[titomc]

" Most of the time it is just easier to hire Asian/Indian employees because they are readily available "

- I doubt that. It's "easier" to hire because they "agree" to lower wages and its easier to retain them, because their visa status is tied to the employer. The employers have H1B workers on a leash.

The process of hiring an H1B worker in short.

- Hire an immigration lawyer.

- Post an LCA.

- Apply petition to USCIS.

- Pay petition fees (higher for fast track process)

- Respond to USCIS queries.

- Get petition approved.

- Done

- Its a different game if the employer wants retain the H1B worker after 6th year of H1B.

So hiring is not easy. But retaining and paying them is "easy". So why do these corporations take this much pain in hiring H1B workers ? No its not the skills they are after. (after all H1B is lottery based not skill based right ? )

[pslam]

You're missing the part where the employer is required to:

- Post representative salary data, including the last few (5?) hires to this position.

- Publish the job position locally, so it can be filled by local workers preferentially, and then only by H1B if unfilled.

- Ensure the worker is initially paid a salary similar to other existing hires in that position.

I don't understand how people make the leap that H1B is used to lower wages. It's an awfully complex, risky and inefficient way to suppress wages. You would need to lie about "prevailing wages" in order for this scheme to work, which is illegal and would put you and your company into deep trouble.

[hibikir]

The prevailing wage comes from a chart: you don't just do research or come up with it. Figuring out which prevailing wage to use among the existing job descriptions is already a matter of judgement, and you can just aim for the low one.

Publishing the position locally is easily skirted: It's not published in places that people look at, it's not written in a way that makes it sound appealing, and often has some nonsensical requirements: In practice, you don't get local workers applying to them.

Then, there's how you hire for positions as junior as possible, and you keep the person there for 6+ years (the green card process can take pretty much forever if you are mean enough to your employee).

I was an H1B. My compensation was pretty fair when I started compared to the US employees around me, but as years went by, I kept taking on more responsibilities, but my salary didn't change to match. Once the green card process started, changing jobs became extremely unappealing, not just because risks of having to restart the green card process, but because to apply for a green card, my employer asked me to agree to pay attorney fees and costs if I left before the green card was awarded plus one year. Any job worth applying to would have been higher responsibility than the paper job I had been hired for originally, so would I be able to transfer by PERM filing across employers in the first place? Not guaranteed. So I kept the job: Being European in the early 2000s, there was a signifiant green card backlog for me, but not a decade long, so I could wait. All in all, I was an H1B for 8 years.

In the next 3 years after I got the green card, I changed jobs a couple of times and my salary more than doubled: I went from being called a plain engineer that just happened to report to the CTO to becoming principal engineer at a Fortune 500 corporation. It's 5 years later, and last year I made 5 times what I was making in my last H1B year: That level of catch-up doesn't come from me improving that much in the last few years, but total catch-up from where I started from.

Imagine what the big outsourcers, who handle many thousands of H1B applications a year, can do to suppress wages further.

[titomc]

The companies have these "schemes" in place. If you look at an LCA posting, these scheming companies will post a salary range, eg : 75k-110k. 75k being the prevailing wages from the DOL for that area. This range means the company can pay the employee 75k and its legal. What does it take for the company to pay 110k to the employee as per LCA ? "Depends on relevant skills & relevant experience of the candidate" so that's the blurry line companies use to suppress the salary and its perfectly legal.

[briandear]

Because the H1s that are lowering wages are from Accenture, Tata, etc. Companies hire them at a lower costs that hiring their own workers. You also have companies like Disney firing existing workers to replace them with lower cost H1s. The fired workers even had to train their lower cost replacements. The prevailing wage for an H1 is lower than a US citizen. That's just a fact.

[toyg]

> You would need to lie about "prevailing wages"

Yeah, we all know a huge corporation would never lie, especially not such a shining beacon of progressive virtue as Oracle, where profit always takes a backseat to human decency. I mean, it's not like such a huge company can spare a few hours of paperwork drudge to set up such a scheme; they certainly don't have legions of Romanian dudes ready to file any form they're told to file to keep their job.

TBH, you don't even need to lie. How many government bureaucrats are deeply familiar with wages of a Fusion Enterprise Foobar for Middleware Cloud Baz Devop Ninja, a position that likely exists only in Oracle itself? Just make sure the position is properly "jailed" internally so all hires are consistent ("we don't have any DBAs here, we only have BigData Deployment and Maintenance Specialists for the Cloud Grid, totally different thing") and publish the job "locally" in places nobody will ever pay attention to, or on an intranet job-site where no application will ever be reviewed or actioned.

> It's an awfully complex, risky and inefficient way to suppress wages.

I agree that there are easier ways, like relocating all your operations in cheaper countries - something Oracle has already done almost 100%. But half the developing world seems to be on fire at the moment, and the other half "suffers" wage inflation at increasingly rapid pace, so watchagonnado...

[bduerst]

>I don't understand how people make the leap that H1B is used to lower wages.

It's because immigration has been politicized in the U.S., and the average citizens' understanding of immigration is what they read in the news.

Which is fair, because immigration is a bureaucracy that the average citizen doesn't need to be an expert at, but this complexity makes it easier for misinformation to spread about it.

[dend]

Correct. The H-1B process is incredibly complex and is not a matter of simply applying and bringing a person in.

[coredog64]

My employer posts these notices in a public place. In taking to my coworkers, nobody looks at them to determine if the posted salaries are in the correct range.

[CapOneThrow1234]

<deleted>

[logfromblammo]

You forgot the part about rejecting all current U.S. nationals as unable to work the position. This is often by requiring X+Y years of experience with an X year old buzzword, and then telling your recruiter exactly how to lie on the resume. But it may also be by giving people actual interviews and then either offering them a wage lower than what is intended for the H1B import, or rejecting them for unspecified reasons.

Whenever I get dicked around in the interviews by a potential employer, I start to suspect ulterior motives. One time, for my own amusement, I asked to see their H1B public records. The company immediately got very defensive, and got their lawyer involved just long enough to hastily research what I was talking about, assemble the records, and set up all the flaming hoops I would have to jump through in order to see them. It was almost like they were hiding something. I didn't actually want to see the records, I just wanted to see that they were willing to show them (or that they didn't have records because they didn't have any H1B employees).

It was a lot like asking a toddler who ate the last cookie in the jar, and watching them hide their hands from you as they say, "Maybe it was the invisible ghost ninjas." I don't need that level of immaturity in an employer.

[lawnchair_larry]

They responded that way because that's such an absurdly strange thing for the candidate to ask, not because they were hiding anything or had ulterior motives.

I suspect there are other reasons why you're being rejected. This seems like paranoid thinking. Most companies won't provide a rejection reason as a matter of policy.

[linkregister]

Their H1B records would be posted here: http://h1bdata.info

[bduerst]

H1B workers can, and routinely do, switch companies.

Their new employer has only to file the paperwork to transfer their visa, so your assumptions about retaining H1B workers are not very accurate.

[ergothus]

I've mentioned this elsewhere before, but I've had experiences at both ends of the H1B chain.

In one workplace & location in the US: The H1B workers were...not very good. Adequate, and hard working, but not highly skilled and they were brought in mainly because the location didn't want to/couldn't pay wages good enough to hire skilled US-based talent. There the H1B workers were (in general) fearful and unwilling to complain, because they knew their personal odds of getting another US gig were NOT guaranteed. This left me understanding the various H1B complaints, as the workplace was terrible.

In another workplace in a different US location, the H1B workers were equal or better than any US-citizens working there. The workers were highly sought after and were interested in speaking up to make the workplace better. Switching jobs for them WAS a hassle, but a very doable hassle, so the workplace had keep them as happy as non-H1B workers. This left me understanding the OTHER side of the H1B issues, as these workers raised up rather than lowered their workplaces.

I've had multiple friends spend months uncertain if their visas would be renewed (Most companies seem to employ offshore lawyers to handle the visas on the other ends, and I've heard some horror stories about those lawyers sometimes vanishing, or misfiling). Also, I've had friends that had to stay put in a job during a certain phase of getting their green cards - a change in job title would reportedly move them back to the end of the queue of that step. (No idea about the specifics)

All in all, I've found it pretty hard to generalize about H1B workers and the process as an entire whole.

[gmarx]

or possibly Indians didn't get the diversity memo and are more likely to hire other Indians than the analogous instinct in white managers?

It's odd that the suit alleges that white people are discriminated against relative to Indians yet those that are hired are paid more.

[hemantv]

More often than not you will find opposite to be true.

[r00fus]

It's all about the H1Bs. Oracle wants cheap labor and Asians (Indians) are statistically more likely to be H1B than non-Asians. Thus the higher aggregate salaries for whites (likelihood to be H1B is minuscule).

[mavelikara]

The time when an immigrant gets their H1-B the first time is based on a lottery. Subsequent job changes while on H-1B is not via any lottery.

[briandear]

As a point of fact, an H-1B is a non-immigrant visa.

[vthallam]

> It's "easier" to hire because they "agree" to lower wages and its easier to retain them

Wow. Why do you think someone on H1B will agree for a lower wage assuming he/she has a good skill set to get into oracle or similar company?

Changing to a diff job on H1B involves some paper work which everyone is used to do now. If we are talking about Indian consulting companies getting low wage employees, it might be partially true.

[dannypgh]

Changing jobs always carries risk - the new company might not be a good fit, and you may not last there very long perhaps for reasons beyond your control. Likewise, there are many jobs - e.g. early startups - where the risk of the company itself going under may be significant.

People in the country on an H1B lose their lawful status immediately after their employment ends, which means being unemployed for any period of time carries risk of deportation. Most people don't want a change in their work situation to translate into being forced to leave their country of residence.

Between these two points, I'd expect people here on an H1B to have a narrower field of jobs that seem attractive - high-risk startups aren't going to be appealing to most, and to generally be less mobile than those who don't fear deportation if a new position doesn't work out. Because of this decreased mobility, employers can get away with paying less.

[1_2__3]

Because some of us live in the real world and see this literally happening every single day?

[pps43]

Someone on H1B usually is also waiting for employment-based green card or promise to file for one. Going to another employer means that this multi-year process needs to be restarted.

[chrisper]

You forgot that there is a lottery. So there is more than just applying for one applicant.