This is an open secret in tech. Visa holders have less job offers to negotiate with, less job mobility, and consequently get paid less. Companies preferentially hire them over Americans.
Further, the recent actions making harder for "body shops" like Infosys are actually helping big tech companies win more visa lotteries. This means the recent action that was supposed to help American workers, is actually causing the best jobs to shift more to immigrants and less to Americans.
The whole visa and immigration system needs huge reform. I am not anti immigrant but the immigration system disproportionately hurts American software engineers and American tech. You don't see many visa holders working in sales and marketing, or teaching, or law, mostly just software engineering (at the high end) and then migrant farming and illegal immigrant factory workers (at the low end).
If we gave immigrants more job mobility (notably not attaching the people to the company they work with or making the process so complicated that you need corporate sponsors to go through) then wages would basically be the same as for locals.
Software engineering has the lowest unemployment of any major job category in the world. Beyond it being the right thing to do, making it easier for people abroad to work in the US with the same level of freedoms granted to citizens (including the “right” to get poached at a higher salary) would only help the industry and those within it
Another thing: if software engineers weren’t afraid of unionizing, then companies would have a hell of a lot harder time slowly replacing you with cheaper counterparts. Demanding equal pay for equal work, no matter where your coworkers came from, attacks the core of the problem
Maybe I'm misreading you, but why do they have to move to the US at all? I had a few foreign coworkers that were being paid very competitive salaries while working remotely from Europe and Asia. They came to visit a couple times a year, for a few weeks at a time, and that was it.
I'm happy to work with people all over the world, I don't need to see you face-to-face every day. I really enjoy seeing people a few times a year, but that's only because I genuinely like them and I enjoy spending time in meatspace with them. But I never felt like my job was impaired by having people at different time zones. If anything, it was awesome! I'd put up a PR before going to sleep and by the time I went in to work the next day it would be ready to merge. If any serious discussion had to happen, we'd just use video chat to resolve big issues.
What benefits would unionizing provide? I'm not actively against it, but I don't see any clear reasons to be in favor of it either.
Could you enumerate some of those benefits? I'm not seeing the "better pay" in any example I've seen online. And benefits are questionable, and rather subjective. I don't want my job to provide anything, I want them to pay me a lot of money and let me take care of my problems without becoming involved. Most "job benefits" are just bullhshit and ways to cut taxes.
I don't mind talking to HR. You should always hire a lawyer if you're having any serious discussions anyway, so I don't see in what way a union would help me. If your HR department won't let you discuss something without a lawyer present, that's a clear sign you need to leave immediately.
Your power is that you have an influential position within the company, and if you leave it will cause them to have to hire someone and teach them all the intricacies of your industry. This takes a lot of time and it's incredibly expensive.
If an engineer is fired for a bullshit reason (i.e. I don't like em), other engineers will speak up if they think it's unjustified. I'll also make sure to publicly express my criticisms of the company so nobody within my social circle will seriously consider joining.
Maybe a union makes more sense for a larger company, but so far I'm unconvinced by your points. Like I said, I'm not against unions, but I'm unclear as to what benefits I'd get for joining one.
I can easily imagine all manner of horrors following unionizing. I can imagine the Certified AgileTM types getting into the game and making all kinds of horrible silly rules for their benefit, wave upon wave of people who do not have a passion for software design of any sort but merely view it as a hollow vehicle to extract rent by entrenching themselves in processes. I can imagine the same sort of ridiculousness you find in every stodgy old mega company with armies of lifelong paper pushing cogs now being mandated. Perhaps as a concession they'll carve out exemptions for smaller companies. How nice of them. You already see this behavior any time there is any sort of certification or legal requirements involved it quickly gets weaponized and draws in armies of box-ticking auditors who's favorite word is no and have basically zero interest in the material facts that originally motivated their existence.
> I'll also make sure [..] within my social circle
> what benefits I'd get
A business usually consists of a group of employees, some may benefit more than others, clearly you may be in the others category. But maybe some of your colleagues aren't as vocal or brave as you, or maybe they can't afford to risk losing their job etc. That's solidarity, not tweeting about something after-the-fact for the benefit of your own social circle.
That said, the highly skilled, strictly individual-minded person clearly have benefits to reap too. Comparing with most West-European countries, like:
> What benefits would unionizing provide? I'm not actively against it, but I don't see any clear reasons to be in favor of it either.
After being in Germany and also working with them I am really impressed by the union and the strong labour laws that they have. Really helps in the work life balance for them and how I really wish my country had it.
GP was worried about problems that unionization can help to tackle, if only to counter the massive power imbalance between the owners of capital and the workers.
As for remote work: I’m 100% good with that, but I also believe people shouldn’t be constrained from living in the general area they would like to if they have the means. Also , a lot of people simply don’t like remote work in the first place, and there can also be similar wage depression effects (and other political issues) that can make it a less-than-ideal situation
Demanding equal pay for equal work, no matter where your coworkers came from, attacks the core of the problem
One of the things that makes this difficult for software is that there's not a clear way of defining "equal work". Every company has its own leveling system that may or may not reflect the actual value of the work being performed, and sometimes employees justifiably exceed their designated level's salary.
> the immigration system disproportionately hurts American software engineers and American tech
The immigration debate suffers from overgeneralisation. Illegal immigration is a different problem from legal immigration. And short-term skilled migrants are unlike long-term skilled immigrants. Short-term migrants, i.e. those with no intention of staying in the U.S. long-term, probably depress American wages. Skilled immigrants aiming for residency, and certain classes of unskilled illegal immigrants, appear to add net value.
(Exhibit A of our system's self-destructiveness are international students at American universities being refused residency on graduation.)
However over the last 20 years, most immigration, of both kinds, have been about one thing: reduced labor costs.
At the risk of downvotes, I’m going to include something Steve Bannon said on MSNBC last night about legal immigration. He made this point that it makes no sense for America to keep letting the best and brightest of the world in / draining them from everywhere else. Why aren’t we refusing the really good immigrants if anything? Those are the people we want in their home countries setting up fair and stable systems. Having them here is, after a certain point, kind of greedy.
Also free trade was supposed to fix this by also requiring companies to adhere to strict safety and labor laws, which would make labor prices more even. It never happened.
> Why aren’t we refusing the really good immigrants if anything?
Steve Jobs' father was a Syrian immigrant [1]. It is doutbtful that Steve Jobs--or Elon Musk or Satya Nadella--would have been as successful in their original countries as they've been here. As a species, we all win from giving our best and brightest access to America's stable institutions and rich economy.
More to the point, I find it difficult to believe Steve Bannon suddenly cares about other countries. His line about the overabundance of brown-skinned executives in Silicon Valley is telling enough.
> Exhibit A of our system's self-destructiveness are international students at American universities being refused residency on graduation.
You cannot categorically say that all international students are "highly skilled" or even "skilled". Some are, some aren't; and I'm saying this as an Indian citizen on H1B in the United States. There has to be some kind of vetting period instead of handing off a green card right after graduation. I bet if the tables were turned you won't see anywhere close to this kind of generosity.
Regarding Cisco (downvote me if you want) not a lot of people do "skilled" work; Cisco is a sales machine and does not care about engineering. Fixing bugs (and passing them off as features) from companies which were acquired, doing busy work, attending 2-3 hour meetings, middle management malaise with paper pushers, maintaning status quo (it's 2018 and they still use gcc 3.3) etc. is not what I would define as "skilled" engineering work. It's mediocrity and that's what they want to maintain.
> is actually causing the best jobs to shift more to immigrants and less to Americans.
Just to be clear: people on H-1B are not immigrants as it is a non-immigrant visa. They only become immigrants if and when they adjust status and get a green card at which point none of the limitations you listed will apply anymore.
>They only become immigrants if and when they adjust status and get a green card at which point none of the limitations you listed will apply anymore.
But that process takes years--during that time all of those limitations do apply. And once they do apply, changing employers can reset the application process, adding yet another disincentive to changing jobs.
Also since tech salaries are so much higher in the US than nearly anywhere else, most H-1B workers want to stay in the US for a significant length of time (even if they don't plan to stay forever)--during that time it is harder for them to switch jobs than it is for permanent residents.
Sales recruiter here: yep, companies will not sponsor visas for salespeople at all.
Also, New Zealander working on getting his Greencard: it's a real bummer seeing what some of the bigger tech companies have done with the H1B visa in the past 10 years. They've really abused it and ruined it for everyone.
Why not increase the visa quota, or better yet, remove it altogether, since all the H1b Visas are people with job offers, with an employer that wants them.
Also, you cant get an H1B for sales. Ask the U.S. Government about that, they put that restriction.
Attracting the most talented immigrants is exactly what this country needs to grow its economy. There are nearly no unemployed top talent, and talent (including immigrants) grows demand. Look how many startups are spawned from the top tech company veterans. Taking in brilliant immmigrants is a defenst against the whole industry shifting the balance of power to a different country.
This is my exact argument against h1b, but something tells me you didn't mean it that way.
The fact is if we want to truly attract the best and brightest we need to give them citizenship and pay them for their superior skills.
As it is now we aren't attracting the best and brightest but the slightly skilled and willing to take a gamble and endure the cruelty of our immigration system. These are typically young people which exacerbates the agism problem in tech.
That’s a consequence of the US’s particular implementation of talent visas (H1B being tied to employer), not an argument against attracting high skilled workers.
(I think most people on this forum would agree H1B needs reform ?)
As an H1B, while there is employer tie in at some level, I am free to change jobs. What I am not free to do is to stop working. That fear certainly does indirectly result in lesser job mobility.
For example, opportunities like say going to Recurse Center, or having the freedom to have a decently long sabbatical etc. even with a 6 month emergency fund are not available. The other thing is no freedom to pursue any other job, i.e working on a startup idea during the evenings or weekend, or writing a technical book etc. for money is not allowed.
There are certainly issues with the H1b system, i.e. the lottery, low salary cap, multiple applications per person to game the system etc, but employer stickiness is not one of them, at least for people who are qualified.
The major problem is due to long wait for green card for people from China, and almost impossible wait for people from India. My friends who were not born in these two countries have been able to get a green card within about a year, after getting an H1B, while I am looking at a more than 20-30 year wait.
That is irrelevant. They get paid more compared to what immigrants would get in their home countries. And if you had to pay them as much then they would lose the edge during hiring - it is part of why they are also chosen.
However wage arbitrage is specifically against the intent and the letter of visa programs. It’s to fill actual shortages. If you can’t find a Python dev at $70k per year but you could find one at $100k per year, that isn’t a “shortage” — yet such “shortages” are what gets used to rationalize H1-B expansion.
I'd like to add that part of the factor that's driving down wages is the fact that workers from countries with cheap/subsidized higher-level education can get a bachelor's degree for under $5000 (total), meaning that a student from a foreign country getting a master's degree from an American university graduates with around 1/3 the total debt that an American student would. That advantage makes it more feasible to take lower paying jobs in the first place, thus broadening the talent pool, which inherently drives wages down.
Thats not how salaries are negotiated. Any worker picks the job that suits him best. If you have A and B in the US, and C in your home country, you will pick the best of the three, not "not C".
I agree — the typical path is the abusive H1 system, which is dangled as a carrot by outsourceds in India to retain talent in hopes of getting an assignment here.
It’s a form of indentured labor that should be forbidden.
My grandparents were all skilled blue collar workers who needed a sponsor and a medical exam to enter and eventually get citizenship in the 1940s. There’s no reason that skilled labor from anywhere should not be able to immigrate here on the same terms.
That's great except that H1B is not supposed to be used to suppress domestic salaries or replace existing workers (Disney IT). This is openly happening and the government won't do anything to correct this illegal behavior. It's 2018 and Trump's executive order has amounted to nothing.
Consider these 2016 numbers from USCIS [1] (Can't find 2017 data. Wonder why). All of the Indian body shops pay sub-$90K as their average salary whereas all of the top domestic sponsors are paying significantly more. I'm sure the medians are even worse. So all a US company has to do is play the contractor shuffle and get cheaper labor. Also note that there are no listings for people with master's or doctorate degrees. H1B is clearly not being used for its intended effect.
The effect on wages is inconclusive based on the salary of the people that come in. Its possible the 90k range puts more downward pressure on salaries than the 150 that come about. They all have effects on wages but also create value for the whole. The more immigrants come the more total salaries paid for the workers is, even if the mean is lower.
If they are actually “brilliant.” Some Windows sysadmin a year out of school working for Infosys is typically not your future Google founder. If they are actually brilliant, there are visas for that and it isn’t H1-B.
> The whole visa and immigration system needs huge reform. I am not anti immigrant but the immigration system disproportionately hurts American software engineers and American tech.
We will build the most fantastic firewall ever made, and we will make the foreign engineers pay for it!
There are a lot of immigrants in other fields are well.
Sales maybe not as the skill required for sales is very
hard to measure (maybe thats why).
Marketing: High level marketing executives are transfered to US regularly. Also I maybe wrong but they can come under
the artist visa if they are related to anything artistic
and don't need H1B.
Teaching: High school salaries are pathetic and high schools wont even apply for an H1B. A lot of professors in good universities are immigrants. A lot researchers in Top universities are also immigrants.
Law : The problem is that you have to do your law degree here to get entry into law, but I have seen a lot of immigrants doing that.
Not in your list but Medicine: A lot of people are in medicine as well even though they have to take an exam (? or something) to see if they are trained according to US standards.
Tech has most number of immigrants because large tech companies are headquartered in US, thats it.
For example, a lot of doctors go to UK, because demand and NIH.
I know a lot of mechanical and chemical engineers being
hired by Schlum (even though its technically not a US company).
Go to any US university and you will see a lot of immigrants in any technical fields training and have pretty good jobs lined up for them after graduation.
> I am not anti immigrant but the immigration system disproportionately hurts American software engineers and American tech
Cry me a river. Do you also complain about internal migration towards cities like San Francisco and Boston. It's the same principal at play. Tech workers from all over the US flock to cities where the wealth is. Tech workers from around the world flock to the US because that's where the wealth is. It's not because we like stealing your job.
Developing software is an investment and the people that fund the investment seem to prefer (at least the core of the team) to live nearby. But if you put a hard-stop on immigration. Or if it gets too expensive for people to live nearby, they might just start looking for the talent wherever it is like @dhh.
> The Visa lottery system keeps workers locked into lower paying wages that what they could get as full citizens under the same exact circumstances.
FYI - you can switch jobs in H1B. I don't live in the USA, but everyone I know who is from my home country (India) and is on a H1B and in tech, have switched jobs atleast once (mostly between FB, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Amazon).
OTOH, if you're talking about L1 Visa (which is NOT a lottery system), then everyone I know who is on L1 (interestingly they are all at Amazon and Microsoft), then I agree - none of them have switched jobs so far.
I'm all for more lenient immigration laws. But I'm not sure where this idea comes from that people with H1Bs are like indentured servants. I moved jobs twice in 6 years. Getting one in the first place is a lottery but once you have one it doesn't seem like much of a hurdle to get a renewal with a different company.
It's not about stealing jobs it's about jobs offering less compensation and benefits than what they would normally because they can exploit the inherent risks of immigrating to lock people into less substantial employment contracts.
That's not absolutist true, but this is the type of study I would like the government to invest in with my tax dollars. We should know how often this is the outcome.
> The real secret is that this is the only thing that keeps tech onshore.
If this was the only thing it would have gone offshore more than a decade ago. The reason is hasn't gone offshore is because the results are terrible for a number of reasons, with precious few success stories. It is a tried and failed technique to cut software costs.
Remember, the engineers who work on the top-tier SV firms will also be going offshore. With that talent pool abroad, many more offshore projects than now will be successful.
Also, even now India exports $100B+ worth of software services to US. It is not as if every project offshored is producing "terrible results".
Paying maximum viable cost for minimum viable output is the type of outsourcing that you're thinking of. India, Eastern Europe, etc is full of smart people capable of doing pretty much anything. Being located in California doesn't give you super-powers.
Already happened. My company has sent notice to us that international hired employees are preferentially located to Canada and other sites instead of US, since it is difficult to get a visa here.
People are selfish, so I don't blame them for want to close the door and keep the outsiders outside so they can have a bigger share of the pie.
But don't expect to see that happen either, companies nowadays are much more powerful than individuals and they are very nimble, they will go to places where cost is lower, this won't change a bit, it is in their blood.
So to immigrants coming to US, don't really put much hope in spending decades waiting to get permit to not in living in fear of throwing out. Doesn't worth it. And the resentment towards immigrants is worsening everyday, unless you happen to have certain skin tone. So earn your bucks, and save more, when the time comes take your life and skill elsewhere, life is too short to just wait in vain and hope for the best, act swiftly and you will be happier ;)
You think salary negotiations are somehow immune to those same price pressures when we are dealing with the ppl who mow lawns, pick produce, and clean bathrooms?
The OP likely is talking about tech because it's what he knows. But generally, as a Canadian who has hired immigration lawyers and knows the US immigration process well, you are never getting into the US to "mow lawns, pick produce, and clean bathrooms"... almost all the long term Visas require an advanced degree (4yrs of university) or equivalent in experience in an industry in high demand (doctors, engineers, etc).
You may be mistaking illegal immigration with legal.
That’s true of certain visas. There are a variety of different visas.
I grew up next to an orchard that almost exclusively used Jamaican guest workers to pick apples and other fruit. Same thing with horse tracks, etc. There is no farm operating at any significant scale that isn’t using migrant labor, mostly legal.
Why not hire the best no matter where they come from? I never understand why locals should get preferential treatment. Companies do business, not philanthropy.
" I never understand why locals should get preferential treatment. Companies do business, not philanthropy."
Citizens have absolutely no interest in enabling and empowering corporations unless they serve the community in some way.
Ergo, if corps serve only the benefit of shareholders and not really consumers or anyone else ... and the population derives no benefit ... then those people would vote to disable the very concept of incorporation, after all, why do they want these things around?
Clearly a case can be made for hiring some foreigners.
And more apt - if Cisco can benefit a lot from hiring people from India, it may be better for everyone if they are actually hired and working in India proper.
It's very reasonable for companies to consider locals for jobs 'all things being equal' ... even though they never are :)
> Citizens have absolutely no interest in enabling and empowering corporations unless they serve the community in some way.
Citizens have absolutely no interest in enabling and empowering corporations unless they provide them with a beneficial service/product(s). I seriously doubt most citizens/consumers understand (or care about) the philanthropy implied by your statement. Do you really think people around the world would stop using google because they prefered to hire non-local folks? Some super small minority of folks (the 'locals') might care, but the vast majority of their customer base would be none the wiser.
> and not really consumers or anyone else ... and the population derives no benefit ... then those people would vote to disable the very concept of incorporation
No, they'd go bankrupt because their business model didn't include a viable way for them to survive.
Hiring locals is not philanthropy and people generally care quite a lot about it, that's why ABC corp can't hire anyone in the world and just bring them to America.
Remember that hiring foreigners doesn't just mean 'work' - it means bringing them into the country and all that entails.
Companies follow the law of the land, written by government for the benefit of its citizens (and not everyone can be a citizen; resource limits, cultural integration, those such issues, see the EU for examples of those challenges and why they limit economic migrants).
Companies should obey the law, or leave and be prohibited from operating in the jurisdiction (China does this successfully).
Edit: My apologies for reiterating this here (I mention it in a child comment), I don’t want to be verbose but I also don’t want to comment all over the place and risk a throttling flag: If you are a company and relocate, a country has many tools at it’s disposal to retaliate, and they should be used when necessary (see how the US almost drove ZTE to insolvency).
The companies will be happy to relocate, there is nothing keeping them in a specific spot (unless it's a mining company or a company serving a very local market -- both are not the type of tech we are talking about)
> written by government for the benefit of its citizens
But why, or perhaps more importantly, why should this be the case? Why should citizenship (which is itself an arbitrary legal distinction made by the government) mean a person is more deserving of anything than non-citizen residents? It's not like naturalized citizens did anything to earn their citizenship.
Because citizens are stakeholders in their government. Everyone else is not. Naturalized citizens earn their citizenship through a well defined process [1].
> The decision to apply is a significant one. Citizenship offers many benefits and equally important responsibilities. By applying, you are demonstrating your commitment to this country and our form of government.
> Support and defend the Constitution. Stay informed of the issues affecting your community. Participate in the democratic process. Respect and obey federal, state, and local laws. Respect the rights, beliefs, and opinions of others. Participate in your local community. Pay income and other taxes honestly, and on time, to federal, state, and local authorities. Serve on a jury when called upon. Defend the country if the need should arise.
"Earning" citizenship has nothing to do with your own choices. It depends on your country of origin and the American public's openly racist opinions about the relative merit of people from your country. It's a given that any immigrant wants to become a US citizen, but quotas deny them that chance.
This is just like the NIMBYs. Work to deny people the opportunity to become "stakeholders," then use your success in doing so to claim their needs don't matter.
The birth lottery is a poor indicator of deservingness. This behavior, on the other hand, is bright-as-day proof of its absence.
How so? Because citizens can vote? Because citizens have some legal protections that don't apply to non-citizens? Doesn't that mean that non-citizens actually have more of a stake in the competence and behavior of the government because they have much more to lose from certain government actions?
I'm unsure how we can argue this any further. You're arguing "what supports the existence of the concept of citizenship and a sovereign nation". That is the legal framework (across nations) we've agreed upon.
I have no inherent problem with the concept of citizenship, I just point out that it is arbitrary, and more importantly, I don’t think it should be the threshold for the people the government should be expected to protect or support.
>and not everyone can be a citizen; resource limits, cultural integration, those such issues, see the EU for examples of those challenges and why they limit economic migrants
Concern about the "challenges" of too many brown people in your country is usually just called "racism."
It’s not the color of their skin, it’s their contribution as citizens (mostly; some immigrants don’t want to assimilate into their host country culture, which again is not a racial issue, it’s a cultural issue). Point me to a country that takes in unskilled immigrants on a visa for anything other than farm labor (in limited quantities).
If you have nothing to offer a country, why would that country accept you except under extenuating circumstances (ie political asylum)? You must be able to contribute in a meaningful way.
EDIT: Shifting from a biological to a cultural explanation for why certain racial groups have inferior/unacceptable behaviors doesn't diminish the level of racism. Country of origin dominates any measure of individual assimilation w.r.t your chances in the immigration system, so it's not clear that shifting the rhetorical justification changes anything either.
I’m not suspicious. The land wasn’t shared, it was taken by force and the people it was taken from were either massacred or rounded up onto reservations where they slowly die out from poverty today. Nothing today can change what was done; that doesn’t make open borders and unlimited immigration penance for our historical wrongs.
>Being selective about who a country allows in as a resident or citizen isn’t immoral.
Maybe not, if the selection process were primarily concerned with individual merit. But it isn't. We decide which races to allow as residents or citizens, then throw the individuals into a lottery, with good odds for white countries and bad odds for brown ones. Discriminating on ancestry or proxies for ancestry (like nationality) to keep underprivileged groups down and privileged groups comfortable is immoral. So is denying others the same opportunities benefitted from merely because they came later.
Would your own family tree's entrypoints to the US pass your test?
So are you fine if Cisco relocates most of their operations in India for example? Because companies can move, and have done so many times in the past 30 years. That is basically what such restrictions lead to.
>So are you fine if Cisco relocates most of their operations in India for example
That is almost always threatened and almost always never happens.
As toomuchtodo suggests, this lassez-faire culture with business needs to stop. Every year it's a different scandal, we need to stop tip-toeing around business. They rely on a nation's education system, transport, internet infrastructure etc, they didn't come from nothing. China and India in these respects are doing very well, and I'm sure their citizens are thankful.
I am, and I am fine with tariffing their products if they do so, or going so far as to invalidate their patents or IP (as India does with some pharmaceuticals). China just plain ol shuts you out of their market entirely!
A company only exists because a nation state allows it. That formation can be revoked at any time.
@toomuchtodo: no, at scale, they don't. And in tech, a country has very little to offer unless it possesses something you can't get elsewhere, which the USA doesn't.
Why do you think there is so much 'business' going on between larger enterprises and government at many levels? It's all to keep them around, not because it's the best fit. Take Amazon, they want to build an office, so all states and counties and whatever else you have in local government bends over backwards to try and reel them in.
>> Why not hire the best no matter where they come from?
Here's what H1-B actually works if you hire "the best": you hire people who are way overqualified for the job, and pay them peanuts while they are on H1-B. "But H1-B requires that they are paid no less than US workers" you might reasonably object. There's a loophole for that: just hire them at a way lower job ladder level than an American would consider adequate, and don't promote them as much. It's not like they have much of a choice anyway: they can either work here or GTFO to their country of origin within 2 weeks.
I liked Trump's proposal that only the highest paid positions get H1-B visas. That way economic incentives essentially turn H1-B into an auction for the truly great people, and make life easier for fresh US grads. I'm not sure what happened to that proposal. It was probably smothered in the crib by FANG lobbyists.
Full disclosure: I'm a former H1-B, now a naturalized US citizen.
If you think H1B leads to that outcome, you are either unaware of the issues surrounding it or intentionally misframing the problem.
You have no idea what these people go through, my heart breaks every time I see one with a family and the thousand yard stare they have because they’re clearly being exploited.
Partially. They are multinationals, and while there is a lot of money moving around in the USA, it's not bigger or worth more than the rest of the world combined. At the same time, they are often legally split up so the USA part is very small and (on paper) insignificant.
You seem to be delusional thinking that there is such a thing as an American. USA is the land of immigrants and as long as the best people come to US, it is the place to be. Ban the immigrants and the country loses its edge.
There is citizenship, it gives you more rights than an immigrant has. But even then you are just a child of an immigrant or N-th generation immigrant, where N is not that big.
>is actually causing the best jobs to shift more to immigrants and less to Americans
Ah, wonders of the free market. ;)
Do you honestly think Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/etc hire foreigners because they have to pay them less? The legal costs of hiring and maintaining them easily adds up to 20-30k $ per year.
It’s not a free market when non-resident workers are indentured to a specific employer. Since they can’t easily job-shop, they are necessarily going to make a lower wage than if they had the ability to switch jobs. It isn’t the free market of the free movement of labor is artificially constrained by visa rules. Let’s not confuse this with the free market. It isn’t.
It's harder for them to switch jobs, and depending on where they are in the process of applying for a green card, they may have to restart if they do switch.
That kind of "loyalty" is easily worth 20k-30k for a lot of companies.
And take a massive pay cut? Even among rich countries and even for underpaid H-1B workers, tech salaries are generally much higher in the US, and most of them don't come from rich countries.
Clearly you can see there is a difference between what a company needs to do to keep an H-1B employee from leaving the country, and what they need to do to keep a permanent resident employee from switching jobs?
Sure, but I’m not sure I buy that companies hire H1-B’s because they are more loyal.
They spend far more money and time upfront getting the person the visa and in the end there is nothing preventing them from either going home or tranfering to a similar role at another company.
>They spend far more money and time upfront getting the person the visa and in the end there is nothing preventing them from either going home or tranfering to a similar role at another company.
So if there was a law that said they can't go home or change jobs, then you would accept that it might be worth it?
But if that were the case there's still nothing preventing them from dying right?
Hopefully from this example you can see that an employee who is much more likely to stay for x years, is more valuable despite the fact that they aren't guaranteed to stay for x years.
If you could pay $30k extra for an employee that is 50% more likely to stick around for 5 years, most companies would jump at that chance.
> The legal costs of hiring and maintaining them easily adds up to 20-30k $ per year.
Per year? No it doesn't. An H1B is valid for three years, renewable to six. Unless you're doing something strange there is no cost for the other years.
That’s not how it works. DOL sets a floor to salaries based on the US prevailing wage. If any H1-B holder is paying 1/10th of what a US worker costs, they are breaking the law.
Oh yeah I realize that - just going on the extended not just Cisco, and not just H1-B - there are companies right now in the US that are hiring outside firms or buying such firms employing 20-40 pakistani "employees" for software development. The money is basically just funnelling outside the US at incredible speeds. That software is then sold to US companies at 10 times the price.
> Cisco, which reported $43 billion in revenue last year, employs more than 73,000 workers at its headquarters in San Jose, Calif., and international offices. The company employed nearly 1,600 visa holders last year.
If this number seems low, thats because it is. They probably "employ" another 70,000 contract workers, many of which are also on visas, but since they're not on the "official" payroll they don't show up. That they were cited at all for the 1600 visa workers in the first place is astounding to me.
> They probably "employ" another 70,000 contract workers, many of which are also on visas, but since they're not on the "official" payroll they don't show up.
Used to work there. I was always surprised at the volume of contractors and contracting companies were embedded within the ranks.
Sad thing is - if this is going on at Cisco imagine what goes on in the farm fields, the restaurants, the hotels, and the rest of the lowest paying jobs in this country. If it takes YEARS to build a case against giant company how many little guys are getting away with it on a daily basis?
In the farms, even basic laws banning hiring illegal immigrants get immediately blocked by a coalition of pro-immigration activists and big companies in the industry.
Without illegal immigrants crops would literally rot in the fields. I don't like illegal immigration, I'd rather there be a easy legal program to allow temporary workers, but there isn't, and I like eating.
Everything I have read implies that there is a significant paperwork burden with this visa, and the number of people you can get via the program are very limited.
The Netherlands exports a huge amount of food and loads of the work is fully automated. For the work which isn't there's still a lot of seasonal work. For that they do employ people, often from lower paid countries such as e.g. Poland. Poland isn't far away from The Netherlands.
From what I saw in a documentary the Dutch farmers heavily optimize pretty much everything they can, not only through automation.
Its very hard to automate the picking of fruit and certain vegetables. That's why its not done - for some of them, its currently impossible, and have an acceptable yield rate.
Just to be clear, you believe you would starve if immigration policy was changed in such a way that farmers received less subsidies and had to pay a fair wage to get work done?
No actually. I believe that just deporting the illegal immigrants without fixing the other broken parts of the system that we would have massive crop losses - significant amounts of fresh fruit and vegetables would disappear from shelves.
The same can be said about the opposite: allow immigrants to take up the lowest jobs thinking it'll provide a decent life. That is a lie, and steals that opportunity of a decent life from others too.
It seems like a good solution to H1B abuse is to get rid of the lottery and move towards a bid system, but the "bid" is the foreign worker's salary. This will solve the wage suppression issue, and will grant access to talent to companies that are willing and able to pay for it.
> and earmark them for training of laid off workers of same industry.
A portion ($1500) of most H-1B application fees goes towards funding scholarship and training programs. This is called " ACWIA fee" - see [1] and [2] for details.
"They" are already designing this and it'll make the problem worse not better.
They will keep the 4 DoL skill levels used for H1B and put caps at each level. The extra twist is it will be in the shape of a pyramid where there are fewer highly skill slots but enough for the Google's, and then a lot more for the lower levels. So that company that was continually denied their $55k level 4 "senior dev" in Dallas in the lottery is now high enough in the auction to win.
Highest salary wins. No low level people would get it, as it would be bidding accross the board. If you aren't willing to pay that scientist 150K, then you lose the bid to the software engineer hired in the Bay area.
I heard this proposal a lot, and I think it's very SF/tech centered. Big tech and finance would buy every visa and suck all the talent from the world.
But sometimes the best value for the host country is to get an immigrant doctor that's willing to go to a rural area for less pay than the big tech engineers.
It is in America's interest to suck up economically productive people from all over the world. This is solved by the wage lottery system
It is also in America's interest to increase the number of skilled service providers in rural areas. One policy to solve this might be solved by targeted wage subsidies that are tied to working in certain areas.
There's no need to couple these orthogonal issues together. It doesn't matter whether the rural doctors are native or immigrants. That said, the policies compose well: Wage subsidy + actual wage might win the visa auction, modulo the quantity of subsidy and the demand for medicine as a skill set.
This is the same system with the same problem. Yes highest salary wins but the ultimate goal is to increase the cap. If the cap is increased to 300k per year and they switch to an auction, you are going to get more 55k senior engineers in dallas and they get to say they fixed the problem.
Really, they don't care what happens as long as the cap is increased.
Corporate greed at its finest. The goal was to hire employees at lower wages and who couldn't just up and leave for another company next door so easily. This combined gets them workers who aren't allowed to negotiate and who are cheaper than normal workers.
When driven only by greed, all methods to get more money are always acceptable... unless you are caught.
That’s not greed, that’s smart business. Why would you pay more for something if you didn’t have to? Is it greedy to take advantage of a sale on fruit at the grocery store rather than paying full price?
The problem is visa law, not companies following that law.
It's usually both, when we talk about screwing others in a legal way. But we have to keep the big picture in mind. For people to live together, they need to perceive society to be kind of fair. Otherwise they don't have a problem burning it to the ground... by e.g. voting for a moron to govern them in hope for change.
Having reasonable pressure on prices (including wages) to improve the economy is beneficial to society. Citizens having to compete with people that show an uncomfortable similarity to slaves (especially the dependency on employer aspect) seems beyond that.
For Americans, reducing income disparity, which in turn would allow more money to flow within the US.
For foreign employees, ending a program of indentured servitude that dangles the prospect of citizenship in front of them while providing substandard pay and limited mobility.
For foreign governments, bringing talent back to their countries rather than cash, enabling the development of their own businesses and growth of their own economy.
> For Americans, reducing income disparity, which in turn would allow more money to flow within the US.
You mean increase income disparity. More foreign software engineers would lower the median salary of a software engineer in the us, which is in the top bracket of earners. Increasing the salary of software engineers increases income disparity between those and the median.
Also, i thought the point was to make an ethical one, not a money one.
> For foreign employees, ending a program of indentured servitude that dangles the prospect of citizenship in front of them while providing substandard pay and limited mobility.
Oh why thank you. Did you ask foreign employees if they like your idea of banning them from the US for their own benefit?
> For foreign governments, bringing talent back to their countries rather than cash, enabling the development of their own businesses and growth of their own economy.
If you have a concern for the well-being of foreign governments over the interests in the US, you can advocate or better measures than punishing foreign people.
Cap minimum pay to the equivalent of $150k yearly and watch as the h1b visa program magically starts working as intended.
The solution is not complicated. With the anti-immigrant rhetoric pouring from the current administration, I'm surprised that blatant h1b visa abuse is still rampant.
There is no need for an artificial cap, just make it a bidding system. The companies bid for how many workers at salary $X. Highest bids are awarded the visas. Problem solved.
This may work for tech, but I'm guessing there are quite a few other industries with low volumes of h1b applicants/workers which could utilize a "bidding system" to hire well below market rate due to decreased demand when compared to tech.
$150k cap across the board ensures that all industries are kept honest. A bidding system can be added on top of that, if needed, but this extremely simple fix would ensure that the system fulfills the original goals it was created for, while adding no bureaucratic overhead.
No controls for any other industry - if you want an H1b, bid.
So anyone who desperately needs someone on a visa can get them. Low-end body shops go away and a bunch of industries that are being cheap don't get their visas. This is called a good thing.
There are many sectors where hiring managers want degrees and other certifications and pay minimum wage or damn close. Then they complain about worker shortages.
This is all solved by higher pay and better conditions, but people want to bring in indentured servants as it's easier. As someone who has run businesses and bootstrapped, that's utter BS.
Australian here, but had similar ideas about the visa situation in .au however I think you can't just do a +X% of "prevailing wage"
If the prevailing wage is calculated based on an average, you will find big business will get lower payed workers bundled in to the industry average (i.e. apple has retail staff, most companies have call centre staff, all have janitorial staff, etc) and the "prevailing wage" will be significantly lower then it should be.
If its based on job title you will just find every visa holder will have a "lower" job title (i.e. Junior rather then senior) that gives the companies a way to pay less.
Thats before factoring cost of living between various locations.
Special interests will ensure that the prevailing wage is drawn sufficiently lower then it should be.
I think it has to remain a static value (adjusted for inflation) that is quite high (e.g. $180k->$250k AUD for Australia), enough that anyone who a company will pay that much would almost certainly be a world class employee, and if someone is worth that much, then I can't see how they wouldn't be a benefit for both the country / economy, employee and the competitiveness of the company. I have no issue with this being an unlimited visa class, and should be able to be streamlined for a much quicker approval (i.e. has the company signed an agreement that they are paying $X per year?, if yes its approved pending health and security approval).
This allows companies to hire the best in the world, while not allowing them to drive down salaries with similarly skilled employees. Additionally if there is a shortage it will ensure there is some pressure to train / develop employees, innovate, automate, etc, but providing a pressure relief if needed (if supply and demand becomes unbalanced enough that people are willing to pay $180k for janitorial staff, then economically they are needed).
While something like that would help mitigate the abuse vector (although the number would have to be higher - $150k is not much in Bay area tech), it introduces its own set of problems in the other direction, because now only the most profitable companies will be able to hire foreign labor. I know that's the point, but as long as the market fails to account for positive externalities, positions like nurses and teachers will be systematically undervalued, even though it's much more valuable to the country in the long run for expert labor to land there.
If a company values the skillset and knowledge of a potential immigrant at less than $150k yearly (~3 "highly specialized knowledge" employees at worst), they should utilize immigration channels not designed exclusively for poaching the top 0.1% from other countries TO FULFILL ROLES WHICH CANNOT BE FULFILLED BY US WORKERS DUE TO LACK OF SKILLED PERSON(s).
And I agree that $150k is probably on the low end for tech, but I wanted to name a conservative amount which takes into consideration pay across all industries. Whatever we do, we should __Start__ with that, and then further modify requirements/restrictions as deemed necessary.
AFAIK, the number considered is salary, so the number is decently high, even for bay area. There are some exceptions like Netflix, but a lot of companies pay majority in equity, especially at higher salary levels.
I don't know how easy/difficult would it be for companies to move from equity based compensation to normal salary though, if something like that is implemented.
You’ll also be watching American businesses dying as they lose to global competitors who operate in a much more favourable regulatory environment, because their country doesn’t force them to pay 150k per engineer.
Where is this favorable-to-corporations regulatory environment? Europe? UK? Australia? Canada? I'm having trouble thinking of a single western democracy that has a looser regulatory environment than the US. But I'd love to be educated.
Why does it have to be a western democracy? Chinese companies are a good example - Cisco is rapidly losing market share to Huawei, who can employ skilled workers at a fraction of the price.
Huawei doesn't count. China has a heavily managed economy. If Huawei employs workers at a fraction of the cost, it's not because Indians, Vietnamese and Turkish tech workers are flocking to Shenzen instead of San Jose. It's because the Chinese government wants it that way.
Why does the reason matter? If Cisco isn’t competitive, they die. How do you propose they stay in business when Huawei is selling the same thing for half the price?
I dunno, maybe get Trump to executive order lower salaries for Cisco employees? That would be roughly equivalent to the Chinese situation.
Alternatively, the USA as a country could put some effort into education, so as to be self-sufficient in available, skilled workers.
But you're simplifying things - do we really know that lack of cheap Indian H1-B or L1 workers is what's killing Cisco? No. We don't even know that Cisco is being killed. They just gave $10+million dollar bonus to the CEO, as we learned elsewhere in these threads. That suggests robust health.
I don’t agree that Chinese labour is cheaper is because the government forces people work for low salaries. Sure there is a lot of intervention, but that’s a stretch. In any case, using your example, there are Indian, Vietnamese and Turkish workers that are willing to do the work Cisco needs at a cheaper price than Cisco is required to pay in America. If Cisco doesn’t recruit them, a competitor does and that competitor gains a material advantage over Cisco. Some companies and industries can absorb the inefficiency better than others, and it might not kill them immediately, but in the long run forcing your country’s businesses to operate uncompetitively is very bad.
Allowing your country's companies to under-pay your population probably has worse effects, even in the short run. Corporations are here to make things better for the populace, not to use the populace as resources to be raided before the corporation moves along to better things. That almost always seems to be left out of the analysis. Without any benefits from a corporation,we're all better off without them, except maybe a few big stockholders and C-level employees. If corporations don't help, they're not even Pareto-efficient.
I guess I'll also point out that you've dodged the question. Chinese companies are not a good example - the Chinese government interferes in markets to a degree unheard of elsewhere. That's a different regulatory environment altogether than what you have imagined as being competitive.
Its like the secret everyone knows, but nobody wants to do anything about unless they get caught. Even then when they get caught the worst punishment they will get is a days profit MAYBE. Its easier to pay a $100 million fine every 10 years than to have to pay reasonable wages.
American engineers are getting shafted by the H1B visa program. The H1B work harder because they have a figurative gun pointed at their heads. Work or leave the country. Why would any sane American work that hard?
It is a race to the bottom and the big tech companies at playin with fire. The societal damage is currently unquantifiable, but for an astute observers and people with common sense it’s not good.
When I was at Juniper Networks, Indian managers would routinely hire Indian employees on H1, underpay them to make them look competitive compared to US employees, and then pay them an additional salary through the Indian office, hiding this from the other departments, and the 'white' people.
Onsite Allowance/Bonus is very Common in Indian outsourcing firms. But its not exactly 'yacht and helicopter' money you think it is. Typically something like $1000 per year in Bonus. And they also need to keep the pay roll etc alive, because their dependents need health insurance in India.
Often the biggest Perk for Indians to work in the US is not even money, its to get exposure to the first world infrastructure and overall industry scene. Even if you don't make much money, you return to India with heavily scaled up ambitions.
Not OP, but I spent 5 years at Cisco. It wouldn't be terribly hard to hide opex in a company that size.. there's a good deal of discretion given to middle management with their budgets and non-existent oversight.
I've seen it stated several times here on hacker news that the visas should be available for the highest salaries. And that's it. No lottery. If you want them, pay them. That makes tons of sense to me on a lot of levels, it is going to naturally destroy abuse, recruit the best and brightest to come to the US, and not cause unfair discrimination against American workers.
1,600 visa workers for Cisco seems really low though. Anecdata, but my company hired a VP from Cisco and from that point until they left we made a lot of hires, but not a single American that I am aware of.
Honest question: if immigrants are willing to do the same job for less money, why do US citizens deserve special treatment and higher wages? Why should companies be forced to not hire in an economically optimal way?
I think the simpler form of that question is "what's wrong with globalism?", to which there's many answers.
One of the foremost would be that an American company should support the livelihoods of the American people, especially as long as other countries like China wouldn't allow an American to work so easily in the reverse situation. It's just a natural tribal instinct, also, to care more for the welfare of your neighbor than someone across the world.
I'm not commenting on the validity of those arguments, though, as I think a core part of America's success is being unusually open to immigration.
> an American company should support the livelihoods of the American people
And people who are living and working in America are American, they may just not be citizens. Citizenship is itself an arbitrary legal distinction made by the government. The vast majority of citizens received their citizenship by being born in the country rather than by any effort or merit on their part. So the claim becomes "an American company should support the livelihoods of people born within the borders of America," which I think is pretty clearly an arbitrary claim that needs a lot of explanation before I'll accept it as reasonable.
> It's just a natural tribal instinct, also, to care more for the welfare of your neighbor than someone across the world.
We're talking about work visas, which means those people move here and thus become your neighbors, so you'd have to extend that "natural tribal instinct" defense beyond place of residence.
>And people who are living and working in America are American, they may just not be citizens.
Since when? I have literally never heard this. This is a patently absurd claim to make. Just because someone lives here does not mean they are "American", unless you think that all of the inputs to national identity are vapid, meaningless attributes that are completely transferable.
>We're talking about work visas, which means those people move here and thus become your neighbors, so you'd have to extend that "natural tribal instinct" defense beyond place of residence.
Just because someone has moved in next door does not mean they are now "part of your tribe". This has never been true throughout history, and it will not magically become true today regardless of the outcome of this immigration debate.
“American” is the demonym for the USA. Demonyms refer to natives and inhabitants of an area, or more broadly to characteristics of the area. The term is absolutely not used exclusively to refer to citizens, but I’m not interested in a semantic argument, so suffice it to say that my point is simply that citizenship is an arbitrary legal distinction, and in my opinion a horrible place to draw the line between inhabitants of the US that the government should protect and care about and other inhabitants that the government should not protect or care about.
>The term is absolutely not used exclusively to refer to citizens, ...
It absolutely is used exclusively to refer to citizens by an overwhelming majority of people who would use that term. Attempting to split off "citizens" from "natives and inhabitants" is a naked attempt at trying to redefine a word that carries significant meaning to further a specific agenda.
>...citizenship is an arbitrary legal distinction
Says who? It certainly doesn't seem arbitrary to me. There are considerable responsibilities that come with being a citizen. Men have to register for the draft. You can be called for Jury duty. This isn't arbitrary.
>...and other inhabitants that the government should not protect or care about.
I don't think anyone here is arguing the (American) government "should not protect or care" about non-citizens, but that claiming they shouldn't put American citizens first is dubious at best.
Again, I am explicitly not making a semantic argument. I made my point about citizenship clear, and it does not depend on any particular definition of the word “American.”
I am saying that the choice of legal definition of citizenship is arbitrary, not that it is poorly-defined. Legal definitions vary a lot from country to country. Again, I’m saying it’s a bad choice for the threshold at which a government should protect and care about an inhabitant of its jurisdiction.
> claiming they shouldn’t put American citizens first is dubious at best
That’s precisely the claim that I’m saying is extremely dubious. How is it reasonable to say that people who fit the precise definition of citizenship in US law (usually through no choice or action they made) should be prioritized over other inhabitants of the same country? I agree that this is a common belief, and I’m challenging people to justify the belief.
Because without some distinction of who has responsibilities and obligations to the Sovereign state then we can't have any sort of consistency at all in how we govern ourselves. This is a concept that has deep philosophical underpinnings, coming from Aristotle to Plato and elsewhere. To put in bluntly: Citizens have skin in the game in a way "inhabitants" don't. If the social fabric of a nation-state starts to break down, the Citizens are the ones that have to deal with the consequences. The only way we've come up with to denote who has to deal with this is the Citizenship marker.
I'm curious. Where is this new belief that "Citizenship" is a concept that needs to be blown up coming from? It appears to have become quite common over the last couple years. It has to be coming from somewhere.
We're not talking about tourists here. Immigrant workers routinely become married homeowners and parents with extensive personal and professional networks in the US and few links to their countries of origin. My long-tenured H1B coworkers would do no better upon moving to India or China than I would, save for language skills. But that's moot anyway. If the US decides to kick them out and they have to give up their current lives anyway, we'll move them to a third country with deterministic approval for skilled workers, like The Netherlands.
Americans can flee to Canada or any number of other countries which open their doors to us, just as the draft-dodgers did when the "social fabric of the nation-state broke down."
I agree it's weird to blow up citizenship as a concept. We should be talking about making citizenship actually possible for the people who are committed to it, not locked away behind quotas and waiting lists.
> Where is this new belief that "Citizenship" is a concept that needs to be blown up coming from?
My guess is this being a counter reaction to today's "build a wall and screw the others" mentality displayed in politics.
I do understand people are tribal. I also care more about people closer to me. But nowadays our lives are highly interconnected and profit off each other, thus i need those to do well as well. The problem is overcoming the prisoners dilemma of short term tribal benefits vs long term global benefits. The focus on citizens over others seems a obstacle to that.
Especially these days, where those "others" seem to be a great political scapegoat for all the other problems slowly breaking down the fabric of our society.
I don’t understand the “skin in the game” argument at all. How is it worse for a citizen than a non-citizen if the social fabric of the state breaks down? Besides, this seems like a bizarre argument for why citizens should have “first dibs” at jobs. What does that have anything to do with a doomsday scenario?
As for the necessity of making distinctions regarding obligations to the state, how is that relevant, particularly to job prioritization? Other than perhaps military conscription and some tax laws, I’m not aware of many significant differences in obligations between citizens and non-citizens, and especially of any with any relevance to job prioritization.
> Where is this new belief that "Citizenship" is a concept that needs to be blown up coming from?
I haven’t expressed any such belief, nor do I hold it. I just see no good reason for a government to prioritize citizens above non-citizen inhabitants, especially for job availability.
>I don’t understand the “skin in the game” argument at all. How is it worse for a citizen than a non-citizen if the social fabric of the state breaks down?
Because the "inhabitants" can just go home, while the Citizens are stuck here - this is their home.
>Besides, this seems like a bizarre argument for why citizens should have “first dibs” at jobs.
This is literally what a sovereign government is supposed to do: provide for and prioritize the needs of it's citizens. If your contention is that anyone should be able to come here and be afforded the same protections we'll just keep talking past each other (which I think we already are). It sounds like, by extension and since you don't consider "Citizen" a meaningful distinction, that "inhabitants" should have the same voting rights as Citizens. This is a recipe for chaos.
>I just see no good reason for a government to prioritize citizens above non-citizen inhabitants, especially for job availability.
Then you've missed a lot of reading on what the entire purpose of Government even is.
> Because the "inhabitants" can just go home, while the Citizens are stuck here - this is their home.
I highly doubt that most immigrants who come to the US to work are buying and maintaining a second home, and are instead making America their new home.
> This is literally what a sovereign government is supposed to do: provide for and prioritize the needs of it's citizens.
This is precisely the claim I am disputing and looking for some justification. “Most people believe this” is not a very good justification for anything, so I’m challenging people to question why they believe it and why it’s a reasonable desire. “High school textbooks say that governments should do this” is also not a great justification in my opinion.
It's true that accepting immigrants into the tribe is historically unusual, but that's why it's a distinctive and important feature of American national identity.
I think you should go back and review some of that history. Integration into the "American tribe" has been bumpy at best and downright violent at worst. It's often taken actual war to make it happen. The Draft Riots come to mind.
I think your assessment is correct on certain level. But the problem is, American companies, especially, IT companies, are making money, big money across the GLOBE. They are literally monopolies in many European countries and contribute neither local employment and tax. Make no mistake, they are THE biggest beneficiaries of globalism. Their product, internet service, is dumping to the whole world, probably except China, without any check and balance. It should not happen, let alone last to date.
In that way, if globalism is to be fixed, internet companies need to be both held accountable in and outside of US. If they pay fair share to hire local people and pay taxes in the country they operate, I believe US won't have this ridiculously high salary for tech workers. In short, tech salary being so abnormally high and jobs concentrated in US is the symptom of globalism. Once fixed, the tech workers salary will be more evenly distributed across the countries, immigration problem will be fixed as a result of that.
As internet industry is plateauing, the technology is becoming ever more commoditized everyday, and the policy makers are finally doing the job to act on it, I am staying optimistic that the redistribution of tech workforce from US to the world will finally happen.
The internet has no boundary, that is just a globalist fantasy. It definitely should have boundary, as the tax and economic activities created alike. GDPR is a very welcome move, and it is taking effects, I would expect more systematic approach coming after it.
Yes! I think that the amount of propaganda and cultural infusion of negativity against unions (often slurring unions with communism) is the real cause of the stagnation in worker rights and wages.
Because that is a race to the bottom for Americans. Americans enjoy a very high standard of living, and having to normalize your wage expectation with people from countries with significantly lower standards of living would destroy that. American companies operate according to American laws, and American laws should be setup in the interest of Americans, not as some charity for the world.
As to "deserve", American citizens also paid the taxes that supplied the infrastructure, education system, legal system, police, etc that allows these companies to grow. That aside, America is a sovereign country, and no one but its citizens has any right to expect it to act in their interest.
> Because that is a race to the bottom for Americans. Americans enjoy a very high standard of living, and having to normalize your wage expectation with people from countries with significantly lower standards of living would destroy that.
Malthus pokes its head.
The workers get paid a fraction of what they produce. Thus the whole society is richer the more workers you have.
Do you really believe americans would be richer if 90% of its population were to be decimated, leaving the survivors with the highest paying jobs?
The potential flip side of this is why aren't visa workers being paid market value. Are they held back so much by employer's biases that they can't reliably compete for a fair salary on the open market?
Mobility is the number one reason. The second one is legal expenses: the employee does not pay them directly, but does so indirectly. A visa application can cost up to 10k, and also you have a 40% chance it doesnt go through, which means its way more expensive.
Also, what is market value and fair? Does the immigrant have a thick accent? A slighlty incompatible culture? A lower quality education?
Because the United States is a sovereign nation founded for the benefit of its citizens and their posterity, not an economic zone for the benefit of the profit of transnational corporations that only exist the way they do because of the legal system, civic institutions, international influence, and military power of the US.
In the long term, Cisco needs to be competitive in the global marketplace to survive. When you force companies like Cisco to pay above market rates, it benefits American workers in the short term but over time the company will lose to e.g. Huawei who are operating in a much more favourable regulatory environment. At that point, America loses in a big way.
Huawei's favorable regulatory environment has less to do with its ability to bring in foreign labor like Cisco and other US tech companies, and more to do with trade barriers set up by China for national security purposes (also, potentially other actions in violation of its membership in the WTO). The US claims Huawei as a national security threat, because the Chinese government could be using their devices to backdoor critical infrastructure. In the same manner, China claims Cisco as a national security threat [1]. The point here is that the spherical cow of all things being rootless, unbound, purely individual and rational economic transactions does not actually exist. Behaving as if it does is a loss for your group as other groups adopt more mercantile policy.
Not that I agree with our immigration laws, but have you considered that it's not so much "willing" as it is a choice between poor options ("take this position at less than market rate" or "stay in this country and have little or nothing")? In other words, you are presenting the case as if it's a simple free market at work when in fact there are many other factors making that not the case.
It sounds like immigrants are willing to do it because they have no other option. The issue here isn't US citizens deserving special treatment; the issue is closing the loophole which only benefits the companies.
Because labor needs more power against capital. Immigrant vs non-immigrant is a shoddy technique, but constraining supply is an effective way to gain negotiating power against capital.
It's a hardened belief that jobs are a zero-sum game — and from this arises the idea that every skilled immigrant takes away a job from a U.S. worker. This isn't true. More skilled, educated workers will actually add to the economy — and grow the economy.
Some companies abuse the system, and the abuse must be stopped. But immigration of the best and the brightest is what made this country a superpower, and must be encouraged.
There are not unlimited new graduate roles at these companies, Microsoft was telling students they passed the interview but that slots were full at the school I attend.
I don't see how cherry-picking a few of the top companies demonstrates anything. The top Big Law firms pay new associates $180k+, despite the oversaturated law market.
There will always be competition for the cream of the crop. Pointing out the situation for that competition says almost nothing about the rest of the market.
We needed to hire a few people at a smaller Cisco site for a project in a less than favourite BU. Recruitment reached out to me after my rec didn’t find any fits in a week and the pushed a couple candidates my way. As these candidates required sponsorship, we knew that we could probably retain them for less and for longer. I don’t have anything against Americans, but if I can get someone who is better educated, will not jump ship in 18 months, and will do more for less then I’ll jump all over that.
> I don’t have anything against Americans, but if I can get someone who is better educated, will not jump ship in 18 months, and will do more for less then I’ll jump all over that.
By this logic, why not enslave children and teach them CS.
The argument against cisco is the "players" are clearly trying to CHEAT "the game". H1b's are for finding talent when there isn't any, not for finding workers that won't "jump ship". The freedom to jump ship is why America is great.
Worked at another big Californian semiconductor company for several years. Directors/middle managers, mostly Americans, would always joke about how easy it was to get H1Bs hired and all the shady stuff they did to not have to actually advertise the position. They got great bonuses, life was good.
Eventually, {specific H1B subgroup} made up a significant portion of the company as they always continue to hire more of {specific H1B subgroup} at the expense of everyone else. During a downturn several years ago, there was a tremendous layoff to try to maintain profitability.
Most of the old guard, almost all the older higher paid Americans that didn't make it to the VP level, got axed.
I think the answer to this problem is to require H1B holders to be paid 25-50% above prevailing wage for that job type or sector, which would preclude just picking up someone on H1B for cost reasons.
I heard a story once that in acity with rat infestations, the government proposed a bounty for each rat-tail that could be shown as evidence of having killed a rat. Promptly the rat population increased exponentially.
If you made the race to salary, you can remove health benefits, PTO, stock, restricted bonuses, etc etc to artificially increase the number which would in the end harm the worker as well, since he will pay a higher tax rate for the shenanigan.
H1B needs to be abolished. It has only been used to suppress US wages and to bring in lower paying bodies to do the same work a properly trained US Citizen could perform in IT. There's no shortage of IT skills in the USA.
That doesn't add up at all. How can there not be shortage of IT skills? IT is one of if not the most profitable field per employee with the lowest unemployment rates, and IT companies are flush with cash.
IT companies would love to launch entire new products and divisions and recruitment is their bottleneck.
And all websites from outside the us shoudl be blocked. The US can build its own websites, and not give any revenue or attention to any outside website. And we should build a firewall, the best you have ever seen!
I'm curious to see what happens if a company like Huawei enters the US networking hardware market after cutting its teeth. Are we supposed to go with Cisco out of patriotism? Is the general public going to petition the government for protectionism?
I also wonder how long it takes wage suppression to propagate out into lower demand and shrinking GDP growth.
I'd love to see H1B completely done away with. Transferrable visas for non-immigrant status freely available in exchange for a fairly massive bond and annual fee ($50-100k/yr), and immigrant visas on a much less expensive basis based on merit.
Something needs to happen for positive change. My Indian friend recently fathered a baby and couldn't see his son almost a year later. Politics getting in the way of people just trying to make the world a better place as per usual.
So easy to fix. If you believe in free market, you also need the labor pool to be free. Let H1Bs be able to change jobs like anyone else, and wages will rise. Pretty simple. Indentured servitude is anti free market.
If Cisco pay fair share to all its employees, regardless of their status, how much more money will it cost? I would say it won't be a big number as compare to their executives bonuses.
Almost ironic that this article is from Bloomberg. Recently interviewed with them for a software engineer role and the only american I talked to out of 6 people, was the recruiter.
I'm asian-american myself and I was interviewed by other asians who I had trouble understanding despite being brought up around my own family's accent. I wasn't using "american" to represent race or citizenship.
I didn't see think of them as american because we clearly did not share anything in common and had trouble communicating with each other.
Side note: My grandmother is a US citizen, but she only knows how to say "Hello" and "thank you" in english. Bringing in citizenship feels disingenuous.
EDIT: Citizenship comment is regarding this conversation and not the article itself. Sorry if it seemed like an attack.
The ability to pay less, and to not worry about the employee leaving for another employer. Citizens are able to jump between employers in ways that visa holders are not, which gives them more leverage and the ability to bargain for better pay/benefits.
As for pay: an anecdote. I manage a team that includes some H1-B visa holders. The visa holders are paid quite well relative to most workers in America, like most tech workers are, but they are definitely paid less than their peers on my team (a situation I work hard to remedy at raise and bonus time), but not so much less as to necessarily draw focus from regulators. It's more like the pay discrepancy between men and women (except not quite to that degree).
As for mobility: ask any H1-B holder who has worked at a company with massive layoffs whether they felt more or less anxiety than people with less restrictive visas, greencards, or citizenship.
>Labor Department investigators recently concluded that Cisco Systems Inc. discriminated against U.S. workers by favoring immigrant visa holders for job openings, sources familiar with the probe tell Bloomberg Law.
>The DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs determined that the technology firm secured visas for foreign workers instead of hiring U.S. citizens for certain jobs and paid the visa holders at a lower rate than their American counterparts, according to the sources.
Yes. The article says that they pay immigrant visa holders less, not that paying them less is the reason that they supposedly did this:
> The DOL’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs determined that the technology firm secured visas for foreign workers instead of hiring U.S. citizens for certain jobs and paid the visa holders at a lower rate than their American counterparts, according to the sources.
>Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
One of the biggest threats America faces—we are told—is the assault on our workforce: the loss of American jobs to immigrants, to foreign competition fueled by free trade, and even to technology that will make all kinds of jobs obsolete. In this talk the Ayn Rand Institute's executive chairman, Yaron Brook, argues that this fear is entirely misplaced—that a proper grasp of the virtue of productiveness shows that far from fearing and opposing free trade, immigration and robots, we should be eagerly embracing all three.
Further, the recent actions making harder for "body shops" like Infosys are actually helping big tech companies win more visa lotteries. This means the recent action that was supposed to help American workers, is actually causing the best jobs to shift more to immigrants and less to Americans.
The whole visa and immigration system needs huge reform. I am not anti immigrant but the immigration system disproportionately hurts American software engineers and American tech. You don't see many visa holders working in sales and marketing, or teaching, or law, mostly just software engineering (at the high end) and then migrant farming and illegal immigrant factory workers (at the low end).