Trump administration announces overhaul of H1B visa program requiring higher pay • Hacker News Board

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

#681

Post by hiram112 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

kouohhashi wrote: post #661

I know most of tech community believe open USA. But I think that view is heavily biased because most tech guys in Silicon Valley is relatively rich and many of them are even foreigners. In order to understand the problem, I want to know opinion which support H1B visa restriction. Anyone who work for tech and support H1B visa restriction?

I'm an American who worked for a year in India and another few months for a large H1B "WITCH" company in the US. It was an interesting experience, but it took me about 2 weeks to understand how it was not about "best and brightest" but about US multinationals gaming the system to push down wages and use indentured servants.

If it were up to me, I'd set the limit at something like $250K tied to average home prices in the area where the H1B worked. If home prices go up, so must the minimum salary.

This would push wages up rapidly for medium IT and software jobs for Americans, including American blacks, hispanics, etc. who Corporate America pretends to care about while employing 80% Indians in their tech departments.

Google, Apple, and etc. could still pick the cream of the crop from around the world, while all the banks, IT staffing companies, and others making CRUD apps on AWS would be forced to hire and train Americans at higher wages which would push more smart students into the field and out of law, finance, etc.

Companies that play games like opening offices in India or Canada or wherever would eventually be caught by the local cities and states who need that tax revenue more than ever, so I don't fear a huge loss of talent and jobs overseas.

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

#682

Post by belltaco » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:16 AM UTC

hdydhdjdx wrote: post #296

belltaco wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one is also a particularly terrible move: >“ Because those required wage increases take effect this week, existing H-1B holders looking to renew their visas might not qualify unless their employers raise their salaries accordingly.” Copying from my comment below, this is likely to backfire. Since remote work has become acceptable and they already know the ins and outs of the job, many of these folks losing their…

The US economy isn't the same as the state economy. For local revenue states and cities could simply tax the employer a percent of the outsourced employee's paycheck and if the problem did become federal then the federal government could do the same. Since these employees are coming from places with a lower CoL there's no reason they couldn't make up the difference in savings anyway.

Moves like that would be dangerous, because what's stopping the company from moving their office or HQ out of that state or city or even the country to escape taxing of someone that isn't even in the country. And then, forget about the tax on the non existent employees, real local employees could be out of a job.

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

#683

Post by balls187 » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #112

notJim wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The H1B program has been abused for a long time What's the abuse?

A majority of H1B visas are currently issued to relatively low paying consulting firms, who are then hired by big enterprises in place of their more expensive technical employees. This isn't supposed to be legal - you're not allowed to hire H1B employees if an equally qualified American could have filled their role - but due to the specifics of how the program is administered you can often pull it off with that kind…

This happens to US workers too.

"Bottom" performing FTE's are let go as part of annual stack ranking, only to be hired by staffing agencies, and contracted back to large tech companies.

It's a way for tech companies to retain people who are necessary to perform the work, but at reduced wages.

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

#684

Post by disabled » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:20 AM UTC

TheColorYellow wrote: post #673

bjornsing wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about H1B abuse that primarily affects non-US citizens. I can sympathize (and I’m not a US citizen), but you can hardly expect the US press or hacker news to have that perspective or use that terminology... right?

More importantly, the US administration is not trying to solve H1B abuse from the perspective of non-US citizens.

Correct. It should prevent abuse both ways (for both US citizens and non US citizens). By making the system fairer, both US citizens and the world ends up benefiting, in addition to likely further helping the US economy.

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

#685

Post by epicureanideal » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

reissbaker wrote: post #200

jedberg wrote: 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…

The pay level still isn’t high enough. Minimum pay of about 170k in San Jose for a software engineer? That’s not a specialist, that’s average for a small startup.

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

#686

Post by belltaco » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:22 AM UTC

tequila_shot wrote: post #657

jedberg wrote: 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.

Why is this on the top of the hacker news? The article talks about nothing that will stop the abuse. There are indeed a lot of RFEs that are being given out if you don't have a CS degree and apply for a Software Developer position already. The Pay structure that the article mentions is NOT true anymore. Take a look at the links[1], it's withdrawn and the rule is not valid. How is hiring folks with a CS degree for an…

>The Pay structure that the article mentions is NOT true anymore. Take a look at the links[1], it's withdrawn and the rule is not valid.

Is there any other independent confirmation that it was withdrawn? I can't find any. The PDF is still up.

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Int...

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

#687

Post by bjornsing » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:24 AM UTC

TheColorYellow wrote: post #673

bjornsing wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about H1B abuse that primarily affects non-US citizens. I can sympathize (and I’m not a US citizen), but you can hardly expect the US press or hacker news to have that perspective or use that terminology... right?

More importantly, the US administration is not trying to solve H1B abuse from the perspective of non-US citizens.

Well... It still could, if “fair and honest dealings” is a political ideal you want to promote in the world. But sure, it’s not an administrations top priority, for understandable reasons.

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

#688

Post by tequila_shot » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:25 AM UTC

belltaco wrote: post #686

tequila_shot wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this on the top of the hacker news? The article talks about nothing that will stop the abuse. There are indeed a lot of RFEs that are being given out if you don't have a CS degree and apply for a Software Developer position already. The Pay structure that the article mentions is NOT true anymore. Take a look at the links[1], it's withdrawn and the rule is not valid. How is hiring folks with a CS degree for an…

>The Pay structure that the article mentions is NOT true anymore. Take a look at the links[1], it's withdrawn and the rule is not valid. Is there any other independent confirmation that it was withdrawn? I can't find any. The PDF is still up. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/oflc/pdfs/DOL-Int...

I posted the link to rule: https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eoDetails?rrid=131148

You can correlate the RIN between the Rule and the PDF: RIN 1205-AC00

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

#689

Post by bjornsing » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

tequila_shot wrote: post #674

bjornsing wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re talking about H1B abuse that primarily affects non-US citizens. I can sympathize (and I’m not a US citizen), but you can hardly expect the US press or hacker news to have that perspective or use that terminology... right?

Goal of my comment wasn't sympathy; but to get the facts out there that the current changes do nothing but to worsen the situation.(...not solving the H1B crisis)

Well raising the salary requirement should (long term) have a positive effect on all kinds of abuse, don’t you think?

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

#690

Post by dcolkitt » Wed, Oct 07, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #621

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…

All that will happen now is the manual UI testing position that would have been hired in the US will now be done back in India as companies scramble to deal with this situation. They'll probably do the work for even less, companies and teams and infrastructure will expand in India to do the work, and taxes and spin-off benefits to the US economy will be lost. Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that p…

> Or alternatively (and quite likely) we'll just hire that potential candidate up here in Canada; growing our tech industry further and competing with American workers in the same time zones and language as you, with a just-as or better educated work force, and a for lower cost to the employer and in a culture that on the whole appreciates immigrants more.

I'm virtually certain that Canada will not have a single tech company with the market cap as large as the tenth largest US tech company within in the next 25 years.

If anything Canada is actively losing ground against the US tech industry. In the past it used to have RIM, Nortel, Bell North and Corel. Today the largest Canadian tech company is "Constellation Software".

And the reason for the decline is simple. Canada's best and brightest don't go into tech. They go into real estate and property development to extract value out of the insanely overheated housing market.

And ironically this ties back to the immigration discussion. One of the major contributing factors to the housing shortage is because of Canada's aggressive pursuit of wealthy emigres. The housing market in places like Vancouver has turned into a slush fund to launder the money of CCP party members and other third world kleptocrats.