The mouse has disappeared into my hand and I've forgotten its existence. When I read your post I remembered how pain free my mousing experience has been lately.
If there are qualified American workers who are looking for work and applying for these positions then no, they should not. Legally they cannot either. Now on the flip side, if there is an actual shortage of qualified workers then sure. But right now, there is no shortage of qualified workers in most of these slots, especially if companies are willing to pay a competitive wage.
I think you need some context here, most of the time, these folks have already gone through the PERM process (at least the legitimate ones, ignoring the fraud for a second), and gotten to the next step, but USCIS will reset them back if they switch jobs. If the candidate is from India, they'll probably do this multiple times in their career because the green card wait time is very long for them. I have a colleague who's not from India, and they got through the process and even got their citizenship in 6 years, for Indians, that it'd take 12 years on average to go from finishing the PERM and getting a greencard (let alone applying for citizenship, which would need 3 more years)
I think you need some context here, most of the time, these folks have already gone through the PERM process (at least the legitimate ones, ignoring the fraud for a second), and gotten to the next step, but USCIS will reset them back if they switch jobs. If the candidate is from India, they'll probably do this multiple times in their career because the green card wait time is very long for them. I have a colleague who's not from India, and they got through the process and even got their citizenship in 6 years, for Indians, it'll take 12 years on average to go from finishing the PERM and getting a green card (let alone applying for citizenship, which would need 3 more years)
Some of these posts make it seem like software engineering is a low skilled job, I beg to differ, it's still a very high skilled job, < .5% of the world knows how to code.
Is it that skilled when it gets taught in 4 years in college while an Electrician has to apprenticeship for 7?
That said, whether software is high-skill or not is tangential to the point I'm making. Which is, H1-B is being used to depress wages and that reworking it shouldn't affect jobs that actually have few people that can do it because O-1 allows them to work that job.
I don't think this is a fair comparison, software development is very complex, but an electricians job isn't, it's very simple but it's high consequence.
Software development may seem simple for a lot of people here on HN, but trust me, I can do the electricians job easily, but an electrician won't be able to do my job. The regulatory environment which requires the "apprenticeship" is a totally different topic and doesn't inform anything on the skill required to do the job. Also, the electrician apprentice gets paid while learning on the job, the software developer in training doesn't.
To the poster (nunez?) who was lamenting about me apparently claiming blue collar jobs are easier (and then deleted it when I was writing this reply):
1. I didn't claim that.
2. Yes, I did say it's "high consequence", but technically, comparing skill to skill, it's MUCH easier. I've done a ton of electrical work (along with plumbing) on our old home, there are a great set of safety rules to follow (and gear to use) before "touching the wrong wire".
> Soon AI can do your job easily, but it can't do an electrician's job.
[he said gleefully]
do you really want an Amercian to lose a job to AI?? Also, why do you think I can't become an electrician after AI apparently "does my job" (or a plumber, I'm a better plumber than an electrician)
anyway, it's fine, you don't seem to have any idea about software development or how AI is actually going to help me more.
I think you might be biased by where you live. In Germany an electrician's apprenticeship is ~3.5 years (and can sometimes be shortened). So while I am not an electrician and have no deeper insight than what friends who are told me, I am reasonably sure our electric installations are not 40%-50% as complex as the ones in your country.
I know electricians that were working within days of being hired with no experience. Apprenticeships are entry level jobs, not minimum certifications. They're also used to gatekeep positions by the unions. It has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the position is "skilled" or not.
And the answer really is that they're both skilled. Neither is more or less unless you're getting much more specific about the roles.
Apprenticeships are just unions gate keeping. Unions only reward seniority so you have to “pay your dues” in terms of time before you’re allowed to make any money.
The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement. The company is just a shell to win the auction and sponsor them. If an auction system were adopted without safeguards, it could turn the H-1B program from a labor-market tool into a plaything for the ultra-wealthy.
> The “employee” isn’t living off an H-1B salary — they’re already wealthy enough to bankroll the whole arrangement
If you are wealthy enough to bankroll this kind of a convoluted method to immigrate to the US (back of the napkin math $150k-250k), you are wealthy enough to bankroll an investor visa to the UK or Canada, invest locally in a business AND THEN target an American investment visa, or marry someone within the diaspora.
People are really overestimating the pull the US has on the truly rich. Most Indian H1Bs tend to be middle class Indians who hit a rut in their career in India, and are using the temporary US experience to land a better role back in India or maybe Canada.
If you are already earning $30-60K TC in the Indian market, the pull factor to earn $90-140k base on an H1B doesn't exist, especially because Green Card backlogs are multidecade long now.
There's a reason most of the H1B abuse is coming from consultancies - they tend to pay in the $3k-20k range. For someone in that bracket, the math of working as a low paid H1B works out.
That's why the H1B market is so bimodal - you have a huge chunk at consultancies who are paid low even by Indian standards and then an equally large chunk of people who are actually pretty elite and successful in India and are working at FAANG or top startups.
As a skilled immigration system, you want to optimize for the right half of the distribution and minimize the left hand side, but if you are too draconian in nature, you disincentivize people who you actually want to attract from coming to the US. India has already started trying to build something similar to the Thousand Talents program for NRIs and PIOs.
IMO, the current changes proposed are a good middle ground, but everything else on HN seems dumb.
about 12 years ago I worked at a very large non-tech company that had outsourced to contractors to work on some code. They had a room in the basement for about 20 kids on H1B visas that were clearly right out of college. This was in a major city that had plenty of jr developers around, they just would expect more money.
I forget the contractors company name but they came up on HN at the time for being abusive towards their employees who risked deportation if they stood up for themselves. If I find specific examples I'll add them later, but you can probably just search hn for h1b.
Yeah, there's plenty of abuse with H1B with those consulting companies operating out of India and shipping people overseas, I don't believe many of them would qualify for the H1B. That said, many folks who come here to study and get hired by companies (usually, for their specialization in a masters degree for most foreign students) also apply for a H1B.
I don't understand your "low wage" argument though, aren't there laws against it currently? they need to be paid at least the prevailing wage in their location/job level.
The statute creating the H-1B visa—which allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated workers as well as fashion models from abroad—contains language establishing a “prevailing wage.”4 This prevailing wage requirement is intended to protect the wages of U.S. workers in occupations requiring a college degree from adverse impacts and to prevent college-educated migrant workers from being underpaid and exploited. Corporate lobbyists and other H-1B proponents often cite this prevailing wage requirement in the H-1B law as evidence that H-1B workers cannot be paid less than U.S. workers. However, the reality is that the H-1B statute, regulations, and administrative guidance allow employers wide latitude in setting wage levels....
Although salary information that corresponds to requested positions on LCAs has been made available by DOL for a number of years through the Office of Foreign Labor Certification’s LCA disclosure data, until recently the prevailing wage levels selected by employers were not readily available. In 2011, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for the first time reported what some had suspected and speculated about but to that point were not able to officially confirm: The vast majority of H-1B jobs were being certified by DOL at the two lowest wage levels.
Fraud should be curbed and punished, but I don't understand why the visa itself is bad because of this, that's like saying people speed and break traffic laws, therefore we must ban vehicles entirely.
Or the ultimate work-around, pay then the same and work them twice as hard. Boom, half the wage and nobody can tell!
How many of these consulting companies just have the most awful, toxic company culture imaginable? I don't think that's a coincidence - that's a purposefully engineered cost saving strategy.
Isn't it directly influencing prevailing wage? When H1-B dominates a sector then I'm competing with H1-B and am forced into that existing wage not the other way around. If I don't want to work in that environment because it fucking sucks well guess who's getting a green card? Whole thing is rotten and software industry is going to become the new "going postal".
The mouse has disappeared into my hand and I've forgotten its existence. When I read your post I remembered how pain free my mousing experience has been lately.