As per usual, I'm mortified more by the clowns "on my side" than by those I'm opposed to. This comment is really a threat to those of us who take the pandemic seriously? We need to censor/downvote positions opposite our own? Cowards.
The implied “problem” is that these companies are loopholing the H1-B process to hire for positions that American workers were laid off from. Of course, lawyers know how to make things work.
> The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
> for positions that American workers were laid off from
Is this true? My observation at Google has been that very few teams had layoffs and now have open headcount. The teams that are hiring aren't the ones that had people fired.
I was on a two-person team that was, due to recent client poaching, pretty severely overstaffed. Our manager had just been promoted and we got a new one hired in.
He viewed our lack of work to do as temporary and started recruiting. He eventually hired a third member and we started training her. After the first day of training, I was fired with no notice and no severance. The manager remarked, in the surprise exit interview, that he had taken a look at staffing recently and we had too much.
There are a couple interesting things to consider here:
1. We had been severely overstaffed (as advertised!) for several months before he even started hiring. He was well aware of it.
2. My team's original manager had offered to me that I was free to live anywhere in the world, as long as it had an internet connection. He left the team so soon after I joined that this didn't happen. But the new manager gave many indications of being acutely uncomfortable with the idea that I had made a request that he wasn't willing to grant immediately.
My question to you is, was I fired because we were overstaffed, or was that mentioned in the exit interview for no particular reason?
And my followup question is, did the companies discussed here do layoffs because they were overstaffed, or because they felt they had the right amount of staff, but they wanted to pay them less?
I dont know, but companies need to keep hiring because of both staff turn over and switch of priorities. Presumably, the people getting hired are for positions that are perceived more valuable by management than the work people being let go are doing.
And of course, companies also have practical right to make mistakes, from overstaffing to understaffing, or to place bets that do well or do not.
The point is that these things would happen even if things were being run perfectly, so they are not indicative of nefarious practices or abuses.
And there was no one capable for these roles in those 12,000 people? I find that hard to believe. If the answer is “no”, prove it (I have been the sponsor of H1Bs, and am familiar with the paperwork and the process).
Edit:
> Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.
Google has already done this previously during economic uncertainty.
That’s not really how it works. It’s hard to be fine-grained when firing 12k people. It’s operational much easier to do the layoff and then fix the gaps.
Indeed, the gist of my complaint to my Congressional reps is going to be “Google appears incapable of managing Human Resources at scale and defaults instead to hiring folks on visas at the same time letting a bunch of existing domestic workers go.”
“Too hard” to sorting hat a subset of 12k employees into other roles and slash and burn instead? You shouldn’t get H1B quota.
We are coming up on an election cycle after all.
> but there is no logical or legal reason to do so.
Edit: throttled, can’t reply @bubblethink that is what the law and legislation is for, helping corporations along when their actions are too efficient for society’s liking. I expect regulation to catch up to their labor practices.
The visa status is only incidental in all this. You expect them to prioritize training existing employees or maybe even hire citizens, but there is no logical or legal reason to do so. At Google's level, they have access to the entire global market and they do not care about visa stuff.
Big tech does have such a mechanism. The individuals laid off generally get a couple of months to find a new job within the company. In these times there are few open positions but many do get filled by internal applicants who were laid off.
OK, that is fair. However, it's not fair to claim you cannot find someone to do what probably amounts to run-of-the-mill development work domestically and need to import talent - aka. what H1B's were supposed to be for.
For all but highly specialized sub-fields, it is really hard to convince me H1B's are necessary - other than to artificially suppress wages for citizens.
Americans like to think they have a monopoly on skilled programmers. But the reality is that most countries have them and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price. Everything is done over the internet these days so it doesn't matter that much where you are located.
We still have a monopoly on good language practices for American english and/or AFAIK how to actually build something that solves business needs rather than requirements.
We saw similar between 2005ish-2015ish. Lots of offshoring where you could get whatever you 'wanted' built, but it was exactly what you 'wanted' and not what actually made sense.
By this I am referring to contract houses that weren't quite 'code genies' but still would deliver products that were barely workable upon delivery. More than one shop I worked at over the last decade actually -suffered- from this.
Magically, most orgs who could figure out how to deliver even semi passable/realistic functional requirements could get the same done in house for a LOT less money.
You are probably thinking about dirt cheap outsourcing to places like India. When part of the shift that's happening now is internal hiring of full time developers in places like Australia or the UK where the language skills and culture is pretty much the same but the wages far lower.
Indian developers are far superior to Australian and UK developers.
It’s just that you’re hiring a million Indian developers for every 1000 UK developers, so is it surprising that the average Indian developer doesn’t seem as good?
This is precisely what the parent commenter doesn't understand. He thinks the job of a programmer is all about technical skills. In fact that is only a part of the job. You need to be able to write, speak, and communicate in fluent English to be effective. And most Indian nationals, Peruvians, Columbians, et al cannot rise to that level.
You're standards are to high. The kinds of mistakes native speakers make are often technical -- not using commas correctly, dangling they're participles, switching affect/effect. And that's because they're transcribing the voice in there head. Annoying to grammer prescriptivists but the meaning ends up being clear and understood.
A'int gonna end up being authors or technical writers for sure but it doesn't get in the way of actually communicating.
And it is highly unlikely that aforementioned group of illiterates are applying for software engineering positions... so I'm not sure how relevant this statistic is.
Given the context, it's a bit ironic that you fail to spell "Colombians" correctly . I mostly agree with your assessment though. For most latinos it takes several years working full time in English to get to the level you mention.
So considering Asian developers far outnumber American ones, maybe the real bottleneck is the insistence on including American developers.
Especially since American developers are unlikely to speak any other language, while their Asian counterparts can communicate extremely well in their primary language and do a more than decent job in communicating in English as well.
> and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price.
For a while. I worked with some excellent remote developers in other countries, but it always felt like a revolving door as the pivoted from one remote job to the next so they could get a $5K increase here and a $5K increase there. Eventually we had applicants demanding salaries equivalent to MCOL United States salaries, so we just went back to hiring local for a lot of the roles. Hiring and managing remote workers comes with a lot of financial and managerial overhead.
Once companies catch on, it's just to easy to go in and snipe entire teams from one company by giving them nominal raises.
> Americans like to think they have a monopoly on skilled programmers.
Almost no American in the tech industry thinks that, given how many of our co-workers aren't (or at least weren't born as) American.
> But the reality is that most countries have them and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price.
At the high end of the tech labor market, it is actually a world market for talent, meaning the talent goes where they can make the most money, and bargains are hard to find because people are not so immobile (e.g. due to H1Bs).
> Everything is done over the internet these days so it doesn't matter that much where you are located.
This is true, but top talent is still going to demand top dollar, even if you let them live in a LCOL region, since they can just move to a HCOL region otherwise.
> Almost no American in the tech industry thinks that, given how many of our co-workers aren't (or at least weren't born as) American.
And yet nearly every American is vehemently against the H1B visa which is the only way for 99% of non American tech workers to work in the U.S. and not do the same work outside the US.
> And yet nearly every American is vehemently against the H1B visa
That is a very broad generalization, considering 27% of Americans are foreign born. Yes, the MAGA crowd is largely against H1Bs (and even here you'll find lots of exceptions), but they didn't win the last election.
> which is the only way for 99% of non American tech workers to work in the U.S. and not do the same work outside the US.
And yet, America has a lot of H1Bs and greencard holders, unlike China or India themselves (I say this having worked on a Z work visa in China for 9 years).
To my knowledge, the main barriers are managing the payroll: how do you deal with each countries' laws and obligations for each of your remote employees ?
The traditional way to do that at scale is to go through a local proxy company that abstracts the complexity and is the legal entity responsible for the workers in that country. Except you have to pay that middle-men, maintain an ongoing relationship, and if for instance a tenth of your engineers are managed by them, their bargaining power will be pretty high and the cost will rise.
If as a company you deal with each individual employee instead, you have to also directly manage all the legal aspects. Hiring freelance workers only can partially alleviate that, but this comes with its own can of worm, and the complexity stays the same in case of conflict (imagine getting sued by the worker in their own country)
You don't have to. Your foreign workers can be independent consultants receiving money from you, paying their own taxes. You just need their W-8BEN every year.
They love having contractors, what they hate is having contractors and the IRS later telling them "no, they are employees, and you owe payroll taxes and penalties for the last 5 years"
On an individual basis that makes sense (in particular if you really handle it like a service exchange contract, with little to no management on how the person do their work)
In this day and age though, I wonder how much it actually works . For instance if one of your contractor does something completely illegal in your country and you get media backlash for it, you're in a tight position if that thing was perfectly legal on their side, and wasn't covered by the contract as you had your own country's law in mind.
I'm not sure you could push your country's law on them, nor that it would help your situation as your company is still fronting the backlash.
In the grand scheme, having remote workers not handled by a proxy company is also extremely rare.
And even in that setup, we all remember Nike and many other apparel makers stuck with the "child worker in a factory" image basically forever. Or Apple being questionned about FoxConn's working conditions, or the environmental impact.
When it comes to PR, pushing the responsibility to the foreign contractor doesn't looks like a good working strategy IMHO.
It’s actually made substantially worse by the fact that every jurisdiction that you “hire” a remote worker in is another jurisdiction whose laws you have to comply with. An American contractor suing an American company in a Californian court is at least a risk their legal department should know how to manage. An Australian contractor suing an American company in an Australian court, followed up by an Australian labor authority taking action against them for say not paying proper sick leave entitlements, is something they’d be much less equipped to handle. Then just multiply that by the number of jurisdictions they hire these remote workers in, which is information they might not even have.
> An Australian contractor suing an American company in an Australian court, followed up by an Australian labor authority taking action against them for say not paying proper sick leave entitlements
Does "contractor" mean something different to you than it does to everyone else? This would be like me buying an iPhone and then Apple suing me for not paying proper sick leave entitlements.
It means something different in every location, and I’m just using Australia as a random example. The fact is that channeling your payroll through an offshore company doesn’t allow you to skirt local labor laws. It would be more like you selling me a faulty iPhone, then after realising that my country had consumer protection laws, you were forced to fix it.
The risk of “misclassification” where an independent contractor sues to be classified as an employee, or where some labor or tax authority takes legal action to have a contractor reclassified (with or without the consent of the contractor/employee) exists in basically every jurisdiction. The only thing that changes if you move your contractors overseas is the jurisdiction where that dispute will be heard, because it will happen in the jurisdiction where the contractor/employee is located. Even if you put aside the mischaracterisation risks, each jurisdiction is likely to have different worker safety, entitlements, tax… obligations, even for contractors. If any disputes arise relating to those, they’re also going to be heard in the jurisdiction of the contractor/employee.
I can understand where your misunderstanding comes from, thinking they’re all just businesses providing services to other businesses. But this interpretation is very naive, and the legal reality is massively more complicated than you’re making it sound. Governments really don’t like independent contractors, they’re subject to far more restrictions than ordinary businesses, and companies employing their services are usually exposed to risks that they don’t have when dealing with ordinary businesses.
In many jurisdictions, the US included, whether or not you are a contractor is not up to you and the company you do the work for. E.g. even if both parties think it’s a contracting relationship, the IRS can decide otherwise.
The nature of the relationship, and the work you are doing determines whether your employer is a regular employer and what taxes they have to pay. In Canada, for example, certain taxes (GST) are applied to the contractor relationship based on whether the product the company sells is available within the country, and the distinction between contractor and employee is much less fuzzy than it is in the US (if you have to ask, the person is almost certainly an employee).
That still means you negociate and maintain individual contracts with each of them, and have to deal with what happens when conflicts arise (let's say one of them disappears with a client's confidential info in the middle of a critical project. Your only reasonable action is to cut the losses, short of trying to go sue them in Zimbabwe's court)
Or more interestingly, I'd assume an independant consulting contract could be void in many legislations if it happens that their work should be reclassified as employment under some specific rules (e.g. you dictate their working hours etc.)
Basically, is the contract valid under the worker's country laws is a question you won't be able to ignore I guess ?
That makes them compliant with American law. Your company may still not be in compliance with local law (which can differ significantly in the liberal interpretation of what the us thinks a contractor is), and that can cause serious issues.
The employee may find themselves in hot water or facing some serious tax implications, the company may find that they are no longer able to do business there, the executives of the company may find that they have trouble at the border.
Depending on treaties, not having a formal business entity in a country doesn’t make you immune to their laws and taxes (not a lawyer, but it is totally possible to collect foreign debts in the US for example), if you’re publicly traded, breaking foreign laws intentionally is a BAD idea. On top of all that most companies strive to stay on the right side of the law regardless of the ability to get away with it.
Not an exact parallel, but see the saga of the Huawei exec who was arrested in Canada on behalf of the US for a business deal made by a Chinese company with Iran.
Are you probably going to get away with it? Yes, if you aren’t a very big fish. But what if you don’t.
It would be great if the cost of living in the US was 1/4 what it is, just like another country. Best gig for a US programmer is remote work from Bali or another beautiful place with reasonable prices.
That being said, these companies don't really provide much as far as stable US jobs go so it would be better to encourage entrepreneurial activity for US programmers.
Another word of advice for programmers. Do what you can to own the IP of your work. Whether it's open source or your own proprietary IP. Work for hire where the company owns the IP if your work is a dead end job.
COVID-19 forced businesses to cope with remote work and a work force that insists they'll never go back to the office, so it might just start panning out this time.
I hired a team in Colombia and they've been nothing but great. Till the recent tech burst, demand there also was going through the roof and some US companies reportedly started paying in USD to give extra stability to workers there who deal with high inflation. I hope for them that demand there keeps rising and their comp gets closer to US. Great devs and excellent time zone!
> Once you switch to full remote, why not hire from Central and South America at maybe 1/4 the price of a Californian.
Because interview process in bigtech has been subverted by people benefiting from it and who are already skilled in it. I bet absolute majority of people that I worked with and considered them very good couldn't solve knapsack problem on whiteboards in 15 minutes, don't know Z algorithm by heart and won't be able to correctly project Amazon leadership principles with (made up bullshit) examples from their previous jobs.
I am sure they pay their H1B workers less than their non-H1B workers.
So it still may be "high wages" but that does not negate the GrandParent comment that they laid off higher paid workers in favor in importing lower paid workers
I have been in many comp planning meetings at companies like Google and Microsoft for the last two decades, and can assure you that no one in the room even knows the visa status of people in their division. That is not a factor when considering promotions and raises.
Why are you sure? I’m a former H1B that was said a salary comparable to my coworkers (I know this for a fact). There are employers that abuse the visa but not all do.
1. Layoffs happened regardless of visa status, so visa workers were part of the layoffs.
2. The visa applications for H1B could be for workers already working in the company under a different visa like TN or F1
3. The positions affected by layoffs and positions filing for H1B could be different. For example, a front end position may be affected by layoffs, but the visa application could be for an ML eng.
4. Visa could also be for more tenured staff. Plenty of companies are now only hiring staff+ roles after the layoffs
5. Because of the lottery system and how it works, you could have filed for a visa before a certain date but then before the visa was picked, the worker was laid off. i.e. you filed for a visa in Feb for the April lottery but laid off the person in March, giving the illusion that you filed for a visa after laying people off.
Nah that's not true. New applications are due in late April usually, and valid assuming you win the lottery, you can start at the beginning of the new USICS fiscal year in October. You can prep the paperwork in a week or two if you want. 6-7 months should suffice, and thats assuming you are selected. With premium processing you should know within what 2 weeks of submission? Not sure how premium processing works with the lottery.
Not sure how the article knows "new" employees, but something doesn't click for me. H1B visas kick in on October 1st of each year. August 17th can only be for H1B transfers. Might still be a new employee, but definitely not someone coming from overseas.
Correct, in which case, it seems like a manufactured outrage. These folks are already in the US and authorized to work here for up to 6 years - basically indefinitely if applying for a green card.
You can’t really refute the claim that H-1B drives down the market price of labor by citing their price in the market. You have to show those wages would be the same even without the immigrant workers. From a basic supply and demand perspective that sounds unlikely, but markets are complex dynamic creatures so perhaps it’s the case. Nevertheless it needs to be shown.
Agreed, markets are complex. And frankly I don't find market based arguments for or against immigration particularly compelling for that reason. So far as I can tell we really have no reason to believe either side's claims along that dimension.
I don’t necessarily believe this position but not a single one of your points argues against the theory that H1b visas are bad for green card/citizen holders during times of layoffs.
It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
My personal opinion is that liberalization of the visa process does more to protect local workers than our current system, but it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude big tech is currently using the visa system to blunt the tech labor market.
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off”
Only from a particular nationalist sentiment that isn't aligned with capitalism and free-markets.
It is fairly reasonable to believe that tech layoffs were used to blunt worker power. It's much harder to make that argument around h1bs, given the relatively small number of h1b employees, relative ease of employing foreign nationals, and (within the set of companies we're focused on) relative equality of visa holders (in terms of salary and growth opportunities).
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
Given these folks could be 10+ year long-term Indian residents of the US with approved I-140s waiting for their priority dates to come up, I'd say this would be incredibly inhumane. Generally sending people back where they came from because the company they work at made poor decisions feels like a bad idea, actually. Especially for a country as dependent on immigration as the US is to even come close to maintaining its population.
After living and working in a place for 10 years you no longer have "a place to go back," the new place is your home, regardless of whether USCIS and US immigration laws categorize you as a "non-resident alien."
Uprooting people's lives, including that of US nationals (10 years is long enough to meet someone and have kids, even people that do not have a US citizenship or permanent residence either) is not humane. Visa holders have since 2017 a 60 days "grace period" in which H1B Visa holders have to find a new job, while L1 visa holders have that time to pack up and leave.
Small nit, anybody who stayed in the US for 10 years is very unlikely to be a nonresident alien (which is mainly an IRS tax classification and doesn’t have much to do with having an immigrant visa)
That wording is used both by the IRS and USCIS. Non-GC holders are non-resident aliens, but some visas are "dual intent" which allow you to become a resident alien/permanent resident/green card holder. For the IRS being a resident alien means that when you get kicked out of the country after (iirc) living in here for 7 years you have to pay taxes on any assets you own in the US as if you had sold them, just like Americans have to when renouncing their citizenship.
Edit: Quick googling to double check myself and it seems you're right in that USCIS indeed doesn't use that wording, which I must be getting confused with some other term they use in some form, or some other agency, or I'm just plain wrong and got the IRS wording internalized with something else.
I worked that long in another country, as an American, and had kids there. Then I was laid off. The government didn’t care, my employer didn’t care, I had to leave and uproot everything. This is how it works in most of the world. Only in America do we think an immigrant “deserves” a job while letting native born citizens go hungry.
You do realize that basically 90+% of Americans today are all immigrants right? You do realize that right?
Essentially you are stating everyone who loses a job in the U.S. should leave the US.
Or alternatively you want to draw a line when the good immigrants are allowed to enter after which are the bad immigrants. And I’m sure that conveniently that line will ensure your family becomes part of the good immigrants.
Hm, not really. That would make you a second-generation immigrant. [1]
First-generation immigrants are folks who are born outside the US and naturalize. "In the United States, among demographers and other social scientists, 'second generation [immigrants]' refers to the U.S.-born children of foreign-born parents."
Not in the strictest sense, but it's not the bright line you're making it out to be either.
Unless your ancestors were in the Americas before Columbus arrived, you're an immigrant. First generation, tenth generation, a hundred generations from now, it doesn't matter. Your great great grandfather landed at Plymouth Rock? You're not native.
These folks should invest their talents in India instead.
My mom was talking about how her siblings were selling their inherited property in Bangladesh (where land prices are skyrocketing) and buying property in the US, Canada, and Australia. And I’m like—you realize this is helping to keep Bangladesh is poor, right? All that capital flowing out to developed countries. (Not to mention the brain drain.) Meanwhile they’re voting to turn America into Bangladesh. -_-
One of my coworkers is gay. He is an Indian citizen and has been in the US for about two decades, roughly half of his life and basically all of his adult life. He is still waiting for a green card and will likely wait a lot longer.
"Just invest your talents in India" is asking him to leave his friends, his long term partner, his job, his home, and everything he has known for most of his adult life. It is also asking him to move to a place that is oppressive to his sexuality and denies him his deserved human rights. It is inhumane.
I also have no idea how H1Bs are voting to turn American into Bangladesh. They aren't allowed to vote.
> Just invest your talents in India" is asking him to leave his friends, his long term partner, his job, his home, and everything he has known for most of his adult life. It is also asking him to move to a place that is oppressive to his sexuality and denies him his deserved human rights. It is inhumane.
India is his country. There’s nothing “inhumane” about ending a residency situation that is—according to the words on the paper, “temporary.”
I agree it’s enormously disruptive for Indians who think H1B is anything other than a temporary work visa. I agree it’s wrong that US employers and many politicians give people a false impression of the H1B program. That’s all the more reason for people to stay in India instead of dealing with this stupid system.
> I also have no idea how H1Bs are voting to turn American into Bangladesh. They aren't allowed to vote.
I’m talking about people who are naturalized citizens. There is a saying “I’d rather be governed by the first 100 people listed in the Boston food directory than the faculty of Harvard University.” This is a common sentiment among Americans. But it’s completely incomprehensible to people from the subcontinent. There is a deeply held belief in Credentialism and elite bureaucratic governance. When these people become citizens, they vote, according to these deeply, held cultural beliefs.
You can't really talk both about H1Bs and naturalized citizens at the same time here. The topic of conversation is worker visas. And, conveniently for you, it takes fucking forever for an Indian citizen in the US on H1B to get naturalized.
But I'll ask you: do you think that naturalized citizens of south asian descent should leave the country? You and I disagree politically, why can't I demand that you expatriate?
> You can't really talk both about H1Bs and naturalized citizens at the same time here.
They are closely related. American law sees the H1B as a temporary worker visa, which in theory won’t lead to lots of new naturalized citizens changing the country and the workforce. Indians see the H1B as the first step to permanent immigration and naturalization. The ridiculousness of the H1B process arises from that fundamental conflict.
> But I'll ask you: do you think that naturalized citizens of south asian descent should leave the country?
No—citizenship is citizenship. But citizens get to decide immigration policy in their own self interest. That’s democracy. On a going forward basis, it’s entirely valid to ask how H1Bs are changing the country, and whether the American body politic believes those changes are good or bad. My family came to northern Virginia in an immigration wave that rendered the place unrecognizable. The place where I grew up doesn’t exist anymore. Had you polled Virginians back in 1989 and given them a glimpse of how importing a bunch of foreign elites would change their state, they quite reasonably could think those changes were for the worse.
By the way—this is not a Democrat versus Republican thing. Asians (who used to vote Republican until 2000) played a major role in reshaping the Democratic Party due to their concentrated populations in key states like Virginia. The immigrants who strive to send their kids to work on Wall Street and Silicon Valley are mostly not interested in solidarity with working class people.
> They are closely related. American law sees the H1B as a temporary worker visa, which in theory won’t lead to lots of new naturalized citizens changing the country and the workforce. Indians see the H-1B as the first step to permanent immigration and naturalization.
Not exactly. It's considered a dual-intent visa by USCIS which means that the USCIS also sees it as the first step to permanent immigration and naturalization.
The common dual-intent visas are: H-1B, H-4, L-1A, L-1B, O-1, O-3, K-1 to K-4 and V.
The alternative is a non-intent visa (B-1/B-2, TN, H-2A, H-2B, E-1 to E-3, F-1, J-1, M-1) which becomes invalid as soon as you demonstrate immigrant intent (for instance by filing an I-485 adjustment of status petition).
> The ridiculousness of the H1B process arises from that fundamental conflict.
From a conflict, yes, but not from this conflict. The conflict is that neither US party is pro-immigration but USCIS is still mandated by law to offer immigrant visas. So they make it as difficult as humanly, legally possible.
> It's considered a dual-intent visa by USCIS which means that the USCIS also sees it as the first step to permanent immigration and naturalization.
The way the “dual intent” thing works is not by making it a non-temporary, or immigrant visa. It is still a temporary, non-immigrant visa, and the law still says that having immigration intent still is grounds for refusing entry. The only thing the “dual entry” legislation did was to create the legal fiction, where the USCIS/CBP are not allowed to use the application for a green card as evidence of immigration intent.
Before 1990 or so, as soon as you applied for a green card while on H1B, your visa (though not status) became effectively invalid. You couldn’t leave the country, because you’d be denied entry, given your immigration intent. You couldn’t also apply for extension of H1B visa for the same reason.
Today, according to law, you are still not allowed to have immigration intent while on H1B, it’s just now applying for a green card does not constitute evidence of immigration intent (which is, of course, entirely a legal fiction).
The US immigration law and practice is completely insane. We have non-immigrant visas that, through legal fiction, are used to facilitate immigrations. At the same time, we have millions of people illegally crossing the border and making bogus asylum claims, which everyone understands to just be an immigration back door, created not through legislation, but rather discretion in enforcement. Instead of reforming the law to make it sane, and enforcing it (similar to eg. what Canada or Australia have), we have insane law, and strictly enforce it only against people who would be most valuable to have here.
> The way the “dual intent” thing works is not by making it a non-temporary, or immigrant visa. It is still a temporary, non-immigrant visa, and the law still says that having immigration intent still is grounds for refusing entry.
An immigrant visa to the US is a green card.
Having immigrant intent is not a barrier to admission on a dual-intent visa. H-1s do not have to demonstrate that they have a "residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning" and "the H category is specifically excluded from the I.N.A. § 214(b)'s presumption of immigrant intent;" [1]
> Before 1990 or so, as soon as you applied for a green card while on H1B, your visa (though not status) became effectively invalid. You couldn’t leave the country, because you’d be denied entry, given your immigration intent. You couldn’t also apply for extension of H1B visa for the same reason.
This is exactly what happens today if you file I-485 on a non-intent status like a TN. It doesn't happen on a dual-intent status.
> Today, according to law, you are still not allowed to have immigration intent while on H1B, it’s just now applying for a green card does not constitute evidence of immigration intent (which is, of course, entirely a legal fiction).
Regulation 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(16)(i) states: "The alien may legitimately come to the United States for a temporary period as an H-1C or H-1B nonimmigrant and depart voluntarily at the end of his or her authorized stay and, at the same time, lawfully seek to become a permanent resident of the United States." [1]
Also you can possess immigrant intent and even petition from non-intent status like TN, so long as you developed said intent after arrival, and once you take steps (I-485 for instance) you can’t renew. A lot of folks apply for a green card from TN status, it’s just risky since you can’t leave until advance parole and if denied you may be deported.
Applying for a green card through adjustment of status absolutely 100% counts as demonstration of immigrant intent. That is filing for I-485. Having your employer file I-140 doesn't because you didn't file it, your employer did.
This is basically all wrong.
Except for the part where you say that the US immigration system is silly - it is - and the part where you say that a system more like Canada and Australia would help - it would.
The USCIS doesn’t make the law, Congress does. Its regulations are interpretations (and workarounds) of the statute. The statute is clear that H1B is a non-immigrant, temporary worker visa. “Dual intent” appears nowhere in the statute. It’s a legal fiction created by the regulation that’s necessary precisely because the statute requires non-immigrant intent. It doesn’t mean that the H1B visa allows either non-immigrant and immigrant intent. It means that you have both at the same time—the immigrant intent from filing for a green card, and the non-immigrant intent required by the H1B visa.
The reason for all this is that the 1952 INA promised the American people that it would not change America’s demographic makeup. Nobody can get the votes to change that in Congress. But the executive branch can change the regulations unilaterally.
> Having immigrant intent is not a barrier to admission on a dual-intent visa. H-1s do not have to demonstrate that they have a "residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning" and "the H category is specifically excluded from the I.N.A. § 214(b)'s presumption of immigrant intent;" [1]
You are missing the point. Yes, H1Bs are excluded from presumption of immigrant intent. This doesn't mean that they can have immigrant intent. Instead, the law says (reiterating what I said in my previous comment) that "the fact that an alien is the beneficiary of an application for a preference status filed under section 1154 of this title or has otherwise sought permanent residence in the United States shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence for purposes of obtaining a visa as a nonimmigrant described in subparagraph (H)(i)(b) or (c), (L), or (V) of section 1101(a)(15) of this title or otherwise obtaining or maintaining the status of a nonimmigrant described in such subparagraph". Of course, in practice, since the government has few other means of proving immigrant intent, and since they cannot presume immigrant intent, this means that the obvious immigrant intent exhibited by applying for permanent residence must be ignored. This is why the CFR says that, because this is true in practical application of the law. My point is that it is true thanks to legal fiction, where the government is obligated to ignore the obvious evidence of immigrant intent, notwithstanding legislation otherwise demanding lack of immigrant intent.
> Also you can possess immigrant intent and even petition from non-intent status like TN, so long as you developed said intent after arrival, and once you take steps (I-485 for instance) you can’t renew.
Yes, I talk about this in my comment, let me helpfully quote it, in case you missed it:
> Before 1990 or so, as soon as you applied for a green card while on H1B, your visa (though not status) became effectively invalid. You couldn’t leave the country, because you’d be denied entry, given your immigration intent. You couldn’t also apply for extension of H1B visa for the same reason.
Observe that I explicitly say that this doesn't invalidate your status, only (effectively) your visa.
> Having your employer file I-140 doesn't because you didn't file it, your employer did.
This is incorrect, otherwise the legislation wouldn't need to say that "the fact that an alien is the beneficiary of an application for a preference status filed under section 1154 (...) shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence".
> This is basically all wrong.
Nothing I said is wrong, and nothing what you said has contradicted what I said (except where you were wrong). You are just talking past me: I acknowledge the practical reality of the consequences of the legislation and the ensuing CFR regulations (indeed, I am myself a beneficiary of the process, starting from a dual-intent L-1 visa). Instead, my point is that the law, instead of saying that "yes, it's totally kosher for for H1B holders to come here with immigrant intent", it schizophrenically says something like "no, you cannot have immigration intent on H1B, but unlike on, say, B1, you don't have to prove that you don't, and we will just pretend that your immigrant petition does not in any way show that you have an immigration intent (which, to reiterate, you shall not have)".
I didn’t say that they should live in another country, nor am I telling you what to value. I’m pointing out that by coming to places like Virginia, we dramatically changed them, and it’s entirely reasonable for people to ask whether we want further immigration and further such changes. Maybe you like the changes, but I think they were for the worse, and I bet a lot of people in Virginia agree.
You said that they should “invest their talents in India.” You brought up us citizens who were voting. You can’t back out of this now. You said it.
It seems from your post that you weren’t even living in VA at the time. Are you somehow bigoted against both south asians and Virginians? You betting that a large portion of Virginians are just racists who don’t want brown people around (excuse me, “people who vote for elites”) is just fucking awful. I don’t even understand what you are trying to achieve.
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
This is really suboptimal though, what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer in a key position that would make your company collapse if they left but say, they were born in India, and you're laying off folks in projects that failed / folks that are low-performing.
It's pretty easy to fix the perverse incentives of H1B hiring: give folks a green card after being here for 3 years, that's basically how long it takes for ROW folks to get green-cards in good years.
The US requires foreign labour to function.
Which is why neither the Repubs or Democrats have ever been even remotely serious about tackling migration.
Maybe at the service/entry level but certainly not for tech jobs. Tech visas have nothing to do with filling the millions of service jobs; they're about filling the corporations' pockets with millions.
> his is really suboptimal though, what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer in a key position that would make your company collapse if they left but say, they were born in India, and you're laying off folks in projects that failed / folks that are low-performing.
You can offer them a different visa? H1B isn't the ONLY option. It's only being used because it's not a "key" position.
That's really messed up:
1 - the high performer is either writing REALLY bad code, which means he's probably the only coder and no one can replace them because no one can read the code
OR
2 - the high performer is writing the best code that ever existed, which is why you can't replace them. However this is so rare. Most of those people have already migrated to FAANG where you better believe no one is that necessary.
> what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer in a key position that would make your company collapse if they left
Provide an option for a company to submit some paperwork and pay some non-trivial fee (to avoid gaming) that allows them to exempt such an employee from the visa-first layoff requirement. Additionally, fast track the green card process for whom said exemption is granted.
> Additionally, fast track the green card process for whom said exemption is granted.
Yes, this. Or alternatively, in an economy where everyone is getting laid, the 60 day deadline should be extended indefinitely until the economy recovers and similar jobs start becoming available and plentiful, at which point they can consider reinstating the employment requirements.
Isn't that how the H1-B program is supposed to work?
"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce"
I've worked with some awesome folks, but I didn't get the impression that they possessed skills or abilities that are otherwise unobtainable in the United States.
It's such a scam to pretend that H1B workers are, on average, high performers in key positions. That isn't the reality, has not ever been the reality, and will not ever be the reality. H1B is about cost of labor, has always been about cost of labor, and will always be about cost of labor.
disclosure: have worked for large h1b heavy shops my entire career, and while there has been the very occasional exception, the bulk of the h1bs are hired entirely for cost reasons.
> It's such a scam to pretend that H1B workers are, on average, high performers in key positions.
I don't think this is what OP meant. OP said "what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer". This has nothing to do with the average performance of any group. The point is that a blanket mandate that a group should be fired over others first may hurt the livelihood of a company. Note whether this is right or wrong is definitely up to debate, and different countries implement different policies for either side. I'm just clarifying the underlying logic of the OP.
It's also about companies violating the H1B visa rules on a large scale. H1B is supposed to be about high performers (that is in the law) ... and it just isn't. Companies do not ever use it like that.
There should be consequences to violating these rules. Not being allowed to hire workers JUST because they're cheap (99% of H1B visa workers) is something that should always be enforced.
It's not just H1B ... it's higher paying workers vs lower paying potential. I've seen shadow recruiting for replacements WHILE layoffs of existing staff were in progress.
To avoid gaming the system, make the company pay the current MAXIMUM salary for the same position or greater to the worker AND double the normal taxes AND have the government's IRS and Labor related departments review the description and actual duties of the job on a quarterly basis.
That is, hiring someone from outside the country SHOULD cost more so it isn't gamed.
It’s worse than that, it’s the citizenry subsidizing the business as the business can pay less by offering immigration as part of the package which is desirable due to the investments of the citizenry. The citizenry has to compete with a service they’re subsidizing.
I don’t believe those numbers, economics is terrible at measuring ‘but for’ conditionals. Statistics will tell you whatever you need if you torture it enough. As a former immigrant employee to the US I felt the intended wage suppression first hand. But for the large numbers of immigrants would a wage shortage lead to more taxes paid by citizenry? As I’m now an employer and not an employee I get the benefit of the wage suppression and it’s very real. It also prevents others from saving enough to do the same which is also of personal benefit for me but bad for society which I assume would be bad for me long term…
So because data can be used to mislead, we should ignore data, and go by assumptions and feelings. Hmmm.
I guess if all you have to go by is your own personal anecdote, one can understand why you might feel immigration is a net negative for the country you’ve immigrated to.
I didn’t stay in the US, I’m not optimistic about the future of the US. I do work in statistics / machine learning, it’s mainly the work of economists that I have a problem with. I’m surprised that anyone still takes them seriously given how terrible they are at predictions which is a core part of their job. I’ve run my own numbers and have my own results but unlike many economists I don’t have time to argue my point, I’m too busy with work.
By that logic babies are bad for workers, they grow up and take their jobs!
Except that is obviously ridiculous, because people on visas induce their own demand in the local economy, growing the pie for everyone. They are also pre-trained, commit crime at a level vastly below the citizen population, don't get any sort of welfare, and pay enormous amounts of taxes.
I'm a proponent for highly trained visas, but I don't think it's disputable that they are bad for their direct local competitors. They might be good for the economy at Large, and they might be good for consumers in general, but those are different factors.
As a minor note to babies comment, a baby isn't going to reduce the salary of the delivering nurse the day it comes out of the womb. If you let a million trained nurses enter the country, that would be a different story.
It’s very disputable that visas are bad for direct local competitors.
Look at what’s happening to the UK after Brexit. While in the EU, non UK EU citizens essentially had super visas that allowed them to work in the UK as long as they could get a job. This changed almost entirely after Brexit.
The result? Hundreds if not thousands of businesses such as farms, fisheries, bakeries, butchers, have shut down because they can’t find employees. This has resulted in a massive net loss of jobs among UK workers themselves (workers are not fungible…to switch to a new job they require training, skill, expertise, and desire). In addition, this is helping drive up inflation in the UK so that it’s higher than nearly every country in the EU even though the UK is more protected from Russian natural gas than say Germany.
Further, its national services, such as the NHS, which is unable to find doctors and nurses where it did so far more easily before Brexit, are consequently collapsing.
So it’s very disputable that visa holders almost certainly negatively impact the local working population.
It's really doubtful whether a labor constrained labor market helps _all_ local workers. Sure, some may see a benefit. Others might see employers cancel projects and reduce planned investments, due to more expensive inputs driven by higher labor costs.
I think it is pretty definitively good for their competitors. This is different than all labor or all local workers. If you're one of a few workers that do X and everyone wants to do X, this is a good thing for you.
Software jobs create software jobs. A huge reason why engineers in the US are paid so much better than in other countries is because people from all over the world come here to be educated in software and work in software.
There was far lower supply of software engineers in the 1980s. But that market was much worse for software engineers in the US.
In my opinion, that's true. We should be bringing even more skilled people to this country to work. Making sure that the US is the center of the software world is good for US software engineers.
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first
Elon Musk didn't get laid off in the 2000-01 tech bubble presumably because he was good? But maybe it should be perfectly "logical" to send him home.
Incredibly short sighted take, the US have doubled the population in the past 60 years, are we running a 50% unemployment rate? The selective immigration have hugely benefited the US and its native population.
> It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
Depends what you mean by "logical". Blindly preferring citizens over visa holders is bad for the company, bad for the visa holders, and bad for the economy in the long term, but it's good for the citizen workers in the short term. I guess logic is defined by your priorities.
Points 2-5 all contain the words could be. Sure, the reason for submitting applications for H1-B could be any of the reasons you listed, or the applications could be for the obvious economic incentives.
Maybe it's been too long and things have changed, but that's not how H1B visas work. I have a smallish S-corp and brought in some a long time ago.
We filed, got the paperwork submitted, it got approved, they eventually came to work for me stateside. This took 14 months from filing to arrival. No one filing for a visa in February is having someone come over in March. No company is firing someone and filling that spot with an H1B the next day, unless that H1B is a contractor, and another company he already works for holds his visa.
So the major missing thing here is (unless the process radically changed), is the article is blatantly lying.
> Just one month later, Pichai’s firm filed applications for low-paid foreign workers to come to America and take highly specialized tech jobs.
It is important to note that LCA filings (which are public) have a wage that is typically lower than the actual wage paid, because companies do not want to disclose publicly how much they're actually paying.
I don't think anyone is implying Google pays differently based on visa status. The implication is that Google would rather hire a foreign worker who is willing to accept lower wages as opposed hiring locally - and therefore put downward pressure on all employees wages.
Whoever wrote this doesn't understand how the H-1B system works. Most of these applications are for existing employees of the company who are on some other kind of work authorization (like EAD or OPT). Because of the lottery they have to reapply every year for 3-4 years until their authorization expires. The layoffs have nothing to do with anything.
No other domestic worker could do that job for the same price. You see, we just went through layoffs for cost saving purposes, and have nearly no money in the bank (just $100B), so we can only hire these H-1B visa holders or our business will go under.
H-1Bs are required to be paid prevailing wage for the job in the geographical area as determined by the DOL. There's a whole labor conditions application filing that you have to make with the Department of Labor.
That's not the requirement. It's frustrating to see otherwise smart people on every single tech board ever since decades to not understand work visa and employment green card requirements and the difference between them.
You’re right about the law, however the rhetoric from tech executives testifying before Congress in favor of increased visa issuances has always been about a shortage of workers. So this misconception people have didn’t come from nowhere.
I understand perfectly. And I still firmly believe that companies should immediately and completely lose ANY access to the visa pipelines if they do a layoff.
If visa holders are that important to the company, then the company will figure out how to not do a layoff, no?
Of course, I'm also someone who believes that visa holders should be granted green card status within 24 months tops--none of this 7 years of indentured servitude bullshit. Green cards like this would shut down 90+% of the companies abusing the visa process in the US.
That is the requirement. The law applies standards to ensure that domestic workers aren't adversely impacted by the hiring of foreign workers. This includes putting essentially bogus ads in newspaper classifieds, and requires that they're paying the same to H1-B workers in the same role as a domestic worker, among other comical things.
The program has defacto evolved to one in which the US can tap into a skilled global labor market to increase competition for roles, without paying too much attention to the actual legal requirements.
Sources:
(Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa)
> This includes putting essentially bogus ads in newspaper classifieds
> Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa
Both of these things have absolutely nothing to do with H1B visa requirements. You're just proving my point in the comment you're replying to. Please read it again.
Also read your own references to see where they require ads in newspapers or needing to tailor H1B "requisition documents". Spoiler, there's none.
It would be better to spend less of your comments expressing frustration with people who don't understand, and more explaining what the difference actually is. I read both of your comments and while I have no reason to disagree with you, I can't tell what you're actually saying.
If you respond to incorrect information with correct information and show us how it is correct, your comments will be more persuasive as well as more in the intended spirit of the site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
It can be easy to take this for granted when you already have the correct information mapped out in your head many times over—but the rest of us don't have access to that!
Fair, I will do that. I had just become jaded over the years(almost 15 years now) spending time explaining the same point in tech forums and then later it's just even more and more comments from others confidently stating the same wrong things again on every tech immigration related story(a bunch on this story including the couple of parent comments in this thread I was replying to). This creates a feedback loop with others assuming the same.
For a while I did not engage with such stories because it feels like a losing battle swimming against the current even though tech forums are generally filled with smart folks.
As another sibling comment said, the requirements for placing ads etc. are for the first step of the green card process, aka PERM, and are not required for a H1B visa.
Maybe I should write a blog post or something explaining it and link it every time :)
Having posted over 60k comments largely repeating the same explanations over and over, I definitely sympathize with the frustrations of internet statelessness!
Writing one definitive explanation and then linking to it sounds like a good solution in this case. Even if just you wrote it up as an HN comment and then linked to that in the future.
Are you sure you are not conflating this with PERM? H-1B only requires a prevailing wage determination. There is no “ludicrously specific” job description, nor a requirement to post ads (just a notice at the workplace).
With mass layoffs of this scale, it seems like H1B roles should be the on the top of chopping block if we're keeping in the spirit of the actual purpose of the program. That means those H1B roles should have been so unique and world class talented that they were considered irreplaceable by the other thousands laid off. It seems they should be required to show justification this holds. It seems this should be pretty easy to provide evidence for if your holders are say Google Fellows (picking Google as an example) or the Peter Norvigs of the world.
I have nothing against H1B holders, I do however have a lot against businesses who often abuse these programs to suppress labor costs and dangle green cards as a piece of leverage. To be fair, big tech companies tend to be better about this and pay competitively for these roles though not always.
> this should be pretty easy to provide evidence for if your holders are say Google Fellows (picking Google as an example) or the Peter Norvigs of the world.
Google Fellows wouldn't be on H-1B but on O-1.
The H-1B visa is a good fit for foreign nationals in the early to mid-stages of their careers hoping to expand their experience by working in the U.S. The O-1 visa is generally suited for established professionals and researchers.
The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability. A specialty occupation is one that requires the application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
People born in India will be under this "temporary employment" for decades before they get a green card due to the country cap. With recent backlogs it looks like the process will take up to 50 years for someone with a currently approved green card petition.
>I have nothing against H1B holders, I do however have a lot against businesses who often abuse these programs to suppress labor costs and dangle green cards as a piece of leverage.
One would be called a Right Wing nutcase for saying this :
"I have nothing against immigration.
But I am against businesses employing illegal immigrants to lower labor costs while taking away jobs from poor Americans."
But on HN it's fine for Tech workers to protest for 'fairness' when it comes to H1B and Tech jobs.
Most people entering Legally on H1B will not get a Green Card for next 15-20 years.
That's not exactly 'dangling' green cards.
A lot of them will return to their home countries after paying a ton of Taxes in the USA.
As they can't be sure if and when they will get a Green Card.
But the same American Tech workers are all for 'Immigration'.
I guess, immigration is good when it suits them.
Cheap Janitors, Plumbers, Mechanics and more Blue Collar workers.
Lowers living costs.
Good Immigration.
The biggest concern is that people spur the government into forcing companies to fire H1Bs before US citizens. There was a time when I thought that could never happen but given the political climate it might happen, with disastrous consequences.
The only way this could be a problem is if you assume employees are fungible.
But they aren't. You may have too many of one type of worker, and not enough of another, so it would make perfect sense to lay off the first ones, and hire foreign workers for the second one.
While opinions differ about whether the article has any merit, I know that when California brought the AB5 bill several top quality folks doing "side gigs" for my then employer were subtly let go because the management believed that the nature of their association with us brought them within the ambit of "contractor". They were quickly replaced with people from cheaper locales.
I've also seen documents supporting a few H1B filings and know that most of the skills mentioned in their are fabricated.
So yes companies do this regularly to cut costs in the name of layoffs and talent shortage.
253 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadI’m not making any statement on the veracity of the claim that the pandemic was manufactured, just pointing out a flaw in the logic here.
> The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
Is this true? My observation at Google has been that very few teams had layoffs and now have open headcount. The teams that are hiring aren't the ones that had people fired.
I was on a two-person team that was, due to recent client poaching, pretty severely overstaffed. Our manager had just been promoted and we got a new one hired in.
He viewed our lack of work to do as temporary and started recruiting. He eventually hired a third member and we started training her. After the first day of training, I was fired with no notice and no severance. The manager remarked, in the surprise exit interview, that he had taken a look at staffing recently and we had too much.
There are a couple interesting things to consider here:
1. We had been severely overstaffed (as advertised!) for several months before he even started hiring. He was well aware of it.
2. My team's original manager had offered to me that I was free to live anywhere in the world, as long as it had an internet connection. He left the team so soon after I joined that this didn't happen. But the new manager gave many indications of being acutely uncomfortable with the idea that I had made a request that he wasn't willing to grant immediately.
My question to you is, was I fired because we were overstaffed, or was that mentioned in the exit interview for no particular reason?
And my followup question is, did the companies discussed here do layoffs because they were overstaffed, or because they felt they had the right amount of staff, but they wanted to pay them less?
And of course, companies also have practical right to make mistakes, from overstaffing to understaffing, or to place bets that do well or do not.
The point is that these things would happen even if things were being run perfectly, so they are not indicative of nefarious practices or abuses.
Have the companies stopped hiring domestically? As this seems like normal behavior.
For comparison, Google laid off 12,000 employees this cycle.
Edit:
> Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.
Google has already done this previously during economic uncertainty.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/google-said-to-rescind-job-o...
“Too hard” to sorting hat a subset of 12k employees into other roles and slash and burn instead? You shouldn’t get H1B quota.
We are coming up on an election cycle after all.
> but there is no logical or legal reason to do so.
Edit: throttled, can’t reply @bubblethink that is what the law and legislation is for, helping corporations along when their actions are too efficient for society’s liking. I expect regulation to catch up to their labor practices.
For all but highly specialized sub-fields, it is really hard to convince me H1B's are necessary - other than to artificially suppress wages for citizens.
This is not an ok way to think about it and certainly not something we should accept, let alone justify as a viable business practice
Doing a lot of the wrong thing doesn’t absolve you from responsibility that you have to each individual.
Its a good thing that Google is a AI first company. It can use AI to do such fine grained search.
Normalizing reneging on job offers is a bad path to go down.
But you can imagine that a lot of the people who were laid off would be justifiably pissed and uninterested in that sort of thing.
We saw similar between 2005ish-2015ish. Lots of offshoring where you could get whatever you 'wanted' built, but it was exactly what you 'wanted' and not what actually made sense.
By this I am referring to contract houses that weren't quite 'code genies' but still would deliver products that were barely workable upon delivery. More than one shop I worked at over the last decade actually -suffered- from this.
Magically, most orgs who could figure out how to deliver even semi passable/realistic functional requirements could get the same done in house for a LOT less money.
That said, yes a lot of counties can provide very competent software development and houses.. but the communication time gap is often still present.
Another shop I worked at had EU devs that were competent, but that communication gap was still a big hurdle.
It’s just that you’re hiring a million Indian developers for every 1000 UK developers, so is it surprising that the average Indian developer doesn’t seem as good?
A'int gonna end up being authors or technical writers for sure but it doesn't get in the way of actually communicating.
Especially since American developers are unlikely to speak any other language, while their Asian counterparts can communicate extremely well in their primary language and do a more than decent job in communicating in English as well.
For a while. I worked with some excellent remote developers in other countries, but it always felt like a revolving door as the pivoted from one remote job to the next so they could get a $5K increase here and a $5K increase there. Eventually we had applicants demanding salaries equivalent to MCOL United States salaries, so we just went back to hiring local for a lot of the roles. Hiring and managing remote workers comes with a lot of financial and managerial overhead.
Once companies catch on, it's just to easy to go in and snipe entire teams from one company by giving them nominal raises.
Almost no American in the tech industry thinks that, given how many of our co-workers aren't (or at least weren't born as) American.
> But the reality is that most countries have them and they will do the same work for a fraction of the price.
At the high end of the tech labor market, it is actually a world market for talent, meaning the talent goes where they can make the most money, and bargains are hard to find because people are not so immobile (e.g. due to H1Bs).
> Everything is done over the internet these days so it doesn't matter that much where you are located.
This is true, but top talent is still going to demand top dollar, even if you let them live in a LCOL region, since they can just move to a HCOL region otherwise.
And yet nearly every American is vehemently against the H1B visa which is the only way for 99% of non American tech workers to work in the U.S. and not do the same work outside the US.
That is a very broad generalization, considering 27% of Americans are foreign born. Yes, the MAGA crowd is largely against H1Bs (and even here you'll find lots of exceptions), but they didn't win the last election.
> which is the only way for 99% of non American tech workers to work in the U.S. and not do the same work outside the US.
And yet, America has a lot of H1Bs and greencard holders, unlike China or India themselves (I say this having worked on a Z work visa in China for 9 years).
To my knowledge, the main barriers are managing the payroll: how do you deal with each countries' laws and obligations for each of your remote employees ?
The traditional way to do that at scale is to go through a local proxy company that abstracts the complexity and is the legal entity responsible for the workers in that country. Except you have to pay that middle-men, maintain an ongoing relationship, and if for instance a tenth of your engineers are managed by them, their bargaining power will be pretty high and the cost will rise.
If as a company you deal with each individual employee instead, you have to also directly manage all the legal aspects. Hiring freelance workers only can partially alleviate that, but this comes with its own can of worm, and the complexity stays the same in case of conflict (imagine getting sued by the worker in their own country)
In this day and age though, I wonder how much it actually works . For instance if one of your contractor does something completely illegal in your country and you get media backlash for it, you're in a tight position if that thing was perfectly legal on their side, and wasn't covered by the contract as you had your own country's law in mind.
I'm not sure you could push your country's law on them, nor that it would help your situation as your company is still fronting the backlash.
And even in that setup, we all remember Nike and many other apparel makers stuck with the "child worker in a factory" image basically forever. Or Apple being questionned about FoxConn's working conditions, or the environmental impact.
When it comes to PR, pushing the responsibility to the foreign contractor doesn't looks like a good working strategy IMHO.
Does "contractor" mean something different to you than it does to everyone else? This would be like me buying an iPhone and then Apple suing me for not paying proper sick leave entitlements.
I can understand where your misunderstanding comes from, thinking they’re all just businesses providing services to other businesses. But this interpretation is very naive, and the legal reality is massively more complicated than you’re making it sound. Governments really don’t like independent contractors, they’re subject to far more restrictions than ordinary businesses, and companies employing their services are usually exposed to risks that they don’t have when dealing with ordinary businesses.
The nature of the relationship, and the work you are doing determines whether your employer is a regular employer and what taxes they have to pay. In Canada, for example, certain taxes (GST) are applied to the contractor relationship based on whether the product the company sells is available within the country, and the distinction between contractor and employee is much less fuzzy than it is in the US (if you have to ask, the person is almost certainly an employee).
It gets complicated quick
Or more interestingly, I'd assume an independant consulting contract could be void in many legislations if it happens that their work should be reclassified as employment under some specific rules (e.g. you dictate their working hours etc.)
Basically, is the contract valid under the worker's country laws is a question you won't be able to ignore I guess ?
Depending on treaties, not having a formal business entity in a country doesn’t make you immune to their laws and taxes (not a lawyer, but it is totally possible to collect foreign debts in the US for example), if you’re publicly traded, breaking foreign laws intentionally is a BAD idea. On top of all that most companies strive to stay on the right side of the law regardless of the ability to get away with it.
Not an exact parallel, but see the saga of the Huawei exec who was arrested in Canada on behalf of the US for a business deal made by a Chinese company with Iran.
Are you probably going to get away with it? Yes, if you aren’t a very big fish. But what if you don’t.
That being said, these companies don't really provide much as far as stable US jobs go so it would be better to encourage entrepreneurial activity for US programmers.
Another word of advice for programmers. Do what you can to own the IP of your work. Whether it's open source or your own proprietary IP. Work for hire where the company owns the IP if your work is a dead end job.
Because interview process in bigtech has been subverted by people benefiting from it and who are already skilled in it. I bet absolute majority of people that I worked with and considered them very good couldn't solve knapsack problem on whiteboards in 15 minutes, don't know Z algorithm by heart and won't be able to correctly project Amazon leadership principles with (made up bullshit) examples from their previous jobs.
1. Fire high-paid workers
2. Import low-paid ones
3. ...
4. Profit.
So it still may be "high wages" but that does not negate the GrandParent comment that they laid off higher paid workers in favor in importing lower paid workers
I’m quite sure they don’t. My friend makes over $1M total comp. Are you saying he would be paid $2M if he were a citizen?
Immigrants get shit done.
1. Layoffs happened regardless of visa status, so visa workers were part of the layoffs.
2. The visa applications for H1B could be for workers already working in the company under a different visa like TN or F1
3. The positions affected by layoffs and positions filing for H1B could be different. For example, a front end position may be affected by layoffs, but the visa application could be for an ML eng.
4. Visa could also be for more tenured staff. Plenty of companies are now only hiring staff+ roles after the layoffs
5. Because of the lottery system and how it works, you could have filed for a visa before a certain date but then before the visa was picked, the worker was laid off. i.e. you filed for a visa in Feb for the April lottery but laid off the person in March, giving the illusion that you filed for a visa after laying people off.
Refutes at least two points you made if not three..
It’s a perfectly logical (if not humane given current immigration law) position to hold that companies should be required to lay off visa holders first and for there to be a “cooling off” period between layoffs and hiring of visa holders.
My personal opinion is that liberalization of the visa process does more to protect local workers than our current system, but it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude big tech is currently using the visa system to blunt the tech labor market.
Only from a particular nationalist sentiment that isn't aligned with capitalism and free-markets.
It is fairly reasonable to believe that tech layoffs were used to blunt worker power. It's much harder to make that argument around h1bs, given the relatively small number of h1b employees, relative ease of employing foreign nationals, and (within the set of companies we're focused on) relative equality of visa holders (in terms of salary and growth opportunities).
Given these folks could be 10+ year long-term Indian residents of the US with approved I-140s waiting for their priority dates to come up, I'd say this would be incredibly inhumane. Generally sending people back where they came from because the company they work at made poor decisions feels like a bad idea, actually. Especially for a country as dependent on immigration as the US is to even come close to maintaining its population.
Uprooting people's lives, including that of US nationals (10 years is long enough to meet someone and have kids, even people that do not have a US citizenship or permanent residence either) is not humane. Visa holders have since 2017 a 60 days "grace period" in which H1B Visa holders have to find a new job, while L1 visa holders have that time to pack up and leave.
source: current resident alien
Edit: Quick googling to double check myself and it seems you're right in that USCIS indeed doesn't use that wording, which I must be getting confused with some other term they use in some form, or some other agency, or I'm just plain wrong and got the IRS wording internalized with something else.
Resident alien is synonymous with lawful permanent resident or green card holder, however nonresident alien is a tax term.
More seriously, while this particular discussion centers around US visas, obviously the analogous arguments apply to other countries as well.
Essentially you are stating everyone who loses a job in the U.S. should leave the US.
Or alternatively you want to draw a line when the good immigrants are allowed to enter after which are the bad immigrants. And I’m sure that conveniently that line will ensure your family becomes part of the good immigrants.
First-generation immigrants are folks who are born outside the US and naturalize. "In the United States, among demographers and other social scientists, 'second generation [immigrants]' refers to the U.S.-born children of foreign-born parents."
Not in the strictest sense, but it's not the bright line you're making it out to be either.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigrant_generations
My mom was talking about how her siblings were selling their inherited property in Bangladesh (where land prices are skyrocketing) and buying property in the US, Canada, and Australia. And I’m like—you realize this is helping to keep Bangladesh is poor, right? All that capital flowing out to developed countries. (Not to mention the brain drain.) Meanwhile they’re voting to turn America into Bangladesh. -_-
"Just invest your talents in India" is asking him to leave his friends, his long term partner, his job, his home, and everything he has known for most of his adult life. It is also asking him to move to a place that is oppressive to his sexuality and denies him his deserved human rights. It is inhumane.
I also have no idea how H1Bs are voting to turn American into Bangladesh. They aren't allowed to vote.
India is his country. There’s nothing “inhumane” about ending a residency situation that is—according to the words on the paper, “temporary.”
I agree it’s enormously disruptive for Indians who think H1B is anything other than a temporary work visa. I agree it’s wrong that US employers and many politicians give people a false impression of the H1B program. That’s all the more reason for people to stay in India instead of dealing with this stupid system.
> I also have no idea how H1Bs are voting to turn American into Bangladesh. They aren't allowed to vote.
I’m talking about people who are naturalized citizens. There is a saying “I’d rather be governed by the first 100 people listed in the Boston food directory than the faculty of Harvard University.” This is a common sentiment among Americans. But it’s completely incomprehensible to people from the subcontinent. There is a deeply held belief in Credentialism and elite bureaucratic governance. When these people become citizens, they vote, according to these deeply, held cultural beliefs.
But I'll ask you: do you think that naturalized citizens of south asian descent should leave the country? You and I disagree politically, why can't I demand that you expatriate?
They are closely related. American law sees the H1B as a temporary worker visa, which in theory won’t lead to lots of new naturalized citizens changing the country and the workforce. Indians see the H1B as the first step to permanent immigration and naturalization. The ridiculousness of the H1B process arises from that fundamental conflict.
> But I'll ask you: do you think that naturalized citizens of south asian descent should leave the country?
No—citizenship is citizenship. But citizens get to decide immigration policy in their own self interest. That’s democracy. On a going forward basis, it’s entirely valid to ask how H1Bs are changing the country, and whether the American body politic believes those changes are good or bad. My family came to northern Virginia in an immigration wave that rendered the place unrecognizable. The place where I grew up doesn’t exist anymore. Had you polled Virginians back in 1989 and given them a glimpse of how importing a bunch of foreign elites would change their state, they quite reasonably could think those changes were for the worse.
By the way—this is not a Democrat versus Republican thing. Asians (who used to vote Republican until 2000) played a major role in reshaping the Democratic Party due to their concentrated populations in key states like Virginia. The immigrants who strive to send their kids to work on Wall Street and Silicon Valley are mostly not interested in solidarity with working class people.
Not exactly. It's considered a dual-intent visa by USCIS which means that the USCIS also sees it as the first step to permanent immigration and naturalization.
The common dual-intent visas are: H-1B, H-4, L-1A, L-1B, O-1, O-3, K-1 to K-4 and V.
The alternative is a non-intent visa (B-1/B-2, TN, H-2A, H-2B, E-1 to E-3, F-1, J-1, M-1) which becomes invalid as soon as you demonstrate immigrant intent (for instance by filing an I-485 adjustment of status petition).
> The ridiculousness of the H1B process arises from that fundamental conflict.
From a conflict, yes, but not from this conflict. The conflict is that neither US party is pro-immigration but USCIS is still mandated by law to offer immigrant visas. So they make it as difficult as humanly, legally possible.
The way the “dual intent” thing works is not by making it a non-temporary, or immigrant visa. It is still a temporary, non-immigrant visa, and the law still says that having immigration intent still is grounds for refusing entry. The only thing the “dual entry” legislation did was to create the legal fiction, where the USCIS/CBP are not allowed to use the application for a green card as evidence of immigration intent.
Before 1990 or so, as soon as you applied for a green card while on H1B, your visa (though not status) became effectively invalid. You couldn’t leave the country, because you’d be denied entry, given your immigration intent. You couldn’t also apply for extension of H1B visa for the same reason.
Today, according to law, you are still not allowed to have immigration intent while on H1B, it’s just now applying for a green card does not constitute evidence of immigration intent (which is, of course, entirely a legal fiction).
The US immigration law and practice is completely insane. We have non-immigrant visas that, through legal fiction, are used to facilitate immigrations. At the same time, we have millions of people illegally crossing the border and making bogus asylum claims, which everyone understands to just be an immigration back door, created not through legislation, but rather discretion in enforcement. Instead of reforming the law to make it sane, and enforcing it (similar to eg. what Canada or Australia have), we have insane law, and strictly enforce it only against people who would be most valuable to have here.
An immigrant visa to the US is a green card.
Having immigrant intent is not a barrier to admission on a dual-intent visa. H-1s do not have to demonstrate that they have a "residence in a foreign country which he has no intention of abandoning" and "the H category is specifically excluded from the I.N.A. § 214(b)'s presumption of immigrant intent;" [1]
> Before 1990 or so, as soon as you applied for a green card while on H1B, your visa (though not status) became effectively invalid. You couldn’t leave the country, because you’d be denied entry, given your immigration intent. You couldn’t also apply for extension of H1B visa for the same reason.
This is exactly what happens today if you file I-485 on a non-intent status like a TN. It doesn't happen on a dual-intent status.
> Today, according to law, you are still not allowed to have immigration intent while on H1B, it’s just now applying for a green card does not constitute evidence of immigration intent (which is, of course, entirely a legal fiction).
Regulation 8 C.F.R. § 214.2(h)(16)(i) states: "The alien may legitimately come to the United States for a temporary period as an H-1C or H-1B nonimmigrant and depart voluntarily at the end of his or her authorized stay and, at the same time, lawfully seek to become a permanent resident of the United States." [1]
Also you can possess immigrant intent and even petition from non-intent status like TN, so long as you developed said intent after arrival, and once you take steps (I-485 for instance) you can’t renew. A lot of folks apply for a green card from TN status, it’s just risky since you can’t leave until advance parole and if denied you may be deported.
Applying for a green card through adjustment of status absolutely 100% counts as demonstration of immigrant intent. That is filing for I-485. Having your employer file I-140 doesn't because you didn't file it, your employer did.
This is basically all wrong.
Except for the part where you say that the US immigration system is silly - it is - and the part where you say that a system more like Canada and Australia would help - it would.
[1] https://isss.temple.edu/international/h-1b-temporary-employe...
The reason for all this is that the 1952 INA promised the American people that it would not change America’s demographic makeup. Nobody can get the votes to change that in Congress. But the executive branch can change the regulations unilaterally.
You are missing the point. Yes, H1Bs are excluded from presumption of immigrant intent. This doesn't mean that they can have immigrant intent. Instead, the law says (reiterating what I said in my previous comment) that "the fact that an alien is the beneficiary of an application for a preference status filed under section 1154 of this title or has otherwise sought permanent residence in the United States shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence for purposes of obtaining a visa as a nonimmigrant described in subparagraph (H)(i)(b) or (c), (L), or (V) of section 1101(a)(15) of this title or otherwise obtaining or maintaining the status of a nonimmigrant described in such subparagraph". Of course, in practice, since the government has few other means of proving immigrant intent, and since they cannot presume immigrant intent, this means that the obvious immigrant intent exhibited by applying for permanent residence must be ignored. This is why the CFR says that, because this is true in practical application of the law. My point is that it is true thanks to legal fiction, where the government is obligated to ignore the obvious evidence of immigrant intent, notwithstanding legislation otherwise demanding lack of immigrant intent.
> Also you can possess immigrant intent and even petition from non-intent status like TN, so long as you developed said intent after arrival, and once you take steps (I-485 for instance) you can’t renew.
Yes, I talk about this in my comment, let me helpfully quote it, in case you missed it:
> Before 1990 or so, as soon as you applied for a green card while on H1B, your visa (though not status) became effectively invalid. You couldn’t leave the country, because you’d be denied entry, given your immigration intent. You couldn’t also apply for extension of H1B visa for the same reason.
Observe that I explicitly say that this doesn't invalidate your status, only (effectively) your visa.
> Having your employer file I-140 doesn't because you didn't file it, your employer did.
This is incorrect, otherwise the legislation wouldn't need to say that "the fact that an alien is the beneficiary of an application for a preference status filed under section 1154 (...) shall not constitute evidence of an intention to abandon a foreign residence".
> This is basically all wrong.
Nothing I said is wrong, and nothing what you said has contradicted what I said (except where you were wrong). You are just talking past me: I acknowledge the practical reality of the consequences of the legislation and the ensuing CFR regulations (indeed, I am myself a beneficiary of the process, starting from a dual-intent L-1 visa). Instead, my point is that the law, instead of saying that "yes, it's totally kosher for for H1B holders to come here with immigrant intent", it schizophrenically says something like "no, you cannot have immigration intent on H1B, but unlike on, say, B1, you don't have to prove that you don't, and we will just pretend that your immigrant petition does not in any way show that you have an immigration intent (which, to reiterate, you shall not have)".
This is just bigotry. Clear as day.
I was living in Virginia in 1989. You don’t get to tell me what I value.
It seems from your post that you weren’t even living in VA at the time. Are you somehow bigoted against both south asians and Virginians? You betting that a large portion of Virginians are just racists who don’t want brown people around (excuse me, “people who vote for elites”) is just fucking awful. I don’t even understand what you are trying to achieve.
This is really suboptimal though, what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer in a key position that would make your company collapse if they left but say, they were born in India, and you're laying off folks in projects that failed / folks that are low-performing.
It's pretty easy to fix the perverse incentives of H1B hiring: give folks a green card after being here for 3 years, that's basically how long it takes for ROW folks to get green-cards in good years.
Maybe at the service/entry level but certainly not for tech jobs. Tech visas have nothing to do with filling the millions of service jobs; they're about filling the corporations' pockets with millions.
You can offer them a different visa? H1B isn't the ONLY option. It's only being used because it's not a "key" position.
OR
2 - the high performer is writing the best code that ever existed, which is why you can't replace them. However this is so rare. Most of those people have already migrated to FAANG where you better believe no one is that necessary.
Provide an option for a company to submit some paperwork and pay some non-trivial fee (to avoid gaming) that allows them to exempt such an employee from the visa-first layoff requirement. Additionally, fast track the green card process for whom said exemption is granted.
Yes, this. Or alternatively, in an economy where everyone is getting laid, the 60 day deadline should be extended indefinitely until the economy recovers and similar jobs start becoming available and plentiful, at which point they can consider reinstating the employment requirements.
This could easily be done by not having a per-country quota for green cards that seriously sanctions H1B holders from India and China. As in:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/nri/migrate/democrats-i...
Republicans probably won't let it happen, however.
disclosure: have worked for large h1b heavy shops my entire career, and while there has been the very occasional exception, the bulk of the h1bs are hired entirely for cost reasons.
I don't think this is what OP meant. OP said "what if you have a H1B worker that's a high performer". This has nothing to do with the average performance of any group. The point is that a blanket mandate that a group should be fired over others first may hurt the livelihood of a company. Note whether this is right or wrong is definitely up to debate, and different countries implement different policies for either side. I'm just clarifying the underlying logic of the OP.
There should be consequences to violating these rules. Not being allowed to hire workers JUST because they're cheap (99% of H1B visa workers) is something that should always be enforced.
That is, hiring someone from outside the country SHOULD cost more so it isn't gamed.
It is always good to be labor in a labor constrained market, and the lower supply, the better.
I don't see how any liberalization could help local workers in the short term (I assume liberalization means expansion in this context).
I guess if all you have to go by is your own personal anecdote, one can understand why you might feel immigration is a net negative for the country you’ve immigrated to.
Except that is obviously ridiculous, because people on visas induce their own demand in the local economy, growing the pie for everyone. They are also pre-trained, commit crime at a level vastly below the citizen population, don't get any sort of welfare, and pay enormous amounts of taxes.
As a minor note to babies comment, a baby isn't going to reduce the salary of the delivering nurse the day it comes out of the womb. If you let a million trained nurses enter the country, that would be a different story.
Look at what’s happening to the UK after Brexit. While in the EU, non UK EU citizens essentially had super visas that allowed them to work in the UK as long as they could get a job. This changed almost entirely after Brexit.
The result? Hundreds if not thousands of businesses such as farms, fisheries, bakeries, butchers, have shut down because they can’t find employees. This has resulted in a massive net loss of jobs among UK workers themselves (workers are not fungible…to switch to a new job they require training, skill, expertise, and desire). In addition, this is helping drive up inflation in the UK so that it’s higher than nearly every country in the EU even though the UK is more protected from Russian natural gas than say Germany.
Further, its national services, such as the NHS, which is unable to find doctors and nurses where it did so far more easily before Brexit, are consequently collapsing.
So it’s very disputable that visa holders almost certainly negatively impact the local working population.
There was far lower supply of software engineers in the 1980s. But that market was much worse for software engineers in the US.
Elon Musk didn't get laid off in the 2000-01 tech bubble presumably because he was good? But maybe it should be perfectly "logical" to send him home.
Incredibly short sighted take, the US have doubled the population in the past 60 years, are we running a 50% unemployment rate? The selective immigration have hugely benefited the US and its native population.
Depends what you mean by "logical". Blindly preferring citizens over visa holders is bad for the company, bad for the visa holders, and bad for the economy in the long term, but it's good for the citizen workers in the short term. I guess logic is defined by your priorities.
It is the perception that matters.
We filed, got the paperwork submitted, it got approved, they eventually came to work for me stateside. This took 14 months from filing to arrival. No one filing for a visa in February is having someone come over in March. No company is firing someone and filling that spot with an H1B the next day, unless that H1B is a contractor, and another company he already works for holds his visa.
So the major missing thing here is (unless the process radically changed), is the article is blatantly lying.
It is important to note that LCA filings (which are public) have a wage that is typically lower than the actual wage paid, because companies do not want to disclose publicly how much they're actually paying.
Anyone here from Google want to pose some interesting questions to Sundar at the next all hands?
Google salary bands are the same whatever visa you're (not) on, and they're certainly not low-paid. This "article" is ridiculous xenophobic garbage.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62g-h1b-require...
[2] https://flag.dol.gov/programs/LCA
If visa holders are that important to the company, then the company will figure out how to not do a layoff, no?
Of course, I'm also someone who believes that visa holders should be granted green card status within 24 months tops--none of this 7 years of indentured servitude bullshit. Green cards like this would shut down 90+% of the companies abusing the visa process in the US.
The program has defacto evolved to one in which the US can tap into a skilled global labor market to increase competition for roles, without paying too much attention to the actual legal requirements.
Sources:
(Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa)
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
[1] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/the-h-1b-vis...
> Like many here, I've written a few H1-B role requisition documents - which are often designed to be so ludicrously specific that it would be almost impossible to find anyone to fill that role, save for the one person applying for the visa
Both of these things have absolutely nothing to do with H1B visa requirements. You're just proving my point in the comment you're replying to. Please read it again.
Also read your own references to see where they require ads in newspapers or needing to tailor H1B "requisition documents". Spoiler, there's none.
If you respond to incorrect information with correct information and show us how it is correct, your comments will be more persuasive as well as more in the intended spirit of the site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
It can be easy to take this for granted when you already have the correct information mapped out in your head many times over—but the rest of us don't have access to that!
For a while I did not engage with such stories because it feels like a losing battle swimming against the current even though tech forums are generally filled with smart folks.
As another sibling comment said, the requirements for placing ads etc. are for the first step of the green card process, aka PERM, and are not required for a H1B visa.
Maybe I should write a blog post or something explaining it and link it every time :)
Writing one definitive explanation and then linking to it sounds like a good solution in this case. Even if just you wrote it up as an HN comment and then linked to that in the future.
That is not an H-1B requirement.
They probably should though, at least I think so.
With mass layoffs of this scale, it seems like H1B roles should be the on the top of chopping block if we're keeping in the spirit of the actual purpose of the program. That means those H1B roles should have been so unique and world class talented that they were considered irreplaceable by the other thousands laid off. It seems they should be required to show justification this holds. It seems this should be pretty easy to provide evidence for if your holders are say Google Fellows (picking Google as an example) or the Peter Norvigs of the world.
I have nothing against H1B holders, I do however have a lot against businesses who often abuse these programs to suppress labor costs and dangle green cards as a piece of leverage. To be fair, big tech companies tend to be better about this and pay competitively for these roles though not always.
Google Fellows wouldn't be on H-1B but on O-1.
The H-1B visa is a good fit for foreign nationals in the early to mid-stages of their careers hoping to expand their experience by working in the U.S. The O-1 visa is generally suited for established professionals and researchers.
From the DOL (https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b), emphasis mine:
The H-1B program applies to employers seeking to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability. A specialty occupation is one that requires the application of a body of highly specialized knowledge and the attainment of at least a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
People born in India will be under this "temporary employment" for decades before they get a green card due to the country cap. With recent backlogs it looks like the process will take up to 50 years for someone with a currently approved green card petition.
One would be called a Right Wing nutcase for saying this : "I have nothing against immigration. But I am against businesses employing illegal immigrants to lower labor costs while taking away jobs from poor Americans."
But on HN it's fine for Tech workers to protest for 'fairness' when it comes to H1B and Tech jobs. Most people entering Legally on H1B will not get a Green Card for next 15-20 years. That's not exactly 'dangling' green cards.
A lot of them will return to their home countries after paying a ton of Taxes in the USA. As they can't be sure if and when they will get a Green Card.
But the same American Tech workers are all for 'Immigration'.
I guess, immigration is good when it suits them. Cheap Janitors, Plumbers, Mechanics and more Blue Collar workers. Lowers living costs. Good Immigration.
But they aren't. You may have too many of one type of worker, and not enough of another, so it would make perfect sense to lay off the first ones, and hire foreign workers for the second one.
Which Google does by pushing every hire through the same hiring funnel.
I've also seen documents supporting a few H1B filings and know that most of the skills mentioned in their are fabricated.
So yes companies do this regularly to cut costs in the name of layoffs and talent shortage.
I suspect you thought this was going against https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35968968