Just an interesting note to point out that the man who's wife spoke with Obama did get a lot of calls / interest from companies across the country, but because of a custody agreement needs to stay in North Texas, which I'd be willing to bet contributes much more to his difficulties finding a job than H-1B visas.
> because of a custody agreement needs to stay in North Texas
Wow, pretty bad case to blame immigrants.
As a father I can sympathize with the guy, it should be hard having to choose between a decent job offer and the ability to see your children every day. But mobility is one important factor in the job market, you don't always get to choose where to live while advancing your career (unless maybe if you're a rock star and telecommuting is viable), especially in STEM areas that have most jobs in large metros or startup/high-tech hubs.
This is as true today as it has been for the past 10-15 years. "highly specialized knowledge" == "cheap talent". And as has always been true, you get what you pay for.
We're a startup and have hired 2 (and soon to be 3) folks on H1B visas. These were folks who got their Masters degrees here, who are brilliant and who'd have otherwise left.
While I don't dispute that there are holes in the program and abuse that happens, it has enabled us to find some folks for our team who have put us as a company on a different trajectory.
Yet if tech workers are in such short supply, why are so many of them unemployed or underpaid? According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), tech employment rates still haven't rebounded to pre-recession levels. And from 2001 to 2011, the mean hourly wage for computer programmers didn't even increase enough to beat inflation.
I think anyone who is actually any good at programming could disagree with that statement.
There are 2 problems with H-1Bs:
1) Body shops in northern NJ bringing mediocre talent here, lying on their resumes to get them placed, and then paying them 1/10 of what they're billed as indentured servants.
2) Not enough visas for qualified people, partially because of 1.
Yeah. I work with several very talented indians, and hear on a regular basis about their visa woes. People who've paid taxes in this country for 10 years, raising kids here, the only reason they're not citizens is because the process takes too damn long. They're on H-1Bs and deserve to be citizens, so it touches a nerve when I hear H-1B described as some 'dey tuk ur jawbs' system.
If you're being outcompeted by the incompetent body shop employees, you need to step up your game rather than try to restrict the labor market.
I would be fine with them getting green cards and letting them compete on the same terms as I do. I'm not fine competing with someone that gets deported if they get fired and don't find someone else to sponsor their visa. H-1Bs give employers too much power over the employees.
There may be some body shops with incompetent people, but I think there are plenty of competent H1-B holders.
The proper framing is that their visa can be held over their head to extract 14 hour days 6 or 7 days a week and other working conditions and salaries that Americans would not accept or be able to compete with (for good reason).
The US government actually sets generous price floors on what H1-B's can be paid to prevent this sort of thing (for better or for worse). An H1-B application specifying a salary that is lower than said floor would be rejected.
From all the people I know around here who're on an H1B, the salaries are quite on par with US nationals. I do admit that I don't know anyone working for the companies named in the article (TCS, Infosys).
The issue that needs more discussion is why not let US-educated non-immigrants have an easier path to Permanent Residency vs. letting them leave the country to start companies back in their homeland.
While that may be true, but I can tell you from personal experience, that having to wait ~20 years to get a green card is not the most appealing choice either.
Top 10 users of H-1B visas last year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys. Together these firms hired nearly half of all H-1B workers, and less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents.
I'm a little bit confused in here. Is it the same 65k visa cap for Europe and India? Does that mean that Tata and Infosys have taken half of it and people who they hired weren't even working in US?
I didn't squeeze into the last year's visa quota and decided to stay in UK (hearing - "if you reapply we might get a visa for you in a year" is not very encouraging). From what I heard, getting H1B is becoming quite of a race against time as the places are getting filled out quickly. I think I know why now.
It is a per year limit. Most H1-Bs return back to India within a year and a new person will be sent to fill in the same position next year.
That's why most people never get PR. The main reason is not to short charge the client, but to give chance to other workers in India, cause most companies pay them only $5k to $14k/per year back in India(That's the market rate in India). There is a rat race where people have to fight to fly to US or other western countries so that they can earn 10X more.
With a very broad brush, I think it's pretty straightforward to split H1-Bs into two categories: body shop consultancies... and everyone else.
From the H1-Bs we employ, I know they receive comparable (and sometimes higher, since we tend to pay slightly below market and H1-B salaries are somewhat inflexible) salaries to their resident/citizen counterparts.
I concur. I live in Israel. From what I know of my friends who have moved to the Silicon Valley under H1B, they went to fill high-demand engineering positions with high compensation (definitely on par with their US-resident coworkers).
I both agree and disagree. I'm on an H1B, and I am definitely paid market rate.
However, I have had the misfortune of interviewing a number of candidates coming from companies like those mentioned- they are indeed underpaid. However, they're also unemployable, because they are trained in highly specific areas. I interviewed more than one .NET candidate that did not know SQL, for example.
The sad reality is that they are underpaid because they are underqualified. In an ideal world no company would make do with that, but as these employers demonstrate, it's quite possible to get by stringing together a collection of underqualified employees and pay them less.
Being in IT since 1997 I definitely agree with this. I have seen way to many job postings for positions that want a great deal of experience and well below market pay. Eventually these get filled by H1-B visa holders.
Overall I see H1-B visas as a means of companies to suppress wages of domestic IT workers. I know entirely way too many good software engineers and developers looking for jobs for there to be a "shortage".
That being said I am very aware that my comment like the rest of the comments is anecdotal. I am hopeful more objective numbers can be found that will allow us to have a more informed conversation on this.
At what price point? If you are looking for good developers at or near the "market" you will probably not find them. Anyone who has been in the industry for awhile and is very competent will know they are generally worth more.
Not true, you'll get to a point where however much you pay you'll be interviewing people who can't do the job, as opposed to paying more and finding somebody who is capable.
That is the point I was trying to make. I don't believe their is a true shortage of talented workers, but I do believe large companies state that there is as a means to drive down wages. H1-B Visa just happen to be the handy hammer they use to do it with.
"Shortage" in an economy is expressed as higher prices. In almost any cases you will be able to find more workers if you are willing to pay an unlimited amount. There is no way of determining the "correct" price.
The reverse is also true. More potential employees in the marketplace lowers salaries.
If you take "you could find employees at a higher salary" as a proof that the shortage doesn't exist you'll virtually always have that proof. Under that definition shortages don't exist which feels like some sort of semantic trickery.
If companies are hiring workers who can't do the job just because they're cheaper, they're only hurting themselves. I'd imagine it's an unsustainable strategy.
If companies are hiring workers who can do the job and are willing to do it for less than domestic workers, why is that wrong?
I realized this was way too flippant. To elaborate, we're paying around the same as what everybody is paying, and a candidate with similar experience and skills to my own would make the same I do. It's rare to have someone turn us down due to pay. The people we want generally don't apply in the first place because they already have a job they like.
Here in NYC startup-land we have no trouble finding talent at "market" rates. Granted, market-rate for an engineer with even just a few years of experience and up-to-date tech skills is $150K-200K total comp.
I've noticed that the H-1B discussions tend to be extremely polarized, and it reflects the bimodal distribution of the tech industry. There's the highly-paid glam side (see: Google, Facebook, etc) where comp is high and you meet $200K H-1B engineers around every corner.
And then there's the bodyshop consultancy side of the industry, where cheap H-1Bs are brought in by the planeload and shopped out to clients at insane markups.
The bimodality of H-1Bs is important to remember. Personally, I have trouble meeting devs around here making less than, say, $120K, H-1B or otherwise.
Quick question: do you hire remotely? Obviously I am talking domestic-remote as opposed to Philippines-remote. If you restrict yourself to local, on-site hiring then yeah, there's a shortage. If you hire people working remotely from Iowa or Canada, then maybe less so.
We do, for the right person, but we prefer on-site when possible. I'm actually the only remote worker in the company at the moment. I can't say I've ever seen a good candidate who wanted to work remotely from Iowa or Canada, but maybe we just haven't looked properly. (Nothing against those places, just hasn't happened to me.)
Of course, if you're willing to hire remotely, the H1-B thing gets much less pressing, as you can simply hire people overseas and keep them there, no need for a visa at all.
To counter your anecdote with another anecdote: I am a H1B holder, and in the process of looking for new jobs (which, yes, is quite possible) I have seen many a "no visa please" notice in job descriptions. A lot of smaller companies simply don't want to go through that process.
Where are you located? Certainly in NYC I don't know a single good developer looking for a job.
By definition any increase in supply of labor will lower wages somewhat. However, as I'm currently on an H1-B and being paid a pretty hefty wedge I suspect your assertion is wrong.
In this market the only good engineers I see having problems looking for jobs are those who are unwilling to relocate or older guys.
This is false. The status of permanent resident can be obtained much sooner if your employer or spouse is willing to sponsor you. The problem is that a lot of companies can manipulate you by treating you poorly, and justify it by threatening permanent residence status.
I find the government giving a company the power to coerce an employee through the threat of deportation fairly horrible. It's indentured servitude. The H1-B program needs to be abolished and replaced. If companies have trouble finding workers of a certain skillset the government needs to open up immigration to that skillset.
But the companies should then need to compete in the free market for those hires.
This is a great idea. However, how can you certify someone has a given skill set, in special with environments where the skill sets themselves change very fast? How can you ensure those skills are really absent in the local work force?
1) Decouple the work authorization from the employer. The employee gets an open work permit for X (say 5) years.
2) If you can prove you have been gainfully employed above some agreed upon salary (via tax records) for 3+ years you get temporary permanent residency without any employer interference/input. You then finish out the other formalities (health, security checks) to get the official permanent residency.
The goal of 1) is to empower the employee with work mobility that does not affect future residency. If there really is a skill shortage they can leave without additional formalities or negotiate for better compensation. If they are talented, have stayed legal in other respects, and wish to stay in the US, they are now set.
Not entirely true for employer based sponsorship... the time frame depends on your birth nation. People born in China and India have a long wait regardless of how cooperative their employer is. The system is just back logged for years for those people (EB2, EB3 categories).
For the employer case, this is true for prospective immigrants of all national origins except India and China, which also make up the bulk of potential engineers looking to become permanent residents. As of today, the average time for an Indian in the EB2 ('advanced degree or exceptional ability') category is roughly 5-6 years and this number is going up because of increased demand. For the EB3 category, the wait is at least a decade.
I agree that companies have the potential to abuse this power they have over you, but in practice, I have rarely seen this happen.
Yes, I was implicitly assuming the spouse was a citizen. Apologies for the confusion.
You have rarely seen this happen because it is illegal. It is also illegal to hire based on nationality, gender, race or any other identifying feature. You can't seriously claim that this doesn't happen in practice. While this may be cynical, I don't doubt this for a minute.
What does it say about programmers that HN is half swamped with complaints about recruiters and half with complaints about putative oversupply of labor?
My team has 4 job openings. The only two candidates who could pass our phone screen are not U.S. citizens.
One is from Russia, who didn't get the visa for on-site interview.
America seems to be very harsh to legal immigrants, but pretty nice to illegal immigrants.
I think it's good for a country to import some competition. After all, h1b has a 60000 cap each year, that's not too many people.
Agreed. In the process of sponsoring green cards for prospective candidates, we go through the process of trying to find US citizens that could fill the role. This is a requirement of the labor certification process. We rarely, if ever, find _any_ US citizen that applies for these positions. Most applicants are immigrants, which makes us reject them (since the exercise is to really see if we can find citizens). These are not low-paying grunt jobs. These are highly-specialized, very well paid positions.
Maybe you should focus on finding smart people (if you actually pay decently and are located somewhere somebody in their right mind would want to live) and then consider training them in your 'high-specialized' whatever you need.
"My husband has an engineering degree with over ten years of experience," the Fort Worth resident told the president during a web chat hosted by the social network Google+. "Why does the government continue to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?"
There's engineers and then there's engineers. If he could code (or was interested in coding) fluently in modern web environments, I suspect he'd have no problem finding a job at all...
One should learn and adpt to the world's conditions. I'm an ex-semiconductor engineer who took up the web myself. Far easier to start a business with little capital.
I am an Indian here. I have heard horror tales from TCS employees on how they are given "on-site" experience. Mostly it is a portrayed as a favor done by the management to the employee. You have to earn the on-site opportunity which involves a great deal of kissing people's rears. It is mostly not about the talent you have. One of the guys who had gone on-site on one such occasion had told me how the organization billed him as an Expert Oracle consultant while he was told to study oracle while he was boarding the flight. It is true that they get paid a pittance when compared to US nationals. A developer with 5 years of experience makes about $2.5k a month. They usually subsist on Taco Bells, McD burgers and so on. On the other hand many indians prefer this, as it still works out better than if they had stuck to the indian job. In fact, in many family circles you are not considered a human if you are working in IT and do not have any "on-site experience". Most these folks are completely dependent on the organization that they work for and are willing to fight for it tooth and nail to defend it even if the organization is holding them under a sort of an indentured servitude. There are a few genuinely smart hackers but those are far and few in between. Most of these organizations are as dysfunctional as the companies that they consult for.
In fact, in many family circles you are not considered a human if you are working in IT and do not have any "on-site experience"
I'm probably too independently minded, but I'm not sure I could be bothered to give a rat's ass about what my family thought of me with respect to my job or how I live my life. If I'm working, keeping a roof over my family's head, enjoying what I do and getting better in my profession... tough cheese if someone in my family doesn't 'consider me human' - that says far more about them than me.
I have worked for a tata company in the past. I guarantee that this is not my experience. Of course, there are bad people in every organization, including american companies, but you cannot generalize all tata employees are bad.
Not everyone working for such companies are complete idiots. Many people in these orgs are competent enough to learn new skills and apply their previous skills to a new job.
Like every other organization these ones also have politics and that makes things a lot worse for the employees.
I think the way H1-B visa holders are basically beholden chattel to a specific enterprise is especially repugnant.
Anyone who reads through job listings for engineers (all types, as in real engineers) and programmers will also conclude that many job descriptions and salaries are designed so that a) there are practically zero people who will match the 'minimum' requirements, despite the fact that most of the deficiencies candidates are likely to have can be solved by 3 months or less of training, and b) if there were any Americans with the actual qualifications expressed, they would never work for the listed salary.
It's also worth noting, the hidden secret to getting cheap developers in the US is to be based somewhere that doesn't have a huge tech hub.
If you base yourself in moderate size cities you'll find a hidden field of competent applicants who will take salaries close to $50k a year just because there are few jobs in mainstream America that aren't Java or .Net unless they move to a tech hub (people often do not want to live in NYC or SF, at any cost). And 50k in a region they like with a tech they don't hate is better than moving. On average.
I should know. I'm a competent (but not end of the world amazing jock rock star hipster) developer getting paid 50k a year somewhere in America that is distinctly not New York or California. And my company pretty much has me locked in because there are pretty much no other businesses or shops in town that use Javascript or Python or other similar common open source languages instead of .Net or Java (or PHP). (Obviously not an issue of technical ability, but language taste.)
Probably you paid off a good agency in India to fix you up with jobs, then.
You're right that it's a little more complicated. A family friend is here from India on some kind of visa where she is able to switch employers, but she has to leave if a new one won't sponsor her or something. But she pays (or paid) thousands of dollars to some agency in India to fix her up with a job/jobs.
What really gets me in her case is that she has a child who has lived here for over a decade and can't get in-state tuition without special treatment despite being legal.
Well, I'm not from India, so no, I didn't. I changed jobs by going out, looking for a job, applying for it, and interviewing.
The principle is absolutely simple- an H1B visa is freely transferrable to a new employer. There is absolutely nothing (legal) that your old employer can do in retribution once the transfer is complete, and it is possible to go through the transfer process without notifying your current employer.
The problem is almost always for people from China, India, Mexico and Philippines. The Green Card process takes less than a year for all other countries except these. The Green Card paperwork takes a lot of time and effort for people from these countries. While doing the paperwork, there are extended periods where it does not make sense to look for new jobs. That pushes the expected date further in the future. For example, as of today, people who applied for the GC in 2004 and have a MS or 5 years of experience, are just eligible for it now: http://www.travel.state.gov/visa/bulletin/bulletin_5885.html
Indian here, and I have worked on a H1-B with one of the out-sourcers (Infosys/Wipro likes). I think the article has some truth and a lot of crud. It is important to understand the context first.
What you can say about technology right now in USA, there are two large disjoint islands. There is the silicon valley kinds of "cool"/startup technology and then there is run of the mill "IT" for Bank/Insurance/Big-Non-IT technology. Outsourcers go after the latter kind and in fact can only go after the latter kind. Their premise is to hire really below average "Engineers" in India, and expect them to just learn the tricks of the trade to replace/take over another run-of-the mill IT job.
The point is, if your day job is just about maintaining/coding something mind numbing, with no real value add or just being a cog in the wheel in some Big-Co that has nothing to do with technology, you can expect someone to do your job much cheaper. Probably the quality will dip, but then the Big-Co hardly cares about its software right?
Whereas, if you look at the stuff being done in the "valley like" companies, you won't find those outsourced developers. You will still find smart Indians on H1, but then the non-linearity of their talent is at play. Although, I have seen valley companies outsource their QA (manual testing).
I think it is important that one keeps working hard on moving from the second island to the first, no matter who it is (American or otherwise). There is nothing new about this... we have seen this happen to manufacturing. It has happened to web design - Go to elance and you will find at least 20:1 ratio of some Indian firm to US firm. All of them compete at the low-end of the scale.
It is very hard to secure a comfortable life in that lower-end of the technology pipeline living here in USA.
I'm a journalist doing a story about H1B visas for public radio. I think you have a very interesting perspective and would like to speak with you about your experience. You can reach me at Samharnett@gmail.com
Friends, I'll approach this from a different perspective, if you'll please take a moment to lend me your ears, and hear my plight.
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> But in reality, most of today's H-1B workers don't stick around to become the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin
I recently wrote a letter to a Congressperson about this, regarding the recent House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Immigration Reform. The same point was brought up there too. Do these people think it's easy to start a company on an H-1B? It's near impossible. I'd know, because I've looked into it with a brilliant lawyer. Let's take a look at the factors.
* H-1B costs around 4-5k, and the result of the application is uncertain. Would you want an uncertain cofounder? Would investors?
* H-1B workers must be paid prevailing wage. For a programmer in Cambridge, MA, the cheapest level-1 codemonkey must be paid around $55k/yr. How many of us started out paying ourselves that much money? Or any money for that matter?
* A document called the Neufeld Memo from 2008 states that the H-1B sponsor and worker need an employer-employee relationship. This means that the company, that you helped start, must have the ability to fire you whenever it wants. You must relinquish your rights to control your employment in that regard. How would you feel about this?
* For similar reasons, owning majority stake in your company is nearly impossible, and owning any stake is generally frowned upon and investigated further by authorities.
* Work visas are per-company and per-job. You want to do some consulting on the side to keep the purse full? Tough luck, unless you also are able to get an H-1B from there. (hint: it's tough.)
If you had all these limitations, how likely is it that you'd be the next Sergey Brin? Is it any wonder that H-1Bs are not creating jobs for Americans? The reason for all this is that the H-1B was created for BigCo.
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> ComputerWorld revealed last week that the top 10 users of H-1B visas last year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys. Together these firms hired nearly half of all H-1B workers, and less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents.
Again, the H-1B system surely favors BigCO. The reason for this is because it was created for BigCO, and it was advanced by constant lobbying by BigCO. There is no equivalently large lobby, however, for the bright immigrant entrepreneurs that America wants. Brin himself is probably lobbying for the H-1B, as Google is in the top 10 H-1B employers.
"Less than 3% of them applied to become permanent residents". Honestly! This makes me angry. Do people think they didn't want to become permanent residents? Are we this out of touch? This is because they can't decide to apply to become permanent residents themselves! They need sponsorship for PERM (green card) applications too! But the companies don't want to take this costly and time consuming (6+ years for Indians) route often, when they can just replace them.
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There are more glaring things in the article, but I want to keep my point clear. Do I think H-1Bs are great? NO! God no. But calls to ban it are a bit overzealous. Please, have some compassion.
People seem to forget that H-1Bs are the only way to legal immigration for people who don't have ties to the US, or people like me whose American parents haven't lived in the US for a long time. Ban it, and the likes of me are screwed.
I hope that there comes a better alternative that doesn't serve corporate interests as much, that supports foreign founders who create jobs for Americans. Something that raises the bar for potential applicants and lowers the bar for consultancy-farms. I'm hopeful about the STEM visa. I like the startup visa. I think there are tons of flaws to be fixed in the system.
Please, consider what will happen to us, just as you consider what will happen to you. I understand that America must think of its own first. But consider how immigrants created entire...
No one has said anything about banning H1B in this thread. You're misdirecting us from the real issue which is that H1B program is about to be EXPANDED. This will accelerate the damage to the job market in places like NY/NJ/CA/TX where most H1Bs are placed. The amount of H1Bs that were previously admitted in a decade will now be admitted in slightly more than 2 years. What do you think that will do to salaries (yours included)?
>> But consider how immigrants created entire industries, when they were allowed to do so. Heck, most Americans are descendants of immigrants.
You are once again misdirecting. If you consider the statistics, a 3% citizenship rate is indicative that the H1B program is not really a immigration program at all -- it is actually a guest worker program.
What's wrong with that? Guest workers who have limited freedoms, are tied to their jobs for legal status, and can be sent back to India on their employer's whim are not really free market participants or citizens -- they are indentured servants or modern day slaves to the corporations that hold their visas. It's then unsurprising that this special class of workers lowers market salaries, or that expanding the number of people in this special class will lower salaries.
>> Do I think H-1Bs are great? NO! God no.
You admit that H1B is a awful visa, but you don't want to rock the boat and do anything about it. You are not actively campaigning to improve conditions, instead you are here misdirecting and essentially supporting the expansion of the H1B program in its current form. I'm sorry, but that's a mistaken attitude and I can't get behind that.
I think you read me wrong. I agree with everything you said, but you need to take your thought process one step further.
You are indeed right about the banning - in this thread. This issue, however, has been coming up recently (3-4 major articles in the last 45 days or so) and there is a growing "let's get rid of it" sentiment, but without proposals for an alternative. If you take a peek at my conclusion again, you'll see that this is what I'm asking for. An alternative.
>If you consider the statistics, a 3% citizenship rate is indicative that the H1B program is not really a immigration program at all -- it is actually a guest worker program.
Read again please, I agree with this exact point in the second section of my comment. I made the point that it's not the worker's choice, it's BigCo's choice. The system is set up to serve temp-workers to BigCo. I've supported this exact idea in the 5 bullet points I've made above that. What I disagree with was the implication in the original article that guest workers didn't want to naturalize. "less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents" makes it sound that way. They can't apply themselves!
I don't need lecturing about how guest workers have limited freedoms. I know firsthand! I'm not too keen on servitude myself! It's not that I don't think rocking the boat is a good idea, but I'm wary and scared. Do you know how many alternative visa program / immigration reform bills have been proposed so far? And how many have been passed? And how many of those have been bills that support the current long-term temporary worker style?
As my wise lawyer says, "I'll believe it when I see it".
I'm afraid that we're going to kick this system over, in favor of no system. And then no alternative is going to be agreed upon (in the Senate and House), or the alternative is going to be heavily lobbied yet again, to create a similar system, entrenching it even more.
Once again you are mixing in logical arguments with emotional ones, and using emotion to override logical arguments and ultimately support an unjust status quo.
You agree that changes need to happen. So why not lobby for the changes that you want to see? Why lobby for the status quo or the expansion of the current broken program?
From your comment, why not lobby for these:
1. Employers should NOT have the right to send people back within 30 days if they eliminate a position. Instead, the person should have the right to look for another job as long as the visa period has not expired.
2. Employers should not be involved in the green card application process -- people should apply for a green car on their own, after X years of stay.
Why not have a real change agenda instead of sniping at non-existing arguments (they'll ban H1B!) or adding support to the idea that being exploited by BigCos is the only way things can be?
As for why many of them don't become permanent residents: it is quite hard to jump from H1B to permanent residency. I'm facing this problem myself at the moment and there's no easy solution. Living in such uncertainty about your future is hard and many people are just like 'screw this' and leave after some period of time. It's not like they want to leave and take their work with them.
The point is that laws are such that they encourage you to leave the country after you've been educated and gotten good work experience. Which is crazy. You'd imagine there should be an easier way to become a permanent resident after you worked in a country for a while.
I register today just to say this
TL;DR: it sucks being here on visa. Even if I want to be a US-citizen and I contribute like a US-citizen, they still make sure I'm just a second-class in here.
I am a F-1 Visa Vietnamese student that recently got a pretty good offer in a big corp. I am really tired of being treated like half-resident person. While I do all of my duty (paying taxes), I never receive the benefits of being an resident.
First there was a out-of-state tuition for every public university in the US. For over 5 years in school, I've seen many of my friends run out of money because of this "premium" price we pay.
Now, some of us try to work to support our premium tuition, but we are not permitted to work outside of school. As a result, most of us would have to work illegally in some Asian restaurant, usually with under-minimal wage and no tips. I understand they stop us from getting a job to protect American. However, from what I observe, those minimal-wage jobs which could not be taken by international students will be taken by illegal immigrant anyway. So it puts the US government in a lose-lose situation: those jobs won't return to American citizen, and they lose some of the taxes. Maybe they should look at others country, such as UK (allowed to work up to 20h), or Australia(allowed to work in controlled manner)... and rethink.
The only way you can work, is to get a job in your college with minimal wage or to get an OPT. I've had a job on campus in which I design a website for dorm using bottle.py and backbone.js for... $9.5/hour. Before tax. An OPT is a program where you can work outside of your college for one year, but the job has to fit your major. I got my internship with EMC by OPT.
Now, although we do not have the benefits of being residents, we still have to do our duty while we are in here. I have to pay taxes like everyone else. I just finish doing my tax for last year. With one internship and an on-campus job, I fall in the second braket of tax, although I did pay a lot more for my education. We also do not have credit cards as no-one trusts us. I just got my frist creditcard after 6 years being here :).
Now, after 6 years of suffering, it finally pays off for me to have a offer for a big corp and be an h1-b visa. I can asure you that they pay me very competitively. However, it is still pretty damn hard to become a US-citizen from here. The process is lengthy, and sometime depends on luck. Not to mention if I want to bring my wife to the US, my wife will not be able to work at any form, not even on college campus.
Be grateful many people don't have these opportunities. We all pay the same for tuition if weren't not from that state. I've suffered working in a restaurant for the past 6 years and low rate college pay jobs. At least we can still afford tuition when a lot of people can't or don't even have the option to go to school.
I know it is not fair for americans to be unemployed because we foreigns are taking your positions; but you guys don't know what it feels to live in a third world country.
You can read all you want about poverty and violence, you can get shocked by the news and movies that touches that kind of topics. But you will hardly ever experience what it feels to live in real poverty. You don't know how it feels when your brothers or children are dying of starvation.
So I kept studying for years, stuck in a country were you can get killed anytime... became a freelance and later I was brought to the US under a H-1B visa. And guess what... it saved my life and my family's.
I've realized America is the kind of country that loves to exploit and get as much as possible from other countries (third world ones generally), and when it comes to give back some of that... well, you find this kind of reactions.
If the people who run unions were smart, they would have gotten rid of H-1B a long time ago. The tech industry is the only part of the USA economy that even has a potential for the sort of labor shortage required for healthy private-sector unions.
I am journalist for public radio and I'm doing a story on H1Bs. I am interested in getting the perspective of employees working on H1B visas. Anyone who is interested in sharing their experiences can reach me at Samharnett@gmail.com.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadWow, pretty bad case to blame immigrants.
As a father I can sympathize with the guy, it should be hard having to choose between a decent job offer and the ability to see your children every day. But mobility is one important factor in the job market, you don't always get to choose where to live while advancing your career (unless maybe if you're a rock star and telecommuting is viable), especially in STEM areas that have most jobs in large metros or startup/high-tech hubs.
While I don't dispute that there are holes in the program and abuse that happens, it has enabled us to find some folks for our team who have put us as a company on a different trajectory.
Disclaimer: data point of one.
I think anyone who is actually any good at programming could disagree with that statement.
There are 2 problems with H-1Bs:
1) Body shops in northern NJ bringing mediocre talent here, lying on their resumes to get them placed, and then paying them 1/10 of what they're billed as indentured servants.
2) Not enough visas for qualified people, partially because of 1.
If you're being outcompeted by the incompetent body shop employees, you need to step up your game rather than try to restrict the labor market.
The proper framing is that their visa can be held over their head to extract 14 hour days 6 or 7 days a week and other working conditions and salaries that Americans would not accept or be able to compete with (for good reason).
From all the people I know around here who're on an H1B, the salaries are quite on par with US nationals. I do admit that I don't know anyone working for the companies named in the article (TCS, Infosys).
The issue that needs more discussion is why not let US-educated non-immigrants have an easier path to Permanent Residency vs. letting them leave the country to start companies back in their homeland.
I would say the pay is same as Americans working along with them.
The reason many companies are off-shoring to India is that there are more people with mix of domain and technical knowledge in India.
I'm a little bit confused in here. Is it the same 65k visa cap for Europe and India? Does that mean that Tata and Infosys have taken half of it and people who they hired weren't even working in US?
I didn't squeeze into the last year's visa quota and decided to stay in UK (hearing - "if you reapply we might get a visa for you in a year" is not very encouraging). From what I heard, getting H1B is becoming quite of a race against time as the places are getting filled out quickly. I think I know why now.
That's why most people never get PR. The main reason is not to short charge the client, but to give chance to other workers in India, cause most companies pay them only $5k to $14k/per year back in India(That's the market rate in India). There is a rat race where people have to fight to fly to US or other western countries so that they can earn 10X more.
That sounds wrong. The period of the H1-B visa stay is three years.
From the H1-Bs we employ, I know they receive comparable (and sometimes higher, since we tend to pay slightly below market and H1-B salaries are somewhat inflexible) salaries to their resident/citizen counterparts.
However, I have had the misfortune of interviewing a number of candidates coming from companies like those mentioned- they are indeed underpaid. However, they're also unemployable, because they are trained in highly specific areas. I interviewed more than one .NET candidate that did not know SQL, for example.
The sad reality is that they are underpaid because they are underqualified. In an ideal world no company would make do with that, but as these employers demonstrate, it's quite possible to get by stringing together a collection of underqualified employees and pay them less.
Overall I see H1-B visas as a means of companies to suppress wages of domestic IT workers. I know entirely way too many good software engineers and developers looking for jobs for there to be a "shortage".
That being said I am very aware that my comment like the rest of the comments is anecdotal. I am hopeful more objective numbers can be found that will allow us to have a more informed conversation on this.
I remember Scott Adams using the word "managerish" to describe decisions like this.
If you take "you could find employees at a higher salary" as a proof that the shortage doesn't exist you'll virtually always have that proof. Under that definition shortages don't exist which feels like some sort of semantic trickery.
If companies are hiring workers who can do the job and are willing to do it for less than domestic workers, why is that wrong?
Here in NYC startup-land we have no trouble finding talent at "market" rates. Granted, market-rate for an engineer with even just a few years of experience and up-to-date tech skills is $150K-200K total comp.
I've noticed that the H-1B discussions tend to be extremely polarized, and it reflects the bimodal distribution of the tech industry. There's the highly-paid glam side (see: Google, Facebook, etc) where comp is high and you meet $200K H-1B engineers around every corner.
And then there's the bodyshop consultancy side of the industry, where cheap H-1Bs are brought in by the planeload and shopped out to clients at insane markups.
The bimodality of H-1Bs is important to remember. Personally, I have trouble meeting devs around here making less than, say, $120K, H-1B or otherwise.
Of course, if you're willing to hire remotely, the H1-B thing gets much less pressing, as you can simply hire people overseas and keep them there, no need for a visa at all.
Where are you located? Certainly in NYC I don't know a single good developer looking for a job.
In this market the only good engineers I see having problems looking for jobs are those who are unwilling to relocate or older guys.
But the companies should then need to compete in the free market for those hires.
1) Decouple the work authorization from the employer. The employee gets an open work permit for X (say 5) years.
2) If you can prove you have been gainfully employed above some agreed upon salary (via tax records) for 3+ years you get temporary permanent residency without any employer interference/input. You then finish out the other formalities (health, security checks) to get the official permanent residency.
The goal of 1) is to empower the employee with work mobility that does not affect future residency. If there really is a skill shortage they can leave without additional formalities or negotiate for better compensation. If they are talented, have stayed legal in other respects, and wish to stay in the US, they are now set.
For the employer case, this is true for prospective immigrants of all national origins except India and China, which also make up the bulk of potential engineers looking to become permanent residents. As of today, the average time for an Indian in the EB2 ('advanced degree or exceptional ability') category is roughly 5-6 years and this number is going up because of increased demand. For the EB3 category, the wait is at least a decade.
I agree that companies have the potential to abuse this power they have over you, but in practice, I have rarely seen this happen.
You have rarely seen this happen because it is illegal. It is also illegal to hire based on nationality, gender, race or any other identifying feature. You can't seriously claim that this doesn't happen in practice. While this may be cynical, I don't doubt this for a minute.
America seems to be very harsh to legal immigrants, but pretty nice to illegal immigrants.
I think it's good for a country to import some competition. After all, h1b has a 60000 cap each year, that's not too many people.
There's engineers and then there's engineers. If he could code (or was interested in coding) fluently in modern web environments, I suspect he'd have no problem finding a job at all...
However, there is nothing wrong in the way Mr. Obama replied. Watch the video to get how article kind of distorts that fact.
I'm probably too independently minded, but I'm not sure I could be bothered to give a rat's ass about what my family thought of me with respect to my job or how I live my life. If I'm working, keeping a roof over my family's head, enjoying what I do and getting better in my profession... tough cheese if someone in my family doesn't 'consider me human' - that says far more about them than me.
Like every other organization these ones also have politics and that makes things a lot worse for the employees.
Anyone who reads through job listings for engineers (all types, as in real engineers) and programmers will also conclude that many job descriptions and salaries are designed so that a) there are practically zero people who will match the 'minimum' requirements, despite the fact that most of the deficiencies candidates are likely to have can be solved by 3 months or less of training, and b) if there were any Americans with the actual qualifications expressed, they would never work for the listed salary.
It's also worth noting, the hidden secret to getting cheap developers in the US is to be based somewhere that doesn't have a huge tech hub.
If you base yourself in moderate size cities you'll find a hidden field of competent applicants who will take salaries close to $50k a year just because there are few jobs in mainstream America that aren't Java or .Net unless they move to a tech hub (people often do not want to live in NYC or SF, at any cost). And 50k in a region they like with a tech they don't hate is better than moving. On average.
I should know. I'm a competent (but not end of the world amazing jock rock star hipster) developer getting paid 50k a year somewhere in America that is distinctly not New York or California. And my company pretty much has me locked in because there are pretty much no other businesses or shops in town that use Javascript or Python or other similar common open source languages instead of .Net or Java (or PHP). (Obviously not an issue of technical ability, but language taste.)
As an H1B holder on his third job in the US, I can tell you that we aren't actually beholden to any employer.
You're right that it's a little more complicated. A family friend is here from India on some kind of visa where she is able to switch employers, but she has to leave if a new one won't sponsor her or something. But she pays (or paid) thousands of dollars to some agency in India to fix her up with a job/jobs.
What really gets me in her case is that she has a child who has lived here for over a decade and can't get in-state tuition without special treatment despite being legal.
The principle is absolutely simple- an H1B visa is freely transferrable to a new employer. There is absolutely nothing (legal) that your old employer can do in retribution once the transfer is complete, and it is possible to go through the transfer process without notifying your current employer.
What you can say about technology right now in USA, there are two large disjoint islands. There is the silicon valley kinds of "cool"/startup technology and then there is run of the mill "IT" for Bank/Insurance/Big-Non-IT technology. Outsourcers go after the latter kind and in fact can only go after the latter kind. Their premise is to hire really below average "Engineers" in India, and expect them to just learn the tricks of the trade to replace/take over another run-of-the mill IT job.
The point is, if your day job is just about maintaining/coding something mind numbing, with no real value add or just being a cog in the wheel in some Big-Co that has nothing to do with technology, you can expect someone to do your job much cheaper. Probably the quality will dip, but then the Big-Co hardly cares about its software right?
Whereas, if you look at the stuff being done in the "valley like" companies, you won't find those outsourced developers. You will still find smart Indians on H1, but then the non-linearity of their talent is at play. Although, I have seen valley companies outsource their QA (manual testing).
I think it is important that one keeps working hard on moving from the second island to the first, no matter who it is (American or otherwise). There is nothing new about this... we have seen this happen to manufacturing. It has happened to web design - Go to elance and you will find at least 20:1 ratio of some Indian firm to US firm. All of them compete at the low-end of the scale.
It is very hard to secure a comfortable life in that lower-end of the technology pipeline living here in USA.
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> But in reality, most of today's H-1B workers don't stick around to become the next Albert Einstein or Sergey Brin
I recently wrote a letter to a Congressperson about this, regarding the recent House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Immigration Reform. The same point was brought up there too. Do these people think it's easy to start a company on an H-1B? It's near impossible. I'd know, because I've looked into it with a brilliant lawyer. Let's take a look at the factors.
* H-1B costs around 4-5k, and the result of the application is uncertain. Would you want an uncertain cofounder? Would investors?
* H-1B workers must be paid prevailing wage. For a programmer in Cambridge, MA, the cheapest level-1 codemonkey must be paid around $55k/yr. How many of us started out paying ourselves that much money? Or any money for that matter?
* A document called the Neufeld Memo from 2008 states that the H-1B sponsor and worker need an employer-employee relationship. This means that the company, that you helped start, must have the ability to fire you whenever it wants. You must relinquish your rights to control your employment in that regard. How would you feel about this?
* For similar reasons, owning majority stake in your company is nearly impossible, and owning any stake is generally frowned upon and investigated further by authorities.
* Work visas are per-company and per-job. You want to do some consulting on the side to keep the purse full? Tough luck, unless you also are able to get an H-1B from there. (hint: it's tough.)
If you had all these limitations, how likely is it that you'd be the next Sergey Brin? Is it any wonder that H-1Bs are not creating jobs for Americans? The reason for all this is that the H-1B was created for BigCo.
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> ComputerWorld revealed last week that the top 10 users of H-1B visas last year were all offshore outsourcing firms such as Tata and Infosys. Together these firms hired nearly half of all H-1B workers, and less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents.
Again, the H-1B system surely favors BigCO. The reason for this is because it was created for BigCO, and it was advanced by constant lobbying by BigCO. There is no equivalently large lobby, however, for the bright immigrant entrepreneurs that America wants. Brin himself is probably lobbying for the H-1B, as Google is in the top 10 H-1B employers.
"Less than 3% of them applied to become permanent residents". Honestly! This makes me angry. Do people think they didn't want to become permanent residents? Are we this out of touch? This is because they can't decide to apply to become permanent residents themselves! They need sponsorship for PERM (green card) applications too! But the companies don't want to take this costly and time consuming (6+ years for Indians) route often, when they can just replace them.
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There are more glaring things in the article, but I want to keep my point clear. Do I think H-1Bs are great? NO! God no. But calls to ban it are a bit overzealous. Please, have some compassion.
People seem to forget that H-1Bs are the only way to legal immigration for people who don't have ties to the US, or people like me whose American parents haven't lived in the US for a long time. Ban it, and the likes of me are screwed.
I hope that there comes a better alternative that doesn't serve corporate interests as much, that supports foreign founders who create jobs for Americans. Something that raises the bar for potential applicants and lowers the bar for consultancy-farms. I'm hopeful about the STEM visa. I like the startup visa. I think there are tons of flaws to be fixed in the system.
Please, consider what will happen to us, just as you consider what will happen to you. I understand that America must think of its own first. But consider how immigrants created entire...
No one has said anything about banning H1B in this thread. You're misdirecting us from the real issue which is that H1B program is about to be EXPANDED. This will accelerate the damage to the job market in places like NY/NJ/CA/TX where most H1Bs are placed. The amount of H1Bs that were previously admitted in a decade will now be admitted in slightly more than 2 years. What do you think that will do to salaries (yours included)?
>> But consider how immigrants created entire industries, when they were allowed to do so. Heck, most Americans are descendants of immigrants.
You are once again misdirecting. If you consider the statistics, a 3% citizenship rate is indicative that the H1B program is not really a immigration program at all -- it is actually a guest worker program.
What's wrong with that? Guest workers who have limited freedoms, are tied to their jobs for legal status, and can be sent back to India on their employer's whim are not really free market participants or citizens -- they are indentured servants or modern day slaves to the corporations that hold their visas. It's then unsurprising that this special class of workers lowers market salaries, or that expanding the number of people in this special class will lower salaries.
>> Do I think H-1Bs are great? NO! God no.
You admit that H1B is a awful visa, but you don't want to rock the boat and do anything about it. You are not actively campaigning to improve conditions, instead you are here misdirecting and essentially supporting the expansion of the H1B program in its current form. I'm sorry, but that's a mistaken attitude and I can't get behind that.
You are indeed right about the banning - in this thread. This issue, however, has been coming up recently (3-4 major articles in the last 45 days or so) and there is a growing "let's get rid of it" sentiment, but without proposals for an alternative. If you take a peek at my conclusion again, you'll see that this is what I'm asking for. An alternative.
>If you consider the statistics, a 3% citizenship rate is indicative that the H1B program is not really a immigration program at all -- it is actually a guest worker program.
Read again please, I agree with this exact point in the second section of my comment. I made the point that it's not the worker's choice, it's BigCo's choice. The system is set up to serve temp-workers to BigCo. I've supported this exact idea in the 5 bullet points I've made above that. What I disagree with was the implication in the original article that guest workers didn't want to naturalize. "less than 3 percent of them applied to become permanent residents" makes it sound that way. They can't apply themselves!
I don't need lecturing about how guest workers have limited freedoms. I know firsthand! I'm not too keen on servitude myself! It's not that I don't think rocking the boat is a good idea, but I'm wary and scared. Do you know how many alternative visa program / immigration reform bills have been proposed so far? And how many have been passed? And how many of those have been bills that support the current long-term temporary worker style?
As my wise lawyer says, "I'll believe it when I see it".
I'm afraid that we're going to kick this system over, in favor of no system. And then no alternative is going to be agreed upon (in the Senate and House), or the alternative is going to be heavily lobbied yet again, to create a similar system, entrenching it even more.
Is this fear not justified?
You agree that changes need to happen. So why not lobby for the changes that you want to see? Why lobby for the status quo or the expansion of the current broken program?
From your comment, why not lobby for these:
1. Employers should NOT have the right to send people back within 30 days if they eliminate a position. Instead, the person should have the right to look for another job as long as the visa period has not expired.
2. Employers should not be involved in the green card application process -- people should apply for a green car on their own, after X years of stay.
Why not have a real change agenda instead of sniping at non-existing arguments (they'll ban H1B!) or adding support to the idea that being exploited by BigCos is the only way things can be?
Norm Matloff's H1B web page should be required reading for anyone who wants to discuss this: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
He definitely falls on one side of the issue, but he's the leading academic researcher on the subject.
I am a F-1 Visa Vietnamese student that recently got a pretty good offer in a big corp. I am really tired of being treated like half-resident person. While I do all of my duty (paying taxes), I never receive the benefits of being an resident. First there was a out-of-state tuition for every public university in the US. For over 5 years in school, I've seen many of my friends run out of money because of this "premium" price we pay.
Now, some of us try to work to support our premium tuition, but we are not permitted to work outside of school. As a result, most of us would have to work illegally in some Asian restaurant, usually with under-minimal wage and no tips. I understand they stop us from getting a job to protect American. However, from what I observe, those minimal-wage jobs which could not be taken by international students will be taken by illegal immigrant anyway. So it puts the US government in a lose-lose situation: those jobs won't return to American citizen, and they lose some of the taxes. Maybe they should look at others country, such as UK (allowed to work up to 20h), or Australia(allowed to work in controlled manner)... and rethink.
The only way you can work, is to get a job in your college with minimal wage or to get an OPT. I've had a job on campus in which I design a website for dorm using bottle.py and backbone.js for... $9.5/hour. Before tax. An OPT is a program where you can work outside of your college for one year, but the job has to fit your major. I got my internship with EMC by OPT.
Now, although we do not have the benefits of being residents, we still have to do our duty while we are in here. I have to pay taxes like everyone else. I just finish doing my tax for last year. With one internship and an on-campus job, I fall in the second braket of tax, although I did pay a lot more for my education. We also do not have credit cards as no-one trusts us. I just got my frist creditcard after 6 years being here :).
Now, after 6 years of suffering, it finally pays off for me to have a offer for a big corp and be an h1-b visa. I can asure you that they pay me very competitively. However, it is still pretty damn hard to become a US-citizen from here. The process is lengthy, and sometime depends on luck. Not to mention if I want to bring my wife to the US, my wife will not be able to work at any form, not even on college campus.
I know it is not fair for americans to be unemployed because we foreigns are taking your positions; but you guys don't know what it feels to live in a third world country.
You can read all you want about poverty and violence, you can get shocked by the news and movies that touches that kind of topics. But you will hardly ever experience what it feels to live in real poverty. You don't know how it feels when your brothers or children are dying of starvation.
So I kept studying for years, stuck in a country were you can get killed anytime... became a freelance and later I was brought to the US under a H-1B visa. And guess what... it saved my life and my family's.
I've realized America is the kind of country that loves to exploit and get as much as possible from other countries (third world ones generally), and when it comes to give back some of that... well, you find this kind of reactions.