The H1-B visa program sucks. It indentures the immigrant to their employer. If their job sucks their options are really limited.
There's virtually no other path to get a skilled worker into the US.
L1, H1B1, O1, etc.
Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
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Re: Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
#32The H1B program needs to be ended immediately. It's an outrageous giveaway to corporations. It represents deliberate attempt to reduce the relative price of labor in the American economy.
Re: Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
#33It needs to be much easier to switch employers on H1B so that workers are not abused.
There are also needs to be a bidding process. It's absurd that a small company that is desperate to hire someone for $400k needs to participate in the same lottery as a megacorp paying $60k that doesn't really care whether or not they can hire a particular candidate.
It is, supposedly, a program for highly skilled workers and not a low wage worker program.
Re: Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
#34I don't understand H1B visa program. Shouldn't we be forcing the H1B grantees to become citizens? Instead, we're training them on how to be a modern tech worker, and then shipping them back to where they came once the job is over (assuming that they can't line up another company to foot the legal bills of taking over their visa).
Why? We have 700,000 new citizens every year. Let's make H1B part of the path-to-citizenship... either they're a citizen within 2 years, or they're done. It'll add 10% increase to citizens every year, but these will be high-salary, well-trained, employed citizens.
Re: Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
#35The H1B program needs to be ended immediately. It's an outrageous giveaway to corporations. It represents deliberate attempt to reduce the relative price of labor in the American economy.
But that hasn't happened. Tech jobs have only increased in value. We still need more tech workers, and can't train them fast enough.
Instead, we should be forcing citizenship on workers, encouraging them to stay here, start a family, etc. These are among the smartest and well-educated people in their former countries, and we have space for them.
Re: Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's virtually no other path to get a skilled worker into the US.
L1, H1B1, O1, etc.
Unless you already work at the company you can't get a L1.
And H1B1s are for Singaporean and Chileans only. Hardly a meaningful impact on the US immigration system.
TN for Canadians & Mexicans are not visa and don't allow immigration intent.
Getting an O1 visa is non-trivial (otherwise all the people who don't get H1B's would get one)
The wait for getting a green card based on a job application is very long - practically no one goes that way.
The US doesn't have a points-based skilled worker immigration system like many other countries do.
Re: Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
#37You cannot, as a culture, simultaneously underplay the importance of science and math education (nerds!!!) and complain when immigrants come in to occupy the high tech jobs. There is a big outrage about lack of high-paying jobs, yet there is rampant anti-intellectualism and discouragement of critical and analytical thinking which is needed for those jobs.
I actually don't think "nerds!!!" is much of a thing any more - much of our cultural output is based around comic books and fantasy stories, the likes of which were regarded as nerdy persuits when I was a teenager. I think people are happy to describe science and math education as important, they're just not happy to pay for it. Decades of underinvestment in public education results in undereducated people, but no-on…
Agree - "nerds" today may not necessarily be the coolest kids in the room, but they aren't typed as social outcasts either. This is of course location dependent.
Re: Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I am sympathetic, perhaps those countries should solve these problems rather than emitting emigrants. The interval between opening new coal fired plants in China is on the order of days. If it wasn't possible to confuse H1B status with indentured servitude and wages were rising in the US, it would be a different thing. H1B makes feasible a lousy management style that perpetuates bad practice, which results in l…
That is ridiculous. It's trivial for a someone on H1B to switch employers.
That's simply false. It is anything but trivial.
Re: Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
#39The H1B program needs to be ended immediately. It's an outrageous giveaway to corporations. It represents deliberate attempt to reduce the relative price of labor in the American economy.
But that hasn't happened. Tech jobs have only increased in value. We still need more tech workers, and can't train them fast enough. Instead, we should be forcing citizenship on workers, encouraging them to stay here, start a family, etc. These are among the smartest and well-educated people in their former countries, and we have space for them.
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Re: Don't Give Silicon Valley More H1B Visas
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I am sympathetic, perhaps those countries should solve these problems rather than emitting emigrants. The interval between opening new coal fired plants in China is on the order of days. If it wasn't possible to confuse H1B status with indentured servitude and wages were rising in the US, it would be a different thing. H1B makes feasible a lousy management style that perpetuates bad practice, which results in l…
Unless you're a native american, someone could have made the same claim about your own ancestors, back in the day, no?
Of course they could have. So by the same reasoning, people in China must put up with polluted cities as an inevitibilty?
I have to know that hydraulic fracturing hasn't caught on in China. The barriers are bizarre, but they're still barriers. With fracking, those could be gas fired plants. We're talking < $10B in investment to fix that problem. So why don't they?