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That's not what's going to happen. All the new proposed legislation will do is drive up wages (and therefore income inequality) for both Americans and H1-B holders. It will also allow the big firms to shed their worse employees and hold on to only their best, thereby making it incredibly difficult for smaller competitors and public entities to find staff:
> All the new proposed legislation will do is drive up wages (and therefore income inequality) for both Americans and H1-B holders. It will also allow the big firms to shed their worse employees and hold on to only their best, thereby making it incredibly difficult for smaller competitors and public entities to find staff.
Anecdotal, but I work for a small company and this would make it easier for us to find staff.
Right now, huge companies like Cognizant, Tata & Infosys submit a huge amount of H1B applications. The lottery system means that small companies like my own simply cannot get H1B visas.
Something like an auction system would actually benefit us because we pay engineers competitively compared to the best paying large companies and a lot more than most large companies.
No, the key problem is that the big contracting sweatshops are able to muscle out far more deserving applications from employers who are in fact willing to pay a lot more. See the salaries:
I'm pretty sure the parent was willing to pay more than the $76k that Infosys offers -- an amount that pretty much proves that H1Bs aren't being used to find the "super rare talent" that the program is ostensibly for.
That's why we should go toward a highest-bidder system. No need for the government to try to learn the difference between DB admins and deep learning specialists, and it would ensure that the slots are going to the immigrants creating the most economic value, rather than the ones best at pretending to look real hard for qualified Americans.
I'm not sure I understand your comment. It is not obvious to my why you think that we underpay. Can you help me understand by elaborating?
We just end up hiring people who already have some form of work authorization instead of sponsoring new H1Bs. The current system for sponsoring new H1Bs is dominated by large companies.
The lottery system means that we do not even attempt to sponsor new H1Bs. An auction system would mean that our small company would probably get approved H1Bs because, as I mentioned, our pay is competitive with the best paying large companies and higher than the majority of large companies.
I think he is referring to citizen hires. i.e. offer more money for the job and US citizens with the right qualifications will magically appear at your door.
It is a rather simplistic view of how the labor market works, but some people can't seem to not think this way.
I mean right now we hire people who already have work authorization.
Right now we can't sponsor a foreign new grad who goes to Cambridge and has an IMO gold medal because their H1B has a high probability of not being approved. We'll lose time interviewing and we'll probably lose other candidates while we wait.
If H1Bs were allocated by pay then our H1B would probably get approved because we're really desperate to make those hires.
Instead those visas go to megacorps who are not as desperate as we are. How do I know that they are not as desperate? They pay less.
We are so desperate to make these hires that we are opening an office in a jurisdiction with friendlier immigration laws. This is extremely expensive in terms of direct costs. I also think we lose out on ad-hoc communication by not having everyone in the same office.
The net effect is that the US loses out on a ton of tax revenue. Not only will the employees' personal taxes go to a different country, but taxes on some our profits will also shift to that country as the company will have to make transfer payments for the work done in the overseas office.
Why should Americans be concerned about foreign worker's ability to find a job in the American job market? Are People in Australia, Japan, India concerned with the ease or difficulty Americans have finding jobs in those respective economies?
Certainly Americans should be concerned with income inequality at home, or at least concerned with decreasing poverty among all Americans.
> Why should Americans be concerned about foreign worker's ability to find a job in the American job market
Income taxes from an employee hired at Microsoft U.S. office flow to U.S. federal government. If the employee passed the interview rounds, got the offer, but was unable to procure a proper visa, he'll be hired into Microsoft U.K., Microsoft Switzerland, Microsoft Ireland or any other major office which is successful in obtaining such visas.
As larger amount of such jobs concentrate in foreign offices, they spur more local hiring due to the office's ability to handle larger projects, growing importance within the organization, larger budgets, etc.
There are some ancillary benefits to the local governments such as ability to collect local sales and property taxes on a hire residing in Redmond, WA vs a hire residing in Dublin, Ireland.
That presumes Google, MSFT, etc. cannot or would not be able to find an equivalently talented American.
As far as I know, there are few and far between advanced economies promoting the benefits you speak of in their own counties by favoring American (or other foreigners) workers in their countries. So it seems yours isn't a very well understood proposition by other economies.
> That presumes Google, MSFT, etc. cannot or would not be able to find an equivalently talented American.
Multinational product companies are not really constrained by geographies. Once somebody passes the interview bar and is deemed desirable, a hiring process kicks in to solidify that hire. Sometimes the specific geographic office is critical (small and concentrated team), sometimes they're hiring into generic "software engineer" position, where personal preferences and ease of visa procurement decide the specific office of employment.
International outsourcing companies, however, are very geography-constrained and skills-oriented, as their needs are driven by clients. So if they are looking for someone with 10 years of Oracle RDBMS and specific integration experience with SAP, Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics back-ends in Kansas City, the skills most of the time are very specific and the employment must occur in Kansas City at client headquarters.
> there are few and far between advanced economies promoting the benefits you speak of in their own counties
Ireland and UK have fast-track immigration procedures for technology employees and buy ads in technology magazines claiming they're "open for business". Canada bases their entire immigration system on education, qualifications and employment availability where someone with technology skills and an employment offer is almost guaranteed to gain Canadian residency.
Some other countries do not have revenue dependence on personal income taxes, and thus couldn't care less if employees within their jurisdiction earn large salaries. Others derive majority of the revenues through natural resource exploitation with entire economies based around those industries.
Because that affects willingness for others to come and work in the country. If country relies on foreigners to bring in required skill sets, it better not to allienate the very same people.
Then industry and our academia might put an effort into training our own people --the many women, minorities and rural Americans who are sometimes underrepresented in various sectors of our economy. But, no, they want the easy way out.
We have lots of our own people who could benefit from the US favoring its own workforce to its fullest potential before looking outward.
I'll see things your way when other governments care about American workers.
And if immigration numbers are any indication, the US does not suffer from a lack of interest from foreign skilled workers, students or laborers.
> Then industry and our academia might put an effort into training our own people --the many women, minorities and rural Americans who are sometimes underrepresented in various sectors of our economy. But, no, they want the easy way out.
They certainly do not. There are an incredible no. of programs that encourage American students to take up the sciences and more specifically, computer science/programming. There are an equal no. of other programs that promote women in engineering, minorities in engineering etc. So academia and industry are most certainly trying.
There is already exactly such a tax that needs to be paid with every visa application that had collected 2.3B as of 2011.
>The American Competitiveness and Workforce Improvement Act (ACWIA) established what is commonly referred to as the “training fee.” This fee is currently set at a level of $1500 for companies with more than 25 employees; the fee is reduced to $750 for companies with 25 employees or fewer. This payment must accompany most H1B petitions. The amount collected, totaling more than $2.3 billion between fiscal years 2000 and 2011, is used for funding training and scholarships for U.S. workers. The report cites a statistic from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that a portion of these funds has been used for 58,000 college scholarships for U.S. students in the fields of science and math.
This is simply not true. I was there when my entire org got rid of its test team and the people who stayed were not more likely to be H1B holders. If anything, the reverse was true.
More like mis-informed assertion on your part. The filing employer is REQUIRED BY LAW to prove that they couldn't find an equally qualified person in USA.. They are required to post a job listing and vet applicants. The H1B abusers like Microsoft, Infosys skirt around this by putting an ad in an obsure local newspaper that no-one is going to read. And even if someone applies the Hiring Manager finds some grounds to reject the applicant without legally getting into a pickle ("ex: candidate failed verbal tech interview etc).
As someone who doesn't have deep background knowledge of the issue i brought up, i ask you: Please refrain yourself from tone-policing.
If he is correct, then that is a valuable and interesting point to bring, and i would prefer to learn about it regardless of the words it is stated in. If he is incorrect, i would rather learn what the actual facts are. Downvoting him because he did not speak in a way you like is not conducive to learning in either way.
I don't think it's "PC and ridiculous" so much as it's self-serving censorship. Tech employer types who frequent this board are generally pro-visa while the rest of the country is suspicious of it. Some are suspicious for xenophobic reasons, others for economic ones.
And before anyone accuses me of xenophobia, I think if we need their skills we should give them citizenship so they have the same rights, same mobility, and same negotiating power as the rest of us. If they don't have that parity, it lowers the bar for the entire market (citizen and resident alien).
>Down-voters, explain yourself. You are being PC and ridiculous.
The irony of that statement.
I would recommend you read the HN guidelines, the part about trying to keep HN a place for discussion and not flame baiting. Its fine to disagree and carry on an argument, but the regressive mentality you're displaying in this statement is to make you feel good, not to present information.
