

Invited to the U.S., Foreign Workers Find a Nightmare - josephmosby
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/the-new-american-slavery-invited-to-the-us-foreign-workers-f#.ivEx7ExBpD

======
seibelj
I will make a slight derail into H1B's. Anytime that you allow a company to
have significant control over an employee's life, such as putting a
significant risk of deportation on the employee, you are putting the employee
at severe personal risk. This is the central problem with guest worker
programs, as you incentivize the company to threaten employees in order to
keep them working for you and their costs down.

I had an intense argument with someone about whether H1B's were good or bad
for the economy. The key point he was arguing was that H1B employees _do not_
have significantly less salary, and they are fully capable of switching
companies.

In my experience, the primary reason that a company would go through the
hassle of hiring an H1B is for cost reasons, because there are enough
competent workers locally there to fulfill open positions (at a price), and
the quality of H1B workers is generally less than local hires. On rare
occasions a foreign worker has extremely unique skills, but this is certainly
the exception.

Secondly, it is very difficult for an H1B to switch companies, as it's
difficult to convince a company to go through the hassle of paperwork /
lawyers / cost, so an H1B employee has little recourse for being treated
poorly and paid less.

Therefore, I'm against H1B's. If we had a more reasonable immigration policy,
where people could more easily come to America as normalized citizens, I would
be for it. But the H1B and similar programs give far too much power to the
companies, which is ripe for exploitation.

~~~
zaitcev
I knew a few guys on H-1B who switched. The only downside is that the clock is
not restarted, but since the H-1B timer is 6 years and GC takes about 3 years,
a worker who's not a complete idiot has plenty of time to shop around.

Hiring H-1B for cost reasons is not possible. It is not allowed to pay less
than market price and the government audits it. My first H-1B job paid $75k in
'97 dollars (e.g. north of $120k now) and it was more than typical market
value. Full bennies, too.

~~~
hga
_Hiring H-1B for cost reasons is not possible._

Then explain why, in 2001 while working for Lucent, a more qualified for the
job H-1B engineer was paid 45K to my 80K?

While I hear from people like you and other sources that there are H-1Bs being
paid what they're worth, all the cases I actually know something about are
paid significantly less than market or the like (e.g. too many cases of more
expensive, experienced US citizens and permanent residents being replaced by
cheaper H-1Bs; we've been reading in the general news about some particularly
notorious cases of this happening en masse lately at that California utility
and Disney).

