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H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

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Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#221
post #211

Can't believe this is only recently getting attention. It's not just Oracle, it's common knowledge how the same thing has been happening in several large corps. I know from the inside because Deloitte came in and scooped up our entire foreign students batch on graduating (Pennsylvania). Same thing happened the next year as well. Many of my friends still work there. I remember there was a fire drill that took place in…

It's had 'attention' for a while - it's just a very hard thing to prove.

Moreover, the investigation has a political sensitivity that could create bad headlines, so it needs the right environment to happen.

Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#222
post #14

Granted that H-1B visas should ostensibly be filled only for positions where it is difficult to find qualified American citizens or permanent residents, but in all honesty are the Department of Labor's allegations really that surprising? In the Bay Area, qualified job candidates are so scarce that it's quite common for citizens/permanent-residents to change jobs frequently. H1-B candidates are attractive for companie…

Seems like such a simple issue to fix: the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary, say above 150K. Doctors included, I see no reason to protect them from competition. Hop jobs at will but need to maintain within 85% of that level. If a company can't find workers, it should pay more up until a level that puts the competitiveness of the economy unde…

>the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary

Countries in Europe do precisely this but take it slightly further. Take Ireland[0] and Sweden[1], for prime examples. For those of you who don't want to read the links: The company has to have a minimum salary (oft above the standard cost of living) for the employee to obtain (and retain) the permit.

(On an aside, in Sweden, they go a step further in that the contract must also be approved by the relevant union that company has agreements with.)

[0] - https://dbei.gov.ie/en/What-We-Do/Workplace-and-Skills/Emplo...

[1] - https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Private-individuals/...

Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#223
post #14

Granted that H-1B visas should ostensibly be filled only for positions where it is difficult to find qualified American citizens or permanent residents, but in all honesty are the Department of Labor's allegations really that surprising? In the Bay Area, qualified job candidates are so scarce that it's quite common for citizens/permanent-residents to change jobs frequently. H1-B candidates are attractive for companie…

Seems like such a simple issue to fix: the only condition for getting a specialist visa should be to find an employer willing to pay a specialist salary, say above 150K. Doctors included, I see no reason to protect them from competition. Hop jobs at will but need to maintain within 85% of that level. If a company can't find workers, it should pay more up until a level that puts the competitiveness of the economy unde…

The problem is that there's two very different things achieved by the H1B process:

a) Getting talented entry-level employees who graduate from US schools to stay in the US

b) Getting talented experienced employees to move to the US

The H1B is actually rather bad for b) due to the long processing time (6 months) during which a candidate cannot work in the US and high chance of not winning the lottery. Revamping the O1 visa makes more sense for that case. So that leaves a) for which salary requirements based around experienced employees make little sense.

Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#224
You could fix all of the problems with the US immigration system by abolishing the welfare state and opening up the borders.

I love America and I’d move there in an instant if I’d get a chance, but I’ve got too much dignity to go thru the US immigration system and put myself in a limbo for many years.

Maybe when I’ll qualify for EB2 NIW.

Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#225
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the dumbest idea I’ve ever seen. Why bother being a country at that point? You’d have 2 billion people moving here tomorrow and living in the streets. Bad idea.

Not sure what you mean by "being a country," but, no, you wouldn't. If they didn't have jobs they couldn't stay. If they did they'd find housing - perhaps some would even build housing for the rest. To imagine that two billion people could move to the US, find employment, and all be homeless is to imagine an interesting form of market failure that I don't yet understand.

So they would definitely get back on planes rather than just going rogue and trying to stay in the country and working illegally? And existing citizens would not lose out through massive oversupply problems in the labour market?

I can't say I agree at all this would be of benefit to any nation willing to do this.

Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#226
America is the most powerful nation in the world today not because it has the most number of people, but because it has the best and the brightest, gathered from around the world.

There are 4x as many geniuses in China as in the US. This is not because they are superior genetically. This is simply because the population of China is 4x that of USA. If one in 1,000,000 people are geniuses, then China must have 4x more geniuses than the US. That's a threat to the US. If our economy is to remain strong and if we are to remain a superpower we should invite the smartest of the Chinese to immigrate to the US.

Abuse of H1B must be stopped. It is not intended as a mechanism for undercutting American workers. But the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater. We should expand the H1B system and make it easier for immigrants to become citizens, while at the same time preventing abuse.

Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#227
post #104

Granted that H-1B visas should ostensibly be filled only for positions where it is difficult to find qualified American citizens or permanent residents, but in all honesty are the Department of Labor's allegations really that surprising? In the Bay Area, qualified job candidates are so scarce that it's quite common for citizens/permanent-residents to change jobs frequently. H1-B candidates are attractive for companie…

Why is it not okay to discriminate on the basis of your skin color at birth but okay to discriminate on the basis of which side of a border you were born in? Surely, there would a lot of outrage in HN if someone said - "Granted that H1-Black visas should ostensibly be filled only for positions where it is difficult to find qualified whites"?

That's a reasonable argument; we should think it through to the conclusion. In a more general form the argument is:

Given that certain forms of discrimination are unacceptable, why is okay for any group to discriminate against any other group? Why is it ok for a nation to enforce borders, a company to keep the proceeds of a new idea to themselves, or for a wealthy family to favor their own children?

Many people have asked that and tried to create systems that forbid such discrimination. Unfortunately the result is always disaster. It's simply so counter to human nature that it cannot be imposed without a totalitarian government and the problems that come with totalitarianism are far worse than the problems of inequality that come with freedom.

But perhaps a moral person should still seek to follow such a policy of their own volition? That might be viable, if dealing only with other people who follow a similar policy. But how many people are willing to work for such a system, rather than merely using "equality" as an argument only when it serves their own self interests? How many are willing to make the sacrifice when it's their turn to do the dirty job, to work hard without keeping the proceeds, to share their home with strangers, to fight criminals and tyrants with nothing to gain for themselves?

That's an empirical question and many experiments have been conducted on communes, kibbutzim, ashrams, etc. Experience has shown that the answer is: far too few to make such a system viable. Even voluntary societies of this type are plagued by freeloaders and cliques, and must impose borders to prevent being overrun by outsiders.

So while it certainly seems like a good moral position, and has seemed so to many, many people throughout history, it simply fails to work in practice, over and over and over again.

Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#228
This super prevalent in manufacturing related jobs too. It's funny how the rhetoric is to save our manufacturing nowadays when we give a crap ton of IP to countries like India with the process. The sad part is, I've seen a lot of unqualified people fill up these H-1B positions and then we'll have to train them. By the time they can start doing some real work from us training, their visa coincidentally runs out and this process repeats. We literally pay relatively high wage to train India's engineers. Yet managers turn a blind eye because it helps them balance their numbers.

Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't companies in other locations pay competitively?

They pay competitively for their location. Pay is determined by demand and supply. If you sort H1Bs by pay, the places with highest cost of living will get all of the H1Bs. Perhaps a better idea is to do the same thing, but on pay that is normalized against a cost of living index.

> Perhaps a better idea is to do the same thing, but on pay that is normalized against a cost of living index.

Why? The current pay is determined by current supply and demand, but that doesn't make the current supply and demand desirable. If H1Bs are sorted by pay, all companies may learn to raise their bid.

Re: H-1B: Oracle favored hiring foreign graduates of US colleges over American grads

#230
post #102

Posted this elsewhere, but as a former H1B here's what should be done to end abuse: 1. Award a fixed pool of H1Bs to qualified applicants with the highest wage in the offer (and monitor that this wage is in fact being paid). This should be easy to pass if your representatives in congress are in fact _your_ representatives. The president will sign this immediately, since he was the one who proposed it in the first pla…

> It should not be possible to hire foreign workers into entry level positions at all.

And with that, you perhaps got rid of a (imo) very useful subset of potential future Americans: ones who went to college and graduate school in the US.

This group went through it’s formative years in the United States. They are deeply imbibed in the culture and eventually start identifying with it. However, if they can’t get an entry level job, they now have to leave the country to go back to where they came from (or some other alternative like Canada / Australia). Instead, you would rather be bringing in 30 year olds from foreign nations who are unlikely to change and adopt America as much as someone who moved here at 18 would; and who have formed habits more suited to their nation than to the US.

But as I mentioned above, perhaps this is desireable.

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