Some people get upset that someone on a 'non-immigrant' 'temporary employment' visa can apply for permanent residency, although that is allowed by the H1-B program.
Otherwise, one could immigrate through a different visa; there are some employment visas that are explicitly intended for those with intent to immigrate. Or like a family or lottery visa, I guess.
I think it's possible to have a permanent residency application sponsored by an employer from abroad, but especially if the candidate is from China, India, Mexico or the Philipines, the timelines make even less sense than H1-B timelines (submit your application in a two week window near the beginning of March, for the chance to start in October). I don't know too many places that want to commit to a hire that can't start for 7 months, although it's not unreasonable for those on post graduate visas with work eligibility.
It takes around 20+ years to go from H1b to permanent visa/green card. In the meantime your kids born in US have grown up, graduated, you have a house and everything could be yanked at the border when you are travelling.
Meanwhile vast majority of them pay into taxes and social security and leave the US and never see a dime of that money.
Immigrants are the easiest group to exploit by everyone because they have no voice and are vilified by vast majority of the people include the so called intellectuals in here.
I’m sure this is no consolation, but as a born-and-raised citizen who has paid into social security for 15 years now, I have serious doubts about seeing a positive return on those taxes myself.
That's not how social security works. You're not supposed to get a positive return. You directly pay a basic income to retired people (minus administration costs). When you retire, workers pay a basic income to you.
Asking for a positive return on social security is like asking for a positive return on welfare. The positive return comes from not having so many homeless old people all over the country. It's not a personal investment vehicle.
It could be that OP expects Social Security to be kaput by the time he gets to be old.
Looking at the population graph, that’s a valid concern. There’s a ton of boomers and a ton of millenials, but very few babies to pay for our retirement.
(This phenomenon could invalidate even individual stock investment retirement plans as well. We need a future generation of workers, investors, entrepreneurs, consumers).
The issue is that, for me and anyone else who reaches retirement age after 2034, only about 80% of that basic income will be available. For reasons I'm not super clear on, this idea tends to get coded as a conspiracy theory in many circles, despite being uncontroversially true and widely reported on.
That's a perennial Boogeyman. Policymakers have a wide array of tweaks they could make (from adjusting the cap to adjusting retirement age) at any time that could push that out by another century. https://www.epi.org/blog/a-record-share-of-earnings-was-not-...
If only they just used the current 'investors' money to pay the retirees. They actually use the social security taxes to pay for "whatever" and hope they can come up with the rest when they need it.
>I’m sure this is no consolation, but as a born-and-raised citizen who has paid into social security for 15 years now, I have serious doubts about seeing a positive return on those taxes myself.
Look at the bright side though: You get a chance to get conscripted for a war against Iran/Russia/China and also get to blow up windowless mudhouses in the desert to protect democracy and freedom back in the states.
The byzantine US immigration system absolutely is an impediment to people coming and staying here, and in my (admittedly anecdotal) estimation is a major competitive disadvantage, and a big part of the reason the UK, EU, Canada and China are making progress towards becoming tech hubs.
Those particular cases have benefited by the shortcomings of the USA actually. I know some big tech companies send workers who weren't able to secure US immigration specifically to offices in Canada, the UK or the EU. For example Meta and Google [1][2].
One can expect the company then grows an interest in developing full engineering teams in these sites. One can also expect some people might simply decide to not come back to the USA.
With the general rise of China's tech scene, recently there's been a trend by which the USA doesn't retain Chinese international students and they instead opt to return home. One has to imagine the very, very long immigration process they have to go to has to do with this [4].
Canada is not making any sort of progress towards becoming a tech hub. Canadian engineers' dream is to work for a US company. Canadian investment landscape is just sad, but that's a different conversation all together.
Outcomes aren't binary. For any marginal increase in immigration difficulty for skilled tech workers, there is a marginal decrease in US tech competitiveness relative to other countries.
20 years only if you're born in India married to someone born in India. Not great either way though, but it's really affecting the Indian community because of their particular norms.
If your spouse is a US citizen or permanent resident on their own, great. But if you're on H1-B and your spouse is on H-4, I don't think their country of birth makes a difference?
If you're both on H1-B, then sure, having a different country of birth can help.
It does make a difference. When filing for adjustment of status, you can request USCIS to consider both you and your spouse as chargable to your spouse's country of birth, and therefore be placed in a more favourable GC queue. This is called cross-chargeability [1].
Because of this, the "100-year green card queue" problem only really applies for a couple who are both born in India/China, with kids who are not born in the US. If even one child was born in the US, they would be able to sponsor both parents for an immediate green card when they turn 21 years old. In the meantime, the H1-B beneficiary can extend their visa indefinitely and port their approved I-140 whenever they switch jobs, with a 6-month grace period. The spouse also has full working rights.
21 years is a long time, but while working, both parents will accumulate social security credits and will be eligible to recieve benefits upon retirement (if they've secured a green card by then).
You are confusing what he is calling for. He is not advocating for people who are already citizens to lose their citizenship. He is saying, going forward, people who are born here will not automatically be given citizenship.
> Some people get upset that someone on a 'non-immigrant' 'temporary employment' visa can apply for permanent residency, although that is allowed by the H1-B program.
Becoming a permanent resident is explicitly allowed under the H1B visa. By contrast, if an immigration officer even had a suspicion that you intended to immigrate on any other visa, that would be sufficient grounds for them to disallow you from entering the country.
Further, the dual intent nature of the H1B visa means H1B employees pay social security and Medicare, even though they themselves are not eligible for it. Something you don’t have to do if you earn money on a non dual intent visa.
The H1B visa is indeed temporary. It lasts only 6 years. But it allows you, or your employer, to apply for your permanent residency on the basis of other categories while you’re in the U.S. on an H1B visa. IOW, the only real use of the H1B is that it lets an employer get to know an employee well enough that they’re willing to sponsor their permanent residency.
Also, the other reason the H1B appears overused and not “temporary” is because in a moment of brilliance Congress wrote laws so that there were an equal number of green cards handed out to people from Jamaica as those from China. As a result, when Indians and Chinese apply and get approved for a green card, they need to wait decades to actually get those green cards, whereas someone from Greece would get it instantly.
Since Congress hasn’t been able to write new immigration laws in 3 decades, extending thenH1B visa is the only way to allow folks who have essentially approved green cards to remain in the U.S., because they’re discriminated by their country of birth.
> The H1B visa is explicitly a dual intent visa. ... Becoming a permanent resident is explicitly allowed under the H1B visa.
I am aware that this is allowed. However, the DOL describes the program like this: [1]
> 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.
So I understand why people would be confused or upset when nonimmigrant aliens with temporary employment authorization end up immigrating.
I also agree that allocating a limited number of residencies by country of birth is pretty bizarre. There are some countries where the whole population could get a green card in a single year (if they were all eligible), but people born in Mexico and India have a 20 year backlog in some categories. Some sort of population or land area factor should apply. The impacted countries may want to consider strategic division to improve their US immigration backlogs ;P and they could gain more votes in the UN General Assembly, too.
They should just get rid of the green card limit altogether.
There is already a limit on people who can get H1Bs and move into the country. Once they are actually living here on a semi-permanent basis, converting to actually permanent should be based on the person themself, not based on how many other people decided to become permanent residents.
> in a moment of brilliance Congress wrote laws so that there were an equal number of green cards handed out to people from Jamaica as those from China
It is largely by design and serves to preserve cultural diversity. Without immigration caps, half of the U.S. would be Indians and Chinese.
Ah yes the classic "huwhite people and muh racism" gambit.
It's tired. H1Bs are gamed to the point of uselessness. Most companies internally post H1B job offerings so people are aware. I've yet to see one with a competitive salary. They are used to source cheaper labor and avoid paying actual Americans the fair wage they deserve. The last 15-20 years of tech has slowly seen the InfoSys-ization of the tech economy. I work with more contractors from Mexico, India, and Eastern Europe, and more H1Bs from India than literally anyone else. On my team I can count the number of Americans on one hand.
The program should be extremely limited. I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs so companies have to actually justify hiring "talent you can't find in America". There are 300,000 unemployed tech workers. I find it hard to believe none fit the bill. Just that most won't take a 60% haircut for more work.
I have a hard time hiring an American too, especially for backend jobs. But thats because they simply don't apply to the open positions we have. We don't disclose salary upfront, so the argument that "you pay less thats why" doesn't hold. We just don't get those resumes - through recruiters, direct channels, LinkedIn - even when we said we prefer citizens (due to legal costs).
The American people get to decide who they want to allow in and under what conditions. If the American people decide that they should get compensated more than non-American citizens for a role falling under American jurisdiction, they can do that. And other nationalities can retaliate or pound sand, but that's it.
Other countries are free to compete, nobody is arguing otherwise, but it is explicitly the right of any country to determine who is allowed to compete within their nation.
What people want or deserve is irrelevant. If you live elsewhere and feel you deserve more, then that's not America's problem.
That was the context. Your post before this changed it to "want". I was responding to that. Nothing to do with non-americans feeling they deserve more either. It was about why americans feel they deserve
You may characterize it that way, and invite some pretty reasonable animosity; but if you do, then want!=deserve regarding the salary of foreigners, either.
I have been on H1B forever now, and my salaries have been more or on par with the role. I tend to agree there is a lot of H1B misuse, especially by large Indian consulting firms. This needs to be curtailed.
But, there may be 300,000 unemployed tech workers. While I also find it hard to believe none fit the bill, I believe most don't. So many are out of random bootcamps, self proclaimed programmers who can't solve fizzbuzz. I also have not seen any H1B in my career that is good and willing to take a 60% haircut. In my own company, they are the highest paid and are grumpy we are not paying more. They are all really good engineers too. Heck, when I was looking to move to the US, I refused tons of low paying jobs. When we opened up backend programming jobs, only a handful American citizens even applied. We hired one of them, while we needed 4. The rest didn't make it through the interview process. We also rejected tons of H1bs because they didnt make it through the process. Same salary range offered to H1Bs. And we are a fully remote. So I wonder where are these 300,000 unemployed tech workers.
Cut the fraud and it automatically becomes a decent program. Now, if one is entirely against the program of attracting foreign talent, thats a different discussion.
Well, the way program exists now, it's utilized by two kinds of companies:
1) Someone like Verizon that uses it for cheap labor
2) Someone like Netflix that wants to hire good engineers
The way the program works now (before those changes?), it's much easier for group 1 to fill its positions via staffing agencies overseas. That's true even if a company from group 2 already know who they want to hire, since it's a lottery system.
Would be easier if this were two different visas (or program got revamped in a way that it actually works as it's sold to public), but we can't have "Cheap Human Labor Visa" for various reasons.
every problem has a solution except in America where what we THINK is a problem (and discuss ad naseum on HM) is there by design. Group 1’s lobbyist are paying A LOT more than Group 2 - hence they get the most benefit out of the program. it’ll be interesting to see next four years, I suspect the program will at minimum triple
I was paid between 400 and 600k a year while on an H1B.
> I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs so companies have to actually justify hiring "talent you can't find in America".
This is extraordinarily racist if you spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it, and honestly you should question every one of your choices that have led to this point. It is time for you to re-examine your entire worldview.
Why write like this? It's antagonistic and pompous. I really don't like making light of racism by leaning on the "stop calling everything racist" trope response, but this is pretty extreme. I have no idea what's in the parent's heart, but you only need to give them an ounce of benefit-of-the-doubt to believe that the quoted sentence comes from a place of simple favor for one's own fellow citizens, and not petty racism. And on HN, you're supposed to be giving even more than one ounce of benefit-of-the-doubt.
To be clear, the actual proposal being made is "I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs".
One interpretation is that workers should pay 2-3x the income tax, massively depressing net wages for people on visas.
Another interpretation is that employers should pay 2-3x the payroll tax (I guess Social Security and Medicare in the US?) which again means that (not immediately due to nominal wage rigidity, but over time) visa worker wages will be depressed. In any case, visa workers pay into social security, but will not be able to claim benefits unless they become green card holders.
There are already substantial fees employers have to pay, which already depress wages. The proposals suggest making it worse. There is no real thought behind them, no research, no data. Just pure naked nativism: workers must be punished even more than they are right now for daring to immigrate.
It is, in other words, extraordinarily racist. And if someone, through whatever life experiences, has come to believe that this is the way forward, then they absolutely should revisit their worldviews.
---
Neither of these come anywhere close to addressing the actual problem, which is that it isn't the case that workers on visas have the same labor rights as everyone else. Workers on visas are preferentially hired by some firms because they will silently deal with abusive bosses, long work hours and sexual harassment. Giving everyone full labor rights addresses this issue completely.
Do you want H1B worker wages to be depressed, or do you not? Do you care about your fellow workers being sexually harassed, or do you not?
> I have no idea what's in the parent's heart
I don't, either, but structural racism is a million times worse than some rando shouting a slur at me.
> This is extraordinarily racist if you spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it, and honestly you should question every one of your choices that have led to this point. It is time for you to re-examine your entire worldview.
No. Americans should look out for Americans first. This isn't "racism". It could be interpreted as "nationalism" but if Americans don't look out for Americans first - what's the point of even having a country or a flag? I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. Why shouldn't we make companies pay more if that foreign talent is really needed? It should be in desperation that you reach beyond your own countrymen to find what you need.
Second, I had no idea "Americans" were a race. Maybe it's you that should seek some help.
Right, the desperate need for talent is the reason these programs are used so heavily. It's not discounted salary and cost savings in benefits, insurance, and other areas for non-permanent employees, or having leverage over immigrant employees in negotiations. Corporations only ever use these programs to get the absolute best of the best and they absolutely aren't abused to bypass the stricter regulations and requirements for citizen employees. /s
There's nothing wrong with brain draining other countries and incentivizing legal immigration for work visas and H1B style programs. We should want to be the best place in the world to work. This shouldn't come as a detriment to the citizens of the US. Legal immigration and jobs programs need to be better. The H1B program suppresses legal citizen wages as well as immigrant wages because companies are able to use the threat of deportation as an effective negotiation tactic. Companies use immigrants for cheap professional labor, and if the immigrant pipes up, they get let go. With everything in tech life being designed around pushing people into paycheck to paycheck lifestyles, this can wreck someone's life through no fault of their own if they do something like ask for a raise, or better health insurance.
In turn, if citizen employees try to negotiate, the company can replace them with more immigrant workers unless or until they can hire local replacements at the company's preferred rate of pay.
We need a cleaner, easier path to citizenship, without the endless bureaucratic nightmare that is the current system. We need better work visa programs, so that people who legitimately make the world a better place aren't penalized for arbitrary technicalities, while at the same time recognizing the sovereignty of the US and reasonably protecting borders.
Sometimes countries need to be overthrown, and the US shouldn't act like a pressure release valve for dictators. We also shouldn't be in the business of regime management or perpetuating political nightmares that causes a lot of illegal immigration, as well.
TLDR;
There's no shortage of US tech talent. The problem is that we've painted ourselves into a regulatory corner - in order to be competitive, companies have to shortchange payroll by abusing migrant salaries. To fix it, we must strengthen migrant rights so companies can't hang the threat of deportation over employee's heads, and reduce the financial burden of hiring citizens, so you get the same bang for your buck regardless of the immigration status of the employee.
Microsoft and Lumen and FAANG and all the tech industry titans shouldn't have penny pinching strategies designed to bump stock prices using methods that are fueled by human suffering. Get rid of those options and stop blindly implementing systems where the incentives are so obviously awful.
I didn’t believe it until I saw it, but look at the classified section of the San Francisco newspaper where big tech companies post job listing knowing that Americans won’t see them so they can say they tried to get domestic talent.
My neighbor is on a visa from mumbai working at Chase who was brought in as the lead frontend engineer (def can’t find Javascript devs in the US). Even he admitted it’s weird that his whole team is from India on visas. They just aren’t hiring citizens.
As a senior software engineer who was unemployed for over a year, I can confirm almost nobody is hiring USA Javascript and Python devs with 10+ years of experience with some big accomplishments. I got lucky with a backfill.
I find that diversity extremely rewarding. I learn new things, learn about other people’s traditions and learn different ways of thinking and organising. Approach the challenge with an open mind.
These are the fun, but token advantages of diversity in this specific context. There are lots of advantages and disadvantages to diversity - because it is an extremely generic term. I have first hand experience of teams completely losing all the original members, who were extremely talented and all born in the US, because they hired such a huge number of people who were from a different culture (India, in this case). It had nothing to do with racism - they just had nothing in common. It was fun to talk about their different religious celebrations and so on, but they were emotionally aliens. They were reasonably smart, yet there was zero intellectual spark in conversations between the two groups. They were just too different to thrive with each other. Different culturally, ideologically, intellectually, emotionally. Different in methods of communication, in treatment of the business hierarchy, in assumptions and expectations. We can blame the business for making an incompatible team, but the compatibility parameters were too tied to culture and race. It's hard to account for that without essentially being racist.
> We can blame the business for making an incompatible team
In my past few jobs I had many colleagues from India, and learning the cultural differences is extremely important. Teambuilding exercises are also a must - bring your cuisine to work is a stellar example: I brought both pão de queijo (a Brazilian thing) and sajtos pogácza (its Hungarian counterpart), and they brought some the best sweets I ever tasted. To our Turkish colleague's dismay, we all agreed Turkish Delight is not really a delight (but the Turkish colleagues recognized my Hungarian pogácza as some cross-cultural artifact coming from the Ottoman empire days).
You can always take interest in learning their language. You are the host and they are your guests, and, besides, their communication in their native language will be more efficient than if they translated to English for your benefit.
Different culture, but back when I was working on a project with Sony, when they introduced their internet enabled TVs in Brazil, just adding the "san" suffix to my contact's name made him instantly more open to negotiate.
If I piss on your head and tell you it's raining, will you find some silver lining in that activity?
> You are the host and they are your guests
What? This logic doesn't track. If I were a guest in their country, then I might take interest in learning their local language. That's respectful.
Coming here on an H-1B and demanding people speak your niche language is more akin to invasion. (Here comes the "but.. but.. the United States has no official language!" tripe.)
I'm glad you've had good experiences - so have I. But I'm not sure where you're going. You can't advise everybody into happiness when they are stuck in a social group that makes them unhappy. There are immutable forces at work. We're humans. Learning a language is an enormous task, and it feels horrible to imply somebody should do it who is just trying to be comfortable in their own country. You should make that attempt when you visit other countries. Not to mention, it wouldn't solve this multi-dimensional social problem.
By offering wages appropriate for the economy your fellow citizens are accustomed to, as opposed to the economy citizens of other nations are accustomed to.
Saw a university (like 7 years ago) H1B'ing postdocs for like $30k, maybe $35k a year, by valuing the benefits at like $20k. It was kind of a joke IMO.
That is the prevailing wage for postdocs, domestic or foreign.
The abuse of postdocs and grad students exists, but is entirely unrelated to H1B and foreigners. They paid them poorly even before the country was flooded with foreign students.
Great comeback, except you completely ignore the point (its purpose is not meant to be a backdoor) and attack him for... being an American?
Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations. The world doesn't owe anyone anything. Claiming your desires are everyone else's problem is a deeply self-centered way to view the world.
H-1B is dual intent by definition, so it is not a backdoor. Any sane person who knows how green card application works understands that it is objectively hard, if not the hardest in the whole world.
> Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations.
Without such an expectation, who would pay tens of thousands a year to enroll in a random U.S. college, only to be told that there is absolutely no way they can work legally there?
Love how all your arguments boil down to 'I got mine.'.
We don't want illegal immigrants, get legal work authorization. No, don't use work authorized visas use other legal means. No, family based chain immigration should be illegal too. Oh wait there are no other ways to come here ?....good. We never wanted you anyway. This country is full, all 4 million sq miles. Always has always been.
It's not constructive to frame citizenship as "I got mine". People will fight - really fight - to preserve their homes and lifestyles, if they feel those are being threatened. It's obviously not impossible to welcome as many immigrants as we do without this extreme level of conflict, but our system demonstrably does not accomplish that. We simply aren't making use of our space, so why don't we focus on that problem? A tone like yours invites chaos.
I disagree. Better to be direct, than frame it in soft 'feel good' terms. It's a matter of people's livelihoods. My tone invites confrontation as a sincere reflection of the stakes. I don't make value judgements. Citizens are entitled to hypocrisy, cognitive-dissonance and selfishness. It being bad is a social judgement made by the observer.
Let's be clear. We're talking about the US here. Arguments based in nativism, isolation and crowdedness have thin ground to stand on. By percentage population, legal-immigration to the US is below the historic average. Yet threads on H1b quickly devolve into vapid arguments. The accusers are happy to sling unsubstantiated stereotypes towards immigrants, but hide behind soft language like 'we aren't used to making space' when immigrant commenters retaliate in kind.
Racists aren't irrational actors or evil people. They simply have higher affinity for their tribe, and that's okay. Sometimes it takes for self-interests to be threatened, for bigoted & tribal behaviors to manifest in a loud manner. Again, that's okay. Americans are the ones who gave a negative connotation to to words like bigot and racists. In the rest of world, tribal & bigoted behaviors are an accepted norm. We're all racists sometimes. But, American tech workers are definitely at their racist-est on h1b threads.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you are the land of free, that practices extreme meritocracy and thrives as a result of it. You're a nation built by migrant groups over the last 4 centuries, and the door is always open to the ambitious and hard working. A benevolent super-power for all. Or, you're just as tyrannical as any selfish group. You're a white majority people that found a pre-inhabited land of the greatest resources and size. You claimed it all for yourself. Killed the natives. You give lip serve to globalism and meritocracy as long as it gives you access to all markets of the world. Your relationship with the rest of the world is transactional, and you will continue to be a world superpower through military strong-arming and thinly veiled globally-egalitarian propaganda.
The reality ofc, is that neither extremes are true. But, it is a slider between the tribal-nativist and internationalist-meritocratic impulse. There are no right or wrong answers for what a nation's choice will be. But, if your slider is near the former while you claim to be the latter, then the hypocrisy is grating for the rest of us. For the lack of a better insult, it's Trudeau-esque.
Personally, I am a big fan of out-right selfish people. There is genuine honesty there. I also love the US (warts and all). Say what people might, it is the least racist nation of any out there. Lastly, I have a vested interest as someone who is on an H1b myself. (although I'd like to think I'm senior enough to be insulated from negative outcomes for h1b)
As I write this, I recognize that most people don't like harsh phrasing. I don't think our politicians or public speakers should adopt this language. But, a mostly civil pseudo anonymous forum of tech nerds is IMO, just right for this kind of directness.
Does America want smart people to come here and advance science/technology/economy or would she rather close the doors and watch other countries get ahead?
Yeah, you have no idea of the process of getting green card via h1b works.
You can ditch the US, get permanent resident status in Canada, become Canadian citizenship, get TN visa to work in the US if you want to and someone who thinks that h1b is a backdoor to a green card will be just starting on green card paperwork. And that's if there are no issues with application.
This is all after participating in h1b lottery for years. Trust me, it's an extremely slow and painful way of getting a green card. If h1b is your way to a green card, it means either: you're already married, you have no idea what are you doing.
It's no a backdoor in any way, person move to the US for work and builds a life here, accumulate assets, I think it's pretty reasonable to give those people a way to settle in the US permanently in these cases.
The program needs to be revamped because it's not working in the way it's sold to voters.
So...what's the front door to the green card ? How does one arrive legally to the nation with the highest [1] historic immigration rate of any nation in the world ?
I read through it and even asked chatgpt for summary and it looks like "passport is now required" and "one beneficiary one draw" that is if you put in multiple petitions it will only consider you once.
I thought Elon was talking nonsense when he mentions frivolous government rules but reading these h1b changes makes me question my own sanity about the government "rules" which they aptly named it as "Final rule" (wtf?).
> 2. Bar on Multiple Registrations Submitted by Related Entities
DHS will not finalize the proposed change at 8 CFR 214.2(h)(2)(i)(G) to expressly state in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple H-1B registrations for the same individual. On February 2, 2024, DHS published a final rule, “Improving the H-1B Registration Selection Process and Program Integrity,” 89 FR 7456 (Feb. 2, 2024), creating a beneficiary-centric selection process for registrations by employers and adding additional integrity measures related to the registration process to reduce the potential for fraud in the H-1B registration process. In that final rule, DHS states that it “intends to address and may finalize this proposed provision [expressly stating in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple registrations for the same individual] in a subsequent final rule,” but that “[m]ore time and data will help inform the utility of this proposed provision.” 89 FR 7456, 7469 (Feb. 2, 2024). Initial data from the FY 2025 H-1B registration process show a significant decrease in the total number of registrations submitted compared to FY 2024, including a decrease in the number of registrations submitted on behalf of beneficiaries with multiple registrations.[1]
This initial data indicate that there were far fewer attempts to gain an unfair advantage than in prior years owing, in large measure, to the implementation of the beneficiary-centric selection process.[2]
Under the beneficiary-centric selection process, individual beneficiaries do not benefit from an increased chance of selection if related entities each submit a registration on their behalf. As such, DHS has decided not to finalize the proposed change pertaining to multiple registrations submitted by related entities.
> C. Summary of Costs and Benefits
DHS analyzed two baselines for this final rule, the no action baselines and the without-policy baseline. The primary baseline for this final rule is the no action baseline. For the 10-year period of analysis of the final rule, DHS estimates the annualized net cost savings of this rulemaking will be $333,835 annualized at a 2 percent discount rate. DHS also estimates that there will be annualized monetized transfers of $1.4 million from newly cap-exempt petitioners to USCIS and $38.8 million from employers to F-1 workers, both annualized at a 2 percent discount rate.
Can't read the full article due to paywall but ostensibly it's due to bias rules on race and not visa rules? Sounds like visas being abused and then backstopped by unrelated rules does not mean the visa rules shouldn't be fixed.
Ah, classic regulatory theater. The administration, after 4 years of not introducing these changes, is now suddenly scrambling to roll them out. They’re dropping them right before a major transition, with an implementation timeline conveniently set for after the transition.
It’s a clever little maneuver. When the inevitable reversal happens, they can show up at fundraising galas telling donors, “We tried! We were so close! It’s just those baddies who always come along and pull the rug.”
The USG has to go through a very length period of coming up with a proposed rule. Allowing comments to be made about it, adjusting (or not) the rule based on those comments, and then finally submitting the final rule.
Nobody at USCIS wrote this document yesterday and published this today. This is the result of years of work. Do you seriously expect the USG to shut down anything they don't think they can finish under the current administration?
Maybe it's a total coincidence that this final rule takes effect the Friday, January 17 and Trump's inauguration is Monday, January 20th. But I sort of wonder.
Doesn't the bottom of this announcement describe a previous rule that was announced in January 2024 and then implemented in March 2024? Interesting that rules process was far more rapid than this one.
So a different related rule started its process awhile back and a second rule was in the works concurrently. Is the USG only allowed to do one thing at a time?
The comment period for this rule ended last year to give you an idea of how long this has at least been in the works. All of this information is rapidly found via the submitted url at the top of the page.
It's the same question. What decides when a long process and comment period is required and when it isn't? Why does this agency have such variable performance when it comes to similar rulings?
Also worth noting that today's rules, 89 FR 7456, and the previous one, 89 FR 103054, both derived from the same NPRM. Apparently, based on feedback they thought some parts of the rules needed more work than others and finalized them in two parts.
We all know how a distant deadline can make us slack off. Then suddenly the deadline is in three months instead of four years, you’ll discover a bunch of things you could do faster.
That’s not to excuse the slowness, but I imagine this stuff was in process for a while.
> The administration, after 4 years of not introducing these changes
They might have spent the last four years negotiating what exactly the changes would ideally be. Government doesn’t work well with the “let’s see what sticks approach”.
This is an executive power. USCIS - the President can modify regulations, such as how H-1B applications are processed or the criteria used in selection lotteries.
There is rulemaking process that takes time. It has to go through notice and comment period, withstand lawsuits, etc. I agree with your overall point though, that this admin was utterly spineless and useless.
No, the classic people not understanding how the government works.
These are changes that were done through the rule-making process, not legislation. The rule-making process is (by design!) VERY SLOW to give the stakeholders a chance to voice their opinion.
Typical rules take about 2 years to be implemented. And I guess Biden hoped to get a real immigration reform that would have made these changes unnecessary.
those were then times, now billionaires shelled out a whole lot of money to put him in power and payback time is coming. h1b may double/triple/… in the coming years. policy will be to keep “bad people out” (southern border) while taking in a bunch of “smart people, best people” from other countries
I’m very happy for everybody on H1-B whose live this improves! Does this include renewal in USA?
But as an American the “bonafide job requirement” makes me nervous. We have a massive ghost job problem that really needs to be a federal crime. Will this make that worse?
Near as I can tell, it’s similar to ‘don’t talk about salary at work’ stuff - technically maybe if you can prove it and complain to the right person, but it’s everywhere.
they mean "bonafide job offer". What is happening right now is staffing agencies (mainly in India) mass file H1B applications for all their staff, and then once they get picked in the lottery, they find assignments in the US and file the entire petition after. This heavily disadvantages non-staffing companies who file H1Bs for their staff outside the country or those in the US on F1 visas for actual jobs.
This change is meant to close that loophole. This used to not be a problem, because you had to file the entire petition BEFORE you enter the lottery, but now you just pay some nominal fee and get your name in, leading to a highly profitable situation for staffing companies.
You'd still have to comply with the H1-B rules for the job you are petitioning for, like the duties you are performing, the salary requirements etc. And the legal costs of doing the petition.
Now, misuse could come if you are independently wealthy and can self fund, but at the end of the day if you are doing that in the US, the economy still benefits.
EB-5 is a onetime payment for a green card (permanent residence). Prevailing wage must be paid every year and you have 60 days to leave when you the company stops paying you.
Yes, but the prevailing wage threshold would be lower than the investor visa, as will the commitments. The investor visa you have to show a plan, hire people etc.
> In addition, for those individuals who obtained treaty country nationality through a financial investment, USCIS may require additional documentation to show that the applicant has been domiciled in the treaty country indicated in the application for a continuous period of at least 3 years at any point before applying for E-1 or E-2 classification.
Plus E-2 visa is a non-immigrant visa, so it doesn't give you any kind of special pathway to green card. Might as well apply for an EBx at the outset instead of fiddling with an E-2 visa.
You're missing several. Montenegro and Macedonia are definitely available, and I think also Panama.
> Might as well apply for an EBx at the outset instead of fiddling with an E-2 visa.
EB-5 has pre-country quotas, and for some countries the wait can be quite long (for China it's around 10 years). It also is veeerrrryyyyyy slow, even with the initial form processing taking _years_.
You're right on North Macedonia (which again needs $200k, so terrible value for the $ hence the low takers) but wrong on others. Montenegro suspended its CBI program and Panama never had one, only a residence visa which then you use to naturalize after 5 years (plus it technically doesn't permit dual citizenship although enforcement seems non-existent)
For EB-5, China and India have a waitlist but that's only in the 'unreserved' category. There are new EB-5 categories now that both reduce the investment amount required and processing can be done in a couple months now. If one really wants to immigrate and has the money, EB-5 is still the best choice by far.
** Wait, so I can just open LLC and get H1B visa for it? There have to be conditions and limitations, otherwise it will be misused.
No, you have to first post a job posting at a low salary, preferably with an in-office requirement in a HCOL city. If you get applicants, give them Leetcode Hard and no one will pass.
Then, when no one applies or passes the interview, you claim there is a shortage.
I run a one-man consulting business from the EU. I sometimes hire freelancers. I work with US clients anyway. Does that mean I can open a US llc and move?
What's the reason for cap-gap extension to April 1? I thought that the government fiscal year starts on October 1, so H-1B statuses take effect on that date and therefore the extension is only needed until October 1. What is the motivation here?
> - Organizations where fundamental research is a key activity now qualify
> - Startups can hire researchers (AI, health, hardware) year-round
That’s a good change. I’ve seen ML researchers (PhDs) who led DARPA funded projects as principal investigator while working for a for-profit company not being selected for H-1B (lottery and cap) and having to leave the US.
I wonder if it is possible to found a US company and open a bank account for it while being a resident of Russian Federation, and then self-petition yourself for a visa....
Establishing a company in the US is easy, but you'd have difficulty finding a bank willing to do business with a brand new company with Russian beneficial owners (at least in the current geopolitical climate).
Unclear. They're not going to be consistent or competent, and the intent of everything they do will be to either part out the government to their friends, weaponize the US government against perceived enemies. And they might reward people who kiss the ring by granting exceptions.
Really, given the premise, anyone sane should kill H-1B entirely for tech:
"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"
There is no shortage of qualified US software engineers. CS schools are full. The very concept is ridiculous. Kill this law, liberalize immigration instead.
Also, there are going to be endless, endless lawsuits on everything, because everything they do is going to violate either the Constitution or existing US law. I'm not sure how much that will slow them down.
The undergrads at my university were mostly US-born. I believe that's the case most places, even elite universities. The more expensive universities are incentivized to take more international students for the money though -- and obviously there's enough wealthy people globally to fill whatever slots they offer. There are plenty of good engineers from the US who simply weren't lucky enough to be born to rich parents in CA. It turns out moving 2000 miles from home for a worse quality of life isn't super attractive to people born in the US when your whole family still lives in the same region. Of course, if you're born in India or China, the value proposition is a bit different.
Perhaps geographic restrictions on H-1Bs would spread the wealth: force these companies to prove they can't find engineers in the US by looking outside the wealthiest enclaves in the country, where even FAANG engineers complain about cost of living. We'd ease the Bay Area housing crisis, lift up other regions of the country, and provide more domestic-born citizens a path to good jobs while maintaining their own communities.
Trump can’t speak about anyone he opposes without giving them a childish nickname, seems fair to reciprocate. Going further, it appears that the leader of the nation modeling this behavior also normalizes it.
What's grown up about people who say they don't care if their candidate murders someone on the white house steps, they'd still vote for him? Insanity needs to be derided.
I think you are excessively credulous and that’s the most polite I can be.
I’m a natural born citizen that’s the wrong skin color and I’m planning on carrying my passport everywhere come Jan 21 - I’m not going to chance being thrown into the back of a BORTAC van.
I don’t think you’ve thought through the downside risk. A coworker - himself of my ethnicity - assumed I was foreign born, I’m not going to leave it to chance when the promised deportation dragnet starts up.
If it's the same process as getting a passport in the first place, you have to give them the documentation proving that you're a citizen, and they sit in it for a while before eventually mailing it back to you.
Your concern is reasonable, and I've thought about it myself. The Wikipedia article linked downthread by int_19h notes: "Up to one percent of all those detained in immigration detention centers are nationals of the United States according to research by Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University." There are specific cases mentioned in the article, and the case of Mark Daniel Lyttle was pretty alarming. It was written up in: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/the-deportatio...
On the other hand, you can't be detained without probable cause, and race/ethnicity alone isn't enough. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (https://case.law/caselaw/?reporter=us&volume=422&case=0873-0...): "In this case the officers relied on a single factor to justify stopping respondent’s car: the apparent Mexican ancestry of the occupants. We cannot conclude that this furnished reasonable grounds to believe that the three occupants were aliens. At best the officers had only a fleeting glimpse of the persons in the moving car, illuminated by headlights. Even if they saw enough to think that the occupants were of Mexican descent, this factor alone would justify neither a reasonable belief that they were aliens, nor a reasonable belief that the car concealed other aliens who were illegally in the country. Large numbers of native-born and naturalized citizens have the physical characteristics identified with Mexican ancestry, and even in the border area a relatively small proportion of them are aliens. The likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor, but standing alone it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens."
I second the recommendation to get a RealID. You're going to need one eventually for domestic flights, among other things. When I got mine at the DMV renewing my driver's license, they asked for a birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, and proof of (local) residency (e.g. utility bill). So why not get one and carry that as additional proof?
Do you know how insane that sounds in this context? I absolutely despise Trump, make no mistake; but if you think Trump is rounding up any of the 40+% of the USA's non-white citizens and deporting them, you have been deluded by widespread FUD.
The "deportation dragnet" might apply to illegals, sure. Will any meaningful amount of US citizens get scooped up in that, if any? Highly, highly unlikely. You're probably more likely to be murdered.
All evidence points to first week being dedicated to flashy arrests in blue states with Tom Homan previously bragging that they would deport both illegals and their citizen family members with no regard for the obvious illegality of the concept.
I think he poorly phrased deporting "anchor babies" by ending birthright citizenship. Since then, he's directly or indirectly claimed multiple times that he doesn't plan on deporting USCs. There's no telling whether he wants to deport USCs deep down in his heart, but he knows that's not going to happen.
I wasn't talking specifically about you... there are campaign promises "we are going to deport _____ people" that you should know by now are just shit politicians say so that they get the votes in South Dakota, Alabama and shithole places like that. We heard in 2016 "build the wall, repeal ACA, lock her up..." and whatever BS was spewing at that time. the only policy that you know for sure will be in place for the next 2 to 4 years will be there to make sure that richer get richer - hence my statement that we'll see more people become billionaires than people that we will actually deport :)
This is a movement based on extreme hatred and dehumanization of anyone different from them, and most of the time such movements have taken control anywhere historically, it has resulted in mass murder/genocide. We underestimate what atrocities they are capable of at our own peril. I am hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.
I feel like I - and a lot of people I know - have been in denial of what is happening for a while. It is terrifying, and I don't want it to be true, but it is undeniable. I don't want to be one of those people that says "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "We knew nothing about that."
I have a mixed race family, and am scrambling to get passports in time for people in my family with darker skin, and we will 100% be at least carrying good quality copies of them at all times.
They are claiming to start mass deportations next month, and profiling based on skin color is absolutely the only way that can be possible. Moreover, just like the Nazis discovered, both deporting people and indefinite detainment are impossibly expensive- leaving only one option. This political movement is already based on the idea that people different than them don't deserve to be treated like human beings, and will not be.
Funny I see this kind of misguided comments all the time.
Their immigration policy is never only about illegal immigration. Do you actually think it is possible to tighten immigration policy without affecting H1B?
If you need evidence, just look at what happened between 2017-2021. H1B denial & RFE rates were way up, and the administration tried multiple times to roll out policy that significantly restrict the eligibility of H1B visas. They even used coronavirus as an excuse to issue travel bans on H1B. How is that making legal immigration easier?
Trump has said he’d like to “staple green cards to diplomas”. Despite what the media portrays, he’s not pro American, pro white, pro nazi, whatever.
He’s owned by a different slice of the parasitic ruling class that, while opposed to some of the goals the Biden admin was for, still share a common theme of not caring about the average American at all. He has probably the most pro Israel cabinet we’ve ever seen and appears to be cozying up with big tech (thiel, musk, zuckerberg, etc).
If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.
Wouldn't attaching green cards - or at least temporary work permits - to US university degrees be a positive change compared to employment agencies / contractor firms trying to sneak in piles of people without such degrees and screening? That would be a good response to the issue of training (ideally) highly qualified smart people and then kicking them out.
Didn't Trump try to prevent even greencard holders from returning if they were from overseas from the wrong religious area of the world, after promising a Muslim ban? And was then only stopped by courts? Or am I misremembering that?
> Despite what the media portrays, he’s not pro American, pro white, pro nazi, whatever.
Going after a religious/ethnic minority legally holding United States greencard status... Even if he tried to hide it in regions and not a DNA or religious test, he did it immediately after campaigning on a Muslim ban in those words. Sounds quite in line with those terms except it is actually anti-American if we take a huge part of 'pro American' to mean valuing the First Amendment.
> If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.
This is exactly right and exactly why Trump won't do anything about it... when you surround yourself will billionaires you'll want to make this that this tiny population of capital holders prospers even further :)
Unlikely. Elon heavily favors more H1-Bs. If they roll it back, they'll introduce their own version that is even more favorable to those that gain by suppressing tech worker salaries.
From what I understand you also need to be able to pay yourself a $60,000 salary minimum, from that LLC. If people can do that, then power to them and let them stay!
If you're worried about people shortcutting a line to get a visa by injecting money into the US economy, again by somehow getting 60K into the LLC to pay the salary of the recipient, this is also a win.
- Less strict on the direct link between degree/job responsibilities
- Recognizes that AI may require multiple academic background
You really won't need to clarify whether the role is a specialty one or not if you just increase the minimum wage for H1Bs. I really don't know why we don't have some rule that pins H1B wages to like the 90th percentile wage.
It would be exceptionally easy to solve the "H1B problem" by making sure that H1Bs are more expensive than local talent; then they really only would be used when local talent doesn't exist.
It's supply and demand economics: if there is a low supply of workers and a high demand for them, then employers are supposed to compete for them with more pay, more benefits, training/education, etc. When the supply of workers is artificially increased, then companies have less incentive to compete. It becomes a buyer's market for employers.
It can't be due to fundamental skill, though! That same engineer's earnings statistically triple upon moving to the US, which is why we should allow more of them in: people are more productive in the US, and we all benefit from their productivity (most obviously fiscally, but less obviously through products that wouldn't exist in the counterfactual).
General equilibrium exists though, if the supply of workers increases you usually see businesses which were previously non-viable appear to take advantage of them at similar rates.
You can illustrate this by doing the other direction: if we killed half of the workforce, would real wages double. Unlikely! You'd probably just see broad-based inflation for a while until wages equalized again.
Yeah, I wonder what that is going to ground out to. With the AI race, basically anything tangential is research, at least in the definition of "doing something scientific-looking that's not been done before". That could include a _lot_ of companies from massive to tiny.
You are missing that it is used a lot in spite of that process (1) being a major administrative headache for the users, both employees and employers, (2) costly compared to hiring "locals" although that's moderated by perhaps lower salary with not a huge amount of evidence, and (3) rather unpredictable and risky for both employees and employers.
Hypothetically it exists to allow companies to hire singular overseas experts like von Braun or Einstein that don't have domestic equivalents. It has become totally accepted to lie on the application though and now it is used to hire Java developers.
That's a sign of how accepted it has become to say that you can't find any local workers that know Python when filling out the H1-B forms. The requirement is there but it's normally overlooked.
"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 [...]"
That is incorrect. People with exceptional abilities are covered under EB-1 green cards (and O-1 visas). H-1B was created to bring people in specialty occupations requiring a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience. A Java developer definitely meets the bar (with the right degree or experience).
True, but at the same time immigrants have nothing to lose and everything to gain, thus in many cases they will work harder/longer and as result often be more skilled than an average developer.
And in general skilled immigration has many times over been proven to only benefit the country and that java developer you mention.
This piece of misinformation seems to be trotted out every time H-1B is discussed. H-1B is not for "extraordinary ability", the O-1 is. The H-1B is just designed for regular workers in a "specialty occupation". This is how Congress designed it in the Immigration and Nationality Act.
You're not missing anything. Other than that, seemingly, STEM roles are the only industry where the laws of supply and demand do not apply, and a positive supply shock of something does not, for some reason, drive down the price.
If a supply shock doesn't drive down the price then it suggests that the supply constraint was larger than than the shock and that the market was being artificially constrained to prevent the prices from rising to meet demand.
It's also possible that the supply itself is what creates more demand. People who move to the US are probably less risk-averse than the average person, and more likely to start new companies, creating more jobs.
Have you engaged with the Card vs Borjas literature at all? We learn about the world by studying it, not by simply thinking about it from one's armchair.
STEM roles already pay incredibly well in this country, and even more so if you compare it globally.
What is the downward price shock you're talking about? What do you think the salary would or should be, assuming all H1B worker are magically gone the next day?
The program exists to get skilled workers into the US. It has done this well. There are few other programs to get them in and onto a pathway to permanent residence and citizenship. STEM wages don't exist in a vacuum. Increased utility to the US economy is more important than them. The US government rightfully determined that having people like Elon Musk here makes this nation more competitive. Likely the effect was also to increase software engineering compensation but that's harder to tell.
The reality is US is a tech powerhouse, many successful companies have been started by former h1b holders and US tech workers are highest paid in the world (even PPP adjusted). What you're hearing is not the reality - it's just vibes.
Not really, O-1 is essentially a visa to bring a specific person to the US. While H1B is a wide net (yes, visa given to a specific person, not what I'm saying).
o-1 is to bring Albert Einstein and h1b is to bring some physicist that matches criteria.
As in, O-1 is person-focused, while H1B is role-focused.
>h1b is to bring some physicist that matches criteria.
those are exceptional cases. The majority of the 65K year h1b visas granted every year are for filling IT related positions. Mostly dev related positions.
Global competition exists. If US companies can't hire the best, others will. I hope you don't assume that all the best workers/researchers are born within US borders.
I don't think countries should hire the best. Pretty good should do. They should foster a greater sense of community within their borders. Now, I'm not against immigration. I myself am an immigrant. But I think there's too much global fluidity and not enough attention paid to taking care of one's own.
Do you think the average H1B or other visa holder in STEM is among “the best”? I’m forced to hire non-American engineers (contractors) because my company is too cheap to pay for and commit to paying American workers full time for a couple of years. There are certainly a ton of qualified Americans who can work for us (fully remote) for not much more money, and their native English skills would make them objectively better at the position. I would even hire juniors straight out of school, but the corporate bs gets in the way.
As somebody who does not live and work in the US, it seems plausible to me that the H1B system helps prevent other countries from obtaining similar talent hubs as Sillicon Valley. A lot of the talent is in the US, which attracts more companies, which attracts more talent, which means it's easier to go to the US and work there and start companies there than to do it anywhere else.
There’s also the easier financing, but yes - I’m sure the outcome is dominated by the network effect of having denser talent. That’s one of the reasons Silicon Valley is so hard to replicate elsewhere.
> If harm was the goal, something like a STEM worker tax or cutting R&D tax incentives would be easier
These would affect all STEM workers equivalently. The H1-B program, whatever one thinks of its merits, hurts domestic STEM workers and helps immigrant STEM workers.
Perhaps the result is that the overall opportunities are greater because the larger talent pool results in more companies being formed. That depends a lot on how mature the industry is, and whether technological trends like generative AI will replace large swaths or STEM workers altogether.
> phrased differently, the goal is to help industry, not hurt workers. hurting some workers is an acceptable cost, not the goal.
The phrase "help industry" has many dimensions. The simplest of course is that by increasing labor supply and suppressing wages it increases profit margins, rewarding shareholders.
Another important function is that by having more workers overall in the US, it increases the productivity of the domestic industry itself, due to increased competition for jobs driving up the productivity of the average worker. This in turn makes the industry more competitive vs its equivalents in other countries.
The average worker (whether permanent resident or temporary/H1B) who doesn't have significant investments likely doesn't receive much of those productivity gains, since they mostly go to capital owners.
Long term, it boosts returns to capital while capping returns to labor, the same trend noted by Thomas Piketty some years back.
I dont think there long term impacts are so clear or cynical. the question is less about productivity, but network effect, number of jobs, and quality of jobs.
> I dont think there long term impacts are so clear or cynical
The economic impacts I described are looking backwards, not forward, and the data is pretty clear that long term returns on capital swamp the returns on labor (especially since the 1970s). STEM workers have been somewhat insulated from that due to the industries they work in growing in the past few decades faster than the labor supply. It's anyone's guess whether or not either trend will continue into the future.
> the question is less about productivity, but network effect, number of jobs, and quality of jobs.
I'd argue productivity and returns to capital are almost everything when it comes to what informs immigration policy from an economic lens. "Network effect" is a mechanism, not an outcome, and outcome metrics like "quality of job" or even "quality of life afforded by a job" are not a concern of such policies. On average, they might improve, or they might get worse, but productivity and returns on capital will always go up, whether they require workers or not.
I understand that you are trying to make a point about return on capital, but I dont understand how you are connecting it to the question of H1-B visas and if local benefits to industrial expertise outweigh the downward pressure from labor competition.
> I dont understand how you are connecting it to the question of H1-B visas and if local benefits to industrial expertise outweigh the downward pressure from labor competition.
Because what you are calling "local benefits to industrial expertise" is ultimately realized in the form of returns on capital.
Whether these benefits outweigh the costs is an open question.
When the tech industry's growth was very talent constrained as it was in the last few decades, arguably opening labor competition had the effect of increasing overall growth (mainly through new production invention). The list of immigrant technologists who have created new technologies and products - and jobs as a result - could probably fill an encyclopedia.
It's unknown whether that type of growth - the kind that creates more and better jobs - will continue, especially given recent developments in AI.
If the benefits going forward are largely going to be based on massive increases in labor efficiency, then it's not as clear that the benefits (mostly to capital) outweigh the costs (mostly to labor). Most business models in AI are predicated on replacing people, who are expensive, not making more or better goods. Sure, we'll get some neat robots along the way that actually make stuff, but that will likely be a small fraction of the money to be made.
Or perhaps we are at the dawn of a new era of technology which will make more and better jobs. We'll see.
OK, so you were changing the topic to something else you wanted to talk about. That was not clear to me. I thought you were making a rebuttal to what I was saying.
Correct, if you look at my comment I was unpacking what the phrase "to help industry" could mean, not rebutting your comment.
It's relevant to the original context because what helps industry (in terms of immigration regulation) might or might not help workers in that industry.
The interesting thing about the return to labor vs capital line of argument is that generally speaking, capital doesnt consume the types of product that labor is interested in.
When productivity goes up, that doesnt mean workers are making 10X as many houses or hamburgers, which capitalist are eating.
For me, this begs the questions of what exactly is being produced when we say worker productivity has increased, and where is it going? If it is "stuff" being produced, surely it should be evident somewhere, like massive exports hoarded stockpiles. Alternatively, the productivity is an illusion because there is a corresponding inefficiency or deadweight loss, like paying some service workers to create problems and paying others to fix them.
> For me, this begs the questions of what exactly is being produced when we say worker productivity has increased, and where is it going?
Power.
Political power: policies written to benefit the highest bidder.
Financial power: more leverage in being able to dictate terms of borrowing by workers - and being able to force the government to borrow from capitalists instead of levying taxes on them.
Physical power: Being able to buy/influence law enforcement (themselves a type of worker) to protect the capitalist's interests over those of other workers.
Increasing worker productivity manifests as greater returns that predominately go to capital owners, not workers. That concentrated wealth in the hands of capital owners is wielded as power in the political, economic, and physical realms.
The "product" that the increased productivity buys is control over policy at whatever level of government, not more washing machines or tires.
Returns of what? I feel like this argument is leaving out words and skipping logical steps. Hamburgers are a product, cars are a product, cleaning services are a product. Wealth is not a product.
If you have a company and worker productivity goes up 200%, where does the product go? Wealth created selling that product may go to the owner, and carry power with it, but that doesn't answer the fundamental question. Where is the product?
> If you have a company and worker productivity goes up 200%, where does the product go?
In a mature industry, there is no new product, because all else equal, demand doesn't change. The company makes the same amount of product, but with fewer workers (aka layoffs).
Even in an industry serving growing demand, increase in worker productivity is not the cause of increase demand for product produced by that industry. Any growing enterprise knows it's first more important to focus on demand than increasing productivity, usually by hiring workers at the lowest cost possible. Otherwise, your competitor will serve your customers needs before you do. Premature optimization is a waste.
What increases demand for products is technological innovation plus a need/desire for more personal convenience, comfort, and time, coupled with the funds to purchase those in the hands of a growing population. Why have most companies have staked their future profits on the developing world's demand growth? Because the developing world has the desire for all of the above plus a growing population.
The question of where the new product goes has nothing to do with the question of worker productivity unless the workers have the funds to purchase those products. The product goes where the purchasing power is.
Capital's share of the return, however, goes into assets and as I described earlier, power. It doesn't go into purchasing any increase in product created.
>The question of where the new product goes has nothing to do with the question of worker productivity unless the workers have the funds to purchase those products. The product goes where the purchasing power is.
That is my exact question, who is purchasing the goods? we have high employment and have supposedly high productivity. We dont have massive national export surplus. You say capital isn't purchasing the goods, so what gives?
Where is the black hole that is consuming all of the goods, if the workers dont get them, the rich dont get them, and they aren't exported.
> Where is the black hole that is consuming all of the goods, if the workers dont get them, the rich dont get them, and they aren't exported.
Take new cars as an example. We are producing fewer of them [1], they are larger and more expensive, and they are mostly being sold to wealthier people. So yes in this case, capital owners (people more likely to have more wealth) are the ones purchasing the product.
Also, for a while we have been shifting towards a services based economy, so for a lot of this production growth, you won't see physical products. For example, you can't see the software IDE subscription I signed up for yesterday.
We also don't have a national export surplus because we import so many goods that are not worthwhile to manufacture here, while we export a ton of services, petroleum, and other raw extracted materials, all industries that scale with technology/capital/machinery and not labor.
This still seems to negate the point you made earlier that there are huge productivity gains and 100% of them have gone to shareholders. It doesn't seem realistic that they are using all of the new services. I feel like I'm repeating myself, so I think this is the last post.
> This still seems to negate the point you made earlier that there are huge productivity gains and 100% of them have gone to shareholders.
I didn't say 100%, I said most (re-read my comments upthread). Please don't misrepresent my words. I choose them carefully.
Greater productivity does not automatically equal a commensurate increase in products/services delivered, which seems to be the flawed assumption you are unable to get past.
Here is a concrete scenario to illustrate this.
A company makes 1M units of a product at a cost of $1/unit, and sells them for $1.50/unit. Profit/unit is $.50.
Productivity doubles, so the same million units can now be produced for $.50/unit. When sold for $1.50, profit is now $1/unit.
The $.50/unit increase in profit goes mostly to shareholders.
There are no new products, no new services.
In reality, demand varies over time, so product output varies with that, but the gains in profit mostly have gone to shareholders.
The only time they ever go to labor is when labor is in short supply or when labor organizes to demand a larger share.
In my experience close to 100% of productivity increases accrue exclusively to shareholders.
When my companies have produced more output from the same inputs (or the same output from less inputs in the case of mass layoffs), we return the cash to shareholders by way of a stock buyback or special dividend the following quarter.
Maybe in some companies they instead give workers raises or outsize holiday bonuses, but I’ve never seen this.
What about the output goods produced? if you make 200% more hamburgers, the shareholders arent eating them. If every US company has doubled production, where is all this stuff piling up?
> Existing studies that show an increase in capital’s share of income miss the growing role of depreciation in short-lived capital, in items such as software, says MIT’s Matthew Rognlie in “Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share.”
Subtracting depreciation isn't a fair comparison. The example uses software as a short-lived asset. Has the monetary value of Google's search algorithms depreciated? They've been upgraded with routine investment, but the scale of the returns on their upkeep vastly outweighs the capital investment, otherwise Google wouldn't be so profitable.
Software of the internally-developed sort isn't even depreciable [1], so it's not clear how its value for these purposes would be determined (short of assuming it represents a percentage of the business's value).
Also, from the paper linked in your article:
> Once all compensation of employees at the sawmill is
subtracted, the remainder is its gross capital income. Some of this capital
income will be paid to lenders in the form of interest, some will be paid
to the government in taxes on profits, and the rest may be retained on the
balance sheet of the sawmill or distributed as dividends to shareholders.
Gross capital income is thus a very broad concept, encompassing funds that
are ultimately paid out to many different recipients—it is unaffected, for
instance, by the split in financing between debt and equity.3
GROSS VERSUS NET: CONCEPTS An alternative to gross value-added is net
value-added, which subtracts depreciation. This can be divided into labor
and net capital income, the latter being gross capital income minus depreciation.
Everything which I have emphasized above are examples of returns to capital. Excluding them from consideration in this presentation is ignoring how a large amount of returns are channeled to owners of capital.
Debt-holders gain from interest and shareholders are enriched via dividends and share buybacks that never appear on the article's net income derived graph.
Of course, when you willfully ignore those huge tranches of returns, then housing looks like a major factor, because it is the common asset class that has been on a largely unchecked inflationary track.
Finally, your article from 2015 argues that the overall trend will reverse and labor's share of GDP will start increasing. Here's what has actually happened since then:
The brief spike in 2020 was due to pandemic era redistribution policies like the child tax credit, among others. Since those have been repealed, labor's share has continued its prior trend downwards.
The US owes much of its success to its ability to poach talent from other countries. By letting all the people who would start competing firms move to the US instead international competition is reduced and the products built in the US are better.
Software is one of the few STEM fields where one can get a fantastic job with just a Bachelor's. In most other engineering fields, a MS gives you a significant boost, and a PhD may do so as well.
The reality is that in most of those fields, few Americans get an MS/PhD. Go to a typical engineering department and you'll often see the majority of advanced degree students are foreigners.
So it's a question of: Do we want to continue to train foreigners, only to not have them contribute to the US economy?
If you move out to the pure sciences, you pretty much need a PhD to get a good career. Once again, a big chunk, if not the majority, are foreigners.
Look around at the highly skilled folks you see who are not of US origin, and you'll find most of them are in the US due to the H1-B program (only a tiny percentage come via other programs like the O visa).
Yes, H1-B is often abused, but this is the reason it exists. It's a lot harder to get an H1B visa and then permanent residency if your degree is in the humanities, for example.
Ooh yes, let's address next how US top universities are all profit machines incentivized to take as many foreigners as possible, driving up the tuition they can charge so US citizens can't afford to get degrees. Let's do talk about how if you get a part time job to be able to pay for college then they yank your financial aid.
While foreigners definitely are a cash cow, I think you'll find in STEM fields most foreign PhD students are not paying tuition, but are instead funded by US grants.
As for the cost of tuition, there are many, many reasons, and I suspect if you did a PCA, you'll find "raising tuition to milk foreigners" to be of minimal impact.
In my state, for example, a local university publicized their finances going back decades, and the increase in tuition has been mirrored by a drop in state support per student. Overall the university is not making more money per student than they were 30 years ago - the only thing that changed is the entity making the payments.
Isn't it well known that the main reason that most foreigners have advanced degrees is because that's how they get into the country legally in the first place?
I don't see many people getting employed straight out of undergrad from India or China and moving to the US directly. They get their advanced degree here first to get into the country then they get employed...
> Isn't it well known that the main reason that most foreigners have advanced degrees is because that's how they get into the country legally in the first place?
Yes, and ...?
I mean, if it were a requirement to start a business and employ 10 Americans gainfully, would you go and say "Yeah, but the reason so many foreign born people do that is so they can get in legally."
So?
As long as they have higher level training than most Americans, and as long as we spend money training them (via research/teaching grants), isn't it a good idea to keep them?
You're assuming people are really learning anything in those programs that they wouldn't have had in their undergrad. I've never met an American with an undergrad who is underperforming compared to their foreign MS counterparts. The MS is merely a cheaper tool to get into the country than other investment visas plus you get credentialed. I think it's also a bit of a validation tool that the person actually has studied at the same level as US counterparts. I have met some people from India who were surprised at how difficult college was when they came to the US compared to back in India.
I think vast majority of Americans not going on to higher education is because system is so screwed up due to debt and unlimited student visas.
Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.
> I think vast majority of Americans not going on to higher education is because system is so screwed up due to debt and unlimited student visas.
For undergrad, I understand the frustration, although student visas have almost nothing to do with it. As an example, when I was in my undergrad (for engineering), there was only one foreign student in my engineering classes. Almost all the foreign students were at the MS/PhD level. The number of foreign students in the undergrad population was easily under 5%, if not under 1%.
Probably true in most no-name state schools.
> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
An MS is only 2 years, and you should go only if it's fully paid for (quite often the case in engineering). And you typically don't accrue interest on undergrad debts for those 2 years - so it's only delaying paying off debts by 2 years.
No - most Americans don't do MS in engineering, simply because they don't want to and don't value it.
> Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.
Entirely dependent on the advisor, although I do suspect your anecdote is becoming more common. Also, likely more common at top tier universities and less so in no name state universities.
> I think vast majority of Americans not going on to higher education is because system is so screwed up due to debt and unlimited student visas.
International students percentage is about 6% of total high education population [1]. We can say that their percentage in higher in some fields/degrees. But overall they are not significant reason High Education is not affordable. Actually for undergraduate (majority of international students) they will pay more tuition and many colleges wants to admit more to subsidize domestic students.
> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
Study abroad is expensive and you still need to enter the job market to earn your living and probably pay your dept (some will take loans to study in the US). This applies quite well to international students too.
The reason why foreigners get those degrees is because it's a way for them to stay in the USA longer. I have a friend who didn't win a renewal for their H1B and they signed up for a master's program and applied for a different VISA. So yeah, some foreigners get them because their hands are forced.
US tech exports in 2018 was $338 billion. Tech is our biggest export by far. Think of the US tech industry as a siphon that sucks in wealth from foreign countries. Would you want to make that siphon bigger or smaller?
If you want to make that siphon bigger — and more competitive — how would you do it? By limiting the people that can work in tech to whoever companies can hire locally, or by bringing in the smartest people from around the world?
Does "The US" siphon that money off? Or Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. siphon that money off? And where and to whom does it go from there?
The major benefit of reducing or eliminating the H1B visa program is that those companies can continue to do well, and Americans can do well along with them.
Restricting or eliminating the H1B visas will cause these companies to hire more in oversea offices. Consulting companies however are a whole other deal.
Because the talent is already here or will be here (on h1b/o1). It's common complaint I hear from people doing offshore consultancies type of businesses that their best workers leave for US $$$ paycheck.
The money this siphon brings in is benefiting not just tech workers and tech shareholders. When the money is spent it turns the wheels of our economy, which leads to prosperity for all Americans, not just the 8% or so that work in tech.
The tech industry vacuums up money from foreign countries and pumps it into the economy of our country. The beneficiaries include all Americans, including those who work in restaurants, retail, healthcare, insurance, education, housing, transportation, entertainment and so on.
Limiting tech industry to whoever companies can hire locally will hurt its global competitiveness. Such a move will not just hurt the few would-be tech immigrants that are prevented from immigrating, but American prosperity in general.
When is that prosperity coming to the US? It seems that it's been leaving the US for the past decades and life is harder and harder and the American Dream is hardest to attain in decades.
you can grow the sector. there's not a fixed supply of jobs. getting more talented people into your economy will likely just lead to more companies, more agglomeration effects etc. it's good.
I think you should ask why any feature of our immigration system exists. Each way is cruel, byzantine and expensive for no discernible benefit to anyone except the directors of those programs.
As Asimov pointed out, "[t]here is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been." American culture is profoundly anti-intellectual. Every Dunning-Kruger rando thinks they have something valuable to contribute to every discussion.
EU also has a lot of immigrants as well, and also an even bigger culture of education and intellectualism. Why then don't they have more successful tech companies?
I think you're omitting the giant impact of the FED, wall street, power of the USD world reserve currency and the VC investor incentives of risking billions on ideas that may or may not be profitable, with the low risk for investors if their investments don't pan out.
It's all downstream of the US's incredible geopolitical luck after World War 2.
The latest Gallup polling suggests anti-vax sentiment is at an all-time high. In no other comparable country on earth do 45% of people say vaccines shouldn't be mandatory. And it's not the foreigners on visas who are contributing to anti-vax sentiment.
That's exactly the reason. I don't remember working with any H-1B visa people in the 90s then the dotcom boom happened and demand soared. A couple years later I started working with H-1B engineers and my salary flatlined for over decade since.
I'm not saying it's good or bad at brain drain, I'm just saying without knowing how many people overseas are worth "draining" that's not an argument.
The program might have been designed for this, sold as this, but it's definitely not used for that anymore.
H1B was created in 1990, that's when Russia (and ex-USSR in general) had a lot of idle brains that wouldn't mind moving to the US. Today isn't 1990 tho.
my apologies, I was just being sarcastic in my initial comment… the brain draining other countries by taking in 65k or whatever yearly is … funny for the lack of worse but respectable word :)
Put simply: It is in the national interest to have the world's most talented technologists here. It is yet more in the national interest that they work here, for us, and not for our enemies. One of the best ways we can compete with China is to attract their best and brightest with our free society and high wages.
Tech exists in a globally competitive market: the companies will exist where the skilled workers are, and the tax benefits will occur there. The US's large immigration rate is a precondition for maintaining its tech dominance and all of the benefits thereof.
This H1B program is gamed so hard its a joke at this point.
I personally witnessed someone that submit multiple applications that this person won the H1B lottery. This person even had fake office, fake business address, etc for the fake entities.
I already reported it, but no action has been taken. This person is now happily employed in the US using H1B.
Unethical life pro tips but work: for those of you trying to get H1B, just submit multiple applications to multiple "companies". There are services like this out there, just need to find out where.
Dude that's just not true. You need to submit almost every single detail about yourself before the lottery, including information on your passport. In fact this has dramatically decreased the duplicate entries to H1B lottery.
I'd rather have H1-B visas be a 5 year unrestricted work permit.
America needs to keep attracting the world's best and brightest, but linking it to a specific employer is problematic. Opens up employees to mistreatment.
I'd say charge a straight up fee, 500k upon approval. That gets you 5 years, if your wiz making 400k a year it's a great deal.
I hate that it is time restricted at all. Just make it a green card program with a path to citizenship outright. Brain drain the rest of the world. Instead we are providing work experience to our future competitors.
I worked many years under H1B, but moved out of the USA. Unsure if I'll come back, technically I still have time on my H1b, but man, it's just so stressful to lay roots knowing they're conditional on all sorts of ticking clocks and hoops to jump.
I like working at early stage startups— works pretty well with H1B but it makes the process of getting a green card via work complicated. Some people can deal with all that stress, I just rather not.
If you need to already set up the business that can generate 500k in your home country before coming here, you do the opposite of bringing value and innovation to the US. You have already given most of that to the home country.
Are we actually doing that though? I managed H1-B employees at Verizon and honestly it felt like a scam. They weren't the best and brightest despite being awesome people in general, and they were also getting exploited by the company in terms of compensation. The only one benefitting seemed to be Verizon.
I would have preferred for a multi-billion dollar company to use the H1-B program as intended and to pay an American wage to someone living and working in America.
I'm just responding to the portion where you said the only one that benefits is amazon. Surely at the very least, the immigrants themselves benefit if the alternative was no ability to work in the US?
There is already a work visa for that called EB5 even though the requirement is $1M (800K for rural areas) and you will need to hire 10 American workers. Plenty of rich people from other countries are using that already.
800k in investment gets you a green card. And you may even make a return on that investment. Why would anyone pay 500k for participating in a pageant ?
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 521 ms ] threadIt's not needed.
It's used to game the system.
It's not supposed to be a backdoor to a green card.
Otherwise, one could immigrate through a different visa; there are some employment visas that are explicitly intended for those with intent to immigrate. Or like a family or lottery visa, I guess.
I think it's possible to have a permanent residency application sponsored by an employer from abroad, but especially if the candidate is from China, India, Mexico or the Philipines, the timelines make even less sense than H1-B timelines (submit your application in a two week window near the beginning of March, for the chance to start in October). I don't know too many places that want to commit to a hire that can't start for 7 months, although it's not unreasonable for those on post graduate visas with work eligibility.
Meanwhile vast majority of them pay into taxes and social security and leave the US and never see a dime of that money.
Immigrants are the easiest group to exploit by everyone because they have no voice and are vilified by vast majority of the people include the so called intellectuals in here.
Looking at the population graph, that’s a valid concern. There’s a ton of boomers and a ton of millenials, but very few babies to pay for our retirement.
(This phenomenon could invalidate even individual stock investment retirement plans as well. We need a future generation of workers, investors, entrepreneurs, consumers).
It has always baffled me how nobody ever takes this into account for investments.
The surplus is because of all the people that have payed into the program and haven't retired yet ...
[1]: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/progdata/assets.html
Look at the bright side though: You get a chance to get conscripted for a war against Iran/Russia/China and also get to blow up windowless mudhouses in the desert to protect democracy and freedom back in the states.
They should absolutely be shunning this unfair system and helping India become vishwaguru of software.
One can expect the company then grows an interest in developing full engineering teams in these sites. One can also expect some people might simply decide to not come back to the USA.
With the general rise of China's tech scene, recently there's been a trend by which the USA doesn't retain Chinese international students and they instead opt to return home. One has to imagine the very, very long immigration process they have to go to has to do with this [4].
[1]: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Does-Meta-relocate-you-to-Can...
[2]: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-difficult-to-relocate-from-the-G...
[3]: https://news.cgtn.com/news/2024-08-29/The-return-wave-Why-80...
[4]: https://www.statista.com/chart/16528/long-wait-times-for-gre...
Primarily only for Indians. For almost everyone else, it's much quicker. Most people I know get it in 2-3 years. Many in under 2 years.
(And yes, it's frankly immoral that they have a separate queue for Indians).
So don't get rid of H1B. Make it one queue.
If you're both on H1-B, then sure, having a different country of birth can help.
Because of this, the "100-year green card queue" problem only really applies for a couple who are both born in India/China, with kids who are not born in the US. If even one child was born in the US, they would be able to sponsor both parents for an immediate green card when they turn 21 years old. In the meantime, the H1-B beneficiary can extend their visa indefinitely and port their approved I-140 whenever they switch jobs, with a 6-month grace period. The spouse also has full working rights.
21 years is a long time, but while working, both parents will accumulate social security credits and will be eligible to recieve benefits upon retirement (if they've secured a green card by then).
[1] https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-7-part-a-chapter-...
And now even their citizenship is threatened.
It's unlikely he'll succeed, and he walked back on many campaign promises.
The H1B visa is explicitly a dual intent visa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent
Becoming a permanent resident is explicitly allowed under the H1B visa. By contrast, if an immigration officer even had a suspicion that you intended to immigrate on any other visa, that would be sufficient grounds for them to disallow you from entering the country.
Further, the dual intent nature of the H1B visa means H1B employees pay social security and Medicare, even though they themselves are not eligible for it. Something you don’t have to do if you earn money on a non dual intent visa.
The H1B visa is indeed temporary. It lasts only 6 years. But it allows you, or your employer, to apply for your permanent residency on the basis of other categories while you’re in the U.S. on an H1B visa. IOW, the only real use of the H1B is that it lets an employer get to know an employee well enough that they’re willing to sponsor their permanent residency.
Also, the other reason the H1B appears overused and not “temporary” is because in a moment of brilliance Congress wrote laws so that there were an equal number of green cards handed out to people from Jamaica as those from China. As a result, when Indians and Chinese apply and get approved for a green card, they need to wait decades to actually get those green cards, whereas someone from Greece would get it instantly.
Since Congress hasn’t been able to write new immigration laws in 3 decades, extending thenH1B visa is the only way to allow folks who have essentially approved green cards to remain in the U.S., because they’re discriminated by their country of birth.
I am aware that this is allowed. However, the DOL describes the program like this: [1]
> 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.
So I understand why people would be confused or upset when nonimmigrant aliens with temporary employment authorization end up immigrating.
I also agree that allocating a limited number of residencies by country of birth is pretty bizarre. There are some countries where the whole population could get a green card in a single year (if they were all eligible), but people born in Mexico and India have a 20 year backlog in some categories. Some sort of population or land area factor should apply. The impacted countries may want to consider strategic division to improve their US immigration backlogs ;P and they could gain more votes in the UN General Assembly, too.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
There is already a limit on people who can get H1Bs and move into the country. Once they are actually living here on a semi-permanent basis, converting to actually permanent should be based on the person themself, not based on how many other people decided to become permanent residents.
It is largely by design and serves to preserve cultural diversity. Without immigration caps, half of the U.S. would be Indians and Chinese.
To:
We need to make sure we only allow valuable immigrants that add to the economy
To:
Cancel this program. They are gaming the system.
You can choose the game to play but you can't choose the rules of the game.
It's tired. H1Bs are gamed to the point of uselessness. Most companies internally post H1B job offerings so people are aware. I've yet to see one with a competitive salary. They are used to source cheaper labor and avoid paying actual Americans the fair wage they deserve. The last 15-20 years of tech has slowly seen the InfoSys-ization of the tech economy. I work with more contractors from Mexico, India, and Eastern Europe, and more H1Bs from India than literally anyone else. On my team I can count the number of Americans on one hand.
The program should be extremely limited. I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs so companies have to actually justify hiring "talent you can't find in America". There are 300,000 unemployed tech workers. I find it hard to believe none fit the bill. Just that most won't take a 60% haircut for more work.
Yeah, it does. I assume you don't post it because it's not competitive, and in every case I've personally encountered this was the case.
Why do american citizens deserve more than non american citizens for the same work?
What people want or deserve is irrelevant. If you live elsewhere and feel you deserve more, then that's not America's problem.
That was the context. Your post before this changed it to "want". I was responding to that. Nothing to do with non-americans feeling they deserve more either. It was about why americans feel they deserve
I am an American, no one asked me to decide this. Who are these “American people” making these decisions…?
Nonsense.
But, there may be 300,000 unemployed tech workers. While I also find it hard to believe none fit the bill, I believe most don't. So many are out of random bootcamps, self proclaimed programmers who can't solve fizzbuzz. I also have not seen any H1B in my career that is good and willing to take a 60% haircut. In my own company, they are the highest paid and are grumpy we are not paying more. They are all really good engineers too. Heck, when I was looking to move to the US, I refused tons of low paying jobs. When we opened up backend programming jobs, only a handful American citizens even applied. We hired one of them, while we needed 4. The rest didn't make it through the interview process. We also rejected tons of H1bs because they didnt make it through the process. Same salary range offered to H1Bs. And we are a fully remote. So I wonder where are these 300,000 unemployed tech workers.
Cut the fraud and it automatically becomes a decent program. Now, if one is entirely against the program of attracting foreign talent, thats a different discussion.
Seems that there is no way you could possibly determine that given the circumstances besides speculating about supply and demand.
Because they know their salary, and what is supposed to be for their role?
1) Someone like Verizon that uses it for cheap labor
2) Someone like Netflix that wants to hire good engineers
The way the program works now (before those changes?), it's much easier for group 1 to fill its positions via staffing agencies overseas. That's true even if a company from group 2 already know who they want to hire, since it's a lottery system.
Would be easier if this were two different visas (or program got revamped in a way that it actually works as it's sold to public), but we can't have "Cheap Human Labor Visa" for various reasons.
> I am a fan of charging 2-3x the normal tax rate for H1Bs so companies have to actually justify hiring "talent you can't find in America".
This is extraordinarily racist if you spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it, and honestly you should question every one of your choices that have led to this point. It is time for you to re-examine your entire worldview.
One interpretation is that workers should pay 2-3x the income tax, massively depressing net wages for people on visas.
Another interpretation is that employers should pay 2-3x the payroll tax (I guess Social Security and Medicare in the US?) which again means that (not immediately due to nominal wage rigidity, but over time) visa worker wages will be depressed. In any case, visa workers pay into social security, but will not be able to claim benefits unless they become green card holders.
There are already substantial fees employers have to pay, which already depress wages. The proposals suggest making it worse. There is no real thought behind them, no research, no data. Just pure naked nativism: workers must be punished even more than they are right now for daring to immigrate.
It is, in other words, extraordinarily racist. And if someone, through whatever life experiences, has come to believe that this is the way forward, then they absolutely should revisit their worldviews.
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Neither of these come anywhere close to addressing the actual problem, which is that it isn't the case that workers on visas have the same labor rights as everyone else. Workers on visas are preferentially hired by some firms because they will silently deal with abusive bosses, long work hours and sexual harassment. Giving everyone full labor rights addresses this issue completely.
Do you want H1B worker wages to be depressed, or do you not? Do you care about your fellow workers being sexually harassed, or do you not?
> I have no idea what's in the parent's heart
I don't, either, but structural racism is a million times worse than some rando shouting a slur at me.
No. Americans should look out for Americans first. This isn't "racism". It could be interpreted as "nationalism" but if Americans don't look out for Americans first - what's the point of even having a country or a flag? I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. Why shouldn't we make companies pay more if that foreign talent is really needed? It should be in desperation that you reach beyond your own countrymen to find what you need.
Second, I had no idea "Americans" were a race. Maybe it's you that should seek some help.
Well you of course can. These rules are set by government and they have power to change as they see appropriate.
There's nothing wrong with brain draining other countries and incentivizing legal immigration for work visas and H1B style programs. We should want to be the best place in the world to work. This shouldn't come as a detriment to the citizens of the US. Legal immigration and jobs programs need to be better. The H1B program suppresses legal citizen wages as well as immigrant wages because companies are able to use the threat of deportation as an effective negotiation tactic. Companies use immigrants for cheap professional labor, and if the immigrant pipes up, they get let go. With everything in tech life being designed around pushing people into paycheck to paycheck lifestyles, this can wreck someone's life through no fault of their own if they do something like ask for a raise, or better health insurance.
In turn, if citizen employees try to negotiate, the company can replace them with more immigrant workers unless or until they can hire local replacements at the company's preferred rate of pay.
We need a cleaner, easier path to citizenship, without the endless bureaucratic nightmare that is the current system. We need better work visa programs, so that people who legitimately make the world a better place aren't penalized for arbitrary technicalities, while at the same time recognizing the sovereignty of the US and reasonably protecting borders.
Sometimes countries need to be overthrown, and the US shouldn't act like a pressure release valve for dictators. We also shouldn't be in the business of regime management or perpetuating political nightmares that causes a lot of illegal immigration, as well.
TLDR; There's no shortage of US tech talent. The problem is that we've painted ourselves into a regulatory corner - in order to be competitive, companies have to shortchange payroll by abusing migrant salaries. To fix it, we must strengthen migrant rights so companies can't hang the threat of deportation over employee's heads, and reduce the financial burden of hiring citizens, so you get the same bang for your buck regardless of the immigration status of the employee.
Microsoft and Lumen and FAANG and all the tech industry titans shouldn't have penny pinching strategies designed to bump stock prices using methods that are fueled by human suffering. Get rid of those options and stop blindly implementing systems where the incentives are so obviously awful.
My neighbor is on a visa from mumbai working at Chase who was brought in as the lead frontend engineer (def can’t find Javascript devs in the US). Even he admitted it’s weird that his whole team is from India on visas. They just aren’t hiring citizens.
In my past few jobs I had many colleagues from India, and learning the cultural differences is extremely important. Teambuilding exercises are also a must - bring your cuisine to work is a stellar example: I brought both pão de queijo (a Brazilian thing) and sajtos pogácza (its Hungarian counterpart), and they brought some the best sweets I ever tasted. To our Turkish colleague's dismay, we all agreed Turkish Delight is not really a delight (but the Turkish colleagues recognized my Hungarian pogácza as some cross-cultural artifact coming from the Ottoman empire days).
What would you bring to this table?
Being the only American citizen on a team of people constantly speaking Hindi or Tamil often isn't "rewarding."
Different culture, but back when I was working on a project with Sony, when they introduced their internet enabled TVs in Brazil, just adding the "san" suffix to my contact's name made him instantly more open to negotiate.
> You are the host and they are your guests
What? This logic doesn't track. If I were a guest in their country, then I might take interest in learning their local language. That's respectful.
Coming here on an H-1B and demanding people speak your niche language is more akin to invasion. (Here comes the "but.. but.. the United States has no official language!" tripe.)
I mean, you didn't provide details/data, so I don't know what you have in mind.
The rules require you pay prevalent wages for the geo you're in.
The abuse of postdocs and grad students exists, but is entirely unrelated to H1B and foreigners. They paid them poorly even before the country was flooded with foreign students.
Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations. The world doesn't owe anyone anything. Claiming your desires are everyone else's problem is a deeply self-centered way to view the world.
> Instead of telling everyone else to check their privilege, maybe check your expectations.
Without such an expectation, who would pay tens of thousands a year to enroll in a random U.S. college, only to be told that there is absolutely no way they can work legally there?
Thoughtful discourse is predicated first on basic respect.
I'm sure you think of your own citizenship as charity as well...
It should be hard.
We shouldn’t feel bad about protecting ourselves.
We don't want illegal immigrants, get legal work authorization. No, don't use work authorized visas use other legal means. No, family based chain immigration should be illegal too. Oh wait there are no other ways to come here ?....good. We never wanted you anyway. This country is full, all 4 million sq miles. Always has always been.
Let's be clear. We're talking about the US here. Arguments based in nativism, isolation and crowdedness have thin ground to stand on. By percentage population, legal-immigration to the US is below the historic average. Yet threads on H1b quickly devolve into vapid arguments. The accusers are happy to sling unsubstantiated stereotypes towards immigrants, but hide behind soft language like 'we aren't used to making space' when immigrant commenters retaliate in kind.
Racists aren't irrational actors or evil people. They simply have higher affinity for their tribe, and that's okay. Sometimes it takes for self-interests to be threatened, for bigoted & tribal behaviors to manifest in a loud manner. Again, that's okay. Americans are the ones who gave a negative connotation to to words like bigot and racists. In the rest of world, tribal & bigoted behaviors are an accepted norm. We're all racists sometimes. But, American tech workers are definitely at their racist-est on h1b threads.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you are the land of free, that practices extreme meritocracy and thrives as a result of it. You're a nation built by migrant groups over the last 4 centuries, and the door is always open to the ambitious and hard working. A benevolent super-power for all. Or, you're just as tyrannical as any selfish group. You're a white majority people that found a pre-inhabited land of the greatest resources and size. You claimed it all for yourself. Killed the natives. You give lip serve to globalism and meritocracy as long as it gives you access to all markets of the world. Your relationship with the rest of the world is transactional, and you will continue to be a world superpower through military strong-arming and thinly veiled globally-egalitarian propaganda.
The reality ofc, is that neither extremes are true. But, it is a slider between the tribal-nativist and internationalist-meritocratic impulse. There are no right or wrong answers for what a nation's choice will be. But, if your slider is near the former while you claim to be the latter, then the hypocrisy is grating for the rest of us. For the lack of a better insult, it's Trudeau-esque.
Personally, I am a big fan of out-right selfish people. There is genuine honesty there. I also love the US (warts and all). Say what people might, it is the least racist nation of any out there. Lastly, I have a vested interest as someone who is on an H1b myself. (although I'd like to think I'm senior enough to be insulated from negative outcomes for h1b)
As I write this, I recognize that most people don't like harsh phrasing. I don't think our politicians or public speakers should adopt this language. But, a mostly civil pseudo anonymous forum of tech nerds is IMO, just right for this kind of directness.
Not protecting them is how you get behind. America produces smart people as well.
Ps. I’m Dutch. This same rhetoric is all in the West. It’s shifting.
You can ditch the US, get permanent resident status in Canada, become Canadian citizenship, get TN visa to work in the US if you want to and someone who thinks that h1b is a backdoor to a green card will be just starting on green card paperwork. And that's if there are no issues with application.
This is all after participating in h1b lottery for years. Trust me, it's an extremely slow and painful way of getting a green card. If h1b is your way to a green card, it means either: you're already married, you have no idea what are you doing.
It's no a backdoor in any way, person move to the US for work and builds a life here, accumulate assets, I think it's pretty reasonable to give those people a way to settle in the US permanently in these cases.
The program needs to be revamped because it's not working in the way it's sold to voters.
So...what's the front door to the green card ? How does one arrive legally to the nation with the highest [1] historic immigration rate of any nation in the world ?
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/net...
I read through it and even asked chatgpt for summary and it looks like "passport is now required" and "one beneficiary one draw" that is if you put in multiple petitions it will only consider you once.
I thought Elon was talking nonsense when he mentions frivolous government rules but reading these h1b changes makes me question my own sanity about the government "rules" which they aptly named it as "Final rule" (wtf?).
> 2. Bar on Multiple Registrations Submitted by Related Entities
DHS will not finalize the proposed change at 8 CFR 214.2(h)(2)(i)(G) to expressly state in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple H-1B registrations for the same individual. On February 2, 2024, DHS published a final rule, “Improving the H-1B Registration Selection Process and Program Integrity,” 89 FR 7456 (Feb. 2, 2024), creating a beneficiary-centric selection process for registrations by employers and adding additional integrity measures related to the registration process to reduce the potential for fraud in the H-1B registration process. In that final rule, DHS states that it “intends to address and may finalize this proposed provision [expressly stating in the regulations that related entities are prohibited from submitting multiple registrations for the same individual] in a subsequent final rule,” but that “[m]ore time and data will help inform the utility of this proposed provision.” 89 FR 7456, 7469 (Feb. 2, 2024). Initial data from the FY 2025 H-1B registration process show a significant decrease in the total number of registrations submitted compared to FY 2024, including a decrease in the number of registrations submitted on behalf of beneficiaries with multiple registrations.[1]
This initial data indicate that there were far fewer attempts to gain an unfair advantage than in prior years owing, in large measure, to the implementation of the beneficiary-centric selection process.[2]
Under the beneficiary-centric selection process, individual beneficiaries do not benefit from an increased chance of selection if related entities each submit a registration on their behalf. As such, DHS has decided not to finalize the proposed change pertaining to multiple registrations submitted by related entities.
> C. Summary of Costs and Benefits
DHS analyzed two baselines for this final rule, the no action baselines and the without-policy baseline. The primary baseline for this final rule is the no action baseline. For the 10-year period of analysis of the final rule, DHS estimates the annualized net cost savings of this rulemaking will be $333,835 annualized at a 2 percent discount rate. DHS also estimates that there will be annualized monetized transfers of $1.4 million from newly cap-exempt petitioners to USCIS and $38.8 million from employers to F-1 workers, both annualized at a 2 percent discount rate.
You can’t make a rule that says “hey don’t break the rules”.
That seems logically fallacious.
It’s a clever little maneuver. When the inevitable reversal happens, they can show up at fundraising galas telling donors, “We tried! We were so close! It’s just those baddies who always come along and pull the rug.”
The USG has to go through a very length period of coming up with a proposed rule. Allowing comments to be made about it, adjusting (or not) the rule based on those comments, and then finally submitting the final rule.
Nobody at USCIS wrote this document yesterday and published this today. This is the result of years of work. Do you seriously expect the USG to shut down anything they don't think they can finish under the current administration?
Doesn't the bottom of this announcement describe a previous rule that was announced in January 2024 and then implemented in March 2024? Interesting that rules process was far more rapid than this one.
So a different related rule started its process awhile back and a second rule was in the works concurrently. Is the USG only allowed to do one thing at a time?
The comment period for this rule ended last year to give you an idea of how long this has at least been in the works. All of this information is rapidly found via the submitted url at the top of the page.
https://www.regulations.gov/docket/USCIS-2023-0005/document
2021-02-02: President Biden issued Executive Order (E.O.) 14012[0]
2021-04-19: Request for Public Input begins[1]
2021-05-19: Request for Public Input ends[2]
2023-10-23: Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. Comment period begins[3]
2023-12-11: Comment period ends
2024-01-30: Final Rulemaking announced[4]
2024-02-02: Regulations are published in federal register[5]
2024-03-06: Rules take effect
[0]https://www.federalregister.gov/executive-order/14012
[1]https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/04/19/2021-07...
[2]https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/04/26/C1-2021...
[3]https://www.regulations.gov/docket/USCIS-2023-0005/unified-a...
[4]https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/uscis-announces...
[5]https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/02/02/2024-01...
- Launched rockets from Ukraine - remote work contracts extended to 2029 after Elon + Vivek wants people to RTO - TikTok ban
And the classic answer is always the same here: ,,it was all planned for years'' (sure, but the decision is made after the elections on purpose)
That’s not to excuse the slowness, but I imagine this stuff was in process for a while.
They might have spent the last four years negotiating what exactly the changes would ideally be. Government doesn’t work well with the “let’s see what sticks approach”.
This is an executive power. USCIS - the President can modify regulations, such as how H-1B applications are processed or the criteria used in selection lotteries.
No, the classic people not understanding how the government works.
These are changes that were done through the rule-making process, not legislation. The rule-making process is (by design!) VERY SLOW to give the stakeholders a chance to voice their opinion.
Typical rules take about 2 years to be implemented. And I guess Biden hoped to get a real immigration reform that would have made these changes unnecessary.
Work expands to fill the space available, as they say.
But as an American the “bonafide job requirement” makes me nervous. We have a massive ghost job problem that really needs to be a federal crime. Will this make that worse?
This change is meant to close that loophole. This used to not be a problem, because you had to file the entire petition BEFORE you enter the lottery, but now you just pay some nominal fee and get your name in, leading to a highly profitable situation for staffing companies.
The tweet is a super brief summary, reproduced below.
Founders can self petition (& spouses can work)
Roles tied to research institutions cap-exempt Students get seamless transition Faster H1-B transfers for job changes Clarification of specialty role Cracking down on fraudWait, so I can just open LLC and get H1B visa for it? There have to be conditions and limitations, otherwise it will be misused.
Now, misuse could come if you are independently wealthy and can self fund, but at the end of the day if you are doing that in the US, the economy still benefits.
Or you can just buy a green card for a $800000 investment (EB-5).
It'll cost you about $50-100k extra.
> In addition, for those individuals who obtained treaty country nationality through a financial investment, USCIS may require additional documentation to show that the applicant has been domiciled in the treaty country indicated in the application for a continuous period of at least 3 years at any point before applying for E-1 or E-2 classification.
Plus E-2 visa is a non-immigrant visa, so it doesn't give you any kind of special pathway to green card. Might as well apply for an EBx at the outset instead of fiddling with an E-2 visa.
> Might as well apply for an EBx at the outset instead of fiddling with an E-2 visa.
EB-5 has pre-country quotas, and for some countries the wait can be quite long (for China it's around 10 years). It also is veeerrrryyyyyy slow, even with the initial form processing taking _years_.
For EB-5, China and India have a waitlist but that's only in the 'unreserved' category. There are new EB-5 categories now that both reduce the investment amount required and processing can be done in a couple months now. If one really wants to immigrate and has the money, EB-5 is still the best choice by far.
I'm not sure you understand how this works.
No, you have to first post a job posting at a low salary, preferably with an in-office requirement in a HCOL city. If you get applicants, give them Leetcode Hard and no one will pass.
Then, when no one applies or passes the interview, you claim there is a shortage.
Viola!
I run a one-man consulting business from the EU. I sometimes hire freelancers. I work with US clients anyway. Does that mean I can open a US llc and move?
Wonder how this works for remote-only positions/companies.
> - Organizations where fundamental research is a key activity now qualify
> - Startups can hire researchers (AI, health, hardware) year-round
That’s a good change. I’ve seen ML researchers (PhDs) who led DARPA funded projects as principal investigator while working for a for-profit company not being selected for H-1B (lottery and cap) and having to leave the US.
Really, given the premise, anyone sane should kill H-1B entirely for tech:
"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"
There is no shortage of qualified US software engineers. CS schools are full. The very concept is ridiculous. Kill this law, liberalize immigration instead.
I guess you never paid any attention to the nationality of students enrolled in CS classes.
Perhaps geographic restrictions on H-1Bs would spread the wealth: force these companies to prove they can't find engineers in the US by looking outside the wealthiest enclaves in the country, where even FAANG engineers complain about cost of living. We'd ease the Bay Area housing crisis, lift up other regions of the country, and provide more domestic-born citizens a path to good jobs while maintaining their own communities.
Edit: I had no idea it was controversial to say that name calling makes an argument less convincing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Dona...
I don't think following Trump's footsteps with tit-for-tat name calling is beneficial to anyone.
Name calling is not a way to make a convincing point. That's the entirety of my comment.
I’m a natural born citizen that’s the wrong skin color and I’m planning on carrying my passport everywhere come Jan 21 - I’m not going to chance being thrown into the back of a BORTAC van.
I don't think the chances of something that drastic are high, but it doesn't hurt to err on the side of caution.
REAL ID is plausible but I don't really trust it, given that illegal immigrants can get identity cards in my state.
REAL ID is a bare minimum. It shows that you at least have legal residency.
FWIW it's trusted by DHS so that's all that matters for your usecase or assumption.
If you are worried about the risk of being hauled by ICE, then you should get a REAL ID.
> it requires me to send my existing passport for several weeks
Last I remember, you can do it in person.
Here are the passport offices - https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/get-fas...
> In the event of a government shutdown
The US Passport Office remains open during the commonly termed "government shutdowns"
On the other hand, you can't be detained without probable cause, and race/ethnicity alone isn't enough. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Brignoni-Ponce (https://case.law/caselaw/?reporter=us&volume=422&case=0873-0...): "In this case the officers relied on a single factor to justify stopping respondent’s car: the apparent Mexican ancestry of the occupants. We cannot conclude that this furnished reasonable grounds to believe that the three occupants were aliens. At best the officers had only a fleeting glimpse of the persons in the moving car, illuminated by headlights. Even if they saw enough to think that the occupants were of Mexican descent, this factor alone would justify neither a reasonable belief that they were aliens, nor a reasonable belief that the car concealed other aliens who were illegally in the country. Large numbers of native-born and naturalized citizens have the physical characteristics identified with Mexican ancestry, and even in the border area a relatively small proportion of them are aliens. The likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor, but standing alone it does not justify stopping all Mexican-Americans to ask if they are aliens."
I second the recommendation to get a RealID. You're going to need one eventually for domestic flights, among other things. When I got mine at the DMV renewing my driver's license, they asked for a birth certificate, social security card, driver's license, and proof of (local) residency (e.g. utility bill). So why not get one and carry that as additional proof?
Do you know how insane that sounds in this context? I absolutely despise Trump, make no mistake; but if you think Trump is rounding up any of the 40+% of the USA's non-white citizens and deporting them, you have been deluded by widespread FUD.
The "deportation dragnet" might apply to illegals, sure. Will any meaningful amount of US citizens get scooped up in that, if any? Highly, highly unlikely. You're probably more likely to be murdered.
https://www.newsweek.com/tom-homan-family-deportation-undocu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Americans_from_...
I feel like I - and a lot of people I know - have been in denial of what is happening for a while. It is terrifying, and I don't want it to be true, but it is undeniable. I don't want to be one of those people that says "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst" - "We knew nothing about that."
They are claiming to start mass deportations next month, and profiling based on skin color is absolutely the only way that can be possible. Moreover, just like the Nazis discovered, both deporting people and indefinite detainment are impossibly expensive- leaving only one option. This political movement is already based on the idea that people different than them don't deserve to be treated like human beings, and will not be.
Their immigration policy is never only about illegal immigration. Do you actually think it is possible to tighten immigration policy without affecting H1B?
If you need evidence, just look at what happened between 2017-2021. H1B denial & RFE rates were way up, and the administration tried multiple times to roll out policy that significantly restrict the eligibility of H1B visas. They even used coronavirus as an excuse to issue travel bans on H1B. How is that making legal immigration easier?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act
See https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77l28myezko
He’s owned by a different slice of the parasitic ruling class that, while opposed to some of the goals the Biden admin was for, still share a common theme of not caring about the average American at all. He has probably the most pro Israel cabinet we’ve ever seen and appears to be cozying up with big tech (thiel, musk, zuckerberg, etc).
If he was truly pro American H1-B would be thrown out and we’d require these companies that are wildly profitable to invest in educating American workers. H1-B is used to exploit both foreign and domestic labor to the benefit of a tiny population of capital holders.
> Despite what the media portrays, he’s not pro American, pro white, pro nazi, whatever.
Going after a religious/ethnic minority legally holding United States greencard status... Even if he tried to hide it in regions and not a DNA or religious test, he did it immediately after campaigning on a Muslim ban in those words. Sounds quite in line with those terms except it is actually anti-American if we take a huge part of 'pro American' to mean valuing the First Amendment.
This is exactly right and exactly why Trump won't do anything about it... when you surround yourself will billionaires you'll want to make this that this tiny population of capital holders prospers even further :)
Currently workers are often abused since the system puts intense pressure to keep a job and don't move around.
If you're worried about people shortcutting a line to get a visa by injecting money into the US economy, again by somehow getting 60K into the LLC to pay the salary of the recipient, this is also a win.
So what is the problem here exactly?
It was a big problem for our family.
Oh no, the 50% rule won't be exploited sir.
Clarification of specialty role
You really won't need to clarify whether the role is a specialty one or not if you just increase the minimum wage for H1Bs. I really don't know why we don't have some rule that pins H1B wages to like the 90th percentile wage.Employers outsource all those works to overseas.
You can illustrate this by doing the other direction: if we killed half of the workforce, would real wages double. Unlikely! You'd probably just see broad-based inflation for a while until wages equalized again.
For a first-take study on this, see https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
And in comes a flood of "Research Software Engineer" roles
You don't see the need but perhaps the users do.
"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 [...]"
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/immigration/h1b
But it's also possible to say that one hasn't been able to find a skilled-enough Java developer.
And in general skilled immigration has many times over been proven to only benefit the country and that java developer you mention.
An odd claim, wish there was more evidence for it being true. As in, what is the "artificial constraint" for front end web developers?
You learn about the world by living in it, not by reading about it.
What is the downward price shock you're talking about? What do you think the salary would or should be, assuming all H1B worker are magically gone the next day?
o-1 is to bring Albert Einstein and h1b is to bring some physicist that matches criteria.
As in, O-1 is person-focused, while H1B is role-focused.
those are exceptional cases. The majority of the 65K year h1b visas granted every year are for filling IT related positions. Mostly dev related positions.
Because that's not profitable.
Phrased differently, the goal is to help industry, not hurt workers. Hurting some workers is an acceptable cost, not the goal.
One idea is that having a thriving industrial ecosystem helps those same workers more than the downward pressure.
If harm was the goal, something like a STEM worker tax or cutting R&D tax incentives would be easier.
These would affect all STEM workers equivalently. The H1-B program, whatever one thinks of its merits, hurts domestic STEM workers and helps immigrant STEM workers.
Perhaps the result is that the overall opportunities are greater because the larger talent pool results in more companies being formed. That depends a lot on how mature the industry is, and whether technological trends like generative AI will replace large swaths or STEM workers altogether.
You can’t really separate the two sides of the same coin.
Im not extracting all your blood for the fun of it, or to kill you. profit is the motivation.
Saying the motivation is to kill you is simply not correct. It is a byproduct.
Can we honestly say these hires are paid exactly the same their American counterparts would be willing to accept?
Im not sure why this is confusing. One part is the motivation, the other isnt.
The phrase "help industry" has many dimensions. The simplest of course is that by increasing labor supply and suppressing wages it increases profit margins, rewarding shareholders.
Another important function is that by having more workers overall in the US, it increases the productivity of the domestic industry itself, due to increased competition for jobs driving up the productivity of the average worker. This in turn makes the industry more competitive vs its equivalents in other countries.
The average worker (whether permanent resident or temporary/H1B) who doesn't have significant investments likely doesn't receive much of those productivity gains, since they mostly go to capital owners.
Long term, it boosts returns to capital while capping returns to labor, the same trend noted by Thomas Piketty some years back.
The economic impacts I described are looking backwards, not forward, and the data is pretty clear that long term returns on capital swamp the returns on labor (especially since the 1970s). STEM workers have been somewhat insulated from that due to the industries they work in growing in the past few decades faster than the labor supply. It's anyone's guess whether or not either trend will continue into the future.
> the question is less about productivity, but network effect, number of jobs, and quality of jobs.
I'd argue productivity and returns to capital are almost everything when it comes to what informs immigration policy from an economic lens. "Network effect" is a mechanism, not an outcome, and outcome metrics like "quality of job" or even "quality of life afforded by a job" are not a concern of such policies. On average, they might improve, or they might get worse, but productivity and returns on capital will always go up, whether they require workers or not.
Because what you are calling "local benefits to industrial expertise" is ultimately realized in the form of returns on capital.
Whether these benefits outweigh the costs is an open question.
When the tech industry's growth was very talent constrained as it was in the last few decades, arguably opening labor competition had the effect of increasing overall growth (mainly through new production invention). The list of immigrant technologists who have created new technologies and products - and jobs as a result - could probably fill an encyclopedia.
It's unknown whether that type of growth - the kind that creates more and better jobs - will continue, especially given recent developments in AI.
If the benefits going forward are largely going to be based on massive increases in labor efficiency, then it's not as clear that the benefits (mostly to capital) outweigh the costs (mostly to labor). Most business models in AI are predicated on replacing people, who are expensive, not making more or better goods. Sure, we'll get some neat robots along the way that actually make stuff, but that will likely be a small fraction of the money to be made.
Or perhaps we are at the dawn of a new era of technology which will make more and better jobs. We'll see.
It's relevant to the original context because what helps industry (in terms of immigration regulation) might or might not help workers in that industry.
When productivity goes up, that doesnt mean workers are making 10X as many houses or hamburgers, which capitalist are eating.
For me, this begs the questions of what exactly is being produced when we say worker productivity has increased, and where is it going? If it is "stuff" being produced, surely it should be evident somewhere, like massive exports hoarded stockpiles. Alternatively, the productivity is an illusion because there is a corresponding inefficiency or deadweight loss, like paying some service workers to create problems and paying others to fix them.
Power.
Political power: policies written to benefit the highest bidder.
Financial power: more leverage in being able to dictate terms of borrowing by workers - and being able to force the government to borrow from capitalists instead of levying taxes on them.
Physical power: Being able to buy/influence law enforcement (themselves a type of worker) to protect the capitalist's interests over those of other workers.
My understanding is that GDP or Piketty's review has no column for "Power".
If someone is counting influence as GDP and worker productivity, I would say that is a faulty measure, and worker productivity has not increased.
The "product" that the increased productivity buys is control over policy at whatever level of government, not more washing machines or tires.
If you have a company and worker productivity goes up 200%, where does the product go? Wealth created selling that product may go to the owner, and carry power with it, but that doesn't answer the fundamental question. Where is the product?
In a mature industry, there is no new product, because all else equal, demand doesn't change. The company makes the same amount of product, but with fewer workers (aka layoffs).
Even in an industry serving growing demand, increase in worker productivity is not the cause of increase demand for product produced by that industry. Any growing enterprise knows it's first more important to focus on demand than increasing productivity, usually by hiring workers at the lowest cost possible. Otherwise, your competitor will serve your customers needs before you do. Premature optimization is a waste.
What increases demand for products is technological innovation plus a need/desire for more personal convenience, comfort, and time, coupled with the funds to purchase those in the hands of a growing population. Why have most companies have staked their future profits on the developing world's demand growth? Because the developing world has the desire for all of the above plus a growing population.
The question of where the new product goes has nothing to do with the question of worker productivity unless the workers have the funds to purchase those products. The product goes where the purchasing power is.
Capital's share of the return, however, goes into assets and as I described earlier, power. It doesn't go into purchasing any increase in product created.
That is my exact question, who is purchasing the goods? we have high employment and have supposedly high productivity. We dont have massive national export surplus. You say capital isn't purchasing the goods, so what gives?
Where is the black hole that is consuming all of the goods, if the workers dont get them, the rich dont get them, and they aren't exported.
Take new cars as an example. We are producing fewer of them [1], they are larger and more expensive, and they are mostly being sold to wealthier people. So yes in this case, capital owners (people more likely to have more wealth) are the ones purchasing the product.
Also, for a while we have been shifting towards a services based economy, so for a lot of this production growth, you won't see physical products. For example, you can't see the software IDE subscription I signed up for yesterday.
We also don't have a national export surplus because we import so many goods that are not worthwhile to manufacture here, while we export a ton of services, petroleum, and other raw extracted materials, all industries that scale with technology/capital/machinery and not labor.
1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DAUPSA
I didn't say 100%, I said most (re-read my comments upthread). Please don't misrepresent my words. I choose them carefully.
Greater productivity does not automatically equal a commensurate increase in products/services delivered, which seems to be the flawed assumption you are unable to get past.
Here is a concrete scenario to illustrate this.
A company makes 1M units of a product at a cost of $1/unit, and sells them for $1.50/unit. Profit/unit is $.50.
Productivity doubles, so the same million units can now be produced for $.50/unit. When sold for $1.50, profit is now $1/unit.
The $.50/unit increase in profit goes mostly to shareholders.
There are no new products, no new services.
In reality, demand varies over time, so product output varies with that, but the gains in profit mostly have gone to shareholders.
The only time they ever go to labor is when labor is in short supply or when labor organizes to demand a larger share.
When my companies have produced more output from the same inputs (or the same output from less inputs in the case of mass layoffs), we return the cash to shareholders by way of a stock buyback or special dividend the following quarter.
Maybe in some companies they instead give workers raises or outsize holiday bonuses, but I’ve never seen this.
That effect mostly comes from housing, non-housing capital has not had that big difference in returns. See https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-...
Subtracting depreciation isn't a fair comparison. The example uses software as a short-lived asset. Has the monetary value of Google's search algorithms depreciated? They've been upgraded with routine investment, but the scale of the returns on their upkeep vastly outweighs the capital investment, otherwise Google wouldn't be so profitable.
Software of the internally-developed sort isn't even depreciable [1], so it's not clear how its value for these purposes would be determined (short of assuming it represents a percentage of the business's value).
Also, from the paper linked in your article:
> Once all compensation of employees at the sawmill is subtracted, the remainder is its gross capital income. Some of this capital income will be paid to lenders in the form of interest, some will be paid to the government in taxes on profits, and the rest may be retained on the balance sheet of the sawmill or distributed as dividends to shareholders. Gross capital income is thus a very broad concept, encompassing funds that are ultimately paid out to many different recipients—it is unaffected, for instance, by the split in financing between debt and equity.3 GROSS VERSUS NET: CONCEPTS An alternative to gross value-added is net value-added, which subtracts depreciation. This can be divided into labor and net capital income, the latter being gross capital income minus depreciation.
Everything which I have emphasized above are examples of returns to capital. Excluding them from consideration in this presentation is ignoring how a large amount of returns are channeled to owners of capital.
Debt-holders gain from interest and shareholders are enriched via dividends and share buybacks that never appear on the article's net income derived graph.
Of course, when you willfully ignore those huge tranches of returns, then housing looks like a major factor, because it is the common asset class that has been on a largely unchecked inflationary track.
Finally, your article from 2015 argues that the overall trend will reverse and labor's share of GDP will start increasing. Here's what has actually happened since then:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006173
The brief spike in 2020 was due to pandemic era redistribution policies like the child tax credit, among others. Since those have been repealed, labor's share has continued its prior trend downwards.
1. https://www.irs.gov/publications/p946#en_US_2023_publink1000...
If I rock it explodes killing all of the astronauts, was that the purpose of the rocket and the mission?
If I crash my car on my way to the store, is that the purpose of leaving my house?
The reality is that in most of those fields, few Americans get an MS/PhD. Go to a typical engineering department and you'll often see the majority of advanced degree students are foreigners.
So it's a question of: Do we want to continue to train foreigners, only to not have them contribute to the US economy?
If you move out to the pure sciences, you pretty much need a PhD to get a good career. Once again, a big chunk, if not the majority, are foreigners.
Look around at the highly skilled folks you see who are not of US origin, and you'll find most of them are in the US due to the H1-B program (only a tiny percentage come via other programs like the O visa).
Yes, H1-B is often abused, but this is the reason it exists. It's a lot harder to get an H1B visa and then permanent residency if your degree is in the humanities, for example.
As for the cost of tuition, there are many, many reasons, and I suspect if you did a PCA, you'll find "raising tuition to milk foreigners" to be of minimal impact.
In my state, for example, a local university publicized their finances going back decades, and the increase in tuition has been mirrored by a drop in state support per student. Overall the university is not making more money per student than they were 30 years ago - the only thing that changed is the entity making the payments.
I don't see many people getting employed straight out of undergrad from India or China and moving to the US directly. They get their advanced degree here first to get into the country then they get employed...
Yes, and ...?
I mean, if it were a requirement to start a business and employ 10 Americans gainfully, would you go and say "Yeah, but the reason so many foreign born people do that is so they can get in legally."
So?
As long as they have higher level training than most Americans, and as long as we spend money training them (via research/teaching grants), isn't it a good idea to keep them?
Outside of SW, not many engineering jobs have a mix of undergrads and MS folks doing the same work, so your sample is extremely biased.
> I have met some people from India who were surprised at how difficult college was when they came to the US compared to back in India.
And I've met the opposite. Ask folks who went to the top IITs.
Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.
For undergrad, I understand the frustration, although student visas have almost nothing to do with it. As an example, when I was in my undergrad (for engineering), there was only one foreign student in my engineering classes. Almost all the foreign students were at the MS/PhD level. The number of foreign students in the undergrad population was easily under 5%, if not under 1%.
Probably true in most no-name state schools.
> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
An MS is only 2 years, and you should go only if it's fully paid for (quite often the case in engineering). And you typically don't accrue interest on undergrad debts for those 2 years - so it's only delaying paying off debts by 2 years.
No - most Americans don't do MS in engineering, simply because they don't want to and don't value it.
> Also, alot of foreign students are willing to work/study insane hours because visa hanging over their head. I have a friend who got MS in Engineering but didn't want to continue because he looked at what's required and started talking with his mentor about his PhD. His mentor said it's 996 schedule and if you don't want to, I can likely find a student visa student who will.
Entirely dependent on the advisor, although I do suspect your anecdote is becoming more common. Also, likely more common at top tier universities and less so in no name state universities.
International students percentage is about 6% of total high education population [1]. We can say that their percentage in higher in some fields/degrees. But overall they are not significant reason High Education is not affordable. Actually for undergraduate (majority of international students) they will pay more tuition and many colleges wants to admit more to subsidize domestic students.
> Debt means most Americans go "I need to enter into the job market so I can pay off these debts".
Study abroad is expensive and you still need to enter the job market to earn your living and probably pay your dept (some will take loans to study in the US). This applies quite well to international students too.
[1] https://opendoorsdata.org/annual-release/international-stude...
It's much much higher in Postgraduate because it's a way to stay in the country without being employed
If you want to make that siphon bigger — and more competitive — how would you do it? By limiting the people that can work in tech to whoever companies can hire locally, or by bringing in the smartest people from around the world?
Read more: https://mckoder.medium.com/does-america-need-immigration-781...
The major benefit of reducing or eliminating the H1B visa program is that those companies can continue to do well, and Americans can do well along with them.
The tech industry vacuums up money from foreign countries and pumps it into the economy of our country. The beneficiaries include all Americans, including those who work in restaurants, retail, healthcare, insurance, education, housing, transportation, entertainment and so on.
Limiting tech industry to whoever companies can hire locally will hurt its global competitiveness. Such a move will not just hurt the few would-be tech immigrants that are prevented from immigrating, but American prosperity in general.
Walmart is a U.S. company that historically did well, but I don't see why anyone would care unless you buy their stock or live in Bentonville.
People don't care about macro indicators that lump the 1% and the 99% together.
As Asimov pointed out, "[t]here is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been." American culture is profoundly anti-intellectual. Every Dunning-Kruger rando thinks they have something valuable to contribute to every discussion.
Then why are US tech companies the most successful?
I think you're omitting the giant impact of the FED, wall street, power of the USD world reserve currency and the VC investor incentives of risking billions on ideas that may or may not be profitable, with the low risk for investors if their investments don't pan out.
All stuff that doesn't exist outside the US.
The latest Gallup polling suggests anti-vax sentiment is at an all-time high. In no other comparable country on earth do 45% of people say vaccines shouldn't be mandatory. And it's not the foreigners on visas who are contributing to anti-vax sentiment.
The program might have been designed for this, sold as this, but it's definitely not used for that anymore.
H1B was created in 1990, that's when Russia (and ex-USSR in general) had a lot of idle brains that wouldn't mind moving to the US. Today isn't 1990 tho.
I personally witnessed someone that submit multiple applications that this person won the H1B lottery. This person even had fake office, fake business address, etc for the fake entities.
I already reported it, but no action has been taken. This person is now happily employed in the US using H1B.
Unethical life pro tips but work: for those of you trying to get H1B, just submit multiple applications to multiple "companies". There are services like this out there, just need to find out where.
Good luck. This nation is for plunder.
You have no idea what good lawyer can do :)
It works.
America needs to keep attracting the world's best and brightest, but linking it to a specific employer is problematic. Opens up employees to mistreatment.
I'd say charge a straight up fee, 500k upon approval. That gets you 5 years, if your wiz making 400k a year it's a great deal.
I like working at early stage startups— works pretty well with H1B but it makes the process of getting a green card via work complicated. Some people can deal with all that stress, I just rather not.
Unless their business generates way more than $500k, in which case they'd probably be moving as businessmen, not as skilled workers.
There is already a work visa for that called EB5 even though the requirement is $1M (800K for rural areas) and you will need to hire 10 American workers. Plenty of rich people from other countries are using that already.