It seems like it would be so easy to fix the H1-B program but no one wants to and I feel like I must be missing something. The purpose of the H1-B is to allow companies to hire foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens.
So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?
Let any company apply and list a salary which they have to agree to pay for at least two years, and then just issue them highest salary first until they hit the quota for the year. No country based quotas or any other kind. Just straight up salary. And make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.
If people are so skilled then they must be valuable, right? This would be good for both the employee and the country, bringing in the most highly paid people.
The only ones that would get hurt in this process are the companies that abuse the system to underpay people and then get them beholden to the company.
> foreigners with special skills that can't be found amongst US citizens
This is honestly rare, unless you couple it with a wage level that is lower than the domestic market will bear. Some individuals involved in R&D, but outside of that there are few skills that are not found in the US. I believe the condition isn't not found, but rather, in low supply?
> make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.
In my experience, the special skills that many foreigners tend to have that many Americans do not is the ability to tolerate absolute and utter bullshit. I'm not kidding.
I am not satisfied with my job/employer -- bad environment, bad culture, etc.. I have coworkers from all over. Of the non-US native ones that I interact with, they all absolutely love our job and/or employer.
I've asked them about it, and I generally get the sense that I could not survive in the conditions from which they originally came -- both at work and outside of work.
If a dumb drone like me could figure that out, then I am sure plenty of employers found out long before me.
> Of the non-US native ones that I interact with, they all absolutely love our job and/or employer. I've asked them about it, and I generally get the sense that I could not survive in the conditions from which they originally came -- both at work and outside of work
My dad’s an H1. (Before they created H1B in 1990.) He grew up in a village in Bangladesh. One out of five kids died by the age of five. He came in as a skilled worker and was an elite within our country—but that meant his parents owned land in a third world village and he went to school (but it had no walls). Both my parents sound like Breitbart when Gen Z or work from home or work life balance comes up. (And they’re Democrats!) My dad’s bullish on China “because they know how to work hard like Americans used to.”
And so do I! I didn’t grow up in a village, but I grew up with my dad, who made clear that there’s 16 work-hours in a day. I’m an absolute company man. So is my brother, who was born here. So is his wife, who was born here but whose family fled communism in China. My kids are growing up hearing my dad talk about taking a boat to school during monsoon season.
At some point the memory will fade. Maybe my grandkids. But in the meantime, how many more H1Bs will they have brought over?
This comment made me realize sometimes I’m such an entitled shit. Lately I’d been feeling legitimately depressed that I seem to have hit a career plateau, despite that plateau occurring at a very generous salary.
> In my experience, the special skills that many foreigners tend to have that many Americans do not is the ability to tolerate absolute and utter bullshit. I'm not kidding.
This actually made me giggle a little bit and while I have seen this, what I've seen more of is that a company hiring internally has offshore employees who have a vast amount of company specific info and experience that the company simply can't hire for. That only applies to internal transfers of course but it's what I see the most of.
It's how big tech with multinational offices manages to handle lack of enough H-1B, among other things.
You hire someone in local office for a year, then arrange L-1B visa which has no numerical issuance limits - but requires at least one year of previous employment with the company sponsoring the visa.
There's also L-1A which IIRC doesn't require time in company but is limited only to upper management in practice.
The foreigners with special skills for which it's really hard to hire someone in the US, even for a lot of money. Maybe if you agree to pay $1M / mo, you'll have them leave their current jobs and flock to you, but will your business still stay profitable?
Hence the idea of prevailing wage, and paying somehow above that.
This of course creates an avenue to game the system, because prevailing wage for basically any work in SF or NYC is likely higher than on average over the entire US. You can undercut local markets a bit by bringing in smart people from abroad, and paying them less than they would make in SF or NYC if hired as locals, but more that the country-wide average.
(Smart, hard-working, educated people from underprivileged places get a chance of having a better life while working to improve the US economy! What's not to like?)
I'm a little confused with your logic here. You're saying that businesses are looking for these allegedly rare skill sets, which do exist in the US but only at excessively high wages (your "$1M / mo" hypothetical/exaggeration). So the solution is to bring in H1Bs and pay them less (or what's affordable for the company).
How does this not, by definition, depress what would otherwise be the prevailing wage for these "rare" skill sets in the US?
> Smart, hard-working, educated people from underprivileged places get a chance of having a better life while working to improve the US economy! What's not to like?
Lots of things if people thought about it for more than 10 seconds. Why do you think the US has such uniquely bad work life balance even in white collar sectors? And those educated people are in the top 1-2% of their home countries. What’s it going to your country to import a bunch of foreign elites with chips on their shoulder?
If what you care about is maximizing profits for Fortune 500 companies, then yeah, maybe it’s a good thing.
Transfers are cap-exempt, but the new employer still needs to file LCA and hence do the prevailing wage determination. You're effectively applying for a new H-1B for the balance of the time remaining on the first one, exempt from the cap. [1]
The thing you're "missing" is that it absolutely is, in practice, about laundering low-wage foreign labor. It's not actually complicated. It's obfuscation of exploitation. Same as it ever was. You're just not supposed to believe that your country is doing that.
A lion's share of H-1Bs go to big tech companies where people make $250k a year or more. And where total comp of $400k+ is common for senior roles, with no regard for visa status.
Yes, it alters market dynamics and the whole reason it's done is that the same skills are not available domestically for that price (or at all) - but talking about "low-wage labor" and "exploitation" as the whole point of the program is pretty rich.
I'm going to disagree here. Looking just at tech, it's possible to have huge compensation and still exploitative working conditions, like unofficial expectations of unlimited overtime and being available 24/7 and putting up with abuse from others in the company.
Rachelbythebay wrote about this in 2018: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/09/08/visa/ if your company decides they don't want you anymore, you have _ten days_ to get a new sponsored job or be out of the country. If you're being bullied or harassed or otherwise treated badly and your employer knows full well they can have you kicked out of the country in under two weeks, would you really speak up?
For an extreme example, see Susan J Fowler's https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on... . Fowler had the luck to be a US citizen, so she could go public without being deported. (She also says she got another job offer less than a week later.) Would the next person in this situation, but on a H-1B visa be able to do the same?
> A lion's share of H-1Bs go to big tech companies where people make $250k a year or more. And where total comp of $400k+ is common for senior roles, with no regard for visa status.
Since you're apparently so acquainted with the stats, please enlighten us outsiders: what percentage of H-1B employees make $250K a year or more, and what percentage of H-1B employees make $400K+?
Considering US DOL didn’t count stock comp for prevailing wage (at least last i checked) it would not surprise me if over 50% do in fact clear 250k in total gross comp
Not being hyperbolic, ALL of H1B friends I personally know makes 250+ total comp. Many makes around that in base salary. ( most my friends are late 20 and early 30s )
Several reasons come to mind including better laborers. But also politics, culturalism, tax incentives, racism, bribery. Employment law has a large share of the legal market, keeping with litigation. We should have no expectation that companies are only hiring for company profit. Employees and managers appear to be, often times, doing what's best for themselves.
Some healthy subset of companies just want to hire the best people they can get that will accept their offer, and sponsoring an h1b is a small part of the overall costs.
As another commenter mentioned you may or may not consider my experience as selection bias. So with that out of the way:
- all H1B friends I know obviously are from work; I used to work at one of the FAANGs
- these friends are in late 20s and above, so at least SDE 2 if not more senior
- you can verify at levels.fyi that 250+ TC is normal for these roles
I'm interviewing a lot for my company and I recall in the height of the hiring boom that peaked around 21, we really are throwing out 200-300 TCs for fresh graduates, Americans or not
H1B salaries are public, but with the caveat that it only includes the base salary. So if you see someone getting paid $170k at Amazon, they actually make $170k + bonus at their level + equity that is almost as big as their salary. You can look at the public salaries, and compare them to the base of what people at their level get at the company they work for using levels.fyi to figure out how much they get paid.
In my area the top H1 salaries are mostly doctors and radiologists in the $200k to $500k range, but a huge chunk of the overall H1s go to teachers making sub $50k/yr. Along with random stuff like aircraft mechanics (also sub $50k) and postdocs (sub $60k). But a lot of random ones seem like scams - school district has a computer lab technician at $36k, for example.
Without any claim to the accuracy of the data, there is no incentive to list a salary on the LCA that is higher than required. You can always pay more, never less, so it only limits future flexibility. I have certainly paid higher salaries to individuals than what's listed on their LCA, not to mention total packages which aren't stated on the LCA.
Because then the agricultural company in Alabama wanting to hire the brightest chemist will be at a disadvantage compared to the IT firm in California. Forgetting about the cost of living adjustments for each area the industry wide disruption alone may not be worth it
A disadvantage in what way? Unless I'm missing something this just sounds like markets being markets. As a worker, why would I accept a job that pays less and requires me to live in Alabama if I can do better?
That’s not how the market works. It doesn’t go “oh we need chemists let’s increase their pay and they’ll flock here”. It goes “oh I guess we let our science skills rot for 20 years it seems really hard to do chemistry now let’s pivot the business into a glorified real estate holding and invest in those ad companies that seem to have good ROI”.
The data at those links indicate the demand for child care workers is more than 40x the demand for physicists and astronomers combined. Yet, childcare workers make only slightly more than 1/5th the wage.
This is because skilled labor is not fungible and different jobs are on different demand curves.
Maybe I misunderstand your argument. I thought your main point was that pay may be high despite demand being low, and vice versa. I'm sure there are exceptional cases where this is true, but the examples you provided illustrate something very much counter to your point.
In your examples, pay and demand are low for all three professions, chemists, child care workers, and astronomers, according to the BoL.
My point is that each profession has its own independent supply and demand equilibrium, and not every market even operates at equilibrium. The relative wages of two entirely independent markets for labor don't indicate relative demand.
Okay. I didn't make that comparison. I see why you might though. For clarity, my point isn't that they make less than any comparable. It's that taking into consideration the cost of acquiring the degree, it's unusual that the pay would be about median in keeping with uneducated laborers. An explanation like unusually low demand (or market saturation) is likely to be the cause of that pay deficit. In this case, it appears to be in fact.
To a point, they will. However, the amount they can rise is capped by other economic factors. e.g. If wage pressure goes beyond a businesses ability to pay, they can't hire. This then leads to businesses ceasing operations and hiring nobody.
The issue is that tech can pay exorbitant salaries compared to physical-world companies as the product they're producing has infinite reach and is often 'evergreen'
It's the same issue as investment banking; when you can almost literally print the money you're paying salaries with you can hire everyone at any price.
The issue is, that leads to the smartest people in the country all ending up at 'virtual' industries and you discover eventually you don't have an economy, you just have a giant video game.
No, they try to rebrand as “quantitative bioscientists” or “molecular engineers” and cross their fingers and hope for postbac students who weren’t chemists because they don’t believe in their own curriculum anymore.
> So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?
As others have pointed out, you're assuming highest salary == most valuable, but what your idea will lead to is a bunch of talented people working on new ways to get people to click ads or write yet-another trading algorithm.
IMHO, you'd fix the H1-B program by doing two things:
1. Eliminate the requirement that the visa-holder have a sponsor past the start date, so the they can quit immediately and take a different job if they are underpaid or the working conditions are poor. That will eliminate any potential exploitation enforced by the program.
2. Limit the sponsors to legitimate US-based companies who will employ the workers for in-house work. Working out a precise definition may be hard, but it should be possible because it's pretty clear when we see it. Basically, something to prevent foreign contracting/outsourcing companies from even using the program.
I have the opposite experience, I guess, as a US citizen who immigrated to Ireland, but after putting in my two years with the company that sponsored me and getting the right to work without sponsorship I left within a month for a 50% raise (actually more like 150% but I got lucky on stock) and full remote (before full remote was normal).
A lot of the appeal of an immigrant is that they can't quit or take a better deal.
> A lot of the appeal of an immigrant is that they can't quit or take a better deal.
Exactly, the whole point of my proposal is to undermine that appeal. An H1-B program structured like I propose would mean that employers would only sponsor immigrants when they truly can't get employees with the needed skills domestically at the real market rate.
We agree! I phrased my response clumsily, I meant my experience was the opposite in that I emigrated from the US instead of immigrating to it. I like living in Europe but it likely came with $2 million or so in opportunity cost, especially since I'm from norcal...
Another goal (as I understand it) of the H1-B process is to allow foreigners who've come to the US for school to stay here and work after they've graduated. This seems (IMO) better than training a bunch of valuable people, then having them immediately go back home.
A system based entirely on salary would bias towards only senior roles, preventing the handling of that scenario at all.
The point is that paying more isn't gaming the system
(and to be super explicit, yes if the US were to choose to allocate 25k annual h1b by ranked wage & thus all 25k were to go to various flavours of computer programmer or financial modeller, that seems totally fine)
The purpose of H1B is to keep wages in control amongst highly qualified American workers so that owners and executives can create a more competitive financial advantage in P&L and stock price juicing
I'm surprised even in HN we are taking PR at face value.
The problem with replacing a lottery with a salary ranked cutoff is that all skills do not exist on a single linear axis proportional to economic value. It is not as if all academics are currently highest paid across the economy, so why would that be true of imported academics?
To me, an ideal skilled worker system would define quota categories by skill/job at a much finer granularity, i.e. hundreds or thousands of different H1-B sub-categories somehow weighted by policies rooted in national strategic interest.
Maybe some kind of blinded auction process that could minimize abuse. Both potential employer and employee go through some vetting process and post their needs/skills using a standard ontology. Then, a matchmaker assigns job offers that are binding. You might allow either party to reject the offer and go back into the matchmaking pool for a limited period or number of offers before they are evicted with a cooling-off period before they are allowed to reapply.
You would also need some kind of anti-abuse audit. Otherwise, malignant players could establish esoteric job requirements via covert channel and then mislabel both the worker and the position to try to force the matchmaker's hand. How do you distinguish a truly rare skill from covert ear-marking?
They are only exempt from the yearly quota (aka 'cap'). They still result in foreign talent being brought in so if your concern is about displacing the labor pool that still applies.
Firstly, your assumption seems to be that it’s broken but I don’t think uscis or most other participants actually share that opinion. What they need to fix is fraud and you can have fraud in any system including the one you proposed.
Secondly, h1b is not just a working visa - it’s officially a “dual intent” visa meaning it’s also a path to immigration. If we do what you are suggesting then 99.99% of applicants will be senior-principal sw engs from china/india. Which, i assume, is not the intention of this program.
Besides, companies already have to pay over prevailing wage for the role in the area. I don’t think you can just conjure up expert professionals out of thin air by raising wages despite what folks on hn/reddit seem to believe. We tried that in 2021 - didn’t work too well
Yeah junior devs that barely can use css being paid 200k was quite common sight at the height of pandemic bubble. Most of them are gone now though. I guess that’s why HN seems to be in slightly more bitter mood nowadays than in the past 2-3 years
It’s because the positions that talent may not exist for (but is needed) isn’t necessarily as profitable (and can’t pay as much) as other industries under the same program.
Basing on salary alone would mean ~100% of visas go to tech talent in major cities, and every other profession is cast aside.
That’s not to say that ranking based on salary within an industry wouldn’t be a potential improvement. Or modifying caps to be industry based. There are definitely options here that could be a bit more surgical.
Wrong, it's because being an animation artist is much more often a career of passion, which brings down the salaries in the industry due to increased labor supply.
According to your logic the H1-B program doesn't need to exist at all then. You can find all special skills within US Citizens. However what happens is that companies deny interviewees the chance so they can obtain H1-B workers for cheaper or for political power.
The fact that the U.S. immigration system is so obviously broken is the topic on which I am most vulnerable to conspiracy theories. It just makes no sense. From the Southern border to H1-B, it looks designed to anger and disappoint every single stakeholder (excepting the businesses who employ illegal immigrants for poor wages).
Because the major donors for both parties support illegal immigration.
Republican donors enjoy the labor of illegal immigration which is much cheaper than domestic labor. Any crack down on unauthorized workers in agriculture or hospitality, for example, would disrupt lots of big donors.
Democratic donors have openly stated that demographic changes would help them win more elections. These are the "demographics are destiny" folks that noted that increasing hispanic populations are good for them in elections. (If you're not winning enough votes, change the voters.) There was a lot of truth here -- just look at California, New Mexico, and Arizona elections from the 80s and 90s vs today. Recent polling suggests this may be changing.
So you end up in a strange situation where policies supported by the vast majority of Americans from all political stripes is (mostly) ignored by the parties.
> Democratic donors have openly stated that demographic changes would help them win more elections.
How does "illegal immigration" impact this? You know undocumented workers cannot vote, right? Hell, you know documented, legal, residents also cannot vote? The only people who get to vote in US elections are US citizens.
Demographics shifts obviously help the modern DNC, for the same reason it helped the GOP a century ago: Conservatism is definitionally rooted in having minimal demographic variance (be it race, gender, religion, or whatever), so if you have two parties one of which says "only this group matters" and the other says "more than that one group matters", then increasing the demographic variation will always favor the latter, because for anyone not in the ideal conservative demographic will see that party as actively targeting them.
It's also important to be careful when saying "look at elections from the past", because a lot of laws were passed in many countries in the late 20th century to address a variety of biased laws that impacted the voting power of targeted blocks. In the US there was redlining which prevented specific demographics from voting in specific areas of the country, coupled with extensive gerrymandering this allows large scale disenfranchisement that is still being undone by the courts today, even though redlining itself became "illegal" in the 80s. There are a wide array of actions that occurred in the states you're talking about through the decades you referenced and onwards to now, that both made it possible for demographics to shift where previously people were functionally banned, and to reduce the disenfranchisement of demographics that were already present. None of that resulted in "illegal immigrants" impacting elections though, because again, non-citizens cannot vote in US elections (even though they pay taxes in the country that produced "no taxation without representation").
As an additional note, because of US government representation being determined by total population, and not "legal voters" the abuse of biased law enforcement is hits multiple times: first off victims of that bias lose representation, but then regions that get prisons get increased voting power. If you're in a region with 1000 people, but have a prison that has 5000 prisoners, then you get the congressional representation that comes from 6000 people, but only 1000 of them get to vote. Again, prisoners should be able to vote. Felons should be able to vote. Ex-cons should be allowed to vote. If there are enough of those groups to impact election outcomes, then it's a reasonable assumption that law enforcement is being used as a tool to restrict voting rights (Something that multiple people from the Nixon and Reagan administrations have explicitly stated was the reason for how the "war on drugs" was set up).
While migrants can’t vote in national elections, they are counted in the census (California has an additional four or five seats in congress just from illegal immigration, for example).
Secondly, the children of illegal immigrants are citizens and can vote. It takes decades for this strategy to pan out obviously. It can be sped up by family unification policies once an immigrant has a child citizen.
> While migrants can’t vote in national elections, they are counted in the census
Much like prisoners and legal non-citizen residents.
> Secondly, the children of illegal immigrants are citizens and can vote.
People born in the US - children of citizens, of legal residents, and of undocumented are all citizens because that's the only how the colonies justified their right to govern the territory they colonized. If you remove birthright citizenship the overwhelming majority of people in the US would not have any right to citizenship, and in fact most "illegal immigrants" would have a much stronger claim to governance and/or citizenship than pretty much every other group.
The fact that some people now find it inconvenient that the rules that were helpful to them now help a different group is irrelevant to that.
Moreover arguing that illegal immigrants are human (let's be clear here, the DNC is anti-immigrants as well, Obama deported more people than bush or trump), is not the same as being "pro-illegal immigrant".
You could make the same argument that conservative states weakening penalties for assault, removing women's bodily autonomy, fighting against actual sex ed, defunding education, etc are similarly a grand plan to increase the representation for conservative states.
An employee with an H1-B is definitionally not an illegal immigrant. H1-Bs are definitionally documented legal workers, the companies using undocumented workers are not companies interested in getting visas.
The solution to the "apparent" scourge of undocumented workers is to make it so that the people running companies the use that undocumented labor are the ones who go to jail, and in the event ICE finds undocumented labor the minimum fine for the company should be a significantly greater than one multiple of the amount the company would have had to pay a documented worker, in addition to ensuring the undocumented workers are fully compensated at the amount a documented worker would have been paid. Threatening to report them to immigration, underpaying, and wage theft are all clear evidence that the company knows they were employing people who were not allowed to work.
That's all that would be needed. Instead of ever more draconian penalties for the undocumented workers - many of whom have lived in the US for essentially their entire lives at this point, and simply don't have a choice - the penalties that should be being increased are the ones that apply to the employers. It's great because it will stop all that evil undocumented labor people claim to hate, because now these employers have to pay the undocumented labor if anything more than documented labor, because undocumented labor can report unsafe or illegal working conditions, come out fully compensated and in addition to those costs the employer has to pay even more in fines, while the managers and executives who knowingly employed said laborers go to jail.
That said as we've seen in Florida, plenty of businesses in America have set themselves up to be unable to operate without violating the law, so when Florida started passing its various "lets punish the workers, but not those that employ them" laws a whole bunch of businesses couldn't handle the idea of capitalism and complained about how they couldn't get any workers.
It’s not even really a conspiracy. The status quo is good for many and so it continues because people don’t care enough (or are persuaded to care in ways that others want them to).
The system as it currently stands was a quick hack on the prior, explicitly racist immigration system we had before the Civil Rights Act. To be clear, there was no Congressional will for racially equitable immigration at the time. They wanted to keep the immigration system white without having to have the words "white race" in the text of the bill. So instead they changed the system to heavily favor family sponsorship, under the idea that white people would just keep sponsoring other white people and that would keep the system white.
Now, it'll probably be a shock to you, but these family sponsorship visas actually make America's immigrant pool way less white. It may not feel like it if you're trying to get an immigrant visa on an employment basis, but America is actually one of the easiest countries to immigrate to if you have relatives here. Other developed countries are far more selective and bureaucratic.
The trick is to recognize that nobody agrees on what part of the system is actually broken. The DNC said the quiet part out loud[0], but the GOP has been thinking for decades that immigration was just a way to dilute Republican voters. A good chunk of the GOP thinks the problem is that it's too easy to immigrate and we need to become like Japan[1]. Another chunk doesn't care about immigrants, but they want to end illegal immigration by any means necessary. The DNC wants, at a minimum, immigration amnesty with a path to citizenship[3]. And then you have business interests that maximally exploit immigrants, legal or otherwise. None of those positions are reconcilable in a way that will produce an immigration bill that will pass the House, Senate, and President Biden.
[0] "Demographics is destiny", which was DNC-speak for "Hillary Clinton can't possibly lose because we have enough Mexicans in California".
[1] As a massive weeaboo[2] I do not understand why anyone would want to adopt Japanese immigration standards.
[2] "Japanophile", but a different, derogatory term I won't use; wordfiltered by 4chan to a word they stole from https://pbfcomics.com/comics/weeaboo/
[3] Keep in mind that there are two classes of illegal immigration:
- People who just moved in without the proper visa, have been here for decades, have no intention of going back, and are already integrated with their local communities. Deporting them would be needlessly cruel.
- Agricultural companies who are importing massive amounts of day laborers from Mexico to avoid having to pay minimum wage
You can argue that the former should have amnesty while still wanting to have a functional minimum wage law by stopping the latter.
> So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?
Because then the acceptance rate would be x% for people from India, y% from China, and 0.001% for everywhere else, which would be politically untenable.
H1B does not have country caps. So the acceptance rate is already that based on the distribution of applicants. You are thinking of green cards, which do have country caps, and that's why this whole set up is quite asinine. It creates a large immigrant population with limited rights and no realistic path to permanent residency.
> So the acceptance rate is already that based on the distribution of applicants.
Currently it's a lottery which you can at least argue is fair in the sense that every applicant has an equal chance. If they made it so that only the highest paid were accepted, that would skew the distribution much further.
One thing I find really, really weird about the US immigration system is that immigrating illegally is trivial (apparently even more so nowadays than it was 15 years ago), and it even comes with a loophole that can make you a legal immigrant later, yet legal immigration is a very tedious and often impossible path.
I have a relative that 15-ish years ago simply overstayed their tourist visa and never left. Some 5 years later he found a chick and put a ring on it (and because he married a US citizen, all his overstay was instantly forgiven). Then he had a immediate US citizen relative who sponsored him for a green card, which he got a couple of years ago. In a couple of years he can apply for naturalization. Yes, he couldn't leave the US until he had the GC in his hands, but I'd say it was a small price to pay for a massive shortcut.
For a married European that would love to live in the US, like myself, legal immigration paths are simply not viable. I would not accept a non-immigrant visa (like H1B), because it doesn't come with any guarantees that I'll be able to stay in the US, and legal immigration paths are basically limited to winning the DV lottery or coughing up $900k for the EB5, as no company in the right mind would sponsor me for an EB2/3.
And for many people from oversubscribed countries (like India and China), marrying a US citizen is the ONLY viable path to a green card.
Having been through it myself, I agree that US immigration is fundamentally broken. With that being said:
> One thing I find really, really weird about the US immigration system is that immigrating illegally is trivial (apparently even more so nowadays than it was 15 years ago)
The system had serious negative consequences on my health, but my personal suffering isn't even a hundredth as bad as what hundreds of thousands have gone through.
>For a married European that would love to live in the US, like myself, legal immigration paths are simply not viable.
As a European, you have several options. H1, O1, L1, etc. are all fine. None of them have any guarantees, but realistically, you'll be able to apply for a green card through an employer and get one within a couple of years under EB2/3. You can also apply for EB2-NIW or EB1A by yourself even from outside the US if you qualify, and you don't need to get a visa at all. You'd get a green card directly.
Worked in jobs that didn’t ask for proof of employment authorization.
Being white also probably helped a lot. I’m actually willing to bet that most americans aren’t even aware that white people can also immigrate illegally.
> Congress is considering a bill that would grant the Romeikes permanent status as legal residents, with a possible pathway to citizenship. U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., filed the bill on Sept. 12, and it is being reviewed by the House Judiciary Committee.
Jesus Christ. Might as well just amend the Cuban Adjustment Act to extend to people from several other countries at that point.
How so? There’s a 100+ year wait on EB2 and EB3 Green Cards for people born in India. Only 7% of GCs can go to people of any one country. At the current cap of 49000, it means only 3400 EB2 GCs can actually be issued to Indians per year. An approved application doesn’t equate to a green card actually minted and issued. There’s a 12 year backlog on applications alone. (https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...)
H1B is neither a green card nor a path to one.
There is one category that has no cap at all however. The “Immediate relative of a US citizen” one.
>There’s a 100+ year wait on EB2 and EB3 Green Cards for people born in India.
No-one knows what the actual wait period is until the priority date for applications established - this is all based off estimates and extrapolations. A priority date is not a backlog in applications - it's the date which, if you applied before then, that you can file for adjustment-of-status which is more or less a pro-forma process.
The link you've provided shows a priority date of 2012 for people born in India looking for EB-2 visas. Priority dates for that combination have had implied wait times of between about 8 and 12 years since 2014.
>this is all based off estimates and extrapolations
This is not exactly rocket science. The supply is largely fixed (a few thousand a year), and the pending inventory is ~1M (based on published data). Barring legislative change, the extrapolation, even if off by several factors, moves the dates in the range of years or decades. There is no meaningful difference once you are past a few decades. At that point, the worker is at the end of the career and unless (s)he gets residency through some other path, the original work path is moot.
>wait times of between about 8 and 12 years since 2014
This is not a fixed delta. It was close to 10 years for someone in 2010; it's not 10 years if you file today - it is several decades. Demand has vastly outpaced supply.
The majority of "Top H1-B Recruiters" are in the "Professional and Technical Services" industry. I think people imagine that most immigrants on H1-B visas are being paid princely sums directly by FAANG companies. Instead the reality looks like they're being exploited by the same Indian bodyshops like Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL, Tech Mahindra, etc. Of the companies in that list that aren't bodyshops, the majority aren't in IT.
Aside from all of the obvious problems with the system, and the political implications, I think many people really have the wrong impression about who the real beneficiaries of the H1-B visa system are.
Here's what will happen if they do that:
A large number of universities will go under without tuition fees from international students.
Professors will leave these universities to pursue industry careers, soneven if the job market recovers the universities won't.
Without competent specialized people from the universities, US will lose the tech edge very very quickly. Cutting edge tech requires a large number of people willing to slog through several years of training.
And I highly doubt the kind of universities that rely on tuition revenues from foreign students are ones leading the US's tech edge. The universities that actually matter in this regard will be well-equipped to survive a small setback of less foreign admissions.
I think you would see the opposite. You would incentivize going to grad school for a few years under a student visa. Universities could name their price.
> You would incentivize going to grad school for a few years under a student visa.
That's a significant change in immigration policy that's not covered in 'pause H1B'. I agree in principle that if you align the incentives like this, it would work out.
> The initial registration period for the FY 2025 H-1B cap will open at noon Eastern on March 6, 2024, and run through noon Eastern on March 22, 2024.
I know fraud prevention is whack-a-mole, and I know the system has been broken a long time, but this still works only for a certain segment of hires.
I was on the board of a "foreign" school. All instruction (except English) is in the home country's language, and we of course want native speaking teachers familiar with the subject material. For years we used H-1s -- all the teachers qualify, as they all have master's degrees or more and the specialized skills -- but when the big consulting companies started scamming all the H-1s in early October that became impossible for us. Teachers don't tend to think about leaving until late in the school year, certainly not in March, and they need to know relatively quickly so they can move to the US and get settled before the school year starts. What a pain.
US immigration is an absolute nightmare especially for Indians.
In Europe its simple. Job offer above minimum salary? Apply and get a blue card yourself. Has been in the country for over 5 years and speak the language? You get citizenship.
In the US its nearly impossible to get a Green Card. Forget how difficult it is to get an H1B visa in the first place because of the lottery system.
India has a brain drain problem. The most profitable career in India is to leave India and become an immigrant.
The US is not responsible for that problem and never will be. And even if the US fixed its immigration inconveniences, the problem in India would remain.
India has other problems as well. For software engineers, the number one threat of hiring from India are the corporate cultures at Infosys, TCS and similar companies. I do not want to work with the alumni of those work cultures. It's radioactive-level toxicity.
The US should absolutely make it easier for brilliant people to immigrate. A very high bar for immigration + a simpler process for such people is a net benefit. The current H1B process is broken and exploited. Some Indian kid graduating from Berkeley with a perfect GPA shouldn't have to rely on a lottery system.
The bar for H-1B is bachelor's degree from almost any institution. What you describe (top student from top school) does not represent the elegibility criteria for H-1B, or the profile of most people being granted that visa type.
H visa is not for world class top talent, that is the E visa.
Friends of mine pursuing Swiss citizenship had a much longer road than what you describe above. I know them to be pretty fastidious when it comes to paperwork exercises and they did not have citizenship after 10 years, though they indicated they were on a path towards it.
That's because Switzerland needs 10 years in the country for citizenship. Spain too. Switzerland also has a lot of extra steps in their citizenship process. It is vastly easier and simpler in say the Netherlands.
In Switzerland you have to apply for citizenship to the local government, and each one of them is xenophobic to various degrees. There are some famous cases where citizenship was denied because the person had a few speeding tickets, or thought that loud cowbells should be forbidden because they torture cows.
> Also under the new rule, USCIS may deny or revoke the approval of an H-1B petition if it determines that the fee associated with the registration is declined, not reconciled, disputed, or otherwise invalid after submission.
The fact that they mention this suggests that they couldn't do so previously... which is pretty mind-boggling.
Oh, so this looks like it's correcting for that thing where companies were essentially using multiple contracting companies to all apply for a visa for the same person? e.g. double (triple? n-ary?) dipping in the lotto?
I still think a lot of the more wanton abuses in the H1-B system could be resolved by requiring the employee be a direct employee of the company they're actually working for (e.g. you can't get a contracting company to provide you with engineers), and to require compensation be - say - a minimum of say 20% above the average wage for the job they're doing, relative to other employees at the company, other workers doing manifestly similar jobs in the same geographical area, etc.
If nothing else this will apply upwards pressure on wages even in shitty "we're abusing the h1-b process" contracting companies, because every new h1-b employee they have necessarily increases the average wage at that company, which increases the minimum wage for the next h1-b, etc. The reality is that the set up of the h1-b program allows employers to abuse h1-b employees with relative impunity (including notably lowering wages), so a mechanism by which simply increasing the number of h1-b employees you have forces the wages up counters their ability to use h1-b supported abusive practices to undercut local workers.
Yeah I’ve heard of multiple applications, some sketchy applicants swaps (basically purchasing the winning ticket) and more. You won’t see it in large established companies because they mostly play fair but there is good amount of fraud in the fat tail
My recollection was that it was essentially company A would decide they wanted to employ person X, and they would then go to contracting firms 1 through 100 and get all of them to apply for the same person X. And they could use the contracting company model to then deflate the salary for the h1-b recipient by having the wage comparison be to similar (below real market rate) contracting company jobs rather than the employees they would be working with.
> the registration fee during the registration period starting in March 2024, will remain $10.
Yeah, every single outsourcing provider is going to enter all their employees and market whoever is selected for on-site assignments to their customers. The cost of entry is way too low and this attracts frivolous registrations.
Previously, it used to cost thousands of dollars before to prepare a full petition and only those employers with serious job offers applied for H1B.
The lottery ticket price has always been low; you pay the full price once you win the lottery. They're de-duping applications this year (stopping people from buying multiple tickets), and the ticket price will go up next year (to somewhere in the ~$200 range). Raising the ticket price for a lottery is an ass backwards way to solve anything.
From what you linked, it looks like it was free earlier, and it became $10. "Moreover, the nominal fee would assist DHS in recovering the cost of administering the electronic registration process. "
Parent comment is correct: They are talking about the "filing fee", which had always existed, and should not be confused with the $10 registration fee.
The situation pre-2020 was that it was more difficult to enter the H-1B lottery compared to now, because the employer had to prepare all the paper forms and write checks for at least several hundred dollars. Now, they can enter a trivial amount of information online and pay a trivial fee, and they only have to do the full filing for employees actually selected.
Also, a comment in the DHS final rule pretty much says the same thing as the parent comment:
> One commenter asked how the nominal fee will prevent large outsourcing companies from gaming the H–1B system, when their revenue is in the billions. A professional association stated that the addition of a $10 registration fee will not sufficiently deter speculative and/or fraudulent filings. Another commenter noted that requiring employers to pay a more substantial fee may protect employees from predatory employers and that we should include a provision barring employers from passing the fee on to their employees or garnishing it from their wages.
That fee has been $10 all along—see this from last year [0]. I don't know much about this process, but the thousands of dollars must be coming from something else—probably some combination of other government fees and attorney bills.
No. You previously had to fill the entire H1B petition and pay full fees (including lawyer fees to prepare the petition) just to enter the H1B lottery. Your fees get refunded if you do not get selected in the lottery. You're still out lawyer fees though.
The $10 fee to enter your name and later fill the entire petition is a fairly recent change
Fair, but this isn't a new change this year. If the catastrophe that you say will happen was going to happen, we should already be seeing it since at least 2020.
I think part of the issue is that H-1B is a non-immigrant visa.
It's ridiculous for a country like the US to expect people to move their whole household for ... 6 years?
H-1B is actually slightly better than an L1*. At least with the H-1B you are allowed to change jobs if the new employer wants to do the paperwork. For the L1 you can't do that. The visa is tied to the current employer. You leave? You're out.
>> Under the beneficiary centric process, registrations will be selected by unique beneficiary rather than by registration.
Why do they think that's a good thing? If you have more than one offer then you are more in demand on the job market, presumably being a better specialist, more deserving of getting a visa :D
In the previous H-1B registration system, employers could submit multiple registrations for the same beneficiary (employee). This increased the chances of selection for that beneficiary but potentially reduced the fairness of the process. So, this makes things fairer to an extent.
The H1B program makes little sense in this moment. The major issues facing America are cost of living related. Importing high-pay workers just makes it that much harder for the regular Joe Schmo.
I find the entire H-1B program somewhat ridiculously designed.
0. There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US. What's the point of educating people and equipping them with everything they need to be successful in the US, advance the US (including creating lots of jobs) and then deporting them right after?
1. There should be no cap for people who are going into STEM, AI, or other jobs that are going to vastly develop the economy.
There is a cap-exempt H1B, but it's for nonprofits. It makes no sense.
There's been a massive problem of diploma mills, both in America, and even worse in Canada, where colleges have basically been admitting students for fake degrees for pay, just because it gets them work permits post graduation much more easily, as somewhat of a workaround Canadian immigration.
Canada recently has cracked down on (I believe undergraduate) student visas recently, with effectively a per-province cap. I'm not sure if Canada has a problem with diploma mills at the Master's level though.
Sometimes it's not even Diploma Mills but state schools wanting to sweet sweet foreign student money. One of my H-1B coworker got her Masters in Computer Science from University of Houston. She was competent programmer but her work and another developer work was indistinguishable. She said 97% of her class was foreign students because if you look at the program, it makes little sense for any American to go into debt to get this degree.
And work visas should have built-in naturalization paths. There's no reason a highly educated, highly contributing member of society for the past 5-10 years should risk deportation if they get laid off, or, god forbid, quit due to working conditions.
My honest opinion is that you should get citizenship upon graduation or shortly thereafter, but I haven't really thought it through enough to figure out unintended consequences of that.
Yeah I fully agree with this. I know multiple people on H1B visas who stayed at their jobs even in the face of sexual harrassment, deteriorating physical health, and depression, because of bad job markets and the stupid 60-day rule, and some subset of them already had family and kids in the US who were already adapted to US lifestyle and not ready to be uprooted to a foreign language and culture.
All they needed was some time off and time to recuperate and then some job searching time.
There is no reason someone who is already "effectively American" from a professional perspective should be uprooted and moved. They already thrive here, they already benefit this country, they should be allowed to stay indefinitely and continue to contribute.
I think h1b itself is limited to 5 after which you have to leave for a year unless you already filed green card application. At least that was the case back in the day
> There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US.
Then you're effectively creating a loophole. There would be a proliferation of private schools that accept anyone willing to pay enough $$$ and churn out barely-competent graduates just so that people have a better shot at citizenship. "Attended a school in the US" is not a good proxy for being an asset to the country.
> There should be no cap for people who are going into STEM, AI, or other jobs that are going to vastly develop the economy.
That's essentially the whole point of H-1B, and right now, they're overwhelmingly allocated to what one could generously describe as STEM professions.
Accreditation doesn't mean that the school is prestigious or selective, or that the degrees are useful. You have no shortage of silly and easy degrees you can pay for at accredited schools, and I don't think they should give you special immigration privileges. Communications, advertising, dance theory, you name it.
A disturbingly large number of non-US born people I know with US degrees in STEM fields got their green-cards by marrying a friend who they had not previously been in a romantic relationship with. In many cases this was after dealing with the H-1B system for some time.
>There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US.
I'm ok with that, if it comes along with the death penalty for diploma mill operators including major universities. Otherwise its not a loophole - its an open barn door.
> There should be no cap for people who have received higher education degrees in the US.
This has the effect of delegating decisions about who enters the country to an unelected and unaccountable group of admissions officers working at private institutions.
Private and public; don't forget that there are many, many public colleges and universities in the US. And presumably this would be limited to accredited higher-education institutions; you couldn't just stand up Butts University, start issuing degrees in Flatulence and Cheekiness, and have met the criteria. And maybe it's not just anyone who graduates from a US institution; maybe limit it to certain levels of achievement, and/or certain fields that the US has interest in developing or maintaining competence or dominance in.
I get your objection about unelected/unaccountable, but this happens all the time, and is normal, expected, and unavoidable. The government very often reaches outside itself for expert opinions on things that it cannot or should not develop its own expertise in.
The current system is stupid. Educating foreigners in the US and then kicking them out (absent something with the intentions of a Fullbright, for example) is just bad policy.
No; they're already in the country, that's really the whole point. They'd still need to meet the requirements for H-1B visa.
Say you're a STEM graduate; you first got an F-1 visa to study, then you spend four years at school in the U.S. You find a job with a great firm for your OPT, and that firm immediately starts to enter the H-1B lottery on your behalf.
Based on the amount of oversubscription, there's a significant number of people who are just not going to get selected before they time out on their OPT and have no option but to leave the U.S. after seven years living here, amounting to perhaps their entire adult lives.
The fact that such people have no preference in a random lottery with others that have no investment in the U.S. at all is utterly perplexing.
That's something that the state and federal govt. can easily regulate through the Dept. of Education. The converse is more absurd. If I want to study X, and university Y wants me, why does a third party dictate anything here ?
Students only get a visa after getting interviewed by a visa officer at a U.S. embassy/consulate. So they've already been vetted by a government official.
> What's the point of educating people and equipping them with everything they need to be successful in the US, advance the US (including creating lots of jobs) and then deporting them right after?
Making money for the schools where they go? Foreign student, studying in the US, come here on an F visa, and to obtain such a visa one has to prove that he or she has such strong ties to the home country that they cannot possibly stay in the US after graduation and need to quickly come back and use the education at home.
I think USCIS is trying to fix one common misuse by certain applicants where he /she applies for H1B through more than one employers ( typically body shop companies) and tries to increase his\her odds of getting the visa. Sometimes the applicant gets more than one H1B visa and wasting the limited visas.
You can get one chance per applicant now. So if 10 companies apply for you, the chance of being selected is the same as if only 1 company apply for you.
It used to be much more expensive to make an H1B petition so this strategy was not viable. Then they made it way cheaper, leading to the mass applications.
yeah, I've heard a bit about this- basically, it is technically legal right now to have multiple job offers from separate employers to get multiple H1B lottery tickets. The abuse comes from some shady operations, that will basically give you 3-10 "offers" from various consulting firms, where you'll be paid way less than market rate to work at any of them, with the idea being if you win a ticket from any then you trade off your potential salary for the H1b.
They had an easy life being drafted into the US army, and then having to work the land and having to build all the infrastructure from scratch without power tools.
So why not just grant H1-Bs to the companies that are willing to pay their talent the most?
Let any company apply and list a salary which they have to agree to pay for at least two years, and then just issue them highest salary first until they hit the quota for the year. No country based quotas or any other kind. Just straight up salary. And make the visa transferrable if another company wants to take it over after say the first two years at the same or better salary.
If people are so skilled then they must be valuable, right? This would be good for both the employee and the country, bringing in the most highly paid people.
The only ones that would get hurt in this process are the companies that abuse the system to underpay people and then get them beholden to the company.