If you’re in the process of job searching, please mention this option to any company with less than 250 employees that you are in the recruitment process with.
The H-1B program is designed to suppress tech worker wages in the U.S. and create a more compliant workforce here. I'm not sure it is possible for a company to ethically use this program, and many outright use it for abuse https://www.epi.org/publication/new-evidence-widespread-wage...
We all know that this is the ground truth, but wow that video was damning. And that's not even the body shops that regularly engage in straight immigration fraud (like faking resumes entirely), but regular companies being advised as to how they can fraudulently circumvent the necessity of hiring a local American worker before seeking cheaper foreign labor.
What's even worse about this is that there are many many highly skilled and qualifies foreign workers in the US on H1B that absolutely deserve to be here in the roles they are filling, and their presence is negatively impacted by the sheer quantity of fraud that surrounds the H1B program through things like what is shown in the video and the behavior of body shops.
That video isn't even about H1B. It's crazy how little techies know about the legal immigration system, the tech forums are always in mass confusion over it.
To be fair, in during a downturn it actually helps US Citizens. Any laid off H1b who doesn't find a job soon will end up deported. This will prevent a large glut of labor considerably bringing US down wages.
There are situations where GP is correct, because there is an alternative to the H1B. Employers can outsource the entire department.
Outsourcing has risks, though. These risks are especially difficult to mitigate in "real" high tech where IP and trade secrets have real value. Outsourcing risks are also difficult to manage in cases where sensitive customer (or valuable company) data is being handled. In these cases, companies will only outsource when they really cannot find domestic labor, full stop. (Remember that >60% of CS PhDs go to immigrants.)
In these cases, H1Bs allow the job function to stay completely onshore. So then local employees benefit from the fact that they are easier to hire when companies over-shoot layoffs or lose H1Bs due to ratios.
I think it's really unethical to tell people they need to pack up their lives and move countries because of external factors that were not their fault.
That's up to the citizens of a country to decide, as they have the collective sovereign right to decide who can or cannot reside/work/etc. within their borders.
People within your borders who are short of cash and have no other options are always going to work. Citizens can only decide whether they work in the white-market or whether they want those people to use crime to survive and/or get exploited in black-market labor.
I agree, but I imagine that trying to apply this universally (e.g. for children of undocumented immigrants) would show that not everyone feels the same way.
People who came to the US knew that when they came. That is part of the conditions of coming to the country. If someone doesn't want to have to worry about that they can choose not to come in the first place. Other countries do that same thing.
Actually, even in a downturn, kicking out H-1B's may well do more harm than good for US citizens on average.
1. The person who has to leave won't use any goods/services in America anymore, further decreasing demand on the economy at the worst time. H-1B's are generally well paid and can afford to spend money on goods/services when employed, which probably usually sums up to more than one job's worth of labor (and not just unskilled labor, things like legal counsel too). Especially if they have family. In particular, while they are still unemployed they cost 0 jobs but still consume, so kicking them out is a guaranteed net negative until they find the next job. Which they would be most likely to do when the upturn begins, at which point it wouldn't matter anymore.
2. They are laid off and didn't find a new job. So they _aren't_ consuming a job in the US that an American could have filled - instead, the job is gone. On the contrary - if they _had_ retained/found a job in the 60 day window, they would have been allowed to stay. And they might not have gotten a new job before the next economic upturn. So the expected cost of letting them stay is more than 0 jobs but also less than 1 job.
3. It might help improve the odds for current job seekers competing for a limited job pool, but as H-1B's are on average highly qualified (the H-1B category is for specialty occupations), the job that the H-1B might have held will still not be available to most Americans and companies will probably end up with worse qualified employees (otherwise they wouldn't have hired an H-1B in the first place). So companies will be worse off, which is probably also bad for Americans as a whole on average. And those Americans who are likely hit hardest by the downturn - lower skilled labor - don't benefit from it at all.
4. The reduced supply of highly qualified labor may contribute to delaying the next economic upturn. This can have very severe mid term consequences. We see this in other areas, for example the chip shortage is _still_ causing serious issues. And considering how slow the US immigration system moves, it unlikely a (skilled) labor shortage would be any easier to solve than a chip shortage.
5. Kicking H-1B's out also means they will take any property and savings with them, instead of keeping them in the US market. Tech worker investments can be significant.
6. It is possible that their departure may lead to a job moving overseas, which is strictly worse for Americans than the job being in America and just held by a non-American (taxes etc.). Both because of reduced high skilled labor supply in the US, and because if they were already attractive enough to be employed as an H-1B, imagine how attractive it would be to get the same employee overseas, at a lower price point, and maybe with a better chance of long term retention if the company works on a new H-1B with them. All the US labor market protection mechanisms (prevailing wage determination, labor market test, etc.) don't apply to non-US subsidiaries...
Also, not deported. Deportation is one option for what happens after breaking laws and being put in removal proceedings (another would be voluntary departure). All H-1B's that I know are acutely cognizant of immigration laws and would leave if they can't find a job rather than risk incurring a ban. Either in 60 days, or maybe longer after applying for a period of satisfactory departure. Of course this distinction is primarily important for that person; the outcome for those who stay may be the same but let's have empathy.
It baffles my mind why anyone would immigrate here legally, considering how laughably easy it is to overstay (or cross one of our multi-thousand mile borders or coasts).
I've interacted with DHS (the department under which immigration is housed) and they are nothing but authoritarian jack-boots who systematically destroy your civil rights, I can't imagine what it would be like to actually ask them "may I pretty please papa" on a regular basis while you wait for the next arbitrary reason for denial.
If you came here legally there's millions of illegal immigrants laughing their ass off at all your effort. ~400k removals a year with ~11M undocumented/illegal immigrants; the chances of someone undocumented being removed without committing a crime is well below 5% a year (and probably well below that, since a pretty small minority get into crime and thus disproportionately expose themselves to the system).
-------
re: it is not easy to retain a good middle class lifestyle long term
Something like half of illegal immigrants don't have a high school education. Yet they earn roughly the same amount as US non-high-school graduates at roughly ~25k / yr. So portraying them as earning much less than Americans without high school education would be wrong. They are earning close to same as citizen without having to go through immigration process. The higher earning illegal immigrants may be using B2B payments (possibly to offshore company they setup) or someone else's document to satisfy I-9, if they aren't working off the books.
It may be easy to overstay, but it is not easy to retain a good middle class lifestyle long term. For example:
1. Mandatory I-9 verification means you will not be able to work at any large or non-shady company. No more highly paid tech jobs.
2. You can not re-enter and therefore you cannot leave, e.g. to see your parents in your home country, business trips or international vacations.
3. You cannot renew your drivers license past your visa expiration date. At best you can get a worse alternative (depends on state; AB60 in California) that lets you drive and not much more.
4. You would live in fear of ICE. After going through the legal immigration system, I cannot even imagine the stress of interacting with the illegal immigration system.
5. At that point your chance of naturalization is gone. Even everything else being equal, leaving and legally coming back on another H-1B would've been a _much_ more appealing option.
And I don't think any illegal immigrants would be laughing at the efforts of legal immigrants. I am shocked that you would write that. I am pretty sure nearly all illegal immigrants would love to follow a legal path if there was one that was achievable for them. After all, undocumented immigrants currently pay billions of dollars in state and federal taxes every year.
Isn't immigration nation the program where they showed something like 98% of those going through the legal immigration process to seek asylum being denied and sent back to get hunted down and killed by gangs waiting back home? When they could have came illegally and only had something like 5% chance a year of being caught and removed (and most likely, far less if they dont engage in non-immigration related crime)?
You know anybody in tech jobs working on contract? Did you know they don't verify I-9 for 1099 workers and B2B payments? Did you know about half of illegal immigrants have no high school diploma, yet they make roughly same as American non-high-school graduates?
AS you say California does issue driver license.
The fear of ICE for illegals who are off the record is swapped for other fears when you're legal and on the books. Like the fear I have of CBP (customs/border patrol), who actually served me a search warrant since I'm a citizen with a recorded address who goes through the legal port of entry. Last time I got tossed in a cell for 16 hours and was strip searched, put into medical debt, printed and booked, shackled and cuffed, made to perform bodily functions in front of CBP officers, taken around by prisoner transport van, even though I did nothing wrong -- all because I used the legal port of entry instead of sneaking through the desert. Citizens aren't immune to persecution by our immigration and border apparatus, and unlike illegal immigrant I don't have another nation to fall back on when my own countries immigration system turns tyrannical on citizens like me.
And it's a myth you can't be naturalized if here illegally. People get married and do it all the time.
Thank you. While my overall opinion has not changed (legal immigration is preferable), I appreciate your factual corrections (e.g. no I-9 for 1099). And I am sorry you had that interaction with CBP. Then you can relate to the cruelty of that system better than me. I too have been treated arbitrarily and incorrectly, but it has only resulted in delays and paperwork. Nothing like that.
Immigration Nation was very hard for me to watch back then, in the context of the time at which it was released.
Sorry for the shit you experienced. I do welcome immigrants to our country. I just despise our immigration system and have become quite jaded from my observations.
I felt quite embarrassed when I watched that documentary; these agencies have never been great but they seem to have really went off the rails post 9/11.
> It baffles my mind why anyone would immigrate here legally, considering how laughably easy it is to overstay (or cross one of our multi-thousand mile borders or coasts).
It’s not easy - and not an easy life compared to having a valid work visa
IMO this is a gross generalization and exaggeration. Sure some abuse occurs in H1b, but it has also been the path of entry for many immigrants. While I am not certain, I believe Nadella, Pichai, Musk, and many others came in via the h1b. Over 50% of companies founded in SV have a founder who is foreign born.
To just blithely dismiss the positives because of your own naked self-interest. ("suppress tech worker wages"). FYI US tech workers are among the highest paid occupations in the nation, and there is full tech worker employment, your claims have no basis I am afraid.
H1B is quite problematic in its design for sure, a sensible approach would be to determine the need for a certain job group / skill set and give people relatively long residence permits (i.e. 5 years) to come and build a life with the option to naturalise at the end. A skilled worker won’t change professions usually as that is a huge undertaking.
Instead you have company controlled visa structures where market swings can result in quite a bit of losses.
Almost anything can be seen as wage suppression, however creating a healthy market for both parties is much more important than some people significantly earning more at the expense of unfulfilled need.
> Sure some abuse occurs in H1b, but it has also been the path of entry for many immigrants.
You are not even remotely addressing the concerns of the person you are replying to. Saying the program is a "path of entry for many immigrants" while true doesn't in any case obviate the fraud, in fact it's true even in cases of fraud, it's a tautology.
There are ENTIRE multi-billion dollar businesses that are entirely based on immigration fraud. This last fiscal year TCS alone made nearly $5B in profit on more than $25B in revenue, and their entire business model is based on immigration fraud. The entire WITCH segment (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL) are structured to enable, support, and advance immigration fraud for profit.
> US tech workers are among the highest paid occupations in the nation
This does not obviate wage suppression, it's merely a testament to the real value of technology.
This type of behavior was a concerted effort that is provable that was taken to suppress tech worker wages. Immigration fraud is also a pathway to do so.
You speak of this as if this is the only case of fraud/misrepresentation in any government program. Surely you are not saying every "American Programmer" <wink> <wink> has been fraud free, or no American Company has ever broken the law. The "WITCH" group as you call them is no better/worse than most other businesses.
Your emotional straw-manned attack speaks volumes about your own entitlement arrogance and naked self-interest, dare-i-say greed. I am a business owner that employs h1bs, we pay them on par with US hires - and we pay top dollar because of our specialized skill needs.
Also I think the fraud is in people like you and your entitlement arrogance, with fantasies of running a "American Programmer" cartel. Sorry businesses are not going to kneel to your shakedown racket: "pay me whatever-i-ask or else..."
Finally - this is crying out loud for some whataboutism - h1b fraud P-A-L-E-S in comparison to fraud in SS/Medicare/Medicaid/... many, many other government programs. For people like you to get on a high horse and yell "fraud" because of some cases of visa abuse, are really about your own greed.
Such smug holier-than-thou absolutist sanctimony among people on your side of the argument prevents meaningful h1b reform such as better filtering (salary-based) mechanism, which I think many in business would back as well to reduce fraud.
AFAIK US has a visa scheme where you can invest something like $1M and get an investor visa. Pretty common to see immigrants that come to the US and buy up some gas station or other fairly turn-key business to take advantage of this. You don't have to buy a company and then have the company sponsor you if you do it that way AFAIK.
If you have a few hundo' thou' you can get an investor visa that leads toward residency about anywhere, and only a few places like America are more than that.
It’s unethical to hire foreign talent and provide a legal means of entry for high quality immigrants? This is a despicable take and very suspect agenda minded rationalization.
I think OP is suggesting that the position could be filled locally. Should H1-B be used to fill junior or mid-level positions? Certainly these positions require a lot of training and development work on the part of the company hiring them. That certainly is an argument against the applicants being at a high skill level.
It could easily be a way to drum up business. They're offering their services to businesses looking to hire. If those businesses get the legal work done for free on their first H1B hire, they may decide to do more of it, and then this firm is a known quantity to them and a safe choice.
It's to help companies and H1B workers at the same time. It doesn't support the nativist theme that legal immigrants should be tossed out of the country for no other reason than their company had layoffs it a tight market.
Ideally, we'd spend more on education/training and less on sourcing workers from other countries - but being nice to the workers already here and making it work for small companies seems a legit altruistic move (and good PR).
In the case of "S" and "M", those wages are below median for the country and in some cases not even livable for the first 6 years of a career [1, 1a], and people struggle with rent well into middle age [2]. For better or worse, Science and Mathematics are case studies in "limitless immigration" and the result is wage suppression to the point of not being able to afford rent on a shared apartment and food at the same time.
NB: this isn't an argument against immigration. We should welcome all. But we should also truly require reasonable prevailing wages, no matter what. Otherwise everyone loses.
H-1Bs are a form of wage suppression. They claim they can't find workers to work in STEM but what they can't find is workers who are willing to take massive pay cuts.
So, instead, they hold foreigners hostage (in all but the most literal sense) with poor wages and the "promise" of citizenship eventually.
46 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadWhat's even worse about this is that there are many many highly skilled and qualifies foreign workers in the US on H1B that absolutely deserve to be here in the roles they are filling, and their presence is negatively impacted by the sheer quantity of fraud that surrounds the H1B program through things like what is shown in the video and the behavior of body shops.
But everything checks out to what I saw: throw every qualification or certification into the job ad, no one could seriously match it
Outsourcing has risks, though. These risks are especially difficult to mitigate in "real" high tech where IP and trade secrets have real value. Outsourcing risks are also difficult to manage in cases where sensitive customer (or valuable company) data is being handled. In these cases, companies will only outsource when they really cannot find domestic labor, full stop. (Remember that >60% of CS PhDs go to immigrants.)
In these cases, H1Bs allow the job function to stay completely onshore. So then local employees benefit from the fact that they are easier to hire when companies over-shoot layoffs or lose H1Bs due to ratios.
1. The person who has to leave won't use any goods/services in America anymore, further decreasing demand on the economy at the worst time. H-1B's are generally well paid and can afford to spend money on goods/services when employed, which probably usually sums up to more than one job's worth of labor (and not just unskilled labor, things like legal counsel too). Especially if they have family. In particular, while they are still unemployed they cost 0 jobs but still consume, so kicking them out is a guaranteed net negative until they find the next job. Which they would be most likely to do when the upturn begins, at which point it wouldn't matter anymore.
2. They are laid off and didn't find a new job. So they _aren't_ consuming a job in the US that an American could have filled - instead, the job is gone. On the contrary - if they _had_ retained/found a job in the 60 day window, they would have been allowed to stay. And they might not have gotten a new job before the next economic upturn. So the expected cost of letting them stay is more than 0 jobs but also less than 1 job.
3. It might help improve the odds for current job seekers competing for a limited job pool, but as H-1B's are on average highly qualified (the H-1B category is for specialty occupations), the job that the H-1B might have held will still not be available to most Americans and companies will probably end up with worse qualified employees (otherwise they wouldn't have hired an H-1B in the first place). So companies will be worse off, which is probably also bad for Americans as a whole on average. And those Americans who are likely hit hardest by the downturn - lower skilled labor - don't benefit from it at all.
4. The reduced supply of highly qualified labor may contribute to delaying the next economic upturn. This can have very severe mid term consequences. We see this in other areas, for example the chip shortage is _still_ causing serious issues. And considering how slow the US immigration system moves, it unlikely a (skilled) labor shortage would be any easier to solve than a chip shortage.
5. Kicking H-1B's out also means they will take any property and savings with them, instead of keeping them in the US market. Tech worker investments can be significant.
6. It is possible that their departure may lead to a job moving overseas, which is strictly worse for Americans than the job being in America and just held by a non-American (taxes etc.). Both because of reduced high skilled labor supply in the US, and because if they were already attractive enough to be employed as an H-1B, imagine how attractive it would be to get the same employee overseas, at a lower price point, and maybe with a better chance of long term retention if the company works on a new H-1B with them. All the US labor market protection mechanisms (prevailing wage determination, labor market test, etc.) don't apply to non-US subsidiaries...
Also, not deported. Deportation is one option for what happens after breaking laws and being put in removal proceedings (another would be voluntary departure). All H-1B's that I know are acutely cognizant of immigration laws and would leave if they can't find a job rather than risk incurring a ban. Either in 60 days, or maybe longer after applying for a period of satisfactory departure. Of course this distinction is primarily important for that person; the outcome for those who stay may be the same but let's have empathy.
"No, it is not possible for me to ethically hire you" is... quite a take.
I've interacted with DHS (the department under which immigration is housed) and they are nothing but authoritarian jack-boots who systematically destroy your civil rights, I can't imagine what it would be like to actually ask them "may I pretty please papa" on a regular basis while you wait for the next arbitrary reason for denial.
If you came here legally there's millions of illegal immigrants laughing their ass off at all your effort. ~400k removals a year with ~11M undocumented/illegal immigrants; the chances of someone undocumented being removed without committing a crime is well below 5% a year (and probably well below that, since a pretty small minority get into crime and thus disproportionately expose themselves to the system).
-------
re: it is not easy to retain a good middle class lifestyle long term
Something like half of illegal immigrants don't have a high school education. Yet they earn roughly the same amount as US non-high-school graduates at roughly ~25k / yr. So portraying them as earning much less than Americans without high school education would be wrong. They are earning close to same as citizen without having to go through immigration process. The higher earning illegal immigrants may be using B2B payments (possibly to offshore company they setup) or someone else's document to satisfy I-9, if they aren't working off the books.
1. Mandatory I-9 verification means you will not be able to work at any large or non-shady company. No more highly paid tech jobs.
2. You can not re-enter and therefore you cannot leave, e.g. to see your parents in your home country, business trips or international vacations.
3. You cannot renew your drivers license past your visa expiration date. At best you can get a worse alternative (depends on state; AB60 in California) that lets you drive and not much more.
4. You would live in fear of ICE. After going through the legal immigration system, I cannot even imagine the stress of interacting with the illegal immigration system.
5. At that point your chance of naturalization is gone. Even everything else being equal, leaving and legally coming back on another H-1B would've been a _much_ more appealing option.
And I don't think any illegal immigrants would be laughing at the efforts of legal immigrants. I am shocked that you would write that. I am pretty sure nearly all illegal immigrants would love to follow a legal path if there was one that was achievable for them. After all, undocumented immigrants currently pay billions of dollars in state and federal taxes every year.
You know anybody in tech jobs working on contract? Did you know they don't verify I-9 for 1099 workers and B2B payments? Did you know about half of illegal immigrants have no high school diploma, yet they make roughly same as American non-high-school graduates?
AS you say California does issue driver license.
The fear of ICE for illegals who are off the record is swapped for other fears when you're legal and on the books. Like the fear I have of CBP (customs/border patrol), who actually served me a search warrant since I'm a citizen with a recorded address who goes through the legal port of entry. Last time I got tossed in a cell for 16 hours and was strip searched, put into medical debt, printed and booked, shackled and cuffed, made to perform bodily functions in front of CBP officers, taken around by prisoner transport van, even though I did nothing wrong -- all because I used the legal port of entry instead of sneaking through the desert. Citizens aren't immune to persecution by our immigration and border apparatus, and unlike illegal immigrant I don't have another nation to fall back on when my own countries immigration system turns tyrannical on citizens like me.
And it's a myth you can't be naturalized if here illegally. People get married and do it all the time.
Immigration Nation was very hard for me to watch back then, in the context of the time at which it was released.
I felt quite embarrassed when I watched that documentary; these agencies have never been great but they seem to have really went off the rails post 9/11.
It’s not easy - and not an easy life compared to having a valid work visa
To just blithely dismiss the positives because of your own naked self-interest. ("suppress tech worker wages"). FYI US tech workers are among the highest paid occupations in the nation, and there is full tech worker employment, your claims have no basis I am afraid.
H1B is quite problematic in its design for sure, a sensible approach would be to determine the need for a certain job group / skill set and give people relatively long residence permits (i.e. 5 years) to come and build a life with the option to naturalise at the end. A skilled worker won’t change professions usually as that is a huge undertaking.
Instead you have company controlled visa structures where market swings can result in quite a bit of losses.
Almost anything can be seen as wage suppression, however creating a healthy market for both parties is much more important than some people significantly earning more at the expense of unfulfilled need.
You are not even remotely addressing the concerns of the person you are replying to. Saying the program is a "path of entry for many immigrants" while true doesn't in any case obviate the fraud, in fact it's true even in cases of fraud, it's a tautology.
There are ENTIRE multi-billion dollar businesses that are entirely based on immigration fraud. This last fiscal year TCS alone made nearly $5B in profit on more than $25B in revenue, and their entire business model is based on immigration fraud. The entire WITCH segment (Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant, HCL) are structured to enable, support, and advance immigration fraud for profit.
> US tech workers are among the highest paid occupations in the nation
This does not obviate wage suppression, it's merely a testament to the real value of technology.
It's been litigated and proven beyond doubt that SV companies engaged in wage-fixing, including FAANGs like Apple and Google, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
This type of behavior was a concerted effort that is provable that was taken to suppress tech worker wages. Immigration fraud is also a pathway to do so.
Your emotional straw-manned attack speaks volumes about your own entitlement arrogance and naked self-interest, dare-i-say greed. I am a business owner that employs h1bs, we pay them on par with US hires - and we pay top dollar because of our specialized skill needs.
Also I think the fraud is in people like you and your entitlement arrogance, with fantasies of running a "American Programmer" cartel. Sorry businesses are not going to kneel to your shakedown racket: "pay me whatever-i-ask or else..."
Finally - this is crying out loud for some whataboutism - h1b fraud P-A-L-E-S in comparison to fraud in SS/Medicare/Medicaid/... many, many other government programs. For people like you to get on a high horse and yell "fraud" because of some cases of visa abuse, are really about your own greed.
Such smug holier-than-thou absolutist sanctimony among people on your side of the argument prevents meaningful h1b reform such as better filtering (salary-based) mechanism, which I think many in business would back as well to reduce fraud.
If you have a few hundo' thou' you can get an investor visa that leads toward residency about anywhere, and only a few places like America are more than that.
Ideally, we'd spend more on education/training and less on sourcing workers from other countries - but being nice to the workers already here and making it work for small companies seems a legit altruistic move (and good PR).
Really? Still going with this? Especially the S and M?
NB: this isn't an argument against immigration. We should welcome all. But we should also truly require reasonable prevailing wages, no matter what. Otherwise everyone loses.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03478-x
[1a] graduate students are often instructors of record on courses and conduct funded research. These are jobs.
[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/professors-struggle-...
So, instead, they hold foreigners hostage (in all but the most literal sense) with poor wages and the "promise" of citizenship eventually.
No one wins - except of course the megacorps.