H1B is a pain-in-the-ass, plain and simple. It’s designed to hoard a particularly talented and desperate group of people willing to do anything to get into the US and work in big tech.
After the Twitter saga, two of my acquaintances had to leave the US after being sacked. The H1B is tied to your job, and switching employers is incredibly stressful since you need to find someone willing to sponsor you.
If you’re aiming to stay in the US permanently, the path to a green card and eventual citizenship is just as thorny. Many people go there on an H1B, work in big tech, buy houses, get fired, and often leave the US in shambles.
Countries like Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands handle this visa process better. If you work in tech, you get a Blue Card that transitions into a green card in three years, and then you can apply for citizenship after five. After a year, your visa is no longer tied to your employer, so you can switch jobs. But these countries suffer from bureaucracy and extreme language fragmentation. It’s hard to get excited about learning German and joining a local tech company for peanuts in salary.
In my experience, Canada does an excellent job where this program fails. I entered on the high skill “express entry” visa for a tech job. After 18 months we had permanent residency. After 3.5 years, we had citizenship. It was all online and easy enough for us to do ourselves with minimal stress.
During the express entry period where you are employer sponsored, unlike in the US, if you get fired, you have until your visa expires to find another sponsoring job (the visa is valid for 5 years IIRC).
I’m pretty happy with how it went and glad we can settle, I’m not sure we would have chosen Canada if a rapid permanent path hadn’t been clear up front.
Were you very specialized in a certain field, filling a senior position?
As a Canadian with a CS degree who's been trying to get into tech for years, this is horrible to hear. We have thousands of new grads in Canada who end up working in fast food because they get passed over for cheaper immigrants. I've seen it first hand, all my tech friends have seen it. We're worse than the US for this, and we have even less tech jobs here.
We don't need to be bring more entry level talent, we have tons of that not being utilized here.
There's plenty of talk about greedy corporations until the topic of using immigration to increase their profits comes up. Then it's silence.
I was coming in as a ‘normal’ developer design manager, but that is likely fairly specialized. I’m guessing that was in my favor. I know others with a couple of years engineering experience under their belt having a similar experience. But yes, the lack of jobs can be an issue. Lots of folks I know, myself included, now working remote for US-based companies.
In tech in Canada, usually we aren’t hiring immigrants because they’re cheaper—visas, moving someone, etc, is a huge expense. It’s often more that they’re the best possible fit for the role. After Covid with remote work etc, I don’t think there’s as much of that immigration going on, though—I don’t know of many Canadian companies sponsoring right now.
The entry positions are FLOODED with new comers. We aren't hiring them because they're the best fit, we have plenty of unemployed locals begging for work. To say we only bring in the best because we cannot fill the roles is a blatant lie.
You sound like you're describing senior position, which I would say is fair.
This was probably true a few years ago, but Canada’s tech market has shrunk a lot. I had the option to move to Canada or Germany, and I chose the latter, even though I wasn’t happy about having to pick up German and dealing with EU bureaucracies. I had trouble finding a well-paid job in Canada that would give me an okay lifestyle in somewhere that's not Alberta.
The market is still going, it’s just pretty tight right now, yeah. For what it’s worth, I lived in Europe for 5 years (NL) before this and honestly I think you’ve made a great choice there too. I learned a lot working in the Netherlands, and there’s lots of great things about living there you can’t find in North America. I miss not being bound to a car!
It's remote and gets extremely cold in the winter. Life is sort of lonely there if you come from a warmer region. However, at least for me, all the opportunities I was getting was there.
>After the Twitter saga, two of my acquaintances had to leave the US after being sacked. The H1B is tied to your job, and switching employers is incredibly stressful since you need to find someone willing to sponsor you.
Easiest way to fix this issue. Tie the Visa to a state or federal government. They check in and can stay as long as they are working in X industry in potentially Y state. Still not as easy to move, but the company has much less leverage to keep an H1B hostage.
> It’s hard to get excited about learning German and joining a local tech company for peanuts in salary.
I don't know about Germany but in the Netherlands there is also a minimum income restriction in order to get a knowledge worker visa. I would be surprised if Germany didn't have one as well.
As far as I know, the Blue card income requirement is the same across the EU, and also quite a bit higher than the HSV income requirement in the Netherlands. If you have a choice, the Blue card is better as it gives more mobility and more time to find a new job if you get fired (in general, I think it's the same for the first 6 months).
It does have an income requirement. In Germany, it’s around 50k Euros per year, and many companies just pay the bare minimum.
That said, I was fairly lucky and found something that isn’t terrible, so I moved. Other than the language barrier, I don’t have many complaints. I’ve heard the language situation is better in the Netherlands than in Germany.
BlueCard has very specific floor too. The Op describing the process using some super utopian terms excluding all the same thorny bits but I suspect Op is not familiar with the requirements too.
I went through the process a year ago, and it wasn’t easy. Yes, there’s a minimum income requirement, and European bureaucracy is a nightmare. On top of that, salaries here are peanuts compared to what I used to make.
While the US is more expensive and its healthcare system can be a pain, I still managed to save more money there than I can now. Europe is just poorer, and the tech industry is much smaller. In terms of opportunities, cities like Berlin, Amsterdam, or London don’t even come close to North Carolina, let alone SF/ NYC.
On top of that, the language barrier is frustrating—I can’t imagine anyone being thrilled about learning a new language, earning less, and working in relative obscurity. Still, I moved because dealing with the H1B process in the US was even worse.
> I still managed to save more money there than I can now. Europe is just poorer,
In Europe (at least speaking from the perspective of the Netherlands) a lot of money / resources go to fee's employer have to pay, unlimited sick days, maternity leave (also for men), protection from getting fired, the fact that you have more humane rights with your blue card then a H1B, etc. That stuff costs a society money and someone has to pay for that. It's all money which is there, but you don't get to "see it" because often it is paid directly by employers. It is basically all wealth redistribution which is simply not there in the US. So sure, it means you will be able to pocket less money, but that doesn't directly mean there is less money in the system.
It's 3-4 years these days, unless you qualify for EB-1. Every step in the process takes a few months longer than it used to.
But those numbers are not comparable. In most European countries, you first spend a number of years on a temporary residence permit, and then you can apply for permanent residence. That application typically takes less than a year to process. In the US, you can apply for permanent residence any time, but the application process takes several years.
It's not about foreign relations but how long the queue is.
The current date for India (Employment-based green cards) is most backlogged, followed by China, Mexico, Philippines, and Others (Others being its own category).
I saw it first hand. My Indian colleagues mentioned that their queue to transition from H1B to green card is impossibly long. It’s just how the numbers work. There are just too many Indians applicants and not enough seats.
This is presumably about the per-country limits on H1Bs- i.e. most countries aren't hitting their quota, so if you apply for one as a citizen of most countries, the wait is comparatively minimal.
What do you mean? My green card application has been pending for 9 years. Based on current projections I won’t get it in less than 100 years or so. Indian. This is a well known fact.
Indeed. As you should. Indians and Chinese are no longer considered minorities in the US, so it makes sense to curb the influx.
However, the problem is that the US tech market is volatile, with zero job security. Since H1B makes it difficult to switch employers, tech companies often exploit this and pay these workers disproportionately. On top of that, there’s always the looming risk of getting fired before securing a green card, and the stress of that hangs over you constantly. This part could definitely be improved.
Not saying it is the actual reason, but one rationale is that you don't want a sudden influx of a single demographic taking over the nation and disproportionately affect policy making and culture.
It would take 100 years for a single demographic if they were using all the 65000 annual H1B visas to reach 2% of the population assuming the population doesn’t grow for a century.
First, are we talking about the green card or H1B? There is no quota on H1B and we already see a shift in culture and demographic in many companies.
Second, an immigrant can take their spouse, have kids, sponsor their families' visas, etc. Any one of these will double their demographic's representation, and they are not mutually exclusive, i.e. it can easily be triple or quadruple, or more.
How about no quota at all based on nationality (actually place of birth) when you already have a limit of 65k visas a year being apportioned by lottery.
The quota is fixed per country. For India and China it gets filled immediately. So the sentiment is that they’re no longer considered minority as quotas from other countries are barely filled.
There is a quota for the number of H1B visa holders who have then additionally been sponsored by their company (something which costs a company $20k at a minimum) that can get permanent residency in a year.
And honestly, it's kind of nuts, when you think about it. For India at least, it's better compared to the EU than a 'country'. The concept of 'India' is like 'Christendom'. It describes a very broad cultural region. But realistically, the gulf between culture in one state in India and another is as different as the gulf in culture between the UK and France. It's a bizarre accident of history that they even are under one sovereign jurisdiction. The languages are different (even more diverse than Europe, since there's two independent language families), the writing system is different, the food is different, the religion is different (despite what everyone says, Hinduism is a broad spectrum of beliefs; it's like classifying Judaism and Islam together as the same thing not to mention massive non-Dharmic cultural groups that have also been there a very long time and are sufficiently 'Indian').
That is to say... if the goal is diversity, which is a good goal, you should probably split some of these larger countries up. Especially countries like India which are not dominated by any one ethnic group. There is no equivalent to the Han Chinese in India.
Unfortunately, the basic precept here seems to be 'has brown skin' makes you exactly the same as anyone else with brown skin, which leads to absurdities, such as California's old anti-miscegenation law that considered Indians and Mexicans the same race.
I was suggesting a limit based on subnational distinctions or another form of delineation. Although in general, I tend to be anti immigration, so I would rather just see a total cap and no quota.
India has had those borders long, long before the British. It was initially formed under the Mauryan empire in 300BC and quite a few times again since then. Infact if you consider the Mauryans, Mughals and the British, India has had these borders for 1000s of years.
India has had those borders in the same way the 'greater Mediterranean' has had those borders.
Mauryans were an empire which means that they ruled over disparate nations
No the country of India is in fact not at all united. The various jatis worship different gods, speak different languages, have distinct cultures. Just because they all celebrate a few holidays in common and have some shared cultural beliefs does not make them the same
This is like saying every Roman Catholic is an Italian.
Lastly, the Mauryans never ruled all the way to South India. This is the first time in history the entirety of 'Bharat' has been under one polity (although arguably with the exclusion of Pakistan and Bangladesh, even this is wrong).
Every place in the world was small disparate kingdoms until the rise of nation states. If anything India has been united longer than almost any other place in the world.
Since when does a country mean a single cultural group? By that metric Switzerland, Russia, the UK, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Central Asia, most of SE Asia, any country in Africa, large parts of the Middle East and South America are not countries. For that matter, all of China isn’t Han Chinese, there are Tibetans, Mongolians, Uyghurs, Zhuang, Hui etc.
This is the problem (from the article):
In addition to Big Tech companies, consulting firms like Cognizant, Tata and Infosys are also among the largest recipients of H-1B visas, providing tech companies with a steady pipeline of highly educated, well-trained employees willing to work on contract.
The workers brought in by Cognizant, Tata and Infosys are actually not highly skilled, and they undercut American workers. Their use of H-1B visas should be limited, and the visas should be reserved for highly paid workers who work for Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and so on.
By the laws, an H1B is not cheap. No big corps would pay them much lower than what they are already paying citizens at the same position. Then add on lawyers and sponsorship fees and having an H1B is much more costly than hiring citizens.
The fact that H1B is still being favorable despite higher cost speaks volume about how it really is. In many ways, H1B is one of the reasons the US is so competitive. It takes in talents (like it or not, many H1B are just as good or more skilled than a native), force them to work much harder than a regular resident would ever want to, make them pay taxes on incomes that are higher than natives, then discard them after a few years since not everyone can have residency or can wait that long.
A H1B will always avoid conflict, keep their head down, and straight up afraid of even being anywhere near a crime much less committing it. They are an ideal underclass that can be exploited easily.
And for that reason, in capitalist America, H1B will not go away. They will try to fix some abuses, raise the barrier, make things slightly more difficult, etc. But the F1 to H1B gravy train will continue. An obvious way is to favor US degree holders to make the expensive universities here more attractive, limit abuses, while still cater to the anti-immigrant crowd.
I bet if there is a H1B reform, this will very likely be one of the changes.
We've changed the title now. Submitted title was "Why tech giants can't stop hoarding H-1B visas". It's possible that's what the article originally had; they change sometimes.
Honestly the choices are:
a) letting workers in who will work for reasonable wages, put in a solid shift, pay generous taxes, who will most likely never seeing a penny of social security or medicare benefits
b) outsource to Bangalore for much cheaper
In my biased Indian view, unless something drastically changes, the proposition of 20+ years on a Green Card queue is looking a lot less appealing for a software person, especially if they are talented.
After the Twitter saga, two of my acquaintances had to leave the US after being sacked. The H1B is tied to your job, and switching employers is incredibly stressful since you need to find someone willing to sponsor you.
If you’re aiming to stay in the US permanently, the path to a green card and eventual citizenship is just as thorny. Many people go there on an H1B, work in big tech, buy houses, get fired, and often leave the US in shambles.
Countries like Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands handle this visa process better. If you work in tech, you get a Blue Card that transitions into a green card in three years, and then you can apply for citizenship after five. After a year, your visa is no longer tied to your employer, so you can switch jobs. But these countries suffer from bureaucracy and extreme language fragmentation. It’s hard to get excited about learning German and joining a local tech company for peanuts in salary.
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