY...we should COMPEL them towards the process of citizenship lest they forfeit some amount of tribute.
In no way or shape should our immigration policy serve to distort the labor market here to corporate benefit. We should be seeking every possible mechanism to help our economy grow via the increasing demand for skilled labor here in the USA. That doesn't happen when you collapse demand for entry-level positions in the USA like H-1B has ben demonstrated to do.
We should also BAN in the strongest possible terms the practice of forcing an employee to train their replacement or put it under such onerous terms that no corporation would do it. I'm talking about the equivalent of a years salary in severance or more. If you can't do the job on day one, you have no business replacing a native worker who is doing the job.
Universities, for instance, would have real problems. Universities can often use other visa classes, but not always -- eg the J1 visa can't be renewed after five years.
The whole point of restricting immigration is to avoid the sort of race to the bottom that accompanies the corporate directive to get the best possible labor at the cheapest possible price. You only get that when you're able to cast a very wide net and allow in a population of people who can exploit geographic arbitrage to earn money in one area while planning to spend it in another. I'm specifically talking about people who have zero intention of ever relocating to the USA long-term.
It only makes sense to reserve the benefits of this country to those who invest in it. I'm specifically including corporations in that calculus. The goal of our immigration policy is to balance the needs of private industry against the interest of the state to compete on a global basis.
As a foreign prospective employee you are willing to let go of almost anything to get your nominal salary up high enough to be on the list. Its still a perverse incentive.
Companies can make second class citizens within: higher intensity and time of labor + lower benefits.
You can reduce PTO, you can reduce the quality of the healthcare plan, you can increase working times (ex. be on call on saturdays), you can assign the even worse and worse quality job opportunities (lots of current H1B's do bank-jobs, maintenance and dying tech jobs) etc.
If it were just the same, then what you need to pass is a law that bans all these other instruments like bonuses and equity. Id like to see americans in general say "it doesnt really matter, because I always looked at total compensation".
This just harms the poorer immigration in favor of the richer immigration. Its an active ingredient of inequality. For whose benefit?
It would increase inequality (marginally, H1B pool is still small), but I only think inequality is bad insofar as the poor are worse off. This just creates more wealth since in theory Google would only pay $200k+ if they're at least that productive at developing new useful things people want to pay Google money for. The US also gets more tax dollars, and more "innovation" insofar as that is a thing.
You could still argue it's better to give the large salary increases to poorer people though. I wrote another comment elsewhere with a list of reasonable potential arguments against top N sorting and this was one of them.
>I wouldn't take a high-stress poor quality job even if it paid really well
isn't really an option when doing so risks upending our lives. Even if we don't plan to stay here permanently (I don't), the risk of having the application denied creates an enormous pressure for us to maximize the salary number.
Another angle that is overlooked is that the H1B program isn't just for tech and finance people. I have friends in the creative industry who are on H1B too, and their salary is never as high as ours. In that sense, abolishing the lottery and prioritizing by salary would absolutely deny them any chance of working in the US. Now, if you take the absolutist position that the H1B program is only there to fill positions that are not filled by Americans, then perhaps you'd be OK with that scenario, but I think the diversity (in terms of industry and skillsets, not demographics) provided by the lottery scheme is an important benefit of the program.
I was writing what you quoted from my perspective, I'm a Canadian student who would like to emigrate to the US after I graduate. I have offers from companies in the US that are significantly larger than the still quite good amounts I could earn in Canada.
These offers are already large enough they could probably win a top N salary sort, if the bonus/stock was reallocated as salary. But, if they tried to make the job high-stress or low-quality in order to compensate for additional salary to win the sort, I'd just not take the job and stay in Canada. I imagine most people who could win top N salary sorts are also in enough demand in their home country that they could do well there (if not as well as in the US).
Like I said though, top N sorts would be politically unpopular , because among other reasons, people like me aren't good humanitarian targets for charity, and fair enough.
Ideally I'd say decide who immigrates based purely on economic reasons and use the marginal tax revenue of approving higher-paid people to increase aid. Back of the envelope math suggests that if you did that you could save ~7 children from dying horrible deaths by malaria every year of their career for every marginal top N immigrant rather than lottery immigrant. That helps a lot more poor people. But, I know this kind of thing also isn't politically feasible.
Why? I'm in the US with a work visa and the idea of having a lottery to decide who is allowed to work in the US is absolutely insane for me. It just does not make sense.
There's a lot of angles that people could get mad about:
- The "one percent" angle: The visas would help well-off people like me to earn extremely large amounts of money instead of merely large amounts of money in our home country. Instead of people from India/elsewhere who aren't as well off.
- the fairness angle: Almost all the visas would probably end up going to Silicon Valley, which may seem unfair to other industries and locations.
- lobbying angle: As someone else mentioned, the industries that profit off of cheap H1B workers, as well as industries outside of tech that couldn't pay enough, would lobby and advertise against such a change.
These same arguments all apply to raising the minimum salary, but just to a lesser extent.
I mean, I'd be in favour of sorting by salary, both from a selfish perspective (It would make it easier for me to get a visa) and because I think it would be better for the US in terms of bringing in highly skilled labour that is least likely to be competing with Americans (if you could hire an American, why would you pay a huge amount to win the visa salary sort?). I think there are much better immigration policies, but as far as tweaks to H1B go its solid.
But, I think it would be unpopular both among Democrats and Republicans.
Title of the story linked-to is quite sensational.
I'm not a fan of the current administration at all, but as a former (Indian) H1-B visa holder myself, I welcome this move. It's clearly aimed at the top 10 H1-B visa abusers, almost all Indian Companies - think Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant Technologies, Wipro, Tech Manhindra etc - who grossly underpay the Indian software engineers and abuse H1-B visa program.
Now these crooks won't be able to file Labor Certificate applications with very low prevailing wages, and I think this will help real startups and software companies everywhere in the US, who can't find top engineers in US for new technologies, hire people from Europe, Asia and other parts of the world who are qualified, and not just from India.
Code-monkey Indians and the companies that try to bring them in on low wages will automatically get filtered out.
What is a visa abuser. What a ridiculous term.
If the limit of visas was tripled then there would not even be a concept of "visa abuser".
Crooks? The crooks sir are on the other side of the table, that feel powerful enough to tell people all both within and outside the country that they have the right to tell them where they are allowed to go.
There're a lot of companies of different sizes that legitimately bring foreigners to fill the gaps not filled by local workforce, but bodyshops named in GP's post aren't those companies.
And yes, the government does in fact have the right to say who can come and work inside the country. That's sort of a fundamental right of a nation. If you don't have that, you essentially don't have a nation at all.
The only reason why anyone even thinks of the term H1B abuser its because there are more people that apply to it than it allows: because it has constraint supply. If it didnt, the concept would not even exist (as it is for B1 abusers, or F1 abusers, etc).
> And yes, the government does in fact have the right to say who can come and work inside the country. That's sort of a fundamental right of a nation. If you don't have that, you essentially don't have a nation at all.
It depends on your interpretation of a country, US or its constitution. The government has the capacity to do all that. The 'right' is an entirely different matter.
But that is not the issue being discussed. Visa abusers are companies that use the poor design of the H1-B visa system to underpay engineers (which many argue suppresses wages in the market at large). Because H1-B visa holders cannot easily switch employers while keeping their visa, their employer has extreme leverage over them, which they use to underpay pay them.
It is the very H1B limit that underpays engineers, by making it harder to foreign engineers to pick employers appropriately. All the restrictions on H1B lower their wages by design.
It is not the goal of this change in policy to help foreign engineers. They dont have a voice or a vote here.
It is not the goal of this change in policy to help americans. Providing cheaper labor will either cheapen or widen products offered, much like the importation of anything else.
It is not the goal of this change in policy to help or harm companies. It harms some as much as it benefits others. Its just picking different.
It is not the goal of this change in policy to help american software engineers. The corollary of the one above is that if higher talent comes, wages of higher talent will go down, and wages of the less skilled will go up.
Let it be very clear that in any effect, the only true effect of a change of policy like this is to provide a warm filling in the chest of those who do not understand the economic implications of it.
Diversity is mostly just defined as "not White," so majority Indian, Black, etc. companies, are "diverse," they exist, and no one goes after them.
This is why you have those majority-xyz-race companies, but Apple's chief of diversity was fired for saying Whites can also be diverse if they come from diverse backgrounds.
Rascism occurs to all sorts and types in all conditions.
That's why everyone should be treated as equals regardless of race, gender, religion, etc.
This convoluted system of privilege is concerning. Consider a poor White born into an abusive family, in a rural area, with no inheritance. This qualifies as "privileged" under current dogma. They pretend like these kinds of people don't exist.
It's more of a class war being disguised as a race war.
I'm pretty sure that's not true from a legal standpoint and is therefore only your opinion.
Huh? Casual racism.
I realize (because you say it below) that you're Indian so it feels ok to say this. That might be true in person, but not here. You're broadcasting to a far larger audience with far less information about your intent. In this context, subtleties with slurs (such as 'it's a self-slur too, so that's ok') aren't really possible. If you casually drop the slur in anyway, you're damaging the container that protects what little kindness we have here, so we'd appreciate it if you'd not do this sort of thing.
I would have loved to see some de-regulation in the employment effectively removing the reasons of foreign talent being lock in to a company, thus not having a negotiation power which results in lower salaries.
In my opinion nationality based employment opportunity differences are no different to race or gender based ones.
Don't get me wrong, I actually don't advocate global free movement of labour, I just highly dislike artificial ways like salary caps or employer lock ins to manage it.
Added that this bill closes the loopholes for replacing local US workers mean that for a greater number of workers this is a much better situation.
All rules imposed by the government, not by Infosys and Cognizant. If those two companies can no longer hire these indian developers, then the indian developers will suffer along with Infosys and Cog.
Also, you imply that immigration restrictions decrease cost, but it's quite the other way around.
immigration restrictions raise salary for people like me, citizens. Most countries have some form of immigration restriction for similar reasons.
100, 10K, 100K, million?
https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-numbe...
N is currently 65,000 with another 20,000 for US advanced degrees.
India is exporting it's poverty all over the world and taking advantage of the US.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We can't all just close our eyes and let them keep coming here and taking jobs that pay 30%-40% of what a fellow US employee gets payed.
Just look at Sabre Systems, Toyota, etc in the DFW area. There are more Indian employees now on H1B visa's than there are American employees. It's in the 1000's and I'm not kidding all because they can work them like dogs and threaten to fire them at any moment and pay the what a office admin would earn.
How does this benefit the USA other than decreasing labor costs for corporations at the expense of American jobs.
I would like to scrap the whole H1B program all together, it would only be good for American Employees.
What an insane proposition. Its exporting its labor, and us is buying it. And its a better price for both the US and for the Indian person to bring the labor into the US than to keep it there or not have it at all.
indians (and everyone else on the planet) simply pursue what looks to be a good option. it seems goofy to blame a person for pursuing decent options available to them, so they can better provide for themselves and their family.
your whining should be at the legislators who enact policies you disagree with, not with people just trying to live a decent life.
It relates to H1Bs that are contracted out to other employers where those H1Bs are at least 15% (slightly higher thresholds for employers with under 51 employees) of an employer's workforce. They are colloquially known as Body Shops. The legislation as it stands allows the DoJ and DoL to investigate/prosecute these employers unless the employee makes a certain minimum salary OR has a masters degree. This is a good thing since it specifically targets the abusers of the H1B program while leaving most employers alone. The minimum salary will go up to $90k and the threshold will go up from 15% to 20%.
The proposed bill removes this too.
" The bill prohibits H-1B dependent employers from replacing American workers with H-1B employees, there are no longer any exceptions. It also lengthens the no-layoff policy for H-1B dependent employers and their client companies for as long an H-1B employee works at the company, which means they cannot layoff equivalent US workers.
For H-1B dependent employers to be exempted from the requirement that US workers be recruited first, the Protect and Grow American Jobs Act dramatically increases the salary requirements for H-1B workers. "They must pay the lower of USD 135,000 which is indexed for inflation or the average wage for the occupation in the area of employment, but with a floor of USD 90,000," said a media release issued by the House Judiciary Committee."
This proposed changes would only apply to H1B dependent employers, which are employers with 15% or more of their workforce on H1Bs. Furthermore, there isn't currently and won't be if the proposed language becomes law, any minimum salary for H1B visa workers. Instead the salary mentioned acts as a safe harbor for H1B dependent employers to avoid certain steps they'd otherwise have to take in order to file additional H1B employee petitions beyond the 15% level.
So now you can be a high school graduate but if you earn 135k or higher, you are eligible for an H1B? Am I reading that right?
Also, would this affect (say) a postdoc virologist in Ohio trying to get an H1B? Or is this just for programmers in Silicon Valley?