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Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay

wsj.com

481–490 of 1001 posts

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

#481

People who oppose H1B fundamentally believe that foreign workers should not be allowed to enter the American labor pool thereby depressing the wages here. Fair enough. While on the margin, it is true that if a company can't hire a foreign worker, it _might_ be forced to hire a local worker in the short run. But in the long run, restricting labor this way only increases the chance of that job moving entirely abroad, e…

Are you sure the hiring bar is the same?

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

#482
A key problem with H1B visas is not just the wage requirements, but the fact that the requirements are ever changing, the fees keep getting higher, and that you can get rejected for some arbitrary reason even if you meet all criteria. This means most companies barring the biggest Silicon Valley employers, banks and Indian consulting companies are simply not willing to stomach the perceived administrative expenses or uncertainty that comes with visa sponsorship. It doesn't help that vested political interests use administrative hurdles as workaround to decrease immigration because they fail to pass legislation.

It would benefit all parties to have a system that is more transparent, predictable and administratively simpler.

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

#483
post #214

Overall, I really support these changes. However, this piece really struck me as a big mistake: "Under the changes, an applicant must have a college degree in the specific field in which he or she is looking to work. A software developer, for example, wouldn’t be awarded an H-1B visa if that person has a degree in electrical engineering." Some of the best software engineers I know are graduate degree holders from neu…

I share the same experience. The most talented software developers that I've worked with have just about all been EE's. On the flip side, I've also met some terrible software developers who were also EE's.

Is this just a small sample size? There aren't that many EEs working on software, certainly compared to the whole universe of software developers.

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

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans? Immigration has much less of an impact on employment than you might expect in some cases — because immigrants also consume goods and services. One widely cited example is the Mariel boatlift, where more than a hundred thousand Cubans immigrated to Florida over a short period of time. Subsequent economic analyses found essentially no change in…

I think this is true when we're talking about a large number of immigrants in general, where a significant percentage of them don't have advanced skills (akin to any large sample-size of humans). The dynamic changes entirely when the sample size is comprised mostly of immigrants with advanced skills.

If we allowed in 100,000 immigrant astronauts, I think it's safe to say they'd impact the hiring prospects of American astronauts. And they wouldn't consume enough goods and services to spawn new space ventures that create 100,000 new astronaut jobs.

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

#485
post #94

I feel like rather than pitting immigrants against native born workers, and trying to come up with the perfect arcane rule, we should have sectoral bargaining where the workers could negotiate pay standards directly with their employers. Then it wouldn't matter where someone is from, because they'd be covered by that contract, and the government could get out of the way of the labor market.

What is this even supposed to mean? We already have bargaining between workers and employees. When you have a larger labor pool, market forces will obviously shift the market towards lower wages in the absence of government intervention. People who oppose H1B oppose it because they think that foreign workers should not be allowed to enter the labor pool thereby depressing the wages.

Pretty sure that comment was in reference to syndicalism - a theory of government where worker-controlled unions would have leverage over laws that relate to their domain... But that hasn't been a relevant system of anything since Revolutionary Catalonia was a thing in the 1930s.

(disclaimer, I actually love syndicalism as a concept. In an ideal world, syndicalism could ensure that naive and bought-out politicians wouldn't be able to arbitrarily outlaw encryption - because laws which relate to technology would be in the domain of people who actually work on technology. But like so many systems that sound nice in an ideal world - getting there and making it non-corrupt would be no minor feat).

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

#486

I feel like this thread has a lot of bias coming from bad experiences in the computer science field. While I do understand the bad practices of many tech companies, I think the picture is very different when you look at careers in other STEM fields, such as biology, chemistry, and physics. H1B visas are very important for foreign students in these fields particularly those hoping to pursue careers in academia. H1B vi…

bias coming from bad experiences in the computer science field https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2020-H1B-Visa-Category.as... It isn't bias, just look at the H1B distribution, it heavily biased to the CS/IT space. Like for every possible biologist you are imagining, there probably 100 IT/CS guys coming in. I'd love to have the biologists and chemists come in, but the big IT consultancies are massively abusing the sy…

Why? Are there more jobs for Biologists than Computer Scientists/Developers/Programmers?

It looks like this is a response based on demand. Why in the world would you want more biologists when there isn't market demand for them?

This is mostly wishful romanticization of particular "underdog" areas of studies. Makes no sense to me. Even more preposterous is the parent's profound claim:

> I feel like this thread has a lot of bias coming from bad experiences in the computer science field

I don't understand why we are talking about bias? It's not like the market goes "Gee ... we are a software company, but only if we would abandon our biases and hire an archeologist from Columbia and sponsor an H1b visa for them. Not sure what would do with them, but we must hire them though. Hey Rob! You got any ideas man?"

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

#487
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?

Start a company and see how much it costs to sponsor some uneducated kid. You have good intentions towards the kids, but some communist intentions towards business owners. Let them decide how to spend their money. It's their money.

Businesses should have the expectation that they can hire zero H1B workers. The suggestion is that they do something in exchange for that privilege.

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

#488

People who oppose H1B fundamentally believe that foreign workers should not be allowed to enter the American labor pool thereby depressing the wages here. Fair enough. While on the margin, it is true that if a company can't hire a foreign worker, it _might_ be forced to hire a local worker in the short run. But in the long run, restricting labor this way only increases the chance of that job moving entirely abroad, e…

Are you sure the hiring bar is the same?

In Google and similar big cos, certainly. If anything it's harder because college grads in India and China are some of the most zealous and effective when it comes to Leetcoding and similar preparation techniques.

The elephant in the room is that the vast majority of less-paid and supposedly 'bad' H1B talent comes from 'IT consulting firms' like Infosys, Cognizant etc. who files 10s of thousands of H1B applications, compared to say Google which filed 5000.

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

#489

I feel like this thread has a lot of bias coming from bad experiences in the computer science field. While I do understand the bad practices of many tech companies, I think the picture is very different when you look at careers in other STEM fields, such as biology, chemistry, and physics. H1B visas are very important for foreign students in these fields particularly those hoping to pursue careers in academia. H1B vi…

> It is convenient for the country to attract and retain their talent, of which there is currently a shortage. I think this subtle misdirection is how the lie gets slipped in. It's not that there is a shortage for talent. It's that there is a shortage for talent available at the price point that corporations want. Does that mean we should create an indentured servitude system to make that available? The whole idea of…

In my view, we can never not have a shortage of talent when it comes to scientific disciplines - at any pricepoint. The beauty of bringing more researchers to the country is that they eventually help create as many or more jobs than they "take".

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

#490
post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule doesn't say. It looks like something that was part of the original plan but removed. I don't see it anywhere in the PDF linked above.

So... the title of this submission is wrong?

the title of the article is right, the WSJ article doesn't correlate with the rule linked.
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