The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
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Re: The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
#2Re: The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
#3Thank God. H1-B is a dishonest, abusive program that preys on both foreign and native workers. Some of the arguments in this article arguing against a higher wage floor for visa holders are extremely weak.
I'm in favor of a much fairer immigration program (starting with not tying a visa-holder to an employer), and H1-Bs in their current form are not it.
Re: The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
#4How is wage-based visa allocation denying entry-level applicant visas a bad thing? If there are entry level roles to be filled they should be filled locally since they're low skill/experience by definition.
If you're going to develop talent you should develop local talent. The deal is that you give foreigners the opportunity because they offer valuable skills.
Re: The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
#5A someone who benefited from the H1-B program I’m 100% behind the idea of adding higher wages requirements.
I went to Carnegie Mellon and met some of the smartest people there and it crushed my heart seeing some super talented people lose on the lottery several times and be forced to go back home when they already had an employer in the US paying them 100k+ and willing to go great lengths to keep them.
I was lucky enough to get a visa in my first lottery draw, but that was the only reason I got to do what others couldn’t. Luck.
They lost against those consulting companies that exploited the program with impunity for years.
So the QZ article author here is wrong. Whoever is the next US president, this is the best thing that could have happened to the H1-B program.
Re: The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
#6You can take all kinds of policy positions on a campaign, but any president cannot really do much to the H1B system without passing laws. Passing a new immigration bill is very hard since there are so many competing interests benefiting from the status quo and there is very little to gain electorally.
The current administration tried using executive action and regulatory approaches to fulfil their agenda and both keep getting struck down in courts. The new upward revision in wage levels are also expected to have the same fate. There is simply very little regulatory leeway on H1B visas since they are encoded in law.
It is highly unlikely for a democratic administration to spend political capital changing H1B when they have bigger priorities (healthcare).
At the end of the day, Indians are the only affected population on H1B due to backlogs and aren't a strategic voting bloc for democrats. Everyone else gets a green card in a couple of years anyways. They are more focused on undocumented and family based immigration.
A broken immigration system and the H1B status quo is expected to last for a while unless there are external factors (collapse in international student numbers, US emigration, US companies moving jobs out of the country) forcing action.
Re: The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
#7The visa is meant to give highly talented people an opportunity to fulfill their potential by participating in the US economy, while also benefiting America.
Sadly it has been aggressively abused by some companies to bring cheap labor into the US, actually undermining the local skilled labor system (eg why bother training Americans).
H1-B does indeed need reform, and that does mean an end to the 'good old days' (good for who, though).
All IMHO - I'm not even American, or Indian.
Re: The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
#8A someone who benefited from the H1-B program I’m 100% behind the idea of adding higher wages requirements. I went to Carnegie Mellon and met some of the smartest people there and it crushed my heart seeing some super talented people lose on the lottery several times and be forced to go back home when they already had an employer in the US paying them 100k+ and willing to go great lengths to keep them. I was lucky en…
I’ve never understood why H1-B applications weren’t sorted by compensation (salary): higher salaries go first. Seems like a trivial way to prevent visa farming.
Re: The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
#9Artificial geographical lines segregating people artificially. Remove our set of welfare programs and let anyone that can make it here, live here.
Re: The next US president won’t be great for H-1B visas
#103/4 of all H1Bs are going to Indians. Having some level of diversity from other countries doesn’t sound like a bad idea. On top of it, most of those H1bs are from Indian body shops gaming the system which is how they get so many H1Bs in the first place. So I’m okay with these changes.