Comment by 1024core
9 hours ago
A lot of these problems could be solved if H1-B's were given out in order of salary (I think there's such a proposal going around recently). And by that I mean: something like a Dutch auction. Give H1-Bs to the top 85K paying jobs (maybe normalized to SoL in the region, I'm sure the BLS has some idea on how to do it).
The lure of H1-Bs is the money savings, and the fact that if you're on an H1-B, you're practically an indentured servant (Yes, things have changed recently and it is easier on paper to switch jobs while on H1-B). It used to be that if you lost your job as an H1-B, you had 30 days to uproot your life and get out of the US otherwise you'd be in violation of immigration laws.
Except this isn't about H1B this is about the PERM process for EB2/EB3 greencards.
The truth is we should be much more open to temporary work permits, and much less open to this sort of thing for granting permanent residency. Tons of people getting employment based green cards hold jobs that could easily be filled by an American.
It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model, which effectively outsources immigration selection to firms. That’s efficient for demand-matching, but it concentrates bargaining power in ways that a points-based model avoids.
The practical effect of an H1-B is to act as a non-compete, punitive termination clause, and a time bounded employment contract. These are very expensive terms to ask for in conventional US employment contracts - most of them are now effectively banned for standard W-2 workers. Forcing top wage earners to compete with illegal employment terms does not seem reasonable.
> It’s interesting that the U.S. picked an employer-driven model...
Health insurance, parental leave† and retirement are also employer-driven. This seems to be a US default that incidentally gives a lot of leverage to employers.
† Yes there are government mandated minimums, but when compared to other developed countries, substantive parental leave is largely left to the generosity of the employer
That's right. It is in fact advantageous in many ways for companies to prefer H-1B, they have far more control over those workers than they would over americans. They can even be worse than an american and you would prefer it if you were the type of employer who prioritizes control of their workforce over excellence.
But it's not like if the employee gets nothing out of this bargain. The company in exchange sponsors the visa. It's not unreasonable that they get a minimum number of years of work from the employee in exchange.
It's the government that controls the immigration law that gives the company the authority to sponsor a visa. Of course the H1-B is mutually beneficial to both the company and the employee, that is why the program is so popular.
If H1-Bs are being abused (by hiding job openings to US citizens), or seen as unfair competition for American labor, then the government has the authority to modify or terminate the program. This thread has been primarily about exploring other paradigms for enabling immigration.
This conflates high education specialists with high earnings. It’s probably not completely uncorrelated, but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
I understand that H1-Bs are currently likely to create an abusive relationship with the visa-ed employee, but just because you have identified a valid diagnosis doesn’t mean your suggested prescription would be much better.
That seems like a fair way for the free market to address things, no? If you need special carve outs, create a new type of Visa for those special cases.
The immigrants are all going to be paying taxes on their earnings. If you can boost H1B salaries by an average of $20k/yr by doing a price auction, that brings govt revenue and maybe even gives opportunities to balance the budget by creating more H1B slots.
What do you mean “fair”? What happens in the years/decades between when this hypothetical system is enacted and when the US can train up sufficient workers to substitute the labor force we currently have with H1-B?
Your proposal will mean 99% of all of the H1-B allocation will go to hedge fund quants and 1% maybe go to an AI researcher, but all of the materials science (eg. Cutting edge battery tech), semiconductor fabrication, neuroscience, pharmaceutical research etc will have to go without the skilled workers they currently get from visas. This is a recipe for the Boeingization of the US economy.
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Yes and no. That's going to benefit wall street, at the expense of R&D labs where PhD researchers are paid in whip lashes.
Can we really consider it the free market when there are already so many regulations in place?
Exactly this. Top 1% of artists earn about as much as the average software engineer. Ranking people purely based on salary is turning h1b into a visa for people in specific professions.
Genuinely curious: why do we need H1B visas for artists? My understanding is that H1B visas are meant to cover highly-skilled work that can't be done by locals, and "art" doesn't seem like a field with a shortage of local candidates?
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The O-1 visa exists.
https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...
How about ranking on salary but by profession, so there should be a separate rank for software engineers vs. biomedical researchers.
Does the US have such a shortage of artistic talent we have to hire abroad for it?
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Top 1% of artists have the O1 route, not the H1B route.
Tying H1B to salary is imo a reasonable solution for most companies. Thing is, in that case, most companies would simply resort to bringing in more L1 employees.
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> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
If this is the effect, is there a reason these starved orgs couldn't just hire Americans? If not, I think implicit in your argument is that H1-Bs exist to provide cheap labor to firms at the expense of American lives.
> but only giving H1-Bs to the highest paying reqs which need them starves all of the other reqs of any possible candidates.
Then they need to pay better?
There are not 85,000 quant PhDs jobs paying a megabuck+ in spite of what many vocal people claim (and if they really wanted someone at those prices--they're more likely to just open a satellite site wherever the candidate already is and avoid the whole immigration issue). Any decent engineering salary would almost certainly qualify.
And if you can't qualify for an H1-B because the engineering salary isn't high enough, then I don't have much sympathy.
H1B visas don't require employers to post jobs; this PERM process comes later when someone seeks an employment sponsored green card.
Visas could be allocated in some kind of priority order, but salary alone would probably concentrate visas to just the relatively high-paying tech sector, leaving other professions out entirely.
I'm not sure that's good; the US also needs people with expertise in science, industrial and agricultural control systems, clean power, and more. But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes. Other countries have gone with points systems that try to balance for this.
> But these professions tend to earn a fraction of what a software developer makes.
Then the market says it doesn't need them. Fix market mechanics so hiring another tech worker isn't worth multiples of things people say society should value. I.e. maybe there is too much upside in software sales since copies are free to the IP owner, liability is limited, lock-in is often impractical to escape, etc.
Completely open borders migration between all countries would be the biggest such market correction. If every development job was open to every qualified developer in the world, I suspect software salaries in the US would be much lower.
Yeah, a salary-based allocation would cut through a lot of the noise. If a company really needs top-tier talent and is willing to pay for it, fine... That’s very different from using H-1Bs as a way to fill mid-level roles at below-market rates while locking people into visa dependency
I can't help but expect throwing yet more bureaucratic rules and control at the problem will only make it worse.
We often get into these problems when we start down a path of control, find it isn't working, and layer even more control onto it. See: the history of diesel engines since emission control systems were required.
Can you expand how exactly this particular problem (advertising jobs for PERM to comply with the law yet making sure that no applications will be received) can be fixed with a different order of issuing H-1B visas?
PERM has nothing to do with H-1B, it's a part of the employment-based immigration process. The reason companies do this shit is because they claim to the US that there are no willing and able citizens or permanent residents for a commodity job such as "front end" or "project management". I.e. committing fraud.
Prevents infosys/wipro slop from overwhelming the system, and filters down the incoming roles to only those that can't be filled by a US citizen (i.e. specialist technical jobs, top engineers commanding $500k/yr)
It's not just Infosys doing PERM fraud, around 2020 Meta had been barred from filing PERM due to overwhelming fraud. And are there really 85K unique and impossible to find in the US individuals every year? If these exist they will take a small fraction of H-1B allocation and the rest will go to the fresh grads, as it's now.
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This keeps coming up every so often and most commenters on HN are completely ignorant of how the immigration system works, but have strong opinions about it, therefore it seems that everything is nefarious.
The real problem here is that the way the current system is set up, you have to prove that there are no citizens available for a position by listing a job and interviewing candidates. The problem with that is that you will never be able to prove that by this method. Say you have 1000 jobs for a specific role in the economy and 700 US citizens qualified to do that job and are already employed. The minute you try to file PERM for the 1 foreign national, if you list the job out, the chances of at least 1 person applying out of the 700 are very high because, you know, people change jobs. This puts companies and immigrants in a very difficult position because you literally cannot prove the shortage at an industry level on your own using this method. So they just have to resort to working within the laws to make it work.
This all would be completely unnecessary if congress fixes the immigration laws and asks BLS to setup market tests that are data driven to establish high demand roles.
You have highlighted the problem I was not able to articulate. This kind of requirement “open the job to local candidates and only if no one exists will we allow you to hire from outside” exists in multiple places.
It exists for internal candidates - often companies are encouraged to fill vacancies by first allowing internal candidates to apply. Obviously this creates a cascading effect where a new role opens up in the candidates old position once they fill up the new one. At some point they just need to hire externally or we will be perpetually filling up vacancies.
I wonder how every company managed to understand the cascading effect and just hire externally instead.
I am not sure if your comment is directed at me but I immigrated to the US. In my case there were probably no more than 1000 people in the whole world willing and able to do my job. It was advertised in the industry job boards along with required by law newspapers. Very few people applied and none of them had been a US citizen or LPR. This is what EB immigration is for. You are welcome to lobby for another EB category based on data and tests, but you should not be allowed to commit fraud in lieu of such a category in the meantime.
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TL;DR I don't want to compete with under-priced outsourced labor. I gladly accept peers and betters who expand the market by bringing the best and the brightest to the same national team.
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I'm all for immigration reform in ways that empower the workers.
Want to bring in the best talent from elsewhere? Fine, Make sure they cost the company MORE than you'd pay a US worker, with the government getting the excess as a tax on hiring non-local labor.
That worker should also be either a guest worker OR on a pathway to citizenship at their own discretion.
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Visas coming from India are semi-non-consensual and kickback heavy, I'm not sure the incentives work out the way you expect. Fuck H-1B into the ground and fuck green cards while we're at it.
What is the problem with green cards?
The lure of H-1B is not really the money savings. Go look at the graduating class of computer science students at large universities. A large fraction are international students. Universities thrive on them since they pay the most tuition and are generally not allowed any financial aid. Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it. No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
The difficulty of switching jobs on H1-B has always been a myth. Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens. You just line up things well without the possibility of taking a long break in between jobs. Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
It's not strictly about the money. (Though it is absolutely also about that)
> Dealing with unexpected job terminations (fired or laid off) is the problem.
Herein lies the problem. This gives employers absolutely massive leverage over the employees, which lets them coerce things like ridiculous unpaid overtime and downright abuse.
Even if you pay the same nominal salary, the H-1B is "cheaper" if you can force them to work 60-80h whereas a top-class American is just going to demand 40h weeks. (Though in practice, those extra hours rarely see increased productivity, so whether it's actually cheaper for outputs obtained is up for debate.)
Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
> Contrast: Europe. Tech salaries are low by US standards, but you don't see as much of the outsourcing & migrant worker hype around it. European labour laws mean you can't set up a sweatshop in your branch office, and European migrants to the US won't put up with labour abuses as much.
Europe actually has had more direct export of the jobs. No need of specialist visas when the jobs were already exported away to EE. The EU allowed for companies to arbitrage away tech jobs to relatively poorer countries in the EU. And there's very little need for native top talent as there's very little native innovation happening within the EU in software - it's only a fraction of the amount happening in the US. And that's why those who can often tend to work for American companies in the EU, or migrate if they can.
> Voluntary job switches are just as easy as U.S. citizens.
Then why did my wife's friends that lost their H-1B jobs have to leave America?
American citizens don't face deportation with job loss.
Also, as a US citizen, I'm free to quit my job anytime I want. If I don't like putting up with my job because of some bullshit my employer pulls, I can easily leave. That is absolutely not the case for sponsored workers.
H-1B workers are stressed out and paranoid about their employment. They'll put up with far more, for far longer, with less compensation.
Econ 101: increased supply lowers prices (wages).
A healthy labor pool increase business growth that in turn can push average industry wages higher however.
It’s real phenomena too - US developer wages are so high in part due to the business ecosystem which depends on part on recent graduates and a flexible labor pool.
That is, your analysis is only true in the static case. Starve US startups of talented junior developers and you might kill the next Facebook in the process.
Thats some Wealth of Nations every worker can move the same number of bricks reductive thinking.
I have been in the valley for 25+ years, and worked with a ton of visa holders.
The majority of them were better educated and all well compensated for the work they did. The fact that many of them stayed for green cards and citizenship says a LOT. There is a reason that the boss of both google, and MS came through these programs.
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> No Silicon Valley company that I know of pays H-1B and citizens different wages on that basis.
larger pool means lower wages. this is so fundamental and obvious that it feels like i'm being gaslit when i see shit like this.
Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages. Just as the Luddites tried to stop the rise of industrialization that threatened to bring the skills they used to employ to the wider public at lower costs.
The real answer is that immigrants create enough economic demand to be net positive even for Americans, for much the same reason as Americans are generally more prosperous when there's more of us.
Seriously, you live in some dumpy parts of the country and you can have the exclusive rights on being the town cloud guru locked down and in principle get higher wages in a smaller labor pool, but for some strange reason few of us want to do that.
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The US needs immigrants. We need the best and the brightest. Those are the folks starting the new job creating companies. That’s what keeps us so innovative. The H1B is a good gauntlet through which we can get those immigrants. Ended it is shortsighted.
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> Companies want to hire them in addition to U.S. citizens. That's it.
As opposed to the rest of the graduating class that is already considered a legal citizen?
Your logic doesn’t make sense. “In addition to every option available that doesn’t have additional legal framework attached, these specific people are also desirable.”
Why?
In addition to the U.S. citizens in that graduating class.
Basically large tech companies want to hire whomever passes their interviews, regardless of whether they are citizens or not. The hiring process is intentionally blind on their immigration status.
Small companies will ask you in the application form "will you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S." and larger companies simply don't ask.
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