Something that I personally feel unfair about the H1B lottery is that it doesn't consider where you live and what you are currently doing. Students that graduate through a STEM degree get to work for 3 years in their OPT (Optional Practical Training). This extends then to them having 3 chances (one per year) at getting the H1B. Now what's unfair is that an employer in the US can apply H1B for employees living oversees. That application then goes to the same pool where H1B application of the employees that are already living in the US go. The very same people that already hold a college or graduate degree, are already living in the US, and are contributing to the US economy. Unfortunately, the lottery is fair. So those that don't get picked up even after their third attempt are kicked out. They leave their life that they were trying to build in the US, potentially their girlfriends and partners, their friends, and their possessions. While that happens, someone who has never stepped foot in the US soil gets to go to the US. So in a sense it's fair for them. And while there is no real metric to measure this, when compared, between the fairness people oversees get and the unfairness people already living in the US experience, I personally think that the later tips the scale by a huge margin.
If it were up to me there wouldn't be an h1b. People would be admitted via a points based system like Canada (but stricter) and would then be on a green card path and be granted perm residency after 5y, citizenship after 10.
That's of course my pie in the sky 'we can get congress to agree on things' version. If I were president, I would simply make the h1b go to the highest bidder, so the people that enter the US are, supposedly, the cream of the crop. Yeah, that would make students return home vs someone with more skills and experience. The whole point of the h1b is to bring over people with skills we can't find here in the US.
So basically you want to extend the luck/financial privilege that those people have had to be able to study in the US to extend to additional advantages for future visa applications. Not sure that I’d clasify that as fair, personally. As you mentioned, they already get multiple chances at a H1-B already.
Side note: my understanding is that there’s already a secondary lottery for people who hold a US masters (the advanced degree petition). If you are not selected in the first lottery, and you meet that condition, you get placed in a second lottery which has much better odds as there are far less people who meet this criteria (it also makes up almost 25% of the total H1-Bs granted). So basically each year you have 2 chances, and there are better odds for one of those chances.
I would expect that to be partially counter balanced by companies being more willing to sponsor someone already in the US over someone currently overseas? Haven't had to go through that process fortunately but seems likely from a practical standpoint.
... if you don't get the H1B after 3 tries, some international companies will send the employee overseas to an office in a more tech-work-visa friendly country, have them work there for a year then bring them back on an L-1 (intracompany transfer).
Every system who's main job is controlling or gatekeeping a limited resource in high demand will 100% always get abused to some extent for personal gain or for profit. Same with housing.
Especially when there's litte to no negative consequences for those caught abusing it. Like why wouldn't you? If you don't abuse it, then you're basically leaving money on the table versus your competitors who do abuse it.
Until law enforcement picks up and fines outweigh this "cost of doing business", system abuse will continue as per.
Wait, one can file fraudlent applications for visa sponsorship, get caught and will not be banned for like 5 years from the system? Why? It makes no sense
Why is there a lottery anyway instead of a salary ranking/salary threshold system? This'd disincentivize bad actors, ensure the US domestic labor pool is not undercut, and (more or less) lead to higher quality H-1B immigrants.
Because in spite of what the law actually says, the entire purpose of the H1B visa program is and always has been a way to get mostly adequate people who'll work cheap.
The H-1B system is voluntary indentured servitude.
It’s well paid, especially by the standards of the source country. Employers love it. Visa applicants still find the prospect appealing, even if their experience may not be great.
But the power dynamics of the situation are not that different from what a migrant lettuce picker in California has to navigate. The lettuce picker actually might have more freedom.
Since H-1B says it is supposedly intended for high-value employees unobtainable in the US, why not auction the visas, with a reserve price that would prevent them being used to push down wages?
Because the system is really intended to drive down skilled worker wages and subsidize American universities that essentially sell American permanent residency to full-tuition paying foreign students.
Not "high value", but rather "high skill". Some examples of occupations that need a professional degree in order to be filled.
Information Technology
Software engineers
Database administrators
Teachers
Primary
Secondary
University
Health care professionals
Physicians
Nurses
Dentists
Psychologists
Engineers
Civil
Chemical
Mechanical
Industrial
Surveyors
... and Fashion models
With an auction approach, would the software engineers completely at big tech companies (or consultancies capable of demanding big tech compensation) continue to be able to drown out the other professions?
The visa lottery makes it difficult to reliably get H1B visa teachers. H1B visa abuse makes it even more difficult. An auction would make the H1B visa program into a "visa for software developers where consultancies charge high prices to win auctions and pay their employees little."
A counter argument I've seen - with auction only IT companies will be able to hire H-1B workers and other industries like healthcare and pharma and even chip production will be out-priced. Different industries have different level of salaries. $200k/y salary may suppress SDE wages in Silicon Valley but it is well above market rate for an electrical or a chemical engineer.
Sounds good in theory, but not at all practical. Apple just laid off 600 employees working on their electric car initiative, they moved employees internally where skills were transferable, but the rest were let go. But in your proposal, they would now not be able to hire for ANY job function on H1B.
This is an interesting proposal. Unfortunately, the way around this is a "business solutions" company, whose main solution is providing H1-B'd temps to large companies. There are tons of those around: local companies hire people on H1-B. Foreign companies send people over on L1.
Above all, I wonder why brain drain is not viewed as a geopolitical tool. High skilled young professionals from China and Russia are essentially non-replaceable due to their declining birth rates. You can do a lot more damage this way than through various sanctions. A lot of people already want to move to the US, so this can easily be done by getting rid of the cap and switching to a tax on the employer to simplify the process.
The unfortunate answer is: love them or hate them, people can't pass the leetcode interviews
I've worked as a hiring manager in multiple companies, and recommending or not recommending a hire is done without any knowledge of their status, but solely on the 45 minute interview I did. If they need some sponsorship thats done without communicating to me, I just say yes/no. And with that, somehow most of the Yes's need sponsorship, so what else can you do from an interviewing perspective
There are actually four large “buckets” on H1B usage in software. First are the “regular” software jobs. At the large tech players or other regular companies (eg a software job at a bank). Like you said, there is a lot of supply due to layoffs and not a lot of demand. H1Bs in this area are also limited this year due to this.
Second are the college graduates. Once you complete a STEM degree as a foreign student you get three years of OPT which is for all practical purposes a work permit to work in STEM jobs (with some conditions). If the student (now employee) needs to continue working for the company in the US after this they need a H1B or a green card. Most genuine companies apply for H1B for these employees the moment they join and because it is a lottery keep doing it in the hope that the employee gets a H1B and continues working. These are not new jobs but people in jobs for up to 3 years that the company wants to continue employing and does not intend to layoff. Supply and demand plays a smaller part here.
Third are the outsourcing companies, TCS, Accenture and the like. These companies have people in India and contracts with large Us companies. They predict some number of demand for moving people from India to US (to help support the rest of the offshore team, to replace a higher paid employee at the US company with a lower paid employee of the contracting company etc). These companies will mostly but just barely follow the law (they have also been caught and paid files) and will use all loopholes available to them. These are the biggest “abuses” you see in the press. While the general “abuse” news in the press is about these companies replacing American workers with lower cost H1B employees the other problem is they are not catering to current demand but predicting work at a “client” based on current or future contract, creating “job openings” based on this (which they can, it is their own company) and flooding the lottery.
The fourth are smaller body shops and “consulting” companies in the US. These also predict demand and “create jobs” to enter applicants to the lottery. But the difference is typically the companies in the third category don’t get the employees to the US if there is no “client project” (as in, real demand) and even if they they do, they have the means to pay the minimum required pay the H1B demands - they are big enough to afford a bench of employees. The companies in the fourth category will get people to the US first on fake, or near-fake demand and then pitch them to “clients”. In the meantime the employee is not paid the companies skirt the law in all ways as possible to continue “holding” the employee. They also refuse to share paperwork with the employee (preventing them from moving jobs) and sometimes have the employees pay for the H1B which is illegal (but gets to the grey area if they get the payment in India before the employee travels to the US).
There is very less demand today in the first category. The second category is not much related to demand. Most of the “abuse” happens in the third (by volume) and fourth (by severity). Abuse in quotes because a lot of this is in the gray areas of legality and sometimes outrightly legal but not “right”.
I recently hired for an entry level position, blind to VISA status. We received an enormous number of applications. We received very few applications that were from US residents, I’d estimate only 5%. By the end of the drawn out process of filtering people based on cover letters, resumes, majors, GPA, work experience, portfolios, papers published, etc. There were 2 Americans left, who didn’t respond to the interview request.
American Colleges are full of foreign students, who are often at the top of their class and have made it through several ability filters to get here. If you’re hiring with meritocracy in mind, you’ll end up interviewing foreign students.
Software consulting can be abused because these type of contracts are often awarded based on cost. By driving down salary costs compared to other consultancies, the Indian firms are able to win jobs. These firms aren’t interested in hiring Americans because of the power dynamic that they’ve established with their staff.
Before the H1B really started to ramp up, you used to see foreigners working in IT that truly were some of the best and the brightest because there was a lot of competition and very few spots. These days, that is the exception, not the rule, because it was primarily designed to drive down wages so that CEO's can make larger salaries. The fact that they were able to convince people that reducing your own earning potential by giving the jobs to foreigners is the right thing to do morally shows how gullible/naive many in our industry are.
In an ironic twist, cheaper white collar workers should make services on the whole cheaper. Something that would be good for blue collar/hourly workers. In the same way that lax borders are beneficial to white collar workers by making goods cheaper.
In Germany visa applicants are evaluated based on merit without a lottery for decade and it's working well. US could do something similar instead of using a hole in the fence but it doesn't look like the decision making system is capable of making hard decisions like that.
The US system combines both merit and lottery. The lottery is maintained because it's an effective bottleneck on the volume of applications, which is substantially higher than what Germany is receiving.
Decisions in the US are made by big tech lobbyists, who want the supply of semi-indentured labor who can't jump jobs at a moment notice to continue as usual.
I read this a few times and am really struggling to see how this scam works out.
Crudely speaking, are these agencies just finding existing green card holders and American citizens with names that they can use to put down on paperwork…then hire the foreign worker who happens to have have the same name…and this somehow bypasses some sort of legal checks somewhere? What’s the point of a SSN?
Why do they all keep saying H1-B workers are underpaid? The government determines minimum pay for each application. My experience has been that this number is quite high.
The worst part about H1B and subsequent immigration policies is that it doesn't value your contribution to the country. Someone doing a PhD in the US is usually on an NSF/NIH/DARPA/<Govt agency> grant, and contributing to critical research here. If they choose to to go into industry (academia has uncapped H1B), then they go into the same pool as someone from India working some basic task with some IT Consulting company.
Eventually, the PhD would need to leave despite the government spending close to half a million for their education. This is a huge waste of government resources, close to a billion plus dollars in a lot of cases.
Never understood why I have worked with H1B at past companies where a local person would suffice. We were just making basic web services. H1B is so abused it's not even funny.
> EPI, for example, notes that American employers do not have to recruit US residents before hiring foreign H-1B workers, that it's legal for US employers to underpay H-1B workers, relatively speaking, and that H-1B workers are often exploited and lack job protection and mobility, among other issues.
I think that, in the modern, immigrant-averse west, that's exactly how a worker visa system is supposed to work.
* We don't have enough skilled workers, and employers think the ones we have are too expensive
* Foreign countries have a glut of skilled workers, and are competing with our companies
* So let's allow in a quota of foreign skilled workers, and let's let companies take the piss and underpay them.
Profit! From the POV of the government (they can screw the quota down to placate nativists, and point to the fact that the visa workers are earning a lot less than the natives), and from the POV of the employers (they get a cheapo workforce).
A better solution is to improve the education standard of the natives; but that would involve public expenditure, which is anathema to conservatives, to the press, and apparently (in the UK) it's also anathema to the Labour Party.
I'm not an open borders wingnut; but I think expenditure on high-quality education is a vital investment in a country's future. We have some world-beating universities in the UK; but government policies have resulted in those institutions giving many of their places to overseas students, who pay a lot more. So we educate lots of foreigners, who then go back to where they came from, and then get hired on worker visas to come back and work here, e.g. as doctors and nurses, of which we have a dire shortage.
Then we tighten the rules on worker visas, like banning them from bringing their kids with them.
H1b program itself needs to be overhauled. It's entirely possible this might get addressed with change in the presidential administration starting next January 19th.
[+] [-] pkoiralap|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|1 year ago|reply
That's of course my pie in the sky 'we can get congress to agree on things' version. If I were president, I would simply make the h1b go to the highest bidder, so the people that enter the US are, supposedly, the cream of the crop. Yeah, that would make students return home vs someone with more skills and experience. The whole point of the h1b is to bring over people with skills we can't find here in the US.
[+] [-] terse-broccoli|1 year ago|reply
Side note: my understanding is that there’s already a secondary lottery for people who hold a US masters (the advanced degree petition). If you are not selected in the first lottery, and you meet that condition, you get placed in a second lottery which has much better odds as there are far less people who meet this criteria (it also makes up almost 25% of the total H1-Bs granted). So basically each year you have 2 chances, and there are better odds for one of those chances.
[+] [-] rtkwe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] broknbottle|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lsllc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Rinzler89|1 year ago|reply
Especially when there's litte to no negative consequences for those caught abusing it. Like why wouldn't you? If you don't abuse it, then you're basically leaving money on the table versus your competitors who do abuse it.
Until law enforcement picks up and fines outweigh this "cost of doing business", system abuse will continue as per.
[+] [-] Muromec|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] postepowanieadm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cherryteastain|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|1 year ago|reply
Because in spite of what the law actually says, the entire purpose of the H1B visa program is and always has been a way to get mostly adequate people who'll work cheap.
[+] [-] Spooky23|1 year ago|reply
(Not singling them out, just using for illustration purposes)
[+] [-] bradleyjg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 4ad|1 year ago|reply
A salary ranking scheme would cut most professions out.
[+] [-] shermantanktop|1 year ago|reply
It’s well paid, especially by the standards of the source country. Employers love it. Visa applicants still find the prospect appealing, even if their experience may not be great.
But the power dynamics of the situation are not that different from what a migrant lettuce picker in California has to navigate. The lettuce picker actually might have more freedom.
[+] [-] psychlops|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] CPLX|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Zigurd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] shagie|1 year ago|reply
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=central+consolidated+schoo...
https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=emory+healthcare+inc&job=&...
The visa lottery makes it difficult to reliably get H1B visa teachers. H1B visa abuse makes it even more difficult. An auction would make the H1B visa program into a "visa for software developers where consultancies charge high prices to win auctions and pay their employees little."
[+] [-] citrin_ru|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] karakot|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] darth_avocado|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] avidiax|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vishalontheline|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] psychlops|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alwayslikethis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] FrustratedMonky|1 year ago|reply
For software jobs.
Why is there a demand that can drive abuse. When there are so many people that can't find jobs?
It seems like right now there should not be enough demand for H1-b (for software) to justify abuse. Like it shouldn't be profitable enough.
[+] [-] shmatt|1 year ago|reply
I've worked as a hiring manager in multiple companies, and recommending or not recommending a hire is done without any knowledge of their status, but solely on the 45 minute interview I did. If they need some sponsorship thats done without communicating to me, I just say yes/no. And with that, somehow most of the Yes's need sponsorship, so what else can you do from an interviewing perspective
[+] [-] odux|1 year ago|reply
Third are the outsourcing companies, TCS, Accenture and the like. These companies have people in India and contracts with large Us companies. They predict some number of demand for moving people from India to US (to help support the rest of the offshore team, to replace a higher paid employee at the US company with a lower paid employee of the contracting company etc). These companies will mostly but just barely follow the law (they have also been caught and paid files) and will use all loopholes available to them. These are the biggest “abuses” you see in the press. While the general “abuse” news in the press is about these companies replacing American workers with lower cost H1B employees the other problem is they are not catering to current demand but predicting work at a “client” based on current or future contract, creating “job openings” based on this (which they can, it is their own company) and flooding the lottery.
The fourth are smaller body shops and “consulting” companies in the US. These also predict demand and “create jobs” to enter applicants to the lottery. But the difference is typically the companies in the third category don’t get the employees to the US if there is no “client project” (as in, real demand) and even if they they do, they have the means to pay the minimum required pay the H1B demands - they are big enough to afford a bench of employees. The companies in the fourth category will get people to the US first on fake, or near-fake demand and then pitch them to “clients”. In the meantime the employee is not paid the companies skirt the law in all ways as possible to continue “holding” the employee. They also refuse to share paperwork with the employee (preventing them from moving jobs) and sometimes have the employees pay for the H1B which is illegal (but gets to the grey area if they get the payment in India before the employee travels to the US).
There is very less demand today in the first category. The second category is not much related to demand. Most of the “abuse” happens in the third (by volume) and fourth (by severity). Abuse in quotes because a lot of this is in the gray areas of legality and sometimes outrightly legal but not “right”.
[+] [-] twobitshifter|1 year ago|reply
American Colleges are full of foreign students, who are often at the top of their class and have made it through several ability filters to get here. If you’re hiring with meritocracy in mind, you’ll end up interviewing foreign students.
Software consulting can be abused because these type of contracts are often awarded based on cost. By driving down salary costs compared to other consultancies, the Indian firms are able to win jobs. These firms aren’t interested in hiring Americans because of the power dynamic that they’ve established with their staff.
[+] [-] lgleason|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ilrwbwrkhv|1 year ago|reply
Terrible for America. And terrible for India.
[+] [-] robertlagrant|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Workaccount2|1 year ago|reply
Looks like we are all "racists" after all.
[+] [-] kachurovskiy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] johnnyjeans|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ashayh|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] abswest|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] victor106|1 year ago|reply
"That's where the true scam is and the real money is at,"
If they are really doing this. It’s outrageous. And out right illegal.
[+] [-] testfrequency|1 year ago|reply
Crudely speaking, are these agencies just finding existing green card holders and American citizens with names that they can use to put down on paperwork…then hire the foreign worker who happens to have have the same name…and this somehow bypasses some sort of legal checks somewhere? What’s the point of a SSN?
[+] [-] throwkk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ab8|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vishwanath1306|1 year ago|reply
Eventually, the PhD would need to leave despite the government spending close to half a million for their education. This is a huge waste of government resources, close to a billion plus dollars in a lot of cases.
[+] [-] victor106|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] crappywappy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] greatpostman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] denton-scratch|1 year ago|reply
* We don't have enough skilled workers, and employers think the ones we have are too expensive
* Foreign countries have a glut of skilled workers, and are competing with our companies
* So let's allow in a quota of foreign skilled workers, and let's let companies take the piss and underpay them.
Profit! From the POV of the government (they can screw the quota down to placate nativists, and point to the fact that the visa workers are earning a lot less than the natives), and from the POV of the employers (they get a cheapo workforce).
A better solution is to improve the education standard of the natives; but that would involve public expenditure, which is anathema to conservatives, to the press, and apparently (in the UK) it's also anathema to the Labour Party.
I'm not an open borders wingnut; but I think expenditure on high-quality education is a vital investment in a country's future. We have some world-beating universities in the UK; but government policies have resulted in those institutions giving many of their places to overseas students, who pay a lot more. So we educate lots of foreigners, who then go back to where they came from, and then get hired on worker visas to come back and work here, e.g. as doctors and nurses, of which we have a dire shortage.
Then we tighten the rules on worker visas, like banning them from bringing their kids with them.
[+] [-] nirav72|1 year ago|reply