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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

#211

Post by neeleshs »

gragas wrote: post #200

>I assure you, most american-born students get a free pass in stanford/berkeley/CMU if you pit them against a foreign-born. You have no idea what you're talking about. I have first hand experience with this and Americans don't "get a free pass" by any means. Also, what about black people and hispanic people? Are they the lowest earners in America by far because they "don't want to make $$"? According to common consen…

I'm genuinely curious to know what you are implying here. Indians in the US are making highest median income because of some kind of racism/cronyism favoring them? I always thought it's because a significant percentage (not all) who immigrate are at the top already

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

#212

Post by siquick »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #123
weirdstuff wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That line of thought crossed my mind, as well.

every person (us born, immigrant, or even outside the US), organization (foreign, domestic, corporation, non-profit, et al) is entitled to say "I am America". we might be the only country like that.

> we might be the only country like that.

Why?

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

#213

Post by whitenoice »

hiram112 wrote: post #196
rajathagasthya wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in any case, we should let every person seeking higher education in the US work indefinitely in this country This is the discussion that's always missing whenever H1B is discussed anywhere. It always gets hijacked by Indian IT companies abusing the system. Does the administration have a plan on how to deal with students who get their degrees from US universities, who also seek H1Bs to work? If they don't make this…

> Guess who benefits then? Not the US. If demand at US universities goes down, they might just have to reduce prices. Yeah that would certainly suck for the millions of recent college grads working gig jobs, indebted with tens of thousands of dollars.

More than students it would suck for universities, less funding, less infrastructure growth, it would cause a domino effect. If not US then somewhere else, students will figure it out, they are young but it will have a long lasting effect on US. If talented students don't have options out side their home country they will improve the conditions of their home country and cause less brain drain. Especially China and India considering their population.

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

#214

Post by robryan »

finid wrote: post #120
joe_the_user wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Indian universities are terrible... That's a very broad statement. They are so terrible they manage to produce engineers and scientists who then come here and other parts of the world for higher degrees.

A more accurate statement might be that non top tier universities are terrible?

After doing a little hiring of Indians and working with them I get the impression that the top tier universities are pretty good, but the second tier and below are a lot worse in comparison to similarly ranked institutions in the US.

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

#215

Post by cbanek »

gragas wrote: post #178
jeffjose wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans don't get PhDs because graduate schools are flooded with applications from those trying to gain entry to the US. Once in industry foreigners tend to hire only members of their own race further discouraging Americans from pursuing advanced degrees. That's not true. The American Universities don't choose to admit foreign students just because. The good schools always try to balance the mix of students admit…

>That's not true. The American Universities don't choose to admit foreign students just because. The good schools always try to balance the mix of students admitted into the program. Then why do Indians make up more than 30% of my school's CS program, despite them making up less than 1% of the US population?

One thing to remember is that colleges do take a lot of international students, specifically because they pay a lot more in tuition generally than in-state tuition.

http://www.businessinsider.com/foreign-students-pay-up-to-th...

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

#216

Post by shouldbworking »

spangry wrote: post #156
weirdstuff wrote: post #13

On these more controversial political threads: How are certain accounts instantaneously downvoted to dead on HN, within single-digit seconds? Seems automated but entirely too hard to tell. For example, l3m0ndr0p (yeah, I'm totally him/her) made an "America first" type of comment. I know that doesn't play well with a lot of HNers, but seeing it instantly downvoted to dead was weird, too. I know there's a left-ish bias…

Reading through l3m0ndr0p's comment history is quite a surreal experience. Almost every one of their posts is downvoted to grey, even the extremely uncontroversial and mundane ones. I can get how, with a comment history like that, whatever algos HN has running might automatically drop them to the bottom of the page since it would just run blindly on whatever metrics it sees. What I find harder to understand is how th…

The account is likely shadowdead or some variant of it. A lot of places have a "silent ban" to stop unwanted trolls from continuing to make accounts.

The "silent" part means the user is cajoled into believing they're not banned. One of the ways to do this is to not kill their comments until a couple people reply to them. That way the system can tell them they have +3 votes or whatever when in reality nobody after the first 2 minutes even sees their post. If nobody ever replied to them it would look suspicious.

Not totally sure that's whats happening but it looks like it

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

#217

Post by maksimum »

gragas wrote: post #200

>I assure you, most american-born students get a free pass in stanford/berkeley/CMU if you pit them against a foreign-born. You have no idea what you're talking about. I have first hand experience with this and Americans don't "get a free pass" by any means. Also, what about black people and hispanic people? Are they the lowest earners in America by far because they "don't want to make $$"? According to common consen…

> I can say without a doubt in my mind that there is enormous cronyism and nepotism going on in the US.

And do you have any evidence that is more than anecdotal?

FWIW (not much) I am finishing up a CS PhD, and there are many Indian students in our grad department, and many Chinese in undergrad. Haven't seen much favoritism towards these groups at either grad or undergrad (by my observations TAing) over the 5 years I've been here.

It's crazy to me that not only you think there is epidemic cronyism, but that you also have "no doubt" about your beliefs...

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

#218

Post by virtuabhi »

A few questions.

Is "free" trade possible without "free" labor mobility? Currently, 11 of the top 15 tech companies in India are American. For most of the multinational US companies, India (not EU, not China) is the biggest consumer (after US) or growth region. So how many Indians should be employed by the American companies (both tech and non-tech) active in Indian market? Should Indians be working on localization only or on the core technology? It seems to me, at current H-1B levels, the balance is heavily skewed towards trade rather than labor mobility.

Also how does H-1B decrease the salaries of Americans? H-1B makes American companies more competitive. And they are able to sell products in more markets. A cut in free labor mobility will lead to cut in free trade from the other side. Imagine you are a startup founder. You go to a VC and tell him/her that you plan to hire only natives and sell only in the local market. Do you think you will get any funds from the VC? If yes, then will you get more funds (and more revenue and salary) if your startup hires at the best talent/cost and is able to sell all around the world? The point being that there is a reason that as software engineer you earn 150k in US, not 40-70k as earned by software engineers in other developed countries.

And then there are studies showing that each H-1B creates 2-5 jobs in the US (some studies quote a much higher number...)

Isn't this an example of win-win?

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

#219

Post by letitgo12345 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #110
zzleeper wrote: post #98

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 su…

I don't understand why that's hard. One could literally just make a rule giving first priority to PhDs from research 1 universities and setting up a reasonable quota for other smart ppl who may not have a PhD. End of story.

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

#220

Post by anupshinde »

The article concludes with a great suggestion: "A better change would be to end the rule whereby H-1B recipients must stay with the company that sponsored them"

Its the companies like TCS that get the profits while kind-of-abusing their H1B employees who get stuck for 5-10 years because they want to pursue the American dream

1. Increase the minimum salary a bit - but not too much - you don't want to kill startups

2. Remove the H1B restriction on changing employers

3. Impose a rule to make sure that the employer does restrict movement by imposing any other policy.

4. Let those H1Bs stay in the country, without a job, for max 6 months. This will allow them to circumvent certain irrevocable binding policies from previous employer

5. Also ensure that the H1B employee movement is not restricted by company's policies in other countries. If they want to - make them pay 100K minimum. Example: If TCS is not able to create an employee-binding policy in US, it certainly will do it back home in India.

EDIT: PS: Even as an Indian, I would love to see some blanket H1B restrictions imposed on Indian IT companies, for a multitude of good reasons (for India). I believe that short term pain is necessary for India to get big gains. Unfortunately, this is not something Indian govt can do at the moment.

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