The solution is easy: convert all H-1B Visas to Green Cards. If an H-1B employee is underpaid, they can jump ship. If we really have a shortage of engineers, then what harm is done? When H-1B expansion was first proposed, this is exactly what the IEEE advocated.
Too many companies, as evidenced in the linked article, claim there is an engineering "shortage" but who really mean that there is a shortage of engineers willing to be underpaid and badly treated.
This is my 10th year of employment in Bay area and by any reasonable estimates, I am not laying eyes on my Green Card for another half a decade. And no, i am not in the "slow lane". Makes me wonder if employers are lobbying Washington hard for things to be this complicated.
The irony is that for a lot of Indians/Chinese here, they could either wait 6-8 years, or they could leave the country for a year then transfer back in and have a GC in a year or less. It's particularly unpleasant for H1-Bs who start the PREM process as such. So much easier for internal transfers, especially EB1, O, an L1/L2... and easier still if you're not from a slow lane country (currently China & India, but Brazil was in this boat for a number of years, too).
A lot of companies (Microsoft is one example that I know of) are sidestepping H1-B entirely for college hires (and perhaps other channels of hiring?) for L1. Hire in Canada or the UK; apply for L1; transfer to the US in a year or two.
Apparently it's much more straightforward (and less prone to chance) as compared to H1B.
Its actually pretty cool to see Microsoft 'hacking' the visa system. They opened a center in Vancouver and put all their international hires there for 1 year, then brought them into the US on an L1 which allows them to get a greencard in 1 year- which prevents them from being in the 10 year to be free queue.
There is 0 difference in the speed of GC process. It does not matter if you are on H, L, O or don't have any status at all and applying from abroad. People are spreading this myth because L1-A and O-1 requirements are pretty close to EB1 so if you can get such a category of visa then you have a good chance to apply to EB1. But, again, if you fit these requirements already you can just apply to EB1 from any status (or lack of thereof).
Actually at least one cateogory, EB1-C, specifically applies to managers relocated from an overseas branch of the same company. An equivalently qualified manager on H1-B in the US is ineligible for that category.
Equivalently qualified manager on H-1B would have spent a year out of last 3 serving in such a position overseas so he would also be eligible. Alternatively, a L-1A manager who already spent more than 2 years in the US would be ineligible.
Didn't know that, thanks for the information. I was rejected in the H1B random lottery step (sigh) after getting an offer from a grown startup in SF, and did not investigate the green card process deep enough.
They screwed things up royally a few years back with the bonded Canadian workers in the timber industry in Maine. Some sort of snafu with immigration held up the paperwork, and a bunch of contractors on tight margins went tits up because they couldn't find replacements for those workers, some of whom had been working for them for 10, 15, 20 years under that system.
Not really. There are disproportionately more applicants from certain countries, and the US government wants to make sure they don't flood the system. There are a limited number of "slots" every year.
When every 1 out of 7 people on this planet is either from India or China, makes me wonder what was the thought behind the limited number of "slots".
Additionally, these "slots" seems to have been placed only in the last stage of green card, there are no country specific limits for H1B applications, Green Card Application(LCA), nor the I-140 Immigration petition for Alien Worker.
You can change jobs but it requires going through a bureaucratic obstacle, and if you ever find yourself without a job temporarily, you'd better find a new one _very_ fast or you're deported. Worse, switching jobs can make it a lot harder to get a green card since it resets. H1-B holders seem to find it hard to switch jobs which is why big companies like Cisco are are able to accumulate so many of them. They just park themselves at a big company and try to keep their head down and wait out the green card process.
With more flexibility afforded to H1-B holders to find a real market-rate job, many of the perceived problems of the program would go away in my opinion.
In a memo[1] dated 11/20/2014, Jeh Johnson (Secretary of Dept. of Homeland Security) stated:
As you know, our employment-based immigration system is
afflicted with extremely long waits for immigrant visas, or
"green cards," due to relatively low green card numerical limits
established by Congress 24 years ago in 1990.
...
The resulting backlogs for green cards prevent U.S. employers
from attracting and retaining highly skilled workers critical to
their businesses. U.S. businesses have historically relied on
temporary visas- such as H-1B, L-1B, or 0-1 visas-to retain
individuals with needed skills as they work their way through
these backlogs. But as the backlogs for green cards grow longer,
it is increasingly the case that temporary visas fail to fill
the gap.
...
To correct this problem, I hereby direct USCIS to take several
steps to modernize and improve the immigrant visa process.
DHS' own progress report lists [2]:
Proposing a draft rule and new guidance to enhance options for
high skilled workers to change jobs and accept promotions while
they wait for their green cards to become available.
This draft rule is, titled "Retention of EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 Immigrant Workers and Program Improvements Affecting High-Skilled Nonimmigrant Workers" [3], is open for comments until Feb 29, 2016. So you'd think USCIS would have done something to, in Secretary Jeh Johnson's words "correct this problem" - right?! NO!!
Outside of establishing a one-time 60-day grace period for employees with an approved I-140 to find new employment, this rule falls much short of what was originally promised in Nov 2014. Here are the main provisions:
* Clarify and improve longstanding agency policies and procedures implementing sections of the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act (AC21) and the American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) related to certain foreign workers, which will enhance USCIS’ consistency in adjudication.
* Better enable U.S. employers to employ and retain certain foreign workers who are beneficiaries of approved employment based immigrant visa petitions (I-140 petitions) while also providing stability and job flexibility to these workers. The proposed rule will increase the ability of such workers to further their careers by accepting promotions, making position changes with current employers, changing employers, and pursuing other employment opportunities.
* Improve job portability for certain beneficiaries of approved I-140 petitions by limiting the grounds for automatic revocation of petition approval.
* Clarify when individuals may keep their priority date to use when applying for adjustment of status to lawful permanent residence, including when USCIS has revoked the approval of their approved I 140 petitions because the employer withdrew the petition or because the employer’s business shut down.
* Allow certain high-skilled individuals in the United States in E-3, H-1B, H-1B1, L-1, or O-1 nonimmigrant status to apply for one year of unrestricted employment authorization if they:
1) Are the beneficiaries of an approved I-140 petition,
2) Remain unable to adjust status due to visa unavailability, and
3) Can demonstrate that compelling circumstances exist which justify issuing an employment authorization document.
Such employment authorization may only be renewed in limited circumstances.
* Clarify various policies and procedures related to the adjudication of H-1B petitions, including, among other things, extensions of status, determining cap exemptions and counting workers under the H-1B visa cap, H-1B portability, licensure requirements, and protections for whistleblowers.
* Establish a one-time grace period during an authorized validity period of up to 60 days for certain high-skilled nonimmigrant workers whenever their employment ends so that they may more readily pursue new employment and an extension of their nonimmigrant status.
I encourage everyone here to read and comment on this in the next few weeks. You can do it online by going to www.regulations.gov and searching for the eDocket number USCIS-2015-0008 [4].
"That’s right. Facebook and Google brought in 900 and 2,800 H-1B employees, respectively, with salaries of $140,000 and $127,000. Cognizant? 3,300 at $72,000. Tata? A whopping 16,435 for a (relatively) paltry $70,000 – literally less than half what Facebook paid."
I still think a good first step is to require a salary for H-1B workers at 10x single person poverty guidelines for the local area[1]. Another measure of base salary would probably work, but something that requires a salary that discourages the body shops[2]. According to the legislation and goals of the program, the people we accept have the talent to be worth this salary[3].
3) http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm "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."
Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well. Right now there is a random lottery choosing who gets the visas, where the Indian body shops are known to "oversubscribe" to it.
Also, after a verification that the Visa recipient is working at the given salary for at least two years, then the they can apply for green card irrelevant to who their current employer is (as long as they are employed and earning at least similar salaries to what they did when they got the visa).
Switching jobs (as long as it is the similar profession/pay), should not reset the Green Card process.
This will remove the current defacto "Indentured servitude" state that most H-1B visa holders find themselves in.
There are many ways to improve the current system (without changing the quotas), to benefit the country itself, and not large corporations, but right now there is no direct personal incentive for lawmakers to do that.
I'm not sure that highest bidder is a good idea. Makes it very hard for smaller companies, e.g. startups, to compete with Google et. al.. Don't really know a good alternative tho. Prevailing wages are pretty easy to game to a significant degree by tuning the job title.
Huh? That may be true for some generic website/application startups. But if you're going for something requiring a lot of domain specific knowledge, I can't agree. There's more than a few fields with few enough experts that one can remember them all.
The problem with sorting by wage is that it gives a massive advantage of SV companies vs even a place like Seattle. They already have to pay higher wages, so a premium on top doesn't hurt as bad.
If it's a lottery system, why not charge 25k per entry or something? It's affordable even by a smaller company is they really want the person. It's affordable by the big tech companies who are being honest about their H-1B visa requests. It puts some hurt on Tata and the like by making them pay through the nose for trying to game the lottery.
Or you could restrict the number issued per company, at least until others have their share. Say every company gets 1500 max, then you bump that up to 2000 for those interested. keep going like that until you exhaust the quota.
Actually, I don't see a big problem with SV companies getting the lion's share of H-1B visa allocations if they are for the highest paying jobs. I would argue that this would ensure that everyone is better off -- workers in Seattle area will see their wages increase while SV companies have (properly) high-priced access to the talent that they claim they cannot get locally.
DoL already has a process for determining prevailing wage for a given location. There is no reason why "sorting by wage" can't mean "sorting by ratio of wage to local prevailing wage".
This could be SO easily circumvented. Just open an office in another location (a subsidary, perhaps) and have it do the hiring at the prevailing wages at that location.
This is not so easily circumvented. If an employee on H-1B transfers to another location, the employer is required to file an amendment to the H-1B petition and go through the prevailing wage determination again. From USCIS website [1]:
You must file an amended H-1B petition if your H-1B
employee changed or is going to change his or her place of
employment to a worksite location outside of the
metropolitan statistical area (MSA) or an “area of intended
employment” (as defined at 20 CFR 655.715) covered by the
existing approved H-1B petition
> Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well.
I would rather have a explicit floor to make sure that simply increasing the numbers allowed doesn't put us back in the same situation or tempt companies into collusion.
If you have easy H-1B transfers (which we do), then this is not an issue since the H-1B worker would have no motivation to stick on in a lower wage job.
You are assuming this worker is hireable by other companies. Most of the body shops train people in a very specific and often obscure technology and they cannot work as general software engineers. e.g. my cousin was trained in COBOL and while he was smart enough to develop other skills, most of his co-workers did not. They are tied to the job. Many are even grateful simply for the opportunity to 'come to America'.
Well, if a company is willing to pay top dollar for a year to hire a candidate for a specific skill, I'd say that the specific skill should be in high demand. So it would be easy enough to find another employer in need of that skill.
A concern I have when I see the suggestion to simply set a higher salary floor. There are foreign workers for many other job types (translation, chef, specialty craftsman) that likely fall far short of what we consider a fair base salary in tech. These are exactly the sort of foreign workers, however, I'd imagine we WANT coming in, since they are by definition specialty and non-replaceable.
Would they still have an avenue into the country, without precluding their use to only those with the money to pay exorbitant salaries? (I don't actually know the visa system well enough; I'm curious if they could use a different visa type or something of that respect)
Otherwise I'd worry about the unintended side effects of such an approach, notably because as mentioned above, the problem seems to be more one of the semantic requirements of visa-ship being abused than just salary requirements at the root of the problem. (the latter is certainly happening, but doesn't seem like the core, better worded.)
> (translation, chef, specialty craftsman) [...] I'd imagine we WANT coming in, since they are by definition specialty and non-replaceable.
If the ostensible goal of the program is to bring in people for low-supply positions (but short of individual O-1 visas) then isn't salary a reasonable not-too-game-able way to measure that?
Potentially, but at the exclusion as I say of anyone who simply doesn't have those sort of funds. Can a local food business afford 100k+ for a chef? It appears to me that this would disallow many smaller businesses from being able to utilize specialty or cultural labor. Thus my suggestion to address violations of the intent of the law; yes, more game-able, but actually gets at the root of the problem.
This looks at demand-supply in a vacuum. You also have the other demand-supply curve: will people be willing to pay a huge premium for, say, authentic foreign cuisine? Probably not as much as would be needed to make this system work.
Those who missed the thread on the Disney outsourcing may want to see this and its parents. Note the video that proves that firms are deliberately posting phony job ads:
We have the same problem here in the UK. For clarity i've had to give my job over 3 times in my career to Indian outsourced employees, including for Cisco (my last employer before the current one)
The rules are not being applied, but for me it's quite simple. If you want to bring a foreign worker in, you need to advertise it on a government website for a month. These details will include salary, role, skills, the sponsoring company as well as the one they will be ultimately working for.
I spent the last 5 months unemployed, but i'm normally a devops/sysadmin. I know my job went to India. I don't mind if they're better, but most of the time they're not. I didn't claim unemployment benefits as I didn't want the shame and the hassle, including having to spend 20 hours a week looking for work on the governments website. If this website included the details of the jobs that allegedly couldn't be filled by a UK guy i'd be far better equipped to get a job I am good at where a company is trying to cheap it out.
Note - I am not trying to get at Indian employees here - the RF guys at my last place were superb and better than anybody in the UK as we don't train enough of them here - but I am very annoyed where a company can twist the system to avoid paying UK wages for a UK job.
> A lot of the time it's not even cheaper, it's costlier. Management just prefers to have a docile, more easily controlled workforce.
Reminds me of something David Graeber said:
Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every time.
Nonetheless, it is sometimes blatantly obvious to the person who is assigned the task of training the person or persons in the duties they perform, immediately before they find themselves without a job.
And when you repeatedly get feedback from several/many people in your organization, asking why this or that isn't done yet or continues to be wrong.
If Management really believes that "this is the right decision for us", with full -- or at least competent -- knowledge of what is going on and how it is working out, then they also are deliberately planning to irritate and inconvenience at lot of their other employees and extant work flows.
I've seen it. Repeatedly.
And, like the grand parent, I've worked with some outsourced/overseas people who were good. In my experience, over a number of years, they tended to be the exception rather than the rule.
This speaks to corporate outsourcing, from a U.S. perspective, rather than in general. Plenty of people elsewhere are very good at what they do. A lot of U.S. corporate outsourcing, in my experience, has drawn from a different and significantly less capable labor pool.
Meanwhile, the people structuring and running these transitions tended to collect their short-term consulting fees and bonuses and move on.
We have the same problem here in apartheid South Africa. For clarity i've had to give my job over 3 times in my career to black South African employees, including for Cisco (my last employer before the current one)
The rules are not being applied, but for me it's quite simple. If you want to bring a black worker in, you need to advertise it on a government website for a month. These details will include salary, role, skills, the sponsoring company as well as the one they will be ultimately working for.
I spent the last 5 months unemployed, but i'm normally a devops/sysadmin. I know my job went to a black South African. I don't mind if they're better, but most of the time they're not. I didn't claim unemployment benefits as I didn't want the shame and the hassle, including having to spend 20 hours a week looking for work on the governments website. If this website included the details of the jobs that allegedly couldn't be filled by a white South African i'd be far better equipped to get a job I am good at where a company is trying to cheap it out.
Note - I am not trying to get at black South Africans here - the RF guys at my last place were superb and better than anybody in white South Africa as we don't train enough of them here - but I am very annoyed where a company can twist the system to avoid paying white South African wages for a white South African job.
I happen to be one of these 'foreign indentured servants'. Or rather someone who would gladly be a 'foreign indentured servant' if only the H-1B lottery picked me. I am also pretty sure that there are probably millions if not tens of millions of people just like me.
You realize that by leaving, you would be negatively impacting the economic development of your native country, correct? Mass exoduses of capital and the most capable members of a nation's society have historically had disastrous effects. It would be harming orders of magnitude more people than those who benefited slightly by leaving.
Sort of like how the 'slight benefit' of allowing the most capable blacks to go work in predominantly white companies had disastrous effects on blacks?
Also, I'm not arguing that H-1B should be restricted to only the most capable members of a nation's society. I am super into allowing the least capable members of India to work in the US - for instance programmers who would only command $20K per year in the US job market because they are not very capable.
I didn't really spell out an argument in detail so let me try to clarify my argument and then we can productively disagree?
1. There are lots of people who would be better off (using any reasonable definition of better off that you chose) working as an H-1B worker in the US despite all the potential for abuse (real and exaggerated) that the status entails. They'd be better off because the pay would be higher. They might be better off because they like american culture better than that of their home country. They might be better off because their is greater scope for career advancement. They might be better off because they might learn more from their peers in the US. Etc.
2. H-1B workers do have the option of quitting their jobs and going back to their home countries if they decide that the abuse is too much. I understand that this is complicated by the fact that they might have taken out loans, or developed attachments to America. However, I don't think that, on net, this justifies banning them from the US labor market.
Perhaps the strongest claim I'm willing to make is that the vast majority of workers ( >90%? ) currently in H-1B status in the US don't wish that the H-1B option wasn't available to them. And that the vast majority of wannabe H-1B workers would still choose to come to work in the US even after they are made aware of all the abuses.
I'm aware that I'm only comparing H-1B as is to no H-1B at all and that numerous other hypothetical arrangements exist that would be better than both.
I should have said analogy - your analogy to breaking apartheid was shitty and didn't imply that you had any good arguments, and perhaps were arguing that people against the H1B system were simply racist. Your follow up post appears completely unrelated and doesnt justify the initial analogy in any way.
I see. My bad! Let me try to explain the analogy to apartheid South Africa. I didn't mean to suggest that people are against the H-1B system because they are racist. I mean to claim that restricting foreigners from competing in US labor markets is bad for the same reason that restricting black South Africans from competing in the labor markets of white South Africa is bad.
In apartheid South Africa, it was illegal for blacks to work in the white parts of South Africa without getting a permit (sort of like the H-1B visa or the green card in the case of the US). Most people consider this to be wrong primarily based on the intuition that such severe discrimination on the basis of race is unethical.
1. Why is it not okay to discriminate on the basis of race but okay to discriminate on the basis of country of birth? Why is it not okay to require that only highly skilled, highly paid black South Africans be allowed to participate in the labor markets of white South Africa but okay to disallow less competent Indians willing to work for a lower wage access to the US/UK labor markets?
2. The South Africa analogy is particularly compelling because black South Africans were not considered citizens of white South Africa.
This analogy is not original to me. I stole it from Lant Pritchett. This is what he says in 'Let their people come':
"The analogy between apartheid and restrictions on labor mobility is almost exact. People are not allowed to live and work where they please. Rather, some are only allowed to live in places where earning opportunities are scarce. [...] The restrictions about who can work where are based on conditions of birth, not on any notion of individual effort or merit. The current international system of restrictions on labor mobility enforces gaps in living standards across people that are large or larger than any in apartheid South Africa. It is even true that labor restrictions in nearly every case explicitly work to disadvantage people of “color” against those of European descent."
The problem is that this is a form of discrimination against local employees in favour of cheaper labour which is often less competent.
There is no other reason for the continuing existence of H1B. It's simply a naive and rather stupid cost-cutting measure.
The analogy to SA is absolutely inappropriate, because SA was run on the basis that black South Africans were fundamentally morally, ethically, culturally, and socially inferior to white South Africans, solely on the basis of skin colour (as a proxy for heritage.)
With H1B, no one cares about anything except cost of labour.
Which is a problem, for reasons that may not be obvious. Consider the possibility that moving (say) Indian talent to the US will stall growth in India and move it to the US.
It may be a good deal for individual Indians, but it's not necessarily such a great deal for the Indian economy.
In fact you get a kind of reverse Ricardian effect, where free movement of labour can depress all the economies involved. The source economy loses talented people, and spending on wages contracts in the destination economy, which drives down consumer demand. (Profits increase in the short term - hurrah! - but if you drive down consumer demand enough, your economy falls off a cliff.)
Morally free movement of populations should be a human right. But you have to get rid of nation states and most notions of economic competition to make it work, and I'm not expecting those changes any time soon.
I find it very disheartening that you and other commenters in this conversation are so happy to brush away the the real harm to the foreigner who doesn't get to work in the first world. You for instance summarize the benefits of free movement of labor as 'profits increase in the short term - hurrah' and 'good deal for individual Indians but not for the Indian economy'. I feel like that is quite hurtful to H-1B holder whose life could be radically transformed by having the opportunity to work in the US.
I find the ease with which you are willing to draft me in a war that I did not chose to be disheartening. That somehow it is the duty of the talented people
of the source economy to to grow it. How about you move to India the grow its economy? (Maybe you are actually a third-worlder who gave up the opportunity to move to the first-world to make your home country better. In that case I deeply admire your sacrifice. But if in fact you are a first-worlder who grew up with all the advantages that the first-world has to offer and still don't see the hypocrisy in asking a third-worlder to stay home because he/she happened to be born in the wrong country, you should engage in some self-reflection.
Your citation of the Comparative Advantage section of David Ricardo's wikipedia page does not give me too much confidence on your understanding of the economic theory of free trade (especially as it pertains to labor) and the shortcomings of that theory. You must be aware that Ricardo says exactly the opposite of your point of view since you label your point of view as the 'reverse Ricardian effect.'
At the very least, provide a reference to the 'reverse Ricardian effect' that perhaps quantitatively models how reduced spending on wages causes an economy to fall off a cliff?
Also, I'm not sure I understand your theory of what counts as unethical discrimination. Why is it wrong for an employer to prefer less competent but cheaper employees? And is this only a problem if the cheaper employees are non-local?
As the numbers indicate, the H1B system is broken. It was broken by allowing the body-shops to apply for what are basically "temp workers". When I got mine, in 1994, such "temp work" (consulting) was explicitly forbidden. The employee had to work for and at the company that applied for you, not at the offices of a company's clients. When and why this changed I don't know.
What I do know, as the founder of a European expat organization with 7k members in the USA, is that H1Bs for highly skilled Europeans have nearly come to a standstill. This is evidenced by the change in demographics of my target audience. Average ages have gone up significantly. Most newcomers now arrive on L1 (inter-company executive transferee) visas, are older, married, and have a family.
The way to fix this is by going back to the old situation and put the body-shops out of business...
Nothing changed. The only thing that changed were companies pushing the limit as far as they could to what you see today. Regulators sat on their proverbial asses and watched it happen without lifting a finger, so companies lost the fear of the law.
I don't know what you call the opposite of "right to work" but that's basically the employment situation H1B's find themselves in. My Fortune 500 clients have office building upon office building of H1B developers. These folks will do practically whatever it takes to keep their employer happy. They are afraid to rock the boat and have their family sent back to India. This means bad decisions go unquestioned. You can guess what the result is.
You have put your finger on a key pathology of software development in general, not just H1-B: Mediocrities with terrible ideas about software love to have their bad ideas implemented without question. This explains why companies can easily end up paying more for H1-B labor. Egos get stroked. Nobody is asked WTF. Bad software is piled on top of bad software.
Not only is this a source of wage depression and age discrimination, it results in the kind of horrible-but-expensive IT that runs banking, health care, government, etc. and makes it much harder than necessary to apply technology to reforming those sectors.
This is true for H-1B's employed by outsourcing companies. It is generally not true for most other H-1B workers who are treated identically to other workers.
Once the wage and labor protections are roughly equivalent around the world, then I'll happily take this position. That is not the world we live in today. If you can get dissappeared[0] by capital in your country for standing up for your right to a decent wage, sorry, I don't want to give capital in my country that kind of leverage.
What about people who aren't citizens but happen to live there? Their lot can just be ignored? Is it just to enact rules that harm their interest in favor of citizens?
To be brutally honest: yes, that is how it is in the real world right now. Non-voters are invisible to democratic governments, apart from how they influence voters.
My small 55 person company is survivng thanks to H1Bs. We struggled to find a dba and a critical dev for years, and found a couple of good H1B candidates.
Saying that this program only benefits billionaires is a bit absurd.
You struggled because you couldn't afford the talent you needed, the talent that I'm sure already existed in the country. It's not a talent shortage, it's a cost issue.
Demand doesn't suddenly make new talent appear within a couple months/1-3 years for non-trivial fields. Sure, longer term it might lead to more people appearing on the market. But till then companies need people to fill the gaps - in some areas the alternatives are giving up on projects (great, not what you wanted) or hiring from competing companies till one side gives up.
To me it seems fairly absurd to assume that there's enough american workers in every field to fill every post, even with really "generous" salaries. Even if you only take the "worthwhile" projects into account.
Obviously that does not apply for fields where you can essentially train a mid-level university graduate up to par within a couple months.
You're combining work permits with citizenship. They're vastly different. Do you want neither to be a requirement? How ethical is it to allow someone to work in a country where they have zero civic participation in its government? Or do you immediately get participation rights because you work for a company based in XYZ? Then you vote for things that affect the future, you move, and you're no longer affected by the votes you put in. Where do your loyalties lie?
A lot of municipal debt is a result of people who voted for things that affected the future and then left. It's not just a hypothetical problem.
(Basically, pensions. They were offered to make municipal employment more attractive, which made the cities nicer places to live. They were not totally funded at the time the services were provided, even though the benefits of offering the pensions were largely consumed at that time.)
There's no point in having municipal bonds in the first place. The federal government can borrow at zero percent to bomb little brown children or subsidize wall street bonuses. Flint can't borrow at zero percent to pay teachers or fix its water mains.
What confuses me is why people like you are personally are more concerned with cutting teacher pensions than cutting war budgets when it's fairly plain which one we actually want more (assuming you don't want to live in a country full of dumb people that is...).
I'm in favor of fully funding them at the time of employment.
I guess I would agree that fully funded pensions might not be as large as promised pensions, but it's not like promised pensions have a perfect record of getting delivered.
Fully funded meaning what? Handing over the money to Wall Street and trusting that they can grow it by 2% a year? 5% a year? -5% a year?
There's no real reason why pensions have to be used to pump up stock market prices. Social Security can simply be expanded, cutting out the million dollar bonuses and ferraris from the process.
Yes, the core thing that I have a problem with is funding services on promises that are expected to be met at the local level. How to manage future compensation otherwise is a serious problem, but it's a better problem than funding services with promises.
I agree that a national benefit program is not as fraught as a local one.
I don't see where I mention citizenship. I'm just saying there shouldn't be a restriction on who someone can work for. For instance it's unreasonable that a French guy can just come to the UK and work, but a Brazilian needs to jump through hoops.
As for whether someone can vote, that's a different story. You still have your basic rights such as the right to a fair trial. But the freedom to work shouldn't be restricted.
We have no scientific evidence of the contrary. There are some studies pointing to mass migration being (slightly) detrimental to the wages of low-income natives, but that's pretty much it. You will find a lot of opinions though.
So-called "slight" decreases to wages add up to quite a lot of money over whole careers. I don't see any reason to deliberately institute a policy that helps advantage capital over labor, when it is already so very advantaged.
Hmmm I can invest my capital in 30 countries easily with a carefully selected index fund. If I could move across borders freely, it would be hard (if not impossible) to do the same thing. So I'd say it isn't the same footing that applies.
If you could literally sign an order right now to completely remove any control on who could come and work in your state (setting aside criminal records, diseases etc), would you do that?
I think you would probably not, because you know it would be a war zone within weeks, with the poorest and most desperate people from all around the world swarming to your small part of the world, bringing with them huge social issues.
Does that happen now? There are plenty of poor, desperate people all over America, do they "swarm" the more affluent areas? Do we have poor people from rural Pennsylvania coming to Los Angeles and undercutting hard-working Californians?
I would. With background checks for criminal records.
People who have the wherewithal to move across the globe are not "the poorest and most desperate people from all around the world", they are the ones with the means to pay thousands of dollars to mafias because we have no better system to bring them in.
Letting women vote had downsides for certain people too. That didn't make it less right.
As for stability, you need to consider the benefits of having the best people from around the world in the jobs where their comparative advantage is greatest.
I favor minimal restriction on immigration: let in anyone who has a job or who has immediate family with a job. As a result, there's lots of young people paying into Social Security. Unlike the federal government, the states currently spend more per immigrant than they get in taxes from them, so the states need to raise their taxes, or the feds need to share the revenue.
I've seen an estimate that allowing everyone to come to work in the US would result in about 1 billion people moving to States within very short timeframe. I think it could very well be the end of the country (as even the army + the police could have trouble handling the resulting riots and general chaos).
Your idea is bad for many reasons, but on the other hand I'm sure it'd be nice for a lot of Americans with underemployment and liberal arts degrees to be able to move around the Anglosphere.
H1B system is broken. It is especially hard if you are from India or China. Although you can change employers, you need to restart the green card process from scratch which introduces lots of uncertainties. Obama wanted to allow H1Bs to change employers easily by giving them better portability but USCIS came up with a bad rule which i believe is due to lobbying by employers. Australia & Canada have better immigration systems where they give PR quickly.
It is bad for US as well. Immigrants are generally more risk taking than citizens & H1B does not allow them to take risks when they are young because they will be waiting in the line for PR (Green Card). By the time they get green card it will be decade or more and their risk appetite would have reduced due to having family/children.
In general, I don't believe most of the high salaries in tech may not be sustainable. Lots of tech jobs will move to India & China (or any low cost country in future which has a good pool of educated people), that is just capital chasing good enough talent which is cheap. Moving up the value chain is the only option.
The US should staple a Greencard to all PhDs and Masters students in the STEM fields. Most grad students have some support of funding (NSF/NIH etc) and it makes sense for these students to work here and pay off the funding instead of letting them leave the country or have them be stuck in a sub-optimal situation, being tethered to one employee.
>The US should staple a Greencard to all PhDs and Masters students in the STEM fields.
No thats horrible. There are tons of "universities" in USA which will give you a masters degree for a given amount of money. I can only imagine how much worse the education scam will get with stuff like greenCards attached to degrees.
what about the brilliant self taught programmers? Not all PHD's have skills/talent that employers are looking for. There are already enough unemployed theoretical math/astronomy pdhs.
If the entry requirement is to merely have an accredited degree, the foreign degree system will be promptly gamed. Bureaucratic rules are always gamed, and being bureaucratic, are very slow to adapt.
Easy solution: get rid of H1-B, whose main use is to offshore jobs, and change the preferences for getting a green card to prefer people with desired skills who want to become Americans.
To me H-1B seems like a bad deal. It gives the employer a lot of leverage over the employee. How do you expect a system like that not to be abused? You can require higher salaries for H-1B employees but that's a half-assed solution.
Besides there's no sensible path to permanent residence or citizenship.
Personally I'd like to spend some time in the States and see the country, work for a year or two and see how it goes. But I have no intention in getting into H-1B mess.
It seems like auctioning the visas to the highest bidders is a win-win solution and good for American workers. Why don't they do anything about it? The following is one reason.
Look at who benefits from the system. On the surface, outsourcing companies who can hire cheaper IT labor. Who are their customers which gain from lower IT service costs? Large corporations with influential ties to the powers that be.
I love the Bay Area, and would have loved to work there, but the draconian immigration laws and the 16-year wait for Green Cards are simply not worth it. I'll get paid half as much in Canada, but at least my future doesn't hang on a lottery, and I can start my own company without waiting to turn 40.
If its any consolation: I lived and worked there 10 years, and left. It was hot, crowded, full of envious avaricious people who turned over every couple of years. When we realized almost every person we knew had moved, we decided to leave as well.
Settled in Iowa where I've worked at half a dozen Silicon Valley startups remotely since then. With reasonable cost of living, a decent stable group of friends, and a culture of helpfulness and inclusion.
From what I've heard, the "consultancies" are using H-1B something like this:
1) File H-1B applications for every new hire in the country of origin.
2) Send the lucky winners over to the US for on-the-job training with clients.
3) Once they actually have the necessary skills to do the jobs, bring them back home and pay them the prevailing wage there, while still charging the clients the same amount.
4) Profit!
Under this model (is this even accurate? I've seen several summaries along these lines, but have no direct experience), the bulk of the wage lowering doesn't even occur under an H-1B, so wouldn't they be able to realign things to absorb a higher US salary? Would a "value-based" system be an actual deterrent, or just friction?
H1-B is mostly about money, and the best and most robust solution, in terms of being difficult to subvert, is to use money as the measure: To limit H1-B to the talent that's unobtainable locally, to auction the visas to the highest bidder, and have a high reserve price, say $30k. To an R&D company creating enormous value per employee it would be just a speed bump. To a body shop depressing wages by renting out compliant mediocrities to mediocre managers who find it comforting to have their crappy ideas never questioned, it would make continuing that blight painfully expensive.
How to fix it, eliminate it.
Not only are the US firms abusing H1-B, the consulting firms from (for example) India are setting up a US footprint & using H1-B to get low cost folks into this country. The quality is not there, but the low cost & quantity is.
There are many Americans that can fill these positions, but the US firms don't want to pay a living wage.
The fix is to make things hard for the body shops (Tata, etc) and their like minded counterparts.
I've posted before, but having worked with India, Korea, Japan, and China... There is only one culture that pushes to outsource things when it doesn't make sense... And usually the one doing the pushing is getting a cut or kick back... It's neither Korea, China, or Japan.
I think the solution is to cut off all Indian body shops and visas in bulk and require strict individual vetting. There are great individuals stuck in the morass, but Tata etc are trying to bring in people less qualified than an automotive technician who could get 3-4 months of training...
H1b and outsourcing is all about the bottom quarterly dollar.
I'm all for it. Let's have reciprocity though. I should be able to show my resume and get permanent residency complete with local healthcare benefits for any country with which we have the agreement.
What if each H-1B simply cost the difference between a citizen's average salary and the foreign worker's average salary?
e.g. if a US citizen working at Facebook makes 180k, and the foreign worker makes 150k, that H-1B should cost 30k. Then if there really is a tech shortage then costs are the same, but if there isn't it incentivizes businesses to hire locals.
I'm sure the argument would be that then they'll just pay their US citizens less, but I'd think the competition for the native highly skilled talent would keep rates up.
Well, more accurately, you can't pay a foreign worker less than some floor set by the DoL for the given job description and location. It is unrelated to how much a given company is paying to any one of their other workers.
Report on desired compensation? Are you serious? What if 2 folks come in and say they want $300k based on their current salaries? What will you do then? You may argue that it is the market salary then but if I were an employer, I wouldn't even invite Google/FB folks for the interview but only inexperienced folks - to game the desired salary requirement.
This is why this requires a more thoughtful approach..
Monetary compensation data, of course, would be for the /field/ and collected via the tax infrastructure. Median for /that type of work/ not based on those interviewed. The reason for having the interviewees report back is to check on if the expectations for the job match the description for the job.
I very much like the idea of auctioning these off to companies, either explicitly (pay the government for each one) or implicitly (bid up the salaries you'll pay for them). Although I'm not a fan of large taxes, I think the former is slightly less distortionary.
If you start to give out visa based upon just the salary, indirectly you are saying that small business and town outside of high cost of living are not worthy of hiring people on visas.
So only SF and NYC can employ immigration while Denver and Atlanta cannot.
Which is the greater problem, the H1-B process, or the fact that we have a global economy but still pretend like nationalism isn't completely counter productive?
I doubt that. Facebook, like many large companies, hires first and worries about H1B later. If you don't make it through the lottery they will put you in one of their offices in some other country. (I don't know if they L1 you later).
They could just put a cap on the number of H-1B workers that can go to any one particular company. Say 1k. You can hire whomever you want right now, but after your 1k, you get no more. It'd force companies to prioritize the most important workers they need and limit the damage companies like Tata can do. It's such a simple, elegant solution, no wonder it wasn't implemented by the idiots who wrote these laws.
Too many companies, as evidenced in the linked article, claim there is an engineering "shortage" but who really mean that there is a shortage of engineers willing to be underpaid and badly treated.