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H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

economist.com

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Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#101
post #80
post #10

"Given that the unemployment rate for college graduates sits at 2.5%, it is fair to say that most native workers displaced by H-1Bs land on their feet." That's completely ignoring the fact that if you have cheaper workers, you end up being underpaid and/or doing a job you'd rather not be doing. Unemployment rate alone don't tell the whole story, and failing to acknowledge that sounds like poor/partial journalism to m…

Average US salary is 45k. Median is 30k. You would think we could train some US persons to do these high skilled jobs. They may like the raise.

The last twenty years have been about deprofessionalization, not professionalization.

Indian universities are terrible but are getting slightly better, US universities have been getting worse over time but are still better.

But the process is about just getting enough numbers - why improve an education system when you can just harvest the small percentage of people who learn despite the poor quality - you only need so many skilled people, after all. The people running this don't care about your average American or Indian but they know there are a lot of Indians.

Training people the usual way costs money and requires an education system where the educators aren't disposable themselves. That's not in the spirit of creating a few highly skilled, energetic, disposable folks who will work 14 hours/day for 10-20 years, squandering their only relatively high salaries until they are replaced by the next batch, with the entire workforce indentured by debt (or visa conditions) despite the poor quality of the education involved.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#102
post #87
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the market already tried that, with pretty poor results.

What exactly do you mean? All the major US tech companies (and plenty of minor ones as well) have huge India offices. If they were delivering "pretty poor results", they wouldn't still be operating.

I can't speak for all major US tech companies, but I can speak for my experience at a major US financial firm, household name, etc. A couple years ago they did the old dump the American devs and move everything to India. I'm the American team lead. The difference, as far as I can tell, is that the time to market for new features has doubled or tripled. This isn't because the Indian devs/QA are lower quality, they're about the same. The cause for all our problems is communication barriers and the time zone problems. All of our customers are in the US. Every single question that goes in either direction takes at least a 24 hour turnaround. God forbid there's some confusion, then there's 2-3 back and forths with a 24-hour turnaround each time until someone decides they're willing to stay up until midnight to have a phone conversation. Not having seen the books I assume this looks a lot better on paper. Where it will hurt is is ten years down the road when our lack of velocity/innovation catches up to us and a more agile competitor eats us alive. If we were in a faster moving market (consumer finance is pretty slow) that ten year timeline would be much faster.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#103
post #7

Article's concluding sentences: "Reducing the number of visas for TCS and its brethren would probably result in them shifting work to India. A better change would be to end the rule whereby H-1B recipients must stay with the company that sponsored them. For within their ranks may lurk the next Elon Musk or Sergey Brin." Personally I find this line of thought (cliche?) frustrating. Not just because apparently us prole…

| ... isn't this a somewhat empirically testable proposition? That is, how many Musk-like or Brin-like individuals have come through TCS or Wipro or Infosys on a H-1B so far?

You're asking to see results for something that is prohibited and presenting its absence as evidence.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#104
post #5

Related, Trump's executive order from today which mentions H-1Bs : https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/04/18/presi... And a quote from the NYT article[1]: “This does nothing,” said Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader. “Like all the other executive orders, it’s just words — he’s calling for new studies. It’s not going to fix the problem. It’s not going to create a single job.” [1] h…

In a pro-union pro-local Democrat administration, that Executive Order would be hailed by Schumer as the most fantastic thing since sliced bread.

Not that I agree with Trump, but Schumer is a complete hack.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#105

I went through the entire comment thread and feel like you guys are missing a lot of the H1B benefits by focusing just on tech and the effect of the Indian consultancies. Most PhDs, specially in STEM, math, stats, econ, etc. are not American. And almost all of them end up with a H1B visa at some point if they remain in the US. It might be lottery based if you go to work at any firm, or quota-free if it is in academia…

I don't think that anyone is wanting people working on self driving cars to not get a visa. I think the bigger question is if H1Bs are being abused to get cheaper labor for not well skilled positions. Raising the minimum wage for H1B positions is a pretty good way to filter that out.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#106
post #99

Regardless of where these jobs are going, H1-Bs are used for the cheap labor, not the best skills. This system has been abused especially by the financial services corporations. First hand experience: If you have an open request to hire, you are required to first look to one of the few outsourcing firms we have a contract with. You cannot post the job for external until you have searched for the "best" person within…

American Apparel and Dov Charney tried the hire american model and it was successful until he was forced out.

Well, sort of. American Apparel hired thousands of undocumented workers who were (arguably) not American.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#107

I went through the entire comment thread and feel like you guys are missing a lot of the H1B benefits by focusing just on tech and the effect of the Indian consultancies. Most PhDs, specially in STEM, math, stats, econ, etc. are not American. And almost all of them end up with a H1B visa at some point if they remain in the US. It might be lottery based if you go to work at any firm, or quota-free if it is in academia…

I am glad that you are here, both doing your work, and commenting on HN! Thank you for your contributions, and you are appreciated.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#108
post #30

Easiest solution is to inflation adjust min salary of $60,000 set back in 1989 and have the limit follow inflation. Lawmakers have this tendency to not build in inflation adjustments(eg: AMT tax limit,min wage) which causes lot issues down the road.

Ugly side to it is that non H1B salaries growth is behind inflation.

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#109
post #29
post #5

Related, Trump's executive order from today which mentions H-1Bs : https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/04/18/presi... And a quote from the NYT article[1]: “This does nothing,” said Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader. “Like all the other executive orders, it’s just words — he’s calling for new studies. It’s not going to fix the problem. It’s not going to create a single job.” [1] h…

>Like all the other executive orders, it’s just words The hypocrisy here is truly disgusting. One moment, executive orders are the end of the world. The next moment, they don't mean anything at all. If a person can't see past this man's partisanship, then they are hopeless; when reason and logic are out the window, it's over. For those who want evidence from the mouth of Chuck Schumer himself [1]: >Schumer said that…

"The hypocrisy here is truly disgusting. One moment, executive orders are the end of the world. The next moment, they don't mean anything at all."

Talking about different orders which say different things, one which actually does change rules and one which simply directs an agency to "perform a study", doesn't seem hypocritical at all.

>If a person can't see past this man's partisanship, then they are hopeless; when reason and logic are out the window, it's over.

It doesn't seem to be quite reasonable or logical to treat two things which say different things the same.

>It's like politicians aren't even pretending anymore. The thing that kills me is that people actually buy this stuff. Maybe Chuck is right about the executive order on immigration. Maybe he's right that executive orders do nothing at all. But he's definitely not right about both things.

They're two different orders. Is it not logical that they could have two different effects?

Re: H-1B visas mainly go to Indian outsourcing firms

#110

I went through the entire comment thread and feel like you guys are missing a lot of the H1B benefits by focusing just on tech and the effect of the Indian consultancies. Most PhDs, specially in STEM, math, stats, econ, etc. are not American. And almost all of them end up with a H1B visa at some point if they remain in the US. It might be lottery based if you go to work at any firm, or quota-free if it is in academia…

Thing is, nobody wants that effect. We want the PhDs. What we do not want it companies that bring in cheap barely-qualified labour for cost-cutting. This hurts the people brought in (they are stuck in bad jobs with bad pay and no way out). This hurts the local workers who cost too much compared to this effectively-slave-labour.

The hard part changing the rules such that PhDs and other productive uses of H1B do not suffer, but the companies exploiting the rules for slave labour do.

I assure you nobody wants to make you feel unwelcome. In fact we are happy to have you here.

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