Multiple registration became an issue for a couple years but the root cause for the large number of applications this year which will continue to happen is because a small change USCIS made in their application process recently which made the application process more democratic and accessible.
Prior to 2021, everyone had to submit a full application packet along with the application fees to enter the lottery. Which meant an IT staffing company had to spend ~2000 USD on immigration lawyers to prepare the application for one employee and another cheque of ~2500 USD to USCIS as application fees. The application fees would get refunded back from USCIS if the application was not picked in the lottery for 85,000 slots and the IT Staffing company would have to at minimum bear the costs they spend on lawyers preparing an application they had to submit to enter the lottery.
From 2022, USCIS I believe made a change with a good intention to reduce burden on the large number of applicants whose applications were bound to not get picked in the lottery. USCIS always received about 225,000 applications typically every year and the 85,000 slots allocated for the full year would get filled in the first week itself. USCIS made a change to the application process and allowed IT staffing companies to pre-register for the lottery by paying a nominal fee of 10 USD. They now do not have to bear any lawyer costs to enter the lottery since they do not have to submit a full application upfront.
This small change makes the whole process more democratic to a vast number of people who work at IT firms in India and allows them to apply now since they fully meet the specialized work conditions set by the H1-B visa system and the cost to enter is almost non-existent.
Staffing companies are extremely profitable and mostly operate on the edge of the law, exploiting visa workers for maximum profit. Any attempt by USCIS to regulate staffing agencies use of H1B has been fought tooth and nail by armies of lawyers.
With the fall of Chevron, I don't think there is a way out of this without legislative changes.
The other side of the coin is the extremely arbitrary and capricious nature of the US employment based visa and immigration system. This naturally leads to middlemen who can navigate the system exploit it.
> Staffing companies are extremely profitable and mostly operate on the edge of the law, exploiting visa workers for maximum profit. Any attempt by USCIS to regulate staffing agencies use of H1B has been fought tooth and nail by armies of lawyers.
That seems weird. Why would they be extremely profitable? Are there big barriers to entry?
Without barriers to entry, you would expect the profits of staffing companies to be competed away. (Just to be clear: you wouldn't expect workers to be less exploited. That's a feature of the visa system and their relative lack of other opportunities, not a function of the staffing companies.)
If there are so profitable, why isn't everyone and their mom starting staffing companies?
The simplest solution is to automatically give an H1-B a green card in 12 months--24 at the longest. Force the sponsoring company to pay for and complete all of the required background and security checks. Make failure to complete or shitty completion of those checks criminal liability directly on the CEO.
This would immediately deprive these kinds of staffing companies of the economic incentive as they would have to pay for the legal costs of an H1-B every 12 months. This would remove the depressive impact that H1-Bs have on salaries as they would be free to compete in the market at large after 12 months.
And the H1-B pipeline would be free to bring in people that we actually want.
They should just auction off those visas (and green cards etc) to the highest bidder. (And require the winners to pay cash up front.)
An auction would cut out all the surplus any middle men could earn, and put it in the pockets of the taxpayer. It would also cut out political meddling, and replace it with an incentive to increase revenue.
It would also give an incentive to hand out more visas, to 'make those foreigners pay for our public services' or something like that.
We are doing such a cap-and-auction system for car licenses in Singapore. It works really well. (Our country is small enough that there's a cap of roughly one million cars.)
> make those foreigners pay for our public services
Do you realize that after a person gets H1B visa and start working they are still paying taxes. It is usually higher. My last experience was F1 visa and I was paying more taxes than my US colleagues earning same money.
Also this suggestion wouls only benefit the big tech companies.
> less-remarkable resumes, paying them lower wages and heightening the risk of undercutting American labor.
If the main problem is less skilled workers that take American jobs, then I would start with agricultural visas -- there a ton of low-skilled foreign workers coming to US totally legally and taking jobs from Americans.
(Of course in my opinion, this is not a problem at all. If low-skilled immigrant without connections and safety nets can take someone's job at a lower pay, then that someone was too entitled on the first place).
The mega Indian outsourcers of indentured servitude such as Infosys, Wipro, Tata, etc all built their empires gaming the H1B system for the past 25+ years, nothing new here.
How did the middlemen get so much power in the US economy ? So much of the economy is just middlemen doing bullshit work and seeking rent. Staffing firms, real estate agents, car dealerships, attorneys, healthcare, etc. I don't think other countries have such a big problem with middlemen inserting themselves everywhere and seeking rent. Is there something unique about the US ?
In Australia few years back the highest paid CEO was not from industries you might expect like mining, banking... but a company doing international student placements, whatever that is -
It's not unique to the US at all, it's fundamentally just how power dynamics work. Power comes from controlling access over valuable resources (ie power = control). Being a middleman gives you some control over something, and therefore some power.
The interesting part is how power tends to centralize into the hands of an elite few (ie oligarchies), rather than equalize or concentrate completely into the hands of one. And I think this tends to happen as to reflect the collective wills of society's members.
>How did the middlemen get so much power in the US economy?
I think it's always been this way. It takes a lot of work and resources to deal with individual customers at scale.
>Staffing firms, real estate agents, car dealerships, attorneys, healthcare, etc.
Staffing firms, real estate agents, and attorneys are not unique to the US at all. Staffing firms are used by many companies because they don't want to hire full-time HR people to do "talent acquisition". (Personally, I haven't had good experiences when I've tried interviewing at these companies, and have always done better by going with companies that do their own recruiting and hiring.) People selling their house don't have the time or resources to sell it themselves usually, dealing with all the prospective buyers. And attorneys are pretty necessary if you have non-trivial legal issues anywhere.
Health insurance isn't even unique to the US; lots of developed nations have systems that look sorta like ObamaCare. But they all do it MUCH better, with FAR lower costs. Someone's probably written a long book somewhere explaining why the US is so uniquely bad here.
Car dealerships aren't unique to the US (how else are you going to buy a car?), but the requirement that they be independently owned is, and adds to the cost of cars in the US, and I think especially results in a lot of (less-than-savvy) customers being ripped off with unnecessary charges.
The thing I see about the US is that it seems to be uniquely bad at actually fixing problems. Most of these middlemen services you list are natural outcomes of real-world constraints. A company that makes milk, for instance, can't realistically sell it individually to customers all over your city or state, so they sell it to distributors, who distribute it to their retail stores, where customers buy it to take home. Similarly, a small car manufacturer, like Studebaker, can't set up dealerships all across the US, so they partner with local dealerships that are probably selling other mfgrs' cars too. Back in the early days of cars, all the carmakers were small, remember. A century later, they're mostly big, but the US made laws long ago requiring independent dealers, and now they can't change.
For whatever reason, as time goes on and things change, the US is uniquely bad it seems at adapting and fixing the problem. In better-run countries, they'd see this independent-dealership law is no longer necessary, and change it. In the US, it stays, because car dealers are politically connected to local politicians.
Middlemen are people who spent time specialising in a market and you pay them as guides. You never have to go through them, but you'll get your ass raped.
There s nothing wrong about them, they work hard and are not rent seekers (a commission on successful deal is the exact opposite of a rent).
Every countries has them (Im French, live in Hong Kong) and what you bemoaned is mundane in my experience.
"The outsize role of these (outsourcing/staffing) firms has distorted the H-1B program, which Congress conceived as a way to help American businesses get access to the world’s top talent. Instead, outsourcing and staffing companies bring in applicants with less-remarkable resumes, paying them lower wages and heightening the risk of undercutting American labor. The result is a system that fails US workers, shortchanges the economy, stiff-arms talented immigrants and enriches a class of middlemen."
When congress created these laws they just fundamentally misunderstood the astronomical demand there was to enter the country. There is so much financial incentive to bring people in, for laborers, for companies looking to push wages down, and for politicians who stand to gain from additional votes, that any route to do so is bound to be abused any way it possibly can be.
[+] [-] vamsiraju|1 year ago|reply
Prior to 2021, everyone had to submit a full application packet along with the application fees to enter the lottery. Which meant an IT staffing company had to spend ~2000 USD on immigration lawyers to prepare the application for one employee and another cheque of ~2500 USD to USCIS as application fees. The application fees would get refunded back from USCIS if the application was not picked in the lottery for 85,000 slots and the IT Staffing company would have to at minimum bear the costs they spend on lawyers preparing an application they had to submit to enter the lottery.
From 2022, USCIS I believe made a change with a good intention to reduce burden on the large number of applicants whose applications were bound to not get picked in the lottery. USCIS always received about 225,000 applications typically every year and the 85,000 slots allocated for the full year would get filled in the first week itself. USCIS made a change to the application process and allowed IT staffing companies to pre-register for the lottery by paying a nominal fee of 10 USD. They now do not have to bear any lawyer costs to enter the lottery since they do not have to submit a full application upfront.
This small change makes the whole process more democratic to a vast number of people who work at IT firms in India and allows them to apply now since they fully meet the specialized work conditions set by the H1-B visa system and the cost to enter is almost non-existent.
[+] [-] vsskanth|1 year ago|reply
With the fall of Chevron, I don't think there is a way out of this without legislative changes.
The other side of the coin is the extremely arbitrary and capricious nature of the US employment based visa and immigration system. This naturally leads to middlemen who can navigate the system exploit it.
[+] [-] eru|1 year ago|reply
That seems weird. Why would they be extremely profitable? Are there big barriers to entry?
Without barriers to entry, you would expect the profits of staffing companies to be competed away. (Just to be clear: you wouldn't expect workers to be less exploited. That's a feature of the visa system and their relative lack of other opportunities, not a function of the staffing companies.)
If there are so profitable, why isn't everyone and their mom starting staffing companies?
[+] [-] bsder|1 year ago|reply
This would immediately deprive these kinds of staffing companies of the economic incentive as they would have to pay for the legal costs of an H1-B every 12 months. This would remove the depressive impact that H1-Bs have on salaries as they would be free to compete in the market at large after 12 months.
And the H1-B pipeline would be free to bring in people that we actually want.
This could be done tomorrow. But it won't be.
[+] [-] eru|1 year ago|reply
An auction would cut out all the surplus any middle men could earn, and put it in the pockets of the taxpayer. It would also cut out political meddling, and replace it with an incentive to increase revenue.
It would also give an incentive to hand out more visas, to 'make those foreigners pay for our public services' or something like that.
We are doing such a cap-and-auction system for car licenses in Singapore. It works really well. (Our country is small enough that there's a cap of roughly one million cars.)
[+] [-] elashri|1 year ago|reply
Do you realize that after a person gets H1B visa and start working they are still paying taxes. It is usually higher. My last experience was F1 visa and I was paying more taxes than my US colleagues earning same money.
Also this suggestion wouls only benefit the big tech companies.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|1 year ago|reply
Data: https://github.com/BloombergGraphics/2024-h1b-immigration-da...
[+] [-] jarsin|1 year ago|reply
It might get fixed by the time we all retire.
[+] [-] trhway|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] deepsun|1 year ago|reply
If the main problem is less skilled workers that take American jobs, then I would start with agricultural visas -- there a ton of low-skilled foreign workers coming to US totally legally and taking jobs from Americans.
(Of course in my opinion, this is not a problem at all. If low-skilled immigrant without connections and safety nets can take someone's job at a lower pay, then that someone was too entitled on the first place).
[+] [-] bastard_op|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bubblethink|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] asta123|1 year ago|reply
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-07/idp-education-ceo-and...
[+] [-] Rury|1 year ago|reply
The interesting part is how power tends to centralize into the hands of an elite few (ie oligarchies), rather than equalize or concentrate completely into the hands of one. And I think this tends to happen as to reflect the collective wills of society's members.
[+] [-] shiroiushi|1 year ago|reply
I think it's always been this way. It takes a lot of work and resources to deal with individual customers at scale.
>Staffing firms, real estate agents, car dealerships, attorneys, healthcare, etc.
Staffing firms, real estate agents, and attorneys are not unique to the US at all. Staffing firms are used by many companies because they don't want to hire full-time HR people to do "talent acquisition". (Personally, I haven't had good experiences when I've tried interviewing at these companies, and have always done better by going with companies that do their own recruiting and hiring.) People selling their house don't have the time or resources to sell it themselves usually, dealing with all the prospective buyers. And attorneys are pretty necessary if you have non-trivial legal issues anywhere.
Health insurance isn't even unique to the US; lots of developed nations have systems that look sorta like ObamaCare. But they all do it MUCH better, with FAR lower costs. Someone's probably written a long book somewhere explaining why the US is so uniquely bad here.
Car dealerships aren't unique to the US (how else are you going to buy a car?), but the requirement that they be independently owned is, and adds to the cost of cars in the US, and I think especially results in a lot of (less-than-savvy) customers being ripped off with unnecessary charges.
The thing I see about the US is that it seems to be uniquely bad at actually fixing problems. Most of these middlemen services you list are natural outcomes of real-world constraints. A company that makes milk, for instance, can't realistically sell it individually to customers all over your city or state, so they sell it to distributors, who distribute it to their retail stores, where customers buy it to take home. Similarly, a small car manufacturer, like Studebaker, can't set up dealerships all across the US, so they partner with local dealerships that are probably selling other mfgrs' cars too. Back in the early days of cars, all the carmakers were small, remember. A century later, they're mostly big, but the US made laws long ago requiring independent dealers, and now they can't change.
For whatever reason, as time goes on and things change, the US is uniquely bad it seems at adapting and fixing the problem. In better-run countries, they'd see this independent-dealership law is no longer necessary, and change it. In the US, it stays, because car dealers are politically connected to local politicians.
[+] [-] readthenotes1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] listenallyall|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] xwolfi|1 year ago|reply
There s nothing wrong about them, they work hard and are not rent seekers (a commission on successful deal is the exact opposite of a rent).
Every countries has them (Im French, live in Hong Kong) and what you bemoaned is mundane in my experience.
[+] [-] downrightmike|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Dig1t|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] SoftwareEngNYC|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] Struyck363|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] SoftwareEngNYC|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Arainach|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|1 year ago|reply