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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

#191
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[idea retracted; proposed a tax-based solution but maybe too distracting]

I am against taxation without representation. If it require "balancing out" (via taxation), then it wasn't a workable system in the first place.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The changes described in the article do not change your hypothetical whatsoever.

It does indirectly. Hiring for the later will hopefully cease to be cost effective. But the former should still be worth it.

Why do you care whether or not it's cost effective to hire a foreign UI tester? That has zero correlation with whether or not its cost effective to hire someone with experience at CERN. Your hypothetical lists 2 different profiles that would be hired for vastly different jobs, and it seems like you only care that one of them is fucked over - is it just a strawman for racism? Can you point to any actual examples of CERN interns being passed over in favor of foreign UI testers?

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your numbers are wrong [1]. > The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world’s migrants. > The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018. > More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. What amazes me is how much hate the US…

Let's get some terminology right. Immigrants are defined in US law as lawful permanent residents, i.e. green card holders. Congress caps the number of green cards issued at 366,000 per year. Therefore, the number of new immigrants to the US each year is 366,000. The 140,000 number I initially used incorrectly was the number of employment based green cards as compared to family based. I've updated the math. [edit] It'…

Unfortunately your smug reply is wrong, as I said before.

From: https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2018/tab...

Table 1. Persons Obtaining Lawful Permanent Resident Status: Fiscal Years 1820 to 2018

Year Number

2018 1,096,611

2017 1,127,167

2016 1,183,505

This also obviously doesn't even count the number of illegal aliens coming here every year.

> The immigrant and descendent of immigrant population of the US is roughly 100%, because there are only 5 million native Americans in the US.

Native Americans came from elsewhere at some point too, I suppose they are immigrants also according to your meaningless definition.

Forgive me if I don't care about the per-capita number of refugees in Canada.

You are the one who is mistaken.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is right. The answer that's best for the economy is to allow more immigration, not less (especially skilled immigration). This move will just make it more dificult for the average company to sponsor H1B workers

Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans? As an American myself, I want to see my fellow Americans getting good jobs over people from other countries.

Those jobs will flee the US. What has happened over the last few years is that many of those jobs have flown to Canada. And that's just with talking about making things slightly difficult, and not succeeding in actually changing rules.

I don't understand how people can go through this pandemic, where at least 50% of the people on this site are of the view that we can all work from wherever we want all time, and think that a company who is willing to pay 90k to hire somebody in the US, will not be willing to pay half that to hire that same person in Bangalore or Kiev instead.

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

#195
> Under the new rule, the required wage level for entry-level workers would rise to the 45th percentile of their profession’s distribution, from the current requirement of the 17th percentile. The requirement for the highest-skilled workers would rise to the 95th percentile, from the 67th percentile.

If you've got an undergraduate degree in CS looking for work as a SWE does that mean you'll need to get paid at p95? Won't this isolate all employment opportunities to places like the Bay Area at companies that pay a high base-salary (no equity counted)?

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

#196
post #140
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.

You would still have to have a job lined up to get a work visa. So there would need to be 500M new jobs.

If our economy grew by 500M new jobs, that would be unequivocally good. Those 500M people would be paying taxes, buying goods and services, paying for housing, etc.

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

#197

I really, really want to like this move. I've written on HN before that the Trump admin's revealed immigration preference is, in effect, "as few immigrants as possible" [1]. Every past move this administration has made with regard to visas has been ill-advised and badly executed (imo). That they solved problem 1 (ill-advised) does not mean they've solved problem 2 (badly executed). In that light, I can't help but thi…

> "you studied math and cs, and now want to work as a data scientist? That's not closely enough related"

This could be trivially avoided by simply aggregating the job posting requirements for similar positions or doing any sort of survey of the qualifications and education of currently employed highly paid data scientists.

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Canada, a country 1/10th the size of the US, brings in 300,000 new immigrants each year. The US brings in 140,000. This means Canada brings in 20X the number of new immigrants per capita than the US does. Actually, "more than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2018, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by India (129,000), Mexic…

Those are non-immigrants, guest workers or temporary workers. Immigrants are defined, in US law, a green card holders. Congress caps the number of green cards to be issued at 366,000 (140,000 for employment based green cards) per year. [edit] It's about 1M once you factor in family members of US citizens.

This is incorrect. A green card holder is a “permanent resident”. But that’s not where the line is for being considered an “immigrant”. Someone on an H1B without a green card is still an immigrant. As are temporary workers (for example on an agricultural visa).

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

#199
post #44

I mean they will pay H1bs higher but still doesn’t make a company pay a us citizen higher. Maybe it will open up space for lawsuits based equivalent responsibilities and help the equal pay for equal movement. Even excluding H1bs we know there are people doing the exact same work for vastly different

H1Bs usually require the employer to prove they couldn't find someone within the country.

I don't think that's true.

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

#200
post #9

Credit where credit is due, this is a good move. The H1B program has been abused for a long time. It sounds like these changes should help make it too expensive for the fraudulent abuse to continue.

The higher pay seems like an overall positive change to reduce the prevalence of "body shops" and so that H1-Bs aren't an easy way for companies to lower overall pay rate. I'm not sure that narrowing degree qualifications is a win; high-skill immigration is a significant boon to America's economy, and I think ability to do the work, and American company willingness to pay above-rate salaries (legally mandated now to 95th percentile for the highest-skill work) ought to be enough signal, and having a particular degree is not as useful a measure at that point. I know plenty of people who are incredibly qualified in terms of industry experience who don't have advanced degrees.

I've been pretty impressed with Taiwan's Gold Card work visa program, where you either need certain educational achievement qualifications, or need to be a highly-paid employee in specific fields — but not both. And it's not tied to a specific employer, which I think helps negotiation (and thus also helps domestic workers, by raising labor prices). I wish America's immigration program worked more like that — specific quibbles about what exactly the rate should be aside; Taiwan's is certainly too low to use for the US — since I think encouraging high-skill immigration would help much more than it would hurt: high-skill immigrants tend to generate more jobs, and also tend to pay more in taxes than the services they receive, meaning it's a win-win where immigrants can get the jobs they want in the country they want to be in and Americans end up with more jobs available and more government services per (American) tax dollar spent.

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