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Gaming the H-1B system for good

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Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#61

Post by shas3 »

bradleyjg wrote: post #56
shas3 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No country is allowed to get more than 7% of the green cards each year (roughly speaking). This GC-H1B lock-in problem is very unique to Indians (~10 year wait), and to a lesser extent, Chinese (~4 year wait). The 7% quota would be illegal were it applied to US citizenship, according to civil rights legislations of the 1960s (prior to which non-whites were discriminated against in naturalized-citizenships via quotas)…

Although the per country limits hit India and Chinese born beneficiaries in employment based preference categories the worst, there is also a waiting list for Filipinos in employment based third and other workers. In the family based categories, Mexicans and Filipinos generally have the longest waits, with Mexican family first preference (i.e. unmarried children of US citizens) in December 1994 and Filipino fourth pr…

Right! There is one across-the-board solution that occurs to me, let's say, the US has an overall cap of 40,000 for employment based preference category, 2800 each are max caps for Indians and Chinese. Because of the 7% quota, I would expect at least some, let's say, M of the 40,000 are left unclaimed. So why can't they take M unfulfilled slots and redistribute that to clear the China/India backlog?

You can think of the same for EB3, and family petitions too. This would be more equitable than 7% quotas.

Edit: I did back of the envelope calculations based on this data: http://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-studies/immigration-forms... For the last year, there are about 120k applications approved, while 140k is the limit. At the end of the year, the remaining 20k can be split up among people in the queue. This can be made even fairer if you aggregate it over two years, and then tie the number of immigrants to the inflation rate. I estimate it would shave off at least 3-5 years from the current wait times for EB petitions. It can even be tied to the percentage of the country's population that got an H1B. There are some more trends here: https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R42048.pdf

Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#62

Post by vigneshv_psg »

As far as i know, most of the outsourcing companies have a contract with the employee that will make the employee pay a huge fine if he quits them after moving to the US. I'm not sure about the legality of this, but a lot of companies enforce this somehow.

(source: i'm indian and i have a lot of friends who moved here on a H1B through the 'outsourcing' companies).

Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#63

Post by silveira »

anovikov wrote: post #4

Is it the lottery in the literal sense? I.e. are applicants who match the requirements and wanted by employers are randomly selected just as the DV lottery winners are?

No. If you are talking about the H1B lottery, the applications are of a candidate-company-position. When there are too many applications, there is a lottery to select applications that will be examined. After examination, your application can be selected or denied (or they ask for more information). If you are selected, then you are going to work for the company-position of your application. If you pay for the premium process service, the answer of the examination is faster.

Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#64

Post by lsc »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #57
lobster_johnson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paying below-market salaries is illegal. The visa has a minimum wage that is defined by your position (developer, designer, etc.). Edit: Of course, one could argue that the wage tables used by the government aren't "market".

Right, but 66k is market rate according to the government for an SF based Level 1 Computer Programmer...

Even if that was fair for a level 1 computer programmer, (which it isn't) - part of your negotiation process is slotting you in to the title that pays what you want;

I currently have the label SysAdmin, but you could easily call me a programmer, a systems engineer or a devops engineer, because my job role includes all those things.

(As an aside, sysadmin is the lowest-paid of all of those titles, which suggests that I could get a raise by finding an employer willing to call my role something more expensive.)

Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#65

Post by ulobabacan »

shas3 wrote: post #46
harichinnan wrote: post #19

I was on H1B with a true blue American startup. They developed cold feet when it came closer to sponsoring Green Cards. To start with GC wage levels are much higher than H1B levels. Also close to 15K+ needs to be spent for processing+ years of patient follow up to USCIS queries/denials and surprise site inspections. The new fangled startups won't have the long term strategy/planning to get me a green card. I had much…

No country is allowed to get more than 7% of the green cards each year (roughly speaking). This GC-H1B lock-in problem is very unique to Indians (~10 year wait), and to a lesser extent, Chinese (~4 year wait). The 7% quota would be illegal were it applied to US citizenship, according to civil rights legislations of the 1960s (prior to which non-whites were discriminated against in naturalized-citizenships via quotas)…

I'm curious, how long is the lock-in for people from "rest of the world" category for H1B to green card process? It looks like there's almost no backlog these days.

Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#66

Post by harichinnan »

sytelus wrote: post #59

Whole H1B system is essentially modern form of slavery. I've seen people becoming multi-millionaires exploiting this slavery system. Companies in India have amassed massive revenues exploiting the same. The way it works is you put advertise in newspaper for minimum expected wage for tech worker. Then you buy a genius 3rd world tech worker and sell him/her to clients for approximately twice that rate. Then you put sig…

Using the term slavery for describing a highly paid white collar job is doing disservice to the descendants of slaves. Let's not get too far with the terminology.

Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#67

Post by [deleted] »

kgp7 wrote: post #15

This assumes that the H1B's filed by the outsourcing companies are engineers your startup would want to hire. Unfortunately thats not true, most good quality engineers are almost never employed by these outsourcing firms. The general nature of their work also is mostly maintenance based , and it tends to attract bottom of the barrel 'engineers' who often couldn't find any other job. I am skeptical whether any of thes…

[deleted]

Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#68

Post by djb_hackernews »

padiyar83 wrote: post #39
djb_hackernews wrote: post #24

I sort of like this except startups typically pay below market salaries which is sort of against the spirit of the H1-B visa right? And if the startups aren't paying below market salaries then why do they need H1-Bs? Suppose I am an SF based startup and I get a candidate from triplebyte that is on H1-B and is paid 66k by a body shop as a Level 1 Computer Programmer [0] but she is obviously talented and got taken adva…

Its a myth that H1b visa employees are not paid in par with local employees and are hired solely to save/cut costs, you cannot make that allegation without data that shows the wage gap between H1 vs non H1 workers, keeping all other factors same. Yes some outsourcing companies do pay less, but that's not the industry norm, most companies that hire H1b visa holders as direct employees (as opposed to contracting them f…

I didn't make that allegation, but studies have shown that H1-Bs are underpaid compared to their peers [0][1][2](however I'm positive employers are paying them legally based on the prevailing wage data they've chosen to use to describe the visa holders skills). Plus in simple supply demand economics it's obvious, at least to me.

[0] http://www.programmersguild.org/archives/howtounderpay.htm

[1] http://cis.org/PayScale-H1BWages

[2] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/the-bogus-high-tech...

Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#69

Post by tosseraccount »

shas3 wrote: post #51
tosseraccount wrote: post #22

A scholarly take on the guest worker visas from Civil Rights advocate Norm Matloff ... [ http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b10min.html ] ... major attraction for employers, especially in Silicon Valley, is the "handcuffed" status of H-1Bs ... There is no tech labor shortage. No study, other than those sponsored by the industry, has ever shown a shortage.

> There is no tech labor shortage. "Tech labor shortage" is not a clear-cut black-and-white issue. The market is not fully elastic to easily use terms such as 'shortage', etc. Say, you need to build a team of 5 machine learning scientist with specific experience in image recognition, there may be 100 people in the country specializing in this field, and perhaps 10 of them are the job market, and 7 are international c…

Are you saying high tech is not really affected by supply and demand like other industries? Many industries claim they need special laws. How is Silicon Valley different than any other business?

Re: Gaming the H-1B system for good

#70

Post by djb_hackernews »

shas3 wrote: post #51
tosseraccount wrote: post #22

A scholarly take on the guest worker visas from Civil Rights advocate Norm Matloff ... [ http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b10min.html ] ... major attraction for employers, especially in Silicon Valley, is the "handcuffed" status of H-1Bs ... There is no tech labor shortage. No study, other than those sponsored by the industry, has ever shown a shortage.

> There is no tech labor shortage. "Tech labor shortage" is not a clear-cut black-and-white issue. The market is not fully elastic to easily use terms such as 'shortage', etc. Say, you need to build a team of 5 machine learning scientist with specific experience in image recognition, there may be 100 people in the country specializing in this field, and perhaps 10 of them are the job market, and 7 are international c…

why would only 10% of qualified individuals be on the market? Wouldn't all of them be? Unless you are counting retired, infirmed, and imprisoned?

Generally skilled engineers are great for training programs.

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