A big complaint seen about H1B process is that it's used to import cheap workers instead of great workers - i.e., not increasing USA quality, but allowing employers to decrease average wages by replacing supposedly expensive locals with cheaper H1Bs.
There can be a simple solution - instead of measuring requirements for "highly qualified workers" by forced advertisements where companies try to get no 'qualified' people to apply, and having an "adequate" salary with the current principle "average of the same job in US", which can be manipulated and abused, why not just set simple absolute criteria?
Make sure that H1B positions need to have a salary minimum of, say, $100k (or some fixed multiple of USA median salary to be future-proof). That immediately ensures that (a) H1B's are used for all professions where high skills are needed, without a need to enumerate them in laws; and (b) H1B's are used to import skills instead of cheap labor, as for less-skilled jobs it would be cheaper to hire locally.
> A big complaint seen about H1B process is that it's used to import cheap workers instead of great workers - i.e., not increasing USA quality, but allowing employers to decrease average wages.
It is illegal to do that. As part of the H1B process, an employer must demonstrate that a temporary H1B worker will be paid the prevailing wage, using the hiring record of others in the same job role. It is extremely expensive to go through the H1B process and certainly not worth it to get "cheap labor". If there's abuse like this, it's certainly not from the big employers, because it would never pass audit and it simply isn't cost effective.
As a hiring manager for a large company where I have personally hired sponsored H1B workers, I can tell you that what the employer demonstrates is a perfunctory notice in the workplace, which is worded in a precise way to fulfill all legal requirements and completely confound anyone who may have an interest in knowing a position is (not really) open. 90% of people if you showed them this piece of paper they would not even understand it relates to a job opening.
Now in my case, I was always hiring people who I considered to be very strongly skilled (relative to peers working in industry). But having also hired contractors I also know that a lot of the body shops will bring in people and charge them at rates that leave no room for doubt that they are low-skill/low-quality/under-paid.
The biggest H1B employers are large IT consulting companies that do a round-robin of cheap Indian IT workers to work in the US and then go back home. The prevailing wage requirement is not grounded in reality. If it were, why would you bring IT consultants from India rather than hire domestically?
If companies want to outsource there is little capital controls preventing them. There doesn't need to be these "inexepensive labor" U.S. government provided subsidies for big companies in the form of guest workers.
I'd recommend vaccinations for expatriate managers and not more "outsourcing visas".
I know that is already [supposed to be] illegal, however, there are valid complaints (such as [1]) that this is happening on large scale in a formally legal way.
My proposal should hopefully be more resistant to such manipulations.
Furthermore, if you have a genuine need to import talent, you should state that you're willing to pay not 'prevailing wage' but above that.
[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9215405/H_1B_pay_and_... quoting "U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat whose Congressional district includes Silicon Valley .... the average wage for computer systems analysts in her district is $92,000, but the U.S. government prevailing wage rate for H-1B workers in the same job currently stands at $52,000, or $40,000 less."
This would help so much. I only wish the government were actually receptive of such suggestions. Basically, my future along with thousands of others is dangling on immigration reforms by the congress over the next few years.
We could also eliminate first past the post hiring by having a defined period for H1-B submissions and only letting in the highest paid 100000 that are submitted.
H1B is not designed to bring in affordable workers, but to bring in workers that USA doesn't have.
If you can only afford to pay $40.000, and no americans want to do that job at that price, then tough luck, you need to pay more to motivate people to train and learn the many years needed for your profession X; instead of bringing in workers at wages that demotivate americans to train for profession X, damaging the skilled labor supply for the future years.
Or you can hire a beginner with potential and train him yourself - that result would also further the goals of H1B program by getting more people with those qualifications.
But if you really, really need that unicorn-rarity specialist NOW, then you can pay for that; and $100k salaries (and much larger) are actually paid for top-rated designers, craftsmen, artists and actors.
Believe me, I went to school here and got my masters from here. I see my bretheren who "worked" out of country who don't know difference between quicksort and mergesort. I am not even talking about stuff like time complexity, turing machines or functional programming.
What H-1B shouldn't be is for people who do SAP, business or someother stuff like that; which by the way is what most of H-1s are going for.
This. I'm almost at the 100k mark now (2 years later) but fresh out of college, I wasn't. I still get paid tons above the prevailing wage though. It's just that setting an arbitrary limit is kinda, well, arbitrary. It doesn't take into account any of the differences between jobs / industries. The US needs a lot of engineers in areas where salaries aren't overinflated.
I think setting a percentage could be slightly better. Say, 20% above prevailing wages. That has the effect you want.
The problem is that companies are good at deflating the prevailing wage. Especially those companies that apply for massive amounts of H-1Bs.
I'm personally partial to the bidding process (i.e. we will pay this employee $150k if they get this H-1B). This would mean employers that couldn't pay above the H-1B strike price wouldn't qualify. Which I think is probably better than the status quo.
I'm not an expert on the subject, but I distinctly remember Oracle's CEO complaining about H1B visas for our graduation speech. It was a stale speech, particularly when their company never even sent a Rep to our school's career fair. It took me months (7) to get a web dev position as a physics major, often because I was perceived as a weaker candidate. My git projects were never even looked at and I was once told to my face that the company doesn't hire physics majors for developer positions. Now, two months on the job, I've fixed runaway JavaScript code that ruined UX on various pages, decreased memory overhead by at least 50% as a starting point and extended a large open source project so it does more for us. These are just the projects out of my own initiative. In the meantime my physics friends are largely unemployed (all but two, me being one of those two) and no company wants any training at all. So forgive me if I'm all out of sympathy for these companies, even if I feel for the global workers affected, but I've seen first-hand the dehumanizing dismissiveness that you are treated with as an entry level dev
Your story really reminds me of what it was like for me to get into the business as well. I was a math undergrad with an Industrial Engineering MS degree, and it took some work to get that first dev job. I'd done some coding for my classes, and I'd written a lot of personal projects. I was doing this back in 2000, when it was more unusual to have something like a github profile where you could share code. It was difficult to get potential employers to look at it.
I couldn't disagree more with jlarocco that this is like trying to be a physician with a law degree. But if you're going to go the untraditional path, it's on you to show that you can do the job. Fortunately, that's getting easier every year - and I get the feeling that the savvier employers are far more likely to look at things like personal projects - in fact, for many of them, that's the main thing they care about, not your degree (BTW, a physics degree is impressive, though they won't care nearly as much as they do about your programming projects).
Oracle... well, yeah, frustrating stuff. But not exactly a great sign about Oracle, either. I think you'll be pretty glad you didn't work for them.
I absolutely agree on Oracle, it's the biggest gripe on my post. Unfortunately I was on my phone so I couldn't convey everything I wanted just the way I wanted.
Your story doesn't back up the claims you're making.
To be honest, I'm surprised you got any developer position at all with a physics major. If you wanted to do web development, why did you get a physics degree? It's like saying "I want to be a doctor" and then getting a law degree. College is training, and you trained to be an entry level physicist. There are plenty of recent CS grads looking for jobs, and their major is at least somewhat related to the job they're applying for.
Yeah, it sucks you had a hard time, but it's not surprising, and it's hard to feel bad for you given the choices you made.
Except I'm not looking for sympathy. And your assertion that a CS degree prepares you for real life programming is almost laughable. Plenty of people work in areas that are only peripherally related to their majors without detriment to their trade. Your comparison of web dev to being a doctor tells me your understanding of the trade isn't all that clear.
If for no other reason, a CS degree is useful because it helps find entry level jobs which lead to actual experience. Without a CS degree, though, how can you really ascertain whether it's useful for "real life programming" or not? You've done okay without it, but you don't know how well you'd have done with one.
Second, I, and apparently several people you interviewed with, would claim physics isn't even peripherally related to web development. If you were writing simulation software or FEA software, I'd completely agree. But where's the connection to web development?
Finally, I was making an analogy, not comparing web development to being a doctor.
Ok, I see your point. On my earlier post, I was typing on my phone, but it comes off as rude where I was trying to be brief.
I understand that a CS degree would've made things much easier on getting a job, and I would've been offered a higher salary as well, I'm sure. As I said, that's why I don't ask for sympathy, I know full well that my path is probably the less traditional one. But even so I had plenty of hours of programming on the courses I took -- C/C++, Digital Electronics (programming FPGA boards, tinkering CPUs/APUs), not to mention that I had an 18 month internship -- which is where I learned about web dev -- and I designed two relational databases in previous part-time jobs. All of this came up during my various interviews, and I wasn't ever given a callback until I was. So I'd say there's an abundance of candidates, even if there's potentially a skill gap on those candidates it's a gap that's easily bridged, but too many employers don't want to invest any time training in their employees, which shouldn't be the norm in any industry, but is somehow acceptable in our current tech industry.
What size companies were you applying to? I've heard that smaller corps tend to put emphasis on CS education, while the big ones (big enough to have research divisions, like Google and Microsoft) are happy to consider people from other quantitative fields so long as they can code and know something about algorithms.
I know people with math, statistics and aeronautical engineering backgrounds who've worked at Google and Microsoft. I'm sure physicists would fit in too.
Oh, come off it. 18 year olds make bad career decisions all the time as they lack the experience and information that would help them making the right choice. Sometimes there is external pressure. Also, people change. And sometimes you realise halfway through your programme that your major is really not for you.
I'm not saying there aren't companies who do that. But you must realize your company is an exception, right? The majority of companies use a CS degree to filter candidates.
The OP made things more difficult for himself, so it makes little sense to complain about how difficult of a time he had. He could have made it 10x easier by switching majors to CS.
An entry level physicist has a Ph.D. not a Bachelor's. I believe this is true for all the sciences. A B.S. in biology or chemistry gets you a job as a lab tech, maybe.
Wow, I had no idea the H1B system reverted to a lottery at some point. I thought it was just a first-come first-served system. That just... sucks.
Just a note for those of you who are looking for foreign workers or if you're an Australian citizen: you can get an E3 visa (2 years, multiple entry, renewable ad infinitum). There is a cap for these too but AFAIK it's never been hit (in the 5+ year history). The E3 has two advantages over the H1B:
- there is no need to "prove" you can't find a domestic worker for your position; the only step required is the same LCA step H1B applications must do; and
- unlike on an H1B, spouses of those on an E3 visa are permitted to work (they get an E3D visa).
Also, you don't need to return to your country of origin (being Australia). You can do apply from Canada, the UK or wherever is most convenient (but you do need to leave the country to apply; you can't adjust status while in the US).
Only if you don't intend to leave the country at all. Once you cross the border, even if it's a short weekend trip, you would have to apply for a new E-3 visa again.
This can be a big deal. I changed from L1B to L1A to H1B (without leaving the country) then when I wanted to leave the country the legal advice that I received (IANAL - TIJAA[1]) was that to be safe I should return to my home country to get the new visa stamp, the Vancouver embassy might legitimately decide not to apply it - at which point I'd be stuck in Canada needing a plane ticket to the UK in a hurry and have the possibility of a multi-week wait for an appointment at the London embassy...
I waited on my green-card application to get to the point at which I could get an Advanced Parole[2] document and traveled on that instead, but this did mean: a) several years in which I couldn't travel outside the US; b) repeated lectures from border officials that the AP document was for "serious travel" only and that snowboarding trips to Whistler didn't count.
For short trips of 30 days or less, to Canada, Mexico or adjacent islands excluding Cuba, it seems you can re-enter on your expired visa and your new I-94, once your extension of stay has been approved. 22CFR41.112(d)[1]. If it were me I would get a new visa though.
I changed jobs this way recently and it took ~6 months to receive a decision from USCIS.
Others have been done much quicker but I would be prepared to wait going this route, and also take USCIS's processing times with a grain of salt.
If the E-3 allowed for premium processing[1], portability[2] or the 240-day rule[3], I would try I-129 again otherwise I think I'll just apply for a new visa outside the US.
1: Pay an extra ~$1200 to hear back from USCIS in ~2 weeks.
2: Permission to start work for a new employer upon filing the I-129.
3: A 240 day grace period during which you may continue to work for your existing employer after your status expires.
I have a coworker who is an unbelievably talented and respected developer both at my company and in the open source community. He has been working on a student visa after he graduated from an Ivy League school in computer science last year.
That the U.S. is even considering deporting him is batshit crazy to me.
It is insane. Despite getting in by April 1st we're now waiting on the lottery results to see if our first engineering hire can stay in the country. It's going to be extremely disruptive both to him and to us if he can't stay. Stupid.
When you go to school in the US and then get a job, you build a network of both personal and professional relationships, you get settled in a place, etc.
Why should someone who's actively contributing to the economy be forced to throw that away?
I'm in the same boat as OP's colleague. Graduated from a US grad school, now working in SF with an apartment, furniture, friends, a girlfriend, a professional network, etc. The company I helped start has created 4 jobs in the last month or two, with many more to come.
And now I'm in a lottery against some large companies who view the visa as just an opportunity to place cheap labor.
How is that fair, sane, reasonable or sensible in any way?
If & when the immigration overhaul happens in Washington, I believe this is slated to get fixed -- higher ed students at US institutions would have an automatic path to permanent residence after graduating.
I haven't followed the immigration reform process since it first broke a few months ago, but as of January the proposals definitely included something addressing this.
I had heard second-hand that international employees of reputable companies like Google etc. have preference for H1-B applications or for Green Cards, I forget which. But in case you happen to be working for a (large) well known company, there is a chance that the immigration team could leverage this (if they aren't already) for your co-worker.
It's long past time to put these up for bid instead of lottery. Companies that really need talent and will pay fairly for it are being held up by cheap CRUD labor sweatshop employers that file mountains of applications. If we met the serious needs first, measured reasonably well by willingness to pay, there would be more than enough visas.
That's in addition to other reforms this program needs like the right to switch jobs.
A bidding system would inevitably favor businesses with more resources to spend on employment. I'm not sure whether that would end up being a good thing. It's already extremely expensive to hire someone on an H1B visa, despite what myths may have been spread, due to legal and logistical expenses.
There is an abuse I have however heard of (sorry no citation): obtaining H1B visas for employees you never intend to bring to the US. This is due to how difficult it is to get work visas to the US, so you end up with an H1B "just in case" you need them to travel.
The right to switch jobs is another tricky one. The remit of an H1B is to place a foreign worker in a job role which has been demonstrated to be difficult to fill with a citizen. It does not replace an individual job. You can switch jobs with an H1B so long as the other job is the same job role (very much the same job responsibilities). This seems ok to begin with, but after several years it turns into a shackle because it's difficult for H1B workers, who by their nature are specialists, to switch to another job with the same specialist role. Combine that with the huge amount of time it can take to convert to a green card (5-10 years for some countries), and they're stuck in a job for most of a decade in an era where job hopping is common.
the problem with the "extremely expensive" claim is that you do get a worker who is somewhat captive in a tight labor market. It is inaccurate to claim, as some people do, that H1B holders can't switch jobs, but they do face much greater barriers (they can't just quit, enter a new field, start up their own business or consultancy... even changing to a nearly identical job in the same field requires new sponsorship).
If the visa were awarded directly to the immigrant in such a way that an H1B holder had essentially the same job mobility as a green card holder, I'd be more inclined to agree that the process is expensive. After all, you'd be paying big $$ to hire someone who has the right to quit the first day on the job.
Up for bid would be terrible news for the startup industry. It would be impossible for any startup (that desperately needs developers) to hire outside of the country.
If you want to help the startup industry, then how about making health insurance portable for the people over 35 that the start up industry won't hire? Then they could start their own garage based firms and compete the with the Sand Hill Road backed companies.
While in short-term that would resolve the issue, the long-term strategy for many companies would be to just establish offices in other countries or hire outsourcing outfits with 1 local project management type employee and a 20-head development team elsewhere.
There's really no reason for government to artificially cap the number of available visas, provided that educational and other requirements are met. The governments are in the business of generating revenues, and H1-B employees pay all proper taxes, so net result is a win-win for both parties.
Why are you assuming sweatshops usually turn less profit per employee (and hence are willing to pay less for access to adequate labour) that companies that "really need talent"? Would you care to elaborate on what type of companies would fit in both of your categories?
Sigh,
this lottery reminds of those grim years of 2007/08 when the lottery was in effect.
The demand then was largely due to the "bodyshopping" companies filing H1s even when they did not have a valid client. USCIS cracked down on them in the following years.
Now it appears the general demand for IT has gone up.
Here is the distribution of H1-bs amongst companies last year (the cap was filled on June-11th I think).
Look at the number of offshoring companies in that list! And look at the average salaries they pay (still higher than the stipulated 60k I think). I am also aware of some of these offshoring companies who file for h1 and then don't bring the person to US in the year (they reserve it for future).
There should be some way to weed out these Indian offshorers who file for h1 and never use it.
Good luck to all who are hoping to get a H1! (that includes me)
I'm so lucky that I got my visa last year. Then I did a transfer to work at a start up and didn't count in the cap either.
Having to worry about potential deportation in addition to the risks of a startup seem like an overkill. I'm probably going to move to Canada if my current startup fails (unlikely that it will). It is much easier to become a resident there. Additionally, I don't want my dating life to influenced by such decisions.
Its more than 52% because the number includes Higher degree exempt applications. For example if its a 90K + 30K cut, then regular quota has 65% chance and higher degree quota has around 86% chance. I wish you luck.
Actually more like: 65,000/104,000 = 62.5%, assuming someone is not in Masters quota.
Out of the 124k, 20k will be for masters. The remaining masters join the pool of lottery for 65k. So there are 65k spots available for 124k - 20k(=104k)
Just to add, out of 65,000, few visas are reserved for nationals of Chile(1400) and Singapore(5700) due to free trade agreements. These visas are called H1B1 and if unused, apparently they are added to visa cap for next year. Never heard about any increase in the cap (due to unused Chile/S'pore H1B1s) though.
I think a lot of people are confusing the three kinds of applicants of H-1B visas. I don't want people to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
* Category 1 is your average small company who found a great foreign engineer and wants to keep them for one reason or the other. These are in the minority.
* Category 2 is your Google, Microsoft, etc hiring high quality engineers.
* Category 3 is your IT outsourcing / consultancy companies, like WiPro, InfoSys etc.
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Of H-1B applicants, #3 is overwhelmingly the largest. These companies fill up most of the quota and crowd out the smaller employers. They also pay closest to prevailing wage (i.e. "low" wages). The crappy part is that sometimes they don't even end up using those H-1Bs down the road while people like me lose their chance in the lottery.
#1 and especially #2 seem to pay wages that are not really correlated with prevailing wage, they pay what they think an employee is worth. In #2's case this can be multiples above prevailing.
A per company limit could help with this, and seems fair to me. This would also distribute the foreign labor better. Not everyone would apply to WiPro et al because they know they're getting a guaranteed visa. Instead smaller companies would get some attention too, and the "h-1b sweat shop" dynamic would be reduced. There are already penalties for being H-1B dependent, but apparently not large enough to be a deterrent.
Or maybe smaller companies could be cap exempt, or part of their own cap. It's not like they are threatening to overthrow the US labor market, accounting for maybe 10k jobs a year. Leave them alone. Let the larger multinationals and such deal with expensive legal procedures, since they really have the power to displace American workers.
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Of the PERM (green card) applicants, the overwhelming majority is #2, followed by #1 and then #3. This tells you how much cat#3 cares about retaining their H-1B workers. For them, I imagine H-1Bs are an incentive for their workers to come work in the US for the lower end of the prevailing wage, and maybe a vague promise for immigration that doesn't get fulfilled very often. Otherwise, I'm not sure why you wouldn't just get an L-1 for your employee (which is even more abusive since it has absolutely no prevailing wage requirements).
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Another tangential point is that people say that this isn't an enforcement problem but in some respects it is. Prevailing wage is determined not only by your profession / job but also your level in that job. I imagine many companies misrepresent that level and also the job title (programmer instead of software architect, etc) to be able to pay lower. Of course the way the government checks against this is mainly through attestation: you tell them what the job description is and they compare with the description of that level. After that there is 0 enforcement. But I'm not sure if more enforcement is the key, since even the mention of an audit is enough to stop any but the largest companies (with expensive counsel) from hiring H-1Bs.
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Anyway, hope this gives you guys some perspective. It's not all bad, and not everyone is in the business of undercutting Americans. But reform is definitely needed. People like me are struggling.
I would also like to point out that Category 1 (maybe not necessarily your "average" small company) may include extremely early stage startups that are still in pre-series-A funding.
Some (smart or stupid, but capable) risk-takers are willing to join the first 10 members of such teams for equity and/or becoming founding members for far less than "commensurate pay" for their role. That "role" itself may be something blurring the lines between many things, they may have to take up lead positions in departments they know little to nothing about. The rigid policies around authorizing people to work in this country is an unnecessarily and ridiculously high barrier.
Now this would all be understandable even for legal immigration if the United States was suffering a massive population problem (like most of the countries these immigrants may be coming from), but that is far from the case here. The worry is that the immigrants will do more harm than good.
Given that I believe I'm a person willing to pay my taxes, contribute to the economy positively (possibly hugely), support myself (and be responsible about any dependents I may take up) and not be a criminal, I feel the machinery in place just prevents innovation and entrepreneurship and holds the economy back.
Or maybe I'm just really stupid and don't understand how country's and economies work.
Source: I'm yet another H1B applicant, currently the 4th member of a tech startup and looking into starting another venture with my technical background, while being threatened to be deported every 6 months.
It's kind of a shame that WiPro and InfoSys are ruining it for everyone; the quality of work provided by these two companies seems to be commensurate with the relatively terrible wages they seem to pay their visa-holding employees, too. (I've nothing good to say about either of them.)
This is why bay area tech companies have to start accepting remote work more. It's easier to work with remote workers than to deal with the H-1B cap and waiting until next October. If you must restrict, just keep them within North & South America so you avoid major time zone issues.
Lots of companies accept remote workers, but not foreign remote workers.
One of my particular pet peeves with StackOverflow's jobs board is the endless parade of remote work with "NO NON-US CITIZENS" at the bottom of the job description.
It's insane. So if I'm a truly passionate and talented but I'm not a US citizen I don't get to play with the best because only the first 65k get to do it?
I bet most of them are applying to big companies and the percent of startups is really small.
We were warned months ago that for all intents and purposes, we'd have one day to get H1B paperwork in; the cap was hit almost immediately last year, too.
eliben is right. Last year the visas were available until June. The year before that it was sometime in November, and the year before that it was sometime in December. But, based on last year's pattern all attorneys predicted it would be reached on April 1st this year.
IIRC, it was in 2007/2008 when the cap was reached on day1.
That is correct, 2007 was the first year this whole mess started, and resulted in the creation of a lottery system. It was the year I got my H1B, and I didn't know until late June - early July if I made it or not ...
Under the law the first 20,000 H1B petitions that are filed on behalf of foreign nationals that have earned an advanced degree from a U.S. institution of higher education are exempt from the USCIS H1B quota. This essentially creates a separate pool of 20,000 additional H1B visa numbers each fiscal year that are available only to those foreign nationals who have earned a Master's or higher graduate degree from a US institution of higher education.
Check out almost any Comp Sci faculty at any major american university -- you will find a lot of foreigners --- especially Chinese and Indian kids. These universities and those kids have nothing to do with bodyshops. To lump all of them with bodyshoppers is just ignorant.
My understanding is that those smart kids at the major universities doing computer science aren't getting those H1B visas, and they certainly aren't working at the bodyshops. They're on student visas.
The big companies get some, but most of the slots, even for the masters-degree-only section, go to "insourcing" outfits that have the paperwork down to a science, and have a list of colleges with super slightweight (but still accredited) masters degree programs.
I guess I got lucky. I applied for H1B in 2009 and the annual quota remained open for 280 days that year. I know great number of engineers who were able to stay because of H1Bs. Company has to offer what is a comparable wage in that region for a particular profession.
There can be a simple solution - instead of measuring requirements for "highly qualified workers" by forced advertisements where companies try to get no 'qualified' people to apply, and having an "adequate" salary with the current principle "average of the same job in US", which can be manipulated and abused, why not just set simple absolute criteria?
Make sure that H1B positions need to have a salary minimum of, say, $100k (or some fixed multiple of USA median salary to be future-proof). That immediately ensures that (a) H1B's are used for all professions where high skills are needed, without a need to enumerate them in laws; and (b) H1B's are used to import skills instead of cheap labor, as for less-skilled jobs it would be cheaper to hire locally.