USCIS is challenging an unusually large number of H-1B applications

One of the strangest things with visas is that the agency that authorizes a person to work (DHS/USCIS) is different and has different objectives from the agency that issues the actual visas (DoS). With a valid USCIS work authorization a person already in the US can continue working legally, but the moment they step out of the country they need to apply for a visa with a US consulate (DHS). Applying for a visa with the DHS can take less than a week or more than 6 weeks (despite having all the correct documents). With the people I've spoken to, this causes a great deal of anxiety when travelling internationally.

TL;DR: A work authorization document issued by one agency allows a person to maintain legal presence in the US. This is different from a visa -- a visa allows one to enter the country and is issued by another agency. The visa doesn't clearly specify what one can and cannot do while in the country.

> Aegis applied for a half-dozen visas this spring, and only one of them made it through the lottery. The year before, Aegis secured a visa for someone filing a type of job he’s filled with H-1B workers in the past. So Narayanan set up a client project for the prospective new employee, a woman who was living in Dehli, India, at the time.

Sounds like they are exactly the type of consulting firm the administration is attempting to crack down on.

> USCIS challenged the application in August, which irked Narayanan because he had provided everything the agency had asked for. Narayanan was doubly annoyed because, without someone else to handle the new contract, it fell to him directly. For the last month, Narayanan has been spending four or five hours each morning doing the work himself, forgoing his own primary responsibility, which is to bring in new clients. “We might not make the profit we were expecting because of these issues,” he said. “We are afraid of on-boarding new H-1B employees, because of the unknown world.”

My heart weeps for him. If he could do the work himself, is it really so specialized he required H1B for it? Or was it more he just didn't want to pay the local rates?

That said, having hired through the H1B program I sure hope it remains viable. Reforms based on salary instead of lottery seem like a good compromise, reducing outsourcing and low salaries endemic with H1B mills. I'd much prefer a floating high salary floor (say top 25%) and uncapping H1B entirely.

This is really the central issue.

The H-1B program hasn't ever been a way to get solid talent from other countries to come to the United States because equivalent talent can't be found here. It's ALWAYS been a way to expand the pool of cheap technology labor so that companies dependent on expensive skills can grow faster.

Economics is economics. Companies have an incentive to fight wage inflation when they experience it due to a reliance on high-skill individuals.

I remember going to the offices of a well-known bank and finding nearly the entire development staff comprised of foreign workers on H-1B. Most of them were from India.

That can't be an accident and it's certainly not an indicator that talent is in short supply. What's in short supply is CHEAP TALENT. H-1B workers are cheap and don't have any ability to complain about their working conditions because they can't move to another company as easily as a permanent resident can. That alone is worth the legal hassle a company assumes when bringing in these workers.

SO, word to the wise....make sure you stay one step ahead of the skill levels of the Indian outsourcing companies or your days are numbered.

In the meantime, support candidates that are willing to rein in this amazing abuse of our immigration policy.

>clean the water he drank for 24 years,

I mean, arguably neither did the Chinese, depending on where you are and how much they've let pollution occur in that area.

I think you are grossly overestimating both the value of these immigrants (it isn't hard to see how much garbage science gets published abroad and how useless a good chunk of international students are) and the entire mechanism for technological improvement and innovation (most of which is market, not PhD, driven).

You also don't cite any sources for your claims; this information would be helpful to anybody seeking to agree or argue with you.

The demand for locally trained highly trained people is stifled by the easy access to highly trained people trained by someone else. Reducing the influx of highly skilled immigrants may have the virtuous effect of increasing the demand for local high quality education, which may, in the long term, reduce the the education gap between US and China / Taiwan / Japan / Germany.