Delivery managers at WITCH (Wipro, Infy, TCS, CTS, HCL) outsourcing firms are paid based on how much they can earn from every account. So, this drives them do many things. One of the consequences is the perception of the said discrimination.
Delivery managers prefer a cheaper resource to an expensive resource. They also practice this in India: that's why every team in India is filled with 80% freshers or those who get paid $5k per annum in India.
In the states, they look for the cheapest resource to fill a position. Often times, they find spots that just require warm bodies to add billable hours. Guess, who would they go for? They will hire some H4 EAD who asks $65K per annum in NJ. These people are happy to get some job and experience.
In old days, companies used to have lots of people coasting in their jobs. Now, WITCH companies have captured that profit in a two prong process: offshore to India and charge the client $30 per hour per person, then pay some desperate college grad in India $3 per hour. And capture that $27 per hour.
This is similar to outsourcing the manufacturing, as the middle layers capture the profit, by paying peanuts in China and by getting rid of expensive employees in India.
Edit: basically, these companies are making money off of outsourcing lots of bullshit jobs. They are NOT eliminating bs jobs. In fact, most of WITCH company onsite people are project managers pretending to be super smart workers.
I think it's unfair to blame it all on the Indians. There is another side to it, in the form of extremely demanding customers. The Indian companies resort to using cheap resources because the customer has x amount of budget, and they want things done within that budget. I knew one American product company (who is/was number one in the world in what they do) demanding that they will pay only x amount per hour for a person and make all these Indian as well as American consultancies compete with each other to find the lowest paid person. My Indian employer didn't even want to sent people there because they wouldn't make much profit while providing a decent salary.
>They will hire some H4 EAD who asks $65K per annum in NJ. These people are happy to get some job and experiences.
In my experience, these companies as well as the American consultancies were hiring Indian students who studied in US way way more than h4 eads. These students are desperate to get a visa, so they will settle for any job that will sponsor them. Over 100k Indian students alone come to US every year, so its no wonder there would be insane competition for the 80k visas.
I'm always in awe at big corps to build big projects with lots of warm bodies that in the end would probably take 3x less people if ""only"" (of course it's a big thing) it was managed in a better way, if the customer knew how to handle its own expectations well and overall it was less about turning the wheels than actually delivering a project.
Does it mean that South Asian employees are more productive and have better performance (output to expenses ratio) than US or other employees? And that there is no discrimination, the company just hires the best people fitting for the job?
Also, I wonder, if South Asia employees are so productive, why do they need an expensive US-based management reaping most of the profit? Why cannot they create their own company?
The last good paying jobs in America are in software and the tech cartel in backhanded collusion with outsourcers are actively working to suppress the wages by flooding the market pure and simple. 10 years ago I had a neighbor who at the time was 40 was a QA analyst and was earning decent wage fast forward 10 years he is driving Uber because his company brought in hundreds of new labor and gave him the option of “transferring” as a contractor to the outsourcing company where the starting hourly pay was $25 an hour. Simple supply and demand mechanics.
It seems to me the problem of the H-1B system can be very easily solved. Instead of lotteries to cap the number of people accepted, just raise the minimum salary requirements until you have the number of people you wanted.
Companies that want to discriminate by country of origin clearly aren't using immigration visas as they are intended. Do you really think they'd still be in the game if there was a $200k minimum? I doubt it.
Every time I see an H-1B related thread comment like this will pop up. No, it cannot "be very easily solved" by sorting salaries. For example, what about other industries who also need foreign talents? $100K might be top wage for some other industries but no where near the top in tech. Even in tech, how do you expect small start-ups or small businesses to compete with giants like FAANG who can just throw money at the problem? Also, what about the cost of living factor? Is $200k in SV considered more competitive than $150k in some other rural area?
No, scrap the bullshit H1B indentured servitude entirely and just have an auction for N green cards every month. Employers can pay for the truly talented they simply can't find in the US. VCs can pay for founders they want to bet on. Foundations and charities can pay for whoever they think deserves it. Individuals can pay for themselves with family savings.
> It seems to me the problem of the H-1B system can be very easily solved. Instead of lotteries to cap the number of people accepted, just raise the minimum salary requirements until you have the number of people you wanted.
Sort of. I think the problems can be solved by making the H-1B a portable work visa that only requires and initial sponsorship, but not a continuing sponsorship.
If a employer really needs employees from overseas, then they'll have to pay a competitive domestic wage, otherwise the immigrants they sponsored will immediately jump ship to a better paying competitor.
Some might challenge this idea by asking "then why would the employers sponsor H1-Bs?" My answer is that they'd stop unless they had a genuine need unmet by the local market.
>>> "H-1B, employing visa holders directly and through outsourcers, and has lobbied for an increase to the annual 85,000 cap on new visas."
>>> My alma mater UC Davis graduated ~300 students in computer science per year (big school). 85,000 new visas.
Firstly, not all 85000 visas are for computer science graduates. So the better number might be the total graduates from UC Davis, or at least the total graduates in Engineering, Management, Economics, etc, etc.
Secondly, UC Davis is not the only school in the country, however big it is. There are thousands of schools.
The total Undergraduate enrollment in the USA is ~10million per year. You can assume 1/4 of that are seniors(2.5M) and perhaps 80% graduate (2M). Obviously not all are Engineering, Management, Economics -- but my point is the "300 student vs 85,000 spots" figure is wildly wrong.
H1B is just a tip of the iceberg. HCL etc. employ a lot of people on B1, L1 and J1 visas. They bring them on-site for 3 month, rent an apartment for like 6 or 7 of them, pay pittance and send back to India.
They don’t need to game the system. The legislations are written by lobbyists with convenient loopholes. Unfortunately for this guy this mega outsourcer has ton of legal firepower to wiggle out of this.
Six Indian companies — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, and the US arms of Tech Mahindra and HCL Technologies — accounted for nearly two-thirds of the rejections among the top 30 companies, the think tank said after analysing data put out by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
The six firms got just 16%, or 2,145, H-1B work permits, less than the 2,399 visas that Amazon bagged in 2018.
Cognizant, which is headquartered in the US but has the majority of its workforce in India, saw 3,548 rejections during the year — the highest for any company.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the only Indian company among the top 10 firms to get foreign labour certification for the H-1B visas for the fiscal year 2018 by receiving over 20,000 such certifications, according to official data in which Ernst & Young was ranked No 1.
London-headquartered Ernst & Young, a multinational professional services firm, has emerged as the top employer to have received the certification, the date from the US labour department said. In fact, Ernst & Young with 151,164 H-1B specialist occupation labour certifications accounted for the 12.4 per cent of all foreign labour certification for the H-1B work visas for the fiscal year 2018 ending on September 30, according to the latest annual report released by the Department of Labour early this month. Ernst & Young is followed by Deloitte Consulting which received 69,869 H-1B specialty occupations labour conditions programme. Indian-American owned Cognizant Technology Corp comes at number three with 47,732 specialty occupations labour conditions programme, the Department of Labour said in its latest annual report. Cognizant is followed by HCL America (42,820), K Force Inc (32,996), and Apple (26,833). India's Tata Consultancy Services or TCS is the only Indian company in top 10 for the year 2018.
A person who is a citizen or a green card holder in the US, compared to a H-1b bonded (tech) laborer, has way too much rights and way little incentive to slog for an employer that is paying peanuts. It’s very easy for a manager to get more out of a team member who is on H-1B than from someone who is a US worker. So often US managers
In US companies also prefer to hire H-1b workers because they/employer have/has such disproportionate control over their immigration aspects.
In addition to this, if you consider the cost of healthcare (to the company and employee) which makes it too expensive to hire an older US citizen instead of hiring 2-3 young H-1B workers even if the per hr $ rate is higher. A US worker will balk at the kind of health insurance offered by these employers. Fresh grad h-1b often has no idea nor does care about it because they are young and healthy.
How can this be solved so that it is fair to the US workers?
Convert aspects of H-1B into a green card equivalent visa:
Aspect 1) employer can sponsor and bring in or hire a local non-citizen candidate. The new employee gets a 3 yr work permit to work anywhere at any time. Possibly the worker can leave on day 1 of work also.
What does this achieve? It means the employer will make sure the worker coming in has the best pay/benefits etc compared to anything offered anywhere else in the country.
If that happens, why will an employer, even if it is one of the WITCH companies, hire someone for below market rates at the risk of losing them the next day? If anything, at this point anyone who doesn’t need a visa, even a 50 yr old US worker (costs a lot w.r.t healthcare to the company) may be cheaper to the employer.
Aspect 2) automatic conversion to permanent green card after 6 yrs:
Since it’s been proven with Aspect 1 that the non-citizen is capable of being employed for 6 years without displacing an US worker, after being on this new H1b / temp GC visa, just mail a permanent Green Card to this non-US worker.
The only thing in such a visa is that the employer who is into abusing H-1b visas or wants to replace costly older employees with cheap young contractors stands to lose quite a bit. But why should anyone care about such employers? Sadly, these are the employers who lobby hard to keep h-1b visa with bonded labor aspects, alive.
Pet peeve: This article is making so many racist/regionist generalizations it is hard to understand what “South Asian” means. Does it mean people from India/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka/Pakistan? Or is it just a euphemism to refer to 1/4th of the world population ?
About me: I’m an ex-H1b person who became a Canada permanent resident without stepping into Canada even once (except for the landing procedures). This, after working for 6 yrs on H1b and my last US employer trying to get me to slog for my green card application. Being born in India, I saw no point in going in for a US GC and remaining a bonded laborer till retirement. While o fee sad that US and USians are squandering this opportunity, I’m glad to see Canada capitalizing on this and see a great future for Canada.
This lawsuit has more likelihood of success if the plaintiff is part of a protected class (non-white, female, age over 40). The article didn't mention this.
If we are going to use a lottery for the H1B, we should also place a ceiling on the number of visas issued to nationals from any particular country: I suggest 10%.
This is similar to how the Green Card lottery works.
Otherwise one or two large countries will just monopolise the whole system, spamming applications from their brethren.
This is exactly what is happening, with Indians making up 76% of H1B holders.
[+] [-] raincom|7 years ago|reply
Delivery managers prefer a cheaper resource to an expensive resource. They also practice this in India: that's why every team in India is filled with 80% freshers or those who get paid $5k per annum in India.
In the states, they look for the cheapest resource to fill a position. Often times, they find spots that just require warm bodies to add billable hours. Guess, who would they go for? They will hire some H4 EAD who asks $65K per annum in NJ. These people are happy to get some job and experience.
In old days, companies used to have lots of people coasting in their jobs. Now, WITCH companies have captured that profit in a two prong process: offshore to India and charge the client $30 per hour per person, then pay some desperate college grad in India $3 per hour. And capture that $27 per hour.
This is similar to outsourcing the manufacturing, as the middle layers capture the profit, by paying peanuts in China and by getting rid of expensive employees in India.
Edit: basically, these companies are making money off of outsourcing lots of bullshit jobs. They are NOT eliminating bs jobs. In fact, most of WITCH company onsite people are project managers pretending to be super smart workers.
[+] [-] nonamechicken|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonamechicken|7 years ago|reply
In my experience, these companies as well as the American consultancies were hiring Indian students who studied in US way way more than h4 eads. These students are desperate to get a visa, so they will settle for any job that will sponsor them. Over 100k Indian students alone come to US every year, so its no wonder there would be insane competition for the 80k visas.
[+] [-] raverbashing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codedokode|7 years ago|reply
Also, I wonder, if South Asia employees are so productive, why do they need an expensive US-based management reaping most of the profit? Why cannot they create their own company?
[+] [-] KorematsuFred|7 years ago|reply
Now, the WITCH companies are into the BS jobs, jobs that help American economy be far more efficient.
[+] [-] ycombonator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conanbatt|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mabbo|7 years ago|reply
Companies that want to discriminate by country of origin clearly aren't using immigration visas as they are intended. Do you really think they'd still be in the game if there was a $200k minimum? I doubt it.
[+] [-] horyzen|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ralph84|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ardy42|7 years ago|reply
Sort of. I think the problems can be solved by making the H-1B a portable work visa that only requires and initial sponsorship, but not a continuing sponsorship.
If a employer really needs employees from overseas, then they'll have to pay a competitive domestic wage, otherwise the immigrants they sponsored will immediately jump ship to a better paying competitor.
Some might challenge this idea by asking "then why would the employers sponsor H1-Bs?" My answer is that they'd stop unless they had a genuine need unmet by the local market.
[+] [-] 1024core|7 years ago|reply
Or just rank the applications by descending order of salary, and give the visas to the top 65K applicants.
[+] [-] hannofcart|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TuringNYC|7 years ago|reply
>>> "H-1B, employing visa holders directly and through outsourcers, and has lobbied for an increase to the annual 85,000 cap on new visas." >>> My alma mater UC Davis graduated ~300 students in computer science per year (big school). 85,000 new visas.
Firstly, not all 85000 visas are for computer science graduates. So the better number might be the total graduates from UC Davis, or at least the total graduates in Engineering, Management, Economics, etc, etc.
Secondly, UC Davis is not the only school in the country, however big it is. There are thousands of schools.
The total Undergraduate enrollment in the USA is ~10million per year. You can assume 1/4 of that are seniors(2.5M) and perhaps 80% graduate (2M). Obviously not all are Engineering, Management, Economics -- but my point is the "300 student vs 85,000 spots" figure is wildly wrong.
[+] [-] IWeldMelons|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ycombonator|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conanbatt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thewhitetulip|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsnk|7 years ago|reply
It's a tool to ingest raw h1b data into postgres, so you can study the data easier with SQL.
I am also working on an app that allows you to look at h1b data on web.
[+] [-] sytelus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonamechicken|7 years ago|reply
According to this article: https://m.economictimes.com/nri/visa-and-immigration/h-1b-ex...
Six Indian companies — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant, and the US arms of Tech Mahindra and HCL Technologies — accounted for nearly two-thirds of the rejections among the top 30 companies, the think tank said after analysing data put out by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
The six firms got just 16%, or 2,145, H-1B work permits, less than the 2,399 visas that Amazon bagged in 2018.
Cognizant, which is headquartered in the US but has the majority of its workforce in India, saw 3,548 rejections during the year — the highest for any company.
From this: https://m.timesofindia.com/business/india-business/tcs-among...
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is the only Indian company among the top 10 firms to get foreign labour certification for the H-1B visas for the fiscal year 2018 by receiving over 20,000 such certifications, according to official data in which Ernst & Young was ranked No 1.
London-headquartered Ernst & Young, a multinational professional services firm, has emerged as the top employer to have received the certification, the date from the US labour department said. In fact, Ernst & Young with 151,164 H-1B specialist occupation labour certifications accounted for the 12.4 per cent of all foreign labour certification for the H-1B work visas for the fiscal year 2018 ending on September 30, according to the latest annual report released by the Department of Labour early this month. Ernst & Young is followed by Deloitte Consulting which received 69,869 H-1B specialty occupations labour conditions programme. Indian-American owned Cognizant Technology Corp comes at number three with 47,732 specialty occupations labour conditions programme, the Department of Labour said in its latest annual report. Cognizant is followed by HCL America (42,820), K Force Inc (32,996), and Apple (26,833). India's Tata Consultancy Services or TCS is the only Indian company in top 10 for the year 2018.
[+] [-] raincom|7 years ago|reply
In 2018, for these 6 companies, the initial approval rate is 60% = 2145/(2145+1405)
Continuing approval rate for these six companies is 77% = 29638/(29638+ 8742)
Source: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/USCIS/Resources/Re...
[+] [-] calvinbhai|7 years ago|reply
In addition to this, if you consider the cost of healthcare (to the company and employee) which makes it too expensive to hire an older US citizen instead of hiring 2-3 young H-1B workers even if the per hr $ rate is higher. A US worker will balk at the kind of health insurance offered by these employers. Fresh grad h-1b often has no idea nor does care about it because they are young and healthy.
How can this be solved so that it is fair to the US workers?
Convert aspects of H-1B into a green card equivalent visa:
Aspect 1) employer can sponsor and bring in or hire a local non-citizen candidate. The new employee gets a 3 yr work permit to work anywhere at any time. Possibly the worker can leave on day 1 of work also.
What does this achieve? It means the employer will make sure the worker coming in has the best pay/benefits etc compared to anything offered anywhere else in the country.
If that happens, why will an employer, even if it is one of the WITCH companies, hire someone for below market rates at the risk of losing them the next day? If anything, at this point anyone who doesn’t need a visa, even a 50 yr old US worker (costs a lot w.r.t healthcare to the company) may be cheaper to the employer.
Aspect 2) automatic conversion to permanent green card after 6 yrs: Since it’s been proven with Aspect 1 that the non-citizen is capable of being employed for 6 years without displacing an US worker, after being on this new H1b / temp GC visa, just mail a permanent Green Card to this non-US worker.
The only thing in such a visa is that the employer who is into abusing H-1b visas or wants to replace costly older employees with cheap young contractors stands to lose quite a bit. But why should anyone care about such employers? Sadly, these are the employers who lobby hard to keep h-1b visa with bonded labor aspects, alive.
Pet peeve: This article is making so many racist/regionist generalizations it is hard to understand what “South Asian” means. Does it mean people from India/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka/Pakistan? Or is it just a euphemism to refer to 1/4th of the world population ?
About me: I’m an ex-H1b person who became a Canada permanent resident without stepping into Canada even once (except for the landing procedures). This, after working for 6 yrs on H1b and my last US employer trying to get me to slog for my green card application. Being born in India, I saw no point in going in for a US GC and remaining a bonded laborer till retirement. While o fee sad that US and USians are squandering this opportunity, I’m glad to see Canada capitalizing on this and see a great future for Canada.
[+] [-] scarejunba|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] entwife|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] LockNess0|7 years ago|reply
This is similar to how the Green Card lottery works.
Otherwise one or two large countries will just monopolise the whole system, spamming applications from their brethren.
This is exactly what is happening, with Indians making up 76% of H1B holders.
[+] [-] calvinbhai|7 years ago|reply
Why not 5%?
Actually, why not just ban applicants who are born in China and India?
</sarcasm>
[+] [-] bigcostooge2|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] miramardesign|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thecoinrepublic|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]