No need to assume the worst. Perhaps he or she is genuinely curious about GC. There was nothing in the comment which can be remotely construed as racist.
Have you read the main article? It has nothing to say about green card at all - literally no mention of green card. Please stop defending folks for defending sake. The OP can step in and do it themselves.
I meaning that L1 and friends are quite often could be changed to GC soon. If they put limit on number of L1 visas, they will simply became GC very fast.
I think they don't have quotes, this is not a lottery.
There's already a massive GC backlog for some countries (India, for example). In some distant future where backlog is cleared, fewer number of H1B/L1 visas could mean faster GC. Until then, this won't have any real impact on GC timelines.
Which would solve some of the problems with H1B - you're effectively an indentured servant with very few options. Becoming a green card holder means you are able to switch jobs, negotiate for better pay/conditions, and eventually apply for citizenship without your employer's support. All things that shift the balance of power to the employee, and the employer may decide it's not worth that hassle.
Yes, exactly. It's this line specifically that pretty much drives that home:
> Specifically, the bill would prohibit companies with more than 50 employees, of which at least half are H-1B or L-1 holders, from hiring additional H-1B employees.
The only companies I can see hitting this requirement are the Infosys/TCS types. I highly doubt most of the rest of tech has > 50% H-1B employees.
Personally, I think this is the right bill to support. H1-B and L-1 have become tools used by Indian outsourcing firms to inject cheap labor into US. Apart from taking away jobs from US citizens, this also has a negative side effect of increasing visa competition (since there are only 65k visas/yr) for students who are doing their higher education in US, often in the fields of STEM - which discourages foreign students from coming to US. This bill fixes this as it prioritizes H1-B and L-1 visas from candidates who have studied in US vs. those who are applying from outside US (which is the route outsourcing firms often take). So while there are more fixes to be made on the H-1B visa, at least ensuring students who have studied in US have the first dibs at it is a good first step.
Sorry, but do americans really hurt by H1-B/L-1? I never heard about lack of need for tech people anywhere in the world. Isn't world's universities produce like 3% of required amount of tech people needed?
Not to be insensitive to the people who lost their jobs at Disney, but "train" their replacement claim is a stretch (most likely were being to do Knowledge Transfer of the system/job function, but sorry to say won't quality as training their replacements).
If anything, any restrictions on H1B force jobs to move out of the country rather than resulting in more "American workers" getting hired. With COVID forced WFH transition with no loss of productivity - even medium-size companies without prior experience in offshore employers are now willing to consider remote tech staff (anecdotal), and will be happy to pay 25%. Unless a very protectionist tax regime accompanies this legislation hard to see this going any other way.
Full disclosure: I am on H1B, and am partial to the visa that helped me build my life and career in the US. Now its a real possibility that I, my ineligible to work spouse and my three "very much American" children will have to leave this country due to these attempts by law-makers to find a bogeyman to target their frustration against.
Yes. I’ve seen it personally. You can see the ridiculous ads all the time. It really is a problem, and frankly it hurts immigrants too, they become wage slaves with the threat of the visa being revoked.
So give them more freedom to move around so that companies will bid up the wages of people who are worth it, to levels comparable to those of people who wisely chose to be born in the US.
H1-Bs can already moved between companies quite easily in the current system.
EDIT: I don't know why on earth I'm being downvoted. I'm speaking from first-hand experience as I have moved from one company to another on H1B and I know other people who did.
why should studying in US be an advantage? The h1b specifically targets experienced specialists. If you're looking at European immigrants they often highly trained but don't have the financial ability or financial risk tolerance to study in the US.
Fair point (and agree on the changes proposed) but this won’t matter anymore in the next few years. Most of the Indian outsourcing companies are going to allow their workforce to be wfh. (Eg TCS is doing that to 80% of its workforce in India). In way you don’t need to be in Bay Area anymore if you can do the same work in Montana or Madhya Pradesh. Yes time zones etc matter remote productivity will rise from what it has been so far. What will matter now is what you can deliver not necessarily where you are. I am not saying former will be the only thing that matters but it will matter more than the latter in tech software jobs. In way this is just capitalism doing its thing - businesses will get more efficient as soon as the opportunity arises. If they don’t they won’t survive as they They won’t be able to compete. Unless you are a monopoly which most business are not specially in a saturated market You will need to be cost efficient. WFH allow some parts of your businesses to be so.
Update: I see I got downvoted not sure why but in any case this is the way world will most likely progress whether you like it or not or whether it’s fair or not. I say a lot more about this when I called the wfh being the norm before twitters and facebooks wfh announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22558552
Notice that there is 0 overlap between in the 9-5 time period between India and the US. Time zone problems like that are extreme and difficult to work with (I worked nearly a year in the US where the other half of the team was in India). I had to start work much earlier than I would have liked and they had to work late into the evening.
What if "you" were not in the picture. I am assuming you are cutting out the work for offshore resources, presumably due to your role as a engineering manager or business liaison. When your company realizes they can be get the work done offshore cheaper (with or without "you" in the picture) they will find a way.
L-1 visas are the ones used in the sleazy "train your offshore replacement worker or lose your severance" kind of deals. The replacement comes into the US on a L-1 visa for a few months to get trained, then returns to India.
> Specifically, the bill would prohibit companies with more than 50 employees, of which at least half are H-1B or L-1 holders, from hiring additional H-1B employees.
I strongly doubt that more than 50% of Facebook's workforce is on H-1B visas. This is really intended to stop TCS/Infosys/Wipro from bringing over cheap labor to the US.
* The bill would restore Congress’s original intent for the H-1B and L-1 visa programs.
* The bill requires employers to make a good faith effort to recruit and hire American workers before
bringing in foreign workers and prohibits employers from replacing American workers with H-1B
and L-1 workers or giving preference to H-1B visa holders when they are filling open positions. It
modifies existing H-1B wage requirements, and for the first time establishes wage requirements for
L-1 workers. This will prevent employers from using the H-1B and L-1 programs as sources of
cheap labor and encourage the hiring of qualified American workers.
* The bill prohibits employers from outsourcing H-1B and L-1 visa holders to other sites unless the employer obtains a waiver which is available only in limited circumstances when the rights of American workers are protected.
* The bill gives more authority to the Departments of Homeland Security and Labor to investigate
fraud and abuse in the H-1B and L-1 programs. It requires the two departments to audit employers
and share information so that visa petitions are more effectively scrutinized.
* The bill would crack down on outsourcing companies by prohibiting companies from hiring H-1B
employees if they employ more than 50 people and more than 50 percent of their employees are H1B and L-1 visa holders.
* The bill creates a new H-1B visa allocation system that gives top
priority to workers who have earned advanced science, technology, engineering or mathematics
(STEM) degrees from U.S. institutions.
* The bill increases penalties on those who violate the law, and provides visa holders with a list of
rights before they enter the U.S. so that they are better protected against mistreatment or
underpayment of wages.
I'm not sure if this bill goes in the right direction.
I know many people on the H-1B and this is the problems that I see personally:
* if you are not married, you have to get married or break up (I personally decided to get married, even though I do not believe in marriage)
* your spouse cannot work. Many of my friends have had their spouse not working for years, and going crazy.
* they cannot change job easily, they can't even quit if they're burning out to take some rest time, some of my friends feel like they are basically slaves of their current company
* if they get fired (which happened to one of my friend who works at Uber a few days ago) then their life goes to hell
* they are hard to come by (I applied twice and didn't get it, had to leave the US and wait for a year and a half for a greencard to be able to come back)
Yeah they are not looking to improve the experience for the visa holder. It's about incentivizing companies to hire within the USA. Many other places allow for girlfriends to move without marriage and also allows them to work. It might be a feature that they have the friction on H1-B users rather than a bug.
It’s definitely a feature. The whole intent is to suppress wages and turnout by keeping employees locked into specific companies. These kind of tiered labor systems should not exist.
> * your spouse cannot work. Many of my friends have had their spouse not working for years, and going crazy.
I think that has not been true in a while.
> * they cannot change job easily, they can't even quit if they're burning out to take some rest time, some of my friends feel like they are basically slaves of their current company
That is not necessarily true either. I have worked with plenty of H-1B workers who easily switched jobs. From what they told me their new employer takes care of all paperwork.
There's always risk of having your visa denied when changing jobs and plenty of situations where you get in a really bad place with something out of your control.
I know plenty of people that stick to a sub-optimal job out of fear of being stuck out of the US.
In addition to almost every employer making illegal demands of H1-B holders when they quit or are terminated (such as asking them to pay legal fees the holders are not supposed to be responsible for). I’ve had friends dealing with this multiple times.
Sure, you can get a lawyer to write a demand letter why you’re hoping to not get deported before you find another job. And of course risk a reference from that job or worse. But the whole system is designed to create indentured servitude to corporations for foreign workers. Just put everyone who graduates with an advanced degree on a greencard and call it good already.
It is temporarily not true (since an Obama Administration rule change in 2015), but the change is being fought in court (the case was remanded a few months ago from a panel of the DC appeals court back to a lower federal court, after they found the plaintiffs to have standing; I’m not sure what the current status is).
The Trump Administration has stated multiple times that it intends to roll the rule back. I’m not sure what the status of that is either; it’s not clear if they were just too disorganized to get around to it in 3 years, or if their stated intentions were political posturing and they never intended to follow up, or if they changed their mind, or ...
The people affected have been able to work for a few years but I’m sure the possibility of losing that right on short notice still causes some stress.
I’m not an expert but if you are curious about the details the keyword is “H-4 EAD”.
Honestly a lot of the arguments about “importing cheap labour” are economically shallow and ignore the benefits that immigration has for the overall economy.
There are good arguments for open borders in the equilibrium. But it's very hard to argue that they're good for the people who's jobs are lost. This is the classic median/mean reasoning error. Open borders are good for the arithmetic mean person. They are not necessarily good for the median person.
For instance, the outsourcing of american manufacturing to China has seriously heart middle America. There is no real way around that. It has arguably been good on net for the world, but it has been quite bad for those specific communities. It's important that we fully recognize those tradeoffs, and not imply that unfettered immigration is a universal good.
It is almost certainly good for 'the economy'. But it can be quite bad for most of the individuals in that economy, and it's very important to disambiguate those things. On balance I think I come down in favor of more immigration, particularly high skilled, but I think it's important that we not pretend like people aren't seriously harmed by it, too.
It does apply to technology. My point isn't "some people get hurt, therefore open borders are bad". Some people are hurt by technology, but the net benefits are so great that it's generally worthwhile. I think the tradeoff is a little closer to even for open borders.
Thinking about it some more, it seems there are three main effects:
1) High skill effect. If you invite someone who has higher productivity than average for your country, that has basically the same effect as technology. This is a strong argument for skilled immigration.
2) Low wage effect. If you invite someone who's willing to work for a lower wage (being from a poor country), you are better off, but only until they learn to ask the same wage as natives. This is why I think Caplan's main argument for unskilled immigration is weak.
3) Poor proximity effect. Most natives don't want to live among poor people, so natives become worse off when you invite poor immigrants. This is a strong argument against unskilled immigration.
> Not necessarily. "Low-skilled" is actually kind of a misleading term here. Even American high school dropouts have at least one key skill that immigrants generally don't: the ability to speak English. That makes it possible for immigrants to complement the labor of low-skilled, native-born workers, rather than replacing it. "Low-skilled Americans who are fluent in English in a place like New York City wind up supervising the low-skilled immigrants," Caplan says. "They wind up being the bridge, or the people who train immigrants in jobs that they wouldn’t even know about from their home countries."
The problem with this hypothetical is that Caplan overlooks that libertarians wouldn’t have any political clout in this new world order. Reimagine all of Caplan’s hypotheticals, except the Squad is in charge of everything. How long do you think they would stand for English language skills being a determinant of whether someone was entitled to a supervisory role?
I think there might be a form of the horseshoe theory here at play where the left-"feel good" side meets with the right-"more people/cheaper services" side
Europe experienced some unchecked (outside of EU) immigration in the past couple of years and it hasn't worked well for the average person on most aspects to be honest (though yes, there are unfairly negative views as well). And yes, I'm aware some numbers look good on paper and some jobs were filled.
But the truth is that during the big immigration waves of the XX/XIX (and earlier) centuries the limitation was technology. And that limitation is mostly gone now (ok not right now, but you get the point).
Sure unlimited immigration and then what? House them where? Let them work where? What are you going to do with the people that have limited reading/writing skills (and no English skills)?
Boeing, were the leader in their industry until they decided to pay $9 per hour. Obviously they went extremely cheap and outsourced the development and that is how they achieved $9/h. They could have bring the same developers in Seattle on H1B and pay them $40 per hour. The result was going to be the same. Importing cheap labor is not beneficial, importing talents is the thing which brings benefits. However, talents are not cheap.
Doesn't even try to solve the root cause of any problems caused by these visas. Freedom.
Just let them not be tied to their current employer. Allow them to switch jobs with minimal bureaucracy and let them compete for better jobs.
Simply allowing employees switch employers without hassles will be enough for even outsourcing companies to pay high wages - because those employees won't suck it up. They'll leave for greener pastures asap, pressuring all companies to pay higher and higher for everyone.
For all the talk of capitalism and free markets, we never seem to actually practice it.
I agree. The employer lock-in is very silly, and unproductive. It puts these people at a disadvantage in negotiations, which means they are even more likely to accept lower salaries, and drive down the wages of Americans. Even from an "America first" perspective, you should want H1-B holders to have freedom of movement.
That would definitely improve the lot of the H1B employee, and probably have an indirect effect on the companies involved to discourage H1B's (though I imagine they would recreate the ties with contracts, using things like signing bonuses and relocation reimbursement to keep people stuck in the current job). But it doesn't do anything to address the goal of this bill which is to prevent abuses of the H1B program, and "protect American workers".
My general issues with the immigration system aside, I've been a proponent of this positive change for some years now.
Another method, that I think would be more acceptable is to just allocate the visas based on pay. Hard to argue that H1Bs are being used to undercut US workers when there are no H1Bs making under $200k.
The problem is that there are plenty of fields besides 'computer stuff' where immigrants might make valuable contributions - but they're simply not fields that are that highly compensated.
The green card yearly family based quota is around 200k and the H1B quota is 65k. This seems backwards to me. The green card lottery primarily caters to unskilled labor and without any qualification criteria, while the h1b attracts _more_ skilled labor.
Given we have sufficient unskilled labor, we should just scrap the existing family based green card program and h1b program and roll all quotas into employment based green card.
What you are described in known as "skilled worker" program in Canada. It is designed to attract valuable workers to come to the country to grow the economy. The goal of H1B visas is to help companies to find workers for specific projects. That is why you have "sponsor".
I don't see how anyone can support this from a moral perspective.
Firstly, if we are not producing enough "talented" people, then we should be investing on producing more "talented" people rather than bringing them from overseas. If companies can just bring in foreigners to undercut american workers then what incentive is there for companies and local/state/federal governments to invest in american workers/people.
Secondly, if we are stealing "talented" people from other countries, how fair is it to these countries that need these people to develop. Isn't it amoral for a wealthy nation to steal resources from a poor nation just so that some billionaire can get cheaper workers and/or suppress wages? And if poor countries realize that their "talented" people are going to be taken by wealthy nations, then what incentive is there for these countries to invest in and develop their own people?
If politicians supports this, then I propose we also open up these elected positions to foreigners. Let foreigners run for the senate, house and presidency. Lets see how they like it. Let them also bid for the wages as well. Don't see a downside from where I'm standing as it can't get any worse than the current political class we have.
Isn't the only reason these visas are abused is the employee lock-in?
Iean how can these outsourcing companies pay low salary for these foreign workers when there's so much demand for developers?
The low salaries are mainly because of the low quality of the developers "imported" on H1B. There are plenty of options for good developers to transfer their H1B.
I think this is more or less just a political statement for the republican base. These changes have been discussed for a long time, and conservative publications / reddit have been calling for them since the unemployment numbers went up. It's not going to have much impact, and as mentioned in other posts, it only affects Infosys/TCS types consulting shops which were already revamping their organizations to work around these changes since 2014. It's election year, so not very surprising to weaponize immigration.
It's quite disappointing that the US has decided to politicize two core pillars, healthcare, and legal immigration. I think both of these should be delegated to a bipartisan body, like the judiciary.
It's also disappointing to see the senators miss an opportunity to revamp the whole program. As an Indian, who did no go to grad school in US but worked at one of the FANGs, I think H1-B/L1-B should be just scrapped all together and every foreigner who graduates from an American university should get a green card. It will hurt people like me from coming to US, but generally it will be quite good for the US university system and the tech industry, and also a blessing in disguise for people like me.
Isn't it a solved problem? US universities attract best students from all over the world, from practically every society/country/culture. It's way more diverse, selective, and productive to let universities to decide who gets to come than a rule-based system via DHS.
I am sorry if I come across any condescending, but that is how most of the current masters programs are operated. Generally, masters are considered cash cow programs that funds other research and also brings a lot of commerce to the college towns. There are some exceptions, but most of them do qualify for my hypotheses.
That being said, why is it a bad thing then? If the people are spending money to get some quality education that can be regulated within United States, then I don't see any downside in delegating the vetting process to the universities. 4 years in the United States, one family visit per year and it brings a lot of commerce to the country. If they don't perform well, then it's always upto the university to make the judgement.
Because then universities are materially interested to let everyone in. With job offers the company is both spending extra, and needs the candidate to actually perform well in the position.
i think US gov should set up H1B audit committee to audit all interview records and summon HR head to testify on hiring practice in the big corp. any fraud will be treated like financial fraud which results in prison term.
if students cheated in college and their parents are sentenced to 5 years, i think HR head should be treated as same
Senator Grassley is third in line for the presidency. If Nov's election were somehow delayed then President and VP would be out of office on 1/20/21 and Speaker out of office on 1/3/21. He would assume office and could execute an executive order to make this act law.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadThat doesn't appear to be a racist comment.
I think they don't have quotes, this is not a lottery.
> Specifically, the bill would prohibit companies with more than 50 employees, of which at least half are H-1B or L-1 holders, from hiring additional H-1B employees.
The only companies I can see hitting this requirement are the Infosys/TCS types. I highly doubt most of the rest of tech has > 50% H-1B employees.
(Other points are valid though)
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...
If anything, any restrictions on H1B force jobs to move out of the country rather than resulting in more "American workers" getting hired. With COVID forced WFH transition with no loss of productivity - even medium-size companies without prior experience in offshore employers are now willing to consider remote tech staff (anecdotal), and will be happy to pay 25%. Unless a very protectionist tax regime accompanies this legislation hard to see this going any other way.
Full disclosure: I am on H1B, and am partial to the visa that helped me build my life and career in the US. Now its a real possibility that I, my ineligible to work spouse and my three "very much American" children will have to leave this country due to these attempts by law-makers to find a bogeyman to target their frustration against.
EDIT: I don't know why on earth I'm being downvoted. I'm speaking from first-hand experience as I have moved from one company to another on H1B and I know other people who did.
Update: I see I got downvoted not sure why but in any case this is the way world will most likely progress whether you like it or not or whether it’s fair or not. I say a lot more about this when I called the wfh being the norm before twitters and facebooks wfh announcement https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22558552
* The bill would restore Congress’s original intent for the H-1B and L-1 visa programs.
* The bill requires employers to make a good faith effort to recruit and hire American workers before bringing in foreign workers and prohibits employers from replacing American workers with H-1B and L-1 workers or giving preference to H-1B visa holders when they are filling open positions. It modifies existing H-1B wage requirements, and for the first time establishes wage requirements for L-1 workers. This will prevent employers from using the H-1B and L-1 programs as sources of cheap labor and encourage the hiring of qualified American workers.
* The bill prohibits employers from outsourcing H-1B and L-1 visa holders to other sites unless the employer obtains a waiver which is available only in limited circumstances when the rights of American workers are protected.
* The bill gives more authority to the Departments of Homeland Security and Labor to investigate fraud and abuse in the H-1B and L-1 programs. It requires the two departments to audit employers and share information so that visa petitions are more effectively scrutinized.
* The bill would crack down on outsourcing companies by prohibiting companies from hiring H-1B employees if they employ more than 50 people and more than 50 percent of their employees are H1B and L-1 visa holders.
* The bill creates a new H-1B visa allocation system that gives top priority to workers who have earned advanced science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) degrees from U.S. institutions.
* The bill increases penalties on those who violate the law, and provides visa holders with a list of rights before they enter the U.S. so that they are better protected against mistreatment or underpayment of wages.
I know many people on the H-1B and this is the problems that I see personally:
* if you are not married, you have to get married or break up (I personally decided to get married, even though I do not believe in marriage)
* your spouse cannot work. Many of my friends have had their spouse not working for years, and going crazy.
* they cannot change job easily, they can't even quit if they're burning out to take some rest time, some of my friends feel like they are basically slaves of their current company
* if they get fired (which happened to one of my friend who works at Uber a few days ago) then their life goes to hell
* they are hard to come by (I applied twice and didn't get it, had to leave the US and wait for a year and a half for a greencard to be able to come back)
I think that has not been true in a while.
> * they cannot change job easily, they can't even quit if they're burning out to take some rest time, some of my friends feel like they are basically slaves of their current company
That is not necessarily true either. I have worked with plenty of H-1B workers who easily switched jobs. From what they told me their new employer takes care of all paperwork.
I know plenty of people that stick to a sub-optimal job out of fear of being stuck out of the US.
Changing jobs is very stressful on an H1B visa.
Sure, you can get a lawyer to write a demand letter why you’re hoping to not get deported before you find another job. And of course risk a reference from that job or worse. But the whole system is designed to create indentured servitude to corporations for foreign workers. Just put everyone who graduates with an advanced degree on a greencard and call it good already.
> I think that has not been true in a while.
It is temporarily not true (since an Obama Administration rule change in 2015), but the change is being fought in court (the case was remanded a few months ago from a panel of the DC appeals court back to a lower federal court, after they found the plaintiffs to have standing; I’m not sure what the current status is).
The Trump Administration has stated multiple times that it intends to roll the rule back. I’m not sure what the status of that is either; it’s not clear if they were just too disorganized to get around to it in 3 years, or if their stated intentions were political posturing and they never intended to follow up, or if they changed their mind, or ...
The people affected have been able to work for a few years but I’m sure the possibility of losing that right on short notice still causes some stress.
I’m not an expert but if you are curious about the details the keyword is “H-4 EAD”.
I recommend this book for a really detailed exploration: https://www.smbc-comics.com/openborders/
For instance, the outsourcing of american manufacturing to China has seriously heart middle America. There is no real way around that. It has arguably been good on net for the world, but it has been quite bad for those specific communities. It's important that we fully recognize those tradeoffs, and not imply that unfettered immigration is a universal good.
It is almost certainly good for 'the economy'. But it can be quite bad for most of the individuals in that economy, and it's very important to disambiguate those things. On balance I think I come down in favor of more immigration, particularly high skilled, but I think it's important that we not pretend like people aren't seriously harmed by it, too.
Yeah, and it's strange that the people who make these arguments are in positions unassailable to those taking advantage of "open borders".
That seems like a too general argument, as it also applies to technology.
1) High skill effect. If you invite someone who has higher productivity than average for your country, that has basically the same effect as technology. This is a strong argument for skilled immigration.
2) Low wage effect. If you invite someone who's willing to work for a lower wage (being from a poor country), you are better off, but only until they learn to ask the same wage as natives. This is why I think Caplan's main argument for unskilled immigration is weak.
3) Poor proximity effect. Most natives don't want to live among poor people, so natives become worse off when you invite poor immigrants. This is a strong argument against unskilled immigration.
Look at the difference between middle America and middle Portugal.
> Not necessarily. "Low-skilled" is actually kind of a misleading term here. Even American high school dropouts have at least one key skill that immigrants generally don't: the ability to speak English. That makes it possible for immigrants to complement the labor of low-skilled, native-born workers, rather than replacing it. "Low-skilled Americans who are fluent in English in a place like New York City wind up supervising the low-skilled immigrants," Caplan says. "They wind up being the bridge, or the people who train immigrants in jobs that they wouldn’t even know about from their home countries."
The problem with this hypothetical is that Caplan overlooks that libertarians wouldn’t have any political clout in this new world order. Reimagine all of Caplan’s hypotheticals, except the Squad is in charge of everything. How long do you think they would stand for English language skills being a determinant of whether someone was entitled to a supervisory role?
Europe experienced some unchecked (outside of EU) immigration in the past couple of years and it hasn't worked well for the average person on most aspects to be honest (though yes, there are unfairly negative views as well). And yes, I'm aware some numbers look good on paper and some jobs were filled.
But the truth is that during the big immigration waves of the XX/XIX (and earlier) centuries the limitation was technology. And that limitation is mostly gone now (ok not right now, but you get the point).
Sure unlimited immigration and then what? House them where? Let them work where? What are you going to do with the people that have limited reading/writing skills (and no English skills)?
Yeah. Right, no more jurisdiction to DHS on labor matters.
https://www.uscis.gov/
Just let them not be tied to their current employer. Allow them to switch jobs with minimal bureaucracy and let them compete for better jobs.
Simply allowing employees switch employers without hassles will be enough for even outsourcing companies to pay high wages - because those employees won't suck it up. They'll leave for greener pastures asap, pressuring all companies to pay higher and higher for everyone.
For all the talk of capitalism and free markets, we never seem to actually practice it.
Another method, that I think would be more acceptable is to just allocate the visas based on pay. Hard to argue that H1Bs are being used to undercut US workers when there are no H1Bs making under $200k.
The problem is that there are plenty of fields besides 'computer stuff' where immigrants might make valuable contributions - but they're simply not fields that are that highly compensated.
Given we have sufficient unskilled labor, we should just scrap the existing family based green card program and h1b program and roll all quotas into employment based green card.
Firstly, if we are not producing enough "talented" people, then we should be investing on producing more "talented" people rather than bringing them from overseas. If companies can just bring in foreigners to undercut american workers then what incentive is there for companies and local/state/federal governments to invest in american workers/people.
Secondly, if we are stealing "talented" people from other countries, how fair is it to these countries that need these people to develop. Isn't it amoral for a wealthy nation to steal resources from a poor nation just so that some billionaire can get cheaper workers and/or suppress wages? And if poor countries realize that their "talented" people are going to be taken by wealthy nations, then what incentive is there for these countries to invest in and develop their own people?
If politicians supports this, then I propose we also open up these elected positions to foreigners. Let foreigners run for the senate, house and presidency. Lets see how they like it. Let them also bid for the wages as well. Don't see a downside from where I'm standing as it can't get any worse than the current political class we have.
This is mere political posturing, nothing more. Immigration bills are pretty hard to pass.
It's quite disappointing that the US has decided to politicize two core pillars, healthcare, and legal immigration. I think both of these should be delegated to a bipartisan body, like the judiciary.
It's also disappointing to see the senators miss an opportunity to revamp the whole program. As an Indian, who did no go to grad school in US but worked at one of the FANGs, I think H1-B/L1-B should be just scrapped all together and every foreigner who graduates from an American university should get a green card. It will hurt people like me from coming to US, but generally it will be quite good for the US university system and the tech industry, and also a blessing in disguise for people like me.
If you do that, aren’t you just making the issue of who can come into the country for education the main problem instead of who can come in for work?
That being said, why is it a bad thing then? If the people are spending money to get some quality education that can be regulated within United States, then I don't see any downside in delegating the vetting process to the universities. 4 years in the United States, one family visit per year and it brings a lot of commerce to the country. If they don't perform well, then it's always upto the university to make the judgement.
if students cheated in college and their parents are sentenced to 5 years, i think HR head should be treated as same
This would also kill the financial incentive to hire H1-Bs for low pay.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
If they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), that could be an exception.