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Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

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Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#131

Post by arcticbull »

gok wrote: post #70
arcticbull wrote: post #10

It's pretty amazing to me how anti-immigrant America is, for a country built on immigration, but I suppose it's always been that way. Benjamin Franklin hated the Germans in the 1750s [1]. For perspective, Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 30,000 refugees each year. The US brings in 18,000. This means Canada brings in 25X the number of refugees per capita than the US does. Canada, a country 1/10th…

> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000. I don't know what definition of "brings in" you are using, but around 1.1 million people obtain permanent legal resident status per year in the US. By this metric your Canada numbers are about right (a bit low, around 340,000 in 2019). Perhaps you're looking at purely comparing Canada's Temporary Forei…

I'd love to understand where the gap is.

I believe the cap on the number of green cards issued per year is 366,000 -- 140,000 of which are employment based. [1] Is mistook the latter for the former and have updated my post to reflect.

[edit] It's about 1M once you factor in family members of US citizens. Updated.

Similarly Canada's 300,000-ish per year number is also the number of new permanent residents admitted per year. [2]

My goal was to track immigration, i.e. becoming permanent residents, not temporary migrant workers, including those under H-1B.

[1] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/how-to-read-...

[2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/canada-to-admi...

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#132

Post by systematical »

commandlinefan wrote: post #105
nrmitchi wrote: post #33

I'll give you that, but it seems like a much simpler solution would have just been improving the flexibility for an H1B worker to be allowed to work at any employer for the term of their status. If an employer used an H1B in order to hire a foreign worker and then under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate, without the work status concern. Without the artificial control over the emplo…

> under pay them, the worker would just get another job that pays market rate Then the employer would go back to the H1B well, underpay another worker for 6 months until the worker bailed, go back to the well, lather, rinse, repeat.

Six months of development is barely useful for most companies. It can take 3 months before a developer is reasonably efficient. Learning the codebase, culture, and business logic takes time in most cases.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#133

Post by nrmitchi »

TuringNYC wrote: post #121
nrmitchi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with this is that H1Bs are not just for software engineering jobs. Other professions that qualify are things like accountants, or health care workers. If it was a straight up "who pays the most", then the software industry (mostly FAANG) would end up with 80k H1Bs per year, and other industries would still not be able to hire for jobs they can't fill locally.

The H1B system is supposed to be for shortages. In a real economic shortage, prices are supposed to go up. If salaries are not going up, it is not a real shortage. I think there is a shortage, so I'm proposing increasing salaries. Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants (lots of accountants go into other fields because they cant find work at a…

> Accounting firms are not competing with tech firms necessarily, they are competing with the market for accountants

Yes, I'm not disagreeing with this. However if you put ALL H1Bs in a single pool, and they go to the highest bidder across all industries, then yes, accounting firms are competing with tech firms.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#134

Post by mardifoufs »

koluna wrote: post #57
908B64B197 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The immigration quotas in Canada are simply out of control. Almost every week on this forum I see Canadians whining about low wages in Software.... in a market that's more or less flooded with cheap labor!

Mind sharing some numbers? This is a patently false statement. Wages in Canada might be lower, but that is because they get a number of other social benefits, such as healthcare, that gets paid through taxes taken from said wages.

But gross wages are also lower here. If anything almost everyone I've came across here in Canada talks about their salary using the gross amount. So not only are wages employers advertise pretty low already, they are usually pretax too.

Unless there's something more that is taken from wages that isn't shown on paychecks. Which would be weird considering that paycheck stubs usually have a full breakdown of where your money went and how much taxes were taken.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#135

Post by dmode »

This is not. As with anything in the Trump admin, this is not well thought out and just focused on election based xenophobic messaging. The people who can game the system, can easily do that. However, many people who really benefit from H1B will be shafted. For example, doctors and nurses in rural areas. H1 also is a path for many engineers, doctors, and phds to enter the workforce. With blanket higher salary requirements, it will just deny a path to the job market for many international students graduating from Ivy league universities. Also, this benefits FAANGs, and if you are a startup looking to hire someone on H1B, forget about it.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#136

Post by diggernet »

tyre wrote: post #76
paxys wrote: post #34

While I'm in favor of the move, wages are just a band-aid fix. The core of the problem is that the premise of the H1B visa itself – extraordinary skill that cannot be found in the US – is complete bullshit. Everyone participating in the program (including the government) knows this, and yet they have to do the entire song and dance of years long approval processes, fake job listings, RFEs and whatnot. Fix the real pr…

I take it you've never tried to hire experienced software engineers. The supply is significantly below demand.

Perhaps that view says more about the hiring process than it does about the available labor pool.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#137

Post by mc32 »

rbultje wrote: post #88
mc32 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not make companies sponsor underprivileged kids who need the opportunity just as much but don’t get as much consideration?

Because educating underprivileged kids takes up to 20 years(school, college, potential post-grad studies), whereas the H1B worker can start immediately. H1B workers also typically have several years experience in the specific position where they're being considered. You need both.

Some H1Bs are talented, many, many copy paste.

Yes it takes years to develop talent. It’s not easy. But these are the same companies who throw money to the wind for the purpose of empty virtue signaling and making some connected politicos happy. Why not devote that money to real causes that actually provide hope for kids rather than fill the pockets of people who know how to shake corps down?

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#138

Post by dmode »

908B64B197 wrote: post #25

This is a great move. The current H1B program made no sense at all. If I wanted to hire: A smart graduate from EPFL, Polytechnique or ETH Zurich who interned at CERN and has contributed to the Linux kernel for a software engineering job at a unicorn startup or A grad from a second tier "technical college" in India with a visa refusal rate of ~90% for a job doing manual UI testing and QA for a body shop my only path f…

The changes has nothing to do with the problem you are trying to address

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#139

Post by jsnk »

arcticbull wrote: post #54
908B64B197 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The immigration quotas in Canada are simply out of control. Almost every week on this forum I see Canadians whining about low wages in Software.... in a market that's more or less flooded with cheap labor!

Immigration quotas have remained constant at about 1% of the population per year since 1992. Low wages in software compared to the US for sure, but that's in part because Canada has very low income and wealth inequality compared to the US. Most people make a living wage, and there's not a huge spread. The US ranks near the bottom of the world in income inequality [1]. Canada's GINI coefficient was 33.8 in 2018 vs the…

The issues of income inequality, most people making a living wage are non-sequiturs to the argument that says if you have an ample supply of cheap labour, the wage goes down.

Re: Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

#140

Post by dudul »

jedberg wrote: post #74

I agree 100% with you. My view is even more extreme, I think we should allow anyone who passes a criminal background check to be able to get a work visa, with no quotas. But barring that pipe dream, this seems like a good interim step.

How would you avoid seeing 500M indians/Chinese landing in America on the very next day?

I think there is a middle ground between the disaster that are immigration laws today, and full open borders.

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