Ugh , wait till you hear about green card process for Indians. Despite living here legally for past 15 years, I might have to wait for another 10 to just get permenant residency.
And if it is going to be this hard, why do I have to pay social security and medicare taxes? I call it a donation/yearly fees at this point, working with such a shady system.
From the Congressional research service's report on immigration backlog [1] (note: this was before covid), for applicants from India, the projected backlogs for various employment-based green card applications applying in 2020 were:
EB-1: 8 years.
EB-2: 195 years.
EB-3: 27 years.
Projecting out to 2030, the report says (for Indian applicants):
EB-1: 18 years.
EB-2: 436 years.
EB-3: 48 years.
I performed a linear extrapolation using the 2020 and 2030 estimates. Two points and a straight line through them gives:
All numbers in years. The numbers are rounded up to the next highest integer. Note that a straight line through these two points isn't necessarily the correct model but whatever. Also, the covid era immigration policy moved a bunch of dates around, so this may not be as accurate. But it is still the best numbers I could find.
In any case, it is reasonable to assume that anyone with a priority date of 2017 or so will likely retire before your priority date is current.
You (and me) will probably spend an entire career paying for social security and never be eligible for it.
> citizens of India can receive Social Security benefits with 10 years of work.
This is about exceptions to the rule preventing payments outside the United States after 6 months, and is based on more than 10 years of work by the qualified worker.
But the actual worker needs to be a citizen or a legal permanent resident (“green card” holder) [0] to be eligible to either receive benefits themselves or have dependents receive benefits based on their eligibility.
[0] Actually, there’s a few other categories like certain refugees and asylees, but not, general dual-intent non-immigrant visa holders (like H-1B workers.)
Again, note this is about payments for people who have qualified for them either as a qualified worker or as a dependent of one while the recipient is outside of the United States, it is not about the status required to be the worker on the basis of whose eligibility payments are made.
This could be just the reason why Congress is turning their attention to work visas.
IIRC green card problem began simultaneously with H1B problem, between 2005-2008. It makes sense: if the major entry to the immigration pipeline ends up 75% of Indian nationals, of course the exit for India-born (due to per-country diversity rule) is jammed.
I know backlog growth has a few unrelated causes adding up together, but at least 90% of the mess correlates very well with overuse of H1B and L1B (transfers) by odd consultancy businesses. Other factors don’t seem as important, for example, China has the same population size as India, but its wait time has been growing several times slower. Both problems are clearly connected.
You could have gained Swiss citizenship in less than that (12 years realistically, that includes waiting for 2 years to get interview, could be less). Sure, you have to learn new language to cca decent level (B1), but that's a minuscule effort compared to big picture.
Much more free time for ie visits back home (basically everybody has 25 days of paid leave + various public holidays, and I can be off sick for a long time without any any effect on paycheck), you have top notch medical and school system for free, retirement savings are forever yours and yours only and accessible from anywhere. CHF is stronger than ever, country is historically most stable in the world for past 800 years, extremely low criminality compared to US.
Being treated with respect regardless where you come from or how you look like and bureaucracy working well are additional features. More real freedom than you could ever dream of having in US (maybe unless you are a proper gun nut) is just a cherry on the top of the cake.
> Being treated with respect regardless where you come from or how you look
How about being treated as a Swiss regardless of where you come from or how you look? Say what you will about America, but it is a place where you can become an American in all senses of the word within one generation.
This is an extremely powerful fact about north america (the USA and Canada) that many miss. All of the old world is based around ethnicity. You are either fully accepted and equal or you are not - all based on ethnicity.
This is not the case in the US and Canada. each country has an ugly past but their true strength is in the ability for anyone from anywhere to become fully integrated and equal in their societies.
This is only because America has no real culture. America has global technological monoculture, which gives you infinite freedom as long as you comply with the state’s laws. No wonder adoption is so easy.
> Ugh , wait till you hear about green card process for Indians. Despite living here legally for past 15 years, I might have to wait for another 10 to just get permenant residency.
Unless you marry someone who's not from India (does not have to be a green-card holder or an American either). Indians really get screwed by their cultural expectations to marry someone who's also from India.
They can be an Indian citizen who grew up in India, but as long as their birth certificate is from a country other than China & India they can get a green card in a reasonable amount of time.
These days, a lot of folks do undergrad in India, then a masters in the US, OPT -> H1B and were definitely not coupled up or married before they came to the US...
> And if it is going to be this hard, why do I have to pay social security and medicare taxes? I
You don’t; no one is requiring you to reside or work outside your country of citizenship; presumably, you have chosen to do so because it provides economic advantage over your other alternatives. (Also, no one is prohibiting you from taking the necessary steps to qualify for a different immigration category, including the unlimited ones that have no quota and therefore no backlog.)
Because you chose to apply to a system that limits the total percentage of recipients taken by nationals of any one country? The USA is pretty public with this information along with publishing applications numbers so if it's a process you are interested in understanding or that could impact you personally you had a lot of information to inform you how it all works and what your odds/wait would be?
Dunno if you are aware of the racism behind this. US limits this by country by birth not citizenship. Just being public about this doesn't make it fair or equitable.
Took me twenty years to get it and the only reason it happened in 20 was the increase in number of available green cards due to covid. $5M+ earnings, leading teams of 30+, generating hundreds of millions in income for companies.
Citizenship of India by naturalization can be acquired by a foreigner (not being an illegal
migrant) who is ordinarily resident in India for twelve years (throughout the period of twelve
months immediately preceding the date of application and for eleven years in the aggregate in
the fourteen years preceding the twelve months) and fulfils other qualifications as specified in
third schedule to the act, 1955.
In addition:
1) A copy of valid Foreign Passport
2) A copy of Residential Permit/LTV
3) A copy of Bank Challan in original amounting to Rs.1500/- deposited in the State Bank of India.
4) One affidavit from self (applicant) and two affidavits from two Indians testifying to the character of the applicant in the prescribed language available in the application form. Affidavit to be allotted by Notary/Oath Commissioner/ DM.
5) Two language certificates certifying the applicant’s knowledge in any one of the Indian languages specified in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. (A language certificate from a recognized educational institution or from a recognised organisation or from two Indian citizens of the district of the applicant).
6) Two newspaper (circulating in the district in which the applicant resides) cuttings of different dates or of different newspapers notifying his/ her intention to apply for citizenship in the prescribed language available in the application form.
regarding social sec & medicare, it is straight up robbery of legal worker. I understand as a nation you have the right to limit immigration as you see fit but if you really are as morally sound as you claim all this money should be refunded to an immigrant if their application is rejected or dropped because the wait was longer than a reasonable human carrier (40years). This is straight up immoral and punishes people who actually played by the rules.
you are missing the larger point, it is often heralded that illegal immigration is immoral & the right thing to do is to wait in line and do it legally. Also, America absolutely claims moral high ground on international stage regularly and uses it to justify use of force when needed.
In case there is any doubt about this, the founding war cry for the country was taxation without representation is basically equivalent to slavery. And then civil war with southern states for the same. How is taking away money from people's paycheck for a service that they'll never use and have no representation into not mini-slavery. I mean if you want to steal that money from down-on-their-luck immigrants then why not just create a new taxrate slab for migrant workers so they have a clear view of what they are getting into.
Typically HN seems to down weight any discussions on visas or immigration to keep it off the front page, but for what it's worth it's important to point out that this lottery system was designed by USCIS and recently changed post 2016 in a way that aids staffing companies and IT consultants.
Previously you have to file a full petition with a serious job offer which costs thousands of dollars but now you just pay some entry fee and you're in. Obviously this was ripe to be gamed by shady staffing companies taking money from applicants for filing a petition and THEN finding a job later based on whichever staffing agency gets picked. It's not even illegal for multiple companies to submit a petition for the same person.
USCIS can fix this by just selecting the lottery based on passport numbers and making sure the full paperwork is filed before the lottery like a few years ago, but of course they'll just lazily blame others for taking advantage of something that is so easily gamed.
The real losers here are the students who studied in the US, worked hard to find a job and only submit a single petition through their employers. It's now way less likely they will get picked in the lottery.
My opinion - USCIS can't legally reduce H1B visas so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications, who they can later reject, or they simply won't file a full petition, and they don't have to issue all the 85K H1B visas Congress has allowed.
> The real losers here are the students who studied in the US, worked hard to find a job and only submit a single petition through their employers. It's now way less likely they will get picked in the lottery.
I'll never understand why we don't just staple green cards to master's degrees. It's absolutely absurd that we're choosing to kick out talented, hardworking people who are already established here, who are disproportionately young and healthy. And they're at the very beginning of their careers - they're ready to pay a lifetime of taxes. They're the absolute opposite of drains on society.
> I'll never understand why we don't just staple green cards to master's degrees.
As someone who has interviewed and worked with a number of international students with master's degrees, approximately 70% of them somehow manage to get a master's
from a US college without actually knowing anything, so my cynical side says we definitely should not automatically add green cards to master's degrees.
How similar is that 70% to US students though. It amazes me how little my friends in the last years of their CS major know about CS or software, so it doesn't surprise me at all if 70% of all masters holders know very little about what they studied.
The reason to give almost anyone working a tech job a green card quickly is so they don't depress the market wage by being indentured serfs.
The absolute worst thing the US could do to the Indian IT sweatshops is to give a "tech worker" a guaranteed green card in 18-24 months so that they can change employers. Those companies would quit applying for visas almost immediately.
Need a source for this. I'm sure there are a vast number of master's students who get their degree from shitty colleges to just be able to work here, but the vast majority of international co-workers I've had were amazing.
> Providing a green card upon completion of your master's degree.
Seems like an interesting idea. Why do you think it's not already being done? I haven't really explored the idea very carefully, but this would amount to giving universities the power to grant citizenship to foreigners, which seems like it has a lot of potential for abuse.
> Just a note that green card holders are residents, not citizens.
While there are time and other requirements after getting lawful permanent resident status (“green card”), the main limitation on access to citizenship is getting status in an immigrant category and thereby becoming an LPR.
Because that is not how American immigration has traditionally worked. Many of us are from families that did not have the means to put someone through graduate school, they arrived as Irish orphans or with $8 in their pockets. The graduate student doesn't need the citizenship, the person with $8 in their pocket does. Imagine a world where the graduate student who is already guaranteed to be pretty successful AND the immigrant who came with $8 dollars have good lives. That's what America is about to me. That is why we limit immigration number by country (so more people have an opportunity) and promote familial immigration, not immigration of elites. If you want that system there are plenty of countries with golden visas, one right next door to the USA.
When I had a friend deported for losing the lottery (she had a masters in a math related field) our friend group had a lot of discussions about the topic. Masters degrees can be gamed, and some people do get them simply because it gives them more time. But difficult degrees in industries that America needs (STEM was our initial thought) we should be encouraging people in those industries to stay with a green card or some extremely long visa that isn't just chance. Determining the fields would be the hard part.
PhDs on the other hand, regardless of the field, you've contributed something unique to the collective knowledge of humanity. Instant green card, it's even dumber to kick them out.
Green cards, also aren't citizenship but are simply a step to getting there. There are many types of visas that let you work but have stipulations, especially around leaving the country. If there really is some kind of fear of people collecting citizenship after spending decades in the country and becoming highly educated, special visas with rules are always an option. But there should be a viable path to citizenship either way. We should not be kicking these people out.
> PhDs on the other hand, regardless of the field, you've contributed something unique to the collective knowledge of humanity. Instant green card, it's even dumber to kick them out.
Depends on the field. I've met PhDs that are fantastic, and I've also met PhDs whose defining contribution to human knowledge over their entire lifetime was "I made this algorithm 2.3% faster in a specific tiny edge case that no one will ever care about."
It's not exactly what you're talking about but there's a post degree completion extension for F-1 visas, and extension for that for masters/doctoral students that can extend the visa (iirc) for up to three years and allow one to work. I've known several people that transitioned from their F-1 OTP to H1-B. I've even known people who sought out masters programs to extend their student visa just to avoid returning to their home country due to political turmoil and violence.
But that said, you would make it more difficult for American citizens to attend American graduate degree programs that they subsidize with their taxes. There's a finite number of seats for students and I'm not sure if they're better filled with locals or people who want guaranteed permanent residency.
Then make VISAs an auction if the goal is maximum value extraction, not some weird arbitrary 'allow all X class (in your case master degree graduates) because they are of 'more value' for 'XYZ reason'. But that isn't the goal nor the will of the American people who have codified a system of ensure the chance for immigration is spread across the world. We are a nation of immigrants most of whom came with nothing. Our goal is giving that opportunity to others who need it. Plenty of countries offer 'golden visas'. If that is how one wishes to immigrate, one can move to one of them today.
This could dramatically increase the value of a degree for a foreigner. I'm curious what some of the effects would be--an increase in tuition rates for foreign students? A corresponding reduction in the number of US students who are able to get admission to US universities? Obviously some of these effects could be limited by regulation, if desired (i.e., universities could be restricted from admitting more than their allotted number of foreign students). Is it right to concede to the university our shared public power of granting residency?
> I'll never understand why we don't just staple green cards to master's degrees.
It can be easily gamed and would lead to a rise in education industry specifically for this.
I think the better would be to give a green card after getting a US degree in areas that matter to the economic growth, and the students have worked here, in those industries for 5 years.
The majority of international students coming to the US are wealthy or from upper middle class families . Do you really want to shut out deserving people who cannot afford to study in the US . Or make the US similar to Vancouver, BC where all the wealthy elite moved and bought up all the businesses and real estate after working for a few years ?
Not for Masters degrees, undergrad yes, because you don't have a lot of scholarships, but for Masters degrees you have a good chance of getting an assistantship or a scholarship.
> Do you really want to shut out deserving people who cannot afford to study in the US
The parent poster did not say anything about stopping other avenues of immigration. Immigration is expensive. Do you think a lot of people who aren't privileged enough can easily immigrate?
A solution to that would be tightening up admission requirements. But if universities deem that applicants are legit, there is no detriment to the supposed "influx" that you are pointing to. At that point, that's just the US drawing in trained labor force
They have to get accepted into a program and graduate and they have to have the funds to pay tuition. Then they'll work productively here and pay taxes. I can't think of any reason why this would be a bad thing except the bigoted "ugh, too many Indian people."
Absorbing educated people from other nations is an economic superpower.
Lower ranked US universities will grant admission to anyone who can afford their fees. Majority of the people coming to the US are from tier 3/4 colleges in their home country. There are few states in this particular country that have consultancies submitting thousands of student applications. Everything is taken care of - from the application form filling to preparing SOPs and letters of recommendation. Always a good idea to understand the ground reality before jumping to conclusions.
Because American's have chosen to have immigration opportunities spread among different countries and specifically written that into our system? Because I don't want a system that promotes elites that 'have the funds to pay tuition'? None of my grandparents could have afforded that high bar. If you have the funds, you don't NEED to immigrate as much as others do.
> Obviously this was ripe to be gamed by shady staffing companies taking money from applicants for filing a petition and THEN finding a job later based on whichever staffing agency gets picked. It's not even illegal for multiple companies to submit a petition for the same person.
Here you go. There's a real position at FAANG for every petition they file (and if the petition doesn't get selected, there's a position at a subsidiary). Keep in mind that If I want to hire:
A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup OR
A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop [0]
my only path forward is H1! They'll both be listed as "computer related occupations" and apply for the same visa in the same quota. Does that make any sense to anyone?
Of course, my odds of getting a lottery spot for the former are dramatically lower, since we all know body shops and consulting firms won't hesitate to file 4-5 applications per seat they plan to fill out (so one can hopefully get a spot in the lottery and not get any RFE).
I think you’ll find the companies abusing the process are almost entirely staffing agencies or worse. Very few, if any, are venture funded startups. At every company I’ve worked at and hired for an H1-B is more work to hire and is treated no differently from a compensation perspective as compared to their US citizen peers.
The theory that HN is part of a vast conspiracy in the startup world related to H1-Bs is misguided.
My most charitable explanation is that these topics do not lead to any novel discussions and instead creates flame wars between the pro and anti visa people for no benefit.
it's funny because that's obviously what people want
then instead in top 5 there is some weird article about like "How I used my old CRT monitor to create a fish tracking app using radios" and some guy reply about some home project in 20 000 words no one really cares about
ProTip: You can browse news.ycombinator.com/active for the topics that become "too popular for the front page." I visit /active at least once a day to see what interesting articles I missed because the algorithm immediately buried them.
You can watch it in action sometimes, with amusing results. Some very active posts do, in fact, vanish from the front page with surprising speed, whereas less-active posts can literally linger for days.
While your claim is plausible there is a lot of confirmation bias, among other biases, when it comes to our idea of what what see on a socially algo'd front page.
I'm not saying you are wrong but I'm saying my confidence starts quite low with this kind of idea. (e.g. the cause could be something different like manual moderation; the effect may just be confirmation bias and not exist; etc.)
Qualifier: I haven't looked into the algo at all, for all I know it could be openly published by YC/HN. I'm mainly responding because I feel like it is important to TRY to be self-aware of our own biases. Emphasis on the TRYing and asymptotically approaching 100% confidence (Qualifier to the Qualifier: it is also important to be at peace with decisions based on <100% confidence lol)
>so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications
USCIS has a conflict of interest as it is funded by the applicants. USCIS exists to fund USCIS, which means (applicants) x (fees). Everything that is wrong with immigration from the execution standpoint follows from that.
This is so sad to hear. During college and up to the present I have spoken with hardworking international students who are struggling to get H1B visa...
Yes but not just though the lottery. USCIS has massively increased visa filing fees, especially for employment, to fund application processing for other areas like asylum etc. which don't have any fees.
Yes, you’re absolutely correct, the people arriving on the southern border seeking asylum definitely haven’t been through any kind of dehumanizing treatment along the way. Solid take.
So because five people you know weren't harmed you're saying things like family separation aren't a big deal? As stated in the links, CBP themselves admitted to splitting up over 6,000 families. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the wait times for marriage visas but at least those waiting aren't forcibly separated from children and kept in detention facilities.
Process A is a miserable dehumanizing process. Instead of pushing against the people who are unnecessarily making it a miserable dehumanizing process, your complaint seems to be that a similar process B isn’t a dehumanizing miserable process.
No it’s that for all the bullshit happening when you go through the legal process such as background checks, interviews, medical exams, expensive filling fees, interviews in other countries in some cases. You can just walk up the border skip all that and be in the US in a week.
The system is a joke to make the US some money off people who have it and punish law abiding citizens. If you have gone through it you would be just as pissed off as i am.
Would love for the process to be changed. Let me know how since most people don’t care about legal immigration.
Can you, though? You'll fail e-verify and won't have an SSN so you'll have to live like the people who cross the Southern border. You'll be picking strawberries instead of writing code.
I'm an immigrant and the two processes are not substitutable.
Might be talking about asylum seekers? Who I believe are allowed to stay until their asylum hearings?
I mean... they talk about the hell of the legal immigration process without mentioning the hell people who're coming to our Southern boarder seeking asylum are going through.
I do agree the legal H1B process is brutal though.
I know several people who can gone through the “asylum” process. It’s not the hell fox news tells you about in 99% of cases. But you won’t see how easy the real process is on the news because it would really piss off both sides. Additionally it’s just a funnel of government money into private businesses that provide temporary housing and holding locations.
> My opinion - USCIS can't legally reduce H1B visas so they intentionally wreck the lottery system to invite bogus applications, who they can later reject, or they simply won't file a full petition, and they don't have to issue all the 85K H1B visas Congress has allowed.
USCIS merely follows the laws and rules. As with most things in the US, this is a Republican-created disaster.
In 2005 the Bush administration invented this system after the Omnibus Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2005. Which was, to put it mildly, a shitshow. They gave members a few hours to read over 3000 pages of new laws and 9 new bills. No one had any idea what they were voting for and parts of the law weren't even properly drafted; only 2 bills had ever even been debated. It took nearly a week after voting for the actual text to come out.
USCIS still has a lot of leeway over how they adjudicate visa applications (both standards and the time duration) and this is used by the administration through political appointees to shape who and how many people they admit.
Post 2016, they dramatically increased RFEs (Request for Evidence) and slowed down visa processing for H1B visas and employment authorization (EAD) cards from a few weeks or a month to years. Many, many women lost their jobs because of that.
This is also primarily why they operate on paper and refuse to modernize.
They wasted hundreds of thousands of employment based green cards every year simply because they didn't bother to process applications on time from people waiting decades.
Don't agree with that part. When the market is tough, anyone is willing to work for shitty companies.
You missed out the main point that people on h1b have hard time leaving companies generally because not everyone sponsors h1bs, and the general process around applying for PERM and GC forces candidates to stick around for >1 year at least.It is a resource-protection mechanism for employers.
Adding to that the general incompetence by USCIS in handling h1b applications - where they take even 6 months to approve a h1b transfer.
That's disingenuous. You could still map the general opinion and value system of the forum majority and hold them to what they purport to care about. As someone who's just beginning to form their judgement of the forum populace, your tone immediately comes across as defensive and deflecting.
Outside of tech, nothing has really changed. Consumer spending is going up.
> Massive layoffs in tech
Business be booking everywhere else. Outside the giants who overhired and VC hyped overfunded startups, pretty much every other company has open positions and is hiring. The hiring bar is high, but they are hiring.
That’s one school of thought, but it’s not the only. Raising taxes on corporations and high income earners (ie the people that actually have money) is certainly another solution, though obviously unpalatable to those current in charge of policy. It’s telling that the Fed frames layoffs of the people most impacted by high inflation, the lower and middle classes, as required.
Exactly: monetary and fiscal policy need to work together to bring down inflation. It's depressing that we're so defeated by seemingly endless congressional dysfunction that the idea that fiscal policy is even an option is beyond our comprehension.
It's unfortunate, too, because fiscal policy can be surgically precise, unlike monetary policy. If you were trying to assassinate inflation, monetary policy would be like carpet bombing the city where inflation lives, instead of fiscal policy sending in Seal Team 6 to inflation's home address.
To be fair, the Fed has fairly blunt monetary policy tools; distributional impacts like that are the realm of Congress and fiscal policy. (Which fairly consistently drops the ball, but blaming the Fed for the inaction of the entity which both sets the Feds toolset and mission and then doesn’t deal with the problems inherent in the Fed executing that mission with the toolset it has is kind of badly missing the point.)
Additionally it's hard to blame the Fed for overreacting to the COVID crisis because they had to act quickly and previously they haven't been able to rely on sensible fiscal policy.
Fed deployed the tools they had then and they are doing the same now, thankfully taming inflation is something they have more experience with vs pandemics.
1. I’m not sure why you think it’s not their job. If we did a responsibility matrix for the Fed, they wouldn’t be responsible or accountable for tax policy but they would be consulted. Obviously we want monetary and fiscal policy to work together for the most impactful outcomes. Government agencies and bodies advise each other all the time, and that’s a good thing. It’s call effective governance.
2. I’m not sure why that’s relevant to this conversation and I also reject your premise that tax cuts on the wealthy help the middle class. The last round of cuts made the corporate tax rate lower permanently and the individual and family tax cuts expire soon. Of course if you live in an expensive place like California or New York, you received a tax increase, not a cut.
I mean.. sure. There are still more job openings for SWEs than there are SWEs. The inflated comps from the last few years are an outlier, as long as you don't expect that you should find a job pretty quickly.
Most of the recently laid off engineers that want jobs are finding them, just not necessarily at software companies, and not necessarily at the same ridiculously inflated salaries.
The engineers that I know that were recently laid off and are unemployed have huge savings cushions and are being tremendously picky.
It might not be sexy to take a job building software for an insurance company, and it might be quite painful to take a 30% pay cut, but jobs are there for those that want them. In an actual nation-wide recession, they are not.
There’s a post every 1st of the month on here with job openings. Better question are there jobs that pay fang salaries out there? That’s what’s getting affected.
When stock price triumphs everything else and management is stuffed with political hacks as opposed to value creators the only way is to keep cutting cost until the whole show runs into the ground.
The focus is on the current set of people to make bank before the thing falls apart.
Is that true? I have pretty good insights from working with many of such people, close friends with many, and working at big tech companies. At big tech anyways, people on work visas are making a lot of money.
They might make a lot of money but they also are incredibly prone to being abused and gave to put up with whatever their boss tells them to do. It's a lot easier to force someone to work 65-80 hours for crunch time when they can't leave without being kicked out of the country.
It very much depends on the company and the bosses. I've seen visa status used to keep wages low and to lock people into shitty jobs and positions. These companies also use visa holders as a tool to keep citizen wages down.
In both cases they will remind you of how easy it is to get someone else in who can do your job.
The reason is that of all the methods of immigration, getting high skilled tech workers is the method that makes the most amount of tax dollars for our country.
Yes the companies are the ones entitled. In a free market wages would rise for citizens, instead we have these huge body shops artificially running down wages for any company outside of the FAANG.
So there’s a shortage until we are all making the same as a Starbucks barista, or whatever is the national median, despite long hours and investment in our education?
So this isn’t the FAANGs of the world. I’m curious if these smaller companies all have an immigration/legal consultancy in common or something like that.
FAANGs are complicit in a few ways, one being they grab what H1B visas they can, another being they hire contractors who are here under H1B from firms that grab even more of the pool of visas.
Contracting companies grab a disproportionate number of H1B visas for their relative size, and then these employees go work for big tech companies.
Out of the top 10 companies, you've got the usual suspects like Google, Microsoft, Amazon. But the total number from consulting companies makes up the lion's share by count, with cognizant being by far the biggest. You can look at the average salaries and tell who's being used for cheap grunt work at scale (spoiler: it's the big consulting companies!).
So what does big tech do with all those contractors? They use them to get work done at bargain basement prices. When they don't need the engineers anymore, they just don't renew the contract. Engineers as a commodity - sort of like the scalability and fungibility of cloud resources brought to staffing.
> Out of the top 10 companies, you've got the usual suspects like Google, Microsoft, Amazon.
One of the reason for that is, from experience, they don't really ask for immigration status (at least not long ago they didn't seem to care). If candidate received the greenlight from engineering, it was the legal department's job to get them a visa. What's a 10k of legal fees when the employee's signing bonus is 3x that?
This is a frustrating situation because these low-value staffing companies (eg Infosys) are flooding the system and denying actual good jobs. And yes, USCIS is allowing this to happen by just allowing an application with a filing fee. I'm not sure requiring a full application when the odds of success are so low is the right idea but clearly we have problems and no real interest in solving them.
People of certain countries (India in particular) who want a green card are so backlogged that they will be on a work visa for decades. This allows these companies to depress their wages and it's essentially indentured servitude. There have been efforts to fix the green card backlog but those solutions haven't been great either for various reasons.
I'm also curious how this works with all the recent layoffs. Why do employers even need H1B applications when they've so recently laid off so many, some of whom are already H1B holders and have been put in a precarious position of having to find a new job or leave the country (within 60 days)?
Layoffs seem to impact your ability to sponsor for residency since part of that process is to "prove" you can't fill a position with a US resident or citizen. I don't think that's the case with H1B visas. But I honestly think an employer should be unable to file an H1B application for 2 years for a given position where they laid off similar employees in any large layoff.
Anyway, given the cheap cost of buying a "ticket" in the visa lottery, it's unsurprising to me that people are filing applications through multiple employers like this.
It's really hard to get people or the government to care about immigration issues however.
> I'm also curious how this works with all the recent layoffs. Why do employers even need H1B applications when they've so recently laid off so many, some of whom are already H1B holders and have been put in a precarious position of having to find a new job or leave the country (within 60 days)?
Except the (very public) meltdowns at Twitter and Meta, layoffs were by far dominated by "tech adjacent" roles (like DEI advocates, recruiters, HR, "Solution Managers" whatever that means).
I know some people who were laid off at Meta, Google and Amazon. They may not have been proportionately affected but these positions weren't unaffected.
Lay off any SWEs, PMs, data engineers or whatever should invalidate you from filing visa petitions for those or similar roles for 2 years. You can hire back those people.
> That practice, according to the agency, is in large part responsible for inflating demand for the visas to a record high this year, with 781,000 entries into the lottery for 85,000 visa slots.
> About 350,000 applicants for H-1B visas submitted one entry into the lottery this year, compared with about 307,000 last year.
> Some 96,000 people submitted multiple visa entries, for a total of about 408,000 entries.
> About 478,000 people competed for visas last year, a record at the time.
So, 350,000 (single entry submission applicants) + 96,000 (multiple entry submission applicants) = 446,000 unique applicants compared to 478,000 unique applicants last year.
In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, H1B applications went down so far that there was no lottery for fiscal years 2010-2013; the applications spread over several months.
This drop in applicants could be a sign of economic downturn.
This page is pretty jank-tastic but it has some charts on it in addition to serving up H1B lottery numbers, the # of days in which the lottery cap was reached, etc. Has some interesting data points around the GFC plus or minus a few years: https://redbus2us.com/h1b-visa-cap-reach-dates-history-graph...
2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 saw no H1B lottery.
2007 took 55 days to reach the cap; 2010 took 264 days; 2011 took 300 days; and 2012 took 235 days; and 2013 took 71 days to reach the H1B visa cap.
I haven't averaged out the 'days to reach the cap' during the other years shown on that chart but the decade or so of "5 days" mixed in with a few 10 and 20 days tells me that the cap is usually reached in about a week or so.
I'm sure that there are sites with prettier bar charts. What surprised me the most was that in the early-to-mid-2010s you were looking at ~85k H1B applications, with that number increasing into the high 100ks, low 200ks by the late 2010s. 2022 saw ~300k applicants with 2023 seeing half a million.
Our immigration system seems like such an incredible squandering of human talent. So many people struggling to through complex bureaucracy just to winnow down the number of immigrants.
I really wish we could fallback on the free market here. If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come.
Immigration is the US‘s main sources of national strength, yet we waste it.
I certainly brain-drained myself out of the US because moving to Canada was far far easier than trying to move myself to the US. I could afford to start the process, sure - and hire a lawyer to make things go smoothly... but instead I spent a total of about $500 and just self-filed some paperwork and I'm now a Canadian citizen. And, at the end of the day, I'm much happier with my current citizenship because the far reduced healthcare risk exposure and egalitarian working conditions are just much nicer to live in - there's still a significant wealth gap but wealth at least isn't glorified up here.
Tech salaries in Canada are in line with other highly paid professionals - I make as much up here as a lawyer... it is true that I'm not looking at the 600k+options job postings you'd see in the SF bubble but I certainly make enough that daily costs aren't a stressor.
Canada is probably about due for a major wage correction though - the PSAC strikes are a pretty good indicator that it's time to either seriously consider 32/hr weeks or starting to claw back corporate excess... that's sort of an international issue though.
Tech salaries in Canada are similar to tech salaries in US backwaters. My hypothesis is that the primary reason is there is some virtuous cycle of access to capital bringing more tech workers to California which cause more tech companies to be created, which suck in more workers from elsewhere, which increase capital availability and the number of new companies created. If immigration policy reduces the amount of workers that can be pulled in too severely, this will slowly grind to a halt.
Immigration has always been a 'superpower' of the US that other countries struggled to keep up with. Having lots of hard working, talented people moving to your country benefits everyone.
US Immigration is fuelled by the immense drawcard of becoming an American, not by any great achievement in it’s immigration policies. You’d get much more & better candidates with a logical system.
Source: I’m an immigrant. I ended up in Canada for unrelated reasons, but the system in Canada is much better. Tough, but fair, mostly transparent, and even kind in some ways. In the US it’s so byzantine by comparison.
In what way exactly? In most countries the only requirement is to have a work contract. No higher education, no rules that employers must show that they can't find local talent for the position, no limitations on the number of immigrants per year.
I am an immigrant myself (not in the US), the only paper I needed was a work contract. After a year of working I got permanent residence with no further requirements attached, it's no longer tied to having a work contract.
There used to be much tighter rules on immigration and many fewer people coming even while the US was the largest economy of the world. So I don't think it has always been a superpower of the US.
Japan also had the second largest economy for decades and a very tight immigration system. China will overtake the US on economy soon if it hasn't already and they have very tight immigration also.
We also overproduce PhDs right now and elite-overproduction is something that seems to be very destabilizing.
It is and it effects the families going through it as well. It took me a year to get back to normal productivity after the stress of my wife going through the process and it took her longer than that to start being able to sleep well again.
The current system is a drain on the US workforce and intentionally dehumanizing
Not eliciting sympathy or anything - I've been in this country since the age of 12, but don't qualify for a green card since I turned 21 before my parents could get theirs. Even that's fine. I've been here for 14 years, I went to school here, I worked hard to get a job and be where I'm today.
However, I got screwed on the H-1B lottery these last 3 years (when over 50% of the applications are fraud, what else can you say). I wake up every day to face the rather realistic prospect of leaving everything behind - my family, my girlfriend of 3-4 years (who happens to be from a different country herself), my pet dog, my entire social network, my professional career/network.
I know I'm not entitled to being here, but I'm frightened at the prospect of returning to a country where I cannot speak the local language or understand the local working culture. I just don't know any other place in the world better than I know the United States.
I love this country from the bottom of my heart for everything it's given me in my life, and it hurts to see that nothing has changed, and seems like nothing will. I've paid my taxes dutifully, and I'll be willing to give back in any way, shape or form. But I don't get to make that choice :')
I know someone like you who had to leave. It sucks. Hope it works out for you. I don't understand how people like you are ignored when politicians support DACA, and similar programs, for people are in exactly the same situation as you, but came here illegally.
FWIW, I support those programs, but wish it included both legal and illegal immigrants.
> I really wish we could fallback on the free market here. If someone wants to live, work, and pay taxes in the US, they should be free to come.
Other than people banned from entry for personal reasons rather than numerical caps (crime, etc.), I agree, thet should have a free choice to come.
Regulate quantity to mitigate impact via fees in place of caps (for the visa categories that currently have caps), with a share of the fees going to states and localities in proportion to the resident alien population settled there, with lower fees in the “higher preference” categories.
And have a catch-all immigrant visa category (lowest preference/highest fee) for anyone not banned but not in any other immigrant category.
(I’d probably also eliminate H-1B and several other visa categories entirely, because they would no longer be necessary.)
We have a gigantic amount of unrealized talent in the US who never get to utilize their full potential because it's cheaper to hire H1s who have already been trained than to invest in US citizens. I will never lament losing out on a few H1s here and there as long as US citizens continue to get the short end of the stick.
yes, in some sense US citizens are second-tier. Businesses want to lower salaries and universities want to charge higher fees. So US citizens miss out on higher salaries and placement at universities in their own country because we create this myth that we need to keep bringing in more immigrants to continue to thrive. There's no evidence given that diversity/immigration is our greatest strength either but you're not allowed to question it. There's plenty of evidence we and other countries do fine without it.
If companies were truly desperate for developers, they'd strive to retain the older, experienced ones already in the business, who usually offer the benefit of uncomplicated legal status.
Yep, it's absolute nonsense. I am a US citizen and this is one of the many reasons I am planning on moving overseas and renouncing my US citizenship. It just isn't worth the hassle of spending thousands of dollars and waiting over a year of her being in a limbo state to live in an unsafe and deeply flawed society when we can take our skills to other parts of the world. We need to go back to the days of Ellis island. Staple a green card to the back of the every diploma issued by a regionally accredited university in the US. Allow anybody with a special talent the US legitimately lacks a easy path to obtaining a work permit for themselves and their families, and partners of US citizens should be able to get a Green Card and work permit within 30 days of marriage.
Ya it's taken 2 years for the government's published estimate of 6-10 months. People can't plan lives around this, or only the increasingly wealthy can. Wish you the best of luck. There's nothing in the US worth having you can't get in other countries (and probably much easier).
If we can't have a free enough market to do things like buy drugs from Canada at a tenth of the price, I see no reason to make it easy for corporations to import labor from abroad. Protectionism for me and a free market for thee.
Free markets and free borders are the way. Border controls only serve the elites, I should be able to import whatever (within reason) I want from any country without interference.
You can still regulate domestic vendors to prevent them from reselling products without disclosing they are noncompliant with safety standards or environmental rules (which you personally would face liability for the pollution caused by your usage of a noncompliant product) or other means of having the same effect as current regulations. Currently, we have people dying due to being unable to afford life saving medicine in the US due to its artificially high domestic cost.
How do you get a number for that based on some version of reality though, and not an arbitrary, magic round number picked by some congressional committee?
I mean, nothing legally prevents Americans from moving from one state to another. States can’t close their border “until our infrastructure can handle it.”
That's completely wrong. As phd514's comment accurately alludes, every single person who came through Ellis Island
* was a legal immigrant
* had passed a medical inspection
* had proof of having enough resources to pay for their upkeep in the US, or a US financial sponsor guaranteeing same
* was turned away if failing any of the above tests, with no possibility of appeal
I, for one, am very much in favor of reinstating such barriers to entering the US.
PS - One more thing: Every single person who came through Ellis Island was coming to a country with an enormous demand for unskilled labor. This is no longer true.
A century largely without government provided social benefits and with minimal taxation.
The local, state, and federal tax in 1910 was $380 per capita (adjusted for inflation!) compared to >$20,000 per capita today.
Government revenue has increased from 7% of 500B in 1910, to 35% of 20 trillion in 2020 in inflation adjusted dollars. This means that real, inflation adjusted taxes have increased ~200X.
> Hoovervilles served as a common ground for many different nationalities and ethnicities. Economic disparity in the United States during the 1930s was not limited to American born individuals. Migrant workers and immigrants greatly suffered from the lack of work and made up a large portion of the Hoovervilles across the country
Hoovervilles aren't a story of a lack of infrastructure, housing or regulation. They're the outcome of an economic depression. You're not going to anti-immigrate out of recessions or depressions.
Modern immigration controls grew out of racist impulse. That's not all they are today. But many of them fail the Chesterton's fence test.
All I'm saying is you need to make sure housing available. Otherwise the cost of rent skyrockets because demand outmatches supply. Similarly, when you have a lot of low-skilled labor coming in, the salaries for those jobs plummets / competition becomes tougher which pushes out locals. That all can combine to make the homeless problem and political problem worse (immigrants don't get to vote).
Now high skilled labor, that's OK. The salaries are already sufficiently high that down-pressure because of immigrants isn't an issue - it's skilled labor so you should be upleveling your skills such that you're not competing with "common" skills that are shared by more people.
> I'm saying is you need to make sure housing available
This isn't the story of Hoovervilles! There was enough housing. People couldn't afford anything because there wasn't work. (I agree with your take on skilled and unskilled labour, broadly, though with significant caveats, given how little we understand about those labor markets. Skyrocketing housing is an explicit American policy choice. We could change it any time, but we prefer to be wealthier and the "feel" of our neighborhoods.)
Not having enough work is what you’d have with an influx in unskilled labor.
Again. I’m not trying to say that immigration will cause Hoovervilles or that it’ll cause a similar situation. You’re correct - the Great Depression was a very different situation. I’m just trying to bring an analogy of a situation with some of the same structural similarities. It’s not a perfect analogy but it’s meant to highlight the risk of laissez faire immigration (which I’m generally more in favor of) coupled with poor planning / bad policies on the infrastructure side. I think we’re in agreement that there are structural risks at opening up the border in certain ways at the same time as we have a clearly bad housing situation and matching political crises.
Did we? I think there's an overly-romanticized view of late 19th and early 20th century immigration to the US. Go to Ellis Island and look at the receiving facilities there where prospective immigrants were evaluated for physical health, mental health, criminal backgrounds, and employment prospects before being admitted into the US. Regardless of how fair or unfair the policies may have been, admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat.
> admittance was not simply open to anyone who showed up on a boat
One could interpret those as checks that someone could "work, and pay taxes in the US." They were cruel. But brief and unconstrained with respect to housing, infrastructure and regulation.
I'm not arguing for a return to Ellis Island. Just that our fine control of immigration is a modern phenomenon without a strong argument for existing.
These threads are always important to read, if you're an immigrant. Remember what the majority of comments here espouse. If you join a tech union and/or help it succeed in some way, these will be the majority of the people there.
Maybe to start with they'll lure you in with pro-immigrant rhetoric but once critical mass is achieved the group will baseline to what you see here.
Don't forget that the AFL pushed for anti-immigration law originally.
Pretty sure that a big reason tech employers push for increasing the H1B visa cap is because they know there's no way tech workers will ever unionize if the majority of them are on "complain and you're fired" visas.
If these visas are supposed to be granted to workers whose American counterparts are not available for whatever company wants to hire them, why make it so difficult? If this lottery thing is supposed to prevent American companies from exploiting foreign workers, you could simply force those companies to pay American grade salaries, instead of implementing some Kafkaesque workaround.
Because if everyone were honest with themselves they'd see H1B is just a tool to depress american IT/developer salaries. There is no shortage of Americans looking to fill these roles.
At one of the companies I’ve worked for the H1b and associated limits was getting significant enough that there were tons off meeting about what to do and so on. At one point a guy was getting pretty heated about it so I asked why we didn’t just hire in Poland, south and Central America and so on? At least the americas time zone would be a major improvement.
The guy who I was responding to reacted like I was crazy. His reaction made no sense. We weren’t a body shop and high tech isn’t somehow exclusive to India.
After the meeting, basically, a few of the other participants pointed out the flaw in my argument: the problem was that I was crazy, obviously, as there aren’t Indians in those places to hire.
The point here isn’t india bad or whatever it’s that there is more going on at the hiring manager level than simply filling area under the curve with solid talent. Personal preferences, clannishness and racism of all varieties distorts the outcome and that by and large H1b has been hijacked to serve other goals.
> Personal preferences, clannishness and racism of all varieties distorts the outcome and that by and large H1b has been hijacked to serve other goals.
It isn't lost on casual observers either. It's not just that there's an expectation that these roles will be filled with Indians, but Indians of a particular caste from a particular region of India.
It seems largely, in my opinion, to be the result of promoting Indians to executive leadership roles in engineering departments. When that happens, there becomes a clear driving factor towards growing the number of Indians from their origin region in that engineering department completely divorced from other goals. It's normal executive empire-building behavior, but recast through the lens of national and regional origin and ethnicity/caste.
One thing I like about the BU I work in is that we have a lot of staff around the world from many different places and have helped people immigrate to the US from many different places, but when I look around my company more broadly it's very heavily dominated by Indians in engineering, beyond any reasonable expectations. There are many talented people in Central and Eastern Europe, in Central America, and in South America that are completely ignored in favor of trying to hire more Indians particularly in many companies, including mine.
I've even been told before it's due to "cultural fit", which used to be a phrase used to discriminate against anyone that wasn't a straight white bro, and is now being used to discriminate against anyone that isn't an Indian from the same ethnic, caste, and regional origin as the rest of the team/hiring manager. It seems absurd to me that we're in a situation where someone can say that with a straight face for a team that's based in an office in a major US city, and truly expect that the only possible answer is to hire more Indians without considering anyone else.
For a specific example of this happening, Oracle got hit by the US DOJ for "racist" hiring practices because they preferred Indian applicants over "white" applicants.
> I had absolutely no idea this was even a thing in the US before reading about it.
Yeah, it's absurd, but it's highly impactful because of the prevalence of Indians in high-paying careers in the US. Indians make up nearly 2% of the US population, and the Indian diaspora is heavily concentrated in just a few coastal tech hub cities, so they make up a sizeable proportion of both the population and the workforce in the tech industry. Caste-based discrimination is therefore highly impactful, and it makes sense that it's now getting the attention from US authorities.
or they could just hire people in the US, there's plenty of good US labor to go around.
The point of these programs was to augment labor markets in times of shortage (H1B isn't just used by tech FWIW), IE, the internal US labor pool wasn't big enough to sustain hiring in the US for N job(s) due to requirements and you could demonstrate that some form of training would be sufficiently work in a timely manner
Its been pretty clear this isn't really true for decades yet H1B hasn't been curtailed meaningfully to uphold its intended goals
Exactly. H1B hires don't have the same freedom to look for another job, because a new employer has to hire a lawyer to transfer the H1B, and not many companies have the resources or are willing to do that. Even if a company offers market wages when hiring a H1B, it's arguably a better investment because they have far lower mobility. That isn't good for anyone except the big tech firms.
2 people, same age, but one from USA and one from a country without student dept...
And this person from another country WANTS to come to the USA. They will be able to live on a lower wage. And even if they're done with the low wage, the process or changing jobs is arduous. So you're stuck. This gets exacerbated by the fact that it's really hard to gauge the cost of living from abroad.
The H1B program might have started out as a way to attract highly skilled workers, and that might still happen in some cases today, but by and large it's not resulting in the US pulling in top talent and it is used as a way to suppress wages in the US across the board.
We need immigration policies that allow highly skilled workers to come to the US with no strings attached so these workers have the same job mobility as US citizens and permanent residents. The H1B program today resembles something closer to indentured servitude.
So yes, the US should attract highly skilled workers, but no, the H1B program is not working that way.
It was never meant as a way to attract highly skilled workers as a goal. Its entire premise was to attract skilled workers when there was a shortage of workers or inability to augment the national labor pool to meet requirements. I want to clarify this on purpose.
For instance, before our current system (which was lobbied for to add loopholes around what qualifies for talent shortage in the late 80s / early 90s) the H1B program was used for truly unique situations, like hiring Medical Doctors, where you could demonstrate that the US national labor pool couldn't fulfill the demand and additional training would not work either.
In 1990 they changed the criteria for what constitutes a "shortage of talent" allowing broad definitions and weak justifications, and thats when the explosion by the tech industry hiring H1Bs took hold in earnest
> We need immigration policies that allow highly skilled workers to come to the US with no strings attached so these workers have the same job mobility as US citizens and permanent residents.
FWIW I know an exceptionally talented hacker who applied for an EB and then gave up after... a year? a while, anyway. And moved to Canada. The process was just too kafkaesque.
I mean, I've had the gamut. TN, H1-B, EB-3, Green Card, and now Passport. And Canadian citzenship before that after immigrating there.
No immigration process is quick. They're probably intentionally designed to not be quick. The Canadian process might be quicker, but it still takes plenty of time, has requirements, etc.
"Other states are unreasonable about immigration too" partially explains this problem but doesn't justify it. (I'm not saying some kind of filter is necessarily bad. But a kafkaesque one is. And this isn't a small problem -- it's made us collectively a lot poorer. (Bryan Caplan, Open Borders, for that argument.))
Engineers are getting paid 200k p/y out of school and you think there's some magical downward pressure on wages?
Even now companies are giving up on the legal immigration system and hiring outside the US. Canada has a much saner system. Gigantic engineering offices in India and China.
The US treats it as some zero sum game between citizens / immigrants and is losing out on taxes, economic spending (every HC outside the US is less spend in the US local economies).
Most graduates, especially engineers, are not seeing $200k out of school. HN is skewed highly towards people in FAANG and SF where salaries are out of the norm for most positions.
I know a few fresh out of school lawyers and they are right below $200k. I could imagine doctors in certain specialties are the only grads getting paid an average of $200k+.
Canadians who grew up in metros like Toronto and Vancouver are getting priced out of housing in large part because we've been getting ~600k immigrants per year (~300k direct immigrants + ~300k international students and TFWs who end up staying) while only building ~200k homes per year for the past 10 or so years.
Seems like a home building problem then. Even if you're right (big if given out of country investment from rich Chinese ancestors was the cause of the Canadian housing bubble in the first place), you're ignoring the tax receipts and spending generated from high income techies who are only there because US immigration is shit.
Most engineers aren't getting paid 200k out of school.
If you want to focus on the top of the top, which 200k out of school would be, then H1B1 should be a pure auction system: take the top X salaries offered, and let them in.
My company struggles to find the right people. Many that we find we can't hire because the risk is too high that they won't make the lottery, so positions keep unfilled. This is a serious problem limiting our growth.
"Many that we find we can't hire because the risk is too high that they won't make the lottery"
Well you lost me right there, because there would be no such risk if you hired a US worker. I highly doubt there isn't a US worker who has the skillset for what you are looking for, but rather there isn't a US worker who wants to do the job for the compensation your company is offering.
I'm not against H1B's/attracting top foreign talent, but unless its a highly specialized role I can guarantee there are people with the skillset right here in the US. You're just not willing to pay what they're looking for, or ironically the risk is too high for a US worker to work for you vs what they're comfortable with (i.e. job security, risk of the company going under, etc).
Why not hire Americans? I went to a no name state school with a large CS class. Sure we're not MIT/Stanford quality (well many where) but plenty of talent to go around.
Whether they want to work for your wages is the real issues.
If they pass the interview then we obviously gladly hire them. But competition is hard.
We do have quite competitive wages. But we need more people than the American-only portion of the market has to offer. Competent foreigners make up a sizeable part of the applicants, and those who don't already have visa or green card we just can't hire. It's as simple as that.
you've made multiple comments in this thread about being unable to find American workers. I'm currently looking for work but looking at your profile I can't find your company. Where can I apply to whatever job openings you have?
So hire US citizens like a US company should. I have friends who are great programmers (entry level but better than most of the outsourced coders I’ve worked with) working in factories because companies would rather outsource the work than give them a chance.
I wasn't aware that there is so strong US nationalism present in the participants of this forum. After this thread I'll need to seriously re-adjust my mental model.
> I have friends who are great programmers (entry level but better than most of the outsourced coders I’ve worked with) working in factories because companies would rather outsource the work than give them a chance.
I have many brilliant co-workers, from many countries of this planet, some are US citizens, some became US citizens recently, and many are from many other countries. They all work well together and if somebody shows up in an interview and clears the bar then they are welcomed. I've also personally witnessed hundreds of "great programmers" in interviews, some Americans some not, apparently thinking they are brilliant and then couldn't participate in a constructive discussion about fundamentals or about real-world program solving.
The generalizations in this thread as well as the assumptions being made about me and my background are quite shocking.
Do you guys have set foot in actual US companies recently? It's not about US citizens vs. outsourced work. The typical company has a broad mix of live stories. Something I value in our industry. Maybe I've just been blind to the bubbles of nationalism that seem to be brewing somewhere. I'm glad they stayed outside of my company (or else I would have).
Not really the question here. The H1B visa is intended to specifically target industries with a shortage of workers. Even as someone who arrived in the country on an H1B myself I question whether software engineering is experiencing a shortage these days given the mass layoffs we’ve seen lately.
Whether we should prioritize local workers over foreign (and whether we have enough local workers) is a much broader political question.
Nation state policy should be aggressively seeking and rolling the carpet out for exceptional talent, not cheap talent to depress internal wages. This is pretty standard policy across developed nations (as someone who has looked into skilled worker visas outside the US from within and is not exceptional talent).
I distinctively didn't say the US shouldn't. I said the H1B program is not working as intended and pointed out its faltering its mission, and has been for decades.
Whether we should have better immigration policies is a separate discussion, and I think we most definitely should. Path to citizenship would be for the best. It historically has worked out in the favor the nation, after all.
I'm sure there are many H1B visa holders who are actually highly skilled in something that's actually nearly impossible to find anywhere else. I know from experience that a lot of H1B visa holders are about the same as what you can find domestically (but they're a lot less likely to agitate for better working conditions).
Where are these candidates? I’ve only ever been given barely-entry level Junior h1bs I’ve been expected to train from 0.
One person I was forced to work with legitimately did not understand how to connect to wifi or know when he was connected to wifi. He kept calling me saying his computer was broken.
We should. That's what the E1/E2 categories are for; H1B was designed to address labor shortages, not necessarily/specifically for attracting highly skilled workers.
They need to update the minimum salary for H1B. There is no reason to bring in a QA engineer making 50k per year who tolerates poor working conditions due to lack of better options. I think that 100k would make more sense, and it arguably should be higher if the country wants to keep fulfilling the original goals of H1B.
> or they could just hire people in the US, there's plenty of good US labor to go around
At 50k USD per year? Doubt it.
50k is nothing to americans but it's a shitload of money to a lot of people, including south americans like me. Very few people here make more than that. In fact the value of such a salary will probably increase even further as our nations descend ever deeper into economy-destroying communism.
Sure, but you don't need an H1B visa to get hired in your own country. Yet suspiciously, companies don't just open international arms of a company to do business (its alot easier than it used to be and its only initial overhead anyway). I'm suspicious of anyone wanting to hire H1B workers for 50K, that sounds like undercutting the labor market with foreign labor which is not the actual stated goal of the H1B system and the legislation that created it
Then they should either setup an international arm abroad, which is perfectly legal[0] or raise your wages. If you can afford the overhead of the H1B system (there's a bunch of ongoing legal costs to doing this) then setting up an international arm of the company isn't that much different.
The H1B program is not and its stated goal is not, to be able to undercut the US labor market with foreign labor
[0]: though as someone in the labor market, it does have negative consequences on me potentially
I had to research this for my greencard a while back. Here’s a fun stat for ya:
USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year.
USA creates about 50,000 new comp sci graduates per year.
There are an order of magnitude too few Americans every year for the jobs available. Whatever you think of the H1B (and it has many problems), I doubt it’s coming even close to bridging that gap.
> There are an order of magnitude too few Americans
Go to /r/cscareerquestions. Every single post is about a recent comp sci graduate who's applied to _hundreds_ of jobs in the past year without a single offer. There aren't too _few_ qualified Americans looking for work.
I agree OP's estimate for job growth is off by an order of magnitude, but I don't know if r/cscareerquestions is strong evidence of an oversupply of qualified workers in general.
First, it's not a random sample of CS graduates--there's a lot of selection bias there. People who face a lot of rejection are going to want someplace to vent.
Second, I've absolutely phone-screened people (not a lot, but some) with CS degrees who couldn't do something simple like fizz-buzz. I'm not taking about nit-picky "you forgot a semicolon" or style things. I'm talking about "fundamentally not getting for-loops". It wouldn't surprise me if the bottom 0.5% of CS graduates each year apply to hundreds of openings, and get rejected by every single one.
Finally, we're in the contraction part of the business cycle right now. I do believe that new grads today/this year are having a harder time finding jobs, but the total number of people employed at tech companies seems to be falling this year, too. Citing jobless American CS grads would be a more powerful argument if jobs were growing at the same time.
Comp Sci isn't the only way (nor the only major) that can satisfy the conditions of software development jobs. Thats a pretty narrow lens. You need to also look at adjacent majors like Software Engineering, Software Development etc. A lot of smaller regionally accredited universities in the US have diversified on this. The pool is much bigger than 50K.
you're also discounting the fact that there are layoffs, businesses closing etc. There may be 500K new positions per year, and say 250K layoffs / closures etc that isn't accounted for in this. Now I don't have the numbers on total layoffs but this should be adjusted.
I would heavily dispute this problem on the whole. Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now, that tells me there is less slack in the system than this leads on.
H1B is also suppose to have a unable to train element, which needs to also be addressed
EDIT: and as others pointed out, that is taking the stats on their face value, which is questionable in and of itself, as the source is a bit dubious
> Look at how hard it is to get hired as experienced engineers right now
I think that’s just what happens when you flood the market with 200,000 qualified people in a short amount of time (and those people have extremely narrow definitions for what counts as a good enough job). The overall trend, measured in decades, remains that there just aren’t enough software engineers.
Yes even including all the software engineers that didn’t study comp sci. Even outside USA it’s rough. When I was in college the average completion time for a comp sci degree was 7 to 8 years because people kept getting jobs and forgot to graduate. All our professors complained about the sky-high 3rd/4th year dropout rates.
> USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year.
I absolutely do not buy that number. The citation you've given is "GoRemotely" who a) only cite that for one year, 2017 and b) are obviously biased towards inflating numbers.
Even if true, it doesn't necessarily follow that there's a shortage of workers in a sector because the number of new grads is way under the number of job postings per year. Even if we assume only comp-sci grads are suitable for 100% of those positions (which is definitely not true) it still doesn't necessarily mean that there's an under-supply. We'd need a lot more info to figure that out.
> USA opens about 500,000 new software development positions per year.
Article doesn't say that. Its says that's global:
> Despite the pandemic, the number of software developers grew by 500,000 globally in 2020
Additionally earlier in the article, it shares numbers which supports a much smaller number:
> ...make this the most accessible 6-figure job in USA. At 1,400,000+ members and 22% projected growth, it is the biggest and among fastest growing high-paying jobs
The Bureau of Labor Statistics identifies that there will be 411k new software jobs between now and 2031, not per year:
Given the number of 50k grads per year, 400k employees for 411k jobs isn't a massive shortage. (Not to mention that many jobs opening aren't for grads, but for senior developers)
There's good and bad ways to count stuff and have a high degree of confidence in the result.
Counting the number of Computer Science graduates in a year seems like a fairly trivial problem where you could get an answer within ~1% of objective reality by simply counting public information and published figures.
But how do you count the number of jobs that are actually available? How does anybody distinguish between "real jobs" and companies just putting feelers out there to harvest resumes, manipulate the immigration system, and keep appearances up to investors in trying economic times? A lot of engineers that are looking for work right now strongly feel that a lot of job postings out there are just utter bullshit and many job posts are posted with no real intention of hiring anybody.
The best way to measure supply/demand trends might be to look at wages. That's one thing that's really hard to fake and get wrong.
Are Computer science graduate wages going up or down? If there actually was a massive shortage of computer workers near the level you describe, wages would be on a rocketship straight upwards right now. Are they? A lot of engineers are seeing that wages in tech seem to be plummeting right now.
This is a really questionable statistic. Your link cites a blog from a jobs site. They don't provide any citation for the 500,000 number.
Both sources refer to it as the "number of job openings" that year (2017). Obviously this isn't new demand for software engineers, most job openings are vacancies caused by people moving in the industry and will be filled by other people moving. If there are around 1.5 million SEs in the USA and average tenure in a job is 3 years then this explains all the job openings right there.
Iinm the article has two numbers: global software developer numbers growing by 500,000 per year. And 500,000 job openings in the United States in one given year.
You may have a point, but there at least a few degrees apart from Comp Sci that can lead to software development, nevermind mid-career direction changes and boot camps.
Is the USA the only country which has 10x more positions than freshly graduated students? If so, then America is the only country in the world which adequately compensates software developers which would mean it is unusual for another country like India and China to even have software developers if they would be better employed in the United States. Maybe the point of computer science programs is to serve as future American immigrants.
> which would mean it is unusual for another country like India and China to even have software developers if they would be better employed in the United States.
There's lots of reasons software developers in India and China would remain in India and China, but one big one is obtaining a visa and permanent residency to live and work in the US is hard in general, and more so for people in populous countries with many emigrants destined for the US; I think it's India, China, and Mexico that have the three longest queues for green cards where there's a limit per country of birth.
There's certainly a path to immigration through a computer science degree. Especially advanced degrees, which give preferences to visa applications. If you can afford it, get a bachelor's in your country of origin, come to the US for a Masters, work on OPT visa after graduation, hope it converts to H1B, work on H1B until you get a green card, is a well worn path, but there are others.
Cool option if you have found some candidates in Singapore or Chile but they’re two small-ish countries (relatively speaking - ~25 million combined, compared to the >7 billion in the rest of the world), that probably won’t move the needle much.
I’m on E3, and my wife is on a TN - the company has to do nothing for a TN visa beyond what they already do for US citizens. Even that was too much friction for many places she interviewed at. The conversation was, "Are you authorized to work in the USA today?" No, but give me an offer letter, and I will be tomorrow morning. "Sorry, bye-bye".
A simple process isn’t enough when most companies are terrified of dealing with immigration topics due to unknown (often non-existent) issues.
It is that simple, but the question comes up early from recruiters and first round interviewers, not the hiring manager. If you are honest, you get disqualified at the gate. If you say “yes” to these folks, and it works, the first thing you now have to say to your real manager will be “I lied about a legal matter and now need you to sign something to help me get out of it”. Helleva first impression.
I don't think you have to word it quite that way. You could be honest and lay it out plainly - "I know how the TN visa works but I know recruiters filter heaps of candidates out needlessly. Anyway here's the process, it's super simple..."
Or you could layer on another lie if you were feeling frisky - "I don't remember being asked that specific question, we briefly talked about it but I thought they understood the implication of the TN visa. Anyway, here's the process, it's super simple..."
If they're an organization with a competent HR department they should be able to manage - they'll be happy enough that they found a good candidate. As long as it's as simple as the person claims (sign letter, problem solved) it'll only be as much of a "problem" as finding out someone you offered an non-remote job to wanted to work 2 days out of each week from home because they have a kid.
It is not ridiculous. It is also the will of a democratic people. Maybe you aren't compatible with the American system as you seem to want some sort of classist system (let in more of the 'GOOD' people where you define who is 'GOOD'). We had that system before this one, and 'GOOD' was defined as western European. We decided we didn't like that system and decided that everyone should have a chance.
The US of A let Singaporeans in easily, but not South Africans or French. You let Chileans easily in but not Mongolians or Equadorians. You let Australians in easily but not New Zealanders or Albanians.
Explain how these exceptions are not "some sort of classist system" that favours some nations over many others?
Define how this was the "will of a democratic people"? Who got asked for these special country exceptions? Do the American people even know about this?
American immigration is utterly broken. I stand by that.
Nobody's here to argue that the system is fair or good. But I don’t think this particular carve out is classist. If it was like Monaco, Switzerland and Norway maybe you could argue that it’s favouring the wealthier upper class. Singapore and Chile are quite different nations economically though, they aren't really one individual distinct class.
My understanding is that H1B1 is not considered a dual intent visa, and so adjustment of status to lawful permanent resident isn't possible. Its history lies in a free trade agreement.
Being dual-intent just means when you arrive (ie, when you cross the border, the first time or anytime after), you can't have immigrant intent at that time.
Once you're in, if you eventually (genuinely) change your mind, that's fine, you can adjust to LPR.
I personally know many people that have transitioned from H1B1 to green card. Some even to citizenship afterwards. I’m sure there is a legal way to do it.
H1B1 can be extended for a long time and is cheap to get and renew.
What do you mean about loosing them?
I mean you want them to have freedom as well right?
For employees, it’s relatively easy to transfer to another employee given how cheap and easy it is to get the visa, especially once you’ve gotten it for the first time.
Those are not tech companies who are colluding. They are scummy Indian sweatshops and t is time that they are put out to the pasture and not let play games on US immigration. The candidates they bring in are generally nothing more than seat warmers.
The US immigration system is a system that calls the incoming immigrants "alien" and their right to visit their home countries in certain stages of the visa process as "parole". This is true even in 2023. It is a dehumanizing system where immigrants have to pay a very heavy price in return for the privilege of calling this free country their home.
> Though some of the duplicate entries might have been picked in the lottery, . ... officials hope to disqualify visa applicants if they committed fraud to boost their chances
Why blame the applicants? Why not prosecute the companies doing this? It's not like the applicant has much choice in the matter.
