Honestly this was long overdue. The amount of abuse in the H1B program is staggering especially in IT consulting and staffing agencies. They find all kinds of loopholes to legally pay the minimum prevailing wage to maximize profit.
Unfortunately, legitimate employers also have to use the same H1B visa due to the lack of a points based immigration system.
This has led to quite a bit of collateral damage and has turned many legitimately high skilled professionals and grad students away from the US towards EU and Canada.
At the end of the day, these steps still don't address the root cause of work visa abuse - your legal presence in the US on H1B tied to the employer. You probably need legislation to address this and it's nowhere in sight.
As far as I know, H1B are transferable, so you are not actually 'tied' to the employer. Some employers are actually reluctant to hire H1B as some people accept jobs they don't really want and then find a better job thanks to H1B transfer being much easier and cheaper than requesting a new H1B.
I should clarify - legal status in the US is tied to your employment status, not necessarily to a particular employer. If they lose their job, they have 60 days to get an H1B with another employer before they start accruing illegal presence.
Also, there isn't really something called an H1B transfer. its a new H1B application every time you change your job, just that you dont go through the annual lottery if you already went through it once or have an I-140 approved.
I went through a transfer of sponsors and I can tell you that the process and cost was the same as getting my H1B the first time. The only difference was that I wasn’t restricted by the yearly cap and the transfer could happen at any time - unlike the first H1B which needs to be filed starting in April and the visa stamped in October.
Invariably someone will offer the opinion that they should auction the visas so the highest paid get it.
Someone else will respond what about junior people joining it and salaries in Michigan vs San Francisco and so on.
I'll tell you what struck me about this article: the data is staggering. The drop in acceptances is much greater than what I would have guessed. The distribution among the firms is about what I might have guessed. But 30-60% rejections is definitely news.
Finally someone is cracking down on the H1B1 mafia. Stop bringing in 7 Indian contractors instead of just hiring 2 americans to do IT work... I'm looking at you Verizon, Tata, Infosys, Cognizant, and every other "staffing company" a.k.a import cheap foreign labor to flood the IT market.
It is not about Indians vs Americans. You could continue your argument with: or bring in 1 hard working Chinese or European, but this is missing the point. American economy needs more qualified workers than the US education system can produce. Now you either starve the economy or force US companies to hire abroad. Non of these options are great for the economy overall. More over, the H1B holders are rarely cheap or flood the market. It it was true the IT staffing wages would go down instead of going up.
Unless Dallas is significantly different than the rest of the world, I find this wholly implausible. That would match entry level offshore rates. So next $25/hr resume you see, please pass it along and I'd be glad to hire that them
Throwing more bodies at technical projects makes worse results not better. Right now we have too many bodies (no kidding) producing shitty results on purpose so they have a justified reason to stick around to fix things. Software is growing in complexity not to address complex issues, but to justify itself.
They are being paid far above market value because they wouldn't agree to drop down to Canadian salaries.
Further, new hiring has shifted to Canada (we didn't hire devs in Canada at all) and there is a new office now because 5 devs is quite a few, as opposed to the single remote Canadian we used to have.
I suspect salaries are only gonna rise. At least the devs who moved from within our company are being paid well above local market value.
That's true for FAANG companies as well. They have slowed down hiring in US since it has become really hard to bring that talent in the country.
Instead they are slowly moving their work to other countries and doubling down on hiring there.
Source - I and many people I know have been approached for jobs in Countries other than my country of residence.
The fact that you hold a permanent residency in Canada will help in demanding more salary in Canada because you are not at the mercy of your employer for your status unlike in the US where you are chained to your H1B sponsor.
In practice, it's mostly a resume-filter thing -- working for a year in a cafe part-time was enough to get me to an interview for a software Pro Services gig
(I had the degree and experience for it, too, but that cleared the "work in Canada" hurdle)
Good for Indians. Regardless of how difficult it is to obtain visa, and even before Trump, many Indians and Chinese in the US need to wait > 10 years to become permanent residents, which limits their freedom quite a bit. I understand why many prefer the US. Currently salaries are higher than Canada and it's more diverse in terms of where they can live, esp in terms of climate, but I'm not sure it's worth it.
Interesting to note that they are cracking down heavily on service and consulting companies as they are the reasons why most people find it hard to get a H1-B. FANG salaries are quite good and the increase in rejection % for FANG-ish companies is a little discouraging though.
Over 90% acceptance in all cases (IBM excluded, as the article states it's probably due to their service business), 95% for the majority. Why is that discouraging? Looks to me as if even with very stringent checks they didn't find many reasons to block.
1- Companies will start hiring citizens and pay them higher salaries leading to shortage of skills and re-skilling of people with other skills into IT.
2- Companies decide to forgo lower NPV IT projects and invest money elsewhere. Accept products without customization. Demand for labour and wages remain close to where they are.
3- Remote work for even project management takes off. It is successful enough that wages actually fall further.
Which one is most likely or will it be a combination of three?
As someone, who argues for H1b, I support these changes. The H1b visa should be restricted to the well-qualified, i.e. people who hold Master's degrees or higher and actually qualified for the jobs (not the body shopping TCS & Wipro types).
I have a BS in CompSci. I hired a person with a masters in CompSci from Syracuse.
She didn’t know what null was. Nor did she know how to write a single line of code.
Which leads me to believe that Either she lied about that degree (unlikely because her visa was tied to it), or that a masters isn’t a sign of anything.
Exceptions & anecdata can be found anywhere...
I am not saying a graduate degree is the only necessary qualification, but one among other such as their OSS contributions, relevant work experience etc.
But strict enforcement is needed to prevent H1b fraud by body-shoppers. I do believe there is a significant need for H1b developers, just a higher quality filter.
Not just exceptions. I have hoards of friends who have bachelors degree and they moved in through H1 route, but now working in FAANG or similar competitive start-ups because they are skilful and are making 130k+.
But I got your point, there has to be a quantifiable way to judge talent.
It depends on what she did during school. I've worked with someone who had a masters in CompSci who couldn't use a computer to save their life, but they could write algorithms and design systems no problem. They had no interest in programming, but loved the mathematical side of it.
Parent has a BS, it’s not necessarily an anti-university statement.
I have an MS but my undergrad degree was liberal arts, I’m sure there are plenty of BS comp sci degree holders who know as much or more than me about topics.
Requiring an MS for immigration is questionable to me.
Why not just start with the person being offered the highest salary and work your way down until you reach the cap? If someone is being offered $500,000 a year who cares if they never finished high school? This would also render the argument that H1-Bs are depressing wages pretty academic.
I don't think the schools are all that different myself and in some ways are probably better than ever. I do think it is easier than ever to get through school without actually learning what you are exposed to.
In engineering maths, people lean on Wolfram Alpha to solve and break down equations then pretend like they understand because they know the steps. You can look up endless discussion and breakdown of rhetoric and take a position as your own without applying much critical thought beforehand. Cliffnotes. People these days seems to think that because they can look up information it's the same as knowing it.
That's before we get into issues such as institutional cheating. I know a person who makes most of his daily cash shadow writing essays for college and high school students. It's done through an anonymizing method on the web. No idea how many he actually writes, but he seems to write a lot of them especially late spring/fall.
This is basically implying schools haven't updated their teaching methods to consider the access to infinite information through the internet.
I've taken courses in grad school where the professor lets you bring a laptop to the exams to lookup whatever you want. You still can't solve his problems if you don't understand the basics.
It looks like the Trump administration is looking to make the H1-B system follow its original intent: bring rare labor to these shores. I look forward to seeing the labor market change where there are five to seven Indian contractors doing basic web programming all living in a rental ghetto in a 2 bedroom apartment. We’ve been treating all labor unfairly. We’ve exploited poor from foreign shores and squashed the ability to develop native talent.
I agree to that, not just it kills local job market, it is exploiting foreign workers. I read Theranos' account, and I imagined many Indian workers kept working because they had no choice to say No.
The moment they say no, they will lose their job, and getting a H1B sponsoring job in 60 days? Ain't nobody got (enough) time for that!
So much misinformation in this thread. H1B's don't get paid lower. Law requires that they be paid market wage and no native workers are being undercut.
If you see this happening, then you can actually report it to DoL (I have had a call from a DoL investigator about H1B abuse at a past employer based on a complaint filed by an employee).
The law also says there can be no gender wage gap.
I've worked at several big tech companies and they all abused H1B's. The immigrant workers were paid a lot less than citizens. It pissed me off because the immigrant workers were treated like crap and also I would imagine it puts downward pressure on my own salary.
I worked at a company that gave referral bonuses to employees for new hires. It went like this: $2,000 for a white. $3,000 for a black or Asian. $5,000 for an Indian. HMMM.
There's little incentive for an individual to report anything. You've seen how "whistleblowers" get treated. Up against a big company with a legal department, chances are good that they know how to put up chaff, redirect, deny and obfuscate their abusive practices. Why stick your neck out when it's a systemic problem?
I upvoted you because you bring up a popular myth.
So you are correct that they have to be paid market wage. But the details matter here. For the DOL, the "market wage" is the "prevailing wage". This is a function of the job classification (title), wage level, location and (most important) which wage survey they choose to use.
By now you can probably guess how a company that wants to underpay can use these levers - under classifying, moving them to a suburb with less employers for that job, using a different wage survey etc.
Well, it already happened more than a decade ago when out sourcing was the trendy thing. It's a bit different than remote work as it was driven mainly by lowering labor costs.
The big companies that dominate the H1-B applications already have offices all over the world and thousands of "remote" employees. They still have offices in the US where they need people locally.
Another aspect of immigration law that is shaken up by the growth of remote jobs is that it makes work restrictions unenforceable. Pretty much all expat digital nomads who travel around to work are doing so on tourist visas. It'll be interesting to see how governments react as this becomes more and more common
If that were true then foreigners on F1 and H-1B visas would be allowed to start their own companies. That not only doesn't take away jobs for locals, it creates new ones. But that's illegal.
Can’t they start the company and then sponsor themselves?
Also H1-Bs are specific to The US so does not negate my comment about most countries and their attitudes to remote workers. Even if technically not allowed somewhere, no one’s going to start a campaign trying to deport remote tourist workers.
Remote workers pay local consumption tax while not draining value from the local economy.
This is absolutely the future of work. There's increasingly high friction for acquiring a Visa and increasingly low friction for working remotely (with tools like zoom & asynchronous workplace cultures).
Maybe, but a lot of the denials from services/consulting companies are of on-site semi-technical project managers who really wouldn't be that useful offshore. The technical people are already offshore.
I think foreign remote employees are much more risky in terms of IT security and law protection. Companies need to take this risk into their business model or develop countermeasures beforehand.
A move like that will actually undercut labor much more, and not just tech labor. It will cause huge outsourcing to Canada(which is already happening to some extent) and to places on the other side of the world. Given that 100 IT jobs create about 30 non-IT jobs supporting them, it's going to hurt the local economy. Once entire teams are built in other countries, companies would prefer hiring new workers there just to keep communication overhead low, forget about the lower cost.
All outsourcing that could have happened has already happened. No matter what people say about H1Bs undercutting salaries they are still paid much more than equivalent employees overseas. Why wait for visas to become scarce to move the business overseas and save tons of money?
It was huge in the late 90s-early 2000s and partly explains the current situation with the lack of programmers since everybody told their kids that software engineering jobs will all be gone by the time the graduate with their, then useless, CS degree.
It appears the efficacy of outsourcing had been overestimated a bit and many jobs had been "re-shored" since then. And yes, there is still substantial outsourcing business I just don't see how it can expand any more.
Perhaps so. It does seem like a fast track "all you can eat and right away" feature would be a draw, even for the steep fee, but maybe on balance it wouldn't be enough. Maybe toss in permanent residence after five years, or something like that.
FWIW, the H-1Bs I've worked with have been good people and as competent as locals. I worry some about them being abused by their employers, but that's their trade-off to manage. I have noticed, though, over the years that demand for my skills has lessened noticeably.
The "H-1B Approval Rate" chart has two problems with the y-axis:
1) the 75 and 100 grid lines should display and marked,
2) it is misleading by setting the y-axis range at 75 to 100. Because it gives reader an impression that approval rate drops to almost zero.
If you want to emphasize the disapproval rate, just make a disapproval rate chart, which can have the y-axis range at 0 to 25.
Unfortunately, legitimate employers also have to use the same H1B visa due to the lack of a points based immigration system.
This has led to quite a bit of collateral damage and has turned many legitimately high skilled professionals and grad students away from the US towards EU and Canada.
At the end of the day, these steps still don't address the root cause of work visa abuse - your legal presence in the US on H1B tied to the employer. You probably need legislation to address this and it's nowhere in sight.