Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
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Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
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Re: Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#2Matloff has written about this in many other places over the years, http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1bwritings.html.
He was my CS professor as an undergrad.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#3As headlines go, this one elicits a "Duh."
However, the HN version of the headline omits "Trump is Right:", which I suppose is attention grabbing, especially from an outlet like HuffPo.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#4My co-workers raised a note that H1B no longer relevant so much for the purpose described in headline.
It's much easier to bring workers on L visa - they have even less opportunity to skip jobs or aruge for a raise than H1B holders, and there's no lottery and no limits. Just bring as much people on L as possible.
As far as I know, Microsoft did this with Canada long ago. They hire you and relocate to Canada, then after a year they make L visa for you and toss over the border to Redmond.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#5Feel like many think this is the only use of H-1B. They don't ever hear about how the best employees at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are also H-1B's.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#6My co-workers raised a note that H1B no longer relevant so much for the purpose described in headline. It's much easier to bring workers on L visa - they have even less opportunity to skip jobs or aruge for a raise than H1B holders, and there's no lottery and no limits. Just bring as much people on L as possible. As far as I know, Microsoft did this with Canada long ago. They hire you and relocate to Canada, then aft…
No more cheap labor for SV to exploit.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#7Okay, so obviously, an employment based visa program does create conflicts of interest and in general, is not good for the immigrant employee, compared to a non employment based visa.
However, the claim that immigrant employees are somehow not as good as their American counterparts is based on shoddy logic.
The criteria he uses in his paper to measure this:
- high salary - high rate of patent production - Ph.D. dissertation awards - doctorate earned at a top-ranked university - employment in R&D
Because of issues with the employment based visa, he himself argues earlier in the article that immigrant employees end up with a lower salary.
Top ranked universities don't always admit people based on merit. Being in the country when applying to school and speaking the language have huge advantages. A lot of graduate admissions are on a case by case basis, and getting an in person meeting with the professor can make all the difference. Also, top graduate schools tend to be a lot more expensive.
Employment is R&D is also hampered by the fact that immigrants don't have comparatively fewer choices when looking for a job, again because of issues with employment based visas. This is especially true is you want to do research in aerospace or materials because of security clearances.
Overall, this doesn't give me a lot of confidence in his other analyses.
Disclaimer: I'm an immigrant, so I'm not without my biases here.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#8My co-workers raised a note that H1B no longer relevant so much for the purpose described in headline. It's much easier to bring workers on L visa - they have even less opportunity to skip jobs or aruge for a raise than H1B holders, and there's no lottery and no limits. Just bring as much people on L as possible. As far as I know, Microsoft did this with Canada long ago. They hire you and relocate to Canada, then aft…
L visas are abused like crazy but there are important differences, namely that a company has to employ you for a certain amount of time offshore and that you can not work offsite in the USA. The first rule means they're only available for international companies and the second means they don't work for outsourcing firms.
Usually when people talk about the "H1b" debate they're talking about the whole constellation of skilled temporary worker visas (H1, L1, OPT, etc).
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#9Feel like many think this is the only use of H-1B. They don't ever hear about how the best employees at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are also H-1B's.
> Feel like many think this is the only use of H-1B. They don't ever hear about how the best employees at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are also H-1B's.
Because H-1B visa is broken. Just cause there's a good side to it doesn't mean we can ignore the broken parts.
Take the good parts and fix the bad one.
Worker exploitation is not going to help native workers nor helped international workers.
> They don't ever hear about how the best employees at Microsoft, Google, and Facebook are also H-1B's.
Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.. have caught colluded in wages before.
Re: Silicon Valley Is Using H-1B Visas to Pay Low Wages to Immigrants
#10Okay, so obviously, an employment based visa program does create conflicts of interest and in general, is not good for the immigrant employee, compared to a non employment based visa. However, the claim that immigrant employees are somehow not as good as their American counterparts is based on shoddy logic. The criteria he uses in his paper to measure this: - high salary - high rate of patent production - Ph.D. disse…
The argument isn't that they're not as good as their American peers. The argument is that they're not exceptionally better than their American peers. The stated purpose of the visa program is to bring people in who can do work nobody else can do. But what happens is that companies bring in tons of perfectly ordinary people to do perfectly ordinary work because they want people who are cheaper, younger, and easier to abuse.