
How to Fix Tech’s H-1B Problem - Garbage
http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/06/how-to-fix-techs-h-1b-problem
======
cjensen
The solution is easy: convert all H-1B Visas to Green Cards. If an H-1B
employee is underpaid, they can jump ship. If we really have a shortage of
engineers, then what harm is done? When H-1B expansion was first proposed,
this is exactly what the IEEE advocated.

Too many companies, as evidenced in the linked article, claim there is an
engineering "shortage" but who really mean that there is a shortage of
engineers willing to be underpaid and badly treated.

~~~
starving_coder
This is my 10th year of employment in Bay area and by any reasonable
estimates, I am not laying eyes on my Green Card for another half a decade.
And no, i am not in the "slow lane". Makes me wonder if employers are lobbying
Washington hard for things to be this complicated.

~~~
dominotw
>employers are lobbying Washington hard for things to be this complicated.

There is nothing complicated about the process itself. You just happen to be
from India/China.

~~~
hebdo
I'm quite sure that by writing "I'm not in the slow lane" he/she meant exactly
that he/she is not from India or China.

~~~
dominotw
wrong. There are many "lanes" ( eb1, eb2,..) with different speeds even for
people from India/China.

~~~
eitally
The irony is that for a lot of Indians/Chinese here, they could either wait
6-8 years, or they could leave the country for a year then transfer back in
and have a GC in a year or less. It's particularly unpleasant for H1-Bs who
start the PREM process as such. So much easier for internal transfers,
especially EB1, O, an L1/L2... and easier still if you're not from a slow lane
country (currently China & India, but Brazil was in this boat for a number of
years, too).

~~~
Manishearth
A lot of companies (Microsoft is one example that I know of) are sidestepping
H1-B entirely for college hires (and perhaps other channels of hiring?) for
L1. Hire in Canada or the UK; apply for L1; transfer to the US in a year or
two.

Apparently it's much more straightforward (and less prone to chance) as
compared to H1B.

~~~
pm90
Its not ideal for the employee though, since they are restricted to work for
one employer. But otherwise, yes, it is a very good deal.

~~~
therein
You should be able to transfer your H1-B to another employer, though. I didn't
think it was that hard.

I recently got married and filed for AOS.

~~~
zb
You can, but the parent was talking about an L1, which cannot be transferred.

------
protomyth
"That’s right. Facebook and Google brought in 900 and 2,800 H-1B employees,
respectively, with salaries of $140,000 and $127,000. Cognizant? 3,300 at
$72,000. Tata? A whopping 16,435 for a (relatively) paltry $70,000 – literally
less than half what Facebook paid."

I still think a good first step is to require a salary for H-1B workers at 10x
single person poverty guidelines for the local area[1]. Another measure of
base salary would probably work, but something that requires a salary that
discourages the body shops[2]. According to the legislation and goals of the
program, the people we accept have the talent to be worth this salary[3].

1)
[https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-01-25/html/2016-01450....](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2016-01-25/html/2016-01450.htm)

2) [http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2016-H1B-Visa-
Sponsor.aspx](http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2016-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx) \-
the top 10 has a lot of consulting / body shop firms

3)
[http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm](http://www.dol.gov/whd/immigration/h1b.htm)
"The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise
obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by
authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not
otherwise authorized to work in the United States."

~~~
ardit33
Sorting the visas by salary will work just as well. Right now there is a
random lottery choosing who gets the visas, where the Indian body shops are
known to "oversubscribe" to it.

Also, after a verification that the Visa recipient is working at the given
salary for at least two years, then the they can apply for green card
irrelevant to who their current employer is (as long as they are employed and
earning at least similar salaries to what they did when they got the visa).

Switching jobs (as long as it is the similar profession/pay), should not reset
the Green Card process. This will remove the current defacto "Indentured
servitude" state that most H-1B visa holders find themselves in.

There are many ways to improve the current system (without changing the
quotas), to benefit the country itself, and not large corporations, but right
now there is no direct personal incentive for lawmakers to do that.

~~~
serge2k
The problem with sorting by wage is that it gives a massive advantage of SV
companies vs even a place like Seattle. They already have to pay higher wages,
so a premium on top doesn't hurt as bad.

If it's a lottery system, why not charge 25k per entry or something? It's
affordable even by a smaller company is they really want the person. It's
affordable by the big tech companies who are being honest about their H-1B
visa requests. It puts some hurt on Tata and the like by making them pay
through the nose for trying to game the lottery.

Or you could restrict the number issued per company, at least until others
have their share. Say every company gets 1500 max, then you bump that up to
2000 for those interested. keep going like that until you exhaust the quota.

~~~
sratner
DoL already has a process for determining prevailing wage for a given
location. There is no reason why "sorting by wage" can't mean "sorting by
ratio of wage to local prevailing wage".

~~~
pm90
This could be SO easily circumvented. Just open an office in another location
(a subsidary, perhaps) and have it do the hiring at the prevailing wages at
that location.

~~~
mavelikara
This is not so easily circumvented. If an employee on H-1B transfers to
another location, the employer is required to file an amendment to the H-1B
petition and go through the prevailing wage determination again. From USCIS
website [1]:

    
    
      You must file an amended H-1B petition if your H-1B
      employee changed or is going to change his or her place of
      employment to a worksite location outside of the 
      metropolitan statistical area (MSA) or an “area of intended 
      employment” (as defined at 20 CFR 655.715) covered by the 
      existing approved H-1B petition
    

[1]: [https://www.uscis.gov/news/alerts/uscis-draft-guidance-
when-...](https://www.uscis.gov/news/alerts/uscis-draft-guidance-when-file-
amended-h-1b-petition-after-simeio-solutions-decision)

------
sofaofthedamned
We have the same problem here in the UK. For clarity i've had to give my job
over 3 times in my career to Indian outsourced employees, including for Cisco
(my last employer before the current one)

The rules are not being applied, but for me it's quite simple. If you want to
bring a foreign worker in, you need to advertise it on a _government_ website
for a month. These details will include salary, role, skills, the sponsoring
company as well as the one they will be ultimately working for.

I spent the last 5 months unemployed, but i'm normally a devops/sysadmin. I
_know_ my job went to India. I don't mind if they're better, but most of the
time they're not. I didn't claim unemployment benefits as I didn't want the
shame and the hassle, including having to spend 20 hours a week looking for
work on the governments website. If this website included the details of the
jobs that allegedly couldn't be filled by a UK guy i'd be far better equipped
to get a job I am good at where a company is trying to cheap it out.

Note - I am not trying to get at Indian employees here - the RF guys at my
last place were superb and better than anybody in the UK as we don't train
enough of them here - but I am very annoyed where a company can twist the
system to avoid paying UK wages for a UK job.

~~~
crdoconnor
A lot of the time it's not even cheaper, it's costlier. Management just
prefers to have a docile, more easily controlled workforce.

Management is also surreptitiously raising its own pay (by increasing
coordination costs).

~~~
eli_gottlieb
> A lot of the time it's not even cheaper, it's costlier. Management just
> prefers to have a docile, more easily controlled workforce.

Reminds me of something David Graeber said:

 _Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem
the only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism
into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former
every time._

------
notlisted
As the numbers indicate, the H1B system is broken. It was broken by allowing
the body-shops to apply for what are basically "temp workers". When I got
mine, in 1994, such "temp work" (consulting) was explicitly forbidden. The
employee had to work for and _at_ the company that applied for you, not at the
offices of a company's clients. When and why this changed I don't know.

What I do know, as the founder of a European expat organization with 7k
members in the USA, is that H1Bs for highly skilled Europeans have nearly come
to a standstill. This is evidenced by the change in demographics of my target
audience. Average ages have gone up significantly. Most newcomers now arrive
on L1 (inter-company executive transferee) visas, are older, married, and have
a family.

The way to fix this is by going back to the old situation and put the body-
shops out of business...

~~~
phil21
> When and why this changed I don't know

Nothing changed. The only thing that changed were companies pushing the limit
as far as they could to what you see today. Regulators sat on their proverbial
asses and watched it happen without lifting a finger, so companies lost the
fear of the law.

------
ryanmarsh
I don't know what you call the opposite of "right to work" but that's
basically the employment situation H1B's find themselves in. My Fortune 500
clients have office building upon office building of H1B developers. These
folks will do practically whatever it takes to keep their employer happy. They
are afraid to rock the boat and have their family sent back to India. This
means bad decisions go unquestioned. You can guess what the result is.

~~~
Zigurd
You have put your finger on a key pathology of software development in
general, not just H1-B: Mediocrities with terrible ideas about software love
to have their bad ideas implemented without question. This explains why
companies can easily end up paying more for H1-B labor. Egos get stroked.
Nobody is asked WTF. Bad software is piled on top of bad software.

Not only is this a source of wage depression and age discrimination, it
results in the kind of horrible-but-expensive IT that runs banking, health
care, government, etc. and makes it much harder than necessary to apply
technology to reforming those sectors.

------
lordnacho
I hope one day in the future the idea of a work permit will be considered just
as crazy as the idea that only men should be allowed to vote.

It strikes me as ridiculous that it could be illegal for someone to work
simply because they were not born near where their employer is based.

~~~
swozey
You're combining work permits with citizenship. They're vastly different. Do
you want neither to be a requirement? How ethical is it to allow someone to
work in a country where they have zero civic participation in its government?
Or do you immediately get participation rights because you work for a company
based in XYZ? Then you vote for things that affect the future, you move, and
you're no longer affected by the votes you put in. Where do your loyalties
lie?

~~~
maxerickson
A lot of municipal debt is a result of people who voted for things that
affected the future and then left. It's not just a hypothetical problem.

(Basically, pensions. They were offered to make municipal employment more
attractive, which made the cities nicer places to live. They were not totally
funded at the time the services were provided, even though the benefits of
offering the pensions were largely consumed at that time.)

~~~
crdoconnor
There's no point in having municipal bonds in the first place. The federal
government can borrow at zero percent to bomb little brown children or
subsidize wall street bonuses. Flint can't borrow at zero percent to pay
teachers or fix its water mains.

What confuses me is why people like you are personally are more concerned with
cutting teacher pensions than cutting war budgets when it's fairly plain which
one we actually want more (assuming you don't want to live in a country full
of dumb people that is...).

~~~
maxerickson
I'm not in favor of cutting pensions.

I'm in favor of fully funding them at the time of employment.

I guess I would agree that fully funded pensions might not be as large as
promised pensions, but it's not like promised pensions have a perfect record
of getting delivered.

~~~
crdoconnor
Fully funded meaning what? Handing over the money to Wall Street and trusting
that they can grow it by 2% a year? 5% a year? -5% a year?

There's no real reason why pensions have to be used to pump up stock market
prices. Social Security can simply be expanded, cutting out the million dollar
bonuses and ferraris from the process.

~~~
maxerickson
Yes, the core thing that I have a problem with is funding services on promises
that are expected to be met at the local level. How to manage future
compensation otherwise is a serious problem, but it's a better problem than
funding services with promises.

I agree that a national benefit program is not as fraught as a local one.

------
jeevand
H1B system is broken. It is especially hard if you are from India or China.
Although you can change employers, you need to restart the green card process
from scratch which introduces lots of uncertainties. Obama wanted to allow
H1Bs to change employers easily by giving them better portability but USCIS
came up with a bad rule which i believe is due to lobbying by employers.
Australia & Canada have better immigration systems where they give PR quickly.

It is bad for US as well. Immigrants are generally more risk taking than
citizens & H1B does not allow them to take risks when they are young because
they will be waiting in the line for PR (Green Card). By the time they get
green card it will be decade or more and their risk appetite would have
reduced due to having family/children.

In general, I don't believe most of the high salaries in tech may not be
sustainable. Lots of tech jobs will move to India & China (or any low cost
country in future which has a good pool of educated people), that is just
capital chasing good enough talent which is cheap. Moving up the value chain
is the only option.

------
kwisatzh
The US should staple a Greencard to all PhDs and Masters students in the STEM
fields. Most grad students have some support of funding (NSF/NIH etc) and it
makes sense for these students to work here and pay off the funding instead of
letting them leave the country or have them be stuck in a sub-optimal
situation, being tethered to one employee.

~~~
dominotw
>The US should staple a Greencard to all PhDs and Masters students in the STEM
fields.

No thats horrible. There are tons of "universities" in USA which will give you
a masters degree for a given amount of money. I can only imagine how much
worse the education scam will get with stuff like greenCards attached to
degrees.

~~~
yetanotheracc
Just restrict the scheme to the top n (n <= 50) schools according to, say,
ARWU.

~~~
dominotw
what about the brilliant self taught programmers? Not all PHD's have
skills/talent that employers are looking for. There are already enough
unemployed theoretical math/astronomy pdhs.

------
WalterBright
If the entry requirement is to merely have an accredited degree, the foreign
degree system will be promptly gamed. Bureaucratic rules are always gamed, and
being bureaucratic, are very slow to adapt.

------
tomohawk
Easy solution: get rid of H1-B, whose main use is to offshore jobs, and change
the preferences for getting a green card to prefer people with desired skills
who want to become Americans.

------
GreaterFool
To me H-1B seems like a _bad deal_. It gives the employer a lot of leverage
over the employee. How do you expect a system like that not to be abused? You
can require higher salaries for H-1B employees but that's a half-assed
solution.

Besides there's no sensible path to permanent residence or citizenship.

Personally I'd like to spend some time in the States and see the country, work
for a year or two and see how it goes. But I have no intention in getting into
H-1B mess.

------
nopinsight
It seems like auctioning the visas to the highest bidders is a win-win
solution and good for American workers. Why don't they do anything about it?
The following is one reason.

Look at who benefits from the system. On the surface, outsourcing companies
who can hire cheaper IT labor. Who are their customers which gain from lower
IT service costs? Large corporations with influential ties to the powers that
be.

------
nish1500
I love the Bay Area, and would have loved to work there, but the draconian
immigration laws and the 16-year wait for Green Cards are simply not worth it.
I'll get paid half as much in Canada, but at least my future doesn't hang on a
lottery, and I can start my own company without waiting to turn 40.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
If its any consolation: I lived and worked there 10 years, and left. It was
hot, crowded, full of envious avaricious people who turned over every couple
of years. When we realized almost every person we knew had moved, we decided
to leave as well.

Settled in Iowa where I've worked at half a dozen Silicon Valley startups
remotely since then. With reasonable cost of living, a decent stable group of
friends, and a culture of helpfulness and inclusion.

------
0xcde4c3db
From what I've heard, the "consultancies" are using H-1B something like this:

1) File H-1B applications for every new hire in the country of origin.

2) Send the lucky winners over to the US for on-the-job training with clients.

3) Once they actually have the necessary skills to do the jobs, bring them
back home and pay them the prevailing wage there, while still charging the
clients the same amount.

4) Profit!

Under this model (is this even accurate? I've seen several summaries along
these lines, but have no direct experience), the bulk of the wage lowering
doesn't even occur under an H-1B, so wouldn't they be able to realign things
to absorb a higher US salary? Would a "value-based" system be an actual
deterrent, or just friction?

------
Zigurd
H1-B is mostly about money, and the best and most robust solution, in terms of
being difficult to subvert, is to use money as the measure: To limit H1-B to
the talent that's unobtainable locally, to auction the visas to the highest
bidder, and have a high reserve price, say $30k. To an R&D company creating
enormous value per employee it would be just a speed bump. To a body shop
depressing wages by renting out compliant mediocrities to mediocre managers
who find it comforting to have their crappy ideas never questioned, it would
make continuing that blight painfully expensive.

------
USANEEDSHELP
How to fix it, eliminate it. Not only are the US firms abusing H1-B, the
consulting firms from (for example) India are setting up a US footprint &
using H1-B to get low cost folks into this country. The quality is not there,
but the low cost & quantity is. There are many Americans that can fill these
positions, but the US firms don't want to pay a living wage.

------
jmspring
The fix is to make things hard for the body shops (Tata, etc) and their like
minded counterparts.

I've posted before, but having worked with India, Korea, Japan, and China...
There is only one culture that pushes to outsource things when it doesn't make
sense... And usually the one doing the pushing is getting a cut or kick
back... It's neither Korea, China, or Japan.

I think the solution is to cut off all Indian body shops and visas in bulk and
require strict individual vetting. There are great individuals stuck in the
morass, but Tata etc are trying to bring in people less qualified than an
automotive technician who could get 3-4 months of training...

H1b and outsourcing is all about the bottom quarterly dollar.

------
dominotw
clickbait tldr; " try to select the most valuable people?" ( instead of
lottery)

apparently, free market is going to determine who is most valuable.

~~~
pj_mukh
Your options are a) Government bureaucrat b) Free market c) Lottery

Which do you choose?

------
ElComradio
I'm all for it. Let's have reciprocity though. I should be able to show my
resume and get permanent residency complete with local healthcare benefits for
any country with which we have the agreement.

------
pbnjay
What if each H-1B simply cost the difference between a citizen's average
salary and the foreign worker's average salary?

e.g. if a US citizen working at Facebook makes 180k, and the foreign worker
makes 150k, that H-1B should cost 30k. Then if there really is a tech shortage
then costs are the same, but if there isn't it incentivizes businesses to hire
locals.

I'm sure the argument would be that then they'll just pay their US citizens
less, but I'd think the competition for the native highly skilled talent would
keep rates up.

~~~
dominotw
> if a US citizen working at Facebook makes 180k, and the foreign worker makes
> 150k, that H-1B should cost 30k

There are already prevailing wage restrictions, you can't pay h1b less than
native employee .

~~~
sratner
Well, more accurately, you can't pay a foreign worker less than some floor set
by the DoL for the given job description and location. It is unrelated to how
much a given company is paying to any one of their other workers.

------
mjevans
Require that the job they were /brought/ here for:

* last at least a year

* pay at least 150% of median market rate

* have been open and unfulfilled with at least 10 who are interviewed AND report on their desired compensation for the role

* Eliminated non-hourly work* ('Salaried' would be a contract to buy between X and Y hours of work per year, with limits of hours per day/week etc.)

~~~
product50
Report on desired compensation? Are you serious? What if 2 folks come in and
say they want $300k based on their current salaries? What will you do then?
You may argue that it is the market salary then but if I were an employer, I
wouldn't even invite Google/FB folks for the interview but only inexperienced
folks - to game the desired salary requirement.

This is why this requires a more thoughtful approach..

~~~
mjevans
Monetary compensation data, of course, would be for the /field/ and collected
via the tax infrastructure. Median for /that type of work/ not based on those
interviewed. The reason for having the interviewees report back is to check on
if the expectations for the job match the description for the job.

------
mathattack
I very much like the idea of auctioning these off to companies, either
explicitly (pay the government for each one) or implicitly (bid up the
salaries you'll pay for them). Although I'm not a fan of large taxes, I think
the former is slightly less distortionary.

------
hemantv
If you start to give out visa based upon just the salary, indirectly you are
saying that small business and town outside of high cost of living are not
worthy of hiring people on visas.

So only SF and NYC can employ immigration while Denver and Atlanta cannot.

~~~
klipt
Well people in SF pay more taxes, so as far as the federal budget is
concerned, people working there _are_ worth more.

If an immigrant doesn't want to stay in SF, they only have to work there long
enough to get a green card, then they're free to move.

------
alanwatts
Which is the greater problem, the H1-B process, or the fact that we have a
global economy but still pretend like nationalism isn't completely counter
productive?

------
EhicsOnImm
Widescale utilitarian logic would be create a slippery slope towards massacres
of the homeless.

All immigrants, regardless of their value, should be treated equal.

------
EhicsOnImm
Widescale utilitarian logic would be a slippery slope to massacres of the
homeless.

------
yadongwen
I was just turned down by Facebook probably because they are unable to sponsor
H1B for me..alas.

~~~
Manishearth
I doubt that. Facebook, like many large companies, hires first and worries
about H1B later. If you don't make it through the lottery they will put you in
one of their offices in some other country. (I don't know if they L1 you
later).

------
joesmo
They could just put a cap on the number of H-1B workers that can go to any one
particular company. Say 1k. You can hire whomever you want right now, but
after your 1k, you get no more. It'd force companies to prioritize the most
important workers they need and limit the damage companies like Tata can do.
It's such a simple, elegant solution, no wonder it wasn't implemented by the
idiots who wrote these laws.

~~~
erispoe
That wouldn't work, you can create as many shell companies as you want and
outsource employment to these companies.

~~~
joesmo
You could limit by parent company then.

