There's a lot of H1B's on here. You have friends overseas who you want to see succeed in the Bay Area.
In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor.
It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
This is not a Xenophobic reaction, it's simply reality.
I've worked at multiple companies (managed their websites) -- where we would temporarily post a job description to appear that it was a fair playing field for local workers -- when in reality that position was definitely, absolutely going to be filled by a cheaper, exploitable H1B visa position.
It happens all-the-fucking-time.
There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now. There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)
We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating.
I got a H-1B visa. I was living in Ireland at the time. But, as it turned out, I never moved to the US.
It was for a compiler position at Borland. I ended up working remotely for the next 6 years or so, first for a year as a contractor at a 6 figure Euro rate, then later as a salaried employee after I moved to London. They flew me over two to four times a year to keep up to date with the team. I collectively lived over 6 months in Scotts Valley, albeit in hotels. All this wasn't cheap.
You're generalizing from a stereotype you've seen. But don't think it represents all situations. The mentality you've got is the same one at work with racism and sexism. It's reductive and will mislead you.
There's a certain amount of tech talent at any given technical ability level available worldwide, and only a fraction of it is in the US. The opportunities to leverage tech talent are, however, larger in northern CA than most other places. And some things can only be implemented by people with the right level of ability. When you artificially limit the supply of qualified labour, all you can do is shuffle your existing resources - paying more won't increase the supply quickly enough. Limiting supply of able labour will reduce the speed of innovation and economic growth - including for locals.
Maybe these "body shops" are a problem. I don't know for sure - I don't have enough information. The way they are talked about, it doesn't sound like the quality of people brought in is terribly high, so it seems to me you don't have much to worry about re competition, unless you're not very capable. On the other hand, it sounds like it could be upskilling India as these people get rotated out, which to my mind is a good thing - beggar-thy-neighbour policies don't pay off in the long run, and besides are morally questionable when the disparity in wealth is very large.
I'm a software engineer and green card holder from Brazil and there is nothing I want more than to see many of my friends who work in Brazil have the opportunity to come here to work in a great industry. That being said, both you and the anon person you replied to are right about the situation.
The position you came to fill is a relatively rare skill here in the US and it helps the US to bring in talent from abroad, but the person you replied to isn't wrong. It's not like compiler engineers don't exist in the US. They most certainly do and they most certainly would make more money if you couldn't get compiler people from abroad.
Personally, I would love it if we were far more liberal with giving out H1-B visas, but also required companies to pay those H1-B visa holders a premium over local talent. i.e. if the market rate is foo, then you need to pay 1.5x foo salary to bring that person from abroad. This would ensure that companies actually can get access to all the talent they need irrespective of origin, but that the talent that comes from abroad doesn't depress salaries.
1.5x foo is friggin' cheap if the alternatively is not having the talent at all. It also forces you to always consider domestic labor first if it exists instead of abusing the H1-B visa program to get cheap labor like many companies do.
Such a system would also serve to help salaries rise to the levels enjoyed by doctors and lawyers (which is really where salaries should be for any solid engineer). If this means certain business models are no longer viable, then c'est la vie. There's nothing that says that you have a right to a business model that wouldn't exist if salaries were not depressed.
Alternatively, I would be okay with eliminating the lottery and giving visas out on the basis of the premium companies are willing to pay over the salary a domestic worker would be paid. If your company is willing to pay 2.0x foo for a position, then you will get the H1-B visa ahead of a company only willing to pay 1.5x foo. The floor would be set at something like 1.1x foo.
Thus, when I hear people complain of companies who hire H1Bs only because they want to pay them less, I always want to ask, "why haven't you reported them?"
Either they don't actually know that the companies are exclusively paying H1Bs less, or they don't believe that the government will enforce the salary floor. Either way, raising the salary floor from 1x to 1.5x probably won't address their concerns.
I don't know the salaries of any of the H1-B visa holders at my company. Do you?
Maybe we can make it a policy that companies make such information public when they employ more than N number of H1-B holders. With mean, median, standard deviation and error bars, you should be able to get an idea of whether or not this is happening.
Besides these numbers for salary, it would also be interesting to see the same statistics for years of experience programming of domestic labor versus imported labor. I would expect to see a significantly greater mean and median years of experience among H1-B holders versus domestically sourced talent.
That data is extremely skimpy. Where is the comparative data? All I saw was one figure, "prevailing wage". What is the sample size? Is the sample based on workers operating in the same region (for example a company with multiple locations could very well cite a domestic salary relative to all locations (bringing the average down) or cite numbers from the cheapest region. etc. etc. etc. There are a many ways to lie with statistics and the number of ways you can lie with them is inversely proportional to the quantity of statistics released.
When I was working at apple IS&T 6 months ago, I saw paystubs of people working for TCS and Cognizant Technology solutions. Cognizant is paying $65K per annum in the bay area; TCS is paying $85K per annum in the bay area.
Think of rents in Sunnyvale: $2K per 1b/1b. Still people save, even on $65K salary, because one lives with 4 other roomies.
When I hear people retort that "companies aren't allowed to do that", I always want to say: "Did you try a simple web-search to find out how they do it anyway?"
For example, there are loopholes in both salary-calculation and also in terms of crafting hideously specific (and not entirely honest) requirements and then claiming nobody local can fill them.
Yeah. The first example I cited in this comment[0] looks like one of those "hideously specific (and not entirely honest) requirements" that no one is going to be able to fill or even consider filling.
If you cite a job with high requirements and a relatively low associated wage, you're essentially describing a job that only foreign talent is going to be able and willing to fill. I don't know a single person that meets the criteria for that position and isn't earning way more already. What self-respecting domestic candidate with the freedom to change jobs freely and that knows his worth would ever apply for such a position?
High requirements? The only experience requirement is "Two (2) years of experience in providing technical service support." Even with a master's degree, $92,000 seems reasonable to me for someone with only 2 years of support experience.
I had this boss in Brazil that also own some business in Florida - when he wants to hire some H1B from Brazil he just adds "fluent in Portuguese" to the job description.
> Alternatively, I would be okay with eliminating the lottery and giving visas out on the basis of the premium companies are willing to pay over the salary a domestic worker would be paid. If your company is willing to pay 2.0x foo for a position, then you will get the H1-B visa ahead of a company only willing to pay 1.5x foo. The floor would be set at something like 1.1x foo.
That would only help the largest companies, and would put the relatively new and smaller companies at a disadvantage...
This. You need to make money to be able to pay for the workers you need for your business to function. To argue against this reality is akin to saying: "I want there to be H1-B visa holders so wages remain low", which is the exact what the top most comment is saying H1-B visas do.
Developers are valuable. We should be paid accordingly. Many of us are employees now. A fraction of us will become founders one day. This approach simply allows companies to actually get the talent they urgently need to succeed. Paying a premium should absolutely not be a problem if you in fact do have a genuine need for talent that doesn't exist in the US at any price (which is the argument being made in this blog post).
I want to be paid a fair wage. I also plan on being a founder (again. failed once). If engineer wages rise making some business models inviable, c'est la vie. I will just have to make sure to start a business that can actually earn money and pay the bills to hire the talent I will need. When I do found my own company, I am more interested in being able to get the talent than paying a premium.
The way things are now, the benefit basically already goes to the Google's and Apple's of the World. How many startups actually go through the whole process of trying to get H1-B visas to get talent. Every startup I know doesn't consider the process viable because it's not expedient. If I need an engineer within 6 months and I have a candidate willing to work for my business from another country, it would be amazing to pay a 1.5x premium to actually be able to have them over here in the US and helping me and my colleagues build a business together ASAP. The H1-B visa process is so drawn out right now that by the time you get your H1-B visa candidate you're already at the end of your runway.
I would love to see AeroFS write a blog post considering the solution I proposed (which many agree with judging by the number of upvotes thus far).
Tons of the so-called engineering shortage complaints can be condensed to not paying as well as google/fb/linkedin/netflix, offering at best the same environment and working conditions (though often much worse), then bitching that skilled engineers aren't jumping at the chance to work for you.
When hiring managers are asked to consider some subset of {more money, more vacation, true flex time, remote work, 4 day work weeks} in lieu of the cash, benefits, and environment the top tier employers pay, they refuse. And continue the bitching.
Also, the stunning discovery that, post incorporating in sf, people from the peninsula and south bay are unfathomably not as excited about a 50-60+ minute one-way commute as you thought they'd be.
Maybe, but the problem is that the larger a company is, the harder time they have recognizing talent, so it seems like a wash to me.
There is a reason why successful startups tend to be friends who closely know eachother and recognize the talent in eachother. Recognizing talent takes time and knowledge and it isn't something you can foist onto an HR department or recruiter.
> salaries rise to the levels enjoyed by doctors and lawyers
The BLS says the median salary for a lawyer is $112k. Median salary for a software developer is $93k.
The $19k difference is not that big when you consider that lawyers have a higher startup cost and higher ongoing cost - wardrobe, dry cleaning, law school tuition + 3 years' opportunity cost. Plus law firms can be a grind, far more than soft eng gigs.
Those are national salaries - the numbers change when you compare programmers in high cost regions to other professions in the same region.
For instance, the national average for software developers is quite a bit higher than for registered nurses, but when you consider bay area salaries, registered nurses earn at the median slightly more than software developers (in San Jose, it is 122k vs 116k, check US News Best Jobs for data).
As for law - the average salary for a lawyer working in San Jose is $183,000 a year (http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/lawyer/salary). It's true that lawyers have to go to three years of law school, but people don't fail out of typical pre-law majors like history or political science and major in CS or engineering because they;re easier, and plenty of programmers have grad degrees.
Also, attrition rates in elite graduate engineering schools are vastly higher than they are at elite law or med schools. The attrition rate for many science PhD programs is 50%. Engineering is a little better at 35% or so. Attrition rates for elite law and medical schools tend to be below 0.5%.
It's a tough comparison, because technically, you don't need any degree at all to be a programmer (you don't even need to know how to program, there's no licensing). But to graduate from an ABET accredited program and get a grad degree, even just an MS rather than a PhD? I'd say it's a much tougher program than history major followed by law school.
Like I said in a different post, the "shortage" of engineers appears to be a rational response to salary and career prospects. Engineering and programming are difficult jogs, and they pays less than people with this sort of academic inclination and propensity for hard, focused work can earn elsewhere. There is absolutely no need for government intervention to solve a "shortage" of programmers or engineers.
> when you consider that lawyers have a higher startup cost and higher ongoing cost - wardrobe, dry cleaning, law school tuition + 3 years' opportunity cost. Plus law firms can be a grind, far more than soft eng gigs.
How much you should earn is about supply versus demand, the latter of which is dependent on value created. The cost structure underneath merely sets the minimum price at which a profession is viable.
The BLS has been thoroughly discredited. $93K isn't that impressive not when a cop or fireman starts off at $100K in Silicon Valley WITHOUT going to college.
That's why I'd support allocating H1Bs by highest-salary-first, instead of via the current first-come-first-served system with a difficult to enforce "prevailing rate" requirement tacked on. Doing so would also tend to allocate the slots to areas where they're most in demand: if a company is offering $140k salary and wants an H1B to bring the person in, I'm more willing to believe this job has a shortage than if another company is offering only $60k for a job that supposedly has a shortage.
This is elegantly simple, puts the right market incentives in place for all the affected parties, and makes so much sense I'm sure it will never happen.
(For the reason cited in your parenthetical comment.)
At the same time, I think it would be awesome to start a petition to draw attention to such an idea so that it does become part of the agenda somehow. If such an idea did become part of the national discussion regarding H1-B visas, it would be extremely difficult for those trying to get these visas to depress wages to argue against this.
I for one would sign such a petition and I know a lot of people who would (American workers and existing H1-B holders). It's important that the opinion of both groups is represented in the debate. Is there a PAC or other organization that would lobby on behalf of such a solution?
Given that the White House gave information that they are asking the USCIS to streamline processing of visa through these kinds of tweaks (the law doesn't say how the quotas should be distributed AFAIK), I believe the correct venue would be a whitehouse.gov petition.
> There's a certain amount of tech talent at any given technical ability level available worldwide
Surely then wages would be skyrocketing for that limited number of qualified workers, rather than remaining static, which they have. This is what has happened in the past in the tech industry, and it's what happens in other industries. Supply and demand, as you said.
> paying more won't increase the supply quickly enough
So individual companies wont pay more because the national supply wont increase as a result? This doesn't make sense
> When you artificially limit the supply of qualified labour, all you can do is shuffle your existing resources - paying more won't increase the supply quickly enough.
Yes, but that is all that needs to happen actually. The problem is not a shortage of talent-- the problem is the proliferation of meaningless projects drowning out the signal in the noise. What we need is a system to get the best engineers working on the most important projects and to let the rest sort itself out. We don't need multitudes of mediocrity-- we need rather the most talented producing moderate amounts of highest quality work toward the right ends.
>I've worked at multiple companies (managed their websites) -- where we would temporarily post a job description to >appear that it was a fair playing field for local workers -- when in reality that position was definitely, absolutely >going to be filled by a cheaper, exploitable H1B visa position.
I worked as a contract developer for over 10 years and this was absolutely the norm for the companies I worked at. It was so egregious at some places that HR would go as far as to get the exact list of skills from the H1B they wanted to hire and then tailor a job posting to that exact list of skills in order to disqualify local applicants.
The H1B system is broken. It is easily gamed and the burden of proof of wrongdoing so high that it is impossible to prevent companies from doing this.
Edit: I want to add that I'm sure that there are companies whose management doesn't abuse the H1B system. My position that the H1B system is broken remains unchanged as it is the bad actors that are causing the problems yet there is no remedy short of congressional action that can properly address the issue.
I agree... (was on H1). The core problem is that the sponsoring company is in control. Control needs to be moved to the candidate (worker). The H1 should not be tied to the employer, but to the candidate, and they should be able to switch employers by registering their new employer with the DHS (HR of the new company and employee act on signing day). H1'ers should be free to move at will and immediately after entering the country (or at most, a 3-4 month wait).
Most of the time the consultancies put H1'ers on the bench waiting for a job... i.e., they over subscribe H1-B's every year. There needs to be an exponential charge to avoid over subscribing tactics... perhaps the app fees double (and keep doubling) for each additional candidate past 2.
Allowing H1Bs to bounce around (unless each job they take can't be filled by the domestic workforce) would violate the intent of the law.
"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."
H1Bs need to be allowed to bounce around because this is the core of the problem! Everyone seems to love to skirt around the real issue. The real issue is that people are brought here and they can't go anywhere regardless of how bad the system sucks except back home. In most cases the places they are coming from are in an even worst state so we stay here instead. At least other things aren't so bad. I came to the united states on an H1B and yes I was paid significantly less than what I thought I was worth and also well below what US citizens and GC holders were paid for a number of years. It was a tough time for me and I had 2 choices then, either go back home to a non-existent economy and get paid even less doing some menial job or wait it out with my crappy paycheck until I get a green card. If I moved to any other company my green card process would restart so guess what I was stuck. If H1Bs were allowed to move around, body shops would disappear overnight. Bigger companies that I worked at paid through their teeth for H1Bs but they were usually hired as consultants. I work at a really big company now (won't say the name) and there is no way we will hire someone full-time who can't pass our interview loop regardless of how much we are saving. It's too costly in other areas and almost impossible to fire them for non-performance. But we'll take a chance on hiring an H1B contractor that a body shop supplies. We pay the body shop exorbitant sums of money, body shop pays employees a pittance.
Companies are supposed to pay an H1-B workers the prevailing wage. But the fact is that real wages are a very wide range that would depend on your exact skills and competence. So companies can get away with paying an H1-B worker less than his real market value and the worker cannot easily switch jobs. If the worker could easily switch jobs, then there is no real incentive for the company to hire a worker and pay him lower wages (). Because, very soon he will switch to another company that pays him his real wage. The problem with the H1-B system is that the law is based on the assumption that fare wages can be enforced by statute as opposed to by ensuring competition.
() One can argue that large companies might have incentives to bring in more H1-Bs to increase the overall labor pool, which in turn will reduce wages for everyone. This can partially be offset by having high fees for H1-B workers.
An O-1 requires "extraordinary ability by sustained national or international acclaim and must be coming temporarily to the United States to continue work in the area of extraordinary ability."
>Extraordinary ability in the fields of science, education, business or athletics means a level of expertise indicating that the person is one of the small percentage who has risen to the very top of the field of endeavor.
I am confident I can get one for a truly talented hacker or computer scientist.
There's lots of evidence out there. Probably the most obvious signal for you should be that companies are complaining about a lack of workers, but wages are stagnant. Or another signal might be the fact that 50% of STEM grads have to work in unrelated industries because of an inability to find work in tech. If you want more proof of funniness:
Do you have a citation for "50% of STEM grads have to work in unrelated industries because of an inability to find work in tech"?
Many STEM graduates choose not to work in tech, for example math majors who go into finance, or chem majors who go into consulting. And, many STEM grads are not actually qualified to work in tech. A BS in biology is certainly a STEM degree but that person is not likely to help scale your Rails application.
"Purported labor market shortages for scientists and engineers are anecdotal and also not supported by the available evidence"
"the education system produces qualified graduates far in excess of demand: S&E occupations make up only about one-twentieth of all workers, and each year there are more than three times as many S&E four-year college graduates as S&E job openings"
"The departure of STEM graduates to other fields starts early. In 2008, the NSF surveyed STEM graduates who’d earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in 2006 and 2007. It found that 2 out of 10 were already working in non-STEM fields. And 10 years after receiving a STEM degree, 58 percent of STEM graduates had left the field"
Of the 50% of engineering graduates not working in engineering, 40% of CS grads not in CS, (35% total are working in totally unrelated fields), ~50% are not working in their fields because of pay and conditions, 37% are not working in their fields because they can't find work, and 10% are not working in the field for another reason. The 37% probably aren't the people who moved into management consulting.
Certainly some STEM grads may not be qualified to work in tech, but i'd argue that a biology major would easily adapt to working in the average web development shop. And certainly a mathematician or engineer would (obviously).
MBA summer interns from elite schools can equal or exceed this as well.
We don't talk about a "shortage" of lawyers or MBAs, though because we know that this isn't typical. Also, for some reason, there seems to be a stronger cultural objection to engineers getting paid as well as lawyers, MBAs, or physicians. I think it's partly because when you say "lawyer" or "physician", people think of a serious, middle aged person with grey hair. When you say "programmer", people think of a young socially inept person. I don't agree with the stereotype at all, but I think it's part of why people would be so quick to conclude that an unobjectionable salary for a lawyer is "astronomical" for a developer.
I'd also say that comparing software development intern salaries at well paying companies probably represents developer pay in its best light. I'm not saying it's misleading or inaccurate - it's a perfectly valid snapshot. But software developers draw higher salaries out of the gate, but may fade in the stretch. Comparing what career developers earn at age 50 with their lawyer or doctor friends would probably give you a different picture that should also be considered. Ultimately, look at the general data - in San Francisco, the median salary for a software developer is just a little more than it is for a dental hygienist and a little lower than for a registered nurse. Yet many people feel that this indicates a severe shortage - I agree something doesn't add up here, but to me, the evidence suggests no particular shortage of developers.
> "H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only" ; "it's simple reality" ; "Without a doubt" ; "It happens all-the-fucking-time" ; "There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area"
Presenting something as a fact doesn't make it one.
You're basically saying that American tech companies should only hire Americans. That the facebook, Google, Mozilla, ... shouldn't hire smart people from other countries.
As someone who doesn't live in the US but would like to work in this industry, I will probably have to relocate to the US (either in the Bay Area or New York). Do you mean that offers I've got in the past were because I'm "cheap labor"? (as in "Let's fly you from the other side of the world, pay for the crazy high VISA fees, pay for relocation, ... and then pay you the same as those that already live in the Bay Area")
Your remarks about "divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos" with "communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating" just makes it worst. I'm not even going to guess who the "We" in your message refers to.
>You're basically saying that American tech companies should only hire Americans. That the facebook, Google, Mozilla, ... shouldn't hire smart people from other countries.
No, the system just needs to be reformed. And I've seen the right reform proposal often enough to be circulating it myself:
* The government can give out N visas in an auction. Firms bid via legally-binding salary offers. The N highest salaries bid get the visas, and the government takes a small additional payroll tax as the only fee.
* The visas adhere to the workers, not the companies.
That will greatly improve the current system for the workers while enabling everyone genuinely in need of high-skilled labor to get it.
Of course, it's worth noting that some degree of so-called "nativism" is just part of the social contract. It's the price we pay for having a society that enforces cooperative coordination among citizens instead of letting everything be run by uncoordinated, law-of-the-jungle free-for-alls.
> * The government can give out N visas in an auction. Firms bid via legally-binding salary offers. The N highest salaries bid get the visas, and the government takes a small additional payroll tax as the only fee.
This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary.
The visas will never adhere to the workers for one simple reason: the visa process exists to benefit the companies, not the workers. The workers are not US citizens and have no leverage with the US government. The visa programs only exist because the US-based companies want them - and those companies DO have leverage with the US government.
> This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary.
So what? Shouldn't the companies that can create the most value from the employee be the ones that get to hire them?
I wouldn't say that professional services firms really create the most value - far from it actually. They're just able to pay more because there's relatively little risk involved for them.
Well said! You'll never outbid a body shop. They'll essentially spend whatever it takes to get the workers here and bill them out for 3x whatever they paid. If you as the product company don't like it tough luck. This is because the people is the product for these companies, product companies have other things to concentrate on.
If they're charging 3x whatever they paid, that pushes up prices for the companies hiring the body shops, which incentivizes finding cheaper competitors to body shops in the labor market -- like hiring domestic workers, for example. The pricing mechanisms of the market will optimize out a balance.
Just a random, unhelpful ping into this conversation to point out that the economics of billing out a programmer for "3x" (I assume you mean "3x the fully-loaded cost of the programmer as an FTE for the consultancy, broken out by hour") is a lot more complicated than this thread makes it sound.
Companies aren't simply using those "3x" contractors as a shortcut to avoid finding and hiring full-timers. A big chunk of that "x" is business value created by the consultancy and sold to the client; the biggest chunk of that involves risk management.
Sure, great. Honestly, I don't mind what companies want to do with contractors and contracting. I've been a contractor for a short time. If a big chunk of the 3x is business value created, great, go ahead.
My only actual point here is that rather than trying to tailor a visa just for the special needs of Silicon Valley start-ups, we should be tailoring high-skilled work-visa programs for letting the market decide what constitutes high-value work, viz: work that people will pay a lot for.
If under the proposed system (h1bs granted in descending sort order of salary), product firms were losing out to professional services firms, then the product firms are free to pay their employees more. If they don't create enough value to justify paying more, well, then the system works as designed.
>This would be doomed to fail. Professional services firms can outbid basically everyone because they can turn around and bill that person out at 5x their salary.
So what? The purpose of skilled-worker immigration in public policy is to maximize productivity, not to cater to the industry to which people on Hacker News happen to belong.
I wouldn't say that professional services firms maximize productivity; they just have good relationships and are more effective at selling their services than an individual developer can ever be.
How do you reconcile 'legally binding salary offers' to adhering the visa to the worker? How long is the company obliged to pay the visa bid rate? What if the company becomes financially incapable of paying the visa bid rate? (yes, demonstrating financial solvency of the employer is part of the visa sponsorship process, but circumstances change). If the worker moves to another company, is that company required to pay the bid rate? I can imagine a 'simple' scheme like that leading to all kinds of shell-game shenanigans where high bids are used to win the visas to bring workers in, then through sleight of hand the worker is transferred to a different job at a lower wage...
>Of course, it's worth noting that some degree of so-called "nativism" is just part of the social contract. It's the price we pay for having a society that enforces cooperative coordination among citizens instead of letting everything be run by uncoordinated, law-of-the-jungle free-for-alls.
You realize that skilled immigrants are going to be the most likely to assimilate into American culture. They will not form ghettos or enclaves(unless there is of course white flight).
Well yes, of course. This is why the proposal is designed to make absolutely sure we bring in skilled, high-value immigrants. It's a filter, not a fence.
Come to Toronto. Amazon is here, and growing. Lots of other start ups and mid-sized companies. Canada is way less insane about visa hoops to jump through. We're pretty friendly, and the crime rate is low (our new Mayor doesn't do crack or hang out with gangsters).
Most importantly, we're a country and city that likes immigration of smart people who want to earn high salaries, and pay our slightly-higher-than-America taxes.
Well, I have actually been considering a move, not just because of Immigration, but because of all of Canada's natural beauty. I also kinda like snow and cold weather and maple syrup.
Here is one important question though: is it a city that you would recommend for young people (in their twenties)? Or is it nicer once you have a family and are looking to settle down etc.? And besides Amazon, is there any demand for tech workers over there?
Toronto is the biggest city in Canada and the industrial center, lots of different sectors and jobs, thriving start-up scene, and all the things other major cities would offer.
Biggest problem you'll face is that we mix-use metric and imperial units, i.e. pounds for weight, feet for height, celsius for temperature, meter for distance.
In Canada currently. The salaries just suck compared to states. Yes the visa hoops are less but living expenses in cities like Vancouver will suck everything out of your pocket.
Software developer salaries are usually about 30% higher in the Bay area than they are in Vancouver.
Renting an apartment will cost you at least twice as much in San Francisco though - so most people are still financially better off with the smaller salary in Vancouver. There are non-financial reasons to move to the Bay Area (more interesting work being the big one), but don't expect your salary to go farther
You're entire post is based on a strawman argument. OP didn't say that companies shouldn't hire non-American talent. He said companies should hire non-American talent through traditional immigration proceedings, and that the H1B program lends itself to an exploitative employer-laborer relationship, that ultimately serves to unfairly lower industry pay rates.
So... An H1-B. Because that is essentially your only choice for temporary residency while waiting the many years it takes for an EB-3 (and months/years for 1/2) to go through. Unless the applicant is from Canada, where you can choose to go the TN route but have to be careful because EB is intent to immigrate, or an L-1 if they're an international transfer.
The H1-B is a decent visa for the purpose its intended to serve, as a way to get immigrants here who would otherwise have to wait years to start working while a permanent residency application goes through. It has its shortcomings, but it's a whole lot better than other routes you could go through.
Traditional immigration proceedings? You mean the system where if you're from China or India, you have to wait 3-5X as long for a green card as people from western europe?
Yeah, that system sounds great. Dunno why people in software engineering of all industries would have a problem with that system.
So why not just fix that system. Its simple to do -- for instance, keep in-total quotas but eliminate per-country quotas and the misfeature you point to is eliminated instantly.
Per country quotas are a mechanism which forces per-origin-country supply to be misaligned with per-origin-country demand.
Your remarks about "divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos" with "communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating" just makes it worst.
Part of the "social contract" when you immigrate to the US is to at least make an effort to join your new country. We aren't the Borg, but we would like to see you learn at least a little English, accept your new country, and generally participate.
You are already most of the way there- you speak English. Your parent is reacting to communities of people who immigrate to the US, learn not one word of English, turn inwards and attempt to create Little Elbonia, including attempting to completely reshape government in Elbonia's image.
How many tech companies apply for H1-B visas for developers who are unable to speak any English at all?
Your post has such an overwhelming air of nationalistic, racist sentiment. "These foreigners come over here, they don't even speak english, and they take all our jobs".
The reality is that most of the foreign developers I've met speak english and communicate at least as well as other developers we've hired here, and oftentimes speak even better english.
Remember, not all H1-B visa holders are dirt-farming Indians who read Ruby on Rails for Dummies in their native language and got tired of farming themselves out on glance for $10/hr. A lot of them are from well-educated western countries - the Ireland, Britain, Canada, Mexico, Germany, etc.
You're generalizing all immigrants into this offensively racist image you've got in your head, and it doesn't make any sense at all. Perhaps there are people like that where you live, but by and large the H1-B visa holders are well-educated, skilled, and speak English as well as people who have been American citizens for decades.
Good lord, I'm not generalizing anything. I was explaining further the specific phenomenon (which does occur sometimes) that manticore_alpha was talking about. I didn't apply this phenomenon to anyone, nor make any statements about policy nor how it ought to impact policy... Or does the simple description of a phenomenon which sometimes happens, now mean I'm a jingoistic, nationalistic, racist dirtbag? I am in complete agreement that this phenomenon is very unlikely to happen with H1B workers, and I am completely familiar with the fact that many immigrants are well-educated, speak excellent English, and fully integrate into American society.
The reason is because it's typically ignorant xenophobic racists who complain the loudest about x or y group not assimilating.
Now I don't think this is you, but that's just the way the argument smells.
Let's step back a minute: what is the big deal with people attempting to preserve their culture when they come to the US? Isn't it a free country? And materially I don't see how it harms anything because the American culture, derided thought it may be by some, is actually extremely alluring and powerful, so even if the parents are nostalgic for the old country the kids are going to gravitate towards assimilation. Where is the harm?
This is a really great example of how powerful the dog whistle techniques used by racists can actually be.
Your instincts picked up on something from silverstorm's comment, but a lack of concrete evidence made it very difficult to say out loud what you were actually thinking. You were forced to go from:
this offensively racist image you've got in your head
All the way back to:
Now I don't think this is you, but that's just the way the argument smells.
I went into silverstorm's use of dog whistle techniques a little deeper in my comment above, but the evolution of your exchange with him really demonstrates how effective it can be as a tool for perpetuating racist views with immunity from criticism. It is a strategy based on controlling the conversation and playing off of several deeply ingrained societal tendencies, and it works.
Saying "You" when not addressing anyone in particular is a classic dog whistle technique. Everyone in the audience knows exactly who you're talking about, and plausible deniability is preserved for future accusations of racism/bigotry.
Of course, silverstorm did not actually explain anything at all. All he did was repeat a few standard dog whistle arguments used by racists with a couple of geek culture references thrown in to pander to the audience.
Let's take a look.
1. Appeal to imaginary "social contract" -- an attempt to establish a criteria for who should be accepted into society based on some vague, unspecific standard. Used in various forms by dominant demographic to argue against immigration.
2. "Learn to speak English" -- Good to see this is still being used. Incredibly high reliability as an indicator of racism, almost to the point where I expect it to soon fall out of favor among racists. [0]
3. Warnings of radical change to society ("attempt to create Little Elbonia", "completely reshape government") -- A common, highly effective technique based on natural human fear of the unknown and preference to status quo.
And of course, silverstorm's response to being challenged was equally standard -- repeated reference to "phenomenon" to avoid potential challenges to assertions, it's only a few bad apples ("a phenomenon which sometimes happens", "many immigrants are well-educated"), preemptive dismissal of direct accusation as self-evidently absurd ("I'm a jingoistic, nationalistic, racist dirtbag?").
If I'm arguing, what am I arguing for? Because it isn't less immigration. If I could have my way, we'd abolish H1B's and Visas and instead simply grant citizenship to basically anyone who wanted it (excepting, I don't know, internationally wanted criminals?).
Well, maybe there is still a place for visas if the person only wants to work in the US for a while and their birth country does not allow dual citizenship. But that's beside the point.
As for integrating, even people who completely refuse to integrate can be here- that's fine. Personally, I just (selfishly) want them to integrate, so I can meet them and talk with them. It's no different from the way that I want to be friends with my neighbors. I'm not pissed if they don't want to be friendly- just sad.
I was just trying to acknowledge that complete and total refusal to integrate does happen (some of my friends growing up had parents like that). That doesn't inform my opinions on policy- they are still welcome to be here.
In my previous post I just explained I am 100% for immigration. All immigration. I welcome any and all peoples. Is that still too vague for you? Too much dog whistle? Too much covert racism? How can I be sufficiently clear?
I brought up H1B's because they were part of the original conversation, before you joined.
you are accusing someone else of racism but at the same you make this comment "not all H1-B visa holders are dirt-farming Indians who read Ruby on Rails for Dummies in their native language and got tired of farming themselves out on glance for $10/hr. A lot of them are from well-educated western countries" . So only western countries engineers are well educated but Indian developers are dirt-farmers ?
That doesn't actually have to mean that all Indian developers are dirt-farmers, which is hyperbole itself, it's just playing to a stereotype to make his point which was the opposite. I'm not sure you should really cling on to the racism card.
From the same vien I'm from the UK but have been approached a couple of times by US companies wanting me to relocate. Typically they tell me money is of no concern, they just deperatly need good people. I'm not convinced they'll save money or get better results by shipping me over from London but I suspect this has more to do with ignorance of the recruiters than malice or conspiracy.
The first three generations of my family in America spoke German. My home town was basically a group of people from a German town who up and moved to start a new town in the Midwest and went on living there as if nothing changed. Hundreds of Midwest towns and cities started the exact same way.
Neither is more 'right' than the other, only that it's pointless to criticize people who are long-dead. It's important for people to realize that European immigrants did (and do) largely the same thing as other immigrants that people often criticize for not learning English, but we can't change the past.
I don't believe these feelings are necessarily entirely rooted in racism, as I've heard plenty of people in Chicago complain about Polish immigrants unwillingness to speak English. I think it's more likely the feelings are a mix of racism, classism and additionally a sense of pride in American culture.
This is really a contract that some Americans would like to impose on other Americans.
The U.S. is a free country; that's the social contract. People are free to live where they want, associate with whom they want, and speak whatever language they want. Other people are free to accomodate them to the degree they wish, or not.
But the idea that you're not "really" American unless you fit some predefined set of characteristics is just a nasty attempt to impose one set of values on everyone.
You are right. In America we deplore things like bribery, oppression of women, caste systems, rule of law, human trafficking, honor killings, etc. We will impose that social contract on anyone who migrates here. Even if you are Sir Elton John, you are just Elton John here. If you bring slave servants to the US and enslave them here, as has happened, you'll be thrown in prison. It's not about language.
> Part of the "social contract" when you immigrate to the US is to at least make an effort to join your new country
Huh? What social contract are you talking about? Don't use quotes as a goto escape. If there was actually a social contract, then in the valley we'd all be speaking Chumash, Mojave or something like that.
> "communities of people who immigrate to the US, learn not one word of English, turn inwards and attempt to create Little Elbonia"
TBH, it's also not so uncommon for Americans in Europe to make no effort to learn the local language, and to seek mostly the company of other Americans.
Exactly. We've already seen Islamists try to enforce sharia in England; if we had wanted a theocracy, we would have let the Christofascists take over long ago. And before anyone goes claiming oppression of differing cultures, the secular culture that is America is precisely the root cause of why many people want to to move there. Others in this thread have already mentioned things like misogyny, homophobia, etc, that while it's not a solved problem in America, isn't nearly as bad as it is in some other countries.
From where I sit (Europe) America does not look like having a secular culture at all. Sure, you have the separation of church and state enshrined in your constitution, but in practice the country seems way too religious.
The commentator was not discussing immigration wholly; they are discussing H1B. There are some good reasons to suspect why H1B is an unfair tool. For example, H1B immigrants cannot easily switch employers, and do so with some appreciably elevated risk or cost. Or the fact that H1B wages are enforced by law, rather than competition, and that it's very difficult to bring legal action. If H1B immigrants could switch around without consequence to their immigration or employment prospects, then this wouldn't happen, but I suspect that companies wouldn't support something like that.
I think that employers already have the edge on workers in general because they have more information, and because many Americans feel that specific talk of income is invasive or rude, and thus American workers don't really cooperate with each other for strategy; or at least it seems tech workers don't.
The specific economic impairments placed upon H1B immigrants, even if written by sincere and well-meaning hearts, unfortunately means that these people are ripe for exploitation without much serious legitimate recourse. I think that assets and opportunities which may be profitably and predictably exploited (and well known in our case), will probably be exploited up to the border where it's no longer profitable to exploit.
As a hiring manager, I can promise you that your generalizations are sweeping and full of misplaced emotional verbiage. Since it is my job to hire the best candidate and even though my company gives me access to a world of engineers, I will still try to find the best with the least amount of friction. That means, someone who already lives here and can start as soon as possible with the least amount of demands.
Talent may be plentiful in the Bay Area, but just like dating, both parties have to actually want to work together and believe in each other. Plus, no engineer I've interviewed was desperate for a job. Nor would I want to hire someone who was desperate.
That being said, regardless of someone's H1B status, we would pay exactly the same base salary to them. Additionally, the H1B person even comes out ahead since we also pay the crazy high government fees for the application or transfer.
Increasing the quantity supplied at the "prevailing wage" by way of H-1B depresses the prevailing wage from rising to what it would be in the absence of the H-1B for the positions for which H-1B has increased the supply (and has knock-on effects for other areas of work, because the Americans that don't get employed in the positions covered by H-1Bs then are competing in fields they otherwise wouldn't be, increasing the quantity supplied at any given price point in those fields.)
Its not only basic economics, but if it didn't work that way, there'd be no benefit to employers from the H-1B existing to justify the compliance costs.
The point was that companies are underpaying H1-B workers. My argument is that there are floor wages they can't pay below.
You're making another point about the impact of immigration. I don't disagree and it extends beyond immigration. If you open a new medical school you're depressing the wages of doctors. Just take a look at what happened to the legal profession.
>> The Department of Labor has wage floors for H1-Bs (prevailing wage). Company's can legally pay below that.
Companies play games with the experience levels and titles to force wages lower. An "architect" or "developer" gets replaced with an "analyst" or "engineer" making 2/3rds as much.
and H1-B body shops force their workers to work umpteen hours of overtime, bill the clients for it, and H1-B workers get no compensation for all the overtime.
and H1-B body shops do shady things like delay payments, take 'fees' out of payments, pay in rupees, etc.
Yep. The HN community is not at all representative of the market -- people here tend to be both more experienced and working in better positions than most -- and I can confirm that for non-tech companies the prevailing wage for entry level tech jobs (do-it-all programmer, web dev, etc) in the SJ/Milpitas/Fremont area is in the 70s, going up to ~100 after 10+ years experience.
I got to be friends with a few of the H1-Bs when I was working at a large company that hired a lot of H1-Bs (mostly Indian, always knew the best places to eat, and since I'd studied Sanskrit in grad. school, knew a bit about Indian culture, and read some Devanagari I always liked getting to hang out). At a point when I was ready to move to another job we talked about salaries. They were generally getting paid 40% less than I was, the best case was one guy (a really scary sharp guy who was a complete workaholic who worked through most weekends) getting 20% less, and they didn't know of anyone getting paid more. Just an anecdote, but it's something to keep in mind. Laws are only relevant if they're enforced.
Dont be crass. If there is evidence of violation, it means the immigration enforcement needs a bigger budget to go after employers. It does not mean we need to cut back on immigration because some citizens have a problem following the law.
I dunno where you're getting these claims, and by the way it's the companies not citizens, but let's read the previous comments.
> LordHumungous : h1bs often get paid less
> bduerst: no they don't, because that would be against the law
> me: mocks foolishness
it's like you're deliberately unaware of companies' very successful efforts to modify the law in self-dealing ways, and even when that fails, to route around the law by stopping enforcement. Or the various well known and widespread h1b abuses that googling for seconds would find for you. Or even seen the list of posted salaries in your office, and noted they were way below market.
The article linked to was an opinion piece against immigrants, hence the context. I also eluded to there needing to be evidence, which the op piece didn't really provide.
if you don't have evidence that h1bs are widely abused, and used to drive down wages, it's for no other reason than you're too lazy to google.
It's also telling that you tar a neutral reporting piece discussing the impact of h1b visas as anti-immigrant, I guess because how else could you discredit it. I mean, right there in the very article you seem to have read is this:
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.
and this
More than 80 percent of H-1B visa holders are approved to be hired at wages
below those paid to American-born workers for comparable positions,
according to EPI.
as the saying goes, if you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.
Why would you expect them to be paid the same. Should something that ships from Alaska cost the same as something shipped from your next door neighbor?
Companies can take advantage of situations for profit, and that's their right, but the argument needs to be qualified so that we aren't speaking past one another.
Are we talking about "should be able to" or "it's the right (for whatever definition of right) thing to do"? I'm going to go with the latter since I have little opinion on the law.
For example, a company has the right to ask its programmers to work 80 hours. It's their right to squeeze as much out of their employees as they can. Should they?
Should companies be taking advantage of low wages in other countries instead of paying market value? They certainly can chase the profit, but we're talking about people, not goods. At the end of the day, they're paying a person less simply because they know that they have little bargaining room.
"Should companies be taking advantage of low wages in other countries instead of paying market value?"
If someone leaves a programming job in India to take a programming job in the USA, they're implicitly saying, This is a better deal for me. The only unethical/anticompetative practice was that someone created an artificial barrier (often pushed through legislation because of xenophobia) to keep "others" out. If you don't think we should the USA should be hiring talented people from India, do you think California should prevent people from Seattle from working in California?
I don't want to draw the line simply because I think it's too much a matter of opinion.
To me, it's not about widely applicable ethics. I think companies should have the right to hire people from other countries and pay them low(er) wages. Or at least, they should have the right until there's some agreeable line that can be drawn (unlikely). I simply would lose respect for that company because I think the decent thing is to pay wages based on merit.
I believe paying wages based on where someone is from is on the same level as squeezing as many hours as possible out of your workforce. In my eyes, it's irresponsible and not respectable.
Can anyone explain the downvotes? or does the Upton Sinclair quote hold "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Then that makes you an exceptional case, and implies that you work for a good company. But neither of those points represent how this program is more widely (ab)used.
What are you so afraid of? Have you ever been to a nice Indian restaurant in Sunnyvale? I'm glad those ethnic conclaves exist.
Also, from a strictly moral perspective, the attitude that you deserve special treatment based on the fact that you were born within an imaginary closed cell on a map just isn't justified.
What makes you so special versus someone from Asia with better skills? I'm supposed to hire you because ... what? We share the same passport and so I owe you some special heightened loyalty beyond what I owe any human being born on our common planet?
Your comment is full of implicit prejudice. Some redneck told you that you deserve to be treated as a special person because you saluted the flag when you were a little kid in class, and without thinking very critically about the concept, you just swallowed it whole. Now you are regurgitating the same concept here as though this audience is as paranoid as the one on MSNBC.com. This is a totally different audience, that isn't afraid to compete against other workers on a skills versus skills basis. I don't think most people here think they need special protection from Uncle Sam against programmers from abroad.
You are probably afraid of some Indian and Chinese programmers. I have zero fear. In fact I welcome the competition and hope that some of the best can be my co-workers. You are welcome to form an exclusive zone with the country's coddled also-rans. Just don't try to form that zone in the Bay Area. I don't know if you are watching Google or Facebook, or Twitter, but former H1Bs are working on the most complex projects at those companies ... and not because those companies can't afford to hire the best students. But because those H1Bs ARE the best students.
> What makes you so special versus someone from Asia with better skills? I'm supposed to hire you because ... what? We share the same passport and so I owe you some special heightened loyalty beyond what I owe any human being born on our common planet?
Well said!
This is what always makes me quite sad and angry every time there's a discussion about immigration. Shouldn't we as a society be past this entitled way of thinking? Why does anyone deserve a job more just because he already was lucky enough to be born in a rich country like the US? Sure, allowing in people from other, often poorer countries might reduce the local wage slightly, maybe even take a job opportunity from some local developer, but so what? That developer is still very well of and the possible wage reduction that US workers might have to live with is minimal, but the gain for the immigrant from the poor country is huge! How about a bit of social conscience and empathy for your fellow humans?
The H1B is already heavily restricted to 65k per year, which is a ridiculously low number for the US so I don't see this being able to do much harm in the first place (Switzerland, a way smaller country has roughly that immigration per year), but it will allow at least some people the chance at a great opportunity. Admitably, the way the H1B currently gives to much power to the employer, but many people here seem to strongly argue against immigration in general which I just cannot understand.
One could make the argument that Americans deserve American jobs more than foreigners because the vast majority of Americans have been contributing to American society their entire lives through their work and taxes and will most likely continue to until their death.
Foreigners come to the US having never been part of the society that made the job possible.
> It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
I think there's little question that increasing the supply of engineers reduces their price -- our salaries. We can argue about whether it's a small or a large effect, and whether it goes away in the long run due to macroeconomic effects, but it's certainly there. So you're arguing against a straw man here.
But more to the point, it's short-sighted and selfish to judge policy decisions solely based on their effects on your salary. Especially since those of us in tech are, by and large, ridiculously well-compensated.
Setting aside the benefits to the immigrants themselves, highly-skilled workers who emigrate to the US are a /fantastic deal/. We paid nothing to educate them, yet they come here and grow the economy and pay taxes. All of these new people have to buy housing, food, medical care, and so on. It's literally free economic growth.
> We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing
> in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves
> rather than assimilating.
This is borderline racist. "/We/ don't need any more of /them/, especially if they choose to live apart, rather than become Real Americans." If the alternative is living near people like you, it's no wonder they tend to stick together.
> But more to the point, it's short-sighted and selfish to judge policy decisions solely based on their effects on your salary. Especially since those of us in tech are, by and large, ridiculously well-compensated.
Maybe it's selfish for you, but what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry? And wages are stagnant for STEM workers, and lowering for CS workers. Hundreds of thousands have been laid off in the last 5 years, particularly faced with globalisation and outsourcing.
It sounds like you're being selfish in your own way here by saying people shouldn't judge policy decisions based on the effects on their salary, because a lot of people in your country aren't as comfortable as you are in terms of pay.
Women have been allowed into the industry for a century+ :S If you mean attracting more women into the industry, supposedly the demand is so high that it wont affect any wages. Wages should continue to increase because of a lack of supply! Oh wait...stagnant for a decade...
> what about the ~50% of STEM grads who can't find a job in their industry?
According to the Census bureau, 74% of STEM grads don't work in STEM [1]. I was pretty surprised to read this, until I looked up what the Census bureau considers to be STEM [2].
You can see from this graphic that CS, math, statistics, and engineering majors all end up working in STEM in relatively high proportions. It's the psychology, social sciences, biology, and (to a lesser degree) physical sciences majors who are dragging this statistic down.
This isn't as surprising to me; indeed, if you hover over the labels in the graphic, you'll see that a lot of bio majors go into health care and education -- not surprising -- and that psych and social science majors go into a wide variety of fields -- again, not surprising or particularly relevant to this debate, I think.
Coming back to people with CS/math/engineering degrees, you're right that about 50% are not employed in STEM-related fields [3]. However, we have zero reason to believe all of these people "can't find a job in their industry". Surely some of them voluntarily work outside STEM.
Note that CS/math/engineering majors have significantly lower unemployment than college grads as a whole [4]. Note also that this 50% fraction is significantly higher for CS/math/engineering than it is for any other group of STEM majors; the next highest is physical sciences majors, of whom only a quarter work in STEM.
In fact, the only groups of people I can find who work "in their fields" in a greater proportion than CS/math/engineering majors is non-STEM "science- and engineering-related" majors working in health care (presumably these are human biology majors and the like), and education majors working in education.
Looking at this data, it's really hard for me to believe there's a problem here. Lots of people don't work in the field that they majored in. This is true for CS/math/engeineering majors, but not as much as most other majors.
One more thing:
> a lot of people in your country aren't as comfortable as you are in terms of pay.
This is exactly my point, actually. Any time you make a decision like this, some people will be hurt, and others helped. But rather than judging this policy decision based on its effect on a particular group of people (almost always, it's "people like me"), we should consider its effect on the country as a whole. As I said, highly-skilled immigration is free economic growth, and a fantastic deal for the country as a whole.
Of that group of STEM majors not in STEM, how many do you think could work in a STEM field after going through a professional masters program? Clearly, some do, but it takes a lot of money and valuable time. If under greater pressure, I'd imagine a lot more established tech companies would recruit with a masters program in exchange for a several year commitment. Some places do, but if it were harder to recruit, it is a fair guess more places would.
I'm not really sure what to think about those sorts of arrangements. If I were an employer, I'd greatly prefer skill-based immigration, excluding questions of exploitation, and that's the point, particularly when referring to STEM as a whole.
Of the 50% of engineering graduates not working in engineering, 40% of CS grads not in CS, (35% of these two groups, total, are working in totally unrelated fields), ~50% are not working in their fields because of pay and conditions, 37% are not working in their fields because they can't find work, and 10% are not working in the field for another reason. The 37% probably aren't the people who moved into management consulting."
You don't feel that there's a problem, based on the data you found. And you might be right, if you don't look at it at a macro-level. The big picture is confusing, however. Companies and government are crying out for more tech workers. They're all lobbying for an easier way to bring workers to the US (my country, Ireland, are also doing this). But wages for computer scientists, across the US, are flat. They've been stagnant for a decade. If some proportion of CS grads do not go into CS, typical market dynamics would suggest that the lack of supply will drive up wages, and entice them into the field. This isn't happening. In fact, some sizeable proportion can't find their first job, out of college, and don't work in the field again.
Something is amiss.
Another copy/pasted this from another reply of mine:
> It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
This may be unpopular, but so what if it hurts local labor? The global flow of goods is good, but the flow of labor is bad? Twenty years ago Pepsi and Coke entered the Indian market and destroyed/replaced the local beverage industry. Uber and Amazon have launched their own price wars more recently. A lot of people want Indian companies to win, but I don't see words like 'unfair' being used in regard to the American companies with deeper pockets that hurt local businesses. I get that immigration hurts American wages, but that's just kinda how the world works. What does it matter if your job is outsourced to India or if an Indian comes to America to take it? The latter is probably better for the US if anything.
>The global flow of goods is good, but the flow of labor is bad?
But that's just it: this is an attempt to slow the flow and distribution of capital (wages) by importing cheap labor. It allows even more economic power and resources to be concentrated in even fewer hands. It should be pretty self-evident why that's undesirable.
1) It may be depressing wages in the US, but tech wages in India are skyrocketing. The best are leaving for better lives in the US and local companies are realizing they need to compete globally for talent.
2) Capitalism concentrates wealth in general but I don't think it's black and white that it's bad. 60% of India's population is small farmers and there's a lot of protection against scale farming with land ceiling laws, subsidies, etc. I don't think we're doing them any great favour by protecting them. The US by contrast has only 3% of it's population employed in agriculture. I'm sure there was a lot of pain in going from 60% to 3% there as well, but it's probably a better outcome even weighing the concentration of wealth that resulted. It isn't perfect, but it's sort of the best available system. And treating labour different to goods makes no sense. By the same argument, importing cheap Chinese manufactured goods are bad. Any automation that removes jobs is bad. Any consolidation for economies of scale is bad.
Is that not true when Pepsi goes to India and sells its product there. The profit is distributed only to share holders of Pepsi, and the Indian beverage companies stand to lose. If Pepsi had not been so "greedy", Indian beverage companies would make some money and probably cause a more better distribution of wealth?
Is Amazon guilty of using drones/machines for its 70 Billion$ business where as Target employs 5 times as many people for an equivalent revenue?
> We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating.
This just smacks of exclusionary racism. Like, 'us white people don't need folk from other countries coming over here and associating with each other, eating their own food and speaking their own language'.
You might be surprised to learn that if you're moving from another country, it's highly beneficial to your adjustment to be around other people from your area; in fact, it can accelerate assimilation because they have a source they can turn to for all kinds of cultural, bureaucratic, or social questions, so they don't have to re-learn everything from scratch.
Admittedly, that still doesn't change your original claim of 'we don't need cheap foreigners coming over here and taking American jobs', or the inherent racism there.
>There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now.
And what are those?
If you are being honest why not just say "We don't want any more immigrants". Because H1B is the only way to immigrate to US. Its great that your parents got a shot a new life and now you want the door to closed.
There is no such thing as "general immigration" to the US.
Honest discussion can only happen if people come right out and say lets stop all immigration( I am not saying this would be wrong, I am just saying that it would be honest and productive).
It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
I disagree with this statement. I am on an H1 and know several other people who are on H1s and can testify that this is a generalization. There are many ways to end up on an H1, overseas body shops is one avenue and American grad schools are another. Most H1s I know, myself included, graduated from good schools, have worked hard within the framework of their visas, have absorbed local culture and have invested almost 100% of what they made back into the local economy, not to mention the out-of-state fees they paid their institutions. From what I see and understand, they are pretty well paid, in some cases better than the local populace and have succeeded solely because they are talented. The hardships that their spouses on H4s go through is an entirely different matter!
That said, I can understand where you are coming from and know that there is abuse within the system. Truly, fake resumes are rampant among H1 consultancies. And although the visa itself is severely constrained, these people thrive due to lack of enforcement. That should change.
Edit: For people who say H1 is indentured servitude.
H1 is not quite indentured servitude, and you can switch employers. Although there is quite a bit of uncertainity associated with it, its still not the worst part. What bothers me, is the DOLs PERM process which is the first step to obtain a green card. This one step in itself is what can be said to make H1s bonded laborers. First, the company makes you sign a statment saying you can't leave until after 2 years upon getting your Green Card - else you'll be billed for it (approx 25K). Second, the DOL takes its own sweet time adjudicating these applications - currently 6 months (or 1.5-2 years if your application is audited, which 30-40% chance). And while you are free to switch employers, this process takes a hard reset and you've to go back to the end of the line. Unless, you stick with the shitty job, and wait out the approval and file your I-140. At this point, the H1 can be renewed indefinitely in terms of 3 years as long as each new company goes through the above process or you get your Green Card. Hopefully, the recent executive order will make this better, but only time can tell. Personally, the reset button has been hit twice for me.
I don't think the point you take issue with is really debatable. The only way it could not be true if there is actually no one in the local labor market who can do the job, and that's a very difficult argument to make. Outside of that, every H1 is a job a citizen isn't getting.
You didn't touch on this at all, so I'm not really sure what your point is. I think you're debating a strawman.
> The only way it could not be true if there is actually no one in the local labor market who can do the job, and that's a very difficult argument to make. Outside of that, every H1 is a job a citizen isn't getting.
Does that mean being a citizen entitles one to a job regardless of qualification? Also, does that mean 100% of the US should be employed before bringing in foreign workers? I think such generalizations are far fetched. The conspiracy theory that claims that H1s are all low paid workers falls flat when examined closely.
> Does that mean being a citizen entitles one to a job regardless of qualification? Also, does that mean 100% of the US should be employed before bringing in foreign workers?
You're making up arguments and arguing with yourself here. Nobody said that being a citizen entitles a person to a job. But the law states that a H1B visa can be extended only IF a citizen can't be found that fulfils the requirements. Companies have been caught flouting this law, and purposely not finding citizens. You seem to have a problem with "every H1 is a job a citizen isn't getting", but, that's the point of a H1B.
> The conspiracy theory that claims that H1s are all low paid workers falls flat when examined closely.
They are not conspiracy theories, and they do not fall flat. The information is all open and available.
Note that there's no value judgment being made here. Nor am I claiming that H1s are low paid. You're still arguing against the same strawman.
To reword: if an H1 gets a job, a qualified citizen is not getting that job. Except in very exceptional circumstances, this hurts said citizen, and by extension the labor pool of people who could be substituted in for said citizen.
You didn't specify 'qualified' in the original post. If it was implied and I didn't get it, I'm sorry. I agree that if there is a qualified local, they should get these jobs before bringing in foreign labor. Although, my argument isn't a straw man.
I thought that "local labor market" implicitly only contained people who were local and could do the requisite labor, but that might not be the agreed-upon meaning. Sorry for the confusion.
Strawman-ness is contextual. You were arguing against an argument that is, in fact, used. However, you did so after quoting something that was not making that argument, but instead a weaker one, and one which your response didn't really respond to.
By this logic, we should not allow people to have more than two children, or else the surplus children will grow up and take the jobs. Because there are only a fixed number of jobs to go around, right? I read last week that the bureau of labor statistics determined the number: 309,219,419.
I don't know what logic you're using, but it didn't come from my post. As I pointed out elsewhere, I didn't make any value judgments. I claimed, essentially, that someone taking a job hurts others who may have competed for that job. I did not claim that there's any need to protect them, with legislation or otherwise.
Removing a specific job from the market is not necessarily hurting local labor; that depends on the overall effects of immigration. Take a person who comes here on a visa, manages to stay and starts a company which employs other engineers - is s/he hurting the local labor market? What about the person who simply is a great worker and allows the company to grow and hire faster?
In any case, software engineers complaining about having less jobs just strikes me as hypocritical. Our whole professions are essentially centered about eliminating the need for human labor. At least in this case, someone is still getting paid to do the job, even if it's not someone who happened to be born with the right citizenship.
Okay, fine. I may have sounded as if I was trying to be precise, when in fact I'm just trying to point in the right direction.
Let's try "every H1 is a positive percentage of a job a citizen isn't getting". This doesn't require that the job market be entirely inelastic; just that the response not go in the opposite of the expected direction. The same conclusion results; said H1 hurts citizens who are also qualified for said job.
Most studies find that you are wrong though. I am sure that you and the people you know are very skilled, and worked hard to get to your current position for that reason. But overall, H1 employees are paid significantly less, and many, many firms specifically refuse to hire local talent in order to fill positions through this program.
If the visa was given to the employee, not the company, then it would be a good program. But your paragraph about how difficult / chancy it can be to switch companies is exactly why it is a failed, exploitative program.
Could you paste a link to those studies (unbiased or bipartisan) to support my wrongness. I've read opinions and emotional outbursts but am yet to find concrete evidence to support it. Until then I go by my own experience.
Yes, there are firms that get blanket visas. Yes, there are some people who deliberately abuse this sytem. But that is a generalization of few examples.Yes, giving visas to the employee rather than employer is better (Canadian, Australian systems is are an example). DOL's PERM process is what makes it more exploitative than not and is rampant with abuse. That needs to change, the H1 on its own is not indentured servitude.
As a critic oh H1B's, I should be careful to point out that I have nothing against the holders of H1B's, many of whom are outstanding people. My problem has to do with a system that artificially limits the bargaining ability of one sector of labor. The solution is better treatment of H1B immigrants, not xenophobic responses.
>There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay
But this is precisely what defines an economic shortage. There's no shortage of anything, if the price offered is right.
I wonder if the discrepancy between supply and demand for labour in the Valley has to do with the fact that, unlike most other industries[1], so many companies aren't making money, and hence can't pay, but still demand much labour? It seems like labour shortages are built into the system.
[1] Speculation. What are some examples of companies with billion-dollar valuations and no-profits, outside SV?
Any position paying more than minimum wage is a position with an economic shortage.
I'm for easy immigration, but let's not pretend that this isn't going to reduce tech worker wages in the area. (In the long run though, it could help, since you tend to get more specialization and scale when large numbers of a certain type of profession are congregated around a certain area).
I get that there's plenty of demand for highly skilled engineers that want to work for $80k and a tiny handful of lottery tickets. It doesn't mean we need to further help the valley avoid the consequences of a lack of investment in domestic education, or their wild irresponsibility with respect to housing and transport issues in the bay.
> It doesn't mean we need to further help the valley avoid the consequences of a lack of investment in domestic education, or their wild irresponsibility with respect to housing and transport issues in the bay.
The shortage of talent in the bay area probably has more to do with the ridiculous concentration of startups there. Maybe if people chose not to live in one of the most expensive areas in the country, with the most competitive labor markets, they wouldn't need to leave. There are oodles upon oodles of skilled CS graduates (yes, in the US!) that aren't moving to the bay area....
A shortage is a lack of supply, a company unwilling to pay above $X is not a shortage of supply, it is a shortage of demand.
If we have a shortage of carrots, we dont have enough carrots at ANY price.
If people are unwilling to pay 5$/LB for carrots but thats what they cost in the store, that is not a shortage.
What this discussion is about is substitute goods[1] replacing standard goods. In this case US workers are the standard goods, and they are being replaced by foreign workers, or substitute goods at lower cost.
No, a shortage is the discrepancy between the quantity supplied and quantity demanded at a given price.
When wages offered are too low, there is a shortage of labour supply. Increase those wages and that shortage disappears.
>If we have a shortage of carrots, we dont have enough carrots at ANY price.
This is simply not true.
>If people are unwilling to pay 5$/LB for carrots but thats what they cost in the store, that is not a shortage.
The shortage of carrot occurs at every price below $5/lb. You cannot talk about shortages in the economic sense without prices. Period.
I'm not sure why people are insistent on arguing the semantics of the word "shortage", rather than the far more interesting supply/demand dynamics underpinning the markets being discussed.
I did some looking around and you're absolutely correct about economic shortages.
From wikipedia:
"In most cases, a shortage will compel firms to increase the price of a product until it reaches market equilibrium. Sometimes, however, external forces cause more permanent shortages—in other words, there is something preventing prices from rising or otherwise keeping supply and demand balanced."
In this case, the H1-B visas are the external force, and are preventing supply and demand from being balanced. Basically because of the availability of cheaper labor, companies are willing to pay less for ALL labor which creates the shortage.
My completely misremembered thinking was that simply because they don't WANT to pay a higher wage, does not create a lack of labor - but i see know that it does in fact create an economic shortage of labor AT THAT PRICE. I was thinking of 'labor shortage' meaning that there is not enough actual people qualified to perform a job; when really in this case it is much more reflecting employers unwillingness to increase wages to the level that qualified people would be willing to compete.
Many companies are unable to obtain programmers in sufficient amounts precisely because they cannot afford to pay market rates.
If we had a bread shortage, some would be unable to afford the high market price of bread, while it would still be available to those who could afford it.
> It is unlikely a robot will ever be able to do the job of entrepreneur.
Sounds like a market opportunity. DoucheBot 6000 can hook right in to algorithmic trading platforms to acquire VC without human intervention at any step! It'll disrupt the startup game!
1) Of all the companies I know and have worked for I don't know a single company that got H1B for cheap indian labour. They got H1B because thats what they could get for people they wanted. You will find plenty on H1B/O1(my visa) etc. from Europe.
It has nothing to do with exploitation although that of course happens but with these are the easiest (and hardest) visas to get
2) The irony of the tech world is that for the right talent there is always work but finding that right talent is actually pretty hard as it's a multitude of factors that are involved in the right hire.
3) The process of getting H1B is trivial but cumbersome and I have yet to meet any organisation that take people in on H1Bs just because it's cheap labour.
Of course it hurts local labour but not because of the wages, because talent is hard to find.
"We" don't need anything in this. Immigrants don't assimilate the moment they get here. They never have. The old saying is, "The parents don't speak English, the children are bilingual, the grandchildren speak English". There have always been ethnic neighborhoods, as long as there's been immigration.
Being lived as an H1-B for about 5 years of life then on EAD and then on GC. The initial couple of years on H1-B is exploitation (not even close to any kind of servitude), but since 2006, I was fairly compensated. May be there are horror stories out there, but you have to understand most of the H1-Bs are educated enough and have contextual nuance with regard to jobs and salary matters, very few have to be indentured servants. The talented H1-Bs that come on body-shop boats, switch their employer to a more easy to work for company. Yes, H1B means being tied to hip of a company, but there are enough firms out there that really work. The problem with smaller companies is the HR and Legal are too ignorant about the whole process and needs baby sitting from the H1B holder himself.
I am not denying exploitation of H1B but certain companies but I think you have a skewed view, it does not apply to majority of the situations.
As someone who came from Europe to the U.S. on an H1B and then won a GC through the lottery: it never felts at all as indentured servitude.
At some point I managed a group of 10 people and had insight in the salaries of 40 engineers. There was no correlation between H1B status and salary, and we weren't given instructions either about giving less to H1Bs.
Increases were purely determined by employee performance.
I understand that it can be frustrating for local STEM candidates to compete against foreigners, but let's not forget that those locals include the full spectrum, from best in class to worse, whereas those H1B candidates have a much higher chance of already being top talent. You can't fault companies for choosing the best.
Unlike a TN visa for Canadians or an Australian E-3 visa, the H-1B is an immigrant visa that is one of the few paths to a green card.
So they're actually the opposite of indentured servitude where there's a path to permanent residency and citizenship. Unlike many other visas that people use to work in the US.
YMMV but I know at least one E-3 holder that ended up with a green card.
The E-3 isn't explicitly a dual intent visa but my understanding is that you can't be denied an E-3 specifically for having applied for a green card. If you're on an E-3 and are seeking a green card talk to an immigration lawyer.
I have said this before here and I will do that again. What hurts the market is L1 visa. H1 visa holders are almost in the same boat as local talent. Why? Because there is a government dictated minimum prevailaing wage that companies have to adhere to. I am yet to meet an H1B who is earning less than his/her peers (within an area, experience, skillset and education).
However, I have met a lot of L1 visa holders (primarily from India) who come here from companies like Wipro, TCS, Cognizant, IBM, Microsoft etc. who are paid lower wages because there is no such scrutiny with L1 visas. Lumping both visas in the same category is a huge mistake.
This is very, very true. L1 seems like a good deal since your spouse can work, but ends up being really bad since you have no negotiating power at salary adjustment time.
The L1A is better than the L1B because of the faster permanent residence processing times, mainly due to the fact that the L1A holders can file under the EB1C category[1] and avoid the long Labor Certification from the Department of Labor[2].
I think H1-B's should entitle someone to work in the US at any company. Personally as a US citizen I think we're really lucky to get the worlds best and brightest to move here. Even if you feel different giving workers the ability to shop around for salaries would be a very effective way of ensuring that immigration is really about talent and not ensnaring workers at artificially low wages (which I've certainly seen personally).
"ethic-neuveau-ghettos .. insulating themselves rather than assimilating" Usually the kids assimilate pretty well, and thats mostly how it works, has always worked with non-europeans. You can't expect these people to wake up one morning, and do a running jump while yelling 'muricaaa!!' and assimilate in a flash. From my experience, most of them want their kids to assimilate while setting up personal thresholds for themselves as to how much they can/want to buy in. You'd be surprised, the country can learn a thing or two from these peoples, for eg. many of these folks come from places where evolution is common sense, and high-schools don't give people life long depressions from which people never recover.
One only need look at San Francisco's "little Italy", which is not in any sense an Italian neighborhood any more, except sort of for tourist purposes. And yet people were really worried about Italians coming and taking jobs and being Catholic and all those other nasty immigrant things. It takes time, but the advantages to integrating far outweigh consigning your children to a ghetto.
Explain to me how someone can become a permanent resident or a US citizen who is current a citizen & resident of Canada, India or the Philippines.
H1-B visas are the most straightforward way for someone with an education to get a job and permanent residency in the US. O and L visas are not universally applicable. Family sponsorship isn't always possible. Not everyone wants to marry an American.
It's not like the UK, Canada or Australia which have point-based immigration systems. The US has very few ways for a competent, educated immigrant to enter the country.
Try immigrating to the EU as an American; not quite so easy there either. If you are a refugee from Africa you have an easier time getting permanent residence in France than a moderately skilled workers would. My Mexican (now American) wife went through the US immigration process (she had a green card already when I met her, so I didn't 'help') You CAN immigrate to the U.S., there is a process. Funny since we're talking about India a lot on this thread, have you ever been through their immigration process? For even tourists you can only visit the country once during a six month period. Mexico's immigration system is rather difficult as well. The U.S. isn't alone in the difficulty of their immigration process. Getting residency in China is very difficult. I don't see why America gets special status with the animosity people feel towards immigration. Places like Canada are exceptions -- immigration is generally a long bureaucrat process in any country.
> I don't see why America gets special status with the animosity people feel towards immigration.
Because it sucks and treats people badly.
My wife, and mother of my dual-citizen children is Italian: I get to stay in Italy, end of story.
To have her go to the US (where I'm from) is, by comparison, a huge, expensive bunch of work even if we've been married for nearly 10 years and have children together.
If your bureaucracy manages to be worse, and slower than Italy's - which it is, in the US - you're doing something wrong.
Sorry but there is no comparaison, Europe has 25 countries with different immigration laws from which you can pretty much choose from depending on what options you are open to.
Take Germany specifically, they have a "Blue Card" (which I believe is available in other EU countries as well) which you can get automatically if you have a degree and a job offer. It converts automatically to residency and eventually citizenship over times depending on the country.
That is a very, very far cry from what H1-B are, and even TN visas.
For H1-B you need a sponsor waiting for you, you need to wait up to ~11 months to know if you are lucky to get through the quota and be allowed to work, an H1-B application is typically 100 pages thick and cost $3 to $8k of lawyer fees and $2k of gov fees (your application gets sent back to you if quotas are reached).
TN/H1-B don't convert to green cards by themselves, your employer need to be willing to go through a lengthly, costly process that takes 2 or more years to get you a green card (that is once you have gone trough all the trouble of getting a H1-B), which many employers will be unwilling to do if you have time left on your 6 years H1-B limit, and you have to stay with the same employer during all that time.
The US does take about 1.2 million immigrants into the country every year.
We mainly do this on family reunification, with a few other limited paths. I do agree that it is a terrible system. I'd love to see a points system like Australia.
That said, I don't think the evidence supports the notion of a shortage of programmers, so I don't think the goal of an immigration system should be to provide silicon valley with more programmers than they are currently getting at market rate.
The problem with the point system is that someone can qualify to immigrate but not be able to find a job. That happened in Canada a while back. A ton of foreign trained doctors were working manual labor jobs because they couldn't work as a doctor.
This could be considered a failure of the medical training system rather than a failure of the immigration system. Canada has lots of need for doctors, there's a lack of residency spots to qualify as a Canadian-approved doctor.
If US citizens who go to med school are heavily protected by licensing laws from competition, whereas US citizens who go to grad school in engineering experience the opposite, you should expect more US Citizens to go into medicine, and more international students hoping to gain entry to the US to train as engineers.
This, rather than deficiencies in the US educational system or problems with making programming "cool", goes a long way toward explaining why US citizens tend to avoid certain fields. It would also explain why the "shortage" of US citizens going into certain fields is actually a highly rational response to a market distortion created by government policy.
It's not like the UK, Canada or Australia which have point-based immigration systems. The US has very few ways for a competent, educated immigrant to enter the country.
The US and Canada both have immigration caps for different resident visas. And they are very similar between the two countries.
A more appropriate way to describe the current situation is that demand for entry into the US is far below available supply.
I don't necessary disagree with you on this: if there is a will, there is a way. Regardless of how the immigration law is, even if you make it "No immigration at all", someone will find a way to get in.
But that's far and far away from "standard and normalized", which implies something is accessible to standard and more average people. The top .5 or 1% (as in aptitude and willpower) will always find ways to get things done, but do you want to get the next 9% too?
The Nobel winner, the Elon Musk won't ever have to care much about those laws, but the discussion has never been about them either.
I'm not so sure about this. I'm a British citizen who's been living in the US for most of the past 7 years (as a student or doing academic jobs), but I can't see any easy way for me to get a job in the tech industry in the US. Perhaps a big company might be willing to sponsor me for an H1B. Apart from that there is just no realistic option that I'm aware of. What other visa could I realistically apply for?
I'm working for a startup that's willing to sponsor me for H1B, EB-1 and even O1 (I'm employee #1, so if we're doing any good, we might try to wiggle an O1 somehow, although that's unlikely).
But yes, you'd need a cooperative employer to get a visa of any sort. Most of the big company in tech (ie Google, FB etc..) are all willing to sponsor for H1B, and a lot of startups are too. But as for the questions of "how to get a job there", that's out of my ability to answer.
One thing about immigration law is that just like tax law, it's too convoluted and specific that it almost depend on your exact situation. You might just qualify for some visas just because of the area you're working on (there is something for academic for H1b that's exempt from the cap). You will need to take a very close look at the law, preferably with an experience lawyer that have done this before, and see if anything that can apply to you by the wording of the law (see the O1? It's not just Nobel winner that can get it).
The whole process will takes something like 10-15 years though ... so don't be discouraged. I've been in the US for 4-5 years, and just like you, I can say that I've no idea if I will still be here in 3 years. And I wouldn't expect for things to "settle down" (immigration-wise) for me for another 10 years-ish either.
A university-educated electrical engineer doesn't want to be an illegal immigrant and the employers that need his skills won't hire illegal immigrants either.
So this is only really true for people willing to work illegally, like migrant farm workers. Presumably the US wants a wider mix of immigrants beyond that.
So far I haven't seen anyone mention the H-1B applicants already in the country. FWIW that's a large number of people. I don't have any stats on that, but assume that it's at least 50% of applicants.
Many foreign nationals who choose to be educated in the US (often at a major premium as most scholarships or subsidized loans are unavailable) aspire to stay in the US to work post-graduation. There are temporary programs that allow this: F-1 Optional Practical Training (OPT) for 12 months. This can be renewed by another 17 months for a STEM degree holder. The 17 month extension was introduced in 2008 to allow the candidate to have two chances at the H-1B lottery [1].
I'm a German citizen who went to college in the US on a F-1 student visa. I worked on an OPT post-graduation before my employer sponsored me for a H-1B. I can guarantee you that I was one of their most expensive employees of comparable education and experience: Preparing a H-1B application (and the associated filing fees) is costly, especially if the government sends a request for further evidence. Just 3 months after I had started (before the H-1B application was filed) I managed to get a 50% raise because I had made myself indispensable and started looking for other opportunities as I felt significantly underpaid. They generally did not give raises to anyone, and as far as I know all of my citizen coworkers continued to be vastly underpaid for years.
If it weren't for the H-1B program, I wouldn't have had an opportunity to stay and work in the country after having already spent some 6 years here.
As an aside: Nobody ever suspects me of being foreign. I'm a white guy with flawless English. However, many of my friends who were born here (to foreign parents or grandparents) are treated with racism. That's simply not ok.
From the other side, I see a lot of over paid "local" workers that spend a lot of time talking and doing no work. Why don't you take your honesty to your bosses and tell them that they are abusing the H1B system to save money? This is my biggest problem with honesty that comes with anonymity. Look, I am not saying there is no abuse of H1B. That is not the government's problem nor it is the problem of the immigrants. It is the American corporates that you work for that abuse the system. You are diverting all your anger towards people who want the experience to live elsewhere. Regarding us not assimilating into your culture, I have no idea what that means. On one hand, I see a lot of people moving to SF just for the variety in ethnicity so you can all be pseudo liberal and then start complaining about ethnic divide.
If the market is willing to pay you $X (at most) then that is your market value. Not more, not less. If you see someone getting paid $X, you need to try and figure out how he/she got there. Why put your efforts/thoughts into how you can drive down that persons salary?
There is no such thing as over paid. Just what you are willing to accept given your constraints. With the current H-1B system there are constraints. In particular, job mobility, that restricts you from easily taking a higher offer (the legal hoops that you and the future employer have to go through is a burden).
Personally, I never had a problem with my salary because I am good at what I do and I project my skills honestly. Salary negotiations involve negotiation skills that a lot of fellow immigrants don't have or don't care about. But when I see their work outperform local workers who are paid more but actually complain a lot about salary, I really get pissed. I have worked with really smart local workers who have all told me they don't feel threatened by immigrant workers. Likewise, I never have felt that someone can exploit me because I am on H1B. But honestly I have far less flexibility in moving jobs which unfortunately seems the only way to get more money in America. So long term I lose. Unlike you, I do think there is a thing called over paid. It is when your value/dollar ratio is exorbitantly high.
If it was about costs, why wouldn't they simply off shore it? I made another post on a similar thread here a few days ago.
I live in Mexico and there's plenty of companies here that do work for US companies, it's great for both sides, on the US business side they're getting what they want for cheaper, and often by some really talented people. On the Mexican side, the company is getting paid in USD and through exchange rates and what not this turns out to be better for them than doing consulting for local business.
So why would they bother opening the borders even more? When they can get the same people to make it for cheaper from this side?
> let's be honest
> one reason only
> absolutely, positively
> without a doubt
> simple reality
> definitely, absolutely
> all-the-fucking-time
> absolutely no
If we're being honest, then we need to start slapping the wrists of the employers.
Technically speaking, to be approved on an LCA (H1B) application, the prevailing wage has to be at or above the mean payable wage for the citizens in the same SOC job classification for the region. Long story short, if there is any exploitation or hurting the local labor, it's because the employers are getting away with illegally hiring talented labor for the wrong, often underpaid positions.
More resources are needed to enforce the restrictions against immigration exploitation on employers, not the immigrants.
Also, the author of this post is running an early-stage business, where cost-cutting doesn't make any sense. It strikes me as a bit naive to extrapolate from what his business is trying to do, to Amazon or whoever. It strikes me as rather likely that businesses more mature than his absolutely are interested in cutting costs, even if he isn't.
what you say may be true for web-development but afaik there is not too much PhD requirements for web-dev work.
I'm in the computer vision and pattern recognition field and as you can guess from its popularity there's definitely a shortage - not just in the US but all over the world.
I'm in France and in my company we are trying aggressively to hire new people in the field but everybody good is already working somewhere or they're working on their own ideas. About 80% of our research/engineering team is from abroad: 2 Swiss, 2 Italian, 3 Turkish, 3 American, 1 Israeli, 2 Russian, 2 Canadian, 2 Spaniard, 1 Iranian - and only 5 French. finding talent in this day and age is a world-wide problem. there's not enough experienced people around for cutting edge companies and there's no way you can hire someone good in the field cheap local or away. that's a very absurd notion...
As I said, I'm currently not located in US and I'm not a US citizen. So, if I decide to work again there I'll need an H1B but as I'm already making quite well where I'm now, I wouldn't consider uprooting my life and returning back to US for no less than $200-250k. if this is considered cheap work, then so be it. exploiting imperialist bastards...
How much of the CV/pattern recognition talent shortage you're describing is because of an unwillingness to consider candidates who don'match exactly. That is, do you have a condition where something like only "PhD in Machine Learning with extensive CV experience" resumes are considered when it is arguably the case that, e.g., "MS/PhD in math/engineering/physics with programming experience" would be equally able to do the work with a (very) modest learning curve to adapt to the specific jargon/processes?
I think there is absolutely a tech hiring culture that discards people who don't have the exact right experience. And it's awful. A good coder with lots of general experience can adapt. An awful, useless hack can sit in a sector and look valuable to a prospective employer while actually being a huge net drain.
I myself have electronics engineering background (telecommunications sub-specialty), 5 others are similarly with ee backgrounds and 3 or 4 people are from applied maths departments. I believe we have only 2 mechanical eng people and the rest is CS guys.
It's not resume or education background bias. However, if you're going to pay in the 150k-200k euro range to somebody, you naturally want them to have relevant experience. After ee undergrad, I majored in signal processing and then got a phd in cv. Hiring people in the hopes that they'll become useful is being done but not excessively in a way that it is counter-productive ( eg. we're not hiring number theorists but accept applied maths guys - one new hire (one of our immigrant workers) has a very cool phd thesis on probability and the data he worked with came from CERN experiments - so it's not CV or PR at all - pure math applied on physics experiments... but he's smart and experienced enough that after only 3 months he's already doing substantial contributions )
cv/pr is not a field where you have a 'modest learning curve' if you hire people to do research - you really need at least a few years of research experience for working on state-of-the-art problems... otherwise, you're paying people to develop their research skills at a very high premium. that should be done at a university...
maybe I'm biased - I always consider this H1B problem in terms of research work - not regular stuff where what you need to do is 95% engineering and 5% research.. this is my bias. but it is also a valid example for H1B discussion in contrast to dismissing all H1B immigrant workers as 'cheap labor' for doing engineering tasks with low requirements.
The US is a country spanning a large continent - maybe that is the reason for many of the racist rants I've seen here on this discussion - it doesn't have many neighbouring countries ( and at odds with all of them except maybe Canada? ) and most US citizens don't leave the states to work in other parts of the world. If you have a whole continent for a country it's easier to find a job in a different part of it than moving to a completely different culture. And so this sort of causes people who don't travel much to have a conservative view of 'immigrant' labor. EU is definitely not perfect and has many problems to solve - but at least, in my opinion, opening the borders for quota-free worker exchanges lets people to hire from a richer pool of talent and helps reduce culture clashes and racist viewpoints in the long term. I'm feeling very lucky to get to know many different cultures from all around the world. I wish you could also have a taste of it too...
Fully agree. That's why H1B's should have a significant minimum requirement for the salary (depending on place). I'm in eastern Europe and I wouldn't even remotely consider Bay Area jobs with less than 250K annual income (base salary + bonuses). Even for other places, it shouldn't be far from that number for me to decide to relocate to US...
So yes, there is a shortage of talent who are willing to work for cheap.
Oh my, I would be curious to know what kind of company offers you such a high living standard in Easter Europe for you to throw any opportunity under the insane amount of 250k...
If I agree that you need more in the SV to live comfortable than probably anywhere else in the world, 250k$/year is an insane amount of money.
A decent home in a good school district is around $2.5m in the Bay Area, so $250k before taxes might get you qualified for a mortgage (provided you saved $500k for a down payment). $100k, while above U.S. median household income, would not go very far in the Bay Area.
Even in Eastern Europe, there are places with very high standards of living for talented developers, such as Prague or Warsaw. With the EU, Berlin, Vienna and Munich are now possible as well and have a very high standard of living.
You can buy a SFH for much less than $2.5m (more like $1m) in good school districts (the best districts are more like $1.5m+). Perhaps not in Mission San Jose, Los Altos Hills or in San Francisco proper, but many many places with a good commute to most of the valley.
For public high schools with a GreatSchools' score of 9 or 10, there are $1.5m 3BR home in places like in Fremont, Dublin or Campbell, but would be a bit of a commute to places like SF, Palo Alto or Mountain View where a high concentration of $250k+ per year jobs are.
>It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
So does buying hardware that's made overseas. Interesting that this argument is made now, but how many local programmers ever bought anything electronic which was a little more expensive but made in the US instead of overseas?
Why do software jobs deserve protection but hardware jobs do not? The amount of hypocrisy here is nauseating.
Why do CEO jobs deserve protection and {...} do not?
Why do physician jobs deserve protection and {...} do not?
Either we make the US job market open for all types of jobs, or have the same rules applied to all professions. Right now, there are many jobs that are heavily protected (how many CEOs/Wall Street types are H1B?), while others are not.
This comment is guilty of the lump of labor fallacy. There is not a fixed quantity of jobs. The job market is dynamic and can generate jobs. One person getting a job does not mean another losing one.
I think you can criticize targeted visa programs without committing the lump of labor fallacy. The reason is that very targeted types of migration such as high tech visas can cause market distortions relative to other fields.
For instance, every new developer probably leads to employment for baristas, brick layers, dermatologists, mortgage brokers, real estate agents, and divorce lawyers. Because developers and engineers in general tend to generate wealth rather than redistribute it, this is especially true.
Here's the thing, if you create a visa program to allow easy migration for developers, but not for all those other professions (or you create a regulatory state that makes it very difficult for migrants to join those fields), what you create is a market distortion. Because new economic activities are available without the competition from the newly arrived migrants, those with existing work and residency rights will have an incentive to avoid engineering and go into other fields. Even if people aren't specifically displaced, even if pay rises a bit, better prospects in other fields may ensure that the existing workforce never goes into software development or engineering in the first place (i.e., someone who would have done so will now instead go into dentistry or tax law).
This, I think, is what we've seen - people who have the right to live and work in the US at the time when they are choosing a career path are shunning these fields. Now, if migration were more general, it wouldn't do as much harm to developers, because while there would be more competition, it would be spread evenly across all fields, not just software.
Think of it this way - suppose we allowed farmers to come to the US, but only if they grow lemons. If you switch your crop, you must leave, because there's a shortage of lemon growers. This would hurt likely harm existing lemon farmers, and you'd expect them to switch to a different crop (probably avocados, where they don't have to compete on price with the suddenly larger and captive population of lemon growers). There might seem to be a shortage of lemons, prices of lemons might still go up, but until they reflect the opportunity cost (what you could get growing avocados), people with the choice won't grow lemons. In this case, the "come here if you agree to grow lemons" visa program would be creating a market distortion that is preventing the lemon market from "clearing".
This is also why a lot of people who have no objection to general skilled immigration strongly oppose such specific tinkering with employment levels, and why a lot of people feel that there really is no evidence of a developer or engineer shortage when you consider the opportunity cost of becoming a developer for people who are free to choose a profession.
I agree with many points of your post, and I can absolutely say that the system does not work as it's advertised to: my wife is(was) an H1B for a prominent tech company, they pretty much insisted on her coming to the US and when they did it they advertised a position publicly (as is required by law) so specific as to completely rule anybody but her, and of would of course summary deny anybody that managed to get an interview(which they don't do any ways, they publicly post the position but than do not hold any interviews, and if they did for show they will never give a thumbs up). The decision to hire the non-U.S. candidate is made before the position is before the posted, which I do think is duplicitous and very much against the spirit of the law.
On the other hand, I just don't feel to strongly that US jobs are solely for US people. This is a global economy and bringing in (hopefully bright and talented) people into the states does increase our national economic prospects. I do feel strongly, however, that the laws governing the process should be enforced completely, not in just the letter but in spirit. There are also some very complicated factors involved such as the cost of education in the US versus many other countries that substantially subsidize it, the potential use of unskilled works simply being used to drive the labor market down.
> There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)
There actually is a talent shortage in the Bay Area. If there was no talent shortage, prices for local labor would be lower. If there wasn't a talent shortage, it wouldn't be possible for me to hire a developer from India, pay to fly him out here, put him up in a hotel in Mountain View for 6 months - all for significantly less than it would cost to hire a local developer.
H1Bs are just the tip of the iceberg. The companies that are pros at this use L1 visas. H1Bs require you to pay a similar wage to the local wage, but L1s have no such requirement. So you can take a developer working in India for $20k/yr and ship him to the US. The consulting company charges them out at the local market rate and pockets the difference. I've seen projects with margins approaching 80% due to this.
The visa system is completely broken, this much is true. But it's really a symptom of the fact that the labor market in the US is not training the types of workers it needs. We train a lot of developers and many of them think they're rock stars. But the reality is that we need a deep bench of competent developers willing to work for substantially less than $100k a year. Those developers exist in other countries, and so the work is going there.
> But the reality is that we need a deep bench of competent developers willing to work for substantially less than $100k a year.
And there we have it. You want developers to continue to be happy with less than $100K salaries while the costs of local housing skyrockets by 20% year over year.
Clearly that won't work for developers hitting their 30s and wanting to start a family or those with families already.
So you're left with hiring the young, highly educated, and unattached. Hence the move to hire H1Bs from overseas.
I work for a Bay Area based company, but I work remotely in Dallas, TX and I can assure you that this problem isn't unique to the Bay Area. It's just that the numbers skew lower.
Here in Dallas, many employers scoff at paying more than $80K/year for a senior developer when they can get an H1B for $50-60K. A lot of this relates to the total capital available, as well as the lower cost of living, but the trend is the same. Employers want more bodies for less money and they've figured out that the H1B is a clear path to achieve this goal.
Well, you get what you pay for (again, exempting professional services/staffing firms from this because they don't operate in the labor market under the same rules as individuals). If you offer $60-80k/yr, you're not going to get great developers. If the market rate is $80k and they're offering $60k for H1B developers, that's actually illegal (though unfortunately rarely enforced).
But many projects don't need great engineers: they just need people who can write code that implements business requirements. Someone with a technical certification may be fine for this (which is usually all these offshore developers have anyway). I would argue that it's insane to pay $100k/yr for this kind of work: from a macro perspective, other skilled labor fields such as accounting are equally challenging, but accounting salaries are much lower. If we trained developers like we do accountants, our economy would likely be more productive.
That's an interesting take. I agree that if programming became more common place (like learning how to use Excel), a number of low skill, high salaried programming jobs would quickly disappear.
However, if that were going to happen, I feel that it would have happened already. Maybe it's because technology moves so rapidly that it forces continual disruption. Any investments and downward pressure on wages due to an increased supply of skilled labor gets effectively reset during technology shifts (like moving from mainframes -> desktop -> web -> mobile).
Having come across a lot of "average engineers", I can tell you that most of the companies they work for survive mainly because they have some type of insulation from technical disruption. Sometimes its in the form of monopolies or regulatory capture, but over time even such companies become vulnerable to the major technology shifts (like mobile).
Look manticore_alpha, you should be honest with yourself here. The primary stakeholders in the H1B discussion are not only local labor, but also the consumers of the products and services produced by the companies that hired H1B's, and the investors in these companies. And consumers and investors have a right to obtain their products and services at a reasonable cost. This is not xenophilia, it's simply reality. This is the economic rationale behind Wal Mart sourcing globally.
And as the original post points out, it is not always about low cost, its also about quality. Would you consider Satya Nadella or Sundar Pichai to be cheap labor?
There is another matter. Why don't you look up the phrase "indentured servant" on wikipedia? It refers to (quote from wikipedia) " a labor system where by young people paid for their passage to the New World by working for an employer for a certain number of years. It was widely employed in the 18th century in the British colonies in North America and elsewhere. It was especially used as a way for poor youth in Britain and the German states to get passage to the American colonies. They would work for a fixed number of years, then be free to work on their own. The employer purchased the indenture from the sea captain who brought the youths over; he did so because he needed labour (sic). Some worked as farmers or helpers for farm wives, some were apprenticed to craftsmen."
Basically, this system which brought in the ancestors of most Americans is very similar to the H1B system in place, right down to the duration of indenture: 7 years, while the H1B has a 6 year time limit.
Been happening all-the-time, my friend. (No, I won't use expletives, and neither should you. Surprised this is the top post, despite HN policies.)
This comment started out sympathetic, veered into an energetic deployment of anecdata, and ended up in a very creepy place.
I'm not sure where I land on the H1B question; it's hard to see how there can simultaneously be a labor shortage and that immigration is going to be helpful to tech workers already here.
But if you want to help make the case against them, probably leave out the appeals to "ethnic ghettos".
> It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
That is not true at all. If engineers get cheaper the result of their labor too gets cheaper and hence the entire American society benefits. American government's job is not to protect interest of Engineers but of everyone. American Medical Council for example has made it illegal for Indian doctors to practice in America and we can see the results. Doctors earn a lot but at the cost of average American.
But there is another important aspect that even the intelligent minds of HN seem to ignore. In highly skilled professions, jobs opportunities are not Zero sum games. Mr. Kumar got a job in US does not mean some Mr. John Smith lost one. On the contrary more engineers you have faster you can solve problems.
Key questions to ask is if US government completely bans H1B throws all Indian H1Bs out will that serve the interest of the American people ?
Communities tend to gravitate toward each other. Your attitude towards these neighborhoods is the same as the attitude expressed toward the european immigrants in the early 1900s.
Does the H1B system need to be reformed? Yes I completely agree. But your reaction is xenophobic. America is a country of immigrants, get over it maybe?
It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
I agree. But that's not a bad thing. That's the market operating more efficiently. The flipside is that it absolutely, positively helps foreign labor. Or alternatively, the overabundance of US citizens absolutely, positively hurts each other's labor.
What makes naturalized citizens so privileged? Surely they themselves are 2nd class citizens to native born Americans, who are in turn less deserving than descendants of actual American Indians. Drawing the line between "naturalized citizen" and "H1B visa holder" is quite arbitrary. It's still discrimination akin to racism or sexism.
Relevant quotes from recently posted article on Pavel Durov:
"Me myself, I’m not a big fan of the idea of countries"
>There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now
Just out of curiosity, what are the "standard, normalized ways " that people immigrate to the US ? If i were to go to the American Embassy in New Delhi and apply for immigration and i don't have close, immediate family in the United States i don't see a way other than becoming a Fiance of a US citizen
You throw a lot of alleged experience behind your opinion, but, having had to hire MANY employees in the Bay Area, it sure as hell doesn't seem like anyone's getting cheap labor, and I sure as hell don't see anyone languishing on the market thanks to this influx of ferriners.
The other important and often overlooked missing piece of the equation is that programming is a brutally ageist profession and that the typical programming career is short. If you haven't made it into management by 30 you will find it increasingly hard to get rank & file coding jobs. So even if the typical programmer's salary is relatively high you mustn't forget that this career may only last 10-15 years in many cases.
It's pretty simple IMO. The programmer shortage would evaporate if programmers were paid according to the value they create.
You worked at some companies that had foreign workers, I get that. Since most companies forbid employees from discussing salary with your co-workers, exactly how do you know they were getting paid less than they were worth?
Also, I don't know if you noticed, but most of the rest of the US, and the entire world as a whole, pays significantly lower salaries for software engineering than Silicon Valley, even factoring in cost of living. Yet Silicon Valley salaries have continued to climb to amazing heights. This is not because you are any better at your job today than 10 years ago. It is because there is a crisis of supply. The industry needs far more programmers today than ever before, and the LOCAL supply is severely constrained. It is hard to even get people from other parts of the US to move to the bay area, let alone from other countries.
Is the H1B exploitable? Yes, but that's because of anti-worker government policies. If the US offered skilled workers a transferrable Visa valid for a fixed (extendable if you can prove you still have solid income in your field), workers would have the power to leave a bad job.
As for ghettos, I don't even know what to say to you. The housing market in the bay is so utterly broken, and there are so few real walkable neighborhoods with a sense of community, you would prefer that recent immigrants what, scatter themselves across the bay instead of striving to at least maintain some sense of continuity in their life? If you want to improve things, fight for local city governments to stop their idiotic policies against infill development and public services.
Without commenting on your opinions, let me touch upon one point you make:
> I've worked at multiple companies (managed their websites) -- where we would temporarily post a job description to appear that it was a fair playing field for local workers -- when in reality that position was definitely, absolutely going to be filled by a cheaper, exploitable H1B visa position.
Alyandon below also says:
> I worked as a contract developer for over 10 years and this was absolutely the norm for the companies I worked at. It was so egregious at some places that HR would go as far as to get the exact list of skills from the H1B they wanted to hire and then tailor a job posting to that exact list of skills in order to disqualify local applicants.
Could you and others give us the names of these companies? I'd be very interested to know if such abuse is seemingly random or tends towards a certain kind of company, because I have my suspicions that it's the latter, and simple legislation could easily be passed to prevent that.
To support his claim here's a video of a law firm advising companies on exactly how to craft employment ads to hire only foreign workers and not hire Americans even if they are qualified. In fact he even says it explicitly, the goal is to not hire a domestic worker, and getting a suitably experienced domestic worker applying for the job is considered a failure state of the process.
It tells you where to place your ads so that they are "publicly visible" but nobody sees them, and how to craft them to the exact skillset of the foreign worker you're already going to hire.
They say that they are complying with the letter of the law, but they are not because the law requires you to make a good faith effort to hire domestically and they are telling you how to reject those candidates even if they apply.
"our goal is clearly to not to find a qualified and interested US worker."
I understand the skepticism on HN because many people are working in places where real high-end work is being done. But I worked in the Midwest for over eight years and we had guys brought in to do Apache Struts work, and half the time I had to teach them how to do it. Maybe part of the reason some of you guys who really need qualified foreign workers are getting squeezed is because other companies are screwing you by fraudulently hiring. Why weren't the people in that video above ever prosecuted? They're on video admitting to crimes.
Not here to give any names, but I can third this observation. The job description ads are absolutely tailored and never intended to hire anyone local. But there is one good reason why that happens - OPT.
Foreign students graduate out of US schools and join companies here and work legally by enrolling in the OPT program that can last upto 28 months. During this time, the only way the company can hire them full-time is through the H1B program. The whole charade with creating these oddly specific ads and posting them where no one can see them is because there is no other way to continue employing the same people.
The same thing is repeated as part of PERM because the company is supposed to post an ad to hire someone for a job to make sure no one local is available, but that person has already been hired!
I can't name names. I can tell you one was the kind of company you're probably thinking about, and the other was a publicly-traded (now) supply chain company.
Or, he fears blacklisting in what is a closed market. The number of employees who have identical work histories is pretty slim; naming 2-3 of them would be very identifying.
I've seen this (job openings explicitly tailored for new or exisiting H1B employees) quite a bit myself, and I too am unwilling to "name names" for the same reason.
While we are on the topic, anyone care to illuminate me on the practicalities of H1Bs as a worker?
1. What do you do if your petition for H1B is rejected. I have 2 shots to apply with my time in OPT, but what if both fail? Is the only option to go back to your home country and start over? That seems freaking absurd!
2. Can you increase your chances of being selected for H1B? For example, I've heard that working at bigger companies like Google/FB/Amazon gives you a better shot. Is there any truth to this?
3. Is there any reasonable way to start a company on an OPT or H1B? AFAIK the rules state that you can either work for a company or own majority stake but not both. So its possible with a cofounder who is a resident, but he/she would own the company legally.
Your experience seems rather limited. Because H1Bs by no stretch are cheap. You got to be kidding yourself if you think Indians buying up all those million+ dollar homes in Bay Area are earning low wages.
Fear based ethnic favoritism is xenophobic by definition. Abstracting that with immigration policy, visa types, foreign labor law, etc to influence the effect doesn't change that.
There is one thing in your post I must particularly disagree with:
> There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)
I can generalize that "there is no shortage of anything provided you can pay". You can get a BMW in Cuba, a skyscraper in NY and what ever you want where ever you want, it's just much more expensive.
Still, there are shortages and high prices are indicative of that.
What people don't quite understand because it has been hammered into the minds of the minds of the middle class for decades now by the ruling elite is that immigration to the USA is bad for everyone involved all around, with exception of the ruling elite. Sure, on an individual basis someone immigrating from central Asia or Central America will be far better off coming to the USA, but fact of the matter is that not only are they sabotaging the local population but they are also being played and harming the source country they come from, which is the even greater damage. The brain, brawn, and bravado drain caused on source countries by the USA sucking up talent is the largest factor of mid to long term problems and failures in source countries, all while also sabotaging and manipulating the market in the destination (USA) country. I don't care what bleeding heart liberals whine and cry about, they are causing more damage than they appear to have the capacity to grasp. It's a process not unlike the damage cause by all the development "assistance" of the past century.
Additionally, what the wealthy are doing in the USA (and other places) by supporting immigration (Pro tip: republicans only dislike immigrants and illegal immigrants when they lie to the faces of their voters) is undermining challenges and competition by the middle class and even the most modest improvement for the more challenged classes. What they are doing with immigration of any kind is sabotaging market factors that would require them to pay fair wages and appropriate costs.
Sure, some will make the argument that blather, blather global market blather captialism * blather* but the fact of the matter is that the wealthy only want everything to flow one direction. They don't want global or even domestic competition and transparency for CEOs, they don't want competition at all. What they want is to rig the game, they want to change the rules as it benefits them at every single step of the way. They are nothing different than the little shit you played with in childhood, who used to change the rules as he started losing at the game or wasn't totally dominating you. What the wealthy do ... what they are ... are the people who sabotage success, they snipe progress in order to keep anyone else from competing with them; because what the wealthy hate even more than the middle class is true competition. They love fake, rigged, and manipulated competition though that means they will win with as little effort as possible.
It hurts because of how H1-B visas are structured. If there was free-flow movement of these high-skilled workers (and none of this indentured servitude to the company), then salaries would raise equivalently.
But for now it hurts local labor because it gives companies a pool of employees without rights (notably the right to walk away from a toxic environment without having to leave the country).
The reason why companies like doing this is because the H1-B worker is bonded to the company for a long... long time. They can continue to keep underpaying the worker. They can even choose to not follow-through with sponsoring the H1-B worker's green-card application.
Lets be intelligent. Salaries for the H1Bs are low because the H1B visas are very exploitative. So, instead of forcing companies to hire local labour, force the government to remove the restrictions and salaries will rise.
>>> I've worked at multiple companies (managed their websites) -- where we would temporarily post a job description to appear that it was a fair playing field for local workers -- when in reality that position was definitely, absolutely going to be filled by a cheaper, exploitable H1B visa position.
"Please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." -- Paul Graham
In short term immigrants definitely have negative impact on wages.
However, in long term brain drain helps Silicon Valley to maintain its software capital of the world status.
Nokia mainly depended on local workforce. From Poland it is much closer to Finland than to US. But it was Google US which hired my brightest school mates.
if there isn't a talent shortage and there are workers in the bay area without jobs that work in engineering I would appreciate an intro to said workers.
also to clarify, if you mean there isn't a shortage and that i just have to offer higher salaries to poach from other companies I would categorize that as a shortage since it will just results in the equivalent of music chairs for jobs.
i don't mind paying top dollar for the best engineers but if the permanent state is music chairs for engineers that to me implies a shortage. Irrespective of the salaries you have to pay, there should be enough engineers to fill all job openings otherwise I would say there is a shortage.
not advocating excessive numbers of workers to drop salaries, ideally it would (job openings -1) number of engineers.
> In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor.
Good to hear your experience, but this response imply that you either think the author is dishonest or that you don't care about their experience because it's not yours (your emphasis "one reason, and one reason only").
I won't be ignoring your response, because I think it's based on truth and it got so many up-votes, but as many have already pointed out, it does indeed goes into unnecessary details to make your point, giving it a xenophobic feel as a whole.
Now to get to the actual subject I believe there are two distincts type of actors (company sponsors) competing for H1-B creating a bit of a dialogue of the deaf every time the subject comes up:
(1) consulting companies, commonly called "body shops" that swift around H1-B workers and scale profits on workers/margins. Such companies as Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro and to a much lesser extend Western IT companies such as Accenture, Microsoft (let's not forget Microsoft make nearly $700k of revenue per employee [1]), etc. [2]
(2) startups and small groups who do product development or research and thus are not looking for cost savings, nor can they scale human costs very well. For these groups (like the authors's), hiring the right candidate has a significant cost and importance and making a mistake can be even more costly. The burden of processing H1-B visas is very high, but the importance of being able to access a global pool of talent is big enough that they still go through the trouble. This is especially evident by the fact that such startups usually do not usually have oversea offices yet but are competing globally.
The problem is that (1) has a very well refined process that has scaled with the bureaucratic obstacles and eats the majority of H1-B visa numbers without much impact for them when some of their petitions get dropped when the lottery gets "drawn". (2) loses however loses greatly at this game.
A very simple solution to this problem is to award the top 65,000 petitions with the highest salaries, and award them monthly instead of yearly, as timing is also a major issues for small companies. If we talks about quotas after making such change, we'll be talking about a very different kind of H1-B and the road will be much more open for a positive debate.
Also, am I the only one bothered by the use of the term labor? High-tech jobs are not usually factory jobs, but more generally creative-type of jobs. This may be how it's viewed in (1), but for (2), people are not necessarily replaceable entities, if a startup want to hire a candidate because they have worked with her in the past or have had a very promising interview, it is their business and their choice, they are not hiring "labor".
Also, just to give a bit of scale context of the H1-B issue in the grand scheme of the immigration debate, the 4 million work permits granted recently through executive orders are roughly equivalent to combining 65 years H1-Bs at current quota levels, not justifying one or the other, just trying to give scale and expose how much legal work visa venues are completely squeezed in the US.
In correction to my previous comments, I missed the part about "at many tech companies", so I shouldn't have taken your statement as an absolute one, my bad on that.
Some additions however to your comments:
> I've worked at multiple companies (managed their websites) -- where we would temporarily post a job description to appear that it was a fair playing field for local workers -- when in reality that position was definitely, absolutely going to be filled by a cheaper, exploitable H1B visa position.
It happens all-the-fucking-time.
All companies have to do that, often time a startup really want to hire a specific candidate, and they still have to play this game. If you are a co-founder and are sponsoring yourself (in the off chance that you think that might work), you have to post a CTO/etc. job offer for your position in your office, with skills matching yours to be able to work in your company. This feel like a relic of industrial jobs protectionism and won't be necessary if companies compete for quota numbers using highest salaries (although it would probably still have to be followed because no one changes immigration laws). It feels somewhat like a dishonest system, but it also dishonest as a factor or the law not evolving with it's time (e.g. just think of the job posting having to be posted on a wall).
> There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now.
What exactly? I don't believe I am the only one asking this question in this thread, and you are not alone in expressing this statement, and it reflects one of the single most misunderstood by Americans realties of US Immigration. Namely that there is not a single straightforward immigration pathway for skilled and motivated immigrants (family, refugees, green card lottery winners however do have one).
> We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating.
This is the part that doesn't add anything to your comment.
Oh and don't get me started on the terrible "conditions" - relative to the tech-bro startups in SF - where H1Bs are expected to stay insane hours and work weekends.
There's a lot of H1B's on here. You have friends overseas who you want to see succeed in the Bay Area.
In my experience at many tech companies in the Bay Area, H1B Visas exist for one reason, and one reason only - to get skilled engineering/STEM labor -- and to exploit connections (primarily Indian/Pakistani) among these workers to continue to get cheap labor.
It absolutely, positively hurts local labor - naturalized citizens - etc. Without a doubt.
This is not a Xenophobic reaction, it's simply reality.
I've worked at multiple companies (managed their websites) -- where we would temporarily post a job description to appear that it was a fair playing field for local workers -- when in reality that position was definitely, absolutely going to be filled by a cheaper, exploitable H1B visa position.
It happens all-the-fucking-time.
There's standard, normalized ways immigrants have come to the US for a long time now. There's absolutely no talent shortage in the Bay Area, provided you can pay (and your ideas are interesting)
We also don't need any more of the divisive ethic-neuveau-ghettos we're seeing in the south bay, cupertino and east bay with communities insulating themselves rather than assimilating.